Of course I knew who it was: Tina Turner. What I noticed was her pain, her modesty, which dissipated any air of stardom, any undeserved arrogance. Her veiled eyes said to themselves, I have no right to all this, but I deserve it. She didn’t apologize for her fame, but she preferred that we share, at least in the anonymity of travel, the human meaning of her songs. She snuggled up next to the window, took off her shoes, and put on her sunglasses; a gracious stewardess covered her with a vicuna blanket — soft, infinitely swaddling, maternal, protecting the singer from the sound and the fury, caressing her with the sweet drowsiness of fatigue.
I didn’t want to stare at her too much; I didn’t want to be curious or impertinent. I thought of the song Diana Soren listened to so often—“Who Takes Care of Me?”—and, looking at the sleeping lioness wrapped in her own skin, I admired, with painful tenderness, the strength of this humiliated, beaten, cheated-on woman who overcame her troubles without taking revenge on her tormentors. Without asking for the death or the imprisonment of anyone, earning, on her own, the right to be herself and to change the world with her voice, her body, and her soul, without sacrificing any of the three. Her art, her race, her spirit … Poor Diana, so strong that she had no defense against the weaknesses of the world. Marvelous Tina, so weak she learned to defend herself against all the powers of the world …
XXXVI
I went to Iowa only many years later, while on a lecture tour in the Midwest. Whenever she’d ask me, “Help me re-create my hometown,” I would tell her I couldn’t: “I have nothing to do with that.” “You’ve seen it in movies,” she said, teasing me for my amateur cinematographic erudition. That’s why I know — I retorted — that the small town in the movies is always the same small town. It’s been there at M-G-M since time immemorial, the town where Mickey Rooney captivated all the girls in high school and put on plays in the barn. Main Street with its signs: barbershop, soda fountain, Woolworth’s, the local newspaper, the church, and the town hall standing in for the saloon and whorehouse of the heroic era. I told her that all that stuff she and I believed in was invented by Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe who, out of gratitude, wanted to construct an ideal image of the United States as perpetually bucolic, peaceful, innocent. A place where boys on bicycles delivered newspapers, where sweethearts held hands on porch swings, and where the universe was an immense perfectly mowed lawn, perfectly open and limited only, perhaps, by that white fence Tom Sawyer painted.
When my friends from the University of Wisconsin took me to Iowa in 1985, I discovered that the myth was real, although it was impossible to know if the town had imitated Hollywood or if Hollywood was more realistic than we thought. The courthouse, a neo-Hellenic building with cornices and blindfolded statues guarding the steps of justice, presided over life in Jeffersontown. Main Street was exactly what I expected: low buildings on each side, shoe stores, drugstores, a Kentucky Fried Chicken with the ubiquitous Colonel Sanders, a McDonald’s, and a bar.
“The high school. Don’t leave out the high school,” she would say.
“But I’ve never been there. I’ve got nothing to do with that. How do you expect …?”
The boys still meet to drink beer in the tavern. They’re tall and strong. They talk about what they did that Saturday when I was in Diana’s hometown. They went out to hunt raccoons. It was the young men’s favorite sport. That carnivore, native to North America, has a difficult Algonquin name, arahkun, and a prodigious nocturnal life. Its fur is grayish-yellow, its tail has black rings on it, it has small erect ears and almost human hands, thin as those of a pianist. But its face is a black Venetian mask that disguises it so it can climb trees more easily. It’s omnivorous, but it washes everything before eating it, and, disguise on top of disguise, it makes its den in hollow trees. Masked raccoon: it sleeps in winter but doesn’t really hibernate. It delivers its litter, of up to half a dozen little raccoons, in only sixty days. Young, it’s pleasant and playful; old, it’s as irascible as a solitary grandfather. It eats everything — eggs, corn, melons. It’s the scourge of the local farmers, who hunt it down. The fiery old ones know how to escape, but the young ones fall more easily. Young or old, however, they turn fierce when cornered. In the water, they’re dangerous — they can drown their enemies.
The raccoon abounds in the hills, bluffs, and plains of Iowa, a state of fertile black soil, of immense pasturelands that have been composting for millions of years. The boys spent the week working at tasks that were sometimes pleasant, sometimes disagreeable. Math is too abstract, geography too concrete, too alien. Who cares where Mexico is, or Senegal or Manchuria? Who lives there? Does anyone live there? Sure: dagos, chinks, kikes, niggers, and spicks. Have you ever seen anyone from there? The drugstore, on the other hand, is the place for dates; love begins over a shared cherry Coke with two straws, as in the Andy Hardy films, and continues at the movies on Saturday night, when sweaty hands are linked in love and popcorn is consumed while on the screen the lovers see themselves live as they are in their seats, looking at Mickey Rooney and Ann Rutherford holding hands, looking at two imaginary kids holding hands, looking at …
“There’d be basketball games at the gym. Don’t miss them. They’re easy to imagine. They never change.”
History class was the most boring. It always took place “before,” in a kind of eternal museum where everything was dead, where there were no people like them except when they were translated to the screen and turned into Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh. That was history, even if it was a lie. Reality could be an illusion — drinking a chocolate malted with your girlfriend, going to the movie to see a new illusion each week. They all knew they’d get married right there and would live right there, and since most of them were good boys, they’d be good husbands, good fathers, and would resign themselves to the aging of their girlfriends — too much flaccid flesh, the death of sex, the death of romance, romance, romance, like the moon going dark forever.
On the other hand, a group of young men hunting raccoons vibrates with a single emotion, like nothing else. Their rifles were obvious extensions of their masculinity, and they showed them, cleaned them, loaded them as if they were showing one another their phalluses, as if acts barely insinuated in the locker room were authorized in the raccoon hunt by those rifles so easy to buy in a country where the right to keep and bear arms is sacred — it’s in the Constitution.
“Go back to the high school for a minute, please …”
It was as if the dogs were blind, their huge floppy ears given over to their single sense, smell. Blind, deaf, plagued with blue ticks, which the boys would amuse themselves by pulling off after hunting and a few beers around the fire.
“It’s a building from the fifties, modern, low …”
Sometimes, when they lost the scent, the dogs would wander off, blind, deaf. All one had to do then was to leave the owner’s jacket out on the plain, and the dog would invariably return. This was the real world. This was the admirable, fixed, concrete, intelligible world. In which a dog would come back to the spot where his owner’s jacket was. The boys hugged one another, laughing and drinking, elbowing one another in the ribs the same way they snapped towels at one another in the locker room, scrupulously refusing to look too low. The rifles were enough; you could stare at a rifle. You could touch your buddy’s rifle. Together, they could skin raccoons around the fire and go back to town with their bloody trophies and their deaf dogs.