From that day forward, whatever her niceness otherwise, Sandra said terrible things behind my back to whosoever would listen—her children, friends, neighbors, Burck’s law partners, even our longtime maid, Katherine Jones, who doted on me and couldn’t understand why I was determined to cross a nice person like Sandra, who in her best Lady Bountiful fashion had taken her to see The Color Purple. Quite simply I combined everything Sandra disliked in a human being, and was a rival for her husband’s affection besides.
Many years later, I observed Sandra at an engagement party for her daughter. She’d run into one of Kelli’s old flames, an amiable jock named Don, who’d gone to fat but was still handsome, still the sort of regular guy who means what he says and says what he means. With him, I noticed, Sandra was perfectly at ease. She laid a hand on his shoulder and they sat chatting for a long time; the change in Sandra was like Amanda Wingfield’s at the end of The Glass Menagerie: “Now that we cannot hear [her] speech,” the stage directions read, “her silliness is gone and she has dignity and tragic beauty.” Watching Sandra with Don, I was sorry I’d been such a disappointment to her; toward them both, indeed, I felt something of Tonio Kröger’s secret love for the “blond and blue-eyed, the fair and living, the happy, lovely, and commonplace,” and I realized too that I’d never quite be accepted by them, try as I might—terrified the while of washing up with the ugly, the abandoned, the mad of the world . . . bearing in mind that my only brother, after all, was Scott.
I ONLY HAVE a few fleeting impressions of Scott from the mid-eighties, though we didn’t entirely lose touch. I saw him over the holidays, or got the odd letter. Soon after our fight in the parking lot, he lost his job at the restaurant and couldn’t find another for a long while. The word was out. In the meantime he sponged off our mother and pursued an interest in petty larceny. When hungry he’d sometimes skulk around the suburbs until he found a backyard barbecue in progress; timing, he told me, was everything. He liked his meat at least medium rare, so he’d have to wait three or four minutes after the steaks or chickens or burgers were flipped, before bolting out of nowhere and fleeing with his dinner impaled on a stick. More serious burglaries had an ulterior motive—that is, Scott liked being in other people’s houses: he was curious to see how they lived, what sort of pictures they hung on their walls, what their family photos revealed (was there a daughter?). He’d sneak into a given house around 2:00 A.M., and if there weren’t any immediate alarums, he’d often stay most of the night. He also liked stealing from hospitals—pharmaceuticals, of course, but also mundane supplies such as bandages and surgical tubing. Marlies still has a wholesaler’s box of petroleum jelly that he gave her once for her birthday: “This stuff really works,” he remarked, “and keeps forever.” For a while he was able to curb his thievery after he won a $20,000 settlement from a punk rock club, where the bouncer had broken his jaw in what Scott’s lawyer insisted was an act of unwarranted aggression. The money, however, was squandered on vices that left him somewhat worse for wear.
I CAN’T REMEMBER how I first learned of Scott’s religious conversion, but he’d taken to attending raucous services at the Crossroads Church, a place roughly the size of an NBA basketball arena. Scott liked that sort of thing and saw the humor in it too. Jimmy Swaggart became a great personal hero of his, all the more so when it came to light that the great televangelist liked to beat off in the presence of prostitutes. Aptly, perhaps, the person who turned Scott on to Swaggart, and hence religion, was none other than good old Uncle Ronny, who used to take such a childlike delight in naughty jokes (“There’s no fuck in strawberry”). By then many of my mother’s gay crowd were casualties of the AIDS epidemic, and Ronny had accepted God into his heart as a tribute to his own deliverance. Both he and my brother were able to reconcile a heartfelt faith with a lifestyle that remained dubious at best. Swaggart had proven that one could be born again and still stray from the path of righteousness on occasion.
I was relieved to find that Scott seemed, at first, disinclined to proselytize. For a year or so, his only sign of piety was the little cross-and-heart emblem with which he signed letters, always, from that point on. Then one bright chilly day around Christmas we were walking downtown to meet our father for lunch when Scott came to a dramatic stop on the sidewalk and shook me a little too roughly by the shoulders. He was beaming. He said we needed to “save” our father.
“You think he needs saving?” I asked.
“Well yeah, Zwieb. Otherwise he’s going to hell.”
I wasn’t offended. I could see Scott was absolutely in earnest, and besides I was finished being offended by him, at least on the subject of our father.
“I have to disagree,” I said. “If there’s a hell, I really doubt Papa is going there. You know? I just can’t picture it.”
“If there’s a hell . . . ?”
“Right. If.”
“Aren’t you a Catholic, Zwieb?”
He said this in a puzzled way, with perhaps the vaguest hint of distaste—the distaste of an evangelical Protestant for the Whore of Babylon—but mostly puzzled, since he’d clearly assumed I’d be an ally in this respect. Alas, my brief dabbling in religion was a thing of the past, and I told him so. Scott looked a little hurt, a little worried for me.
“Why?”
The answer, I suppose, was that my “faith” had been a pretty empty business to begin with, little more than a half-baked juvenile idealism that had lapsed for good my junior year in college, assisted by a girlfriend who preferred to stay in bed and have sex on Sunday mornings.
“It just, I don’t know, it passed. I mean, for one thing, the whole idea of hell is ridiculous to me. Why would our father, for example, a good man who’s worked hard all his life to support a family”—this a bit pointedly—“go to hell?”
“Because he’s not saved!” Scott said with cheerful conviction.
We debated the point a little further, then abruptly (running late) Scott changed the subject somewhat.
“I think he was pretty shocked to hear about it.”
“Hear about what?”
“My being saved. I mean if I can be saved, anyone can!”
“You may have a point there,” I said.
My brother laughed. “Exactly! I think he’s ready to receive Jesus, Zwieb. I think I really made him think about things.”
Scott didn’t mention Jesus during lunch at the Petroleum Club that day except obliquely, when he said a hasty good-bye as we got up to leave. He had to go home and watch Swaggart, he explained, with an anxious glance at his watch.
Later my father and I sat chatting in his office, and I mentioned Scott’s plan to “save” him.
“How do you think you’ll respond to that?” I asked.
My father doffed his glasses and sat rubbing the bridge of his nose. “Like a cobra’s been thrown at my feet,” he said, with a quick wincing grin.
“He thinks you’re pretty ‘shocked’ about the whole thing.”
“No.” He put his glasses back on. “I just assume his life got so bad there was nothing else to cling to.”
AND STILL MY brother’s life remained bleak in spite of his faith, and once again our family began to dread the sight and sound of him. There was always some petty disaster, some fresh grotesquerie—as when he complained to Sandra of “black shit.” By then she’d taken to screening my father’s calls (including the ones from me, if I made the mistake of calling him at home), and once, in the midst of Scott’s flustered insistence that she let him speak to his “own father, goddammit,” he mentioned that his shit was turning black. Poor Sandra hung up in a panic.
Finally he stopped calling. Though Scott would always believe we owed him love and patience no matter what, he must have known he wasn’t wanted, and his pleas for attention only made it worse. For a year or so, all but our mother stopped hearing from him—though she heard plenty: a torrent of grief and grievance that almost drowned her capacity to respond in kind. Whenever possible she’d enlis
t old friends to bear part of the burden, people who tried to minister to Scott as the darling boy they’d once known—hence a photo of Walid from that desert era: his back to the camera, he stands in my mother’s kitchen and clutches Scott’s hand. The latter looks stricken but receptive. What was Walid saying?
BY MY SENIOR year at Tulane I was spending less and less time at the fraternity house. I’d come to accept that I didn’t much like the majority of my brethren, and vice versa, and I’d had enough of sitting around the steps sipping beer and talking shit and shouting flirtatious abuse at the passing “talent” en route to the Josephine Louise dormitory on the Newcomb campus across Broadway. Two things occupied the better part of my time: an honors thesis on Walker Percy that I worked at pretty diligently, especially that second semester when deadlines loomed, and a tortured involvement with a quirky, troubled, and quite lovely girlfriend named Kate, from West Virginia, who shared my social exile to some extent. The year before, as a freshman, she’d pledged Pi Beta Phi but failed to make grades, and didn’t really belong there anyway, so now she was all the more dependent on me and the odd boy she’d dally with on the side. We had terrible fights, the like of which I’ve never repeated with anyone. I don’t think I could if I tried. I used it all up—the passion or heat or what you will, the incredulous shock one feels on first learning that others are just as corrupt as oneself. Suffice it to say, Kate and I had some good times too: when she wasn’t screaming at me (after exhaustive provocation) in her Appalachian Betty Boop voice—“Acehoe!” (asshole)—she’d watch TV and needlepoint an elaborate SAE fraternity crest, suitable for framing, in a droll attempt to be the kind of girlfriend she thought I wanted (even as I became less and less the person who wanted that sort of thing), or, on weekends, we’d buy magazines and comics and whiskey and spend the night tippling in the big claw-foot tub I had in my Garden District apartment.
So the year passed, and despite completing a thesis that my adviser called “a model of the form,” and graduating with low-level honors, I was still a very confused and stunted young man. All the more confused and stunted, perhaps, with every passing day.
After college I moved to Washington, D.C., I know not why. That first month I lived in a townhouse next door to the Dixie Pig Barbecue in Alexandria; to be exact, I lived in a room a little bigger than a closet with a twin-sized mattress on the floor. My three housemates were recent graduates of OU—also fraternity boys, as I recall. A paralegal in my father’s office had put me in touch with them, since I hardly knew a soul in Washington. One was named Scott, and the only reason that sticks in my head is because he shared a name with my brother, who otherwise might have been a different species—nay, from a different planet in a distant (and really much nicer) galaxy. On weekends, when Scott #2 and the others would get drunk in their colorless way, they’d clatter down to the basement, where I was watching TV for want of anything better to do, and indulge in a little bedtime ritual: swaying slightly on the carpet, baseball caps over their hearts, they’d stand watching (over and over) the 1984 Reagan campaign ad set to the tune of Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA.” I didn’t comment; I didn’t mention that I was a Democrat who’d voted for Mondale, nor did I point out that I’d been raised in a liberal family and spent the best times of my childhood in the company of gay men. I just sat there and wondered, in effect: what the fuck. The question was directed at me rather than them.
Meanwhile I worked as an intern in the office of Don Nickles, the baby-faced junior senator from Oklahoma. A Republican of the most guileless, God-fearing variety, Nickles had appointed my father as the token Democrat on a federal judiciary review board; otherwise I would have been an even more improbable member of his workforce. For a few weeks, though—for the sake of my father and certain vague ambitions—I did my best to fit in. I even attended one of Don’s weekly Bible meetings in his office; I can’t remember what we discussed, only that Don (as he insisted we call him) responded very politely to whatever ass-kissing, disingenuous piety I’d advanced: “That’s a very interesting point, Blake . . .” He was a nice guy. Aside from (elective) Bible meetings, my job entailed answering the phone, entering data from the Congressional Record, and writing thoughtful, well-researched letters to constituents such as the woman from Broken Arrow who’d complained about airport noise. My letter to her was such a triumph of obliging, knowledgeable niceness that Senator Nickles himself, rather than the appropriate legislative assistant, saw fit to sign it. That, for me, was the high point.
I pretty much decided to rest on that laurel. Quite aside from Don’s politics, which struck me as odious, the whole ethos seemed ill-suited to the wisenheimer I was. When I was answering phones, for example, I shared the reception area with a young woman named Nikky—a Baptist, of course, who was mystified or downright appalled by any observation that failed to confirm her own sunny but rather stern view of the world. Once, when her boyfriend had been “mean” to her in some way that seemed benign to me, he showed up in the office wearing a rented knight-errant costume and bearing (a) flowers and (b) a boombox playing “Lady,” by Kenny Rogers. He got down on one knee and begged Nikky’s forgiveness while everyone in the office gathered around laughing and clapping—it was so cute—and really, you know, that’s what it took with Nikky! My own hands clapped mechanically, but I thought What the fuck what the fuck what the fuck . . . this, again, directed at me rather than them.
I knew the jig was up when I entered the Hart Building elevator one morning—at least fifteen minutes late, as usual, and getting later every day—and found myself face-to-face with Don, who murmured, “Good morning, Blake,” in a markedly sorrowful way, the nearest thing to a snub he could muster. Sure enough there was a note on my desk from Don’s administrative assistant, Doyce, a lanky freckled fellow with a reddish white man’s ’fro.
Doyce greeted me, all smiles, a vacuous-looking Kurt Vonnegut, and asked me to shut the door. He was poring over my résumé and shaking his head.
“Says here you graduated with honors from Tulane! Heck, that’s a good school! Bet you could get just about any job you wanted with this.”
I gave sort of a demurring whimper, and Doyce got down to brass tacks. His smile faded into a pained look, as though he were passing something sharp in his stool. He wondered, rhetorically, whether my heart was really in the job anymore: my daily tardiness hadn’t gone unnoticed, and just in general my comportment seemed a little . . . but Doyce was too nice a guy to take any pleasure in reproaching me, and whatever he was about to say dwindled into a wince. But finally he came out with it.
“Apparently, Blake, you’ve been telling our constituents over the phone to vote for George Nigh?”
Nigh was then governor of Oklahoma, a Democrat, and Don’s opponent in the next election. I certainly preferred Nigh’s politics to Don’s, but honestly I couldn’t remember making the comment in question, so I protested my innocence with a sweaty little Nixon-giggle. It was dawning on me all at once that they really, really disliked me in that office, and it seemed absurd to defend myself.
“You were overheard by a . . . by a pretty reliable source, Blake.”
Nikky. Well, that made sense. Probably I’d mentioned Governor Nigh in a way that didn’t entirely savor of rebuke, a seemly loathing, and to Nikky’s pea-brain that was tantamount to a ringing endorsement. Anyway, I was out; no use refuting a paragon like Nikky. Doyce and I agreed to disagree and manfully shook hands. I heard him wadding up my résumé as I walked down the hall.
By then I’d moved to the paneled, fluorescent-lit basement of a ranch house in Arlington, which I shared with a large, unhappy woman named Faye and her fifteen-year-old daughter. Once upon a time Faye had taught at my high school in Oklahoma; we were mutual friends with a gay theology teacher, Mr. Osborn, who used to serve me whiskey from a porcelain teakettle when we’d meet twice a month (independent study) to discuss medieval philosophy and the like. Faye, I gathered, had moved to the D.C. area for the benefit of a bureaucrat hus
band who’d recently abandoned her, though he still came around for dinner once or twice a week and seemed very depressed about things. As for the daughter, she was more pissed off than depressed, as I learned one day when she came home from school and caught me upstairs watching her TV.
Earlier that summer my girlfriend Kate had practically begged for the privilege of shacking up with me in Washington—she was flunking out of Newcomb, and wanted a year off to consider her options—but now it was quite the other way around: come live with me, Kate (I all but cried), and be my feckless love! Nothing doing. Kate had visited me that first week in Alexandria and seen my mattress on the closet floor, the Dixie Pig Barbecue, my three leering housemates, and when she visited Arlington a month later and saw that things were, if anything, even worse, she decided to stay put with her eccentric mum in West Virginia. I couldn’t blame her, of course, in my heart of hearts, though I blamed her roundly in person and over the phone.
Those last weeks in Arlington were perhaps the loneliest I’ve ever known as an adult. I had no job, and no idea what sort of job I was capable of holding, if any. For my twenty-second birthday Burck had given me a spiffy new VW Jetta, which I drove up and down the Potomac, all day and (mostly) all night, stopping at bars or scenic places to brood and read. I avoided Faye’s house in Arlington as much as possible; my constant aloneness embarrassed me, and I wanted them to think (but why?) that I had somewhere to go. Midafternoon I’d come home briefly to shower, perhaps filch a few pieces of meat from a nasty, congealing stew in the fridge, then dress for a night on the town and drive away to nowhere again. I drove thousands of miles in just those two or three weeks, often tipsy, often lost; to this day I don’t know my way around Washington any better than Timbuktu, such was the total daze I was in while exploring its every goat track. Not surprisingly my favorite book from this time was A Fan’s Notes. I was feeling a keen affinity for Frederick Exley: his alcoholism, his morbid interest in sports, his contempt for the workaday world—the whole narcissistic juvenile whirl. It was hardly a stretch to see myself lying on a davenport reading Lolita for months on end, or cooling my heels in a madhouse, or even selling aluminum siding for Mr. Blue. That November, at any rate, I moved to New York, where I had a few friends at least, and was promptly hired as a waiter at the Morgan Bar, a tony crepuscular dungeon on Madison Avenue that had no liquor license because its owner (Steve Rubell of Studio 54 fame) was a felon.
The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait Page 12