Milking the Moon by Eugene Walter as told to Katherine Clark

Coca-Cola and popcorn. Why, they wouldn’t have allowed popcorn in that velvet theater, with red velvet curtains with gold fringe and this polished marble foyer. What they had was a little counter with a little striped awning that sold George’s Chocolates. Rebecca always had a napkin in the pocket of her apron so she could unsmear me afterward.
    One of the numbers—it was the only time I ever peed in my pants. It started very low, this music, with a lot of pizzicato. “Shine, little glowworm. Shine, little glowworm, glimmer, glimmer…” Then there was this very pretty girl singing it. And it was this gorgeous backdrop of forests, a kind of eighteenth- or nineteenth-century operatic backdrop. You know, green and tangled trees, and all across the back were little lightbulbs twinkling. And she sang, “Shine, little glowworm, glimmer, glimmer… ” That was okay.
    But then came four big green velvet frogs. And they picked her up and she sang the last verse sitting on their shoulders, and they put her down and she curtsied and then vanished somehow. Then they took their heads off and started tumbling like acrobats dressed as frogs with no heads, and I couldn’t take it. I peed in my pants. Lord, how I loved it.
    *
    On Saturdays at the Lyric Theater there would be a matinee for children. That’s where I met Truman Capote. We were never pals. We were acquaintances called Southerners. He came to Mobile on Saturdays to have his teeth straightened and go to the doctor and various things like that. He was Truman Persons from Monroeville, but he was called Bulldog. He had some funny underbite where the lower jaw sticks out, and he looked exactly like a bulldog. One night at this party in New York, suddenly, I looked across the room and there was Truman. And I said, “Bulldog! What are you doing here?” And he said, “Sh, sh. I’m Truman Capote now.” Well, see, I knew him as Bulldog Persons.
    We both belonged to the Sunshine Club, which sponsored free matinees at the Lyric Theater for children. In the Sunday Register there was the Sunshine Page. This lady called Disa Stone had this children’s page and this Sunshine Club where children wrote and sent in what they wrote and vied for prizes. The grand prize was a pony. For his contribution to the Sunshine Page and for the contest, Truman had spied on this old man who lived up the street in Monroeville and was a real old crank. Even then he was already mixing fiction and reportage. Why not? But let’s not say he invented the reportage-fiction, fiction-reportage style. Daniel Defoe would be giggling in his grave at the thought, not to mention a dozen French writers. And some of his things are so full of Gothic narrative impossibilities that one wants to say, “Now, Cousin Truman, come down outa that tree!”
    Anyway, he wrote this rather long piece called “Old Mr. Busybody, by Truman Persons.” His aunt, when he told her, rushed to Mobile and went to the Register and said: “You cannot publish that. It is too true a description of our neighbor. He’ll sue us, he’ll smash our windows, I don’t know what he’ll do. I want to take that back.” And she did. Years later when I saw him in Paris, the first thing Truman said to me was, “Oh, Eugene, I so wanted to win that pony.”
    I thought he was a hoot. He was this tiny little thing with a tough little bulldog body and a high squeaky voice. But there was this bully boy, J. L. Bedsole, who was very tall, a basketball player, and had a good opinion of himself. His family was very wealthy—the Bedsole Drugs and all. J.L. was always teasing this little thing and doing crazy things to him. Truman would just say, “Leave me alone,” but one day he had had enough of it. One day Bulldog backed all the way across the lobby—he looked exactly like an English bulldog—and he put his head down and charged, hitting J.L. right in the genitals. J.L. never went near that bulldog again, ever.
    I saw him off and on in Mobile, and