Because my theme for the moment is honesty, or else fraudulence (either one), I would like to confess, before I conveniently decide that my self-portrait here will only be damaged by further embellishments to its already broad strokes, that (a) the young man of whom I write was not the same country queen as I later encountered in the Regency Square Hardee’s (I allowed the reader to guess that he was, and I did so on purpose, and I am almost sorry for it); that (b) the above (“(a)”) is in no way meant to diminish my admiration for the talented Hardee’s worker, who was, to be clear, short and white and applaudingly cruel, whereas the friend I mean was tall and black and mostly kind and never, that I saw, went around barefoot (though by this I intend no judgment upon them that did); that (c) I am, or rather my extreme provincialism is, entirely at fault for any lapse in, or discontinuation of, whatever friendships I enjoyed then or have tolerated ever since, including that with this particular friend, who by geographical accident was able to transfer into a high school better able to teach him, and to appreciate his gifts, and perhaps even to accommodate his blackness, than the one he and I had hated together; that (d) nearly twenty years would then pass before I chanced to see him again, in a Richmond parking lot, whereupon I was relieved to learn that he was now living happily with a man, and so had taken my mother’s kind advice after all; except that (e) prior to this arrangement he had cohabitated with a woman, and had fathered a child by her, and although he loved the child, and was boastful of it, and would see to its well-being ever after, was fated to find disappointment in the company of the woman, and so was forced to quit it altogether; by which I came to understand that (f) to the debasement of himself, and to numerous others besides, he might just have opted, for a brief but crucial moment in an already delicate development, to prize my wisdom over that of my mother, which idea could not help but sicken me.
2 And some liner notes.
I was not sickened
Even here, though, my fraudulence betrays me, or else my honesty does, for I was not sickened on account of what harm I might have done a forgotten friend, nor because those charming country convictions I held in decades past were by now so inconsequential to my own experience that I was wholly unprepared for the impact they may at one point have had on someone else’s. Nor was I thrown, exactly, by the realization that this rider may have struck out for the false haven of heterosexuality regardless of what shove I ever gave him (which scenario would grant him all agency in the matter, yes, but anyhow fail to absolve me). No, what sickened me was not any one of these possibilities but rather the overall unknowability of the problem: I could not be sure that my mother’s good counsel had been either followed or ignored; I could not be sure that my own had been heard at all; I could not guarantee that this young man had for one moment sought out his way in any sinner save himself, and, honestly, who would? Ergo, I would never be able to trust in that faint yet sweet note of triumph (over my mother? over nature herself?) which sounded within me one sunburnt parking-lot day. That this is what sickened me, finally, ought to sicken just about anyone.
One last confession, before I cut short this shortcut across time’s mined macadam: the word “sicken,” and any variant of that marker lately employed to describe how at the moment of composition I thought and felt about memories of how I once thought and felt when certain other memories (progenitors at best of those above) first put out their feeble roots within me, now strikes me as so melodramatic as to be counted, if only by the calculus of an ever less dependable fraudulence, an ever more dependable lie.
In my room
Back, then, scurrying with shame and regret, to my little room, where at twelve or so I sat in the dark (by which I mean the literal and not the metaphorical dark, or not merely) until my brother moved in, his own room having been surrendered to our sister (and hers to the myth that endless work on an ancient and uninhabitable farmhouse will somehow elicit a charm that had never taken up residence there in the first place), and asked why I sat so in the shadows, and was told that the overhead was done in, whereupon he reached up and brushed it, just once, with his magical palm, and Lo! Light! I was plainly astonished by this twist after a year’s worth of evenings spent seated or prone in my doorway, trying to read by the bulb in the hall, which was not a hall so much as it was a four-by-four-foot square of bad wood at the top of a rickety staircase eventually destroyed altogether and replaced by newer steps my father came out of his depression to build, impressively and well, in a single weekend, when we had all of us resigned ourselves to the indefinite use of a ladder.
Whether approached by rung or by step, this platform up top gave onto two other rooms, both of them well lighted and occupied by people unconcerned, or unaware, that one of their number had so little by which to illuminate his homework, which he was expected to do well on despite his numerous privations, which task he accomplished only insofar as the standards of his education allowed for the misreading of a line here and there without too much being taken off for it. I might also point out, in case these efforts will themselves be graded on a curve, that my privations were as nothing compared with those suffered elsewhere in the county, which were as nothing compared with those suffered elsewhere in the world. Yet should my hurts, on account of their relative smallness, be ignored? should a preventable wound, because it is shallower than the next, be entirely excused and forgotten?
I wish now that my brother had never healed the fixture in my room. By sunlight the faded and peeling pink wallpaper, which of course there was no money to change, caused only a passing fright, but by tungsten its advances were bolder still, and conveyed a sense of old and pungent desperation in that place, of existence clutched at too long or too easily snuffed out, and attached to me an idea, and withal an actual scent, of sweetened rot, such as a poor woman’s corpse might bestow upon a grave robber who has not bothered, or yet discovered how, to do his homework.
I would prefer to call my room a friend. I know that sort of thing is popular with the modern reader, who wants always to remember childhood that way, even if an extended program of rape occurred there. (Does this crime not nowadays count double against the assailant, for its being a violation not only of the little one’s trust but also of her refuge?) My own tale, alas, is this chestnut in a mirror, for although I went unraped in my room, that I know of, the footage itself never behaved even cordially toward me, nor am I willing to fib now and say that it did. Those walls neither promised nor provided me safe harbor but acted instead very much as they looked: like an ancient bowel unaccustomed to light and intent on a slow (that is to say, an American) digestion of its contents, so as to leave almost nothing behind when those contents finally reached seventeen and were forced out of that farmhouse forever, to negotiate their way through this land’s pinched sewers, by which I mostly mean town.