Joy knocks on the door and asks if she can get in, says she’s sorry about lecturing me. Um, I’m using the thing, I answer, and she says, Good for you, isn’t it nice? and comes in to pee without wondering if I care. It is nice, I say, though the verbena foam is fading. A vinyl curtain between us, the soggy loofah rope around my wrist, I picture her bound up with her sister who lives in Montgomery, which produces some elongation. Terrified, I hold my breath until she exits, and force myself to recall a time before the desert. Joy remembers not to flush, which I love and appreciate.
Taped to the jar that held the ear was a weathered postcard of a black man, strung up above the manicured lawn of a historic southern courthouse. It was not our courthouse, but was quite similar, and the lawn featured a white marble statue of a soldier atop a tall pedestal, no doubt dedicated by the ladies of the town in the first decade of the twentieth century, just like ours was. In the picture, everyone seemed to be gathered around the marble soldier: the lynchee, men, women, and one little girl. The spectators were all white, though none of them looked rich. The hanging black body was beyond mutilated, and the face collapsed. People grinned from beneath. At these events it was not uncommon for men and their boys to penetrate the live body with corkscrews, extracting small tubes of flesh before the hanging. (They usually only cut the ears, nose, and penis off after death.) I hated it, just hated being so constantly at war: with a statue, a postcard, an ear. With love. Looking at Alex, I was devastated to think that by discussing the jar’s significance I might infect him with my battle. Who was he to have to worry about the southern past? What else but sorrow would it bring him to question it?
On the one hand, statistically it just makes sense: since there seem to be fewer homosexuals than straight men, there would be fewer soldiers (hetero) distracted by sex, and thus fewer mistakes made on account of lust-based preoccupations. I mean, given the numbers, no women soldiers equals less lust, right? From the other side of the argument, I just can’t fathom a bunch of fags wanting to rape their fellow Joes all over the desert. I stepped out of the shower and toweled off, then lifted the commode to stare at Joy’s pee and tissue, and flushed. Alex asked if he should bring the ear to class to show what happened before civil rights. I said, No, and could tell that he was dejected. I felt bad and wanted so goddamn much to hold him. Instead, I told him that he should return the ear to the basement, and never speak of it again. Told him that, if possible, it was generally best to stick to the proven methods, advice which I believe we should all remember to remember, lest things begin to get away from us.
They
THEY SAID I had to do it. They drank Schaefer beers and ashed their Dorals on the apartment carpet. Cleared their throats and spat at the ceiling to make “stalactites” dangle. They were a few years older, more men than boys it seemed, and they told me there was no other choice but to take Lee outside and pound him. (He was in the bathroom down the hall when they decided this.) No other choice after what he’d done, they said. After all, that guy had been a guest in my mother’s home, in my room.
In the dark of my room, his pallet on the floor beside my bed, Lee and I would whisper about everything, like brothers. He’d run away because of his father. Quit high school and hitchhiked all the way down from Chicago, and was terrified about things that happened to him en route. He confessed them to me one night, and I’d never imagined people doing such, and never again imagined men the same way. With every description his body had become more complicated. After that, looking at him was like looking at one of those old 3-D wiggle pictures, where two related hologram images appear from different angles. Clown with eyes open; clown with eyes closed. American flag flying; American flag with eagle. The boy whose body was consumed; the boy whose body was me.
Lee was sick about missing his sophomore year of high school. They said they’d get GEDs if they ever needed to, and then join the goddamned Army. The music in their apartment was always the same: screaming. They threw their empty beers at a tall, full trash can in the kitchen. Their living room was exactly like Mom’s and my unit, only there was not a beige couch and small upright piano. There was instead a large Styrofoam cooler, several aluminum-frame outdoor chairs, and a wooden industrial cable spool used as coffee table. A Confederate battle flag tacked on one wall. The snot they spat at the ceiling desiccated into thin yellow strings that were as gnarled and brittle as worms on a sidewalk. The boom box on the floor had been taken as a payment. (They bought eight-balls of cocaine. They’d snort half, then stomp the other half full of baking soda, then stomp anyone who complained about being sold weak drugs. They’d ask me, Free cocaine, kid? and I’d say, No, thanks, and be nervous, and think about that nice cop who warned us about drugs in junior high.) They sported a gallery of tattoos, some incomplete. A forearm of half-inked panther; a flesh-colored Iron Cross amid a banner of crimson. They bragged about getting sex for blow from high school girls. They said I had to do it.
Mom had found Lee a couple of months before, in the laundry room on premise at our complex. He’d been sleeping in a hard plastic chair, his head down on folded arms across his bare thighs. His only pair of jeans in the dryer, the zipper scraping the drum. She woke Lee up to kick him out, saw that he was my age, and instead told him to get his gear together, to get on to our apartment for a bite and a bath. From there, a day turned into a week, and then he was just with us. Mom adopted Lee, sort of, because he was scrawny and put the plates away. Did chores while I was at school, and promised to re-enroll, ASAP, ma’am. He told her he wanted to go home but that his father, a senior chief petty officer, retired, would not condone him. Lee tried to dress tough, and would sometimes borrow my boots. I once decided to walk in while he was taking a bath.
He went down the hall to take a piss. In his absence, they said he was a faggot, then called out, “Ohhh, Leeee-eee,” in a sissyfied voice. When I didn’t chorus in they said he was my girlfriend. I fumbled around for a way to deflect this, before blurting out, No way, y’all; that asshole made long-distance calls on our phone without permission; a whole bunch of them. (I was not angry about these calls, of course, nor was my mother.) Their response was that he was stealing from a single mom, and that I had better step up and be a man. They said I couldn’t let people abuse me.
Lee came back from the bathroom and they laughed and said, What’s up, faggot? and when his eyes dropped they said, Just kidding — lighten up, ha ha. He tried to hold a smirk. I was so nervous that my mouth got watery, like before vomiting. He went to grab a Schaefer from the cooler and they said, Hey, give us some money for that, and Lee said, I don’t have any money, and they said, Well, then you don’t have any beer. They then looked straight at me and said, Want a beer, kid? and I said, Yes, and did not look at him. They winked and handed me one and they laughed and asked, How are we ever gonna drink all these fokkin’ beers? Lee was bony, and I thought I could do it. They did not hurt inside. There’s no way they hurt inside. They finally handed him a beer, then pulled it back when he went to take it, then gave it to him for real. Laughed when his fingers jittered with the pop-top, then looked at me and motioned that it was time.