Against the Country (15 page)

As I stood in line at this particular Hardee’s, alternately bored and shocked by the custom all around me, I heard a familiar woodland voice say, as its source slid a tray toward a woman up front, “There you go, bitch, and I hope you choke on it.
May I help you please?
” this last directed with fine drag timing at the next horrified diner in line, who then paid a dear amount for the simple Coke he wanted, and so on, until at last I stood before this hanging judge, and was greeted with the expected if unmeant
“May I help you please?”
and then heard, to the certain astonishment of anyone not already frightened off, “Oh hi there! How have you been?” I took his hand across the register and said that I was well, and asked how he and his people were doing, and was told that everyone was either dead or miserable or lying to themselves, after which we got on with the rest of the transaction. I asked for whatever Hardee’s had that pretended to be a Big Mac, and some fries, and as he slumped off to fetch my meal I could not help but peek behind the counter to see if he had any shoes on. He did, but I will be forgiven if I choose to remember it otherwise.

God bless and keep our country faggots. One should never discount the amount of faggot in them, nor ever their helping of country.

What a joy there is in time travel, and what a fraudulence. In just thirteen paragraphs
²
I have brought myself out of that wood-paneled womb where I was forced to take form and have rendered myself an almost viable being set to emerge from the faux-marble cunt of a now obsolete Richmond mall. Only pages prior I was younger still, and had yet to befriend a single homosexual, and had yet to do anything about my hair, and was possessed of no great delusions re God, and held no shotgun in my arms with which I might make a few bus-bound teenagers pretend to cringe and crawl. I am tempted to stick with this new and less indictable self, at a sudden seventeen, with a job in town (and a second at the county bank), and reliable use of a vehicle (if not of a reliable vehicle), and the prospect of imminent release can he but save his town money, and avoid collision with a drunk on some lonesome stretch of road, and dodge the impregnation of whichever country girl has lately caught his eye, and not lose sight of the fact that these last two eventualities would almost certainly amount to the same thing.

That thought is surely unkind to the girl, and possibly also to the drunk, but it does take us, with a considerable savings in pain, to the point where both I and the reader might be done with this trial, and its pretense, and its foolishness, were pain

and pretense and foolishness not the only themes still available to the honest American writer. Excepting, of course (though it is painful to bring up, and certainly a little foolish, and bound to be called pretentious by someone), honesty itself. I see, for instance, that I have avoided any mention of that distasteful episode wherein I attempted, in a moment of late-onset religiosity (which in human terms covered the better part of three years but here, I promise, will not last out the next paragraph), to convert my gay friend and informant to the one true path, which involved (the attempt, not the path, though I suppose the latter might also be depicted in this way) mornings with him in the high-school parking lot, and my indication of this (male) and that (female) ass, followed by the practical inquiry “Well, which is it?” I highly recommend this method to anyone who hopes to iron out the dimples in a friend’s sexuality, but in my case the interview was conducted unfairly, and made it clear that the female ass was what we were after here, which answer he dutifully gave, and which answer I did not believe, and which lie then caused me to question him further, and to judge his constant and exuberant singing of spirituals on bus trips (especially “Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” his curtain call) to be a barb and a blasphemy aimed in my personal direction, until at last I took him to see the wisest, most righteous adult I knew, and waited outside for him to emerge from this sit-down with the news that my mother had counseled him not to deny his inner gayness and had remained oddly silent on the question of whether his obvious interest in her second son was likely to bear him any fruit.

Because my theme for the moment is honesty, or else fraudulence (either one), I would like to confess, before I conveniently decide that my self-portrait here will only be damaged by further embellishments to its already broad strokes, that (a) the young man of whom I write was not the same country queen as I later encountered in the Regency Square Hardee’s (I allowed
the reader to guess that he was, and I did so on purpose, and I am almost sorry for it); that (b) the above (“(a)”) is in no way meant to diminish my admiration for the talented Hardee’s worker, who was, to be clear, short and white and applaudingly cruel, whereas the friend I mean was tall and black and mostly kind and never, that I saw, went around barefoot (though by this I intend no judgment upon them that did); that (c) I am, or rather my extreme provincialism is, entirely at fault for any lapse in, or discontinuation of, whatever friendships I enjoyed then or have tolerated ever since, including that with this particular friend, who by geographical accident was able to transfer into a high school better able to teach him, and to appreciate his gifts, and perhaps even to accommodate his blackness, than the one he and I had hated together; that (d) nearly twenty years would then pass before I chanced to see him again, in a Richmond parking lot, whereupon I was relieved to learn that he was now living happily with a man, and so had taken my mother’s kind advice after all; except that (e) prior to this arrangement he had cohabitated with a woman, and had fathered a child by her, and although he loved the child, and was boastful of it, and would see to its well-being ever after, was fated to find disappointment in the company of the woman, and so was forced to quit it altogether; by which I came to understand that (f) to the debasement of himself, and to numerous others besides, he might just have opted, for a brief but crucial moment in an already delicate development, to prize my wisdom over that of my mother, which idea could not help but sicken me.

Even here, though, my fraudulence betrays me, or else my honesty does, for I was not sickened on account of what harm I might have done a forgotten friend, nor because those charming country convictions I held in decades past were by now so inconsequential to my own experience that I was wholly unprepared for the impact they may at one point have had on someone else’s. Nor was I thrown, exactly, by the realization that this rider may have struck out for the false haven of heterosexuality regardless of what shove I ever gave him (which scenario would grant him all agency in the matter, yes, but anyhow fail to absolve me). No, what sickened me was not any one of these possibilities but rather the overall unknowability of the problem: I could not be sure that my mother’s good counsel had been either followed or ignored; I could not be sure that my own had been heard at all; I could not guarantee that this young man had for one moment sought out his way in any sinner save himself, and, honestly, who would? Ergo, I would never be able to trust in that faint yet sweet note of triumph (over my mother? over nature herself?) which sounded within me one sunburnt parking-lot day. That this is what sickened me, finally, ought to sicken just about anyone.

One last confession, before I cut short this shortcut across time’s mined macadam: the word “sicken,” and any variant of that marker lately employed to describe how at the moment
of composition I thought and felt about memories of how I once thought and felt when certain other memories (progenitors at best of those above) first put out their feeble roots within me, now strikes me as so melodramatic as to be counted, if only by the calculus of an ever less dependable fraudulence, an ever more dependable lie.

Back, then, scurrying with shame and regret, to my little room, where at twelve or so I sat in the dark (by which I mean the literal and not the metaphorical dark, or not merely) until my brother moved in, his own room having been surrendered to our sister (and hers to the myth that endless work on an ancient and uninhabitable farmhouse will somehow elicit a charm that had never taken up residence there in the first place), and asked why I sat so in the shadows, and was told that the overhead was done in, whereupon he reached up and brushed it, just once, with his magical palm, and Lo! Light! I was plainly astonished by this twist after a year’s worth of evenings spent seated or prone in my doorway, trying to read by the bulb in the hall, which was not a hall so much as it was a four-by-four-foot square of bad wood at the top of a rickety staircase eventually destroyed altogether and replaced by newer steps my father came out of his depression to build, impressively and well, in a single weekend, when we had all of us resigned ourselves to the indefinite use of a ladder.

Whether approached by rung or by step, this platform up top gave onto two other rooms, both of them well lighted and occupied by people unconcerned, or unaware, that one of their number had so little by which to illuminate his homework, which he was expected to do well on despite
his numerous privations, which task he accomplished only insofar as the standards of his education allowed for the misreading of a line here and there without too much being taken off for it. I might also point out, in case these efforts will themselves be graded on a curve, that my privations were as nothing compared with those suffered elsewhere in the county, which were as nothing compared with those suffered elsewhere in the world. Yet should my hurts, on account of their relative smallness, be ignored? should a preventable wound, because it is shallower than the next, be entirely excused and forgotten?

I wish now that my brother had never healed the fixture in my room. By sunlight the faded and peeling pink wallpaper, which of course there was no money to change, caused only a passing fright, but by tungsten its advances were bolder still, and conveyed a sense of old and pungent desperation in that place, of existence clutched at too long or too easily snuffed out, and attached to me an idea, and withal an actual scent, of sweetened rot, such as a poor woman’s corpse might bestow upon a grave robber who has not bothered, or yet discovered how, to do his homework.

I would prefer to call my room a friend. I know that sort of thing is popular with the modern reader, who wants always to remember childhood that way, even if an extended program of rape occurred there. (Does this crime not nowadays count double against the assailant, for its being a violation not only of the little one’s trust but also of her refuge?) My own tale, alas, is this chestnut in a mirror, for although I went unraped in my room, that I know of, the footage itself never behaved even cordially toward me, nor am I willing to fib now and say that it did. Those walls neither promised nor provided me safe harbor but acted instead very much as they looked: like an ancient bowel unaccustomed to light and intent on a slow
(that is to say, an American) digestion of its contents, so as to leave almost nothing behind when those contents finally reached seventeen and were forced out of that farmhouse forever, to negotiate their way through this land’s pinched sewers, by which I mostly mean town.

We possessed no basement to which I might repair, as the town kids all seemed to, for our house was put up directly onto the soil, and so what sunken living space we implied to the road below was only that part of the foundation time and gravity and the Virginia mud had conspired by then to swallow. Also there was no garage. I might pen a trite little treatise here about why a garage is preferable to a basement from the American teenage perspective, or why a basement is preferable to a garage, but in either case an extended encounter with one or both is required, and so I am bereft. We did, on the other hand, have an attic. By chance or by fate there was, toward the southerly end of my room, a pull-down entrance into the addled brainpan of our jailor, which held only fear for me until my brother moved in, after which it beckoned me up always into its gray rafters, bare in spots but elsewhere laid over with planks enough that a child might easily gather what was needed to suspend a habitat there.

This attic was uncommonly warm in summer, despite or perhaps because of the enormous fan our father had placed in the house’s northern aperture, which contraption seemed somehow to pull the hot air toward us rather than fulfill its mission to push the stuff back out, and which, due to the requirements of its oversized motor, produced such a heat on its own account that I sometimes wondered whether it would not catch fire
some dry night and burn us all alive. Still, for companionship I ranked this machine above most parents I knew, for there was little chance that one of its blades would come loose of an afternoon and strike me for no good reason, and so raise yet another welt, and so raise yet another resentment, and so raise yet another sentence, and if it turned to arson while I was near I would at least be the first one alight and so, by my screams, might warn all the others. Who knows but by a shrieking, embarrassed death I might have attained a heroism that will forever now elude me in this shrieking, embarrassed life.

A preponderance of wasps and spiders presented up there, but in my desperation I imagined that these could be warded off with pluck and a plan. I was wrong, of course: the spirit of a spider is broken soon enough, and if not one can generally smash her and all her issue with a shoe, but wasps are another matter. Wasps are a resistance movement, and they will fight, to a wasp, to the last. Most town dwellers can probably count, or anyway estimate, the number of times some cute little honeybee has pricked and annoyed them over the course of forty or fifty summers; I could not begin to count even the number of wounds I received, to my neck and arms and fingers (as they waved frantically in front of my face), on the single afternoon when I resolved to evict these assassins, with swats aimed in the general direction of the fan, from what I mistakenly assumed to be not their home but mine.