Mississippi Sissy (32 page)

At the lobby door, about to open it, I turned back to look at Audrey. Instead, I saw the man get up to follow me. I hurried into the bathroom's stall. Before I could lock the stall's door—had I hesitated?—he pushed in behind me. I had to make a snap decision between heading back out to a victimized Audrey or staying inside the bathroom's stall and allowing my own victimization to begin that day, a victimization—I hate that word but there is no other for it—that led me right to Dr. Gallman two years later. When he was sitting in that church before his sermon out in Harperville and I thought he was sniffing out souls to save, he was instead, I am certain of it, sniffing at the stench of that bathroom stall that still adhered to me, that adheres still. The man locked the stall door. He knelt before me. I put my penis inside his roughly whiskered mouth. I bent down trying to
find his own penis. “Don't touch that,” he warned me. He straightened me up and touched my hips. He pulled me deeper into his throat and guided my body until it instinctively began to pump him back and forth. I couldn't hold it any longer: I pissed a little inside his mouth. He pulled away and reached up and grabbed me by the neck. He spit my bit of piss in my face. “You stupid little
fuck,”
he whispered that word that had worked so well after my mother's funeral. “I've heard tell of you,” he said, putting his mouth right next to me. Was he going to kiss me? Was he going to make me kiss him back? He tightened his grip on my neck. “You that boy that ain't got no mama,” he said. “Daddy kilt in a car wreck. Front page of the
Scott
Fucking
County Times.
But it don't stop people from talkin' bout you and the way you act. You know that? I seen you walk in here this afternoon, you fuckin' sissy piece of shit. I followed you in. I knew you'd do this. I
knew it.”
He smelled like he'd eaten bacon that morning for breakfast and washed it down with a beer. He banged my head against the stall and continued to strangle me. I assumed I must be turning blue, as blue as I was the moment I was born and Mom ran from the delivery room thinking I was a stillbirth. I wondered if I would die right there. I wondered if my parents would recognize me when I died. I wondered if the man was going to press a little harder against my neck. I wondered if I would like that. Abruptly, he let me go and fled from the stall. I sat on the pot. I pushed my still hard penis between my legs and pissed some more. “That's the way girls piss, Kevinator,” my father had told me once when he caught me peeing that way. “Stand up,” he had demanded and pulled me toward him in mid-piss, my spraying urine running down both our legs. I blew my nose on some toilet tissue inside the stall. I wiped the bit of piss and spittle from my face. I masturbated the rest of the way. I sponged the sperm from the top of my penis with more tissue. I tried to conjure a trance to comfort me. I sat completely still. I pictured the Simpson Lady's son on their own pot back in Pelahatchie. I pictured my legs
around my father's neck. I pictured us drinking imaginary tea. I reached up under myself and gently touched my butthole with one of my fingers. I felt its outline and pretended it was Whatshername's pussy. I heard the audience scream inside the theater and wanted to get back to my seat. I pulled on my pants. I did not wash my face and hands. I did not look at myself in the mirror.

I walked out into the lobby and headed back inside for the end of the movie. “Where do you think you're going, young man?” Old Lady Jacobs asked from behind the snack bar. She had a greasy pageboy that never seemed shampooed, her blond hair having gone that dull gray that blondes go, a mottle of gunmetal strands always caught up in the black-framed reading glasses she mostly wore pushed up on top of her head. The only times she lowered the glasses were when ringing up ticket sales or when a customer wanted her attention there where she stood next to the popcorn machine and soda spigots. She also always had a flashlight holstered to her belt to pull out and shine in a moviegoer's eyes if we had our feet propped up on the seats in front of us. She was one tough little crone, but I had a soft place in my moviegoing heart for her. “You can't go back in there. No way,” she said, leaning her elbows on the candy counter in front of her. She took her flashlight out of its holster and laid it on the counter next to her, like it was her pistol and she was going to try and negotiate with me first. “It's the last eight minutes. I've turned the lights all the way off, like the poster said,” she told me. “No seating now. That's the rule. Who was that man that just ran out of here? By the looks of him he should be in that jail yonder and not in my theater.”

I shrugged. I heard Audrey Whatshername shouting for help inside. She shouted it three times. I stared at Julie Andrews on the
Thoroughly Modern Millie
poster. I read Beatrice Lillie's name in big type toward the bottom of it. It said on the poster that Lillie played someone named Mrs. Meers in the movie. Julie Andrews had a black-and-white checked cap on. The audience inside loudly screamed. I
jumped. Old Lady Jacobs laughed. “People are getting their money's worth, I guess,” she said and re-holstered her flashlight. I turned my attention to the poster for
Hillbillys in a Haunted House.
An illustration of a King Kong-like gorilla was carrying a beautifully frightened blonde who wore a low-cut dress. She looked familiar. Someone in the audience screamed again. Others nervously giggled. Henry Mancini's score was building. Where had I seen the beautiful blonde before? That must be Joi Lansing, I reasoned as I reread the poster, but where had I seen her? The word
Hillbillys
in the title jogged my memory. Of course: She played Gladys, Lester Flatt's glamorous wife, on
The Beverly Hillbillies.
I thought of my aunt with the same first name and all those movie magazines she always made sure she had for me to read. I thought of Uncle Toy and his glass eye and how he liked to give me a nickel so I could punch in that Ferlin Husky song he liked so much, “Timber, I'm Falling,” on his jukebox. I thought of Aunt Drucy telling her juke joint customers to put that dead soldier in a vat of cooking grease. I kept staring at Joi Lansing's big breasts and knew that my dead daddy wouldn't like them. I looked at the word
Hillbillys
once more. I wondered why it was spelled incorrectly. My mother would not approve. I wished I were back in that Lamar Theater lobby with her in Jackson looking at earlier images of Audrey Whatshername, who screamed again in the dark. I kept thinking about the Lamar and how I had tugged at my mother that day, begging her to bring me back to see Whatshername. I wanted, just one more time, just one more, to tug at my mother. Instead I sniffed the finger I had just used to touch my butthole. I thought of Audrey's outlined pussy. I thought of my eleven-year-old one. I kept my finger at my nose—was this how I smelled? this?—until the lobby doors swung open and the audience, laughing at how scared they had been, emerged.

When I first started to masturbate, I'd lie in my bath water and, before ejaculating, I'd put my face in the curve at the back of the tub so my voice would be acoustically enhanced by the porcelain, and I'd sing some of the songs I had sung at Trinity Methodist when I was younger and my soprano hadn't embarrassed me so. “The Church in the Wildwood” remained one of my favorites. I'd sing its lyric quietly to myself as I pulled on my penis:

There's a church in the valley by the wildwood,

no lovelier spot in the dale.

No place is so dear to my childhood

as the little brown church in the vale.

(Oh, come, come, come, come)

Come to the church in the wildwood.

Oh, come to the church in the dale.

No spot is so dear to my childhood

as the little brown church in the vale.

I was singing that verse and chorus over and over one night, after my experience with Dr. Gallman at the Downtowner Hotel in Jackson, when I suddenly began to fantasize about him masturbating me with his sickeningly smooth hand. The thought upset me, and I quickly replaced it with Billy Graham's handsomer visage, his own voice summoning me in his soothing North Carolinian accent when he made his altar call, “Come, come, come, come,” until that memory of my own voice, “Cum, cum, cum,” teasing Bobby Thompson back at our fourth-grade cafeteria table, overtook everything else and I shot a hot stream of sperm into the bathwater. Gallman to Graham to Thompson. It sounded like a double play my father would describe when making me watch Roger Maris and the New York Yankees on television on Saturday afternoons. Two men with the funny names of Pee Wee and Dizzy were the commentators for the game. “Dizzy was born up in Arkansas but we claim him here in Mississippi,” my father would brag. He would make me stop pretending I was vacuuming and dusting the furniture when Maris, who, like my father, threw right-handed but batted from the left, came to the plate. “Dizzy once broke a toe, back when he played for the Cardinals—think it was during an All-Star game—and had to come up with a whole new wind-up from the pitcher's mound. Gave up his fastball for a change-up and a slow curve. That's what you always got to do, Kevinator. When you break a toe, come up with a new way to pitch. That pretty much sums up everything in life. Baseball—can't beat it. People think I love basketball, but baseball's what broke my heart. That's the girl that got away. Dizzy had ‘im a brother that pitched in the majors, too, who went by
the name'a Daffy, like that goddamn duck you like so much. Dizzy and Daffy. Shit.”

I lay in the tub that night and thought of my father and how he would feel if he knew that Dr. Gallman had put his hand down my gym shorts. Would he have beaten him up? Would he have beaten me? It had been a few months since I had seen Dr. Gallman, but his letters continued to come addressed to me at Route 3, Forest, Mississippi. I thought maybe he would feel as ashamed as I did about what had happened between us, but he soon issued an invitation to join him again for a sleepover when he was headed back our way in December for another son's wedding. Mom, of course, was excited by the news. In the intervening months I had almost told her about what Dr. Gallman had done to me but the accusation could never quite escape my lips. I was beginning to admit to myself, however tentatively, that I might as well take on the sexuality that being a sissy entailed. Why not just be what everybody expected I was, I concluded, which was resulting in a conundrum regarding Dr. Gallman each time I worked up the courage to let Mom know what he had done: If I told on him, would I, in effect, be telling on myself? What he had inflicted upon me conflated in my thirteen-year-old thoughts—wrongly so—with my own emerging sexual identity. Men like Dr. Gallman focus on boys like me just at that moment in our lives when we are beginning to question who exactly, in the deepest sense, we really are. They cut us out of the herd that they stalk wolflike at every turn. But they are not wolves. They are lost members of the same herd, having replaced the word itself in their religiously ordered lives with the more compliant
flock,
a connotative palliative more pleasing to all the targeted ears it falls upon. A perverting of language is a logical step for those who pervert their longings. Certain words—love, trust, understand—are utilized by men like Dr. Gallman once they've marked their prey (a perversion of a word itself) and are moving in for the kill. Kill is not a perversion of
a word. Kill is exactly what I mean. Spiritual murders take place at the hands of such men. What must their most secret prayers be like, these men who pray and prey and pray and prey? Do they live in anguish? They cause it, but do they live in it? In my own most secret prayers I pray they do, even as I pray to be able to forgive them. To forgive him. Let me say it now: I forgive you, Dr. Gallman. But I will always hate you. Every time I get a hard-on, there is hatred for you in the blood that rushes there.

“How wonderful!” Mom said when I told her the news about his second invitation. I asked her if I had to go. “Of course, you do,” she said. “Don't you want to?” I shrugged and let pass another opportunity to tell her what had happened. “You been slippin' a bit in your Bible readin'. Don't think I haven't noticed. You don't seem as interested in your Christianity. Christianity takes a heap'a upkeep—like me trying to mop this floor like the fool I am,” she said. I watched her with her one good arm dip the mop into the bucket. Since her stroke, she couldn't wring the water from the mop's head so I'd kneel and do it for her. She insisted on being useful around the house, and trying to push a wet mop about the floor with that one good arm was one of the things she had come up with that she could still do, though I saw that it quickly tired her out. “Dr. Gallman will be good for you,” she said. “You could use a visit with him. Get you back on track.”

“I'll go if Kim goes,” I told her, thinking I could use my little brother to run interference. If Kim were there, Dr. Gallman wouldn't try anything again.

“Well, we'll have to see if he wants to go and if it's all right with Dr. Gallman,” Mom said, handing me the mop and asking me to finish up the job. “I'm sorry. I'm plumb pooped. I'm going out back to see what Pop wants for his supper. I can't eat no more of them stinky rutabagas we've had the last few nights. How does Sloppy Joes sound?”

I shrugged and finished up the mopping. Would I let that old man
put his hand down my pants again? Would he give me another massage? Would we pray again on our knees? Would I take another of his sleeping pills so I wouldn't have to know what he was doing to me during the night? At dinner, I negotiated with Kim for his participation in my plan. After I let him have half of my second Sloppy Joe, he agreed to come along with me and we cleared it afterward with a phone call to Dr. Gallman, who, a few December days later, picked up my brother and me in his Mercedes.