Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (4 page)

“Hey, Walt, did you hear that? It sounded like footsteps up in the kitchen.”

“I didn’t hear anything.”

“Why don’t you go to the stairway and check. We don’t want any surprises.” His underwear was all bunchy in the back, saggy like a diaper, but his legs were meaty and satisfying to look at.

“Dale, would you make sure those curtains are closed?”

He crossed the room, and I ate him alive with my eyes, confident that no one would accuse me of staring. Things might have been different were I in last place, but as a winner, it was my right to make sure that things were done properly. “There’s an open space down by the baseboard. Bend over and close it, will you?”

It took a while, but after explaining that a pair of kings was no match for a two of hearts and a three of spades, Walt surrendered his underpants and tossed them onto a pile beside the TV set. “Okay,” he said. “Now the rest of you can finish the game.”

“But it is finished,” Scott said.

“Oh no,” Walt said. “I’m not the only one getting naked. You guys have to keep playing.”

“While you do what — sit back and watch?” I said. “What kind of a homo are you?”

“Yeah,” Dale said. “Why don’t we do something else? This game’s boring and the rules are impossible.”

The others muttered in agreement, and when Walt refused to back down, I gathered the deck and tamped it commandingly upon the tabletop. “The only solution is for us all to keep playing.”

“How the hell do you expect me to do that?” Walt said. “In case you haven’t noticed, there’s nothing more for me to lose.”

“Oh,” I said, “there’s always more. Maybe if the weakest hand is already naked, we should make that person perform some kind of a task. Nothing big, just, you know, a token kind of a thing.”

“A thing like what?” Walt asked.

“I don’t know. I guess we’ll just have to cross that bridge when we come to it.”

In retrospect, I probably went a little too far in ordering Scott to sit on my lap. “But I’m naked!” he said.

“Hey,” I told him, “I’m the one who’s going to be suffering. I was just looking for something easy. Would you rather run outside and touch the mailbox? The sun will be coming up in about twenty seconds — you want the whole neighborhood to see you?”

“How long will I have to sit on you?” he asked.

“I don’t know. A minute or two. Maybe five. Or seven.”

I moved onto the easy chair and wearily patted my knee, as if this were a great sacrifice. Scott slid into place, and I considered our reflection in the darkened TV screen. Here I was, one naked guy on my lap and three others ready to do my bidding. It was the stuff of dreams until I remembered that they were not doing these things of their own accord. This was not their pleasure, but their punishment, and once it was over they would make it a point to avoid me. Rumors would spread that I had slipped something into their Cokes, that I had tried to French Brad Clancy, that I had stolen five dollars from Walt’s pocket. Not even Mrs. Winters would wave at me, but all that would come later, in a different life. For now I would savor this poor imitation of tenderness, mapping Scott’s shoulders, the small of his back, as he shuddered beneath my winning hand.

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

Consider the Stars

E VERY NIGHT before going to bed, Hugh steps outside to consider the stars. His interest is not scientific — he doesn’t pinpoint the constellations or make casual references to Canopus; rather, he just regards the mass of them, occasionally pausing to sigh. When asked if there’s life on other planets, he says, “Yes, of course. Look at the odds.”

It hardly seems fair we’d get the universe all to ourselves, but on a personal level I’m highly disturbed by the thought of extraterrestrial life. If there are, in fact, billions of other civilizations, where does that leave our celebrities? If worth is measured on a sliding scale of recognition, what would it mean if we were all suddenly obscure? How would we know our place?

In trying to make sense of this, I think back to a 1968 Labor Day celebration at the Raleigh Country Club. I was at the snack bar, listening to a group of sixth-graders who lived in another part of town and sat discussing significant changes in their upcoming school year. According to the girl named Janet, neither Pam Dobbins nor J. J. Jackson had been invited to the Fourth of July party hosted by the Duffy twins, who later told Kath Matthews that both Pam and J.J. were out of the picture as far as the seventh grade was concerned. “Totally, completely out,” Janet said. “Poof.”

I didn’t know any Pam Dobbins or J. J. Jackson, but the reverential tone of Janet’s voice sent me into a state of mild shock. Call me naive, but it had simply never occurred to me that other schools might have their own celebrity circles. At the age of twelve, I thought the group at E. C. Brooks was if not nationally known, then at least its own private phenomenon. Why else would our lives revolve around it so completely? I myself was not a member of my school’s popular crowd, but I recall thinking that, whoever they were, Janet’s popular crowd couldn’t begin to compete with ours. But what if I was wrong? What if I’d wasted my entire life comparing myself with people who didn’t really matter? Try as I might, I still can’t wrap my mind around it.

They banded together in the third grade. Ann Carlsworth, Christie Kaymore, Deb Bevins, Mike Holliwell, Doug Middleton, Thad Pope: they were the core of the popular crowd, and for the next six years my classmates and I studied their lives the way we were supposed to study math and English. What confused us most was the absence of any specific formula. Were they funny? No. Interesting? Yawn. None owned pools or horses. They had no special talents, and their grades were unremarkable. It was their dearth of excellence that gave the rest of us hope and kept us on our toes. Every now and then they’d select a new member, and the general attitude among the student body was “Oh, pick me!” It didn’t matter what you were like on your own. The group would make you special. That was its magic.

So complete was their power that I actually felt honored when one of them hit me in the mouth with a rock. He’d gotten me after school, and upon returning home, I ran into my sister’s bedroom, hugging my bloody Kleenex and crying, “It was Thad!!!”

Lisa was one grade higher than me, but still she understood the significance. “Did he say anything?” she asked. “Did you save the rock?”

My father demanded I retaliate, saying I ought to knock the guy on his ass.

“Oh, Dad.”

“Aww, baloney. Clock him on the snot locker and he’ll go down like a ton of bricks.”

“Are you talking to me?” I asked. The archaic slang aside, who did my father think I was? Boys who spent their weekends making banana nut muffins did not, as a rule, excel in the art of hand-to-hand combat.

“I mean, come on, Dad,” Lisa said. “Wake up.”

The following afternoon I was taken to Dr. Povlitch for X-rays. The rock had damaged one of my bottom teeth, and there was some question over who would pay for the subsequent root canal. I figured that since my parents had conceived me, delivered me into the world, and raised me as a permanent guest in their home, they should foot the bill, but my father thought differently. He decided the Popes should pay, and I screamed as he picked up the phone book.

“But you can’t just. . . call Thad’s house.”

“Oh yeah?” he said. “Watch me.”

There were two Thad Popes in the Raleigh phone book, a Junior and a Senior. The one in my class was what came after a Junior. He was a Third. My father called both the Junior and the Senior, beginning each conversation with the line “Lou Sedaris here. Listen, pal, we’ve got a problem with your son.”

He said our last name as if it meant something, as if we were known and respected. This made it all the more painful when he was asked to repeat it. Then to spell it.

A meeting was arranged for the following evening, and before we left the house, I begged my father to change his clothes. He’d been building an addition to the carport and was wearing a pair of khaki shorts smeared with paint and spotted here and there with bits of dried concrete. Through a hole in his tattered T-shirt, without squinting, it was possible to see his nipple.

“What the hell is wrong with this?” he asked. “We’re not staying for dinner, so who cares what I’m wearing?”

I yelled for my mother, and in the end he compromised by changing his shirt.

From the outside, Thad’s house didn’t look much different from anyone else’s — just a standard split-level with what my father described as a totally inadequate carport. Mr. Pope answered the door in a pair of sherbet-colored golf pants and led us downstairs into what he called “the rumpus room.”

“Oh,” I said, “this is nice!”

The room was damp and windowless and lit with hanging Tiffany lampshades, the shards of colorful glass arranged to spell the words Busch and Budweiser. The walls were paneled in imitation walnut, and the furniture looked as though it had been hand-hewn by settlers who’d reconfigured parts of their beloved Conestoga wagon to fashion such things as easy chairs and coffee tables. Noticing the fraternity paddle hanging on the wall above the television, my father launched into his broken Greek, saying “Kalispera sas adhelfos!”

When Mr. Pope looked at him blankly, my father laughed and offered a translation. “I said, 'Good evening, brother.' ”

“Oh . . . right,” Mr. Pope said. “Fraternities are Greek.”

He directed us toward a sofa and asked if we wanted something to drink. Coke? A beer? I didn’t want to deplete Thad’s precious cola supply, but before I could refuse, my father said sure, we’d have one of each. The orders were called up the staircase, and a few minutes later Mrs. Pope came down, carrying cans and plastic tumblers.

“Well, hello there,” my father said. This was his standard greeting to a beautiful woman, but I could tell he was just saying it as a joke. Mrs. Pope wasn’t unattractive, just ordinary, and as she set the drinks before us, I noticed that her son had inherited her blunt, slightly upturned nose, which looked good on him but caused her to appear overly suspicious and judgmental.

“So,” she said. “I hear you’ve been to the dentist.” She was just trying to make small talk, but because of her nose, it came off sounding like an insult, as if I’d just had a cavity filled and was now looking for someone to foot the bill.

“I’ll say he’s been to the dentist,” my father said. “Someone hits you in the mouth with a rock and I’d say the dentist’s office is pretty much the first place a reasonable person would go.”

Mr. Pope held up his hands. “Whoa now,” he said. “Let’s just calm things down a little.” He yelled upstairs for his son, and when there was no answer he picked up the phone, telling Thad to stop running his mouth and get his butt down to the rumpus room ASAP.

A rush of footsteps on the carpeted staircase and then Thad sprinted in, all smiles and apologies. The minister had called. The game had been rescheduled. “Hello, sir, and you are . . . ?”

He looked my father in the eye and firmly shook his hand, holding it in his own for just the right amount of time. While most handshakes mumbled, his spoke clearly, saying both We’ll get through this as quickly as possible and I’m looking forward to your vote this coming November.

I’d thought that seeing him without his group might be unsettling, like finding a single arm on the sidewalk, but Thad was fully capable of operating independently. Watching him in action, I understood that his popularity was not an accident. Unlike a normal human being, he possessed an uncanny ability to please people. There was no sucking up or awkward maneuvering to fit the will of others. Rather, much like a Whitman’s sampler, he seemed to offer a little bit of everything. Pass on his athletic ability and you might partake of his excellent manners, his confidence, his coltish enthusiasm. Even his parents seemed invigorated by his presence, uncrossing their legs and sitting up just a little bit straighter as he took a seat beside them. Had the circumstances been different, my father would have been all over him, probably going so far as to call him son — but money was involved, so he steeled himself.

“All right, then,” Mr. Pope said. “Now that everyone’s accounted for, I’m hoping we can clear this up. Sticks and stones aside, I suspect this all comes down to a little misunderstanding between friends.”

I lowered my eyes, waiting for Thad to set his father straight. “Friends? With him?” I expected laughter or the famous Thad snort, but instead he said nothing. And with his silence, he won me completely. A little misunderstanding — that’s exactly what it was. How had I not seen it earlier?

The immediate goal was to save my friend, and so I claimed to have essentially thrown myself in the path of Thad’s fast-moving rock.

“What the hell was he throwing rocks for?” my father asked. “What the hell was he throwing them at?”

Mrs. Pope frowned, implying that such language was not welcome in the rumpus room.

“I mean, Jesus Christ, the guy’s got to be a complete idiot.”

Thad swore he hadn’t been aiming at anything, and I backed him up, saying it was just one of those things we all did. “Like in Vietnam or whatever. It was just friendly fire.”

My father asked what the hell I knew about Vietnam, and again Thad’s mother winced, saying that boys picked up a lot of this talk by watching the news.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” my father said.

“What my wife meant . . . ,” Mr. Pope said.

“Aww, baloney.”

The trio of Popes exchanged meaningful glances, holding what amounted to a brief, telepathic powwow. “This man crazy,” the smoke signals read. “Make heap big trouble for others.”

I looked at my father, a man in dirty shorts who drank his beer from the can rather than pouring it into his tumbler, and I thought, You don’t belong here. More precisely, I decided that he was the reason I didn’t belong. The hokey Greek phrases, the how-to lectures on mixing your own concrete, the squabble over who would pay the stupid dentist bill — little by little, it had all seeped into my bloodstream, robbing me of my natural ability to please others. For as long as I could remember, he’d been telling us that it didn’t matter what other people thought: their judgment was crap, a waste of time, baloney. But it did matter, especially when those people were these people.

“Well,” Mr. Pope said, “I can see that this is going nowhere.”

My father laughed. “Yeah, you got that right.” It sounded like a parting sentence, but rather than standing to leave, he leaned back in the sofa and rested his beer can upon his stomach. “We’re all going nowhere.”

At this point I’m fairly sure that Thad and I were envisioning the same grim scenario. While the rest of the world moved on, my increasingly filthy and bearded father would continue to occupy the rumpus-room sofa. Christmas would come, friends would visit, and the Popes would bitterly direct them toward the easy chairs. “Just ignore him,” they’d say. “He’ll go home sooner or later.”

In the end, they agreed to pay for half of the root canal, not because they thought it was fair but because they wanted us out of their house.

Some friendships are formed by a commonality of interests and ideas: you both love judo or camping or making your own sausage. Other friendships are forged in alliance against a common enemy. On leaving Thad’s house, I decided that ours would probably be the latter. We’d start off grousing about my father, and then, little by little, we’d move on to the hundreds of other things and people that got on our nerves. “You hate olives,” I imagined him saying. “I hate them, too!”