As to God in particular, let me say that the above configuration is not my God, nor was He ever, nor will He ever be, unless or until I become so old and infirm that the continent finally overwhelms me, and I am unable to resist the enormous intellectual snooze button that is at once my curse and my birthright. Before the alarm goes off, and the mediocrity sounds, let me try to record some approximation of my position on the matter. My God was not some dull stasis point between the twin poles of belief and denial, of church-taught faith and home-schooled despair, but was rather a violent oscillation between the two, a rapid and continual change of mind so that a kind of frequency was set up: a tone that vibrated within me, and found a natural sympathy there, and hummed each sunset, and grew louder each weekend, and I trust can be heard to this day.
Said tone was liable to change, of course, being subject to how my parents pulled at and retuned the string, but no matter how the wave may have tensed or slackened over the years I am confident that I can find it still, this peripatetic channel, this pirate whine, over which a great number of things reached out at me in my childhood, none of them in any way, and all of them in every way, related to the Lord our God.
Hark! There it is! There it is!
Faggotry
My father was greatly concerned in those years that I might turn out to be a faggot, though only marginally more so than my mother seemed to be, the two of them sharing, through the auspices of my mother’s work with juvenile offenders (and my father’s long congress with tool-belted speed freaks), a perfectly common suspicion that the root cause of all deviation from the familial norm, and certainly of all “attention-seeking antisocial behavior,” was bound to be drug use and, beneath that, a latent homosexuality. As such he was forever at the entrance to the stuffy, low-ceilinged room where I slept with my brother (innocently) and masturbated (I confess it!) and, yes, sometimes (though only on the rarest of occasions, and then only out of the rarest of boredoms) harbored contraband, to ask, or to demand, really, “What’s going on in there?” My stock answer to this humorless and always tardy question was “Nothing.” By night he would frown and stare, and weigh this empty if loaded word for a moment, and amble off with an unsatisfied grunt. By day he would order me back outside and to work, which was his usual remedy for anything: a flu, a nail through the foot, a crushing sadness, assumed drug use, and now, apparently, the specter of an unauthorized faggotry.
I was small for my age, and admittedly odd, but then so had he been, and he grew up large enough, and imposing in his way, and sufficiently mean (by which I mean American) that what few friends I caught hold of in that place would not enter the house out of physical fear of him. I have no notion, then, of what led this man to believe I would not grow up the same as he did (was that not his purpose?); and would not outdo him eventually in size, which with work and patience I did; and would not best him one day in physical combat, which crime both shames and sustains me (the sustenance being but a further source of the shame); and would not challenge him moreover in the ancient art of meanness, to which ongoing contest I submit this humble text.
Some others could not see it, but my father was a decent man, whose intellect was at constant war with the violence inside of him (which is only as it should be in anyone worth knowing) and whose heart would likely have received me at once had I but approached him in the pasture, or at the edge of the woods, or by the side of the stove, or on the lip of the trash pit, and said, simply, “I’m a faggot.” Such a scene would at least have stayed his hand for a while (one was slightly less eager to beat a daughter out there, though I cannot imagine why) and would have prompted in my parents a more interesting conversation than what I had previously been able to overhear: “He’s my child — we’ve always known that” (silence); “He’s like me” (silence); “I know I’m responsible for him” (further silence); until at last my father was compelled to say either “Come on” or “Shut up,” I do not remember which.
For my mother’s well-being throughout this period, I regret that I was unable to arrange a sexual ingress upon her person. (She was my mother, after all, and although the picture of prettiness she did have that ringworm on her leg.) Such an act would have flattered her, of course, and seen me removed from the list of potential family faggots, though I might rightly have been added to the list of potential schizophrenics, which ailment was a great deal more prevalent on both sides of our tree, due no doubt to the continent’s cruel and continued work upon it, than was the far less bothersome moss of homosexuality. As it is I was probably thought a schizophrenic anyway, and possibly still am, and might even have lived up to that diagnosis, with a violent ideation, had my father asked me just one more time about the perfectly harmless goings-on inside my little room.1
Oh, to have been a true country queen! To have been able to claim, in all honesty, a difference between myself and rural America large enough to exempt me from the mundane and brutal rites of passage there! To have been free to walk those roads in bare feet, my pantlegs rolled up, a swish in my ass and impertinence on my face and no care for who saw me from bus or truck or field, an advertisement and a dare! To have yearned for attention like anyone else and to have won it in such abundance! To have achieved, without formal effort, an obvious and irreducible celebrity, so that when national stardom failed to pan out one was bound to be less disappointed than so many of the town fags were! To have neutralized the bullies upon puberty with the realization that no points were to be scored upon a target not naturally considered a boy, as well as by the myth that such creatures employed an oriental fighting technique that in a single quick stroke to the genitals might ruin a natural boy’s reputation forever, which myth is real! To have been so fortunate! To have dropped out of high school, or else shimmied right through, with the understanding that no grade, regardless of how low or how high, could possibly compete with the mark one had already received! To have seen all one’s faults and one’s foibles, all one’s human allotment of pride and viciousness and dissent, boiled down into a single incurable ailment! To have known the advantage of a parent, or two, convinced that a miracle vaccine, or a doctrine, or a hobby, might at last be found! To have been studied like a bewitched cow and handled always with kid gloves! To have been hated with more zeal than one’s siblings yet somehow better loved! To have been wondered at, and prayed over, and above all feared! My God, but that is the thing: to have been feared!
I apologize to my mother, especially, for not having made more of an effort to conform to her wishes out there. Had I but known what a comfort it can be for adults to see just one of their predictions come true in a land that conspires against all prophets, and contrives against all hopes, I might have reconsidered those offers to be fellated in a bathroom stall or buggered in the woods along the cross-country course. I might have done more than simply befriend a few area faggots, and make enemies of certain others, and remain an unknown quantity to most. I might have learned something of what it was like to be a “real” farmboy beyond the fact that at least one of them liked to shove frozen hot dogs up his rectum and then put them back in the freezer for his sister to eat, even as he delivered this same sister from the clutches of a too-insistent football player by taking the offending testicles in hand one locker-room afternoon, and giving both hand and testicles a twist, and saying, softly, “You touch her again and they’re coming off.” This intelligence (does it not sparkle?) was gifted to me by a young man ignored by his own people on account of an anabaptist predilection, and by others on account of his being black, and by me, I am sorry to say, for both reasons until at last he came across with those matchless tales.