by Gary Indiana
I hate my grandmother, I tell my aunt. Bettie: Don’t ever say you hate people, if your grammy died you’d be sorry. She hates me, so why shouldn’t I? She doesn’t hate you, she’s an old lady set in her ways. She acts the same with you and Kev as she did with your father and your Uncle Eli, she picks one over the other. She never liked your father divorcing Flo. Flo was closer to her than your mother. Why would she like Flo over my mother? Because, your grandmother and Flo are Jewish. Does that mean I’m Jewish? You’re a small fraction Jewish. Your grandfather isn’t Jewish, he belongs to the Knights of Pythias. What did she do to become Jewish? Why is Flo Jewish? If a person’s Jewish, they descended from Jews, like the Bergerons are descended from Canada. But didn’t they kill Jesus and spare Barabbas? Bettie: I don’t know, was I there? Maybe they told the Romans to kill Jesus way back when that happened, but your grandmother didn’t do it. She’s not responsible for it, she’s assimilated. Flo tried to kill my father, didn’t she? That wasn’t religious, she did that because Flo is insane. Anyway your father provoked her, is what I think. But don’t go repeating that or your mother will blow a gasket.
Suez Crisis. The Russians invade Hungary with tanks. What if the Russians drop the hydrogen bomb, we’re only sixty miles from Boston. Why do we all have to die on their say-so? They’re not going to drop the goddamn bomb, will you stop worrying about it? The Russkies know they’d be wiped out before their missiles even got here. We’ll all die when we’re good and ready. Mumma runs for town clerk, a real political campaign. The car’s full of thousands of offset photo reproductions of her face on rectangular cards with her name and Republican Party affiliation. She wins. Suddenly our grocery allowance doesn’t depend on a hand Drunk Daddy holds in a poker game.
Miss Anderson’s piano lessons. The veins in her scary shrink-wrap hands bulge like blue-purple worms. I haven’t practiced and stare at the keyboard in a pubescent, semiconscious trance. It takes a lot for Miss Anderson to lose her patience. She has always been approvingly gentle; her anger now is gently expressed but unmistakable. You were such a good pupil for years, but now I have to wonder if you even want to learn this. Miss Anderson’s handwriting is thin as silk thread, strands of delicate whorling penmanship, like Prince Myshkin’s in The Idiot. Miss Anderson’s mysteriously wealthy sister lives in a wedding-cake mansion on the hill above Miss Anderson’s house, a dollhouse by comparison. No one besides the maid and Dr. Tietelbaum, who scrapes my ears in the winter, has glimpsed the other Miss Anderson in thirty-seven years.
Drunk Daddy notices me reading Death in the Afternoon, from his own Collier’s complete edition of The Works of Ernest Hemingway. With the musing air of a shit-faced philosopher he says: Ya know, Hemingway flirted with Communism for a while. No, I tell him, trying to sound worldly and clued in about sex, he flirted with Marlene Dietrich. He fucked Marlene Dietrich, Drunk Daddy trumps, swigging his CC and ginger ale, he flirted with Communism. “Fuck” is the one word no one’s allowed to say in our house, and I can tell he’s drunker than I’ve ever seen him when he says it. I’ve already figured out that Mumma and Daddy never, ever fuck, that it’s the reason he hates her, and hates himself, and his wanting to fuck is the reason she hates him, and hates herself. I don’t know how I know this and I don’t want to know it, I don’t even know what fucking is but I somehow know it’s what married people are supposed to do, and that they don’t.
Sputnik. Why can’t we build a bomb shelter in the new house? Daddy: Because the odds are, if there’s a nuclear war, and we go running like ninnies to a bomb shelter, we’ll bake to death slowly like a batch of Toll House cookies. Lousy way to go if you ask me.
School: If we donate twenty-five cents a week to Catholic Charities, we’ll redeem one pagan baby in Red China by the end of the year, supporting our missionaries who are shown on the pamphlets the nuns hand out being martyred by Chinese Communists who drive long, rusty spikes into their skulls with what appear to be ordinary toolbox hammers. These agonizing deaths draw them even closer to the Sacred Heart of Jesus than they already were.
Bookcase in Aunt Bettie’s parlor: Act One by Moss Hart, The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud, Forever Amber by Kathleen Winsor, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living by Dale Carnegie, Masters of Deceit by J. Edgar Hoover, None Dare Call It Treason by John A. Stormer, How to Be Free and Happy by Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness by Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian by Bertrand Russell, Peyton Place by Grace Metalious, Witness by Whittaker Chambers, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, Peace of Soul by Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, Out of Bondage by Elizabeth Bentley, By Love Possessed by James Gould Cozzens, Ecstasy and Me by Hedy Lamarr, Exodus by Leon Uris, I Chose Freedom by Victor Kravchenko, 100 More Jokes for the John, the Bible, How to Win at Canasta.
Elvis Presley on the The Ed Sullivan Show. Ernie Kovacs. Edie Adams commercials for Muriel cigars. “A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke.” Milton Berle. Dean Martin, drinking. Judy Canova, singing. Sonja Henie, skating. 77 Sunset Strip, tonight starring Efrem Zymbalist, Jr., and Edd “Kookie” Byrnes. “Kookie, Kookie, lend me your comb.” Fabian. I Love Lucy. Leave It to Beaver. Our Miss Brooks. I Remember Mama. The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, starring Bob Denver, and Tuesday Weld as Thalia Menninger. O! Susanna and The Gale Storm Show starring Gale Storm, featuring ZaSu Pitts. William Bendix in The Life of Riley. A test of the Emergency Broadcast System. Oscar Levant, Dody Goodman, Alexander King, Malcolm Muggeridge on The Jack Paar Tonight Show.
The new house, across the street from the old house. Shotgun in the hall closet. Drunk Daddy: One of these days I’m going to take that gun and put all of you out of your misery. Mumma: Your father doesn’t mean what he’s saying. Even if he did shoot me, he would never shoot you.
Why do I have to have the same room as Kev? This house is so big, why can’t I have my own room? Because, that’s why. If your father ever finished that attic he could build you one. When Kev leaves for college you’ll have the whole room to yourself. A medley of nuclear porn beside my bed: Alas, Babylon; On the Beach; A Canticle for Leibowitz; Fail-Safe; Seven Days in May; Dr. Strangelove. Beside Kev’s bed: tennis racquets, tennis balls, ping-pong paddles, baseball glove, basketball, basketball trophy, football, football trophy, football helmet, varsity sweater, jock strap, gym sweats, chemistry book, physics book, A Treasury of American Short Stories, foil-wrapped rubbers pressed between the mattress and the box spring.
In the town, shoplifting from the paper store: 1984, Anna Karenina, Babbitt, The Jungle, Crime and Punishment, Lolita. Signet paperbacks, cover illustrations by Milton Glaser.
A thirty-five-year-old music teacher at the high school who isn’t from around here and was only teaching there this one semester is found face down in the Merrimack River. Somehow mutilated but no one says this, it’s somehow understood from how people don’t say it. There had been hushed adult talk about him from day one, nobody says the word “queer” either, when kids ask their parents about it they’re told the music teacher “got mixed up with jazz musicians.”
Sunday morning at the Family Drug fountain: Mayde Giblin and her companion Emmi. Mayde a world-weary retired nurse, stout and imperishable-looking in an apple-green car coat. Emmi, belted in the gray raincoat worn by spies, sickly and thin. And German, like Rosa Klebb in From Russia, with Love. Blanchie Ceviskas overhears everything and stares through thick glasses making her eyes huge and goofy looking, thinking up something funny to say so someone will talk to her. She lets her bedridden mother, who’s ninety-one, believe she’s at Mass, praying for the old bag’s soul to rise into Heaven right off the bat when the time comes, without doing any time in Purgatory. Blanchie drinks cup after acrid cup of coffee in the Family Drug instead. People cluck pityingly that she never managed to find a husband, but I happen to know she was never looking for one, though I don’t know how I know it. Neither was Mayde Giblin, who I sense is Emmi’s wife, though that’s vague. Blanchie Ceviskas is smarter than people realize. She knows what s
ecretly goes on in our town. She’s not a gossip, but people don’t fool her. She knows when she’s being patronized, too, but she’s too dignified to say so. Mayde Giblin has opinions about the town as well: petty, ignorant, bigoted, and pathetic, full of shits trying to pass themselves off as gold.
Mayde’s house is on 28, near Chanticleer Motel Lounge, popular with married people cheating on each other when it first opened but now nobody goes there. Mayde’s first floor has no furniture, other than a scarred mahogany dining table with chairs around it. A pile of Fact magazines stops open the kitchen door. The topmost, black-and-white cover: “Who Killed Dag Hammarskjöld?”
Bobby Giblin hobbles down from his upstairs on his clubfoot. Bobby Giblin is a painter. He gives me drawing lessons, and shows me how to mix colors. He paints on sheets of a coated paper I am never able to locate anywhere in years to come, even in Boston. It’s nearly as thin as ordinary paper, but, chemically laminated, it doesn’t buckle or break apart no matter how much oil it absorbs.
I incessantly hope a different, better family will adopt me. I’m happier around Mayde, Emmi, and Bobby than I ever am at home. After I’ve known them a few months, during one of Mumma’s interminable nightly recitations of every single tedious thing that happened all day at her office, she remarks as if it’s nothing important that Mayde Giblin dropped dead that afternoon, news I don’t react to at all, even when Mumma, oblivious, says, “You knew Mayde Giblin, didn’t you?” Because I have kept my feelings about anything barricaded against Mumma and Drunk Daddy for years. They tell me how to dress and how to eat and how to act and how to talk and what friends I can have and which relatives I should care about and which ones think their shit doesn’t stink because they moved to Connecticut and who in the town I should look down my nose at and who to steer clear of, who is good and who is trash and what college I will go to and what I should do with my life if I don’t want to wind up poor like they both were in the Depression and all through the war and if I ever told them I really, really loved anything besides them they would run right over it until it was roadkill.
After Mayde dies, Bobby disappears. Nobody ever sees Emmi in the town again, either. Mumma takes us all to a convention at The Balsams two or three years later. As Drunk Daddy, Aunt Pam, and Bettie pillage a buffet, Ellen and I wander off into the red-carpeted halls of the vast resort hotel and somehow lose our way in a basement, a maze of corridors with massive steam pipes hissing under low ceilings. It’s completely deserted, except for a dining room waiter we suddenly spot opening a door at the far end of a long hallway.
Surprise, it’s Bobby Giblin. My happiness at seeing him makes me realize that I loved him, all that time he lived in Derry. I’m old enough now to recognize sexual attraction. That I want him to kiss me, lie down on top of me in bed. I want this impossible thing, in the basement of the hotel. When our eyes meet, my skin tingles. I can’t really tell, but I want to believe he wants to be alone with me, that something would happen, we would “make love” in some way, if we were alone. He asks Ellen how long we’re all staying, then invites us into the room.
The hotel manager gave him an empty storage space to use as a studio, he says: the manager likes his paintings. Bobby’s working in the dining room all summer. The room has paintings and art stuff all over, also a sleeping cot and a refrigerator. Bobby’s really only talking to me—Ellen sees that he’s my friend, that we have things to say to each other that don’t include her. She’s the only relative I have who treats me as a person, instead of a child to boss around.
The Balsams is lucky to get one-third occupancy during the one season they open. It was posh in the Roosevelt era but it’s a third-choice convention center now. I want to ask Bobby why he’s living up north, it’s such an unpopulated wasteland. Why he disappeared right after Mayde died. I know why, though: Derry is a shithole, they all would’ve moved on by this time if Mayde were still alive, anyway.
He shows us his paintings, which are intense, frightening, too graphically suggestive of clawed-open flesh and morbidity for Ellen to give them more than polite looks. She’s squeamish. But she tells Bobby in a really nice way that she’s never had the opportunity to learn anything about art, and wishes she did know enough to appreciate it. She means it, too.
I want to see Bobby again while this convention lasts. He can tell me how I can be an artist and how I can get far away from New Hampshire and my family and survive in the world. Maybe he’ll kiss me, hold me, make me feel loved. He’ll rub his penis against me, or something. But my family is actually having fun for a change without turning vile after several hours, and I forget to look for him again until the night before we leave, and then I can’t find him. Ellen, later: I wonder how Bobby Giblin can wait on tables in that huge place, with a foot like that?
None of us leaves town except in a family bubble, so when we go anywhere, the town comes with us. In town, each family is its own sealed-off country, surrounded by other countries they don’t trust. Ever since my father bought the lot he built our house on from Phil Bartlett, we’ve been in a silent war against the Bartletts, concerning the property markers. My parents believe Phil Bartlett surreptitiously shifts them at night when he thinks he can get away with it, stealing another inch or two of land each time. Mrs. Bartlett is Parisian and thinks she’s better than us, because Mumma speaks Canuck French, and forgets a lot of the language. Plus, Phil Bartlett feels superior because he’s a licensed surveyor.
They’re neutral about the Dumonts one street over, as the Dumonts are the parents of my mother’s friend Leona Deroscher, who’s married to Leo Deroscher, Drunk Daddy’s best Drunk Friend. Leona divorces Leo, goes into AA, and sensibly grows distant from my parents.
Crush on Kev’s friend Eugene Barbosa. Mumma says he’s trash. The Barbosas are guineas who live in Pinardville, a place always mentioned with disdain and dread. Pinardville begins after the last utility pole of Cityville. I have never really understood how these two places are differentiated, since they seem to occupy exactly the same area. Ben Adams lives in Pinardville, the less desirable of the two, and he’s rich. Amelia Adams has leukemia, always fatal. Mumma drags me to her bedside. A fan is blowing in the window. Won’t she catch cold from that fan? Mumma: She doesn’t want us to smell the cancer.
I write down clumsy, clueless fantasies of putting Eugene Barbosa’s penis in my mouth. It’s said to be huge as a donkey’s, it’s a joke among my brother’s friends. I record this in a composition notebook with a marbled white-and-black cover that I swiped from the paper store. It doesn’t occur to me to hide the notebook. Notebooks are private, like diaries. Mumma finds it in my room and immediately reads it. It’s a revelation of sorts that she has no concept of privacy at all where I’m concerned. Worse, she now believes I really sucked Eugene Barbosa, whose sister and I drove her Falcon on a recent wild-goose chase, upstate around Cornish, hoping to find J. D. Salinger’s house. Nothing I say dissuades Mumma from her dirty certainty that I’ve been molested by some filthy Portuguese delinquent. Since nothing sexual can ever be spoken in our family, aside from lame jokes the adults cackle over when they’re loaded, she doesn’t know what she can do about it, and finally, grudgingly, realizes she can’t do anything. At first, though, I’m afraid she’ll call up Eugene, who’ll hate me forever, or say something to his parents, even though they’re trash who would naturally have no control of their kids.
I glean that she thinks I’m naturally ashamed of my desires—and that Mumma believes, or wants to believe, that an evil outside influence infected me with a disease only psychiatry can now cure. But at this juncture in the family’s fortunes, psychiatry is still unmanageably expensive, so she reads up on the subject in the popular literature, and decides to believe “sensitive” boys afflicted with tendencies outgrow them after adolescence.
I’m not ashamed, but definitely embarrassed, and not entirely for myself; it wasn’t a believably written fantasy, and Mumma’s credulity makes her seem stupid, as well as damningly prepared
to think “the worst,” as she conceives it, about this child she’s molded in her image as much as she possibly could, with a certain palpable if unconscious resentment. This is the first sad instance of our nurturing bond mutating into something unbearably oppressive and heartbreaking. In time it becomes a wretched spell I try to shatter by putting myself in extreme situations that would give her a heart attack if she knew about them. To break free of her personal force field, it finally becomes necessary to put the entire continent between us.
Hot-walking saddlebreds at Rockingham. When can I race? Not this year. When? Next summer we’ll put you in the starting race, right when the track opens, and see how you do. Paregoric cigarettes, smoked on my bed with a faunlike boy I worship, who works busing trays in the track cafeteria. We make out a little but it scares him, and I’m afraid we’ll get caught.
First blowjob: Paul Carlisle. His skin’s dark for a Caucasian but his family’s considered white. He has the biggest hard-on of any boy at St. Thomas Aquinas School, it’s well known. I suck him off all through seventh grade. We have nothing in common, but what more do you really need in common in the seventh grade? We hook up again in eighth grade, not as many times, and five or six times in high school. Years after I leave town, when I return to visit I run into Paul now and then in places like the A&P parking lot. He’s married by that time, to Fayanne Parker, the daughter of my mother’s friend Gerrie Trobick by her first husband. We talk about old times, prolong the conversation in his car, or my car. Invariably, I give him another blowjob.
Terpin hydrate and codeine cough syrup, obtainable without prescription at Family Drug. Crush on Seth Willard, a geekily beautiful senior who’s nice to me, which most older boys aren’t. After classes he’s the school janitor. He lets me tag along on his job, through the hallowed, gothic crumb cake where none of us is getting more than a modicum of education. Stoned on codeine, I not-very-secretly adore his back, his ass, his arms, his legs, his hands, his feet, his pale, smooth skin as he mops from the top floor to the main hall, which is lined with mementos of totally forgotten human beings who suffered four years of strangulating boredom in this very building.