I’m no prude and I don’t believe you’re going to love everyone you sleep with, but I worried that he was exposing himself to danger. Who were these people? Maybe that was the thrill. Sometimes he’d make friends with one of his tricks, and they turned out, uniformly, to be nice men, as opposed to the boyfriends, who were awful.
It was a game. These squeaky-clean, handsome men, holding good jobs, would don torn blue jeans or leather and go out at night. They were parodies of masculinity and therefore vulnerable. If you wish to know the flash points of a society, look at the outer fringes. The outrageous behavior is the shattered reflection of something buried deep inside the norm.
These guys weren’t butch bullies but they wanted to pretend they were.
Jerry was enchanted with the charade.
I was enchanted with reality. The more a person poses, the less I have to do with them.
Although a few lesbian bars existed, there was and is no female equivalent to the relentless sexual hunting of some gay men. Back then it wasn’t just some—it was everybody and his brother.
I visited the Sea Colony once, a bar in the West Village. People divided up into butch and femme and that’s not me. I left and a girl jumped me out on the street. I have no idea what inspired her to try to beat me up. She was a good-sized black woman. Maybe she’d heard my southern accent and thought I was a racist. She picked the wrong girl. I whirled around and ran backward, squashing her against the side of the building. She let go of me with an “ooof” and I walked home.
Another bar, Kookies, drew a younger crowd, less into role stuff. The owner, a straight woman with a pile of blond hair, liked me. She knew I hadn’t a sou.
I’d buy a Coke and she’d let me eat all the peanuts in the bowls. One Thanksgiving she gave me a turkey. I kissed her and thanked her and ran the whole way home.
I’d never cooked a turkey but I could sure try. Baby Jesus and I ate that turkey for ten days and made soup from the bones.
One day my cousin Wade visited me. Wade had joined the marines. His father wasn’t happy about it. I’d heard from Mom that Big Ken had claimed he’d shoot anyone who came to get Wade when his draft number was pulled, which it was. Wade didn’t go down to register and sure enough, they came for him. I don’t know what happened but I think Wade, who had a cool head on his shoulders, must have talked his dad out of resisting and saved Big Ken from jail. Anyway, Wade volunteered for the marines like his dad, which settled the mess.
Big Kenny, awarded a Purple Heart for the horror he lived through in Okinawa, conceded the point, but he told Wade to get a skill that would keep him out of combat.
Wade became a diesel mechanic, which should have kept him behind the lines, but you could never be sure. He didn’t know where he was going to be posted except that he’d be somewhere in the Pacific.
Suddenly Vietnam wasn’t so far away.
43
Pea Brains and Pissants
Noel Coward said of Christmas, “that terrible pall of goodwill is about to descend upon us again.” I agree with this fellow Sagittarian.
New York City during Christmas jolts money out of your pocket better than an earthquake. When I lived there the constant advertising, spectacular window displays and over-the-top decorations at Rockefeller Center inspired nausea, since I couldn’t buy a damned thing.
When I could, I’d volunteer to drive a car to a southern city during Christmas. There were a lot of drive-away companies then. Someone would fly to Miami and need their car delivered. This was the only way I could go home. Baby Jesus and I would crawl down those parts of I-95 that were finished until we reached the Pink Palace, the Ixora Express, the home of skinks, parrots, palmetto bugs and Mom.
Perhaps the monochromatic tones of Manhattan dulled my senses, but each time I visited the maternal unit that house became pinker. Finally I told Mother to tone it down—or grow bougainvillea over it.
Aunt Mimi’s houses changed color like chameleons. Her first color was lemon, reflecting her tart years. Her next color was charcoal with white trim, reflecting her sophisticated years. Lastly she opted for white with aqua trim, reflecting her prudent years, since white needed repainting far less often than the other colors.
Mother complained that Sis was losing her nerve, settling for a white house. Too boring. The world should be in pink, like her, of course, or deep yellow. Then again, a pale lavender brightened up the subtropical neighborhood, and there was always that standby, lime green.
Aunt Mimi had carted her cotton-wrapped Christmas tree to Florida, horrifying Mother, who declared it a health hazard. This further provoked Aunt Mimi, who retaliated by rising above her little sister’s childish pranks.
That would never do.
Perhaps they indulged in this animosity due to the welcome news that Wade was in Okinawa and not, so far, in Vietnam. What an irony that Wade should wind up on the island where his father had been pinned in a foxhole occupied by three dead Japanese soldiers. Uncle Kenny said the worst moment was when his boots smashed through the rib cage of one of the dead men. He was not one to dine out on war stories. As an adult I was beginning to understand why.
Now that neither sister could be drained by genuine worry, life could return to normal, their version.
Since Mother couldn’t get a rise out of Sis over the allegedly bug-infested tree, she whipped out to the Sunrise Shopping Center to buy a new pair of glasses—wire-rimmed spectacles, the counterculture look then in vogue among the young. Afterward she buzzed over to Aunt Mimi’s to show off her purchase.
“You look like a teenager. You’re too old for that,” said Aunt Mimi, who favored pointy glasses with rhinestones in the corners.
“Jealous.”
“Act your age.”
“You know. Sis, you haven’t been the same since seeing Mary Pickford in Pollyanna.”
“What’s that got to do with the price of beans?”
“You were overly influenced by the wicked aunt.”
“Juts, you’re soft as a grape. Now act your age and take those ridiculous glasses off.”
“Pea brain.” Mother twirled her purse. Since it was big enough to flatten an elephant, this was no mean feat.
I helped myself to a Coca-Cola in the refrigerator since they were warming up and Mother did not yet need my strong, silent support. As I had just arrived the night before, I figured that once they wore themselves out. Aunt Mimi might remember to ask me how I was, how my studies were progressing. I was staying on at NYU for graduate school and since they were taking only one in sixty applicants, I felt grateful to be there.
No such luck.
I hadn’t paid attention to exactly what they were saying so I don’t know how they quickly leapfrogged from low-level sniping to all-out war. By the time I reached the living room Mother defiantly stood in the middle of the room and Aunt Mimi had retired to her favorite chair as though to a queen’s throne.
“You’re full of shit.”
“See, that’s what got Rita in trouble in the first place, your vulgar language and your refusal to take the child to the One True Church. God as my witness, I tried. I even took her to mass when you were busy.”
“I didn’t appreciate your giving her rosary beads.” Mother dredged up an incident from when I was six.
They never forgot a damn thing.
“Why am I in trouble?” I asked like a stupid ox. I should have kept my mouth shut.
“I know of your cross to bear.”
“Huh?” I squinted at Aunt Mimi.
“Shut up. Sis. You don’t know jackshit.”
“That is twice you have used that nasty word under my roof and during the high holy days. Juts, Juts.” Sis shook her head, delighting in her moral superiority.
“You’re both nuts.” I sat in Uncle Mearl’s chair. He was out painting houses and making a good living at it, too.
“Don’t sit down,” Mother commanded. “We’re going home.”
“I know all about it.” Aunt Mimi gazed out
the jalousie window as though communing with a higher power. All she needed was backlighting.
“You’re all hat and no cattle,” Mother bluffed.
Aunt Mimi leveled her pretty gray eyes at my brown ones. “You’re a homosexual. I know everything.”
“I am?”
“See?” Mother shot me one of her dagger looks.
“You don’t lie any better than she does” Mimi indicated her precious baby sister.
“I’m not lying. I’m not a homosexual. I have a whimsical disregard for gender.” I thought that was a refined way to put it.
“That’s worse. Make up your mind.” Aunt Mimi pointed a knitting needle that she had pulled out of her basket, which always sat next to her chair.
“Aunt Mimi, I’m trying to get my Ph.D.”
“That doesn’t prevent you from sleeping with women.”
In fact, it had not, but those moments had been so few and far between and of such short duration that I hardly thought they defined my entire personality.
“You don’t know anything.” Mother warily moved toward me.
“Tell me the truth,” Aunt Mimi demanded. “I’m the one who held you in my arms all the way back from Pittsburgh in the blizzard. You owe me the truth.”
If there is one phrase I despise, it is “You owe me.” However, Aunt Mimi had a point. I did owe her. You can’t participate in any group of people, much less a family, if you aren’t truthful. Nor can you be part of a community without incurring obligation.
“Oh, little Mary Sunshine, saving the world.” Mother grimaced, edging for the door. “Come on.”
I stood up. “Bye, Aunt Mimi.”
“Well?”
I echoed Popeye. “I am what I am.”
She took this as confirmation. “I knew it! I’ll pray for you. I’ll light a candle for you—”
“I’d rather you lit your hair.” Mom snatched my wrist and hauled me out of there with astonishing force for a woman past sixty.
As we rolled over the little bridge leading from Aunt Mimi’s subdivision, she grumbled, “This will be a hell of a Christmas.”
“Can’t be any worse than the Christmas after Daddy died.”
“That’s the truth.” She pulled into the parking lot of the drugstore out on Route 1. “I wonder who’s been running their mouth.”
“Wade,” I said.
“What’d you tell him?”
“I didn’t tell him anything, Mom, but he visited me in New York. He’s not stupid. Anyway, people have been saying that about me for years. I guess I look gay, I don’t know.”
“You don’t look gay. Athletic, yes. I wish you’d marry and go about your business.”
“I know.”
“I’m going to have to live with this.”
“It’s better out in the open.”
“No, it’s not. She’ll trumpet this to the whole world. Both her girls married beneath them. This is her revenge. I was determined you’d do better than Virginia and Julia Ellen.”
“Mom, keep your voice down.”
She purchased eyedrops and then harangued me as we walked to the car. “You don’t have to tell.”
“If you’re that ashamed of me, I’m not coming home anymore.”
She let it drop. When we walked through the door the phone rang.
“Hello.” Mother listened, then stuck her tongue out. “I take it back, then. You’re not a pea brain. You’re a pissant.”
The rest of the vacation involved various family members checking in to see if what they’d heard was true.
Meanwhile I washed the windows, reorganized the storage space in the carport, put down fertilizer for a Eureka palm Mom said she had to have, and played with Baby Jesus.
Aunt Mimi, unable to stay away, drove up the day I left to say goodbye and breathe a sigh of relief. She worried that I’d slept with Russell when I was in high school. Now she knew that wasn’t true.
I was insulted. Mother laughed. Thanks, Mom.
“I know this breaks your mother’s heart but in some ways it’s good. There won’t be any unwanted children,” Aunt Mimi piously intoned.
“I didn’t say it broke my heart.” Mother swung her leg over the arm of her favorite upholstered rocker, the one with swan heads carved on the armrests.
“Julia, it has to. No grandchildren. No son-in-law to help every now and then.”
“Help with what?”
“It’s so nice to have a man around the house,” Aunt Mimi sang.
“Men are a lot of work,” Mother said. “Anyway, Sis, who knows what the future will bring?”
“I’ll have grandchildren and great-grandchildren and you’ll be left all alone.”
“She’s got me,” I said.
“What good are you in New York? You’d never walk away from your real mother,” Aunt Mimi said.
Here it was again: I wasn’t “one of them.” Under the circumstances, it seemed a blessing. I shrugged, which irritated Aunt Mimi more. Miffed, she declared I’d come home one day with my tail between my legs, I’d never amount to a thing … my real mother had never amounted to a thing, either, and my real father had had a great athletic career, which he had proceeded to drink away.
Another slip of the tongue.
“Shut up, Sis.”
“Alcoholism gallops in her—” She stopped. “You don’t drink?”
“No, but if I lived around you I would,” I said.
“That is impertinent.”
“Well, honey, safe journey.” Mother propelled me to the car.
They both knew who my natural father was. I had been sure of that from the moment of Aunt Mimi’s slip before we left for Florida. I didn’t dwell on it, though. I chose to focus on what was in front of me, not what was behind me. Whoever he was, he didn’t give a fig for me, so I didn’t see why I should give a fig for him.
What bothered me was their lying, that and the fact that once again Aunt Mimi had given me a slip for Christmas, something I never wore. Mother gave me freeze-dried cashews, which I loved, a pair of Levi’s 505s, 28 waist, 31 leg, and socks. Since she lived in Florida she couldn’t get me a heavy sweater, which was what I needed.
And Aunt Mimi always left the price tag on the slip. You’d open the present, she’d see the dangling tag (which she had altered to make the slip seem more expensive), then she’d jump out of her chair with a “Silly me.” After a great show of embarrassment she’d remove the tag.
That bothered me.
As I ate a pickled egg Mom had packed for me and fed Baby Jesus some of her fried chicken—Mom cooked the best fried chicken in the world—I cruised along. Somewhere between Brunswick and Riceboro, Georgia, it occurred to me that those two were a novel, or a series of novels. I wanted to call it Looney Tunes but Warner Brothers might not like the idea.
I figured in time I’d find out what to call the book.
44
Smart Girls
The end of the sixties, the beginning of the seventies, are currently in vogue again. Why? The original was bad enough. The murders of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy unhinged the doors of repression and rage. Fourteenth Street in Washington, D.C., resembled a war zone.
New York City, to everyone’s shock, remained relatively calm. Perhaps Manhattanites were anaesthetized by the vile fashions of the day. How many pretty girls could you see wearing clunky shoes, big pointy collars, plaid pants, white lipstick and Sassoon haircuts before it dulled your senses?
While the citizens did not torch city hall, they were not inactive. New York and Washington, by virtue of their location, size and highly educated populations, became centers for the antiwar movement. Chicago, San Francisco, Atlanta and Boston contained masses of young people marching, thinking and writing for underground papers, but New York and D.C. were central to everyone’s development.
Richard Nixon presented a paradox: brilliant but unprincipled. At least, that’s how I read him. No one suggested that the president was dumb, yet he seemed curiously
unable to comprehend how his actions would be interpreted by others. Being an experienced pol, he couldn’t fathom the idealism of millions of young people. Sometimes I think Richard Nixon was born old and that the lack of a young, impossibly idealistic time in his own life harmed him in ways no one could see at the time. He appeared the most Machiavellian creature. He wasn’t that old when he became president, but to my generation he seemed antediluvian.
The men surrounding him oozed out of the Dark Ages. They didn’t understand that a sea change was occurring, not just here but in Europe too. The Nixon administration underestimated America’s young protestors just as they later underestimated the persistence of reporters to dig out the real story.
What I hated most about those days was the nation’s temporary loss of its sense of humor. Even the music was angry.
How bizarre that a time so opposite to my own temperament should throw up me, a spark in the conflagration.
I’ll spare you the tedious arguments, meetings and dreadfully dull position papers. Position papers, not clothes, made the man and later the woman.
The language used was wrung of any juiciness. America was spelled with a k, Amerika, like the Germans spell it. When I turned in my first article to Rat magazine I was instructed to use a k. Each article was to point out some injustice. Since we’ll never run out of injustices, regardless of the century, Rat never ran out of material.
Graduate school, the antithesis of undergraduate school, bored me. In undergraduate school I’d been encouraged to learn. In graduate school, or at least in the English Department, the attempt was to turn out cookie-cutter scholars. All we did was rip apart texts. In my day the fashion was New Criticism. This is an idea so patently foolish I can’t believe anyone paid attention to it. The idea, simply put, is that you must approach any text without reference to the time in which it was written or the life of the person writing it. A Comedy of Errors is read as a play to be examined for plot, character development, evolving metaphors, etc. I should think a scholar or writer would do that naturally, but not to take into account that it was Shakespeare’s first play seems idiocy to me. The real point of New Criticism seemed to be providing work for critics.
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