When Julianne and I arrived from Illinois, bereaved and nearly broke, theirs became an eight-person household. Porter and Angeline’s two oldest kids were almost finished with high school, and I never got too close to them. And the baby of the family, Virgil, was only starting first grade. But the middle son, my cousin CJ, he was a different story.
CJ and I were the same age, almost literally. We’d been born ten days and a thousand miles apart, and never met until I came to California. We were in the same grade and same class in school, and if it hadn’t been for that, I would have been friendless pretty much until high school. I was skinny and unprepossessing, self-conscious about my birthmark, shell-shocked over my father’s death, culture-shocked over my arrival in California.
I was used to moving-all Army kids are-but Santa Barbara County was different. People hear the words Santa Barbara and they think of wealth, and that was certainly true of the city itself, with its gleaming white Mission-style architecture and streets generously lined with bougainvillea. But where the Mooneys lived, east of Vandenberg Air Force Base, was mostly rural, and yet more racially and economically diverse than an outsider would have thought. In the halls of my new school quite a few of the white students, and some black, were the children of Air Force personnel or staff at the federal prison. Many others were Latino, the sons and daughters of agricultural workers, some of them undocumented. In this working-class mix moved the well-dressed children of winemaker families, new money that had recently gravitated to what was becoming a hotbed of viticulture. Old California was here, too, in the kids with Chumash blood, the Indians who originally settled the area. Our high-school salutatorian was a Japanese boy whose family had farmed its acreage for generations-all except for those years spent in an internment camp during World War II.
Put another way: There’s a certain kind of white person I like to tell about my first real kiss. It was with a classmate in the seventh grade who was black. Awww, isn’t that great, I can almost see the listener thinking. Then I tell the rest of it. The next day, three girls cornered me out behind one of the portable classrooms at the edge of the school grounds. They were black. Their leader was a girl who’d been the boy’s best friend since childhood and felt that she should have been first in line to get that kiss. Her two friends had held my arms while she gave me a pretty good beatdown.
And that’s all I say. Usually, it’s clear that the listener wants there to be more: some throat-clearing rhetoric about how I understand the social tensions that led to et cetera cetera cetera, or maybe that the girl and I had become friends later in high school. When I don’t say anything like that, sometimes people look uncomfortable, like I’ve said something racist, though they can’t identify exactly what it is.
The truth is that the girl and I didn’t become friends, but by a year later, if either of us thought about the incident at all, we remembered it as just girls fighting over a boy. It could have happened between two black girls or two white girls, but it hadn’t. The difference between the way middle-class educated people thought about race and the way people like me lived it was like the difference between what was in surgical textbooks and what happened in an Army field hospital.
When I say that the only thing that made those early years bearable was my cousin CJ, though, I don’t mean that he knew everybody at school and introduced me around, easing my way into social success. The Mooneys had arrived in California only a year before Julianne and me, and though CJ would later become Californian in a big way, it hadn’t happened by the time I got there. In sixth grade, CJ was already six feet tall, but too skinny, with rawboned hands. The other kids found his Appalachian accent incomprehensible and his first name laughably Southern. I never used it; I always called him CJ, which he liked.
CJ had one advantage over me, though: The other kids learned pretty quickly that he could fight, and they left him alone. I served my fistfight apprenticeship a lot more slowly and painfully. To his credit, CJ never jumped in and fought my battles for me. He understood, the way an adult wouldn’t have, that I had to earn my respect myself.
If nothing else, though, CJ’s friendship soothed the pains of early adolescence. At school, we ate lunch together when the longtime Californians and the Air Force kids were branched off in their cliques. After school, we halved the time it took us to do homework by splitting the assignments and copying each other’s answers. It was probably that joint arrangement that kept CJ’s grades up in junior high. It’s not that he wasn’t bright-he was-but his studies had never interested him much.
What interested him was music. CJ’s mother had started teaching him the piano when he wasn’t yet old enough to read, and though he was good at it, by junior high he rarely played, considering the piano to be a feminine, Victorian instrument. But he did love music, black music in particular-blues, gospel, and jazz. Even at thirteen, if he owned a CD by a white artist, I didn’t know what it was. He was forever slipping his headphones over my ears so I could appreciate something about Miles Davis or John Lee Hooker.
In the insecurity of youth, I’d felt I deserved my outsider status, but often I wondered why the other kids didn’t see the CJ I knew. He was kind and funny; he was smart. And he was an excellent kisser. That part, of course, I would rather have died than let the other girls know that I knew.
Yes, I’ve heard all the jokes about the South and kissing cousins. But most people I know have at least one I-didn’t-know-any-better incident in their early sexual history. CJ and I had just been experimenting. It wasn’t like we’d had anyone else to practice on.
I’d started things, one night when we were outside on a sleeping bag after dark, waiting to watch a rocket launch from Vandenberg. Offhandedly I told CJ that I’d never kissed with an open mouth, and I wanted to learn. CJ said that I’d get a chance soon enough and to be patient. Patience had not been my strong suit, so finally he relented and showed me. And kept showing me. Those satellite launches got delayed a lot. It wasn’t like there’d been anything else for us to do.
For about a year after that, making out was just something we did when we had time and privacy. It was mostly kissing, except that when I started getting my breasts, I let CJ cup them in his gentle, long-fingered hands. And the summer before we started high school-I admit there was a bottle of Jack Daniel’s involved in this-he let me touch him down low. He was hard, and when I wrapped my hand around him, I was amazed at how it felt, so powerful and yet vulnerable, all at once.
Then CJ rolled away from me, breathing hard, and said, “We probably ought to knock this shit off.”
And I said, “Yeah, I know.”
So we stopped. We were going to be in high school next year; it was time to put away childish things. No big deal.
In high school, we drifted apart a little. This was partly because Julianne scraped together the money to move us out of the Mooney home and into a rented house in town. But what really set CJ and me on different paths was something that happened to me in a bookstore, a few months before I finished eighth grade.
I was looking for a present for Julianne’s birthday. I knew she didn’t want a book as a gift, but I was mad at her for moving us out of the Mooney house, where I’d felt comfortable. In theory, Julianne and I had moved “so Hailey can have her own room.” In reality, it was so she could have privacy to entertain the Air Force guys she liked. I hated the house-it was cramped and Helen Keller could have done a more tasteful job on the color scheme-and disliked most of the men she dated. I missed the Mooney house with its warmth and life. So there I was, browsing, when I passed a display of educational books and a thick volume caught my attention.