“Diana, goddammit! We ain’t listenin’ to this!”
Gathering her wits and her children, my mother organized our exit from Pew 17. I was a teenager and fully capable of backtalk, but I headed down the aisle like a dutiful duckling, still wondering if Daddy could be right about this. What if the races weren’t meant to be together in church or anywhere else? What if Dansapp was a troublemaker trying to upset the natural order of society and my father was just the only one brave enough to take a stand? I figured at least a few other families would join us in our righteous exodus, but the Maupins were the only ones leaving the church. There were a few quick backward glances from the congregation to see what we were doing before their heads jerked back to the pulpit. Only Reverend Sapp never took his eyes off us, smiling serenely and swaying ever so slightly, as he often did for emphasis during pauses in his sermons. I don’t remember how he had dressed for this pivotal moment, but it was probably something in raspberry.
Things got quiet in the Country Squire on the way home. We had suffered public humiliation and everyone knew it. I wasn’t surprised when we didn’t stop to pay our respects at Oakwood Cemetery, and I was glad, really, since all I wanted was to be home in the privacy of my room with the consolation of Ian and Enid, my Java Temple birds. There was still lunch to be surmounted, however, so back at the house my mother split the funny papers between her children and set about making egg-salad sandwiches in the kitchen. The rest of us staked out places in the Chimney Room (so named because Daddy thought Family Room sounded common).
No one said a word. I stared out the window at the big poplar down by the creek. Daddy sat in the red leather armchair under his Confederate flag, gripping the arms as if he were about to take off in an airplane. I knew he was tallying his losses, counting the traitors who had not followed us out of the church. Some of them were Daddy’s oldest friends, well-bred folks from the Terpsichorean Club he had known since childhood. Some of them must have seen him there on the day of his father’s funeral, twenty-some years earlier, when a coffin full of God-knows-what had been solemnly hauled past Daddy in Pew 17. Some of them might have been pallbearers.
Eventually, Daddy got out of his chair and came to the window, where I was sitting. He gazed down at the creek for a moment.
“Looks like the rain has played hell with the dam again.”
This was how he ran from subjects too painful to face. He just veered away abruptly and waited for us to follow, as if nothing had happened.
“Yes sir,” I said, looking at the creek. “It’s already down by a couple of feet.”
Daddy had built a cement dam across the creek, creating a small murky pond that had become a home for crawfish and copperheads. The copperheads would sun themselves on the dam until Daddy came down from the house and chopped their heads off with a pickax. The dam was always eroding around the muddy edges, so Daddy was constantly prying planks out of the basement—cannibalizing the house, in effect—to plug up the persistent leaks.
He clamped a hand on my shoulder. “I could use some hep with this, sport.”
(My father was an educated man but he had learned to say “hep” instead of “help” and “ain’t” instead of “am not” when addressing a jury. It made him sound folksy, I suppose, like a man of the people, not the aristocrat he fancied himself.)
So I wolfed down my egg-salad sandwich and followed him to the basement, where he picked up a crowbar and began to pry two-by-fours from his workbench. Then we set off for the creek, where I handed him the planks and watched him plug the unpluggable. It was a moment of father-and-son intimacy, or as close as we could get to one. The two of us against the unrelenting forces of nature.
The endurance of that dam was the least of my father’s many illusions. For years he nursed the idea that he would one day run for governor of North Carolina. I fantasized about this with my “sissy” friend Eddie, imagining us down at the red-brick Victorian governor’s mansion on Blount Street watching The Twilight Zone on television. But I knew, deep down, that the old man’s chances of being governor were slim to nonexistent, given his work as a lobbyist at the state legislature.
Among his less-than-appealing clients was the North Carolina Outdoor Advertising Association, so his primary job was to get legislators to refuse federal subsidies in exchange for the banning of billboards on the new interstate highways. It was all about free enterprise, he said; farmers should be able to build whatever the hell they wanted on their own damn land. The federal government was running amok. And those rest stops the feds proposed for limited advertising would be crawling with robbers in the parking lot and sexual predators in the toilets.
It was a winning argument, given that Southerners, despite their tolerance of what I recall as some of the nastiest public toilets in the land, have always been fretful about who’s in the next stall. (It was black folks when I was a kid; nowadays it’s trans people.) But even my father’s eloquent fearmongering was no match for the growing unpopularity of billboards, which were blocking the very scenery they advertised in places like Cherokee and Blowing Rock. Daddy didn’t get this, the way he didn’t get so many things. That’s why our garden was the place I could love him the most. We could talk about day lilies and busted dams, and leave his lost causes alone for a while. It was so much easier to believe him there.
I’m sure no one was surprised when Daddy brought his family back to Christ Church on the Sunday after he ordered us out of the service. For one thing, he was too proud to surrender the pew to the Goddamn Housepainter. His insistence on the way things had always been done may have sent him storming out of the church, but that’s just what would bring him back. He needed Christ Church; it was one of his constancies.
FIVE
IN THE SUMMER BEFORE WE LEFT for college, Clark and I went to work for the North Carolina Civil War Centennial Commission. The job was a perfect way to keep on romancing the Confederacy, since we helped preserve artifacts from a blockade runner that had been sunk in the ocean off the coast of Fort Fisher. These were war provisions that never made it to the Confederacy from England: muskets and fancy-handled knives and brass tourniquet screws that had been salvaged from the deep exactly a hundred years after they went under. Our task was to lower them into ditches filled with formaldehyde in the mosquito-ruled woods of Fort Fisher. This was half a century ago, I have to remind myself, a time so removed from the present that a team of zealous young volunteers recently returned to the site for a new act of earnest archaeology: excavating the very ditch Clark and I had eventually abandoned.
We lived with the Navy diving team in a shabby apartment house in the coastal town of Kure Beach. Our room was so sparsely furnished that we made shelves from wooden fish crates we found discarded at a dock. We gave them a good scrubbing and were proud of their rustic, maritime appearance until their scent reasserted itself. Clark, typically, refused to be discouraged and sprayed the crates with an aerosol deodorizer he found on top of the toilet. The end result was pine-scented fish guts, so we were forced to discard our only effort at decorating.
That was the summer that Clark drove the pickup into the surf. The rest of the time we used it to travel between our apartment and the preservation site, or sometimes to pick up provisions for the diving team in some rusty inferno of a shipyard on the Cape Fear River. I think of Clark in that truck, singing exuberantly, even though (or maybe because) we didn’t have a radio. Sometimes we would sing together. Clark never showed the slightest embarrassment about sentimentality. He could sing “Twilight Time” as we drove home through the moonlit salt marshes and not have to joke about it. He held no attraction for me, nor I for him. I just loved his company. He made me think how nice it would be to live with a boy forever.
I can see us there in that ditch of formaldehyde, holding the ends of a heavy block of rust that had once been a case of rifles. The metal was brittle, so we had to lower it slowly to keep from breaking it. The mosquitoes, meanwhile, were bellying up to the bar. Clark had chosen
this moment to challenge, once again, my virginity.
“I just don’t get it.”
“I told you. I’m saving it.”
“For what?”
“Marriage.”
A mosquito buzzed around my ear, looking for a meaty spot.
“You’re crazy, man. We’re in our sexual prime.”
“Some things are better, you know, when you restrain yourself.”
Oh, what a prissy Aunt Pittypat I was. Clark’s mud-spattered shoulders were bending under the weight of the rifle case, making him more sunken-chested than usual. He was no better at this than I was, but he managed to throw me a look.
“No way I’m gonna restrain myself from pussy.”
A mosquito drilled into my arm. I held the rifle case in one hand, so I could use the other to swat the invader. Skeeter blood exploded lavishly across my arm. Clark barely took notice as I finally regained control of the case with both hands.
All he says is: “I hope you’re at least eatin’ some.”
“Eatin’ what?”
“Pussy!”
We lowered the rifle case together until it disappeared into the orange muck. I hoped this would finally bring an end to Clark’s campaign, but no such luck.
“You know what I always say: Show me a man who doesn’t eat out his wife, and I’ll show you a wife I can steal from that man.”
I couldn’t picture skinny geeky Clark stealing anyone’s wife. I couldn’t picture pussy, for that matter, but I was fairly certain I didn’t want to eat any.
My focus that summer was on the youngest Navy diver on the team, a smooth-chested blond who gave off the same heat as that guy on the cover of Demigods. When he hosed off his goggles and wetsuit outside the apartment house, I would find ways to talk to him—small talk about our tinny-tasting tap water, or the sword he’d just recovered from the ocean—and I would say “Oh, man!” more than I ever had, because I thought it might make me sound like a real guy, and I could buy more time with him. I hoped, too, that it would keep him from noticing how often I glanced at the glinting golden hairs on his arms and the peninsular bulge in his cotton shorts—shorts that were once red but had faded to pink from the sun.
I might have jerked off to the thought of those shorts at bedtime had I been home in Raleigh. There the only danger would be that my mother would enter my room in the morning and tell me, as she once had done, that it smelled like a tomcat in there. But Clark and I shared a room at Kure Beach, so I kept my hands off myself that summer. I was worried that he would hear the springs creaking and tease me about it and, even worse, bring up pussy again. Most nights we just drifted off in our fish crate–stinking quarters to one of two albums I had brought from Raleigh: the soundtrack of Houseboat, starring Sophia Loren and Cary Grant, and a selection of performances at the Monterey Folk Festival, including Leadbelly and Joan Baez. Strange, I know, that I would be grooving to lefty movement songs, but art was already seeping into my consciousness in a way that rational thought could not.
There would be no demigods on the menu that summer. A big evening on the town was a movie in a dinky theater smelling of Coppertone and carpet mold. Clark and I saw Summer and Smoke there, buzzed on Busch Bavarians from the diner next door, and right there in the cool, mildewed dark, Tennessee Williams crept into my tight-assed teenaged heart. This was an unexpected thing. A few months earlier I had written an essay for English class that railed against Williams and Faulkner and other Southern writers who, in my learned teenaged estimation, had maligned and misrepresented our beloved homeland. Mrs. Peacock said I made “an interesting case” and sent it to an English teachers’ magazine, where it won an award and appeared in actual print. I had officially disapproved of Tennessee Williams, yet here I sat, giving it up to him completely—stunned by the realization that I was not Laurence Harvey in this film; I was Geraldine Page. I was the lonely spinster, Miss Alma, whose yearning for love would always destroy the chance of it; and I was headed off to college in the fall.
I felt so old that summer. Older, maybe, than I would ever feel again. I know high school seems like the end of everything for some kids, certainly the ones who’ve left their glory days on the gridiron or under a crepe-paper bower at the Queen of Hearts Ball. That’s not how it was for me. I felt old because I had strangled my youth, and I could not for the life of me imagine what lay ahead.
I certainly could not have imagined that I would one day meet Tennessee Williams in the flesh. It happened in San Francisco in 1977, when he was working on a soon-to-be-panned play called This Is (An Entertainment) at the American Conservatory Theater. I was beginning to become known locally and so had been invited to an opening at a small South of Market art gallery. I don’t remember the artwork, but it had a wannabe transgressive flavor, leaning toward leather, and there, under brutal white lights, I spotted the playwright in a crowd of shiny-faced people, all scrambling to be photographed with him. He had plastered a smile on his face, but he looked bereft and empty. Trapped. It was the most chilling image of fame I had ever seen thus far. I left the gallery and leaned against a car in the parking lot to smoke a joint. Williams made his escape a few minutes later. When he saw what I was doing he approached and inquired in the softest of tones:
“Would you mind terribly?”
I told him not at all, so we shared the joint for several minutes, talking about nothing more than the moon in the sky. I did not try to introduce myself or be one of those fans he had fled. I knew he would prefer the kindness of a stranger.
DURING MY COLLEGE days at Chapel Hill I dated two girls who both bore the middle name of Armistead. We weren’t directly related, though the two of them were related to each other; they were sisters. (Armistead was a distinguished old family name in Virginia, so their parents couldn’t resist the urge to use it twice.) I didn’t date these sisters at the same time; I waited a respectful interval between them. They were both blond and Candice Bergen–y. I took one of them—I forget which—on a walk through the snowy woods of Battle Park and kissed her on a bridge above a creek, where our breaths mingled like ghosts in the air. I wanted this to be a love scene out of All That Heaven Allows, which it sort of was, come to think of it, since Rock Hudson and the first Mrs. Ronald Reagan had about as much sexual chemistry in that movie as me and the lovely Miss Somebody Armistead Somebody.
I wonder sometimes if these sisters ever swapped notes and discovered that these romantic fizzles had been my fault entirely. I hope so. They deserved more than a guy who got off on the incestuousness of our names and wondered if passion could be summoned on the spot by the manipulation of pretty winter scenery.
I was just as chaste with the one other girl I remember dating in college, and my motives were just as dubious. Kim was the daughter of a famous forties bandleader who lived with his wife, the beautiful girl singer in his band, in a big antebellum house on East Franklin Street. I was too young to remember their heyday, but I still found it glamorous to go to their house. Sometimes, when picking up their daughter, I lingered longer than most boys would, making conversation. They were Christian Scientists and a little dowdy by then, but I found glamor in the fact that they both had been in the movies, however briefly. I was dating them, in effect; their daughter was entirely secondary.
So college was a sexless curriculum for me. The lust that crept in around the edges of my consciousness was purely accidental. One afternoon, looking for a place to pee on campus, I discovered a toilet in the basement of Bingham Hall, the English building. I was the only person there, but the stalls were lacquered with yellowing semen and graffiti samizdats so vividly detailed that they could qualify as novellas. As it happened, I was majoring in English, so I returned to this funky-smelling glade more than once, though I never met another person there, just the latest installment of the serials on the walls. I would move from stall to stall, catching up on things, wondering about the men who so brazenly created this literature.
Luckily, my friend Clark was a fellow freshman at Cha
pel Hill, so I wasn’t a total loner. It soon became patently clear that neither of us was cool enough to pledge a fraternity, so we joined forces with our friend Jim, who was equally ineligible, to form a merry band of three. We called ourselves The Cabal, since we had just learned that exotic-sounding word, and we thought it would fit us perfectly as bold conservative freedom fighters. I was the most vocal of the three, so it was decided, mostly by Clark, that I would run as the candidate from Grimes Dormitory for the Student Legislature. We printed black-and-white posters that advertised me as “A Representative Who’ll Represent.” I still have no idea what that meant. Mostly it afforded an opportunity for my detractors to add the word Fascists to the end of the slogan. That’s how ruthless they were, those liberal, Commie-loving bastards.
My Modern Civilization professor, Bill Geer, was a firebrand leftist whose classroom theatrics were widely known across the campus. It was easy to think of him as a Marxist, since he looked like Karl Marx, with his bald pate and frizzy white beard and deceptively twinkly eyes. I sparred with him in class on a regular basis and eventually came to look forward to that, since it gave me a sense of identity. One day, to my complete amazement, he invited me to lunch at the faculty dining hall, where we continued to spar, but on a more personal level.
“Did your father warn you about me?”
This threw me, of course. “You, specifically?”
He smiled. Just in the abstract. “All us pinkos in Chapel Hill.”
I shrugged. It was embarrassing to be asked this directly, since it was true.
“I’m a lot more like you than you know. I’m from Jonesville, South Carolina.” Mr. Geer drawled out the name of his pissant country town to emphasize his point. “My daddy sent me to The Citadel.”
I told him my father had briefly considered that hard-assed military college in Charleston for me. My brother, Tony, an athletic mesomorph who was much more of a team player, would enroll at The Citadel a few years later.