We Learn Nothing

by Tim Kreider

  None of which I particularly was. When I phoned one of the women Lee had referred me to, one Rhonda Rawlins, I got some inkling of what my father must have been dealing with his whole life. Rhonda and her friend Amanda sounded pitifully relieved that at last A Man had stepped in to take over. “We don’t understand these things,” they kept whining. “We’re just women.” I had never before spoken to any female who unabashedly offered up her gender as an excuse for ignorance or incompetence. But this, of course, is exactly the kind of person who would be gulled by Uncle Lee’s charms. I had begun this call by jotting down some practical information, names and phone numbers, in the manner of my father’s lists, but at some point during the conversation I stopped taking any notes at all and started doodling little horrified Munch-like faces and writing things like “IDIOTS,” “NIGHTMARE,” and “DON’T GO.”

  Needless to say, everything did not get quickly straightened out. “Not Good, Tim,” Lee wrote me the day of his verdict. “The Jury Found Me Guilty Of All Charges After Five Hours Of Deliberation. Kind Of Hard To Believe Since I’m Not Guilty Of Any Of The Charges.” It was, indeed, hard to believe. He still maintained that he was being persecuted because he had dared to challenge shadowy, powerful political interests: “I Found Out The Hard Way These Good Old Boys Do Hang Tight. To Run Against One Of Them Is An Absolute No-No.”

  A year after his conviction, my girlfriend Margot and I took a road trip to Florida whose ultimate purpose was to visit Uncle Lee in jail. As a present for him I took along a small plant that takes all its nourishment from the air—an epiphyte. This one was nestled in a shell, its green tendrils protruding like the stalks and claws of a hermit crab. This had been Margot’s suggestion. It was a small living thing he could keep in his cell that required neither soil nor water, something that could thrive in a crevice of cement. It also seemed to me that Lee was not unlike an epiphyte himself—rootless, subsisting in the most improbable niches, apparently living on nothing at all. In between going to beaches and Gatorland and Medieval Times I spent much of that week on pay phones with prison officials, trying to set up a visit. I became acquainted with the stupidity and obstructionism, intractable literal-mindedness, and Uroboric logic of the penal system.

  The day Margot and I arrived at the correctional facility for my scheduled visit, I was told that the night before my uncle had been transferred to the prison hospital, where visitors weren’t allowed. I spent an hour and a half in a small cinder-block room explaining through wire-mesh reinforced glass and a speakerphone that I’d driven here all the way from Maryland and had to head back that same day. I was told that they understood that. Calls were placed as far up in the state correctional hierarchy as they could go on a weekend, but the final, considered answer was the same as the initial, reflexive one: no. The explanation I was given over and over was that the prison hospital simply wasn’t set up for visitors. A prison system treats everyone like a prisoner, regarded as suspect, subject to arbitrary rules and unappealable decisions. I finally gave up and reported wearily back to Margot outside, knowing that I faced yet another hopeless circular argument with her: what had they said, what did I say, had I explained this, had I tried that. There is a photograph of me, wearing sunglasses and a dress shirt tucked into blue jeans, arms spread in a gesture of impotence, my hair blown into my face by the wind, standing in front of the unscenic backdrop of an electrified fence, the low slit-windowed prison building, and, beyond it, the cooling towers of a nuclear plant. Looking at this photo recently, Margot recalled, “I was weeping with rage as I took this.” I had reached the limits of my helpfulness.

  I am, obviously, not my father. The ways in which I’m best able to help people are silly and impractical ones. I’ve also had enough experience with the mentally ill and addicted to know that the people in most desperate need of help are often the most adamantly unhelpable. Not only will you fail to help them, but they will deplete every bit of help you have—your money, time, patience, and kindness—and then move on to the next pushover as unthinkingly as a swarm of locusts devouring a field. These days mental illness seems about as fascinating to me as colon cancer. The last friendship I severed was with someone who was, like Lee, bipolar, and an addict. When a schizophrenic artist I admire called me up recently to confront me over some delusional betrayal, I told him clearly and evenly that I was not going to engage with him, and hung up. Every once in a while I’ll still get a cryptic text from an unknown number that reads like an in-joke, except I’m not in on it, and I’ll know that some former friend has gone off his meds again. I know better by now than to reply, but sometimes I still do.

  After my failed visit, I corresponded with Uncle Lee only intermittently. He became more and more preoccupied with his deteriorating health. “I’m Beginning To Think Of [the prison doctor] As The Grim Reaper As She Consistently Wears Black Skirt & Shoes. . . . ” He was also fixated on the fantasy of an early conditional medical release. In May 1997 he wrote me a jubilant letter instructing me to rent out his old P.O. box in Granite Cliffs—Box #1000. He was willing to offer one hundred dollars to the present occupant to get it if it was already taken.

  I Should Be Released Yet This Month From Prison And Will Report To County Parole & Probation—After That I Intend To Fly Into Phila. Int. Airport Having Floyds [my aunt’s family] Pick Me Up. I Will Rent Or Buy A Car Or Pick-Up To Come To Port Deposit To Pick Up Mail & Rent While I Confer With J.H.U. Hospital RE: Feasibility Of Dual (Heart/Kidney) Transplant & Prostratectomy. . . . My Paramour Rhonda May Be Riding “Shotgun” With Me As Well.

  His letter was pure manic delusion, of course. No medical release was imminent. His official release date was not until April 11, 2006, which he would not live to see. But the letter effectively called my bluff. For all my professed sympathy for his plight, I had to admit to myself that I had no actual wish to see my uncle Lee get out of jail. Granite Cliffs, the town where he intended to rent out his P.O. box, was only ten minutes from where I lived. I was, frankly, afraid that he would show up any day, wanting to sleep on my couch, borrow money, drive my car on the beach. He would forge my signature on checks and deeds and loan applications, stick me with all the bills, burn down my house.

  A month later I received an envelope with lettering even more flamboyantly crazy than usual—capitals like the imaginary letters in Dr. Seuss’s On Beyond Zebra!, with flourishes like barbed devil’s tails. The envelope was scrawled with warnings: “Legal Mail/ Privileged Mail/Dated Mail.” Enclosed was a Xerox copy of a letter from my aunt Lynn, my father and Lee’s sister, anxiously inquiring about Lee’s status—she’d heard he was refusing his psych medication and was under suicide watch. At the bottom of this, Lee had written:

  Please Call The Attorney General Of U.S.A.!, Immediately! I Am Being Beaten Into Submission, Improperly (Intentionally) Medicated, & My Heart & Kidneys Are In Failure. My Prostate Has Cancer.

  Beneath that was something else, written in such a febrile hand I had to squint to make it out:

  Captain Slater Is Burying Beaten Dead Convicts Near Here Somewhere.

  I stopped writing back.

  My ex-girlfriend Margot, who went on to take an entire family of Laotian refugees into her home for years, is dubious about our ability to help anyone. She tends to think the sanest policy is a sort of spiritual triage, saving your efforts for those who are likely to make it with a little immediate aid—a small loan, a job recommendation, a couch to crash on for a week or two—and dispassionately ignoring the moribund. But what do you do if you don’t have the option to walk away, to hang up or hit IGNORE, because you’re bound to someone by obligation or love? What if he’s your brother? What if your elderly mother, whose letters are mostly preoccupied with her gardening, thanks you for looking after him?

  My father’s compromise was to keep his brother so effectively compartmentalized from the rest of his family that we were barely aware he existed. He understood that his brother was not responsible—meaning dangerous as well as blameless—
and believed that he belonged under psychiatric supervision for life. Whether he did Lee, or society, any favors by helping him avoid a life sentence in jail is debatable. In the end Lee frustrated my father’s best efforts to help him. But he never stopped trying, in the few diminishing ways he could. The last testaments to his devotion are receipts for little conveniences he bought for his brother in prison, subscriptions to newspapers and magazines, and yellowing ads for a JCPenney clock radio ($29.95) and headphone set ($9.95) circled in fading black Flair pen.

  The last time he ever wrote me, Lee mused, “I Wonder What Walt Would Say If I Told Him I’d Been Locked Up Down in Redneck Northern Florida For Nearly Eight Years And Not Seen A Kreider Yet Much Less So Much As A Letter.” His brother had finally become his benefactor in memory. At one point Lee sent me a will, which was never notarized or witnessed and probably would have been invalidated on the basis of the handwriting alone. It named me as executor, bequeathed all his earthly belongings to the Billy Graham Evangelistic Campaign, and included a design for his gravestone. When Lee died of heart failure in 2003 his body was cremated, and as far as I know he has no grave. The marker he imagined for himself was to have had an oval space for a photo and bore the inscription, “Farmer in Nature, Seaman at Heart.” The base was to be quarried from Granite Cliffs, he specified, and the headpiece carved of old white marble—“Like Walt’s.”

  My mother’s voice still tightens with old sorrow and anger when she talks about Lee. She says it makes her stomach clench just to think about him. I was kept so successfully insulated from him for so long that at first this seemed to me like an overreaction. The man’s been dead for almost a decade. But then she reluctantly told me about some of the grotesque accusations he’d made against my father from prison in the last years of his life, and that he’d threatened not only to sue but to kill—I believe the legal term is murder—members of our family. I lay awake that night feeling not so much threatened as sullied, molested, by my uncle Lee’s scummy lies and jailhouse threats, the way you’d feel if you’d accidentally seen child pornography or a snuff film. Once you let people like my uncle into your head they will do as much damage as they can, like intruders trashing your home out of spite. I understood now why my mother was still afraid of this man, even though he was a can of ashes now.

  I can understand why people once believed in vampires and dybbuks, demons who took the guises of loved ones. One of the cruelest aspects of mental illness is that those afflicted become indistinguishable from their affliction; they are possessed by it. I know people who’ve had relatives whose personalities changed after strokes or head injuries, but they, at least, could tell themselves that this wasn’t their grandfather—their “real” grandfather was the person he’d been before the trauma. But my uncle started exhibiting criminal behavior in his teens. It’s impossible to know what kind of person he would’ve been if he hadn’t been sick; there is no Platonic ideal of Lee, untouched by madness, to whom we can compare the sad reality of his lifelong self. One of the most pitiable things about John Merrick, the “Elephant Man,” was his undisfigured arm—“a delicately shaped limb covered with fine skin and provided with a beautiful hand which any woman might have envied”—a glimpse of the man he was meant to be, all but smothered inside the aspect of a monster. The only glimpse I ever got of this man in my uncle—of any capacity for self-awareness, candor, or humor—was when I asked him about that bankbook I’d found. He never acknowledged my question, but he signed his next letter: “Your Uncle, Lorenzo von Kreidler.”

  Chutes and Candyland

  Several years ago I was sitting at a bar in Cripple Creek, Colorado, that had video poker games built right into the bartop when a promo came on TV for the upcoming Oprah. That afternoon’s episode was to feature an interview with Jennifer Finney Boylan, a novelist who was promoting a new memoir about her male-to-female sex change.

  “Hey,” I said out loud. “I know her.” This is not the sort of thing I would ordinarily blurt out in an unfamiliar bar, but it’s not every day you see someone you know on Oprah. Maybe the beer was making me chatty. I would learn in a few hours that I was suffering from altitude sickness.

  The guy next to me, who was wearing a hat with a rooster feather stuck in the band and a bolo tie, studied the screen, absorbing the gist of the episode.

  “So was that,” he asked, groping diplomatically for the mot juste, “weird?”

  I said: “Yes.” He just nodded. We both sipped our beers.

  I met Jim Boylan twenty-five years ago, when I was assigned to be his teaching assistant at a summer writing program for kids, where, for easily defensible pedagogical reasons, we blindfolded fourteen-year-old girls and then fed them hummingbird nectar and made them touch an inflatable Godzilla. Jim was a graduate student at the university where I was an undergrad, and after that summer, instead of taking, say, a course on Ulysses with one of the world’s foremost Joyce scholars, I kept signing up for Jim’s classes, which had titles like “Comedy and Horror” and “Modernism, Metafiction, and Irrealism.” (We never got around to covering whatever “Irrealism” was.) He’d always host the last class at his off-campus apartment, one of which symposia ended with three aspiring fictionists setting off fireworks in a pie in a park across the street. Once in a while I’d stop by and visit him at home, where he’d play songs of his own composition, like “Mister Rogers Does the Puppets’ Voices,” on the autoharp, or we’d play a round of Chutes and Candyland, a paradigm-shifting game of our own invention.

  Jim was what they call a Male Role Model for me, much as that may sound like a straight line now. He was the first person I personally knew to have a book published, even if it was with a university press and had a lurid purple and turquoise cover. It made getting into print seem like something that might happen to a real person. I acquired from him a taste for Juicy Juice, a children’s beverage with surprising cross-generational appeal. He introduced me to music whose genre I could not even identify, like the Penguin Café Orchestra. I remember listening to what he had to say to someone who was chronically ill, taking mental notes on how to be kind in such a situation. For a while my laugh even started sounding like his—I was at an age when the tics and mannerisms of people we admire are as infectious as chicken pox among toddlers. His laugh was a high, snickering thing, unmistakable—I remember being in a darkened auditorium and realizing, as the entire audience laughed at a line, that Jim was in attendance. His father died of cancer around the same time that my own father was diagnosed. I don’t remember his presuming to offer me any advice about this, but, as with getting published, knowing it had happened to Jim made it seem real.

  After college, I’d visit him and his wife once a year at his new home in Maine, during the Perseid meteor showers in the first week of August. During this time we would regress together into a couple of ten-year-old spazzes. The high point of one year’s visit was seeing a little girl vomit at at least a couple of g’s on a ride called the Skymaster at the Skowhegan State Fair, a scene we immortalized in both song and ritual reenactment. There was an activity called Naked Fireworks. One year we pulled over at a yard sale and purchased some large plush animals: a dog in lederhosen and a Tyrolean hat, whom we named Frïtzl, and a sad, understuffed rabbit we called Mister Lucky. Frïtzl we threw off a bridge with a cinder block tied to his paw. We strung up Mister Lucky on a mountaintop with a sign hung around his neck that said: A LYIN’, THIEVIN’, LETTUCE-RUSTLIN’ VARMINT.

  But those visits weren’t just about puerile high spirits; they were mountaintop retreats for me, where I could breathe in some clear air and take a longer view before returning to the messy trenches of my own life, where I was still drawing minicomics in front of a space heater with the TV on, miserably trying to figuring out what I was supposed to be. From Jim’s hot tub, where we’d sip whiskey watching the Perseids leave their incandescent trails across the sky like afterimages on the retina, the densely clustered stars of the Maine night looked vertiginously three-dimensional;
I felt not as if I were on top of the earth looking up, but stuck on the outside of the planet looking out into the galaxy around us. The week after my father’s funeral, sitting with Jim in a boat in the middle of Long Pond in the rippling light of August, I said out loud, to my own surprise: “Life could not be pleasanter.” One night that same week, before Jim went up to bed, out of nowhere he said to me, “Good night, Timbo,” something no one but my father had ever called me. He played songs on the piano with a wistful, yearning tenor, chords I could never seem to find at home. There was some music I could only ever hear at Jim’s house.

  I understand now that a lot of what I felt on those trips was the ache that young adults, still unformed and adrift and very much aware of it, feel on looking at someone who’s far enough ahead of them on life’s timeline to seem more settled in the world and at peace with themselves, but still close enough to beckon them on and call back, See, it’s not so bad up here, keep going, you’ll be fine. Whether they’re happy or not they are, at least, content. They’ve made their choices and learned to live with them. They have, for better or worse, become themselves.

  Which is one reason it shook me so personally when Jim announced that he was neither happy nor content—nor had he ever truly been himself. What he was, it turned out, was transgendered. “You know,” he wrote me, “the whole woman-trapped-in-aman’s-body thing.”

  Jim came out to me in a long letter sent after the Perseids had come and gone in the summer of 2000; I’d known something was amiss with the Boylans for some time, because Jim had put off my usual yearly visit the summer before, telling me that he and his wife were having some serious summit talks, reassuring me only that no one was gay, getting divorced, or had cancer. This was not among the possibilities I’d considered. “Having read this far, you’re probably thinking something along the lines of ‘what the fuck,’” he wrote. “That’s exactly what I’ve always thought about it, in fact.” He went on to tell me about a whole life he’d been living unknown to me or anyone else: how he’d dreamed of himself as female from earliest childhood, furtively cross-dressed in high school and college, and secretly ventured out into the Baltimore night dressed as a woman in grad school, when I’d known him. After years of trying to ignore it, hoping that he might be made normal by marriage or parenthood, he’d finally admitted to himself, at age forty, that he could not go on living the way he’d lived his whole life. He’d come out to his wife, who was a social worker and about as well prepared to understand his condition as anyone could be. He was currently undergoing hormone therapy and was planning to transition into being a woman full-time. He reassured me that my friendship was a crucial one to him and hoped that we would be able to talk the whole weird thing out somehow. After his(/her?)* signature—an ambiguous J—s/he appended a crude, childish doodle like two inverted fermata, captioned: “My buzums.” This, at least, seemed to augur well for some continuity in our friendship.