I did it this way.
The main library of the City of Little Rock sat only two
blocks from where I worked. Can you imagine that? It was like an eight-year-old
living a few hundred feet from the city’s largest free candy store.
Before starting work, I’d gotten an updated driver’s
license. With that, they, the nice folks at the library, gave me what appeared
to be a card but which really was a key to an entire universe of delight. I
augmented the assigned reading foisted on me by my mentors with masterpieces by
the likes of Hemingway, Dickens, Eliot, and Frazer. When I wasn’t
off with one of the bosses at a planning commission meeting or such, the evening offered a
soft blanket of calm and reflection.
At work, I was getting along okay. At least they talked to
me. There were some good-natured pranks. One that I remember involved my trying
to find Cantrell Road, one of the most popular and well-regarded corridors of
the city, gateway to glorious entertainment and shopping venues.
“Oh,” said the head drafter. “You live near it. Just go
north on State Street a few blocks and you will run right into it.”
I did. No Cantrell Road. Just a series of streets before
State Street ran into the Arkansas River. I asked again next day.
“Don’t see how you missed it. State Street intersects with
it just a few blocks north. The other drafter smiled and nodded in agreement.
Well, the joke was on me. Little Rock, Arkansas was the
worst city I’ve ever known for situational nomenclature when it came to naming
streets. Consider this example. Arkansas Highway 10 exited from Interstate 30
and headed west. After a few blocks, it became La Harp Boulevard, named after
one of the early explores making harbor at La
Petite Roche. I had found La Harp each time I headed north from where I
lived, no problem there, but where the hell was Cantrell?
What I didn’t know was that a few blocks further west, La
Harp made a curve and headed up what is known from history as “Carpetbagger
Hill.” The name was foisted on a subdued city by incoming northern victors
following the unpleasantness of the 1860s. They built nice homes atop the hill,
overlooking the train depot, and forced a stretch of the street to change from La Harp to Lincoln
Avenue. That's Yankees for you.
After descending from the posh neighborhood atop the hill, Lincoln
Avenue became Cantrell Road. At some point, the exact location and impetus unknown,
the corridor became Arkansas State Highway 10 again, a classic case of “where
you are depends on where you’re at.”
And so it went. There was some unknown giggling going on
behind my back due to my discomfiture over being unable to find my way at times.
I ignored it. I did that also when I found out about the advice I was getting,
that I could probably find cheaper and better lodgings in the historic Capitol
Hotel. A handsome structure, it is now a locally famous five-star hotel, proud
of the fact that President Ulysses S. Grant and wife once stayed there and that
he even gave a speech to city residents from its balcony.
In 1971, it was pretty much a whorehouse as I found out to
my great embarrassment when I mentioned, to a native of the city, the advice I
had gotten about finding an apartment there.
I took it all in stride. The jokes. The misleading advice
about where one could find office supplies. The catty questions about why I
wasn’t married and jibes about the joys I was missing. The still smoldering
concern about why I chose to walk to work. The disdain about the age and
condition of my apartment building. The insinuations about being a drug-crazed
sociopath like my fellow veterans.
I smiled through it all. Along with my nightly readings, I
was teaching myself to type and trying to learn to read French. One phrase
still lingers from those days:
La vengeance est un plat qui
se mange froid.
 |
| The Packet House still stands on Carpetbagger Hill. A few hundred feet west of it, my life would later change forever. |
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