1a From which charge I exempt my mother’s Christmas music (Al Hirt, the Kingston Trio, Harry Belafonte, the Columbus Boychoir), as this was in every case excellent and hilarious, though I do wish it had not counted so firmly against my manhood that I cared about, and was occasionally able to pick out, those famous old melodies on the warped and untuned upright downstairs: boredom and dread will ofttimes lead to experimentation.
1b One wet Christmas we received, from my mother’s wet parents, a gift subscription to three magazines of our own choosing, and my mother arranged for us to take Newsweek, National Geographic, and Rolling Stone. Who can argue now that I am anything more than the predictable result of that decision?
1c Does the salaryman not himself hope to appear counterintuitive and brave?
1d Or can imagine a kind critic calling it such, like a Christmas gift begged and received!
1e With ease I might do any and all of these things, except that I would then have to admit that my parents might have been right about me all along.
Patterson
I would like to record that what follows took place at the McDonald’s on Patterson (a Richmond street but here extended westward into Henrico County, whence extended still it becomes Route 6, a manmade if feeble stake through the heart of Goochland), as this establishment later caught and enslaved so many I knew from my youthful days: the trumpeter above me in the marching band, who had no musical ability whatsoever yet was, and likely remains, wholly devoted to that martial instrument; the kid who first beat me senseless on a Virginia schoolbus and now took my order with the same stark and pissed-off eyes that had prefaced all his punches; at a certain point my own brother, whom I would watch and wait for in a relaxed position on the hood of a parked pickup, while through the panes he mopped and scraped toward the end of his shift, so that we might at least drive home together, laughing at his lot, and mine no better, under dark skies but remarkably bright stars.
Unfortunately, the scene I intend is properly set a few miles off, at the Hardee’s in the Regency Square mall, on my break from a job at the Rite Aid pharmacy there, from which Richmond’s West End never seemed to need anything except cigarettes and maxipads. The memoirists, I know, and most of the journalists, would probably go ahead and claim that the incident occurred at the McDonald’s on Patterson, given the wealth of further material connected with that site (and, of course, with its parent company), and simply bet against being found out, but that is the way of the coward and the fool. My scene belongs at the Regency Square Hardee’s not merely in the dull reporterish sense but also, as a modicum of imagination will show, in the sense of hot isolation from regular goings-on, in the sense of revelation where we may not want or expect it, in the sense of real or suspected country faggots being lent out to work suburban mall jobs at criminally small salaries until they can attract the attention of a sugar daddy, or else a professor, who will make them work a far sight harder for their pay.
As I stood in line at this particular Hardee’s, alternately bored and shocked by the custom all around me, I heard a familiar woodland voice say, as its source slid a tray toward a woman up front, “There you go, bitch, and I hope you choke on it. May I help you please?” this last directed with fine drag timing at the next horrified diner in line, who then paid a dear amount for the simple Coke he wanted, and so on, until at last I stood before this hanging judge, and was greeted with the expected if unmeant “May I help you please?” and then heard, to the certain astonishment of anyone not already frightened off, “Oh hi there! How have you been?” I took his hand across the register and said that I was well, and asked how he and his people were doing, and was told that everyone was either dead or miserable or lying to themselves, after which we got on with the rest of the transaction. I asked for whatever Hardee’s had that pretended to be a Big Mac, and some fries, and as he slumped off to fetch my meal I could not help but peek behind the counter to see if he had any shoes on. He did, but I will be forgiven if I choose to remember it otherwise.
God bless and keep our country faggots. One should never discount the amount of faggot in them, nor ever their helping of country.
Fraudulence
What a joy there is in time travel, and what a fraudulence. In just thirteen paragraphs2 I have brought myself out of that wood-paneled womb where I was forced to take form and have rendered myself an almost viable being set to emerge from the faux-marble cunt of a now obsolete Richmond mall. Only pages prior I was younger still, and had yet to befriend a single homosexual, and had yet to do anything about my hair, and was possessed of no great delusions re God, and held no shotgun in my arms with which I might make a few bus-bound teenagers pretend to cringe and crawl. I am tempted to stick with this new and less indictable self, at a sudden seventeen, with a job in town (and a second at the county bank), and reliable use of a vehicle (if not of a reliable vehicle), and the prospect of imminent release can he but save his town money, and avoid collision with a drunk on some lonesome stretch of road, and dodge the impregnation of whichever country girl has lately caught his eye, and not lose sight of the fact that these last two eventualities would almost certainly amount to the same thing.
That thought is surely unkind to the girl, and possibly also to the drunk, but it does take us, with a considerable savings in pain, to the point where both I and the reader might be done with this trial, and its pretense, and its foolishness, were pain
and pretense and foolishness not the only themes still available to the honest American writer. Excepting, of course (though it is painful to bring up, and certainly a little foolish, and bound to be called pretentious by someone), honesty itself. I see, for instance, that I have avoided any mention of that distasteful episode wherein I attempted, in a moment of late-onset religiosity (which in human terms covered the better part of three years but here, I promise, will not last out the next paragraph), to convert my gay friend and informant to the one true path, which involved (the attempt, not the path, though I suppose the latter might also be depicted in this way) mornings with him in the high-school parking lot, and my indication of this (male) and that (female) ass, followed by the practical inquiry “Well, which is it?” I highly recommend this method to anyone who hopes to iron out the dimples in a friend’s sexuality, but in my case the interview was conducted unfairly, and made it clear that the female ass was what we were after here, which answer he dutifully gave, and which answer I did not believe, and which lie then caused me to question him further, and to judge his constant and exuberant singing of spirituals on bus trips (especially “Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” his curtain call) to be a barb and a blasphemy aimed in my personal direction, until at last I took him to see the wisest, most righteous adult I knew, and waited outside for him to emerge from this sit-down with the news that my mother had counseled him not to deny his inner gayness and had remained oddly silent on the question of whether his obvious interest in her second son was likely to bear him any fruit.