by Mark Richard
It is a small station located between a discount clothing store for black people on one side and a beauty parlor and a Laundromat on the other side. Across the dogleg parking lot is a discount drugstore and a supermarket, both patronized by black people. The secretary of the radio station tells you to bring your bicycle into the station in the afternoons, don’t leave it out on the sidewalk.
There are two large turntables covered with green felt that is replaced every time the town’s saloon keeper puts new green felt on his pool tables. Augie and the other salesmen ask the Lebanese saloon keeper if they can have the scraps. Augie has said on the air that the Lebanese saloon keeper is the only man in town more popular than Jesus Christ. Augie can say things like that, he is the voice of your town. When he introduces the black disc jockey who follows him in the mornings to do the R&B show, Augie says, And now, in living color, Wally Hale! After Wally Hale’s show, Augie comes back at noon to do the Farm Hour—crop prices, weather forecasts, and the state of crop subsidies, which your scoutmaster says are part of a larger Communist plot. After the Farm Hour a lady who chain-smokes plays country music until you arrive at four o’clock.
You play records from Augie’s rack and some from Wally’s, you read the news off the Teletype machine, do Billboard of the Air—mostly cakewalks, church dinner announcements, lost animals—read the final news, play the national anthem, and shut down the transmitter. You take out the trash, load the Teletype with paper, turn out the lights, lock the door, and then ride your bicycle home in the dark.
You make two dollars an hour.
Saturday mornings you no longer have to drag chain through the woods for your father, because you have the afternoon shift. If you need the whole day off to go camping with the Boy Scouts or participate in trash walks along the highway where once you found a fetus in a cider bottle, the other salesman with gouty feet can fill in, always happy to play the records from his days entertaining at the London USO Club during the war where he met his wife. His English wife doesn’t understand his thrifty enthusiasms—spray painting their family car canary yellow with a box of aerosol cans he got in a convoluted radio commercial deal with a hardware store that was going out of business. Sometimes he turns the studio monitors up so loud that the hair dryers in the beauty parlor next door vibrate, and they hate to call but they do.
On Sunday mornings you all take turns hosting the Gospel Show. One Sunday a month you get up at five in the morning, ride your bike over to the cemetery, make sure the three red lights are burning on the antennae so you can check off the maintenance log. For a while there was a grave that broadcast the station, something to do with the metal lining of the burial vault and the fillings in the teeth of a lady’s corpse, theorized the station engineer when some people from a television station came to investigate; then one day it stopped.
Then you ride through the sleeping town and open the station. You have to let the tube equipment warm up for a half hour and check the pile of Teletype that has been layering up all night. Vietnam. Patty Hearst. You used to have a crush on Jane Goodall but now you have a crush on Patty Hearst, the heiress who joined the Symbionese Liberation Army, after Jane Goodall never answered your letters. In your love letters to Jane Goodall you lied to her about the respect you had for what she was doing for all those monkeys. Secretly, you wanted to live with her in a tent with only books and a lantern among animals who walked comically worse than you do. On the transmitter, there is a series of flip levers and buttons to hold in for five seconds simultaneously and then release, knobs to turn just so to bring the station on the air, you’re always nervous you’ll get it wrong and blow up the transmitter. At 6:00 a.m. on the dot you pop in the cartridge with the national anthem played by the Air Force Academy orchestra. You’re live, you’re on the air, you’re thirteen, good morning.
You watch carloads of black men pull up in the empty parking lot outside the studio through the large plate-glass window. There’s the first preacher, a tight little man in a black suit, Bible under his arm. There’s the Mighty Clouds of Joy, the Gospel Harmoneers, is that the Blind Boys? Some of the players, the guitarists and bassists, the keyboard musicians, have come straight from shot houses and roadhouses out near Four Corners or Checkboard Square or South Quay, they smell of cigarettes and gin, some are still a little drunk in sweaty yellow or purple faded tuxedo shirts with sprung collars and missing cuff links. They set up their equipment in the tiny B studio and make a lot of noise you can hear in your headset while you’ve got the microphone open reading the Darden Oil Company news.
You cue the little black preacher through the window to the B studio and he welcomes all the brothers and sisters listening and introduces the first hymn you’re going to hear, already the bass player is walking a few steps with his bass, and three or four singers gather around the old standing microphone you patched in as Augie showed you. You sit back at the console and trim the levels and listen.
After the hymn, the preacher starts in with his good news about the author of our salvation while the players clunk around and whisper and open and shut the door and go out and get cold drinks from the vending machines at the Laundromat. You study the little black man who is off and running now, his eyes closed as he preaches and starts ticking back and tocking forth in his chair, his microphone is picking up the squeak in his chair and there’s nothing you can do about it. Watching this man through the studio glass, you see that he is a believer. He believes in the hope of redemption and in the promise of salvation. You lose track of time. You let him run over. You wish you had his passion for Christ Jesus. You think that someday you would like to be saved as well.
THE FIRST TIME YOU ARE ARRESTED it is for assaulting a police officer. Your parents and your baby sister are out of town. You are on Main Street and it is a Saturday morning before you have to go to work at the radio station. You stand between two parked cars and shoot into traffic with a water pistol. Your best friend, David, comes along and wonders what you are doing. It’s fun, you tell him. Here are some coins, go into Roses dime store and get a water pistol. Get a big one, you tell him.
Soon he joins you and here comes a police car. You reach out, almost into their car, and shoot the police officers in the face. Suddenly you are in the back of the police car driving one block to jail.
The two police officers bring you in front of the lieutenant. You think this is funny? asks the lieutenant as he empties the water pistol, squirting it in your face. They put you in a cell and slam the door. They probably already know about you, stealing lumber from behind the oil company, throwing crab apples at trucks, shooting that traveling salesman with navy beans through a blowgun.
Your best friend, David, makes what must be one of the longest walks of his life to the jail to turn himself in. When he appears in the jail doorway, the police grab him as if he is an escaped convict and throw him into the cell with you.
The Preacher is writing out a sermon when he gets the call from the police station. The Preacher says he can set his watch on Mondays after Sunday’s sermon by the arrival of the delegation of little old ladies who have a problem with something in his sermon the day before. Sometimes the problems in the church have been about full immersion, because they are Baptists. Sometimes the problems are about an usher saying he will not seat a black person if one dares show up for service. To The Preacher, the answers to most problems reside in the answer to the question, Do you love your neighbor as thyself?
The Preacher’s voice out in the police station sounds the way it does when it gives a blessing as it greets the police officers. Soon the jailer comes to get David. It has been hard to look at him because of what you have gotten him into. The jailer pulls David out of the cell and then slams the door shut and locks it. Not only are you going to miss work at the radio station this afternoon; you have to begin to think about spending the rest of the weekend in jail until your parents come home.
Then you hear footsteps. You look up, and The Preacher is standing with his p
ipe looking into your cell. He says to the jailer, And I’ll take this one too.
The Preacher preaches that the end of pride is the beginning of forgiveness, that when a man in sincerity says I have sinned, it gives God a chance to say I forgive. The Preacher says that he is a sinner, that his witness is that of one beggar telling another where to find bread. The only sin you ever know him to commit is when he sometimes drives too fast up North High Street on his way home and gets caught in the speed trap by the cemetery. His sin is telling the policeman that the reason he was driving so fast was so that he could get to the hospital before visiting hours were over. Allowed on his way, The Preacher then invariably drives on to the hospital to give truth to the lie and perform little graces of comfort as afforded by the unwitting police department.
AT SCHOOL, A FIFTEEN-YEAR-OLD pregnant black girl sits with you in the back of social studies. She tells you names of new soul records her boyfriend brings her from Norfolk and you write down the titles of the songs. You have never seen skin as black as her skin; it is blacker than black ink.
Here is how someone has decided to integrate your school: you and half your class will go to the white high school in the morning, get on a bus at lunch, and then go to the black high school in the afternoon.
The first day of phys ed at the black high school you limp with your cane over to the bleachers to sit out baseball, but the black man everybody just calls Coach asks you, Where you think you’re going? Everybody plays. Coach says all you have to do is knock the ball over the fence every time you go to bat. Coach has some old friends who used to play in the Negro Leagues. They come around and show everyone how to field and they show you how to hit. Your shoulders are broadening and your arms are strong from the years of crutches and pulling yourself around. With Coach pitching, you hit the ball over the fence, put down the bat, pick up your cane, and limp around the bases.
It’s only you and three other white boys in phys ed. Some of the black kids are a lot older. Some of them shouldn’t even be in high school. Some of them are worried about getting drafted to Vietnam. There is a butterball of a black boy named Willie who is very happy you are in his phys ed class. All his school life he has come in last doing laps, he is always the last to get chosen for teams. Now you come in last walking laps (because Coach says Everybody does laps) and you are the last person chosen for a team.
But on alternate days there is Your Health, and you are the person all the students scoot their desks around on test days. Coach hands out the test and leaves to go check on something in the locker room. Everybody fights to get a look at your paper. You don’t care. You lean back so they can get a better look as you fill in the blanks. Once, the assistant principal walked in and wondered what was going on, so now on test day you call out the answers as you fill in the multiple choice like you’re calling out bingo—one A, two D, three C. When Coach comes back, everybody’s finished, and for some of the boys Your Health is the only A they’ll ever get in their lives.
You have to go in for some carpentry on one of your hips to rebuild a pelvic shelf with a bone graft. While you’re laid up in bed with yet another body cast, Coach is the only person in the entire school system to come to your house to check on you.
YOU ARE SURPRISED THAT you still have a job at the radio station when you reemerge on crutches. Part of it is Augie, who likes you even though he doesn’t like your music; part of it is the secretary telling the owner of the station that a lot of kids call in with requests when you are on the air, black kids, white kids, their calls give her a headache.
One girl keeps calling and says, Play “Misty” for me, then hangs up. Play Misty for Me is the title of an erotic thriller playing at the movie house. You listen harder to girls talking around their lockers at school, trying to figure out which of the two wallflower girls it is. It’s either the first-chair flute in the school band or the girl who works at a pharmacy after school. A boy down the street confides to you that his older sister thinks your cane is sexy. You both stand there and look at each other confounded by this.
There are some older girls who, when they see you walking somewhere with your cane, stop their parents’ car alongside the curb and say, Get in. Some of the girls have just gotten their driver’s licenses. You think at first they feel sorry for you and are being nice, until the girls tell you they’re going to pick you up that night and you will all go to a movie and then to the Dairy Queen and you say, Okay.
Sometimes the older girls take you to an R-rated movie, and then they ride around out in the county smoking cigarettes in their parents’ big Buicks. It’s three of them in the front seat and just you in the back with your cane and they seem to forget you’re back there as they talk about who’s horny and who’s having their periods. It’s nighttime, so they can pick up a radio station in Chicago as you drive around and smell the dark county in bloom with the windows down if the bugs aren’t bad, the honeysuckle and the bubbling swamp gas smell of rotting vegetation.
There’s an older girl who goes to your new church, red hair that burns crimson in the stained-glass light; even your mother has commented on the girl’s hair, long, gold, highlit with garnet when you sit in the pew behind her and her family in your father’s church. After the incident with the drunken, rope-wielding priest, God for your mother had been a Ouija board, then astrology, then a book of physical fitness published by the Royal Canadian Air Force. You are relieved to be no longer Catholic, even though you are probably going to hell with your mother. When your father called Catholic Communion “The Magic Show,” you laughed out loud.
You like your new church, your father’s Episcopal church, and you like the new priest, Ben. The church smells good, old wood, fresh starch, and the cologne and expensive perfume of the Whiskeypalians, as some of the Baptists call them. The old church organ was brought over from England in the hold of a sailing ship. You like to sit near the man in the sharp suit who defended the spy pilot Gary Powers when he was shot down over Russia in his U-2. His wife is the sister of the poet laureate of the state. There’s the new paper mill manager and his pretty wife, both from Richmond society. Elizabeth Taylor stays at their house when she’s in town with her husband, who is campaigning for the Senate. After service, many will congregate and smoke outside the vestibule steps. Some will go directly to the country club for lunch and discuss Ben, the new priest. Some parishioners find him a little liberal for their tastes. Ben retired as a decorated Air Force fighter pilot before entering seminary to become a priest. When he hears that “somebody” said that he might be a bit liberal, Ben says to tell that “somebody,” Yes, I am a liberal and I am combat ready.
The church has a coffeehouse in the parish hall on weekend nights for kids to gather for fellowship. Black-light posters and a pool table, parent chaperones in the back. It’s a place kids meet and get in cars and go out into the nearby woods to smoke pot and drink beer and do the things teenagers do.
The older girl with the brilliant hair has been meeting you at the coffeehouse and letting you take her into a nearby alley because you don’t have your license, and the older girl lets you do pretty much whatever you want as long as you are standing, or she only has to kneel to do it. In church you realize that the perfume you come home with on your clothes must be her mother’s, because once at the Communion rail you knelt beside her mother and smelled it and your heart beat faster. When you glanced sideways at the mother as she opened her mouth and slightly extended her tongue to accept the little white sliver of host, there was a knot of confusion in your pants.
A MAN AT THE POST OFFICE tells you your father is a real crack-up. You’re finding out your father is doing stand-up comedy in hunt clubs out in the county and down in North Carolina. He’s been doing the Justin Wilson records there and people ask him back. Then you hear your father is in a play somewhere, he has the lead.
Your father has a lot of things going on. Your mother is worried that he has bought new underwear. He says he is going to work at the lake prope
rty and forgets his tools. His car is hit by a watermelon truck going the wrong way on a one-way street, your father says he didn’t see it coming. He doesn’t realize school is out, that you’re just spending your days in the backyard hammock reading Ambrose Bierce short stories and histories of the navies of the world.
But your mother notices and signs you up for advanced-placement math class out at the high school. You’re always late, stopping on your bike to listen to the cornstalks grow and pop in a cornfield. It’s so hot the pavement is splitting open and you have a spectacular bike wreck, going over the handlebars and sprawling on the sticky tarmac. One of your legs won’t stop quivering, like the time you fell at Crippled Children’s and they called the doctor’s stat and Charles knelt beside you, your spasming leg bouncing off the floor until you yelled Hit it with a rolled-up newspaper! and Charles started laughing and the spasming stopped, and your leg rolled over exhausted and went to sleep.
The advanced-placement class bumps you that fall into an algebra class taught by a teacher who polices with a meter stick she once broke over a slow country boy’s back. She looks at you, the youngest in the class, a cripple too, and she smells a cheat.
In defining finite and infinite numbers, she says, by definition, finite terms are numbers assigned to things that can be counted. For instance, is the number of grains of sand in Jockey’s Ridge finite or infinite? You’re the kid holding his hand highest to be called upon, eager. You say the number of grains of sand in Jockey’s Ridge is infinite. Miss Meter Stick smiles and says, No, if you could count them, you would find that there is a finite number of grains of sand in Jockey’s Ridge. No, you say, that’s incorrect. First of all, you patiently explain, the ocean is constantly throwing up fresh sand that dries and is blown onto the dune by the wind at the same time the same wind is carrying sand off the dune into Albemarle Sound. Second, you say, even as you notice Miss Meter Stick tapping the meter stick against the side of one of her shoes, her smiling face beginning to purple, second, the number of grains of sand in Jockey’s Ridge would have to be considered infinite by her very own definition of being able to count them; if the grains cannot be counted, there is no finite answer, hence no finite number. But if you could count them, she says, as she moves down the aisle of seats to where you are seated, you would eventually reach a number, a finite number, so you’re wrong, she says, poking the corner of your desk with her finger. Then you go fucking count them, you unwisely counter, and you are sent home from school for two days at a time when your father is toward the end of his first affair and is looking for someone upon whom to vent his guilt. You had long before nicknamed his backhands “flying tigers” after his college mascot, Mike the Tiger, whose tiny head ornamented the LSU class ring worn on the hand delivering the often unexpected blow.