by Ben Metcalf
I was small for my age, and admittedly odd, but then so had he been, and he grew up large enough, and imposing in his way, and sufficiently mean (by which I mean American) that what few friends I caught hold of in that place would not enter the house out of physical fear of him. I have no notion, then, of what led this man to believe I would not grow up the same as he did (was that not his purpose?); and would not outdo him eventually in size, which with work and patience I did; and would not best him one day in physical combat, which crime both shames and sustains me (the sustenance being but a further source of the shame); and would not challenge him moreover in the ancient art of meanness, to which ongoing contest I submit this humble text.
Some others could not see it, but my father was a decent man, whose intellect was at constant war with the violence inside of him (which is only as it should be in anyone worth knowing) and whose heart would likely have received me at once had I but approached him in the pasture, or at the edge of the woods, or by the side of the stove, or on the lip of the trash pit, and said, simply, “I’m a faggot.” Such a scene would at least have stayed his hand for a while (one was slightly less eager to beat a daughter out there, though I cannot imagine why) and would have prompted in my parents a more interesting conversation than what I had previously been able to overhear: “He’s my child—we’ve always known that” (silence); “He’s like me” (silence); “I know I’m responsible for him” (further silence); until at last my father was compelled to say either “Come on” or “Shut up,” I do not remember which.
For my mother’s well-being throughout this period, I regret that I was unable to arrange a sexual ingress upon her person. (She was my mother, after all, and although the picture of prettiness she did have that ringworm on her leg.) Such an act would have flattered her, of course, and seen me removed from the list of potential family faggots, though I might rightly have been added to the list of potential schizophrenics, which ailment was a great deal more prevalent on both sides of our tree, due no doubt to the continent’s cruel and continued work upon it, than was the far less bothersome moss of homosexuality. As it is I was probably thought a schizophrenic anyway, and possibly still am, and might even have lived up to that diagnosis, with a violent ideation, had my father asked me just one more time about the perfectly harmless goings-on inside my little room.1
Oh, to have been a true country queen! To have been able to claim, in all honesty, a difference between myself and rural America large enough to exempt me from the mundane and brutal rites of passage there! To have been free to walk those roads in bare feet, my pantlegs rolled up, a swish in my ass and impertinence on my face and no care for who saw me from bus or truck or field, an advertisement and a dare! To have yearned for attention like anyone else and to have won it in such abundance! To have achieved, without formal effort, an obvious and irreducible celebrity, so that when national stardom failed to pan out one was bound to be less disappointed than so many of the town fags were! To have neutralized the bullies upon puberty with the realization that no points were to be scored upon a target not naturally considered a boy, as well as by the myth that such creatures employed an oriental fighting technique that in a single quick stroke to the genitals might ruin a natural boy’s reputation forever, which myth is real! To have been so fortunate! To have dropped out of high school, or else shimmied right through, with the understanding that no grade, regardless of how low or how high, could possibly compete with the mark one had already received! To have seen all one’s faults and one’s foibles, all one’s human allotment of pride and viciousness and dissent, boiled down into a single incurable ailment! To have known the advantage of a parent, or two, convinced that a miracle vaccine, or a doctrine, or a hobby, might at last be found! To have been studied like a bewitched cow and handled always with kid gloves! To have been hated with more zeal than one’s siblings yet somehow better loved! To have been wondered at, and prayed over, and above all feared! My God, but that is the thing: to have been feared!
I apologize to my mother, especially, for not having made more of an effort to conform to her wishes out there. Had I but known what a comfort it can be for adults to see just one of their predictions come true in a land that conspires against all prophets, and contrives against all hopes, I might have reconsidered those offers to be fellated in a bathroom stall or buggered in the woods along the cross-country course. I might have done more than simply befriend a few area faggots, and make enemies of certain others, and remain an unknown quantity to most. I might have learned something of what it was like to be a “real” farmboy beyond the fact that at least one of them liked to shove frozen hot dogs up his rectum and then put them back in the freezer for his sister to eat, even as he delivered this same sister from the clutches of a too-insistent football player by taking the offending testicles in hand one locker-room afternoon, and giving both hand and testicles a twist, and saying, softly, “You touch her again and they’re coming off.” This intelligence (does it not sparkle?) was gifted to me by a young man ignored by his own people on account of an anabaptist predilection, and by others on account of his being black, and by me, I am sorry to say, for both reasons until at last he came across with those matchless tales.
I have him to thank for any inkling I gained thereafter of who was, and who was not, and who only seemed to be, and of how in the last case I was bound to be disappointed but in the first case I might just be surprised. (Or was it the other way around?) I have him to thank also for my knowledge of how the Goochland fags reached out to one another with their fast hallway doubletalk, and their obvious (to anyone looking) signals at the football games, and their late-night flashes of headlight (not in every case seen or returned) meant to make for themselves, as Mr. Jefferson’s heteros all tried and failed to do, a commonality of instinct and vim.
Although I did not shine my own headlights into those woods, and blew no more than the trumpet at football games, and never learned enough of their language to say more than hi in an unlit parking lot, I did gain a respect for these people that was wholly unbegrudged and neither demanded nor proscribed by any personal politics of mine. (I had none then and only pretend to have some now.) Nor was my respect for their kind a mere novice respect, such as one might have for those who had ventured into town before one, alone or with like-minded others, to meet strangers at the roller rink, or on rides at the wanting state fair, or to seek a momentary solace at The Rocky Horror Picture Show, so that in time I might follow in a carload of my own sort, and grope a punkish tomboy forced by our number to sit too close to me, and be stopped at the Henrico County line by a trooper turned evil by the roads out there, who charged us with having too many in the car, which law we neither knew of nor agreed with but which nonetheless saw us headed back the opposite way, in chastened silence, toward those parched fields and those judgmental stands of pine.
Better, then, to have been a true country queen, for there were fewer of them, and hence fewer who were likely to be turned back before they could reach town and inseminate, or else be inseminated by, what paltry notions obtained there. Better to have had cause to study the southern laws with more thoroughness than my associates and I ever did, and so forgo a grand waste of expectation and gasoline, and so avoid a surrender to the truth that town welcomes not those who approach it head-on, in desperate and silly numbers, with colored hair and a conceit that they are different, but rather those who come forward quietly and obliquely, in smaller units, bearing with them an old and unassailable difference, to offer their openings to what suburban monsters await and to what corporations will, out of need and avarice on both ends, eventually agree to grant them employment.
* * *
1 Mostly we were only listening to the radio up there, and I insist that we were well within our rights to seek out some idea of music beyond what Flatt and Scruggs had to offer, or the Carter Family, or the New Lost City Ramblers, blers, one of whose whooping bluegrass numbers actually inspired in me, while we still lived in town,
a vivid and not wholly unprophetic nightmare. To be fair, my parents also played Buffy Sainte-Marie on the old town stereo they guarded jealously in their room, so that such phrases as “the love of a good man” and “I’m going to be a country girl again” acquired for the rest of us a hideous connotation. They gave Woody Guthrie a whirl too, and Arlo, and the young (that is, the rural) Bob Dylan, and Judy Collins (singing rural Bob Dylan), and the interchangeable Ian and Sylvia, and all those unctuous Weavers, and Odetta (who I admit was real fun when we were little), and Josh white (who I bet gives every kid the creeps), and the arthritic and comically slow Lightnin’ Hopkins, and later on some John Prine, and Ry Cooder, and Creedence Clearwater Revival, each song bearing with it, somewhere, in lyric or in intonation, an implication that the naturalistic choice was clearly the adult choice here, when in fact it was patently childish; the modest choice, when it seemed to inspire only a great arrogance; the human choice, when in fact it succored animal distrust and, given time, the political prerequisites of an organized death.
So what if Cat Stevens reverberates against the walls of a dilapidated farmhouse now and again? If it is forever the sun-drunk “Morning Has Broken” and never the more apt and suburban “Father and Son” it cannot count for much; it will hardly drown out the other, more horrible sounds heard there.1a What we got from the radio in my room was not exactly an antidote to this bucolic sickness, for Richmond and Charlottesville alike beamed out at us no end of field- and stream-themed rock, yet for every assault on our souls by Poco or the Little River Band there was at least a palliative in some effort by an odder outfit to agitate and console us.
Should I therefore proceed to list the thirty or so bands that “meant the most” to me during my adolescence, ceding for the duration of that list all music of mine to chance and addled namers? should I pay special attention to what is claimed now, by bespectacled and aging salarymen, to have been the proper choices then? should I bend my memories to suggest that an ignorant pseudo-farmboy might actually have cared about, and managed somehow to predict, what the conventional wisdom1b would be decades beyond his own childhood? Should I bravely claim that the bespectacled salarymen might have been off by a significant band or two, which half-honest stance would only legitimize the remainder of their lies and so work to confirm the slick orthodoxy that has risen up during the course of my lifetime to maximize record sales, which goal has always required the tempting of taste down the American death chute?
Perhaps, because it would seem “counterintuitive” and therefore especially brave, I might champion a band the salarymen have not shunned at all but rather too easily anointed (those sales figures cannot be ignored: they represent a generation listening, and a generation listened to: they are a generation listening to itself1c), which the spectacle wearers deprived of salaries (interns in this equation) have all agreed, in open and easy rebellion against their more sold-out peers, to call crap, by which everyone else, from the salaryman to the “hip” listener unable anymore to trust his or her own ear, comes in time to understand is indeed crap.
Why not, then, go against salaryman and intern and listener alike? why not argue, with one’s own money derived from a hardly more subtle form of corporate entertainment (and one’s reputation from a peer group only slightly less impressed with, if no less annoyed by, the actual number of units shifted), that everyone is wrong here: the salaryman on account of a shallow cynicism, the intern on account of a shallow skepticism, and the listener on account of a fickle buoyancy in the wake of this silly debate, which cannot help but result in a compromise among the already compromised? Why not simply explain, with a couched concern for what face is thereby risked (which pose one imagines to be “refreshing”1d), why this bit of craft with a guitar, or that bit of cleverness with a console, is worth far more, to anyone who with a pure heart hears it, than the backlist sales will ever show or deny? Why not claim that the open state of my hormonal template when I first heard those sounds could not possibly impeach the regard in which I hold them now? Why not confuse subjectivity with sentimentality, as so many have agreed to, and why not apply both idiocies to a commonplace end? Why not assume the mask of earnestness as if it were the same thing as honesty, and why not present this “honesty” as if it were the same thing as truth? That is (and I ask this with the utmost sensitivity, and honesty, and a heartfelt desire to be objective), why not lie?1e
1a From which charge I exempt my mother’s Christmas music (Al Hirt, the Kingston Trio, Harry Belafonte, the Columbus Boychoir), as this was in every case excellent and hilarious, though I do wish it had not counted so firmly against my manhood that I cared about, and was occasionally able to pick out, those famous old melodies on the warped and untuned upright downstairs: boredom and dread will ofttimes lead to experimentation.
1b One wet Christmas we received, from my mother’s wet parents, a gift subscription to three magazines of our own choosing, and my mother arranged for us to take Newsweek, National Geographic, and Rolling Stone. Who can argue now that I am anything more than the predictable result of that decision?
1c Does the salaryman not himself hope to appear counterintuitive and brave?
1d Or can imagine a kind critic calling it such, like a Christmas gift begged and received!
1e With ease I might do any and all of these things, except that I would then have to admit that my parents might have been right about me all along.
Patterson
I would like to record that what follows took place at the McDonald’s on Patterson (a Richmond street but here extended westward into Henrico County, whence extended still it becomes Route 6, a manmade if feeble stake through the heart of Goochland), as this establishment later caught and enslaved so many I knew from my youthful days: the trumpeter above me in the marching band, who had no musical ability whatsoever yet was, and likely remains, wholly devoted to that martial instrument; the kid who first beat me senseless on a Virginia schoolbus and now took my order with the same stark and pissed-off eyes that had prefaced all his punches; at a certain point my own brother, whom I would watch and wait for in a relaxed position on the hood of a parked pickup, while through the panes he mopped and scraped toward the end of his shift, so that we might at least drive home together, laughing at his lot, and mine no better, under dark skies but remarkably bright stars.
Unfortunately, the scene I intend is properly set a few miles off, at the Hardee’s in the Regency Square mall, on my break from a job at the Rite Aid pharmacy there, from which Richmond’s West End never seemed to need anything except cigarettes and maxipads. The memoirists, I know, and most of the journalists, would probably go ahead and claim that the incident occurred at the McDonald’s on Patterson, given the wealth of further material connected with that site (and, of course, with its parent company), and simply bet against being found out, but that is the way of the coward and the fool. My scene belongs at the Regency Square Hardee’s not merely in the dull reporterish sense but also, as a modicum of imagination will show, in the sense of hot isolation from regular goings-on, in the sense of revelation where we may not want or expect it, in the sense of real or suspected country faggots being lent out to work suburban mall jobs at criminally small salaries until they can attract the attention of a sugar daddy, or else a professor, who will make them work a far sight harder for their pay.
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 wel
l, 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.
Fraudulence
What a joy there is in time travel, and what a fraudulence. In just thirteen paragraphs2 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.