I would ask my father to comment here, except that I killed him a few pages back, and no ventriloquism of mine (“Hold that fucking ladder or I’ll …”; “Pay some goddamned attention or I’ll …”; “What in the hell is wrong with you?”) will convince the reader that a pile of cool ashes is able, or willing, to puff straight answers out at anyone. I can only, then, try to be accurate about my own petty motivations:
Had our house up and exploded that chimney-fire night, and caught me out stuck to the roof, of a mind to jump off it but melted there by Judas soles, until the whole of my clothing took fire and I screamed in silence, my breath burnt away, and prayed to get out of those boots before I popped like a kernel and sent all my fluff up to God; had my devout yet town-hip mother been less apt to say, in those days of oaths and accusations (hers, mostly, the accusations), “Don’t be so melodramatic,” which hypocrisy I would gladly excuse, had that little “so” of hers, borrowed along with the rest of the phrase, not itself been so melodramatic (; had I but known then of melodrama’s place in my melodramatic future); had I but resolved, all those decades ago, to remain forever a stranger to that corruptive county and never to allow myself, if only for a year or two or three, by means of a steady retreat down Jacob’s unsteady stair, to be transformed into a proudly defensive, ecstatically religious, uselessly horny, country-smug moron, whose own parents would not have recognized him (though it cannot be said that they tried), we might have made an easier go of it ahead. We might have been able to sustain the fiction that a rhetoric of complaint is the one true path across memories of a perfectly ordinary American childhood, wherein delight and contentment, feigned at first, fine, but for that no less experienced, and no more given over to facile caricature than the complaint thus far has been, offer up their own loud and hair-raising hues.
(For those still keeping track)
(Do not reject me, please, for what joy I am about to express, or pretend to express (see above, and below), in Goochland’s gross particularities. Is there a child born of woman who will not seek out pleasure where it can? Is there a child born to man who will not doubt that same pleasure?
(Do not discard me either as an ironist, for God knows I am nothing of the sort. Pretending to pretend I find no more honest, or dishonest, than pretending not to pretend, and neither of these masks will much, of itself, enhance the reality I pretend now to pretend not to pretend to.
(I am after, I hope, what lies beyond these two obvious choices, in that realm where I forever evade one possibility and forever chase after the other, or I guess am hunted, alternately or in tandem, and again forever, by both.
(Do also forgive, while we are at it, this late directness in me, which is meant primarily, if not exclusively, for those still keeping track.)
My subterfuge began
My subterfuge began with the chickens. We had been reading Hardy in the high school, probably because our teacher, who lived in Richmond’s West End and I believe did her best, thought the pastoral themes in his writing might at long last “speak” to us. She was a close and clever reader of poetry, that I can recall, but she had fallen victim to the delusion that novels were not constructions in the manner of poems, to be clambered over and admired (if not always fallen for), but rather were instructors, such as she imagined herself to be, of how, and why (or was it really only whether?), to stay afloat in the flood of life’s tears.
Jude the Obscure stood at least a chance of scaring me up out of the water, but it was Tess of the d’Urbervilles we were expected to grab onto, and that raft quickly capsized. We were already familiar with the yeoman sort of naturalism, and betrayed by it, so there was no real news there, and we had learnt from the land-puppeted fists of our peers what airs like Tess’s pa put on would get you. Yet our teacher, inferring from our Yes, and? looks that most of us had failed even to open the book, which was probably the case, persisted in her mission, and made us watch Tess (1979) on a television set rolled in by a kid from the disabled room whose every step held in it more drama than the film ever could.
She then went on to explain, God help her, about the symbolism at work here, and about how Tess, portrayed by the Kinski girl, whom we had all by then seen with a snake curled around her privates on a friend’s sagging farmhouse wall, was clearly the prey in this situation, driven on every side by malevolent nature, but we understood about that too, and some of us even got that the reason our school emptied out at the start of each deer season was less about hunting than it was about feeling, if only for a day or two, or fourteen, less hunted oneself. This wisdom extended even to the gaudy orange garb those hunters wore: any uniform will make one feel momentarily like a cop, especially with a gun in one’s hands, but in time the truth sets in that orange uniforms are worn far more often, and in vastly greater numbers, by the imprisoned.
I tried to be kind to this teacher, and not lash out at her as I did with most others, since I thought her both smart and pretty (not Kinski-with-a-snake pretty, but still) and only bewitched by the county’s evil, as opposed to willfully ignorant of it, and because she was divorced and unhappy and hence (one can hope) sensitive to all those drowning metaphors of mine. (Some few of us had returned, in loud desperation, to the sea that had delivered our families to this haunted shore in the first place, and saw them off inland to be petrified there (I knew of a Goochlander who sat every day outside a gas station and in seventy years had never caught a ride into Richmond, even when I offered him one. (HE: I wouldn’t impose. I: It’s no imposition, sir. I’m headed that way myself. HE: I wouldn’t care for it.) Williamsburg, and the great Oceanus beyond, must have seemed mere myths to this man!), though to be fair we ourselves approached it only with another family, more sophisticated than we were but in practical terms no better off (being similarly Catholic), so as to save money, and in tents sure to leak because it was sure to rain, as our guardians had elected to wait until summer was over, again to save money, and we ate cheese sandwiches for our sustenance, and what bits of sand affixed to the cheese and pooled in the bread’s greasy chambers, and for warmth we played grab-ass in the deserted waves with a daughter from the opposite family whose father (our immovable own being planted back in Goochland) then gave us a speech about “respect,” which by grabbing at her ass we assumed we had been showing her, though in truth we hoped primarily to make our intentions known to her older and more experienced sister up on the beach, sunning herself scandalously and noticing how we noticed not to notice her, until she saw her stiff Christian father jog waterward to lecture us, at which point she grinned and rolled over, as if to show us what an ass worth grabbing at actually looked like.