Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (7 page)

“Spare change?”

The guy I’d approached had a downy, immature mustache, no more than a few dozen hairs positioned above a mouth the size of a newborn baby’s.

“What did you say?” he asked.

I turned away, and when he spun me back around to face him, I noticed his army jacket, which wasn’t the old ironic kind but a crisp new one, the type you’d buy as practice before you enlisted.

“Did you talk to me, weirdo?” His mouth was bigger now. “Did you say something to my face?”

A second boy stepped up and put his hand on the angry guy’s shoulder. “Come on, Kurt,” he said. “Take it easy.”

“Maybe you don’t understand what’s going on,” the guy named Kurt said, “but this bozo talked to me.” He spoke with great outrage, as if I’d peed in his mouth. “I mean, he actually said something to me.”

Two of their friends who had walked ahead came back to see what the fuss was about and stood with their arms crossed as Kurt explained the situation. “I was minding my own business and this piece of shit started running his mouth. Comes right up as if he knows me, but he doesn’t know me. Nobody fucking knows me.”

The only thing worse than a twenty-five-year-old with a Vietnam flashback was a fourteen-year-old with a Vietnam flash-forward. I turned my head to look for Dan and saw him backing away just as Kurt’s fist caught my ear, breaking the stem off my glasses and sending them to the ground. The second punch grazed my upper lip, and the third was interrupted by the friends, who grabbed Kurt by the arms, saying, “Hey, man, take it easy. He’s not worth it.”

I tasted the blood leaking from my lip. “It’s true,” I said. “I’m not worth it. I swear I’m not. You can ask anyone.”

“He shouldn’t go talking to people when he doesn’t know who the fuck he’s talking to,” Kurt said. “The next time someone gets in my face, I’ll fucking kill him. I swear I will.”

“We know, buddy. We know.” Kurt’s friends led him down the midway, and a minute later one of them returned to hand me a dollar. “You’re cool, man,” he said. “What Kurt did, that was wrong. He can kind of go off sometimes, but I know where you’re coming from. I like peace.”

“I know you do,” I said, “and I appreciate it.”

It was the first time anyone had given me an entire dollar, and it occurred to me that if I could get beaten up twenty times a day, I could make some real money. Then I saw my broken glasses, and the equation fell apart. I was picking them off the ground when Dan stepped up, pretending to have missed the whole thing. “What happened to you?” he asked.

“Don’t give me that,” I said.

“Don’t give you what?” He bit his lip to keep from laughing, and I knew in that moment that our friendship was over.

“Just call your mom,” I said. “I’m ready to get out of here.”

There were a million ways to hurt yourself at the state fair, so when my mother asked about my lip I told her I’d hit the safety bar while riding the Tilt-A-Whirl.

“Aren’t you a little too old for that?” she asked. She had the Tilt-A-Whirl confused with the twirling cups and saucers designed for grade-school kids. My mother had actually pictured me wedged into a flying teacup.

“Jesus,” I said. “What do you take me for?”

She offered to have my glasses fixed but drew the line when I asked for a brand-new pair.

“But the ones I’ve got make me look like a bozo.”

“Well, of course they do,” she said. “They’re glasses. That’s their job.”

Dan and I had planned to return to the fair on Sunday morning, but when he came to the door I sent him away, saying I wasn’t feeling well. “I think I have some kind of flu.”

“Could be the chicken pox,” he said, and again he tried not to laugh. This was what you did to people you felt sorry for, to people too stupid to get the joke, and it was a lot worse than just coming out with it. He headed up the driveway and I thought again of the previous evening and of what I’d said after Kurt had thrown his first punch. Agreeing that I wasn’t worth the energy it took to hit me was bad enough, but did I have to offer it as a matter of public record? You can ask anybody. It was no wonder he’d reared back and hit me again.

Late that night Dan knocked on my bedroom window. “Guess who made forty-four dollars?” he said. The bills were held behind his back, arranged into a droopy fan, and he brought them forth with great ceremony.

“Oh, come on. You did not make forty-four dollars.” I denied it for the sake of argument, knowing that of course he had made forty-four dollars. The following weekend, his hair just that much longer, he would return to the fair and make even more. In no time he’d be wearing ponchos and sitting cross-legged before elaborate brass hookahs, our friendship as vague and insignificant to him as an old locker combination. “The two of you grew apart,” my mother would say. She made it sound as if we’d veered off in different directions, though in fact we had the exact same destination. I just never made it.

It turned out that the vest was not suede but something closer to velveteen. This was a disappointment, but having suffered in its name, I had no choice but to buy it. With the money I had left over I got a pair of blue corduroy hip-huggers, which made an ironic statement when worn with the red vest and a white shirt. I love America. Yeah, right!

“Tell me you’re not wearing that out of the house,” my mother said. I thought she was in some way jealous. Her youth gone, style was beyond her grasp, and she hated to see me enjoying the things that she could not.

“Could you please stop hassling me,” I said.

“Ooh, hassled, are we?” She sighed and poured herself a glass of wine from the gallon jug in the pantry. “Go on then, Uncle Sam,” she said. “Don’t let me stop you.”

I debuted my new outfit at the Kwik Pik, where once again I ran into the hippie girl. She wasn’t begging this time, just standing with a friend and smoking cigarettes. Hanging out. I nodded hello, and as I passed she called me a teeny-bopper, meaning, in effect, that I was a poseur. The two of them cracked up laughing, and I burned with the particular shame that comes with being fourteen years old and realizing that your mother was right.

The last thing I wanted was to pass the hippie again, and so I stayed in the Kwik Pik as long as I could, biding my time until the manager kicked me out. How was it that one moment you could look so good and the next you would give almost anything to crawl into your grocer’s freezer, settling beneath the pot pies until you reached that mysterious age at which a person could truly think for himself. It would be so peaceful, more drowsing than actual sleeping. Every so often you’d come to and notice that the styles had changed. The shag had arrived. Beards were out. You would look at the world as if through the window of a bus, hopping out at that moment of time you instinctively recognized as your own. Here was the point where, without even trying, you could just be yourself and admit that you liked country music or hated the thought of hair against your neck. You could look and act however you wanted, and spend all day in the Kwik Pik if you felt like it. On leaving, you’d pass a woman dressed in a floor-length skirt, the paisley pattern resembling germs as seen through a microscope. A beaded headband, delicate wire-rimmed glasses: she’d ask you for a quarter, and you’d laugh, not cruelly, but politely, softly, as if she were telling a joke you had already heard.

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

Hejira

I T WASN’T ANYTHING I had planned on, but at the age of twenty-two, after dropping out of my second college and traveling across the country a few times, I found myself back in Raleigh, living in my parents’ basement. After six months spent waking at noon, getting high, and listening to the same Joni Mitchell record over and over again, I was called by my father into his den and told to get out. He was sitting very formally in a big, comfortable chair behind his desk, and I felt as though he were firing me from the job of being his son.

I’d been expecting this to happen, and it honestly didn’t bother me all that much. The way I saw it, being kicked out of the house was just what I needed if I was ever going to get back on my feet. “Fine,” I said, “I’ll go. But one day you’ll be sorry.”

I had no idea what I meant by this. It just seemed like the sort of thing a person should say when he was being told to leave.

My sister Lisa had an apartment over by the university and said that I could come stay with her as long as I didn’t bring my Joni Mitchell record. My mother offered to drive me over, and after a few bong hits I took her up on it. It was a fifteen-minute trip across town, and on the way we listened to the rebroadcast of a radio call-in show in which people phoned the host to describe the various birds gathered around their backyard feeders. Normally the show came on in the morning, and it seemed strange to listen to it at night. The birds in question had gone to bed hours ago and probably had no idea they were still being talked about. I chewed this over and wondered if anyone back at the house was talking about me. To the best of my knowledge, no one had ever tried to imitate my voice or describe the shape of my head, and it was depressing that I went unnoticed while a great many people seemed willing to drop everything for a cardinal.

My mother pulled up in front of my sister’s apartment building, and when I opened the car door she started to cry, which worried me, as she normally didn’t do things like that. It wasn’t one of those “I’m going to miss you” things, but something sadder and more desperate than that. I wouldn’t know it until months later, but my father had kicked me out of the house not because I was a bum but because I was gay. Our little talk was supposed to be one of those denning moments that shape a person’s adult life, but he’d been so uncomfortable with the most important word that he’d left it out completely, saying only, “I think we both know why I’m doing this.” I guess I could have pinned him down, I just hadn’t seen the point. “Is it because I’m a failure? A drug addict? A sponge? Come on, Dad, just give me one good reason.”

Who wants to say that?

My mother assumed that I knew the truth, and it tore her apart. Here was yet another defining moment, and again I missed it entirely. She cried until it sounded as if she were choking. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

I figured that within a few weeks I’d have a job and some crummy little apartment. It didn’t seem insurmountable, but my mother’s tears made me worry that finding these things might be a little harder than I thought. Did she honestly think I was that much of a loser?

“Really,” I said, “I’ll be fine.”

The car light was on and I wondered what the passing drivers thought as they watched my mother sob. What kind of people did they think we were? Did they think she was one of those crybaby moms who fell apart every time someone chipped a coffee cup? Did they assume I’d said something to hurt her? Did they see us as just another crying mother and her stoned gay son, sitting in a station wagon and listening to a call-in show about birds, or did they imagine, for just one moment, that we might be special?

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

Slumus Lordicus

W HEN SHE FELT CERTAIN that she had seen every black-and-white movie ever made, my mother signed up for cable and began watching late-night infomercials in the kitchen. My father would wander up from the basement at about four, and the two of them would spend a pleasant half hour making fun of whatever happened to be on. “Give me a break,” they’d chuckle. “Please!”

The only such program they managed to take seriously was hosted by a self-made man who had earned a fortune in real estate and addressed his studio audience as if they were students cramming for a final. The blackboard was in constant use. Charts and graphs were pointed at with a stick, but no matter how many times he explained it, I simply could not understand what the guy was talking about. It seemed that by refinancing his house, he had bought seventeen more, which were then rented out, allowing him to snatch up a shopping center and several putt-putt courses. If you went through his pockets, you’d be lucky to find twenty dollars, but on paper he was worth millions. Or so he claimed.

If accumulating property were truly this easy, it seemed that everyone would be following the millionaire’s advice, but that was the catch: not everyone was awake at four A.M. While the rest of the world was fast sleep, you, the viewer, had chosen to better yourself, and wasn’t that half the battle? I was between apartments at the time and saw the program twice before I left my parents’ house and moved into a place of my own. That was the spring of 1980. A year later my mother and father owned a dozen duplexes on the south side of Raleigh, and were on their way.

We called our parents slumlords, but in fact the duplexes were not bad-looking. Each unit featured a bay window, parquet floors, and a fair-size yard shaded with trees. When first built, they were occupied by white people, but the neighborhood had changed since then, and with the exception of an elderly shut-in, all of the tenants were black. A few had jobs, but most were on public assistance, which meant, for us, that their rent was paid by the government, and usually on time.

The idea had been for my parents to work as a team — she would handle the leases, and he would see to any repairs.

I assumed that, like always, my father would take over and do everything himself, but for once he acted according to plan. Deeds were signed, and within a month my mother was fluent in the various acronyms of the state and federal housing departments. Forms arrived, and the duplicates were sorted into stacks, the overflow spilling from the basement den to my former bedroom, which now served as a makeshift office. “Should this go under RHA or FHA?” my mother would ask. “Does B.J. qualify for AFDC or just the SSI?” She’d sit at the desk, her elbows smudged with copier fluid, and I’d feel sorry for everyone involved.

On a selfish note, “The Empire,” as we liked to call it, provided me with an occasional job — a week of painting or weatherproofing or digging up a yard in search of a pipe. The downside was that I’d be doing these things for my father, meaning that the pay was negotiable. I’d present a time card, and he would dispute it, whittling my hours to a figure he considered more reasonable. “You expect me to believe you were there every day from nine until five? No lunch, no cigarette breaks, no sitting in the closet with your finger up your nose?”

The video monitor in my head would show me engaging in these very activities, and he would somehow catch a glimpse of it. “I knew it. I’ll pay you for thirty hours, and that’s just because I’m nice.”

If we’d agreed on a flat rate — say, $300 in cash to paint an apartment — I might wind up with a check for $220, to be followed at the end of the year by a I099-MISC form. Every job ended in an argument, my empty threats and petty name-calling put on ice and saved for the ride home. The tenants would have loved to watch us screaming at each other, and so we did our best to deny them that pleasure. Alone in the car we were savages, but at The Empire we were ambassadors for our race, acting not like the normal white people we’d grown up with but like the exceptional white people we vaguely remembered from random episodes of Masterpiece Theatre. Doors were held open, and great blocks of time were spent encouraging each other to go first.

“After you, Father.”

“On the contrary, son, after you.”

Were it not for my mother, we might have stood there all day. “Just go into the damned apartment!” she’d shout. “Jesus Christ, you two are like a couple of old ladies.”

When it came to The Empire, my parents’ roles were oddly reversed. My mother was still the more personable one, but if a tenant wanted any kind of a break, he soon learned to go to my father, who displayed a level of compassion we rarely saw at home. His own children couldn’t get a dime out of him, but if Chester Kingsley lost his wallet or Regina Potts broke her collarbone, he was more than willing to work something out. When Dora Ward fell behind on her rent, he gave her an extension, then another, and another. On discovering she had moved out in the middle of the night, taking the stove and refrigerator with her, he said only, “Oh, well. They needed to be replaced anyway.”

“The hell they did,” my mother said. “That stove was only two years old. What kind of a landlord are you?”

I’d hoped to make money remodeling Dora’s empty apartment, but the dream died when an interracial couple showed up, introducing themselves as Lance and Belinda Taylor. My parents and I were assessing the empty kitchen when they knocked on the door, asking for a tour and announcing in the same breath that they loved the place just the way it was. All it needed was a stove and refrigerator, and everything else they could take care of on their own. “Carpentry and whatnot, that’s what I do,” Lance said. He offered his hands as proof, and we noted that the palms were thickly calloused.

“Now show them the other side,” his wife said. “Let them see your knuckles and whatever.”

My mother suggested that the couple come back in a few months, but my father saw something almost biblical in their situation. A carpenter and his wife in search of shelter: all they lacked was an exhausted donkey. He moaned when told they were living in a motel, and buckled completely when shown a photo of the couple’s three children. “We were going to touch the place up a little, but what can I say? You’ve got me.”

“Let’s just think about this,” my mother said, but my father had thought enough. Lance paid the deposit in cash, and he and his family moved in the following day.

On seeing his new neighbors, Chester confided that it was the kids he felt sorry for. “Them and the husband. I mean, is that white woman ugly, or what?”

My father took the high road and tried to talk him out of it. “Oh, you don’t mean that.”

“Yes, he does,” my mother said.

They did make for an odd-looking couple, not because of their color but because they were physically so mismatched. Lance was handsome and accustomed to being admired, while Belinda was gaunt and, “well,” my mother said, “unfortunate looking. That’s the kindest way to describe her, isn’t it.”

When they first moved in, the Taylors were polite and gung ho. Could they plant a vegetable garden? Certainly! Paint the living room? Why not? But the garden was never sown, and the paint cans sat untouched. They fought often, and loudly, and more than once the police arrived to pull the couple apart. The first time he fell behind in his rent, Lance called the house, demanding that my father distribute pebbles over his driveway. “I’m not paying three hundred dollars a month to walk over crushed oyster shells,” he said. “It’s bad for my tires and for my shoes, and before you get any more of my money, I want something done.”

Distributing pebbles over Lance’s driveway meant distributing pebbles over everyone’s driveway, and it surprised us all when my father agreed.

“I’m not talking cheap pebbles, either,” Lance said. “I want the nice kind.”

“You mean gravel,” my father said.

“Yeah. That.”

The driveway was hardly urgent, but still it was heartening to hear someone stick up for himself. This was exactly the sort of thing my father would have done had he been the tenant, and in admitting it, he was forced into a grudging admiration. “The guy’s got gumption,” he said. “There’s no doubt about it.”

A dump truck was sent, and I spent three days slowly spreading gravel. Lance paid his rent and called a few months later, complaining that birds were congregating in the tree outside his bedroom window. Had they been vultures, we may have seen his point, but these were songbirds, whose only crime was happiness.

“What do you want me to do?” my father asked. “Come down there in person and scare them away? Birds are a part of life, buddy. You’ve just got to learn to get along with them.”

Lance insisted that the tree be cut down, and when told no, he went ahead and did it himself. It was just a pine, not necessarily old or beautiful, but that didn’t matter to my father, who loves trees and admires them the way playboys admire women. “Will you look at that!” he’ll say, pulling to a stop at a busy intersection.

“Look at what?”

“What do you mean, 'Look at what?' The maple, idiot. She’s a knockout.”

When told what Lance had done, my father retreated to his bedroom, staring at the oaks outside the window. “Trimming is one thing,” he said. “But to cut something down? To actually end its life? What kind of an animal is this guy?”

Lance felled the tree with a hatchet and left it where it lay. A few weeks later, now a month behind on his rent, he complained that rats were nesting in the branches. “I’ll call the city and report you,” he said to my father. “And if one of my kids gets bitten, I’ll call the city and my lawyers.”

“His lawyers, right!” my father said.

My mother had tried to look on the bright side, but now she worried that Lance might bite the children himself. In talking to other landlords, she’d come to identify him as a type, the sort of tenant who’d live rent-free, biding his time until he eventually bled you dry. If there was a skill to renting out property, it was the ability to spot such a person and never let him through the front door. Lance and his wife had made it in, and now my parents would have to get rid of them, delicately and by the book. They didn’t want to give the Taylors any ammunition, and so it was agreed that the tree would be removed. “I really don’t see any other way,” my mother said. “The son of a bitch says jump, and we’ll just have to do it.”

I went with my father to cut it up and carry it away, and from the moment we arrived I had the distinct feeling that we were being watched. It was like one of those scenes from a Western — high noon and the street was empty. “Be cool,” my father said, more to himself than to me. “We’ll just do our job and be on our way.”

We’d been at it for all of ten minutes when Lance stepped out, dressed in jeans and toffee-colored cowboy boots. Maybe the boots were too small or not yet broken in, but for whatever reason he moved slowly and tentatively, as if walking were new to him.

“Here we go,” my father said.

Lance’s first complaint was that the noise of the chain saw was disturbing his children, one of whom was supposedly sick with the flu.

“In September?” my father asked.

“My kids can get sick any damn time they want,” Lance said. “I’m just warning you to keep it down.” There was no way to keep down a chain saw, but that wasn’t really the point. My father had been put on notice within earshot of the other tenants, and now there would be complications.

Lance hobbled back into his apartment and reappeared a short while later. The boots were gone now, and in their place he wore a pair of sneakers. I was dragging a branch toward the curb, and he complained that in doing so, I was disturbing the integrity of his yard, which was alternately bald and overgrown and had all the integrity of a litter box. “You need to lift those branches,” he said. “One of them touches the ground and you’ll be answering to me. Understand?”

My father was a good six inches shorter than Lance, and he raised his head skyward in order to meet the man’s eyes. “Hey,” he said. “Don’t you talk to my son that way.”

“Well, you talked to my son that way,” Lance said. “You called him a liar. Said there was no way he could have the flu in September.”