“You sound like you don’t care that I’m well now. Like you wish I was still sick.”
“I don’t give a damn either way.”
“That’s enough,” his father would thunder. “No one’s had an easy time around here.”
“You can’t side with her now, Dad. You can’t. Who’d you always come to with the money for the shopping? To me, that’s who. Who’d Sharon and Lei Lani and Doug always run to if they was hurt? Huh? Did they go to her? To you? No, they damn sure didn’t. To me, that’s who. To me!”
Greg would sit in class that year, in junior high school, and his thoughts would be in the big two-story frame house: She’s a liar, that’s what she is. She’s always been a liar and he’s a coward and takes anything she hands him and now they’re trying to turn the kids against me. Against me.
It was about this time that his performance began to suffer both academically and in extracurricular endeavors. He no longer asserted himself in sports. He’d always considered himself a good athlete, especially in winter sports, and now he didn’t seem to care. He even lost interest in his saxophone and in music in general. He began losing weight and dropped off the football squad.
Then, when he was fifteen, he ran away. There were many times on the road that he regretted his decision, especially when he stood on the mountain highway in Kentucky in the rain, and the rain turned to sleet and made heaps of gray-brown slush, and the sky blackened before his eyes so that the boy had a feeling that the sun would never return. All the cars passed without slowing and he counted his money for the tenth time, but it still totaled three dollars and some pennies. He was wheezing, rattling, ripping phlegm from deep within. Then a big sedan stopped, skidding a little on the wet asphalt.
“Want a lift?” asked the man holding the door open and Greg splashed through a puddle and fairly leaped into the car.
“Thanks,” said the boy when his teeth stopped chattering.
“Going far?” the man asked, and for the first time the boy looked at him. He wore a black topcoat and black pants. He had dark hair and eyes, wore glasses, was both tall and big.
“I’m going to Florida.”
“Well.” The man laughed softly. “You have a ways to go. Do you have money?”
“Enough,” the boy said suspiciously.
“Where do you come from?”
“Cadillac. That’s in Michigan.”
“Thumbing all the way?”
“No, I came by train most of the way.”
“Where’re your parents? Michigan?”
“I don’t know where my parents are and I don’t care. Now maybe you better just let me out if you care so much.”
“Hold on.” He laughed. “Don’t get angry. I didn’t mean to pry. What’s your name?”
“Greg.”
“I’m Father Charles, Greg,” the man said, and it startled the boy. For the first time he noticed the Roman collar barely showing beneath the black topcoat.
“I never met a priest,” said the boy. “Do they call you ‘Father’ or what?”
“Most people do.” The priest laughed. “Some less charitable Protestant neighbors call me other things. I have a parish in Georgia. You can ride a piece of your journey with me.”
And then the priest began suggesting, gently at first, that Greg should at least call his parents, and he was saying something else, something about traveling like this, and the conversation seemed to have religious overtones but Greg couldn’t tell. His eyelids were closing and his head was nodding forward onto his chest. He woke up in the state of Georgia.
“This is where I stay, son,” said Father Charles as Greg rode with him to the rectory, planning to leave after a promised hot meal. It was a small poor parish in a region of Baptists and Methodists, but the parish house was clean and warm, and there was a part-time housekeeper to help the priest keep things tidy. Despite his long sleep in the car, the boy was glad to accept the invitation to stay another night. He slept thirteen hours in a warm clean bed.
The next morning Father Charles said, “I can’t persuade you to wire your folks?”
“No sir.”
“You’re determined to go on?”
“Yes sir.”
“Well then, would you consider staying here for a while? I know a man who has a job putting up galvanized siding on buildings. I spoke to him about you. He has a job for you.”
“He does? Well I … well … yes. I guess so. Yes, I can stay. For a little while.”
And the boy went to work that very day, and in the evening after dinner, when the priest returned from visiting a sick parishioner, Greg surprised him by joining in when the priest sang a popular song as they washed the dishes.
“Greg, you have a nice voice.”
“My dad’s a music teacher. He went to the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music. I been playing music and singing since I was a little kid. I can just pick up an instrument and you tell me the scale and I can play. I got perfect pitch.”
“Oh you do, do you?” The priest grinned, and took off his glasses looking at the boy more closely.
They spent the rest of the evening singing together and Greg thought that his voice blended nicely with the clear booming baritone of the priest.
The next morning at breakfast the priest said, “There’s going to be a dance in the parish hall next week. Would you like to go?”
“Sure.”
“I can arrange that you escort a young lady. We’ve got lots of pretty belles around this part of the country, you know.”
“Thanks, but I’d just as soon go stag.”
“Can you dance?”
“Sure.”
“Have you ever dated a girl, Greg?”
“No, I guess not.”
“Really? And why not?”
“I been too busy raising my sisters and my brother. And going to school and working.”
The priest seemed to notice the catch in the boy’s voice and didn’t pursue it.
“It’s time you became interested in girls,” he said, picking up the dishes, turning his back as he walked to the sink.
“I don’t care about them,” Greg said.
“You should. You’re not a bad looking boy. A bit skinny but we can fix that up.” He laughed. Then he came over to the table and put his hand on Greg’s head. “You have very handsome hair. Most girls are partial to blond wavy hair, you know.”
A few nights later the priest took Greg to bed with him.
“Was that the very first time you’ve done that with a man?” the priest asked afterward, lying beside him.
“Yes. The first time with anyone, Father.”
“Greg, God permits men … people … all people … to express love in many ways. What I’ve … we’ve … done is a gesture of love. Shame and delight … well … these are man’s responses, not God’s. With us it was just our way of loving, a moment of love. The only emotion man can ever know for sure he shares with Our Lord. Do you understand, son?”
“Yes, Father. I understand. I’m not sorry. I feel the love. I really do.”
And the priest looked sadly at the boy, then turned his back. Greg was puzzled, provoked, impassioned. He had difficulty sleeping.
One evening after a dinner discussion about the intimate sensual beauty of Christ and his world, Greg suddenly craved the darkness and the priest’s bed, and there in the small living room of the rectory, he threw his arms around the tall man and touched the priest’s fine maple brown hair.
“Father. Father. Oh, Father,” he whispered, and was startled when the priest roughly pushed him away.
“Greg, I’ve got to talk to you.”
“What is it, Father?”
“You’ve got to leave here. You’ve got to go home to your family.”
“Why? What did I do wrong?”
“Nothing. You’ve just got to go. Your parents have undoubtedly notified authorities about you and it’s not right for you to be here.”
“I done something wrong, didn’t I?”
asked Greg, eyes already wet.
“No. Yes. Greg, it’s becoming obvious … I mean, about us … what … the way we express love. It’s that … you’re so clingy. You’re getting like a girl. People are bound to notice. Already have, I fear. You’ve got to leave here, son.”
Greg left the next day when the priest was saying mass. He had been awake all night thinking of the virulent letter he would leave. Now he hated the priest, and couldn’t understand how he could have felt anything for this Judas. He had a delectable vision of himself walking into the church during mass, mounting the altar, and addressing the congregation, telling them about their priest who seduced fifteen year old boys. But two things stopped him: his vanity for one. He couldn’t bear to think there had been others. He had to have been the only one. And if so, he couldn’t have Father punished for it. Secondly, he knew he had not been seduced. It had taken no coaxing. He had been ready.
Gregory Powell took to the road early that day, bitter, betrayed, bewildered. He strode along the shoulder of the highway kicking stones and gravel until his toe was battered, enduring the pain and confusion, hating the dismal Georgia countryside and the cold rain starting to fall, taking solace in the blackened stormy sky which aped his mood. Then he saw a dot in the sky, suspended, shimmering against a lighted streak of cloud like the eye of God. He watched it become bigger, yet still it hung. Then it dropped suddenly, without warning, taking shape as it fell—down, down—and then the wings spread majestically. Not twenty yards away in the field it silently struck something vulnerable. Seconds later Greg saw it swoop up: coppery triumphant wings, hooked bloody beak, soft furry thing dead in the talons.
By the time he hitchhiked into Lake Wales, Florida, he had learned things, and it was a more cynical manipulative boy who affected what he hoped was a passable southern accent. He prepared a story for meddlesome adults that he lived in the next town and was just hitchhiking to his grandfather’s house.
Greg was not even remotely effeminate in appearance, but there was something, some hint in the promising gaze of the boy that was a sign for even a mouse-faced bell captain who hired him as the hotel elevator boy at first glance, and who propositioned him the first moment they were alone. Greg accepted with lip-jutting brazen defiance, but he learned that there was great danger in homosexual encounters. He barely escaped the bell captain with his wolf breath and his studded leather belt.
His sexual appetite was not nearly as sharp then when finally he trudged into Orlando, Florida, neglecting his southern accent when stopped by the local police.
Gregory Powell didn’t want to go home, but it was either that or a Florida reformatory for runaway boys and he reluctantly agreed to tell them to contact his mother, who, with her newfound health, set out to be a solicitous mother. She came personally to Orlando and took her eldest son home to Cadillac, but things were no better at home. In fact they were infinitely worse.
In Greg’s absence his mother had totally dominated the household and the boy could see that any resistance his father may have offered previously was finished now. Greg tested his authority with the children and it was the same. They turned to her for approval or usurpation of his commands. He still found her to be a consummate liar, yet he made allowances, always at night, to himself. Filled with confusion over his feelings toward his mother and father, he made allowances. His mother had been ill for years, and weren’t some of her lies just harmless fantasies? And wasn’t she just now beginning a normal life? And his father, well, he had to get by, didn’t he?
And then he would hate himself for excusing them, and would actually despise them for a long blistering moment. That would lead to thoughts about himself, the way he was, the undeniable hatred of school and the attraction for a curly haired boy named Archie. So he and Archie stole a car in Big Rapids and drove exultant and free to Indiana, where he engaged Archie sexually in the back seat of the car, afterwards falling asleep, only to be awakened by Indiana police. Once again he was returned home by out-of-state authorities. Archie, being older, was given one year’s summary probation for the car theft.
This time Greg could live at home for only a week. The Powells had taken in a roving orphan boy named Harold—a boy slightly older than Greg—big, blond, silent, a masculine boy close to being movie star handsome. Perhaps to the Powells he was a surrogate for the son they had all but lost, another chance with another troubled boy. But it was too late for the surrogate as well as the actual son.
By now Gregory Powell’s weight had fallen from one hundred and fifty to one hundred and eighteen pounds. He was succumbing to one virus after another and when Harold told him he was going to join the navy it was more than Greg could bear. He idolized the older boy, wanted only to be with him, was sickened and worried by his secret desires, telling himself a thousand times he was no queer.
A few days later Harold stole some money from a sister and Greg stole a car and they were eventually arrested in Yellowstone National Park. This time Gregory Powell was not released to his mother. Barely sixteen years old, he was convicted under the Dyer Act and sentenced to a juvenile facility at Englewood, Colorado. Harold was by law an adult and was sent to an adult facility.
Five months later, Gregory Powell, found to be bright but emotionally unstable, was transferred to the National Training School for boys in Washington, D.C. Ten months after that he escaped, was recaptured in two weeks, and sentenced to the federal reformatory at Chillicothe, Ohio. He was released the next year, having served twenty-two months in all, and returned home just before his eighteenth birthday, a swishing, emaciated, self-proclaimed faggot.
His first weeks at home were a nightmare. He walked with iron in his back to correct the exaggerated queen’s step he had consciously acquired in the reformatory. And he thought of the reformatory and wondered how he had found it so hateful, why he had wanted to escape. There were worse things. This, for instance. His nerves were ragged. He was concentrating on being a man, afraid every moment he would betray what he was. He began experimenting with marijuana and would use it sporadically, mixing it with liquor all of his adult life when he wasn’t in prison. And this time he would make what he would later confess to the others in group therapy was a conscious effort to get back inside. He admitted and surrendered at once and irrevocably to a hateful notion: he was in fact an institutional man.
So Gregory Powell stole a car, was caught, and sentenced to the state prison at Jackson, Michigan. This time there was no doubt in his mind. He wanted to stay, but they put him out when he was twenty years old. He discovered it was easier to get in than to stay in. You only had to steal a car and cross the state line to assure entry.
This time out he was to have his first sexual experience with a woman. She was six years older and taught him about heterosexual love, and though he was to maintain in later years that he was a confirmed homosexual early on, it is clear he was not. Greg would, during his years of incarceration and freedom, rebound back and forth between men and women, never knowing what it was he pursued. When he was in prison he was always certain that repressed homosexuality was at the root of his troubles and he would be as overt a homosexual as prison authorities permitted. By now, jailhouse tattoos adorned both arms: “Greg” on one arm, “Mother” on the other, the two people about whom he felt most ambivalent.
In Leavenworth Greg was to meet a willowy Indian boy called Little Sheba. They formed an alliance. Prison was their home and they would remain together. By now Greg had reverted to a masculine type. But they were caught by guards in a sex act and separated, and then Little Sheba was suddenly “given a date.” He was going home.
After his separation from Little Sheba, Greg was temporarily quite mad. He began chewing holes in his wrists, sitting on the floor of his cell bleeding surreptitiously into the toilet, flushing the blood away until he became too ill to continue, inflicting wounds which would heal into ugly ropelike wrist scars. Finally he was hospitalized, given transfusions, and tied into bed so he would not strip the tube
s from his arms.
As always, Ethel Powell was soon by his side. Nothing stopped her, not prison walls, guards, nor wardens. She would invariably enlist the aid of a prison chaplain, travel to whatever prison her son was in, and practically camp out at the prison gates until she got whatever she felt her son needed. This time she felt it was a transfer, and he got it. Her boy was sent to the prison at Milan, Michigan, where he could receive that which she believed would undoubtedly restore him to health—visits from his mother. But upon his arrival there, and five minutes after the removal of his handcuffs, he chewed the stitches out of his wrists. He was resutured and placed in a padded call.
The next several years were repetitious of the others: in and out of prisons, gonorrhea, psychotherapy, liaisons with women, including a promiscuous black juvenile who accused him of fathering her child. Cruising for gay men in between and during heterosexual affairs, always masculine in appearance now, the queen years far behind. A passionate two years in and out of prison with a black drag queen called Pinky who could be used to rationalize later problems: “If only they had paroled me to Los Angeles where I could be with Pinky …”
And yet the heterosexual relationships were the most lasting during his short months of freedom, belying his rationalization. As always, his mother was arduous in her visits and letters to the various penal institutions, while the other children were faring only slightly better than the eldest. Douglas was to become for a time a heroin addict. Lei Lani, the most vivacious of them all, was to run away to an unhappy life of bad luck and tragedies. Sharon was to have a stormy marital life.
The Powell family was finally to move to Oceanside, California, which permitted an occasional visit to Greg, who was in prison in Vacaville Medical Facility where he had undergone a craniotomy to determine if calcification of the brain found in an X ray could have been caused by a tumor—a tumor which could explain his behavior. The exploratory surgery revealed no tumor but the neurosurgeon reported that he found “mild atrophy.” That finding would be used as a defense at a later trial to mitigate Greg’s volcanic behavior, but other experts would challenge it as impossible to recognize in exploratory surgery, and actually “mildly” present in many prudent, reflective, prominent persons.
The Onion Field Page 6