Off Main Street

by Michael Perry

  Art died while I was in high school. By the time Clarence died, I had been away from home for a decade. I lived in the city, near my grandmother, and so I drove her to the funeral. It was a bitter January day. The tiny Lutheran church was packed with neighbors I hadn’t seen for years. Many were farmers in awkward shoes, their hands thick, their shoulders rounded by the closeness of the room. Here and there a tear tracked down a ruddy cheek.

  There was a fair contingent of little old ladies, some of them conversing in stage whispers, and I was reminded of the two elderly sisters who were notorious for crashing local funerals, clucking mournfully throughout, then scoring some eats. You could do worse—funerals here can be described as buffet with a body. The organist played, the soloist sang a gentle version of “In the Garden,” and then we all joined in on Hymn 495, as posted. Your average Wisconsin Lutheran can turn “Sweet Georgia Brown” into a funeral dirge, so the appropriate mournful tones were achieved without great difficulty, although we did tend to thin out and break down a little when we hit the high parts; but like an old farm truck wheezing over a hill, we’d pick up speed and volume on the downslope.

  After the service, we reconvened in the church basement. We sat elbow-to-elbow at folding tables, eating from paper plates. There were brownies and bars, carrot cake with cream cheese frosting, scotcharoos, and green Jell-O dessert. Open-face Cheez Whiz sandwiches dotted with sliced green olives or tiled with potato chips. Kool-Aid and coffee, both served in foam cups. I sat by Jimmy Volsruud. Our fathers used to put up hay together, and Jimmy and I helped, but once he invited me to his tree house to share his raisin stash.

  It was good to see Jimmy after all the years had passed. I told him I had been leery of his raisins because I saw a daddy longlegs crawl out of the red Sun-Maid box. I long coveted Jimmy’s bike, a hand-painted blue single-speed fitted with sissy bars and an orange banana seat. He seemed pleased to recall the bike, and we talked about popping wheelies.

  Many of the people around us were of a generation that still knew how to “visit,” and the basement was lively with conversation. There was a feeling in the room that time had been condensed, that we were being allowed a quick trip back, celebrating the end of Clarence’s years by reconvening them. Jimmy and I, with little in common now, were smiling over shared days, the divergent arcs of our lives meeting one more time at the point where Clarence’s life ended. Sometimes we rail at death’s thievery. Sometimes we cherish what death leaves behind.

  Grandma was ready to go. I pulled the car around to the church steps, and got the door. As we pulled away, I said what we often say in these circumstances, “It was a good funeral.”

  “Yes,” agreed Grandma. “Everyone had a real nice time.”

  2001

  V. Way Off Main Street

  What We Want

  We can call him Al. It’s the name he used in Belize City, and I wouldn’t presume to improve upon it. Paunchy in his polo shirt, he appeared on the balcony of the Seaside Guest House and let himself into a tiny single room hardly larger than a public restroom stall. He was wearing acid-washed jeans and white tennies, and looked to be on the early edge of fifty. The day previous, the guesthouse teemed with the usual motley lot of backpackers and day-trippers: a dreadlocked Austrian, a clean-scrubbed American Mormon, a Canadian fry cook from Florida, a pair of dusty, hippie-beautiful women from the Netherlands. Now they were all gone, off to catch a bus to Guatemala, or water taxis to the Cayes. Where they had all appeared worldly and roadworthy, Al I could picture back in the States, wearing slacks and a name tag, selling home appliances in a strip mall. The others looked like they’d traveled here. Al looked like he’d been caught here.

  The Seaside Guest House is run by Quakers, and it is optimistically christened. You can smell the sea from the second floor, if the wind is right, and should the palm leaves part to provide a sight line over the tin roofs and down the adjacent alley, you might spy a scintilla of Caribbean glint, but knock your Belikin bottle over the balcony railing and you’ll ding a taxi, not a sunbather. At the far end of the balcony, two doors form a right angle. One opens into the tiny single room Al entered. The other opens on a common room furnished with a few chairs and a simple table. A hallway leads from the common area to a handful of double rooms, and at the far end, the bathroom. Just off the common area, at the head of the hall, is a bunk room crammed with six beds, one of which was mine. The bunk room and Al’s room share a common wall.

  Below the rooms, the first floor is taken up with a few tables, an abbreviated breakfast counter, and a small storage room. A young man named Omar mans the admissions desk. Behind Omar, in an office nook, the proprietor passes the time by reading. He is whip-thin, soft-spoken, and given to peering professorially over his half-glasses. I spoke with him the day Al arrived, and he said he taught part-time at the university. Throughout our brief conversation, he was methodically unsealing envelopes, his long fingers moving like deliberate, articulated caterpillars. The guesthouse is girded by a tall wooden fence and a locked gate that opens directly on Prince Street. Shortly after he entered his tiny room, Al reemerged, descended the stairs, let himself out the gate and disappeared down the street.

  It was quiet after Al left. I sat at a table in the common area, composing notes toward a story on Belizian firefighters. When the hot breeze blew, the palms rattled like rain. Across Prince Street, a little old man, his face a wizened pecan, sat under an orange Ovaltine cap on a chair in the sun. Now and then he spoke to a woman ironing in the shade of the great white house that dominated the garden. The woman was built like an oil drum, wrapped in a vast white apron that bulged from her gut like a sail full of wind. Their soft Spanish floated across Prince Street and up through the screen.

  A local reporter arrived and drove me to a seaside club, where we sat at an open-air table overlooking the water, eating chips and salsa spiked with cilantro and chunks of raw conch. At dusk, a squall kicked up and drove inland in a darkening smear. The waitstaff moved around the deck, unfurling canvas curtains as the first rain spit through. I noticed a man standing alone at the railing, hands in his pockets, faced into the wind. It was Al. At his back, disco lights swabbed the barren dance floor. When the reporter and I left, the floor had drawn a few dancers. Al was on the fringe, hanging back.

  Back in the guesthouse just after midnight, I have the six-bunk dorm room to myself. It’s a cheapskate’s special: the dorm room, at the dorm room rate, with no roommates—save for a beetle the size of Delaware that click-clacks across the floor when I switch the light on. I make a few notes in my journal, then settle in to sleep.

  I waken some time later. Someone is fumbling with a door. Al has returned, and it sounds as if he has a friend. A woman is giggling. The wall between us is made of gapped one-inch boards; a few hairline strips of light seep through with the sound. I hear the bunk creak, hear the woman’s voice. Switching between Spanish and Creole, she sounds pleasantly, lazily drunk, her voice a slurring purr. Al begins to petition her for specific favors. She giggles alcoholically, but remains firm on one point: “Condom! Condom!” He protests, quietly and urgently. She mentions a young daughter, asks for more tequila. I hear the bottle tip. I hear Al’s voice again, and again, rather loudly this time, she insists that he produce a condom. He shushes her, but soon I hear the rattle of the wrapper. It becomes quiet. I hear weight shifting. Still no words. More sounds of movement. There is trouble. Al can’t get hard. He makes another request. She demurs—“It will taste bitter.” Again, he shushes her. The drinking and negotiations continue. Soon she is on a bipolar drunk, looping from coy to surly. At one of her low points, she mumbles about suicide. Then she brightens, asks for the bathroom. Al lets her in the main area, points her down the hall, then hides in his room while she pees noisily. Then I can see her reflection under my door. She is drifting around the common area. A chair creaks, and a newspaper crackles. It is quiet for a long time. Finally, Al stirs and creeps from his room. Then a harsh whisper: “What the hell
are you doing?!” After much cajoling and shushing, he maneuvers her back to his room. But now she wants to leave. “This place is poison for me,” she says. She asks if she can take the newspaper.

  “Stay—I will make love to you in the morning,” says Al.

  “You will have to wake me up.”

  “I can go to your place,” says Al, ever hopeful.

  “My place is not so clean as this.” She laughs bitterly.

  “But I will be more relaxed there,” says Al. The woman says nothing. Al speaks again. “Tomorrow I go to Caye Caulker. Meet me.”

  “Can I have cab fare?”

  “No prob-lem-o.” He shepherds her down the stairs and to the gate, shushing all the way. The gate clicks, and she is on her own. I hear him return to his room. I hear the condom wrapper crackle, hear him cap the tequila. Then he pads down the hall to the bathroom. My journal was on the floor beside my bunk. I’ve been taking notes in the dark. I press the light on my watch. It’s 2:30 a.m. I’m a little guilty about the notes, but you find yourself privy to something like this, to the dialogue and circumstance of two people driven by two very different sorts of desperation, and you think you ought to turn it into some sort of parable. At the moment, I’m on my moral high horse, disgusted by a man who, unable to use her, would turn a woman loose in Belize City at this hour, leaving her to weave through the carnivorous backstreets to her sleeping baby. But the story is more complex than that. It is about the human transactions we all make, about the hungers and incompletenesses that drive us, furtive and craven, into dark places, dark places that we inhabit only so that we may buy some time in the light. Worlds apart, separated by a lamina of social, cultural, and economic stratifications, Al and the woman were put on intersecting trajectories by twinned—not twin—needs. This is a damned lonely world, and given cover of darkness, we drive straight to the things we disdain by day. We want them hidden, but more than that, we want them.

  Al is still in the bathroom when she returns. She is banging at the gate. “Al! Al! Al!” The mongrel dog who lies by the desk all day, soundless and unstirring, begins barking wildly. Now she is ringing the doorbell, again and again. Doors slam below. Omar and the manager are cursing the woman, yelling at her to leave. She calls out for Al. His reflection slides past my door as he returns from the bathroom. I can feel him holding his breath as he quietly lets himself out the main door and into his room, but she has spotted him.

  “Al! Al!” The lock on his door clicks in place.

  Now I hear the proprietor, no longer professorial. “It’s that fucking guy in Room One!” His voice moves to the foot of the stairs. “You brought her in here, buddy, now make her leave! Tell her to go home!” Al’s room is dark and silent. Downstairs, the yelling and door slamming continue. Omar cracks the gate and the woman wedges her foot in the jamb. Enraged, the proprietor grabs a machete and chases her down the street, into the darkness. For a while it is quiet. Then the proprietor’s voice, from the foot of the stairs again.

  “If you want a fucking whorehouse, go to a fucking whorehouse!”

  And then it was quiet for good.

  Al was gone in the morning. I caught a ride north, figured when I got back home I’d write up the escapade as a humorous farce: “Likkered Up Hookers Ain’t Nothin’ but a Heart-ache,” or some such. But it just didn’t seem funny. I thought of him flying down here for hookers and snorkeling, and then I thought of me flying down here to fish for stories, a slumming voyeur armed with emergency traveler’s checks and a plane ticket home, and I recognized that obscenity is relative. Scribbling away in my bunk, snuffling around the edge of this little story like a jackal just beyond the firelight, I was doing some skulking of my own. Given a front-row seat at the disintegration of one man’s fantasy, I found myself reviewing my own closeted collection of moldering ghouls and ossified indiscretions. If they were brought to light, would I live differently, or just more defiantly?

  Our passions debase us. Our needs make fools of us all.

  1999

  RSVP to the KKK

  One morning in February of 1998, I found two pieces of mail in my mailbox. This essay is a reply to one of them.

  Dear Grand Dragon Wayne:

  Received your gracious invitation to participate in the White Pride Rally, Saturday, August 22, in Dyess, Arkansas. I am unable to attend. In lieu of my actual presence, please accept the following observations and recommendations, elicited by and culled from your flyer. Perhaps you can share my thoughts aloud at the end of the day when you gather ’round the flickering embers of the cross to toast marshmallows and let your hoods down.

  First of all, your direct-mail technique is sterling. The hand-addressed envelope, the rubber-stamped return address, the letter-from-Grandma size envelope, all work to create an “open me” feel. While the knight-on-a-rearing-horse icon is a bit fanciful, it is balanced nicely by the no-nonsense all-caps rendering of the National Association for the Advancement of White People acronym.

  As to the flyer itself, I am quite taken with the hand-drawn border, festooned as it is with disembodied cartoony hoods—very Casper the Friendly Ghost. However, I note with perplexity that you have chosen to scratch out your typos—surely any self-respecting Grand Dragon would jump at the chance to use a little Wite-Out®. You might also wish to reexamine the photocopying process, as reproductive corruption of the caricatures of Grand Wizard Ray Larsen and Public Relations man Damon Lance Rose (That name—are you sure about this guy?) causes them to appear as morose, hooded black men being kissed on the brow by a bat-winged Easter chick.

  I note with relief that “THIS IS A FAMILY AFFAIR!” with “NO ALCOHOL, FIREARMS, DRUGS OR FIGHTING!” and “WOMEN AND CHILDREN ARE MOST WELCOME.” I don’t need to tell you, Grand Dragon Wayne, or spell it out in underlined capital letters, that this country is going to heck in a handbasket, and I well note your dedication to the preservation of the extended family. It takes a village, y’know. It is also a testament to your perspicacity that in addition to food and beverages, you will be offering souvenirs. Good thinking. From Marxism to Lilith Fair, what’s a movement without merch? Modern movements also require sponsors, and I see you’ve been so blessed by the National Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Congrats. I am less enchanted by the fact that I will have the opportunity to “MEET POLITICAL SPEAKERS FROM AROUND THE COUNTRY.” Can’t we keep politics out of this? Hell, Grand Dragon Wayne, you know you can’t trust politicians. You get them involved, and before long you’ll have to take a senator to dinner, fill out thirteen forms, and complete a ten-year environmental impact study just to burn one little ol’ cross. The upside? When it’s time to take it to the streets, your politician friends may be able to expedite the parade permit process.

  I am also in receipt of the NAAWP application form. While it turns out I’m not eligible (The breakdown: native-born—yes; loyal United States Citizen—yes, by and large; white—seems like it, but I’ve not done my genealogy homework, and I tan with suspicious speed and depth; temperate habits—yes, at least the ones I admit to; of Christian faith—not to your satisfaction; and, believe in White Rights and Americanism—see Christian faith), I’m intrigued by the box that says “I am a former member and would like to be reinstated.” I assume this is in compliance with your Christian faith prerequisite (forgiveness, the prodigal son, etc.), but I wonder: Will dues be prorated?

  Okay, Grand Dragon Wayne, joke’s over. Here’s the deal. I don’t curse much, but when I opened your letter in our little post office, the temperature in my gut dropped twenty degrees and I said something very nasty indeed. Your sentiments slithered right into my tiny hometown, right into my mailbox, right into my hand. That disturbs me. Did you think I was some sort of Aryan rough boy? From the way you addressed my letter I can tell you got my name from a series of articles I wrote for a working-class magazine. One on a country music star and his gun store. One on snowmobile racing. And one on monster trucks. Apparently I fit your recruitment profile. You must have missed my pie
ce on the contributions of black artists to country music.

  Well, Grand Dragon, it’s true that no one will mistake me for an Ivy League–educated liberal professor of multicultural studies any time soon. I hunt. I own guns. I own my share of camouflage clothing. I’m a loner. I shave infrequently. My transport of choice is a beat-up pickup truck. I’ve been known to sing old country music songs at the top of my lungs with no trace of irony. I know my way around the woods at night, and harbor a touch of disdain for anyone who doesn’t. But don’t save me a beer at the rally.

  I despise you, but in a more complex way than you might suspect.

  I despise you not just because you are a racist, but because you obscure the true complexities of racism and serve as an easy out for anyone seeking superficial absolution. You are frightening, Grand Dragon Wayne, and you are dangerous, but you are out in the open. In a country hung up on skin, you are the equivalent of a wart—unattractive, perhaps even pre-cancerous, but easily identifiable, and, if need be, easily removed.

  Meanwhile, the real problems facing us are much more in the character of a metastatic melanoma—a deadly malignancy with tendrils that lace the entire substructure of society. Your type serves as a lightning rod to divert our focus from the deeply insidious nature of prejudice and racism. We get you on Jerry Springer, make fun of your hood, shout you down, engage in group behavior the equivalent of poking a dumb animal with a stick, and then, having solved nothing, hit the remote feeling a self-congratulatory shot of vindication. Meanwhile, you head home too much the true believer to be humiliated, and likely having made a convert or two. Thinking we know who’s to fear and who’s to blame, we stop questioning. If racism were woven with a thread as pure as your white sheet, stripping it out would be a simple matter indeed. Unfortunately it is woven in all shades. In fine, delicate strands. And it is interracial as hell. It is as blatant as spray-painted epithets and as subtle as an averted gaze. It storms through the streets, but even more frequently it coasts through the suburbs in a minivan. It thwarts human endeavor, it plays both ways, it is used as leverage, it is roundly ignored. Its greatest toll is exacted not through white-hot hate, but through distrust and sadness.