by Guy Branum
So that is my strangely southern-white-trash Northern California town, except it isn’t. See, like most farm towns in the portions of the United States that used to be Mexico, Sutter County is also about a quarter Mexican. That’s not surprising. What is surprising is that another quarter of the town is South Asian. No, not the graduate-degreed Indians you’re probably used to from trips to your medical provider or any engineering labs you may frequent, but the hillbillies of Northwest India: Punjabi Sikhs.
I’ll explain more as the book goes on, but just understand the setting is a magical land where old Indian men in turbans guzzle Jack Daniel’s on top of tractors slowly chugging along the road as the descendants of that lady in the Dorothea Lange Dust Bowl photo shoot guns into the air and yell racial slurs. And there are almonds everywhere. And it’s very hot.
In conclusion, Yuba City doesn’t make sense, but neither do I. Now back to me.
Guy Branum: Portrait of an Ungrateful Upstart
So in the middle of the 1970s, the glorious flower of the Ford administration, I came out of my mother and wanted more. It wasn’t obvious at first. I spent several months just rolling around and trying to be pleasant. But I taught myself to speak as quickly as possible to try to start figuring out if better ways of living than a shitty two-bit farm town were a possibility.
I did not go over well in Yuba City. It’s entirely possible that my first memory is standing outside of my grandma Branum’s Southern Baptist church and having an old man ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I told him that I wanted to be a waitress because, at that point in my life, somewhere around three years of age, waitresses seemed like the most glamorous people imaginable. Waitresses in diners wear snappy outfits, they get to talk to the public all day long, and they have, I assumed, infinite access to pancakes. If these were so, waitressing was the line for me.
The old man did not agree. “Big boy like you?! Oughta want to be a football player.” He spat these words at me. I know he had probably clung to the back of a Model T through the baking sun of Route 66, seeking a better life in the 1930s or something. I’m sure he worked a very hard life as a farm laborer or construction worker; everyone in that fucking town did. I just didn’t understand why it made them so mad at me, and about this subject particularly. For the second five years of my life, people were persistently asking me if I wanted to be a football player. Like a woman walking down the street suffering a litany of “Hey, smile,” I was eternally having this question posed to me as though it were some sort of favor. And for the life of me, I couldn’t understand why, because professional football seemed like a ridiculously improbable career to pursue. Waitressing, however, was real, accessible, and made people’s lives better by bringing them more syrup and calling them “hon.”
My career aspirations were not the only thing marking me as abnormal. Let us look to another case study. Around seven or eight years of age, in Yuba City, a boy’s heart turns to torturing cats. It’s a farm town; there are lots of animals all over the place. Dogs, cats, chickens, pigs, and an orchard full of rats, ground squirrels, and crows. The dogs periodically eat the chickens, the cats eat the squirrels and rats and birds, and with some regularity, your mom or grandma kills a chicken for a nice dinner. A kid in a farm town sees death, but around third grade, most boys want to take things further and experiment with death.
One afternoon, over a tense glass of iced tea, my aunt who lived at the other end of the orchard told my mom how my cousin had drowned a cat in a bucket. My mom assured her it was nothing to worry about and advised her to punish him and make sure he never did it again. A few months later, another mom came over to chat and told my mom about her son trying to set a cat on fire. My mom dispensed the same knowing advice. Still, there was a deeper, unspoken worry. The growing concern was becoming clear. Why wasn’t Guy killing any cats?
I was aware, deeply, that there was something wrong with me.
And it wasn’t just issues of gender expression, charming little stories we can now tell about how I was “always gay.” Hardly so. I was, in nearly every way, wrong. I was way too intellectually aggressive. I was constantly asking questions about things the people of Yuba City do not need to worry themselves over. “Who is the mayor?” was one of my obsessions for a while. No one I knew seemed to know. “What is the difference between Methodist and Presbyterian?” “What is the difference between gas and oil?” “What are the Buttes?” They all seemed to vex people.
The Sutter Buttes: Supplemental Notes on Areas Surrounding Yuba City
I realize now I haven’t explained to you what the Buttes are. I was worried you had become bored of my description of my hometown that doesn’t comport with your narrow little construction of how the world works. Wouldn’t it just be easier if I could say “I’m from Schenectady. Just a Jew from Schenectady!” or “Oak Park Heights Grove Lake was just a typical American suburb.” But I’m not. I’m from Sutter County, CA, and to know Sutter County is to know the Buttes.
Remember how I told you about that five-hundred-mile valley full of the finest farmland in God’s creation? Well, the whole thing is one long, flat trough except for one tiny aberration, the Sutter Buttes, a minuscule volcanic mountain range in the middle of the Sacramento Valley. These volcanoes have been dormant for 1.4 million years, but in Algebra II class, I would stare at them and hope they’d choose that day to come out of retirement and erupt again to end the fucking boredom.3
But we can say these things with the benefit of Wikipedia and hindsight. When I was seven, I just wanted to know what they were. Why they were. “The Indians thought they were sacred!” and “They’re the littlest mountain range in the world!” is what I would get, but I didn’t need fucking folk wisdom. I needed to understand.
Guy Branum: Portrait of an Ungrateful Upstart (cont.)
Working-class people are not supposed to understand. They’re supposed to do. Work a job, go home, drink, beat your wife/get beaten, hunt, bake, go to church, build fences. At one point of deep familial tension, my dad built a fence, and then my uncle built a fence up against his fence, and then my dad built another fence next to the first fence. They love fences. But they don’t love logic or reason or books or August Wilson’s Tony Award–winning play Fences. With the exception of my mom and a couple of my teachers, just about everyone told me “You don’t need to know that” with the same vehemence of that old guy telling me I should want to be a football player. Why would I need to know what a parliament is or how World War I started when I was just going to grow up to be a cement mason who farms almonds on the side?
Also, to be clear, my deep, deep need to understand the origins of World War I was the initial major crack in my relationship with my mother. In this world of horrid, caustic people telling me what I couldn’t be, my mom was the one lady who was, on a regular basis, finding it pretty cool that I knew who the Secretary of the Interior was. She also understood that it was her responsibility to make me Jewish; thus she was constantly telling me about World War II, the Holocaust, and that one day soon people would come for the Jews again. She was always doing her best to try to texture my brain with Jewish paranoia, and it worked, but one point bugged me. She was telling me about World War II, a sequel; what was the deal with World War I? I asked about it. She was cagey, she dodged, she stammered some things about an archduke getting shot, but she had nothing for all of my follow-up questions. Finally, when I was six, she bought us a World Book Encyclopedia, and I was finally able to answer some fucking questions.4 It was like scratching an itch in the middle of my brain that had plagued me since at least age four.
So I had this insatiable intellectual curiosity, and everyone found it unnatural. “Where did he come from?” people would ask, vaguely disturbed. Occasionally, I’d get a teacher (one who wasn’t from Sutter County) who’d ask, “Where did he come from!?” in much more enthusiastic tones. They were the lovely people who helped me learn and taught me to teach myself, but it didn’t change the underlying reality:
I was very wrong for the place I lived. I wasn’t great for most other places, either.5
I was even physically wrong. I am gigantic. My mom is five-four; my dad was five-eight. I am six-three. By the time I was twelve, I was taller than my dad. I have also always been fat, a sturdy, farm-working fat that jiggled unappealingly but could lift whatever was necessary. Slower than every boy in class but stronger than every boy in class. Taller and wider than everyone in the class photo. Always the subject of discussions about not looking my age. Even visually, I was an aberration.
My giganticness was the one thing about me that Sutter could have understood or liked about me being different, but I even managed to do this wrong. I was supposed to be a bully. I was supposed to fight. I was supposed to use my size as a source of power over people. My uncle Ray used to think it was funny to have his son, my cat-killing cousin Robby, start fights with me, because even though he was a year younger and half my size, he always won. The thing is, I didn’t understand why he was fighting with me. Usually, people were yelling at me for not having friends who were boys, or yelling at me to play with my boy cousins instead of my girl cousins, but suddenly, this boy cousin was fighting with me and I was supposed to know what to do. What I’m saying is that growing up in a working-class household is a lot like Thunderdome, and I had to figure out how to live life as Master and Blaster combined.
The subject of violence leads us to the other thing I did wrong: I listened to my mom. Since I was two, she’d been scared of me hurting other, smaller kids, so she’d encouraged me to be gentle and kind. Then my cousin and the kids at school realized that giant kid who talked weird wouldn’t fight back if you did something to him, so they started coming after me. My parents told me I was supposed to hit them, that it was silly a boy as big as I was didn’t just pop them one and shut them up. I was confused.
We talk about nature and nurture when analyzing a person’s character.6 We see two ways that an identity is formed. One is biological, the mean of parents’ traits passed down genetically. The other is environmental: How did the world around this person guide and encourage him? The problem is that by either of these methods, I shouldn’t be me. I should be shorter and dumber and not at all concerned with what pairs well with star anise syrup in a cocktail.7 Every man I’m related to has a job that involves digging and concrete. Biologically, I am a proletarian, from many generations of rude mechanicals who did their jobs and did not ask questions. I should be pouring a concrete slab right now instead of writing what you’re already sure is one of the most charming memoirs you’ve ever read.
One Saturday afternoon, while helping my dad in his shop—we were always in that fucking shop—I was thinking about medieval things, as young men are wont to do, and I asked my dad, “If I had lived in medieval times, do you think I could have been a knight?” My dad said, “You would have been a worker. We have never been anything fancy. We have always been workers.”8 And he was, generally, mad. He was always mad after I asked things like that. He wouldn’t have cared much for that “charming memoirs” line, either.
And the place I was from was no better, narrowing the vision of every child raised there until the only world they could imagine was working a high-paying skilled-labor job, construction or agriculture, so they could afford to drink, go to 49ers games,9 and get a tricked-out truck. If you asked any little boy in that town, he would tell you he wanted to be a football player or a carpenter. A football player or a pesticide sprayer. Work gave you strong muscles, it let you ride on tractors, it let you play outside and never have to read a schoolbook again. The message was less explicit than my father’s words but just as clear. Across all lines of race or culture, the children of Yuba City are workers, and will always be workers.
I did not want to be a worker. I didn’t have the power to say “Fuck that” or even to say, resolutely, “No!” All I could do was cling to a hope. I hoped I didn’t have to do mindless, exhausting work in the hot sun for all my remaining days. I wanted to have a life full of complex ideas, bright colors, and people who did not recreationally kill cats. I didn’t know anyone for whom that was true, but still, I dreamed. If this were a musical, it would be the part of the show where I launched into a song that proudly declared my desire to study Torah, or spend a day warm on the sand, or be in America, or find Valjean, but my life was not produced by Cameron Mackintosh. I was scared of the things I wanted.
It was not my hopes, dreams, or desires that kept me from that fate, though. It was my nature. It was my curiosity, which kept me learning when I wasn’t supposed to. It was my gentleness, which helped me avoid the assault convictions and DUIs that sidetracked my high school classmates. It was my homosexuality, which kept me from accidentally impregnating someone so I’d have to go to work to support her. It was my social confusion, which made me more aware of how people on TV were planning their lives than the people who should have been my friends. Some kids in Sutter County wanted to get out, but they didn’t. I was just so wrong at that place that Sutter County rejected me like an Rh-incompatible liver and left me with no option but a life of magic and midlevel adventure.
It would be lovely if this were a book about me finding my place. In which I fled Yuba City and found homosexuality or stand-up comedy, Hollywood or West Hollywood, Ren Faire bead sales or the Church of Scientology, and thereby my problems were resolved. We’d love it if this book were about my dramatic weight loss and my meeting Stephen, the man who made everything make sense.
It’s not. This isn’t going to be a soothing book or a book about how I’ve finally gotten it all figured out. This book is a survival guide.
In a world where people don’t have space for you, you have to make your own space. That takes resolve, more resolve than many people have. I didn’t survive because I was smart, strong, or brave. I survived because people showed me the way.
* * *
1. Pronounced “pick-AHN,” please.
2. Not to be confused with the West Virginian burrowing mountain Jew, or the web-toed swamp Jew of the Louisiana wetlands.
3. Aren’t we lucky that isn’t how I discovered I had geokinetic powers. I mean, accidentally destroying your farm town in the process of learning you have the power to control volcanoes does seem like a solid superhero origin story, and I did hate 80 percent of the people in that town. However, if I’d flooded Sutter County, California, with psychically summoned lava, it would have significantly increased the price of almonds and prunes for most of the 1990s. No one needed that.
4. World War I was the result of the breakdown of the post–Congress of Vienna system of European alliances, which had led to relative stability for the past hundred years. Growing nationalism was eating away at large, anachronistic imperial states in eastern Europe and had formed new, stronger states in central Europe. The attempts of the great powers to use diplomacy to preserve the status quo meant that when inevitable regional war in the Balkans occurred, all powers engaged. That was the deal with World War I.
5. The only place where I would have really made sense in 1975 was at Nora Ephron’s apartment in the Apthorp. She would have really gotten me, and if I’d grown up with parents who really got me, I would be The Worst.
6. By “we” I of course mean the 1983 film Trading Places.
7. Notes of orange.
8. If my life were a movie, shortly after this I would have been magically transported back to the Middle Ages to prove my mettle as a knight. Unfortunately, life rarely adheres to the plotlines of Martin Lawrence films.
9. NFL team affiliation in the Sacramento Valley is an interesting ethnarchy. White people with solid finances like the 49ers. Black, Latino, and economically marginalized whites like the Raiders. The layer in between of white people barely holding on like some other, random team. My dad liked the D.C. team whose name we do not say. The South Asian families just liked soccer.
A VOCABULARY LESSON
IN THE BEGINNING WAS the word. A word I did not know.
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br /> When I was seven years old, my family went to Disneyland. To my parents, this was one of three cognizable vacations:
1. Disneyland.
2. Fort Bragg, a small, strange town on the Northern California coast with wet gray beaches where my mother would never allow us to swim because of her overwhelming fear that the undertow would carry us off to the sea’s depths.
3. Camping, an activity my mother abhorred for reasons unlike those of just about any other identified Jew in America.1
So we went to Disneyland with the regularity that my father’s income could afford. On this occasion, which occurred when I was seven, my parents had attempted to economize by bringing a camping trailer to avoid the expense of a hotel. They also consolidated our vacation with that of my uncle’s family.
This concerned me.
First of all, my cousins Tori and Robby were comfortable with treatment I could not stomach. They ordered off the children’s menu. Their opinions were not welcomed in polite conversation. They got hit with a belt. They were not afforded the luxury of daily baths. I looked at them much like the British looked at the Greeks during the formation of the European Union. How would affiliation with these savages erode my rights?
Second, as stated in previous chapters, Robby, in particular, seemed to me the most distasteful of traveling companions. A year younger than I was, he seemed to enjoy only cursing, fighting, and breaking rules. Playing with him was never fun and often resulted in the destruction of my finest action figures. Snake Eyes’s swivel-action battle grip was rendered useless after an incident with a wheelbarrow, and He-Man, gnawed on by Robby in some fit of rage, looked like he had necrotizing fasciitis. Nevertheless, he and I were expected to socialize during all of my maternal family’s events because we were the only boy cousins. Yet one cannot play with chaos.