Changes:
That Was Then
Excerpt from a novel in progress by Roger Vaughan I. Grayson We had gotten married in the upper east side Manhattan apartment where we had been living. Our neighbor and friend Grayson presided over a homemade ceremony wearing velvety red scarves draped over his purple silk shirt as vestments. The guests were as colorful, looking like Sly and the Family Stone groupies. But then, it was the late 1960s. Grayson was officiating under some sort of bogus mail order license. The legitimacy of his provenance didn’t matter to us, and it surely didn’t matter to Grayson. He had plenty of ego, more self-righteousness than a room full of Roman Catholic Cardinals, and a total distrust for systems and institutions. Self-ordination was his thing. Grayson was also stoned all the time, which created a problem for a guy his age whose proudest extracurricular accomplishment at the University of Virginia had been building a gentleman’s bar in his room. As Grayson once explained, he had been raised in the South.
His grandfather’s crossed Confederate swords hung over his bed. He had been taught in school that the South had won the war, a lesson that was reinforced at home. When I first met him at The Magazine, Grayson wore three-piece suits and had the close-cropped, combed-down haircut favored by greater-Ivy League fraternity boys of the 1950s and ’60s. Grayson was an editor at The Magazine, known for habitually rewriting copy whether it needed it or not, relying on a justifying phrase that burned like a brand into the psyche of every Magazine writer: “because I can.” One frustrated fellow on the staff, an award-winning published poet, once took Grayson to task for altering his picture captions without apparent reason. He asked Grayson why he thought he had a right to do that. Grayson’s response became legendary: “Because,” he told the poet, “I have commanded men at sea.” Grayson had an ROTC commission. His dark secret was persistent seasickness. He was as brutish with his own family.
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