There Will Be No Miracles Here

by Casey Gerald

  If my daughter tells me she’s pregnant out of wedlock, I gotta count it all joy and give it to God! If my son becomes a homosexual, I can’t do nothing about it, I gotta turn it over to the Lord! Come on, saints!

  I don’t remember what he said after this, but I can still feel the eyes of all the saints on the back of my faggot head and on my whore sister’s belly, even though we had not yet done what Daddy said we would do.

  His sermon’s end made way for the invitation to discipleship and for the choir—which, it might be important to note, had lost, in the early nineties, its minister of music and choir director and half of the tenor section to AIDS, each member eulogized by the pastor, who never called out their sins directly but shimmied his hand as he reminded somebody in here that they would not enter the kingdom of God. The remaining mighty voices rose to sing one of my favorite songs: “His Yoke Is Easy,” led by the choir’s prize alto, who began, earnest, a bit labored, with only an organ behind her:

  Since I met Jesus

  There’s a burning

  Oh such a burning deep down within

  He holds me with his unseen power

  And He keeps me from all sin

  And He changes me from day to day

  As I walk along this old narrow way

  Since I met Jesus, since He changed this old soul of mine

  It makes me wanna run on

  Shout hallelujah

  Right to the end

  The organ picked up a little speed, the drummer set a new tempo, somebody grabbed a tambourine, and the choir was ready to go:

  His yoke is easy, His yoke is easyyyyy

  Burdens are light, burdens are light

  Walk where He leads me, walk where He leads me

  Always be right! Always be right!

  Cherish the race, cherish the race

  Running with haste, running with haste

  And by His graaaaace

  I know I’ll make it

  I’ll make it home some day!

  And even though Jesus had not come the way folks said He would, even though they claimed I could not have Him anyway, I found—thanks to this song’s description of what Jesus was truly like—that He was in fact still alive, and was living in the Internet.

  For at the dawn of the new millennium, there was no greater unseen power than the orgiastic churning of a landline modem going at far less than 56 kilobits per second all the way across the information superhighway until it reached the home page of America Online, where you heard that you had mail.

  In the often-freezing back room of Clarice’s house, where Papa had slept and studied, his desk, stacked with cowboy hats and VHS copies of his sermons, still sat against one wall. Opposite was another wall, a shrine to Daddy, including a picture of him, Papa, and Woody Hayes arm in arm at the Orange Bowl. These walls of honor formed a corridor, at the end of which I set up an old folding table, placed my computer on top, and arranged a high-backed chair to face my father’s and his father’s legacy, only because it faced the door.

  I don’t know what it was like to be fourteen out on the frontier of the American West, but it’s hard for me to believe that it was much different, aside from the Comanches and dysentery, than being fourteen on the Internet in the early 2000s. Nobody in my family seemed to know how to use what Granny simply called “The Computer,” which made me useful if not important, as I was the one who wrote down directions from MapQuest (we didn’t have a printer) when it was time to go somewhere new; the one who looked up homework questions and health diagnoses on AltaVista, since our encyclopedia set was from the seventies; and the one who downloaded music from Napster and Kazaa, making decades worth of radio-dubbed cassette tapes obsolete with the click of my mouse.

  Once everybody went to sleep, I’d tiptoe through the darkened house, stringing a long telephone cord from the living room about thirty feet back to the modem on the grimy green folding table, and sit in the chair with a blanket wrapped around my shoulders, the glow of the computer screen shining in my face. Sitting there alone, it seemed that anything was possible. I didn’t even need money, thanks to the AOL free trial disks that came in the mail and to my school, where I slipped them in my book bag. I should have thanked Steve Case, the man who founded AOL, when I met him a few years ago, but I was drunk and tired.

  With the modem connected and blocking any calls, I’d sign into the master account, which was mine. A faceless, armless, yellow man on the screen signaled how close I was to being online, and when I finally reached the home page he said Welcome.

  Why, thank you, Mr. Internet.

  At this time, there were about twenty-five million users on AOL, but it was unclear how many of these were real or different people. And it didn’t matter. One little telephone cord had connected me to a whole new world, where my name wasn’t Casey anymore. And I was only fourteen, or a boy, or in Texas when I felt like it, because the most-asked question on the Internet—A/S/L? (age/sex/location)—was not a request for the truth, just for a choice. And with that choice of who you were, which might change from day to day or hour to hour or chat room to chat room, you also received access to the countless lives, real and not, organized by category—Food, Leisure, Sports, Gay & Lesbian (clearly named by the AOL marketing people)—and gathered in chat rooms—StatenIslandM4M, HotBabesFtLauderdale, RoughSkinAnime—created by random cyborg pioneers in screen-lit rooms across the American night.

  At the outset of this chat room revolution, and even still at its near-apex in 2001, the new frontier disturbed a great many adults and experts. In a 1986 Washington Post article, a reporter warned: It’s certainly the illusion of intimacy—the instant gratification of human contact without responsibility or consequences or actual involvement . . . but the danger is that going online instead of going into the real world ultimately turns conversation into a spectator sport. But what the authorities call danger is often nothing more than a better option. I mean, what was in the real world, anyway? Names we hadn’t chosen, families we couldn’t leave, language that had to be spelled out instead of the much more sensible LOL and BRB—whole lives confined by the school you attended or house you lived in or country to which you pledged allegiance every morning.

  I had no interest in the real world, and I imagine that one-third of those twenty-five million AOL users were reputed to be homosexuals because they were not too fond of the real world, either—not bothered by the idea that “conversation,” which wasn’t possible in the real world anyway, had been turned into a spectator sport, or that “human contact,” which had only come in the form of ass-kickings, could be made without consequence.

  So I sat in the glow of Jesus on the Internet, His easy yoke and very light burdens, and chatted for hours, first in the near-endless chat rooms, then over AOL Instant Messenger, until I ventured out into the new cyber landscapes that popped up before social networks were something to make a movie about: CollegeClub, Yahoo Chat, BlackPlanet, and so on. I even broke my first heart on the Internet, when some man from somewhere I don’t remember asked when we were going to meet. I want to see who you are in real life.

  Um, never. And I never talked to him again, because aside from probably being a murderer, he had outed himself as an old person who missed the whole point of the Internet: Who I was in real life was not important. The only thing that mattered was who I wanted to be at any given moment.

  This might sound like the bizarre fantasyland of childhood. But years later, in my late twenties, I met a boy in Norway—quite possibly the most beautiful boy in all of Scandinavia, with a lithe vegetarian body, a golden feline face that made him look like the one domesticated cat that the Museum of Natural History will preserve to show off to future civilizations, and a floating air about him that let you know you’d likely never see him again—not because he was loose, but because he could not stand attachments.

  Late in the night, I asked him
to tell me about his family.

  Ah, my family. Well, I was adopted actually. He sounded just like Tiny Tim, I promise.

  Oh. Do you know who your real parents are?

  Nope. I’m a proper orphan. Just dropped off—bloop—on a little doorstep in Colombia. Five months old. Yep. A man and woman from Norway came to get me when I was two, and they’ve been my parents since then.

  But don’t you kind of want to know who your people are?

  Nope. Nope. Nope.

  He said nope with so much bliss that you thought it must have been one of the first words he’d learned in English.

  Well, I said, why don’t we just make it up?

  Make it up? He considered this for a moment, blinked the long lashes that framed his eyelids, rested his mane of hair on my chest, and mouthed with a skeptical smile: Okay.

  I closed my eyes to focus, then it all came to me: his mother was a mermaid and his father was a revolutionary. They left their beautiful baby on the orphanage doorstep just before they tried to escape execution. They abandoned him to save his life, and lost their heads a few days later.

  Ah, he giggled. That’s it. I’m a mermaid. And then he closed his eyes and slept for what seemed like half a day.

  Anyway, I tell you this so that you know we never lose the need for make-believe, for carousels and fake IDs, imaginary friends and mermaid mothers who dropped us off to hide us from the nasty truth of this dark world down here. In that way, the Internet was just about the best home I’d ever known, where the unexpected things that happened felt like magic, not like death.

  Back in the real world, life was still the same. Until one night when Daddy knocked on the back room’s door and hollered C’mon Scooter.

  I slipped on my shoes and walked out to the white Lincoln Town Car recently purchased by the third girlfriend—a woman that everybody else in Daddy’s family seemed to like, if only because she had money and lived in Houston. I hated this woman and made it clear by never saying hello or looking her in the face, and by telling all my cousins, who laughed at her jokes, that they were dead to me. The same policy applied to the other women still on the scene.

  And wouldn’t you know it, this most exciting love triangle—quadrangle, I suppose—is why my father had invited me on a ride that night.

  Scooter, man, I got three women and I gotta decide, you know? I got one who’s got money, got one that’s beautiful, and got one that can cook like a son of a gun. What you think, man?

  Mama had been gone for two years or so. Daddy had not said a word about it to me, that I can remember, not a How you doing or a Sure hate that. And now he wanted my input on which of these three harlots he should choose to replace or supersede or blot out my dead or disappeared mother.

  Thankfully I had carried out additional reforms on myself—could now speak in a low easy voice, with very simple pleasant words, whenever I wanted to slide a butcher knife across somebody’s throat. I responded, nicely:

  I don’t want to talk about that.

  The noise of tires on pavement filled the car. I looked over at Daddy. He seemed calm, surprisingly calm, both hands gripping the steering wheel.

  Man, FUCK YOU! His hands flew to the roof of the car and slammed back down, making the Lincoln swerve. Don’t nobody care what you wanna talk about!

  He went silent again, clenching his jaw, chest laboring under an open button-down shirt. He ground his hands into the wheel, over and over. He did not look at me—or if he did I didn’t know, because I turned to look out the window, into the night. Silent too.

  I want to say that I was smiling, but I’m pretty sure that’s just the now me trying to make the then me seem tougher than I was. I want to say that I felt peace—the peace that comes when someone finally admits the thing you’ve long suspected. But between peace and emptiness, the line is thin.

  Maybe that’s what it was. The beginning of an emptying. That’s the image I see now, the one that feels true. A little boy with a heavy sack on his shoulder. He’s trying to get somewhere but doesn’t know where exactly, or how. This sack is so heavy he’s starting to limp and he can’t go any further. He stops on the side of the trail and sits down on a rock. The cool night wind feels gentle on his aching neck. He unties the heavy sack and looks at all the things he’s been carrying. He smiles. No wonder this walk has been so hard. He decides to leave some of the things here on the trail—the heaviest things, the jagged things, the things whose use he doesn’t know. These are the things that he takes out first. He sees a stick nearby and uses it to dig a hole next to the rock. In the hole, he buries the things in his sack that hurt too much to carry. He doesn’t know he will need them later. Doesn’t know that they will wash up in the next rains. For now, all that matters is that his limp is gone and his sack is light and he’s on his way—I’m free.

  And I really did feel free. Free not to listen to my daddy, or to anybody else for that matter, especially all the people who begged me, as fall 2001 approached, not to go to South Oak Cliff High School—which some called School of Crime or Sex on Campus—because they felt it was not safe, that I would not learn, that I could not reach my full potential there. I enrolled anyway.

  * * *

  —

  I walked through the massive golden doors of that building, past the snarling taxidermic bear that stood inside the foyer, twenty-five years after my father became one of the school’s biggest stars, and a few months after I supposedly emptied him from the knapsack of my heart. But the first thing I did was sign up to play his position, quarterback, and ask for his old number, 8. I even spent a few afternoons with him trying to throw the football better, and stood in an awkward meeting with him and my coach where he made the case for why his son should not be on the bench. This does not make sense to me now. And if I look closely enough at fourteen-year-old me I can see a boy to whom the world made little sense and who made even less sense to himself—and, because of this, a boy who watched everything as though his life depended on it, because it did.

  And I learned, as I watched, that if you only see the surface of things, you might as well be blind.

  On the surface, there were adults in charge at South Oak Cliff just as everywhere else in the world. I studied them as I always had, to see what they wanted so that I could give it to them immediately. But from the first day, Ms. Ford, my freshman English teacher, had no interest in anything I had to offer—not my supplicant smile, not the speed and accuracy with which I turned in my assignments, not the way I stared at her for the rest of class with eyes that promised I’ll do whatever you ask.

  Ms. Ford was eager to talk only to a certain horde of boys in long white T-shirts with red Tall Tee stickers, boys in brand-new Jordans, with the booty haircut popular at the time (low fade all around except for a butt cheek of hair on the back of their heads), boys—black, Chicano, all friends—with golds and no books whatsoever. I couldn’t understand why she was so into them and why, for that matter, these grown-looking boys were in a freshman English class.

  I came to understand through unofficial reports (gossip, likely the truth) that Ms. Ford had a little exchange program with these gentlemen: they sold her marijuana, she gave them decent grades. I was and remain a supporter of the barter system, but had no access to drugs (Dean would not have sold them to me) and so was all set to fail that English class. But South Oak Cliff had many rams in its bushes, including my distant cousin Joan, who taught a typing class and coached the majorettes, and to whom I went to beg for help. It could have taken up to a week or forever to be moved, but she saw her cousin’s panicked face and did not ask any questions. Just stood up from her seat and said Oh, naw. C’mon, boy, we gotta get you out of there. Sure enough, she did.

  Her intercession took me to a new English class, where the teacher smiled and gave me free CDs and let me work from the eleventh-grade textbook instead of staring out the window. Took me to advanced biology,
where Mr. Alijahdey still taught, decades after teaching my mother and years after getting rid of his “slave name,” Mr. Morrison. Took me to Algebra II, where I would have been doomed, since I’d finished but not learned the prerequisite Algebra I and Geometry at Atwell, but the teacher remembered Tashia and offered extra help. And took me to Ms. Jacques’s world history class, where I sat for an entire school year, did every assignment, even earned an A—yet aside from telling you King Tut was from Egypt, all I can share of my learning are the opening lines of a poem we had to recite: “Myself” by Edgar A. Guest.

  I have to live with myself and so

  I want to be fit for myself to know

  I want to be able as days go by,

  Always to look myself straight in the eye;

  I don’t want to stand in the setting sun

  And hate myself for the things I have done.

  I shared this poem with pride one night in a tomb I’ll tell you about in a little while, and another person there—an actual poet who spent a great deal of time amongst original Shakespeare folios at Yale’s Elizabethan Club—kindly informed me that Edgar A. Guest was one of the biggest jokes in all of literature. That didn’t change the fact that, at fourteen and for many years after, this poem was far more useful instruction than a primer on the ancient Sumerians would have been.

  Anyway, once she transformed my schedule, Joan shepherded me to the coaches, the registrar, the most respected teachers that I would have in the coming years, and even the principal—who swaggered through the halls like Joe Clark, shouting, slamming a baseball bat on trash cans— and told them all that I was a good kid and a smart student and, most of all, her cousin, so they should look out for me. And from that day on, they did. In one week, Joan did what women—kin and stranger—have done for me since I was born: saw me wandering through the world and grabbed me by the wrist to say C’mon here, boy.