Read Online Downtown by Anne Rivers Siddons - Free Book Online Page B

they looked wonderful to me, vi-brant and smart and eager to be on their way. The 23 Oglethorpe bus rocked along between shops and office buildings glinting in the morning light, and everyone on it seemed to be young. The drivers of the bright cars caught in traffic beside the bus looked young, too, sleek and well-groomed. I felt ginger ale bubbles of glee rising in my chest, and bit my lips to keep from laughing aloud with joy and anticipation.
    Wherever they were going, these chic young men and women alongside me, only I was going into the heart of the city to begin being the new senior editor at Matthew Comfort’s remarkable Downtown magazine. Only I. Ahead of us the city came wheeling up in the dazzling sun. Bronze and silver and blue towers rose up around me.
    “Oh, yes,” I whispered. “Now.”
    Looking back, I can see—though I could not then, caught in its midst as I was—what a strange, exhilarating, and contradictory time that was in the country. It was a cups moment in our national life, the year before the love turned to anger, the peace to militancy. Everything that had gone before us hung shimmering in the air, along with the unseen bulk of everything yet to come. At a Human Be-In in California, heads and freaks had announced happily that the number of live people equaled, for the first time in history, the number of the

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    dead. From that outré coast the sound of mantras and chanting from yogis and the wailing of Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix drifted East; the Beatles reigned supreme everywhere; the hippies and yippies met in their trajectories. Gidget and go-go dancers and Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters competed for the national consciousness, along with Hugh Hefner and the Bunny Hutch. Stokely Carmichael and Eldridge Cleaver were moving toward their time in the sun as Martin Luther King Jr. and his doctrine of nonviolent change moved out of it. The war in Vietnam was not yet called a war, and the great protests still lay ahead, as did the militancy of the Black Panthers, the body of the sexual revolution, and the sisterhood of the women’s movement. In late 1966 the young said “fuck” as often as possible but the pill was still an innovation, and no one had yet bombed a chemistry building. In that year, women were still called “chicks,” even in the most radical circles, and Bunnyhood was as desirable a thing as sisterhood. NOW
    was in its infancy and both Twiggy and Doris Day were at their apogee. The ferocious, militant love of Woodstock Nation—the Hippies’ Last Hurrah—was more than two years away. The first terrible death, that of JFK in Dallas, was three years past.
    In the year I came to Atlanta, it was still possible to regard that assassination as an aberration, a terrible accident. I rode a crowded bus along a literal fault line, one that would soon cleave America apart, and I had no thought of anything except that the sun was shining and I was careening toward the rest of my life.
    When I got off the bus at the Five Points turnaround, I took a deep breath of cold, electric city air and looked up and saw the dancer’s cage, empty now, and above it, on the fourth floor of the gray stone building, a small sign in a window that said “Museum of the Deep South.

    55 / DOWNTOWN
    Exhibits and Artifacts. Open by Appointment.” Below that a smaller sign said “See Big Snake.”
    I began to laugh. My poor father. His Good Catholic Girl had been delivered into the very jaws of the enemy by the 23 Oglethorpe bus. When I got off the packed elevator on the eleventh story of the Commerce Building, in a crowd smelling of youngness and cold wool and Miss Dior and cigarette smoke, I was still smiling.
    I stopped before a red-lacquered door that said DOWNTOWN in bold black capital letters, smoothed my hair, bit my lips, and took a deep breath. I could feel the smile still on my lips, stiff and frozen. I could not seem to make it go away. I closed my