Authors: Mary Karr
You know that on this broad planet sympathetic others exist, at least a few beings somewhere who might feel alien as you. Books prove it—characters like old Holden Caulfield wandering among the “phonies” at his prep school. The words and sentences you take into your body from books are no less sacred and healing than communion. Surely at least one such person lives in your zip code.
You used to look out the window of your daddy’s truck riding to the Towne House and imagine that somewhere from one of these tract houses amid the razor grass and the industrial-maze skyline of contorted steel, a boy riding to the dance might also be pretending that he was being ferried over snowy fields in a Russian sledge. Or perhaps in another truck cab, a girl your age was rethumbing
Catcher in the Rye
and
halfway believing that in the Towne House Holden Caulfield would be waiting under the exit sign in all his wounded, cynical splendor. And that very evening conversation would be struck like a flint, and endless isolate dark illuminated.
But how would such a person find you unless you hung it all out there?
While other girls are zipping themselves into pale blue church dresses or pastel linen, you go out on a fashion limb by slithering into a brown leather dress with square buttons. Your daddy dropping you off looks down at the floor of his truck and says that the yellow Mary Janes with boxy toes you have on look a helluva lot like clown shoes.
A few acts that’ll later garner fame come to the Towne House at regular intervals—ZZ Top and Jerry Lee Lewis, a psychedelic band called the Fever Tree. When Johnny and Edgar Winter visit nearby Beaumont, where they grew up, they also kick in. Admission: one buck—double a movie ticket. You get a tribal hand stamp that glows under black light and won’t wash off for days.
Inside, the band (the Top, as you’ve come to call them) is at first dwarfed by the throbbing light show on the back wall—multicolored amoebae made from clear glass plates sandwiching together an eerie elixir of salad oil and food coloring. The colored squiggles get thrown on the wall by an overhead projector with a Leechfield Library tag. Weird.
Plus this band differs from any you’ve seen, for they wear no powder-blue suits or ruffled prom shirts like the Boogie Kings. They lack the polished and pointy-toed shoes James Brown and the Famous Flames had on the time your daddy took you to a college concert, and you felt for the first time your unalloyed whiteness amid rows of black faces.
The Top wear jeans, torn and patched. Leather cowboy vests over T-shirts. Billy Gibbons’s beard evokes an old gold-miner’s. He and Dusty Hill seem to ride the great bucking rhythms of guitar and bass (respectively) with the stoical stares you’ve seen on prison rodeo bronco busters. You don’t yet recognize their riffs as deriving from Mr. John Lee Hooker. But the beat pounding from those black speakers finds some natural home in your pelvis. It hooks right into the dance moves
you picked up either from Lecia (who goes across the river to Louisiana roadhouses like Lou Ann’s or the Big Oaks) or from your slavish devotion to
Soul Train
. Even kids who start out doing go-go-boot stuff from
American Bandstand
or
Hullabaloo
—waving their arms and ponying around like fools—eventually ask you to break down the Cold Sweat or Harlem Shuffle. The music just gets some swivel working in a person.
On stage, a Day-Glo skeleton holds a foreboding sign that says
Speed Kills.
No one in the band explains that speed refers to methedrine. That even hippies are getting strung out on it. Eating it in pill form, snorting it, or shooting it, forgoing food for weeks on end until they pare themselves down to skeletal form, and ergo have full-tilt heart attacks before the age of twenty on it. (What did you know of velocity then, of weeks eaten by your brain’s own skitter—drops of water on a hot iron skillet? The trick in that town was getting through a night at all without stalling in the sludge of your own thoughts.)
Suddenly, and without instruction, even the farm girls in their corny, matching dresses with different color polka dots are talking about speed with the feigned insouciance of old heads, as if some invisible lightning bolt has shot through every teenage brain in the county searing in this common language. Actual drug use of any kind still seems farther away than Vietnam. But (like Vietnam) some of its lingo seems to infect common parlance in a collective instant. Maybe you’d all brought home the same
Weekly Reader
from school or watched the same TV drug-addict movie. Maybe the hard-driven bass line of the Top just wordlessly hammers all that drug lore into everybody’s skull.
The leather dress you wear is an airless sheath, and every week you soak in your own sweat but can find no other garb appropriate to who you’re trying to become. At one point, you find your body rocking in the arms of a boy from Houston whose iron surfer’s cross clicks against the square dress buttons.
Clarice once told you that tickling a boy’s neck just under his collar would drive him to a sexual frenzy that tethered him to you like a dog. You at first hesitate trying this on the surfer boy, because while you want the power such a response would accord, you don’t want to look
like a skank. With all the tentativeness of a cat testing water, you touch his neck lightly then draw back, half expecting he’ll mistake your fingers for a junebug that needs swatting. But sure enough, the minuscule gesture from you signals him. He draws you closer. You try it again, and his breath quickens. By the end of the song you’re tracing your initials lightly on his neck as if to brand him your own.
Later you sit in the folding church chairs at the hall’s perimeter. His arm slings over your shoulder so his hand hovers inches above your breast without even once grazing it—no small feat. (What did you talk about? Was talking permitted, or was it all you could both do in the rushing terror of letting your bodies touch to endure it?) You ask him—more trying to make conversation than from any true curiosity—about that burnt peanut smell in his clothes, and he tells you he smoked a joint with his sister between sets.
You don’t blink in the face of this fact. Yet he suddenly seems wholly alien to you. Though you’ve been languidly hanging in his arms all night waiting for a kiss, you’re subsequently glad it happens only once, during the last song. His mouth is arid and sour. At the hesitant touch of his tongue, your body seizes up with a fear that masks itself as arousal, even conjuring for a fleet second that night with John Cleary. For years, you’ll confuse terror and sexual heat this way. Whether it’s your peculiar mistake, or the curse of anyone new to bodily discernments, you’ll never figure. But the feelings do favor each other, i.e. sweat rolls down the ribs; breathlessness kicks in; the skin surface become hyperalert. It’s baffling that you feel phosphorescence gather in your body—as you had with your Sadie Hawkins date—given your slight revulsion at the boy’s heavy body and sour kiss.
You draw back from his embrace and pretend to see your daddy’s truck through the far window. Outside, you sneak glimpses of the boy shooting pool in the game room. And when he calls the next day to firm up plans for a beach trip, you won’t come to the phone.
Maybe a friend of high caliber can only arrive after several months of parched loneliness, or after a string of psychic outlays such as
you endured those years in junior high, because only the erasure of beloveds can force you to reveal your need for a friend to a stranger.
For the first months of high school, your lack of friends isn’t a worry. You’re too busy trying to absorb the shock waves of your own new strangeness. Occasionally loneliness manifests as a specific longing—harsh as thirst—for Clarice or John Cleary. But a new awkwardness infuses your dealings with them.
Clarice has hooked up with a traditional Cajun boyfriend from the cross-town rival high school. He keeps a close watch on her and has a whole list of stuff she’s not supposed to do, like cussing or going out at night without him. She lands a job at the Chicken Shack, and despite the boyfriend’s rules, she still manages to flummox customers by chirping things like, “Fuck you and come back,” but so fast the words are nearly (just barely) unintelligible. Some nights, you sit out under the stars about the time John pulls in from a date, and he trots over smelling of shaving lotion to scratch the cat under its chin, but there’s a void between you now.
One source of succor is the drama teacher. Maybe you migrate to her for help in playacting your new self into existence. But drama teachers in that town also have a special role for readers—they’re the only school-based source of contemporary plays and poems. Otherwise, the school curriculum keeps you lashed to the mast of previous centuries—
Ivanhoe
and Tennyson and Dickens out the wazoo. You even manage to resent Melville till you actually read him.
But the twentieth-century works Miss Baird favors for interpretation have an antique flavor and could easily be culled from the past. She adores patriotic and religious sounding stuff, or work with homespun characters—corncob-smoking uncles and head-rag-wearing “mammies.” Edgar Lee Masters’s
Spoon-River Anthology,
so despised by you, is oft-quoted by her. For district poetry competition, you propose Edward Arlington Robinson’s “Richard Cory,” whose title character in the final line “went home and put a bullet through his head.” Soon as you say it, Miss Baird cringes deeply over her desktop. She hurries to the podium,
waving her freckled hands at you as if the offending image hung in the air and could be dispersed like so much chalk dust.
Whatever her literary proclivities, she’s obliged to haul you to speech and drama tournaments. And just as the Towne House dances broaden the territory in your search for like-minded souls, so do these trips. Kids from other towns and schools pour off yellow buses, and always you look among the books they carry for one subversive enough to recommend its reader as a friend.
It’s after school, and Miss Baird stands a stubby five-foot-one before the Drama Club, her flaming orange hair sprayed into a man’s stiff pompadour. She reads in clipped syllables the muster of contestants picked to compete at the University of Houston that weekend. (Miss Baird made you do tongue exercises, saying phrases like
cutta-butta
and
toy boat
over and over.) The school dress code forces her to wear skirts, but she always strides and stands with her legs so far apart that if you sit on the front row, you can see the side seams strain against their stitching.
For the premeet pep talk, she continues to pace before you all, taking the slow, swinging steps that would suit somebody with a peg leg. (Later, you’ll never think of Miss Baird without imagining a riding crop in hand to slap her jodhpured calf with.) “There’s someone who’s worked extra
hard
for this meet, someone who deserves
special
praise.
Special
consideration.” On the stressed words, Miss Baird tends to lapse into an English accent, so
hard
becomes
hah-ed
.
Usually this fake accent would rankle you. But at the very word
special,
a dim hope ignites. You fix a rigid half-grin on your face until you note that Mortimer G. Beauregard’s face has welded itself into the same rictus.
Miss Baird whirls in the opposite direction. “Rarely do I call attention to a
single
person’s work. We’re a
team
after all. We
rise
as a team—” (she raises her hand like a choir conductor calling up all the altos’ power)—“We
fall
as a team.” The same hand dive bombs downward. “But
this
young lady has been so
tireless, brilliant.
Her
talent
borders on
genius
…”
With your hand over your mouth, you try to adjust your expression to an indifferent vapidity that opposes Mortimer’s death smirk, while your fellow students glance around the room for someone deserving of this praise.
“I’m absolutely
heartbroken
she can’t be here this afternoon, for she’s
new
to our school. I’m
speaking,
por supuesto—which means
of course
in Spanish—of none other than
Meredith Bright,
who’s just
joined
us from the
noble
state of Mississippi.” Miss Baird stops mid-room, removes her glasses, and pinches at the bridge of her nose as if in great pain. “
Meredith
certainly deserves the full
Indian
war whoop
welcome. Let’s show her some
school spirit
on the bus Saturday. Shall we
give
it a
go?
”
At this Miss Baird starts whooping—slapping her fingers over her O-shaped mouth with its faded stain of tangerine-colored lipstick. The other students kick in so the sound rises from the chairs around you. Usually a war whoop leaves you feeling stranded inside some gorilla gang. But in this instance, it’s the only way to hide the sneer your upper lip is drawing itself into.
Lying in bed that night, you decide that Meredith will doubtless resemble one of those prissy, stringy-haired girls from the Honor Society, who view their ugliness as a kind of modesty, something to be pious about. (Inducted into the Honor Society, you’re kicked out within a year, by which time, you’ll have grown into enough of a wiseass to say to the principal, “Aw dang, do I have to give my pin back?”)
The Saturday of the meet, your mother says of Meredith Bright, prophetically enough, “Maybe you’ll like her.” She’s fresh from the shower and whapping talcum powder on her back at the time, each touch leaving a frosty chrysanthemum on the pale skin. Her injunction on competing with other girls is a challenge, a gauntlet thrown down: “You just have to be smarter than the ones who are prettier and prettier than the ones who are smarter.”
Your first sight of Meredith is on the bus amid the dreaded war whoop welcome. She holds a beige folder with a casually posed self-possession. Also, she looks totally unlike anyone you’re ever seen. For
one thing, she’s done her honey-colored hair in the corkscrew curls of a young Shirley Temple. This is the era of straight hair. White girls often buy the same chemicals black people use to “conk” or scorch waves from their hair.