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UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI

Date:______

I, ______, hereby submit this work as part of the requirements for the degree of: in:

It is entitled:

This work and its defense approved by:

Chair: ______

BEARING A CROSS

A dissertation submitted to the

Division of Research and Advanced Studies of the University of Cincinnati

in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of

DOCTORATE OF PHILOSOPHY (Ph.D.) in the Department of English and Comparative Literature of the College of Arts and Sciences

2006

Joseph Ray Bates

B.A. Clemson University, 1997 M.A. Clemson University, 2000

Committee Chair: Brock Clarke, Ph.D. ABSTRACT

Bearing A Cross is a collection of stories which hail from Southern literature not in terms of reverting to the disingenuous constraints of regionalism or to the repeated, too-often-revered tropes of the tradition but rather in terms of aesthetics, manners, and aims. Borrowing from

Flannery O’Connor, I define this approach in my introductory essay as a “realism of distance,” as a style of writing which engages the comic and the grotesque not simply as subject matters but as a way to undercut, and thereby approach, the more serious and sacrosanct subject. The realist of distance exaggerates in order to better examine, distorts in order to draw his subjects into focus…in other words, he seeks to remove distance in order to ask basic moral, ontological, even theological questions. While it is true that much of the fiction collected in this dissertation seems, at first glance, to embrace various secondhand Southernisms—including but not limited to Civil War reenactments, Elvis impersonators, and the marriage of church and firearms—my intended subjects, meaning, my truer subjects, are men and women questioning their faith, their love, their lives. The critical portion of this dissertation, “The Beginning of Thought: Ralph

Ellison, Richard Wright, and the Aesthetics of the Protest Novel,” deals with similar issues of tradition, trope, and the individual talent. Specifically, I examine Wright’s Native Son, that work of social commentary and criticism that intends to be art, and Ellison’s Invisible Man, a work that rejects the limiting and simplistic schemas of protest fiction in favor of an aesthetic of complication yet which succeeds, on that very point, as a novel which provokes and invites serious social and political thought.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank my committee for their inestimable guidance not only in the completion of

this dissertation but throughout my doctoral work. In particular I would like to thank Brock

Clarke for his years of encouragement and mentorship.

My gratitude goes to the English departments at the University of Cincinnati and Clemson

University and to the fine people there.

I would also like to thank my family and friends for their love and support, without which I could not have undertaken this degree, much less completed it. Thank you for everything.

And finally, my love and thanks to Lauren.

Whenever I am asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one. To be able to recognize a freak, you have to have some conception of the whole man, and in the South the general conception of man is still, in the main, theological.

—Flannery O’Connor

CONTENTS

Introduction: A Realism of Distance…………………………………………………………………….2

Jesus Is Coming Soon…………………………………………………………………………………..15

Yankees Burn Atlanta…………………………………………………………………………………..33

Butterfinger……………………………………………………………………………………………..56

The South Will Rise Again……………………………………………………………………………..65

The Form of the Joke…………………………………………………………………………………...91

Boardwalk Elvis……………………………………………………………………………………….116

Bearing A Cross……………………………………………………………………………………….140

The UFOs……………………………………………………………………………………………...170

The Beginning of Thought…………………………………………………………………………….200 Introduction A Realism of Distance

In The Anxiety of Influence, Harold Bloom asserts that

Authentic, high literature relies upon troping, a turning away not only from the literal but

from prior tropes. Like criticism, which is either part of literature or nothing at all, great

writing is always at work strongly (or weakly) misreading previous writing. (xix)

For the fiction writer, this anxiety of influence is ever-present—never more so, perhaps, than when he is writing about his own writing—and, as Bloom points out, this necessarily must be, if art is indeed both the process and the product of realizing, responding to, and rejecting the methods and manners of the artist’s forebears, an almost-Freudian balancing act between family tradition and family feud, and with equal neurosis. Of course the anxiety here is heightened all the more by the fact that the artist, unlike the rest of humanity, is able to choose his or her own family, his or her own forebears, to adopt him- or herself into a given tradition and then to search for ways to further that tradition by breaking it, reforming it, risking its ruin.

If all of this is true, then the Southern writer must be the least anxious writer working today.

Not that the Southern writer hasn’t misread his forebears; he has, rather seriously,

enthusiastically, and it has brought him great, goofy, embarrassing joy. Rather, the Southern

writer’s misreading of his own literary heritage—indeed, Southern literature’s continual

misreading of itself—has tended to be not an act of anxiety at all but an act of happy

acquiescence, of proud-to-be-here homage, and of blind, even dangerous devotion. The

Southern writer, rather than rejecting his prior tropes, has taken them for gospel, has exalted and

revered them, and any literature that reveres its own tropes is a dead literature.

Put another way: The problem of the Southern writer is not simply that he makes use of the

tropes of the tradition—the rural setting, the dirt-poor conditions, the crooked preachers and

2 politicians, the girls with wooden legs or glass eyes, the freakshows, the farmhands, the mule—

but that he still believes them. Borrowing from Emerson, the Southern writer has been

Faulknerizing for seventy-plus years, and he has done so, perhaps, for the worst reason possible: because he suspects that this is Southern literature.

Thus the fundamental dilemma of Southern literature for those in its critical and creative pursuit becomes one first of definition, and Southern literature, despite the obvious, has none.

Surely we can say that Southern literature is literature “of and from the South,” but this tells us nothing. Both point to region as the superficial qualifier, whether it is the region of birthright or the region of subject matter or, as a purist of the misguided definition might suggest, both. If it is

region of birthright, then the Southern writer need feel no anxiety of influence: He is a member

of the tradition by virtue of the fact he was spat out somewhere below the Mason Dixon. If it is

region of subject matter, then bring in the crooked politicians and preachers, the girls with

wooden legs, and one more dead mule to beat. Even if a Southern writer must be both at once,

this is hardly an initiation. It requires a bit of luck and a bit of redundancy, and the ability to

read.

Of course, there are those defenders of Southern literature and its tradition who argue that this

kind of blind faith in and stubborn adherence to the past are not faults at all but rather a defining

feature of the Southern temperament, creative or otherwise. In “The Good Songs Behind Us:

Southern Fiction of the 1990s,” Fred Chappell, one of the literature’s most revered elder

statesmen, makes the claim that the fundamental burden of the Southern writer—as well as the

Southerner in general—is history. “The Southern writer is entranced by Southern cultural

history,” Chappell writes, “because it is the only story there is. Once upon a time things were the

way they were supposed to be. Then something happened. Since that point, things have never

3 been the same” (3). Chappell goes on to make the link between this ubiquitous history—offered briefly in the above passage, in his own italics, as a kind of War of Northern Aggression bedtime story, though thankfully not in dialect—and the very earth that makes up the Southern landscape:

“History is pervasive; certain poets…have posited the thesis that history is mystically but nevertheless physically present in the Southern landscape, in the soil itself” (2). In the end,

Chappell argues, it is precisely this pervasive sense of the past that informs the Southern present:

A Southerner will revere his forebears not because they were smarter, braver, or more

virtuous than he believes himself to be, but because they inscribed with their lives the

History that he sees as a counterpart of Nature; it is almost as large as Nature in his

thinking and, as we have remarked, not entirely separate from it. Our ancestors did not

simply die; they died in the cause of the past, in the service of the History that they lived

in order deliberately to create. (6)

Such is the prevailing sentiment of Southern literature, and thus its predicament: No workable definition has grown out of the tradition because none has been willing to outgrow it.

Sometimes this reverence for the tradition and for the integrity of forebears requires the writer to set his work in the Deep Past, in that safeguarded and hermetic yesterday to which the Southern writer too often reverts in order to utilize the tropes of the tradition and still maintain a degree of verisimilitude, as in two of the most successful recent Southern novels, in terms of both readership and acclaim: Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain and Robert Morgan’s Gap Creek.

Sometimes the Southern writer uses this burden of history and the “something” that “happened” in the present tense, examining a Southern identity of poverty, miseducation, even a foreboding sense of violence, as in such works of Southern working-class neo-naturalism as Dorothy

Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina (which, though set in the “present” of Allison’s own life and

4 in the terrible events of her own childhood, remains as Faulknerian in its portrayal of mythic

Southern dysfunction as is bearable). Sometimes this burden is reduced in its violent implication

to a state of simple and often simplistic financial, social, or intellectual defeat, a general state of

Southern being defined by Padgett Powell as “whuppedness.” This form of the tradition takes as

its subject the generic blue-collar Southern stereotype—a character well meaning if largely

incapable, one who enjoys barbecue, NASCAR, Miller Lite, the usual accoutrements—as in the

short fiction of Tim Gautreaux, a talented writer who nevertheless presents such clichés of

contemporary Southern life as believable, because “Southern storytellers seem to love where

they are from, warts included” (viii). The problem with such thinking and such works as those

mentioned here is not their level of artistry or lack thereof; indeed, all of these writers have been

widely embraced and applauded by readers and critics alike. Rather, it is the fact that such

writers, and many more besides, attempt to progress Southern literature by looking constantly

backward. The tradition has not contributed to the definition of Southern literature; the tradition

has become the definition itself.

But perhaps what is truly missing from Southern literature, and what it must have in order for

it to change, resist change, and change again, for it to be a vital and vibrant art worthy of pursuit, is not a definition at all, not a limiting terminology, but rather something more: an aesthetic.

Flannery O’Connor suggests an excellent beginning to such an aesthetic in her essay “Some

Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction” in a line, much quoted and misquoted, which also serves as an epigram for this collection:

Whenever I am asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing

about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one. To be able to

recognize a freak, you have to have some conception of the whole man, and in the South

5 the general conception of man is still, in the main, theological. (44)

O’Connor argues that the Southern writer engages in distortion, in exaggeration, in order to pursue a greater truth—theological, she calls it, aware that this term carries troublesome connotations even as she uses it, but perhaps on a more basic level, excised of its political implications, a moral truth, a metaphysical truth, a human one. O’Connor calls this kind of writer not an “unrealist” at all but instead a “realist of distances,” a writer for whom “prophecy is a matter of seeing near things with their extensions of meaning and thus of seeing far things close up” (44). This writer engages in the comic and the grotesque not as an end in itself but as a means to an end, as a way in which to “[make] alive some experience which we are not accustomed to observe every day, or which the ordinary man may never experience in his ordinary life” but which nevertheless illuminates the ordinary, the everyday. This kind of realist is not interested in mirroring reality, in reflecting those physical, moral, or spiritual laws which we take as understood or for granted, but rather in favoring “possibility rather than probability”

(42). Yet the seeming distance this writer takes toward his subject is not a form of “unrealism” at all but a way of better seeking the subject, the real, the everyday, a way of exposing the freakish as familiar, the familiar as freakish. O’Connor predicts that this “realist of distance” might not be wholly welcome or understood in his approach, might be too easily dismissed as not being interested in “realism” at all, but she maintains that it is the complement of this artist’s ethics and aesthetics that will make the work substantive, whether or not it is wholly embraced.

“The [real] problem for such a novelist,” O’Connor warns, “will be to know how far he can distort without destroying” (50).

Before the skeptic points to this definition as mere semantics—simply another way of saying that Southern literature deals in freaks—it is necessary to point out how O’Connor’s statement

6 moves immediately beyond mere trope, how O’Connor points to the grotesque not as subject but

style. It is necessary, then, in examining how the grotesque functions in order to reach its end, which O’Connor terms “theological,” to move further away from the subject of Southern literature toward a theory of the grotesque and its important work.

Both Northrop Frye and Mikhail Bahktin have noted the role of the comic-grotesque in the early formation of the novel as a democratizing force, as a way of approaching the unapproachable and bringing the reverent down to more profane, human, and thus recognizable and examinable, terms. In The Dialogic Imagination, Bahktin traces the evolution of literature from the old, set form of the epic—a world of distance, of memory and tradition, of “firsts and bests”—to the contemporary, ever-changing, constantly self-critiquing form of the novel.

Bakhtin suggests, as does O’Connor, that the difference is one of distance or lack thereof: The epic as genre is one that is “closed as a circle; inside it everything is finished, already over.” The epic is thus a discourse

handed down by tradition. By its very nature the epic world of the absolute past is

inaccessible to personal experience and does not permit an individual, personal point of

view or evaluation…It is given solely as tradition, sacred and sacrosanct, evaluated in the

same way by all and demanding a pious attitude toward itself. Let us repeat: the

important thing is not the factual sources of the epic, not the content of its historical

events, nor the declarations of its authors—the important thing is…its reliance on

impersonal and sacrosanct tradition, on a commonly held evaluation and point of view—

which excludes any possibility of another approach—and which therefore displays a

profound piety toward the subject described and toward the language used to describe it,

the language of tradition. (16-17)

7 The distance of the old form, in other words, is a product of the reverence it requires of both the reader and of the storyteller toward the story’s own form, subject, style. As such, the epic world

“is an utterly finished thing, not only as an authentic event of the distant past but also on its own terms and by its own standards; it is impossible to change, to re-think, to re-evaluate anything in

it” (17).

What changes the epic, then—thereby changing subject and form from a closed, public

system reliant upon memory to a literature at once more open and yet more intimate, a

movement toward contingency individuality, consciousness, and conscience—is irreverence, is

comic exaggeration and degradation of the lofty subject and form in order to remove distance.

Bakhtin explains:

It is precisely laughter that destroys the epic, and in general destroys any hierarchical

(distancing and valorized) distance. As a distanced image a subject cannot be comical; to

be made comical, it must be brought close…Laughter has the remarkable power of

making an object come up close, of drawing it into a zone of crude contact where one can

finger it familiarly on all sides, turn it upside down, inside out, peer at it from above and

below…lay it bare and expose it, examine it freely and experiment with it…Here the role

of memory is minimal; in the comic world there is nothing for memory and tradition to

do. One ridicules in order to forget. (23)

Here is an approach that the new Southern writer—as opposed to the contemporary one content

to revere and rehash the tradition—must take, one in which the most obvious and necessary

system of subject, form, and tradition to be exposed and dismissed is his own. In recent years

there has been much made of postsouthern parody, of the Southern writer’s attempts to break

free of the anxiety of influence, of memory and tradition, by self-consciously over-embracing the

8 Southern subject. In his book Inventing Southern Literature, Michael Kreyling asserts that

Southern writers, more acutely than the critics of their work, have known that

[postmodern metalinguistic “play"] began with “Faulkner,” the great master-code

recognized now for so long as synonymous with "literary" and with "southern" that it is

harvested in parody contests. Not only is the atmosphere ripe for an "anxiety of

influence"; it is also ripe for the most common response to such anxiety: parody… After

Faulkner, can a southern writer be anything but self-conscious, attuned to southernness as

a matter of metalinguistics, a subject matter never unmediated? (157, 9)

Postsouthern parody seeks, in this way, to use laughter to destroy the epic. It allows the

Southern writer to move beyond the tropes of Southern literature by recognizing them as tropes and exposing them, even overexposing them, as such. Of course there are at least two limitations in the idea of postsouthernism. The first is that this is not, in itself, a new idea: O’Connor famously warned in “Some Aspects of the Grotesque” that the Southern writer must be hyper- aware of the limitations of the tradition: “The presence alone of Faulkner in our midst makes a great difference in what [the Southern writer] can and cannot permit himself to do,” she writes.

“Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down”

(45). O’Connor’s warning nevertheless has not stopped succeeding generations of Southern writers stalling on the tracks; every Southern writer engages in parody of the tradition, though many do not realize they are parodying at all.

But there is another problem: The aim of new Southern writing is not, must not be mainly and merely to ironize itself against its past. Rather, the new Southern writer takes Southernism as an easy and necessary first target in order to dismiss it as a target at all, in order to move forward toward more universal, mythic, possibly mystic questions of existence; if we recall O’Connor’s

9 words, the purpose of engaging in the comic-grotesque is as a means toward the theological, not

as an end unto itself.

In this sense, Frye’s examination of the grotesque and its function in The Anatomy of

Criticism is of crucial importance. Like Bakhtin, Frye claims that the comic-grotesque has

played a pivotal role in the evolution of literature, which he separates into modes:

1. Myth, the earliest form, wherein the hero is in kind and action superior to us;

2. Romance, wherein the hero is in degree superior to us, meaning, superior to

natural law, as in the folk tale;

3. The high mimetic, wherein the hero is in degree superior but in environment

and nature equal, where he is thus at his most heroic;

4. The low mimetic, where the hero is superior neither in kind nor in environment,

where he is “one of us,” and perhaps not a “hero” at all; and finally

5. The ironic, when he is inferior to us in power or intelligence.

Frye argues that the progression of literature is one in which the comic and the grotesque serve to

undercut myth, undercut the sacrosanct hero, until the highest form of literature is finally

achieved—ironically—at the point where its hero is at his lowest, even inferior to the reader.

The ironic, Frye reminds us, is a technique of “appearing to be less that one is…of saying as little

and meaning as much as possible.” In this sense, the ironic fiction writer “deprecates himself

and…pretends to know nothing, even that he is ironic” (40).

But rather than simply being a system in which the fiction writer chooses as his subjects

characters inferior to the reader—say, crooked politicians and preachers, girls with wooden legs

and glass eyes, freakshows, farmhands—the ironic, for Frye, though seemingly the furthest

removed from the Gods of Myth, is a mode able to double back on itself and its tradition, to

10 approach as subject not simply the ironic inferior but, eventually, the moral, the divine, the

theological. “Irony descends from the low mimetic,” Frye writes. “It begins in realism and

dispassionate observation. But as it does so, it moves steadily [back] toward myth, and the dim

outlines of sacrificial rituals and dying gods begin to reappear” (42). Thus the ironic subject

becomes for Frye a sufferer, a scapegoat, one who is essentially innocent and yet born into guilt

“in the sense that he is a member of a guilty society, or living in a world where such injustices

are an inescapable part of existence” (41).

This is the theological question of Southern literature, Christian in its implications if not its

dogma but almost certainly Christ-haunted, and here is where I believe an aesthetics of Southern

literature must begin. It is not a matter of Southernism, not a matter of such superficial criteria as

regional subject matter, idiom, most of all inheritance, but rather it is a style of writing whereby

the writer seeks to examine questions of existence, significance, and suffering. In this style the writer exaggerates and distorts, he uses humor and hyperbole, but his target is a serious one. It attempts to move Southern literature, in other words, finally into the realm of modernism— where Faulkner perhaps intended to move it before getting our mules stuck in the mud—and through to postmodernity and to whatever the age we are in now might be called. And it does so in terms of conflict and contradiction, seeking the real through the seemingly unreal, seeking faith through our freaks and finding freaks among the faithful. “Modernity, in whatever age it appears,” writes Jean-Francois Lyotard, “cannot exist without a shattering of belief and without discovery of the ‘lack of reality’ of reality, together with the invention of other realities” (77). It is by shattering belief and reality, then, that the Southern writer attempts to find and to redefine both.

It is my hope that the stories here fit this definition of Southern literature, that of a realism of

11 distance, above all others. It is true that many of the stories collected here take place in the

South. It is true that I take as my subject corrupt politicians and preachers, and that I throw in for good measure Civil War reenactments, the Atlanta Braves, Elvis impersonators, Tradeo, firearms, and the undead. But these are not revered subjects, nor are they even my primary ones.

My primary subjects are men and women who have lost their loves, their lives, their way, who are searching for a measure of transcendence in the midst of grotesquerie, who are looking for meaningful answers in an often meaningless, hostile, guilty world.

In “Jesus Is Coming Soon,” a man estranged from his wife hopes to prove himself worthy of reconciliation by joining the local Baptist church and then volunteering to head the church’s new

Rapture Response Unit, an act that all but assures the Apocalypse will come, and which does.

But it is through the ordeal that he comes to be the kind of man that might actually win his wife back, the kind of man that could reconcile the relationship, if only the world weren’t ending. In

“The Form of the Joke,” Harold Martin, a laugh therapist at the Institute for Unrecognized

Medicines, finds that he, himself, has become the victim of a joke, though it remains unclear who, exactly, is the joke’s perpetrator: Harold’s own sense of hopeful self-delusion; his wife, in collusion with a priest, a doctor, and a cop; or perhaps God Himself. (I have momentarily omitted another possibility: the author.)

Both “Boardwalk Elvis” and “Butterfinger” deal with artists—of a kind—struggling to come to terms with their work. In the first, an Elvis impersonator endures a crisis of faith regarding his, meaning the artist’s, relevance (not to mention the artist’s absurdity, which is one of the truest and most terrifying risks of art, jumpsuit or no). In “Butterfinger,” a writer and F. Scott

Fitzgerald impersonator is haunted by his inability to create, his awareness of his own mortality, and, above all, by the anxiety of influence, both from the real Fitzgerald, whom he can merely

12 hope to imitate well, and in the bullying form of a ball-kicking Ernest Hemingway. In “The

UFOs,” a man who suffers from Southern Baptist Disorder attempts to overcome his Existential

Diagnosis™ in order to find something in which he might fully believe. On the most basic level, then, and mentioning these few as examples, the stories in this collection tend to follow two main lines of inquiry, questions of faith and questions of art, both of which, of course, are ultimately the same. Whether in my approach to these subjects I have distorted to the point of destroying is for the reader to decide.

But there is an important and final distinction that must be made regarding O’Connor’s statement and my reading of it, and that is distinguishing “moral” or “theological” fiction from moralistic or didactic fiction…even from political fiction, though the realist of distance is occasionally (and, in this, often to his detriment) a satirist. Fiction that intends to “teach” the reader something is not properly fiction, or, I should say, is not properly art but rather propaganda, which sets itself in a closed system, in a hierarchy of thought jealously guarded and not intended to be questioned, and it is precisely this type of system—whether political, moral, or aesthetic—that the realist of distance attempts to undermine. This is not only the subject of the critical piece I have included in this dissertation, “The Beginning of Thought: Ralph Ellison,

Richard Wright, and the Aesthetics of the Protest Novel,” but a matter that I have tried my best to avoid in my work. I am not interested in fiction that purports to have The Answer but which is interested in asking The Question. This is what Theologians themselves have perhaps forgotten, which makes it all the more important that the writer of moral fiction never does.

13 WORKS CITED

Bahktin, Mikhail. The Dialogical Imagination. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981.

Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford UP, 1997.

Chappell, Fred. “The Good Songs Behind Us: Southern Fiction of the 1990s.” That’s What I Like (About The South). Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1993.

Frye, Northrop. The Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1971.

Gautreaux, Tim. “Warts and All.” New Stories From The South: The Year’s Best, 2004. Chapel Hill: Algonquin, 2004.

Kreyling, Michael. Inventing Southern Literature. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1998.

Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983.

O’Connor, Flannery. “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction.” Mystery and Manners. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969. 36-50.

14 Jesus Is Coming Soon

For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God, and the dead in Christ shall rise first: Then we which are alive [and] remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air, and so shall we ever be with the Lord. Wherefore comfort one another with these words. 1 Thessalonians 4:16-18

It has been six days now since I began living here at The Empty Tomb Baptist Church and doing battle with the undead.

Just this morning I had to kill a zombie that had breached our church’s defenses—this is how

I say it, breach and defenses, it’s a siege mentality—and the thing had somehow gotten itself stuck in the baptismal, moaning and wailing like the undead do. Luckily the racket woke me up, and then I woke up the deacons who were supposed to be watching guard. The deacons and I crept up through the choir loft and peeked into the baptismal to see what the fuss was about.

And there it was.

In life the hideous motherfucker had been Old Bill Butts, a man from the community who died several years earlier from an unfortunate accident involving Jack Daniels and John Deere.

He’d been a member of the church, a pillar of the community, a tiller of soil who by all accounts grew a mean melon. But now he was the walking dead in Christ, decaying and drooling, hobbling around in his rigor mortis way, and stuck in a giant bathtub. It was disconcerting for the deacons to see, because they’d known Bill Butts in life, known the man. It was disconcerting for me, too. He’d been buried in a Dale Earnhardt t-shirt.

I took the shot myself and blew its head clean off.

The deacons insisted on a word of prayer when it was done. They said, We know not your ways, Lord. Commend him to your spirit. He was a good man.

But then I reminded them that this last part, the good man part, was part of the problem. He was a good man. He was, in fact, one of the righteous who’d been decreed by the Lord God at

15 the end of time to rise, to give up his grave, and who’d been given by that same God, for reasons

not entirely clear to us, an insatiate appetite for human brain.

“He was an asshole,” I said. “I’m glad he’s dead again.”

It had been a close call, with all of us, the surviving left-behind, cramped into the sanctuary

proper, sleeping on pews, on the floor, wherever we could but keeping together, and if that

zombie’d had enough brains to avoid the baptismal pool, he’d certainly had enough for a decent

breakfast.

So we had a situation on our hands. Somewhere in the church was a breach big enough for

Bill Butts to squeeze his corpse through. Believe me, I didn’t want to leave the sanctuary any

more than anyone else did. But I knew if we didn’t act quickly there’d be more on the way, and

then we’d have not one zombie to deal with but a mess of them—a flock? a gaggle? a murder?— so, being the ranking member of the church’s Rapture Response Unit, by charter five guys who gave a darn about preparedness and the Second Coming, I drafted the five fat piece-of-shit deacons who slept while Bill Butts searched for the buffet line, and we set out.

The six of us crept in commando formation, or what we thought commando formation might be, through the dim corridors of the church. We crawled on our bellies into the bathrooms, the

Sunday School rooms, the preacher’s study. We crept upstairs and checked the Kids’ 8-12.

Finally, there was nowhere left to check but the basement, what we called the Fellowship Hall, where church members sometimes met to eat fried chicken and churn ice cream. None of us wanted to descend into that potential necro-hole—every horror movie I’ve ever seen has preached the same moral, DON’T GO DOWN THERE—but we knew we had no choice. We walked down into darkness, one flashlight among us, the rest of us pointing guns; it had friendly

fire written all over it. But we found the breach on our first sweep, a basement bathroom

16 window half underground, and to our surprise we found it had already been plugged: there was a cadaver stuck in it, just a dead, twitching leg, and one Converse high-top sticking through. It was a foot from the 80s.

So we raided the church’s small storage closet for its tools—a handsaw, some plyboard, hammer and nails—and then we went back to the window and did what we had to do. When we were done we threw the leg and the tools back into the closet, right beside the body of our former minister, The Reverend Horace Black, who I’d shot and killed six days earlier, at the beginning of The End Of The World, and who had not been a zombie when I shot him but something just as dangerous: a Southern Baptist minister.

I’ve been a member of the church a mere six months now, and what's more I joined not because I wanted to find salvation or further the brotherhood of man or be closer to God but because I hoped it might undo the trouble I’d made of my life.

First I’d been caught cheating on my wife, and shortly thereafter I was caught divorced. What followed was a disconsolate and heartbreaking year in which I took up binge drinking, managed in my drunkenness to methodically alienate what friends I believed I had, many of whom, as it turns out, felt more friendly toward my wife than I’d been led to believe—the bastards—and finally began to suffer from poor job performance, PJP, which is the clinical term for not giving a shit. I showed up late, sometimes not at all, and when I did show up to teach English to my sophomores, instead of asking questions like What do you make of the strain of anti-Semitism in

The Sun Also Rises?, I said things like, None of this matters. Words on a page. Hemingway

17 blew his brains out.

In the mess I made of things even my parents turned on me. They said it was no wonder she

left, I was a train wreck; that they were surprised, in fact, she’d stayed so long. They said I

needed to break out of my nosedive, practice positive self-talk, shower and shave, and then go

beg her on my cheating hands and knees to take me back. Maybe I could re-win her trust,

demonstrate I was capable and honest and not so solipsistic—it means self-centered, I had my sophomores look it up. Maybe then I could move back in with her, back across town into my nice house with my nice shudders and recycle pick-up, and move out of my rented mobile home, which they called a cracker box. Furthermore they said I shouldn’t call them again until I’d somehow managed to do all of this, citing the “Tough Love Works Wonders” episode of Sally

Jesse Raphael.

But instead of positive self-talk I was shitfaced and confused, on the verge of losing my job, friendless, hopeless, and solipsistic, and so I began to embark on a series of shameful and hard- to-watch cries for help which I thought, for whatever reason, might win back the hearts I’d lost.

I need not rehash all those plans to make things right which failed tragically, one by one, and

failed publicly, except to say the last of my brilliant ideas, wherein I pretended to be suicidal,

fortunately never got off the ground—I’d dug up the yellow pages and started flipping through S,

for Suicide Hotline, so I could call some high-school volunteer and ask what an approaching suicide looked like, and not to worry or call the cops, I was just pretending so I could win my wife back. But instead of finding the page marked STUCCO - SURGICAL DEVICES, the book fell open, call it luck, providence, gravity, whatever, to a page marked simply, SALVATION.

I decided it was a much better plan: If I pretended to be not mentally disturbed but instead a

Christian, a churchgoing, tithe-giving, Republican-voting upright member of the community,

18 might my parents not see this as a move toward responsibility, as a step toward getting my life back together? Might my wife not see I was penitent for my meaningless and thoughtless infidelity, which surely I was, capable of making amends and worthy, perhaps, of another chance?

So I began calling the listings, one by one, to see what I could do.

Annunciation Church of Tolerance and Understanding asked where I stood on the gays marrying. I said I wasn’t sure. They told me to get sure.

Baptism By Fire let the machine get it, which said, If you are in immediate danger of eternal damnation, press one.

Corpus Christi said they were not taking any new clients, pending criminal litigation.

But when I began to think it was hopeless, I hit the Es and dialed the number for The Empty

Tomb. It rang twice before a man with a graveled, gentlemanly voice picked up: “Mitchell

Moore,” the voice said, “I am The Reverend Horace Black of The Empty Tomb Baptist Church, and I have been waiting here for your call.”

It was, I thought, an impressive use of caller ID. So I joined, attending services twice a week, sometimes attending hungover, but making sure everyone in my life knew I’d found God. I tried my best to get mentioned in the church bulletin, so I could send off copies as proof of my reformation. I took the Royal Ambassadors to Six Flags. I stuffed my own name into the prayer request box—printed every week in the bulletin, so people could stick it on the fridge and remember who they should be praying for when they went for a sandwich—and I made sure I wrote each time, Mitchell Moore is a man who misses his wife. I took every opportunity that came my way, and when Reverend Black rose one Sunday and told the congregation the end was probably near, that maybe we should form a committee to review our Armageddon strategies, I

19 raised my hand high. The bulletins I sent out that week had my new title and responsibility underlined, my grainy, Xeroxed picture circled twice—That’s Me!—and I hoped this would be it, that my life would at last to fall into place.

And then, just five weeks later, God Almighty called my bluff.

It was a Sunday Night service, the slowest of the week, simply another sleep-through sermon I hadn’t been paying attention to from a book of the Bible whose name meant nothing to me, and the next moment it was a strike of thunderclap like God dropping His groceries. And then hell broke loose.

Reverend Black stopped mid-sentence and said, “Did y’all hear that?”, and a beat later the earth boomed, shaking dust from the supports of the church onto our heads, and the sanctuary fell pitch black, and the stained glass passion shook.

Everyone started screaming profanities, so I did too.

Reverend Black screamed for us to get down, get down, started screaming shit that made no sense like Jap Attack!

But the hits kept on coming, one after the other, deafening sounds of noise on noise that came from nowhere and everywhere, irrational sounds of microphoned sheep bleating and blares of trumpets, base minor keys, discords fighting against each other.

As soon as we realized there was no Jap Attack, we fumbled upright and rushed headfirst to the front doors, flung them wide, and we saw. The fat moon was turned black and thick as blood but mixed pale as milk, the light cast sick and pallid over the night, like a photograph of a night,

20 and the stars fell from the sky in kamikaze spirals right down to the horizon, following one after the other, and in the distance things fluttered in the air, massive things on ribbed wings, animals or men or neither or both, wings like a bat and bodies black as bulls and a face only a mother could love.

We were struck dumb, the Sunday Night congregation, straining to say something but making only stifled, strangulating sounds, as if we were trying to cough up our sins, and so I broke our silence and screamed, Jesus Fucking Christ.

“Jesus Christ!” our little old lady organist said, pointing at the dying, drooping moon.

“Jesus Christ!” Reverend Black himself cried, raising his voice to heaven like Help.

“Jesus Christ!” said the deacon with the DuPont toupee, “Jesus Christ!”, and he directed our attention to the rusted graveyard beside the church—every church has a graveyard, it’s one-stop shopping—where a flank of dusty dead were pulling themselves from the earth, standing upright, stumbling on stiff legs toward us, like in Thriller. Every few seconds the ground began to shuffle, stir, and then hock up its remains.

“It’s here,” Reverend Black said. “It’s Armageddon.” He added a hallelujah that trailed upwards like a question mark. He ran his hands over his face and through his cropped white hair like he was trying to scrub himself clean or awake.

It was an excellent time to get back inside.

Within minutes we were barricaded inside the church, surrounded on all sides by graves digging themselves up. Several of the more masochistic among us ran to the windows in the office and study rooms and watched the undead lumbering slowly out of the graveyard, arms raised, staggering in the clumsiest conga line we’d ever seen. From all time, in varying degrees of decay, some no more than bone, Confederate undead, slave from unmarked graves undead,

21 poodle skirt and block letter varsity undead, overalls and Skoal Bandit mesh baseball cap undead, the dapper undead, whose families loved them, all of them limping straight for us, and none of them looking very happy to be back.

“What are we going to do?” the preacher said, which is not something you want to hear in such a situation. Then I realized he was talking to me.

“What are you asking me for?” I said.

“What am I asking you for?” he repeated, raising his voice. “We need the Rapture Response

Unit, Mitchell. We need your plan for the end of the world. It’s go-time.”

I didn’t know how to tell him there was no Rapture Response Unit. I’d been charged with recruiting men of able body and intrepid moral character to serve as Soldiers for Christ and I hadn’t done a lick of it. I made some letterhead with a spooky sunset and a cross and some monsters with google-eyes and my name across the top of it, and I’d written my wife. That was it. Furthermore the letter had very little to do with Armageddon.

“If you’re looking to me for this,” I said, “we’re fucked.” I suggested 911. But nobody could get reception on their cells—I mean normally there’s no reception, the Blue Ridge

Mountains are right there, if you have rabbit ears on your TV you watch fuzz. But even the landline in the preacher’s study made only plastic quiet. It was just like the Book of Daniel predicted, Reverend Black said. Mostly.

“What are we going to do?” the preacher asked again, and I almost started making up things on the spot out of embarrassment, boiling water and clean towels, garlic cloves. But then

Brother Bubba stepped forward and said, “I have a plan.” Brother Bubba was our pianist, a highway patrolman who was known to head into the woods every winter with night vision goggles and grenades and wage guerilla war on deer. “In my car I have an arsenal,” he said. “I

22 propose we rip those dead mothers a new one.”

And someone said, Amen.

Brother Bubba’s El Dorado was right out front, and the church men ran for it frantic as a bunch of rats tied together, trying our best to ignore the moon hanging there like a scab, trying to ignore the bloody sky, crooked like it might fall right off. We took firearms from the trunk and tucked them tight into our bosoms, reminiscent of our glory days on the gridiron—Razorback Pride— and then ran like hell howling and screaming back toward the church.

Brother Ellis was the only one who didn’t make it back. He was seventy-two and probably shouldn’t have gone in the first place, but he’d been stricken by a fleeting bout of dignity and good will, maybe the spirit of the thing, and he’d made it twenty feet of the front door when he was taken. The undead then slobbered him and chewed him until they were full. Every time it looked like it was over, like he’d finally had enough, like there was nothing of him left to give,

Brother Ellis’s leg would twitch, and another undead would stagger or slither up to his body and join in on the meal. Finally, mothers told their children not to look.

It was a blow to our resolve, for sure. Some of the church members suggested we formulate a plan for retrieval and recovery, like in that Chuck Norris movie. Others said Brother Ellis was likely already dead and besides, at seventy-two he wouldn’t have seen too many more

Christmases, zombies or not. But the biggest concern was whether what we pulled in would still be Brother Ellis. Was Brother Ellis himself now an abomination? Or was he just Brother Ellis, chewed? We began putting the hard questions to Reverend Black, asking him to flip past the

23 gospels and psalms and the feel-good books to the prophecy books, the macabre ones, where the

action was. But Reverend Black seemed shaken. He didn’t know if being attacked by the

undead made you undead. He was having a difficult time finding reference to any of this, at least

that might be of use.

“I don’t know where to look,” the preacher said, rustling the tissue pages. “A bunch of this

stuff contradicts itself.”

But Brother Ellis was forgotten moments later when someone shushed us—we cocked our

ears, for no good reason but the effect, and heard at first a low rumbling noise, then the drawing

sounds of tires screeching, horns honking, mufflers obnoxious and rattling and inviolate of state law, all of these sounds at a distance but making ground. By the time we reached the front window, we could see headlights glowing around the curve of the road, headlights from both directions, and then whipping around the bend toward us, caring little about the CHILDREN

PLAYING or the sign with the cow on it, there were cars. Lines of them. Little old lady cars.

Station-wagon family cars. SUVs for a higher tax bracket cars. And in front of them all God- fearing, minimum-wage, gun-loving NASCAR cars, foglight and dual exhaust cars, and the kind of trucks you climb a ladder to get into.

It was the opposite of an exodus, easily the most people I’d ever seen trying to get to church.

It was like watching the blind drive—cars squealing in on two wheels, driving off the side of the road on the gravel and grass and whipping up clouds of dirt, scraping past each other and a few plowing headfirst into each other, a few headlong into nearby trees, everybody parking wherever they could in the lot or on the street and then sitting in their cars and honking their horns and screaming fucking murder, and right there waiting for them was the undead, bumping their way through the traffic jam, lumbering up window to window, flailing their cadaver arms on the

24 windshields, bending down and peeking in. If you’d put roller skates on them, they could’ve served drinks.

Finally the funk of gridlock broke when a family of four in a Jeep Cherokee counted to three

and jumped out of their car, running for their lives toward the front door. A few others had the

bad idea that this was their shot, too, and as soon as the car doors opened the feeding frenzy

began. But many were making it past the zombie lines, some by trying to fight back, some

because others—human beings who at the moment of truth decided being a human being meant

certain noble things—helped them escape by sacrificing themselves, tackling or punching the

zombies and thereby marking their own fate as entrees. Still others simply outran them—the

righteous undead are grotesque and mean-spirited, but you can take them in a footrace.

In this manner we took in half the community. Every few moments someone else started

beating on the front doors and begging to be let in, and the deacons flung the front doors open,

discharged their firearms into the night, and then pulled anything human and not shot inside. It’s

hard to know how long this went on—watches weren’t so important at the time, nobody had to

be anywhere—but it seemed like hours, with us, the men of the church, battling the undead and

offering shelter and Christian goodwill, whatnot. It went on long enough for the church to begin

filling up and then to swell with people from the neighborhood, familiar strangers, from the

grocery store or the drug store maybe, from the random way you know people without ever

knowing them at all. I kept hoping I might see Mary or my parents barrel through, though they

lived on the far side of town, the better-off side, and had dozens of churches to choose from

between. But I kept hoping. Every family dragged in momentarily looked like mine.

Inside the church we were a bunker, a refugee camp, a 1950s family bomb shelter—we were

the people we’d all imagined before, sitting in a war zone or some natural disaster with pale skin

25 and dirty cheeks and dusty hair, cringing when the thunder outside struck close, except the

people in those real situations probably sat in their war zone or their natural disaster and thought,

This must be what it feels like to sit through Armageddon. None of us knew how to act.

Reverend Black retreated back into his Bible, which was probably best, flipping through the

pages as if he’d lost something, muttering to himself like a politician put on the spot, knowing he

had the answer to the question he’d been asked somewhere, in one of those pages, and wishing

the whole time some buttkisser would come cart him off and save him. And none of the rest of

us had any ideas, either, not me or the musicians or the Sunday School teachers or the ushers, no one found themselves but the deacons, who seemed relieved to be spending the time discharging weapons and approximating manliness. I walked around the sanctuary asking people if they

were all right, if they needed anything, but this was more or less rhetorical, as they all needed

something and I didn’t have jack shit. Someone suggested we hold some form of service, if for

no other reason than to just keep our minds off the hell happening outside. Our music director

tried to strike up a few songs, with people sharing hymnals by candlelight, their hands shaking

the musty books close to the flames fire-hazardly. But every hymn the congregation began, no

matter how seemingly cheery it started off, all of them made their way back by the first chorus to

the wailing and gnashing of teeth, to flesh flaking off in sheets, God Getting His. I’d never

noticed how many of those songs turned into a bloodbath, because I’d always mouth instead of

sing. But they all were full of vengeance and warning and doomsday, so after a few failed

attempts at song everyone went back to staring into space, listening to the glass-on-glass noise

coming from everywhere, sound you felt in your ribs, and listening to the booming reports of

firearmed deacons. For my part I was worthless at raising morale—I know only a few jokes, all

of them inappropriate to the setting. I almost started telling them anyway.

26 But then Reverend Black himself came back from the dead. “It’s all so simple!” he shouted,

staring down into his Bible. He held it up for all to see, flayed open to the chapter and verse

where he seemed to think something important had happened. “It all makes sense to me now!

I’ve got it!”

Reverend Black stopped here, stalling for a response, a preacher’s way of asking Know what?, so someone in a back, dark corner of the room—a member of the church, I suppose— finally offered a weak Amen to get him going again.

“Here I’ve been looking at this all wrong,” the preacher explained. “I’ve been thinking,

Revelation says we’ll be taken up before the opening of the first seal. But I think we can safely say, first seal broken and here we are. And Paul in Corinthians says we’ll be transformed at the

last trumpet, whenever that is, and in Thessalonians he says we’ll be taken up immediately, when the dead rise from the ground. Everyone with me? And Matthew says we’ll be living here a while. So we’ve got what they call some dissonance in the accounts, and that’s why I looked

like I didn’t know what was happening.

“But then I realized: the Bible is the infallible word of God. It’s infallible. But John, Paul,

and Matthew are only human, tragically so, and so they’ll make some mistakes now and then.

What I’m saying is that Matthew is flat wrong, Revelations is partly right and Paul, if you

average the two books, comes out to right about now. So let’s get ready to meet the Lord,

people. The Bride of Christ is going home.” Then Reverend Black began collecting a few of his things, straightening his tie, and he took a comb out of his pocket and began fixing his hair,

because he wanted to look his best for his wedding night.

But his reasoning didn’t help us much: maybe a few people followed him, began collecting

their things as if a bus were about to pull up, but most of us just sat there as we’d been doing,

27 looking at each other and at the people readying for glory, and the deacons went back to firearm duty.

“Fire in the hole!” they screamed, and they flung the doors wide open.

In crashed a security breach, a woman wearing two zombies on her back.

And then it was chaos.

Half the deacons leveled their guns straight at her, aiming right at her head, the other half

screamed for them to hold their fucking fire. The congregation screamed and so did I, everyone did but the zombies, which had her bonyhanded by the neck and were trying to move their mouths toward her. I ran up and started swinging my loaner shotgun, trying to knock them off

her and missing every time, hoping that if I managed to make contact the shotgun wouldn’t go

off right in my face. She finally managed to wriggle free and fell face forward into the church, and then we unloaded on the damned things, kicked them out, and shut the door.

But the woman—one of ours, we saw when she stood, the church’s token unwed mother— picked herself up and the hysterics went right on. “They got him!” she screamed. Him meant her

eleven-year-old kid Roscoe, bound to a wheelchair, born without a spine…the wages of sin,

many in the church whispered behind her back. “They got him!”

Immediately we asked where he was, we’d go out there into the parking lot and get him back,

though I suspect if we’d had a little more time to think we might’ve kept our mouths shut. But

she shook us off, raised a finger and pointed above her head, and started waving it. “They!

They! They!”

She said her house opened up like it had been split with an ax, light filled everything, and

then he was gone.

Reverend Black processed this information for a moment, then he put down his Bible and

28 picked up a gun—which as a general rule means trouble—and a few moments after that, I shot

him dead in front of his church.

In the six days since, I hadn’t discussed the shooting with anyone, and nobody had been brave

enough to ask me about it, until this morning, when the deacons and I dislegged the bathroom

intruder and threw the limb into the closet beside Reverend Black. Then, in their tactful way, the

deacons took the opportunity to ask what’d been going through my head the moment I decided to

kill our preacher. I thought about it for a minute, and then I offered a few answers, all of them

more or less true.

First I told them I thought he was off his fucking nut. And this is hard to argue with.

His demeanor changed soon as he picked up that gun, and he began to talk in his slow sermon

voice—which I always found kind of quiet for an evangelical, a good voice to doze off to—and

he explained that he’d been mistaken, that there’d be no reunion in the sky for us after all. He

said the righteous had been taken off to be with Christ and that we had been left behind, like in

the popular book series of the same name. He said the Bride of Christ, after all this, had been

left standing at the altar. And then he said he was sorry, he hated it had to be this way, but

everyone who wasn’t Baptist would have to leave.

I realize now that he had something of a point: our resources are running low, our tensions are running high, and the strain is even more with three-hundred-fifty people than the seventy or so on the books—I've become kind of an ersatz minister myself, by virtue of killing the only real one we had, and it falls to me to think of such things. But point or no point, I believed then and

29 believe now that nobody deserves to be eaten by a zombie. It’s become a credo.

But then, I told the deacons, I realized that as the ranking member of the Rapture Response

Unit, it fell to me to defend the congregation against all enemies supernatural and domestic.

Brother Bubba maybe had as much or even more jurisdiction in this matter, being a highway patrolman, that’s true. But by the time I shot the preacher, Brother Bubba had already become

Officer Down. The front doors were rattling off their hinges with people begging us to open up,

but when the deacons started for the doors, Reverend Black fired a shot into the air, sending plaster and dust down onto his hairdo, and the deacons froze. If we’re going to start kicking

people out, does it make much sense that we’re going to let more people in? he said. He

apologized again for the inconvenience but said this was it, we were going to be stuck there for

some time, and there was simply no way to support all these people, and everyone but Baptists

had to go. He started naming names—Methodists, Presbyterians, humanists, feminists, and so

on—and he scanned the crowd, like he knew what a Methodist might look like. Brother Bubba,

realizing that people were in danger, and not from the abominations outside but from within,

tried to rush him, and Reverend Black shot him with his own damn gun.

Again, all of this seemed, at the time, reason for a shooting.

But for what it’s worth, truthfully—and this is what I did not share with the deacons—in the

moments before I shot The Reverend Horace Black I found myself thinking about my wife, and

for the first time in over a year, my thoughts had nothing to do with my affair or her discovery of

it, or the painful after-events that happened quickly, that dragged on forever—her coming to

school with the letter in her hand, found in a sock drawer; her storming the Guidance

Counselor’s office and knocking the bewildered glasses straight off my brief mistress’s face. My

begging, my misery, my moving my things on a Saturday afternoon alone, box after box heavier

30 and heavier, the full contents of my share of our seven years. I found myself thinking none of

these terrible things, the worst that had happened to us, the lowest and loneliest year of my life.

What I remembered instead was her habit of crying over commercials, like the Worther’s

Original that ran our last Christmas together, the one where the old man in the knit sweater

reconnects with his grandkid. She’d start sniffling soon as it came on. I’d forgotten all about it.

She’s a sucker for commercials like that.

I remembered that she sings in her sleep. I don’t know if she even knows that she does because I never told her. I thought if I told her it might stop; it’s been a long time since I’ve heard it, of course. But there it was, the pop of Reverend Black’s handgun ringing in my ears—

Brother Bubba felled—and my wife in my head on the second verse of something mumbled. It happened in a flash. Both of them did, I mean. The singing and the shooting. Everything does.

But it was the finality of it all—Reverend Black and his firearm, the bodies on the floor and outside, the recognition of the end—which made me remember these things, and made me realize, or maybe recognize, that I might never see them again, my wife or my parents. I realized

I’d missed my chance, missed a lifetime’s worth, the only lifetime I’d ever get, to make things right. I’d never have those simple, unused allowances again, not to apologize for my mistakes, not even to make sure they were safe. And I found myself hoping that maybe my wife and my parents had somehow made the grade and were no longer on this world but were somewhere in the sky, rising up to the next. Or if they were still on this world, I hoped that they’d found a church of their own and were bolted in with decent men and women devoted to their protection, and I hoped in that case they had superior firepower. But then I saw my own church flickering in candlelight; saw the fear in shadows on the faces of the taken-in, our preacher training his weapon on them; saw a single, silhouetted undead standing outside one of the stained glass

31 windows, his dead hands cupped to his face, trying to peek in; heard the screams of those who

were still outside, horrified, pounding and pleading for help, right on our own front door. And I

knew, though my family might never know, that I hadn’t squandered my last chance to be the

kind of man they wanted me to be, the kind of man they might be proud of, if only they were

here, and the world weren’t dying.

Reverend Black pulled back the hammer on his weapon and asked if everybody was ready.

And I knew that I was.

I took the shot myself and took his head clean off. Nobody clapped. Nobody screamed. It

was just what it was.

“Open those goddamn doors,” I said. “Let’s take them in.”

And so we did, every last one of them—Methodist, Presbyterian, Episcopalian, Lutheran,

Mormon, Muslim, Jew, Communist, socialist, feminist, atheist, liberal, conservative, apathetic,

and, God help us, even the Catholics—and so we remain, cramped up in this small church,

waiting for whatever happens next. But though I’m no one’s model of a religious scholar, I

think I have a good idea what that might be. I know that, for better or worse, Jesus is coming

soon, and with him comes judgement. But I hope that when that time comes, when the mistakes

of our lives are played before us, one by one, we will have the chance before him to make our

case. Until then, we will do what we have to do to survive, defending ourselves against the

attack of the righteous, so long as the ammunition holds up, and nourishing ourselves on HiHo

crackers and grape juice, the body and blood of Christ.

32 Yankees Burn Atlanta

I’d been named starting pitcher at the Braves Baseball Fantasy Camp, the Prime-of-Life League,

and I felt the start an honor, my moment to be both excellent and man-like, the very reasons I’d

come to camp in the first place. I suppose there were a few more reasons, truth be known, that

I’d flown down to Florida to play baseball with a bunch of strangers for a week, such as the

trouble I’d been having at Independent Vikings of America, the insurance company where I

work, leading to some occupational malaise, due to the fact I hadn’t sold a policy in months.

Such as the quiet that followed my son’s leaving home for the University of North Carolina,

what the WebMD refers to as empty nest syndrome. Such as my low self-esteem and high self-

disregard, my hairline receding and my waistline widening, my nearsightedness, my halitosis and

hypertension, and my lack of rigidity in the act of physical love. But Fantasy Camp was my

chance to make a fresh start, to rid myself of the mediocrity I’d become exceptional at. It’s the

great old story of middle-aged men triumphing over adversity.

But at first it looked like camp might turn out to be one more gross miscalculation in my

life—it wasn’t exactly what was advertised in the brochure. For instance, Fantasy Week was supposed to take place at Disney’s Wide World of Sports Stadium in Beautiful Lake Buena

Vista. But there was a money dispute between AOL Time/Warner—they’re the sorry bastards who own the Braves—and the Disney Corporation. So instead camp was some AA stadium in the middle of the end of nowhere. I don’t know where we were, really. It was the kind of place a mobster dumps a body.

Here’s another for instance: In the brochure it said I’d get to rub elbows with former Braves greats, with Braves of Yesteryear. But that wasn’t really the case. I got to meet Phil Niekro the first day of camp, but he showed up not in a uniform but a polyester suit like I’d donated to

Goodwill twenty years ago, and instead of a ball he cradled a martini. He made a few

introductory remarks about baseball, its romance, the import of the game on our national

identity, et cetera, but then he got off track and started talking about this lady who lived beside

him he was taking to court because she was growing shit-ugly trees in her front yard, and the

gated community had eyesore policies, and he was Phil Fucking Niekro. He went on like this for

a good twenty minutes, then he lit a cigar and disappeared. That’s hardly rubbing elbows.

Instead we hung out all week with a gruff old goat named Sandy. He was shaped like a bowling

pin and claimed to have taken a few at-bats with the Braves in 1982, but nobody much

remembered him. Sandy was more of a bourbon man.

“Listen up, candy asses,” Sandy said, when Niekro went off to find his limousine. “I’ve been

charged with turning you sacks of shit into ballplayers by the end of the week, and by God if I’m

not steamed about it. Look at you. You know what kind of men have worn the Braves uniform?

The same damn uniform you’re going to squeeze your fat asses into? Real men. Brave men.

Dedicated men. You got your Dale Murphy. You got your Hank Aaron. Phil over there. What

about Babe Ruth, Rogers Hornsby, and Cy Young? Yep, yep, and yep, a season apiece. And

now you guys.

“I don’t care what kind of high-rolling jet-setting candy-ass job you’ve got on the outside, for

the next week you are ballplayers. That means you will eat, drink, and sleep baseball. That’s right, you won’t eat caviar and you’ll put down the donut. You’ll eat baseball. For the next

week, you’re representing the entire Atlanta Braves organization, and when you squeeze your fat

asses into that uniform you’ll be charged with keeping up a storied franchise that started in 1876,

a long time ago.”

Beneath the offensive, insulting, bastardly exterior, Skip was really a fine man—Skip is

Sandy, I mean, he was the skipper of the team, not named Skip, baseball lingo. At the meet-and- greet the first night—which turned out to be just us and him standing at the main concession stand with an icechest of cold Miller Lite—Skip told us his obligatory tales of the diamond, his days in the minors and his literal span of days in the majors. He’d put on a shirt and tie for the party, even a sharp blazer, though he still had his baseball pants on, and he jostled his bourbon neat and smoked filterless cigarettes and told us how the game used to be. He said back then superstars and working grunts all smelled the same, unperfumed. He said base hits were hard as building a house, and home runs had to be muscled out of the park. He said back then the Braves team would roll in from a road trip and would be back in the arms of the women they loved by ten, and then back home by midnight. It was a good one, though I’d heard the joke before.

That night the fantasy campers huddled into the concrete barracks where we’d be staying— like a bomb shelter above-ground, a block building with rows of rust-framed bunk beds, an open shower and busted toilet in the back, a pay phone for homesickness, and a couple of corroded window fans that didn’t do much besides make noise and breeze the cobwebs around—and we claimed our bunk beds and shook hands and acted uncomfortable. I could tell we were all in the same way: all of us in our fifties, uncertain about what we were doing here and about each other, uncertain most of all about ourselves, tentative to let our guards down or our trust up, afraid of the humiliation of failing in front of other men. You could see it in the way we carried ourselves, slightly hunched in at the shoulders, arms down at our sides, like trying to fold our bodies around us for protection. All of us dressed in golf shirts we’d bought for the trip, or maybe that our wives bought, all neatly ironed, tucked into khaki slacks which rode too high on us, the belts getting closer to our navels year after year. There was only one younger guy there, who looked about thirty, with his faded baseball cap and untucked tee shirt, and he shook hands

and said hello polite as the rest of us, though I wondered what the hell he thought he was doing there among so many manicured, insecure middle-aged men. I think we were all wondering that.

Just before lights out, when the men all piled into the bathroom to brush their teeth and wash

their necks and underarms, I went back to the pay phone and called home to my wife. I told her

that my hopes for self-actualization were high, despite the shitty conditions of the camp itself.

“I tell you, Helen, I really believe this is going to do it,” I said. “The funk I’ve fallen into is about to break. Here is my chance to right the wrongs of my middle-aged life. Here is my chance to recover a sense of masculinity and self-worth that will guide me confidently into my twilight years. I’m living the dream.”

“Drink your fluids,” Helen offered. “Don’t overdo it the first day. Just stretch and drink your

fluids and have some fun with it. Everyone is there to have fun, Eugene. So just enjoy it.”

Helen and I have been married thirty years, have raised a son, have endured sickness and health

and all the difficult, heartbreaking monotonies of adult life, and she’s always been the one to

look out for me. It was her idea I come to Fantasy Camp: She saw the commercial on TV and

TiVo’d it, made the right inquiries, and for Christmas she gave me a glove with the brochure

tucked inside. She told me to bring the glove to camp and to use it to bring the cheese. Helen’s

interest in baseball is through marriage, but she knows the names of the players and their stats,

knows the history and keeps track of the standings as much as I do. She holds my hand

whenever I cry. Sometimes I forget I’m a lucky man.

But by mid-afternoon Monday, our first day of fielding practice, I thought I’d made a big

36 mistake about recapturing some hopes and dreams, as our Fantasy Week threatened to become something more of a Harsh Reality Week.

We were terrible. We stunk the place up. We were the opposite of good. We let ground balls bound right between our feet. We took pop flies square on the top of the heads. Our throws were high or wide or in the dirt, and a few actually found their way into the empty stands.

“What are you shitbags doing?” Skip yelled, popping fly ball after fly ball up for us to fudge.

He yelled things like plant your feet, squeeze the catch, eyes on the ball, but after a few hours he stopped coaching altogether and just started cursing, calling us horrible combinations of profanities I’d never heard before, the kind you know only if you’ve been in baseball forty-plus years. It was an honor but still humiliating.

Our batting wasn’t much better. We broke for a bag lunch around one, peanut butter and honey sandwiches, a child’s pint of milk, a chocolate cookie for dessert, and then we stepped up to the plate for another few hours of taking the fun out of fundamentals. Skip lobbed the ball to the plate and watched the fouls fly, the zingers straight back, the choppy grounders that were more mistake swings than anything, a few bloopers into the outfield that Skip condescendingly referred to as blasts. He said he’d seen better swings on ghetto playgrounds.

But after a while we finally began to loosen up, to show some signs of progress, despite

Skip’s anti-encouragement. By the time supper came around, the February sun setting early but in beautiful shades, clouds full of copper and rust, we’d worked out some of the nerves—taking better cuts, making solid contact, or at least making better baseball sounds. I took a turn late in the practice and drilled one down the right-field line, making the phantom first baseman in my head look stupid. Skip rewarded our moderate okayness by piling us into a shitty old GMC van with a muffler problem and driving us into town to Shoney’s Big Boy for the all-day breakfast

buffet. We crunched bacon and shoveled eggs and went back over our failures and successes of

the day, made notes to ourselves, mental and otherwise, and discussed the direction our team was

heading. Morris my bunkmate asked where I was sitting so he could sit there, too. Skip sat by

himself in the smoking section, reading a newspaper, and when we caught him looking over at us

he shook his head in mild disgust. But we knew it was just part of the act. Bad cop, bad cop.

After all, he bought us all breakfast.

Back in the barracks the awkwardness of the first night had disappeared, and the feeling that

replaced it was one of camaraderie, trust, the feeling of being a team. Grown men walked the

barracks shirtless, letting their flabby guts go loose and unselfconscious. A few walked around with bats over their shoulders, as if they might be called up to the plate at any moment. There were smiles all around and jokes, and the slapping of backs. We were cautiously optimistic.

Skip came in just before lights out and told us shitbirds not to get too worked up, we had a big day tomorrow—our first game was scheduled for four in the afternoon, an exhibition between us and the AA Berkley Barons, whose worthless facilities we’d overtaken.

“And you’re gonna need to get up a little early tomorrow, shitbirds,” he said. “So we can get you guys sized up for some uniforms.”

Hearing this put a shiver up our concrete barrack spine. Just the thought of putting on that heavy, uncomfortable, beautiful polyester raised chillbumps on us, made us realize that this was it, there was no turning back. We were the Braves.

“Lights out at ten-thirty,” Skip said. “That’s fifteen minutes, Betty.”

But we were riding too high to sleep, too excited about our first game the next day and wearing the uniform, so we cut the lights at ten-thirty, just for show, and then brought out our flashlights, huddling in a circle on the barracks floor, the cold concrete, discussing our practice

that day and what we should have done differently, discussing baseball in terms both practical

and philosophical, what it meant to us, and we fantasized about what we hoped would happen the

next day, when we were there on an actual field in play, in actual uniforms, playing against another team, when it was for real. Marvin, an ophthalmologist from Selma, Alabama, hoped he had the chance to charge the plate hard on a bunt attempt, make the throw to first off-balance, both feet in the air, get the batter by a step. Reilly, a mortician’s assistant from Macon, wanted to hobble from the dugout in the ninth, his knees busted from a season of injury and abuse, barely able to walk, and hit the improbable home run that put our team into some kind of imaginary postseason. Then he wanted to limp around the bases with his fist raised. Jimmy—the thirty- year-old with the faded baseball cap, a grade school teacher from Myrtle Beach— said he wanted to steal home, said he’d been practicing for months now back home, starting from his garage and stealing a doghouse. We went around the room this way, half-hidden in the spooky shadows from our flashlights, and one by one revealed our dreams for the field of play, from the fundamentally fundamental to the heroically remote to my dumb bunkmate Morris, who claimed to be from “all parts” and who had no real plan for the week, so long as it involved “bringing it.”

I said I wanted a breaking ball that defied the laws of physics, one that started in the clouds and ended on the outside corner. But in truth I just didn’t want to bounce the ball to the plate.

But then, as the hour grew later and the flashlight shadows on our faces grew longer, the conversation became more serious, and we opened up regarding the reasons we’d come to camp, revealing to one another in a manner befitting Oprah, in the unabashed and unpenitent male bonding only professional sports or the approximation thereof can offer, the failures and disappointments of our lives—our mediocrities, our mortalities, our once-rebellious and groovy manes of hair. We were from all walks of life—insurance salesmen, car salesmen, mortician,

AMWAY—but we found that we shared at least two things in common: One, we had all woken

up one day in our fifties and wondered if this, what we had or had not done, did or did not have,

was all there were, and we’d all been stricken thereafter with an inexplicable, irrepressible

sadness which settled into our lives when we should have been enjoying life the most, readying

for retirement, our children gone, appreciating all we’d accomplished thus far, and two, we all

held a genuine if misguided, even desperate faith that what we had lost might somehow be

reclaimed, that, of all things, a week at camp might somehow jumpstart the stalled engines of our

lives, might grease the gears, spark the plugs, change the tires. I guess we had three things in

common, since we all liked baseball.

One by one, our stories and our symptoms were the same. Our bellies were rolling out. We

had hair in our ears. We’d never understood our fathers—fearsome, frigid, authoritarian men,

the kind of old-time, don’t-make-em-anymore men’s men who wore sleeves even in the summer,

who never paid for an oil change in their lives, who worked the same textile lines forty years

until they finished with gold watches and Bolivian maps of burnt skin up to their elbows, whose

idea of both affection and correction involved hitting you flat on the crown of the head with their

palms—and we feared our sons didn’t understand us, and who could blame them, because we

didn’t fully understand ourselves. We were in a moment of male crisis.

Except for Jimmy the grade school teacher, of course, who sat there in the circle and listened

to our tales of trouble and woe and nodded, as if he knew, as if he could. So we asked him, What are you doing here, anyway? You’re young. What are you, thirty? Why aren’t you out living it

up? We wanted him to hear our story and learn from it. We wanted better for him than we had

ourselves. It’s a cautionary tale.

But instead Jimmy looked at us plainly and said, “I understand how you all feel. Really, I do.

I feel the same way.” He nodded when he said it, looking us in the eyes, as if we should believe him.

“You don’t know shit,” Reilly the mortician’s assistant said, shaking his Icabod Crane head.

“What can you possibly know at thirty? You don’t know anything.”

Jimmy looked at us looking at him, stonefaced in the half-darkness, an ultimatum right there on the floor. Suddenly he looked sadder and older than thirty. Then he reached up and took off his worn Braves cap. Underneath he was bald as ambition. We all cringed in spite of ourselves, hunched up our shoulders and deformed our hands into claws, made impolite cringing noises just to drive home the point, all by reflex. Jimmy had a look on his face as if he’d seen the looks on our faces before.

“At seventeen,” he said, “it just fell out.”

We were stunned. We didn’t know exactly what to do. So we did what we thought best: We took him into our circle, gave him a group hug, welcomed him as one of our own. The world had gotten to him early. He was a casualty. He was one of us.

It was almost midnight, and we knew we should hit the bunks, rest up for the big game. So, having dispensed of the serious business of the night, both on-field and off, we broke out our stash of candy bars and began passing them around, a few men brought out baseball cards and began making trades, and then, around twelve thirty, nervous for the day ahead, we crawled into our bunkbeds and pulled the covers up to our ears and fantasized about the glories of the game ahead until we drifted off to sleep.

But the Berkley Barons massacred us.

One could make the argument that we’d practiced too hard the day before—we’d all woken up stiff as a morgue, lumbered out of our bunk beds, groaned into the showers; bending to tie our shoes was an act of faith. One could say we were uncomfortable, in those scratchy, awful damn uniforms. That we were distracted by the crowd—our game was open to the public, and the public who showed up, almost a thousand, either baseball lovers or simply unemployed, were clearly there to root for the Barons. With good reason, I suppose. They came out and knocked us around. They came out and made us pay for being old, and uniformed, and ridiculous.

Merle, a fat druggist from Alpharetta, was on the mound for us instead of me, thank God.

They hit him something like twelve times—down the left field line, in the gap between first and second, bloopers in the outfield, three or four out of the park. I could only sit there in the bullpen and squirm in my polyester and watch until I couldn’t watch any more. I managed an inning of relief, in the seventh, and I got them one, two, three. For the most part.

The game was finished quick, despite all the offense—the freckled starting pitcher for the

Barons, sort of a menacing Richie Cunningham, had excellent command of the strike zone, and the defense behind him were graceful and quick as gazelles, if gazelles played baseball. The

Prime-of-Life Braves had only three baserunners all afternoon, two accidental base hits and one hit batsman, my bunkmate Morris, who was beaned in the fourth on the flabby part of his back, just for spite.

After the game Skip loaded us into the GMC and took us to Shoney’s for hamburgers and ice cream.

“You guys got your asses handed to you,” he said, sitting at the head of the table instead of the smoking section, showing solidarity. “There’s no denying it. But it happens, all the time.

It’s just part of the game.”

“They destroyed us,” Horace the centerfielder said.

“It builds character,” Skip said.

“They humiliated us,” said bald-thirty Jimmy.

“It’s always darkest before the dawn.”

“They were impolite about it,” I said.

“It’s a world for the young,” Skip said wisely.

But a Zen lesson in how much we sucked was not the reason we were there, and hamburgers

and cokes, though fine, didn’t make us feel that much better. Even sitting in Shoney’s we

couldn’t help but feel ashamed of ourselves—families kept glancing over at us with pitying

looks, like grown men out in public dressed as the Braves signaled that we’d arrived on the short

bus. Or maybe some of them had actually seen us play.

Skip gave us the night off, which we spent back in the barracks staring off into space. None

of us called home to tell our wives about the game, though we’d all promised to, nor did we want

to talk about the game with each other. But all of us knew full well what it was we weren’t

saying. It was possible Reilly might go back to dressing corpses little more than one himself, on legs. It was possible Merle might return to the pharmacy no more a watcher of the walking, trying dying but a sad confederate. It didn’t seem like exaggeration to us—we’d risked our pride

in coming, and it seemed an imminent possibility that not only might we leave every bit as lost

as we were when we’d arrived, but we might’ve paid three thousand dollars for the honor. Fear

is what men my age have instead of sense.

It seemed there might be an opportunity for self-actualization the next afternoon, Wednesday

of our week, when we were finally scheduled to play our first major league game, an exhibition

43 between ourselves and the aforementioned, much-advertised Braves of Yesteryear. But the old men who showed up looked like they might’ve played for the Boston Braves. Barely making contact with the ball, defensive swings more than anything, feebling toward first on fragile hips and fake knees, sliding into base might’ve killed them. We beat the hell out of them 12-3. I pitched two innings of relief fulfilling as kicking a dog. It was the worst baseball game ever.

I thought the whole thing was going be a wash after that. Back in the barracks the men wept out loud, called their families one by one, relived the shitty triumph. Skip came in later that night to congratulate us, and he took one look around the barracks and said we were the sorriest sacks of shit he’d ever seen. Who gets upset when they win? Who cared that we’d beat up on old men? We’d beat up on major league old men. We might’ve gone out there today and beat up on somebody Joe DiMaggio once beat up on. It was something we could tell our grandkids.

But that didn’t lighten our moods.

That night we talked about making a break for it. To hell with self-actualization, the least we could do was salvage what dignity we had left and use it to catch a bus out of here. Horace the centerfielder suggested we sneak out in the middle of the night, follow the dirt road into the nearest town, use a pay phone to call our wives to come get us, though why we couldn’t simply use the phone five feet away was lost on me. Someone else suggested we go into the woods around the stadium and hide until camp was over. We could live on lichen and wild berries.

We could build a fort. My bunkmate Morris suggested we strike, which got him sucker-punched a few times. But in the end, after the sniffles finally dried up into crust, we decided we had only one choice: We were ballplayers, goddammit. We had to play ball, like it or not.

We all nodded our heads with appropriate masculine resolve and reverence for the game that this was so. Then, our begrudging course of action decided, we broke out our candy bars, my

bunkmate Morris had a Playboy and passed it around—we made jokes about the boobs, though we were secretly fascinated by them—and finally, after midnight, we shut off our flashlights and

crawled into our bunkbeds and replayed the horrors of the geezer game in our heads, in spite of

ourselves, until we fell into our dull, dreamless sleeps.

But in baseball, as in life, each new day brings a chance for redemption, and when Skip came in

the next morning he brought us ours: We had the Yankees.

It was the Friday game, the big intramural between our Fantasy Camp and theirs, our chance

to feel like real ballplayers—we’d even be taking a bus down to Tampa for the game, and it

promised to be a long, uncomfortable ride, just like the pros, fifty years ago.

“Now listen up,” Skip said. He still had on his bathrobe and slippers, and there was powdered donut ash down his cheeks. He sipped from his coffee cup: 100% Bitch. “I’ve had enough of this sad-sacking around. So you played one game and you stunk. So you played another and beat the elderly. Well now it’s time to pony up, boys. You’ve got one more shot for this Braves organization, one more shot to prove to me and yourselves and the world, at least the world who cares, that you are not merely weekend warriors, that you are not simply sacks of fat tied off at the neck, that you are ballplayers. It’s not going to be easy. You know who these bastards are.

They’re the goddamn Yankees. They handed it to us in ’96 and again in ’99. Do you

remember?”

We remembered.

The Braves had struggled their way from worst to first in the miracle season of 1991, had

gone to the World Series that year and every year thereafter, save one—the year the Phillies had

a team that looked like they could tell me what was wrong with my carburetor—and finally won

it all in 1995. But then, the next year, the Yankees showed up. In the first two games of the

World Series the Braves beat them soundly, as a team of destiny should, and it looked as if the

Braves were about to repeat as World Champions. It was going to be sweet.

Then things went to Hell. Back in Atlanta the Yankees squeaked a Game Three win, 5-2.

The Braves got back on track in Game Four—or so it seemed—scoring five runs in the third and

tacking on another two innings later. Six to nothing. It was a done deal. But the Yankees

scored three in the sixth to close the gap, and in the eighth Jim Leyritz, that dough-faced son of a bitch, stepped up with runners on against the Braves’ closer Mark Wohlers, worked the count 2-2 by fouling off what they call sharp cheese, and then belted a ball to South Carolina, tie game.

The Braves never recovered, blowing the game 8-6 in the tenth and then blowing Game Five the next night, a pitchers’ duel between Andy Petitte and John Smoltz, 1-0.

Two nights later the Yankees clinched the World Championship back in New York, and it’s not been a reasonable world since.

In ’99 it was even worse. The Yankees were merciless, storming into the Series with their pretty boys and their million-dollar bills and their deodorant sponsorships and claiming the unofficial title Team of the 90s in a shameful four-game sweep. Yankees Burn Atlanta, the dumb headlines read, I guess because Yankees Sweep Atlanta sounds like they were being helpful.

Thus ends the story of how the Yankees became our most hated and feared rivals.

Of course, other teams beat Atlanta in the World Series in the 90s, too—the Twins and the

Blue Jays. Do I hate those teams? Yes I do. But there are other factors at work here—it’s

Atlanta versus Yankees, Yankees. It’s a grudge.

But all that past was prologue, Skip said between sips of coffee. Now it was our turn.

“I don’t have to tell you, this is the reason you’re here,” he said. “It’s going to be tough— tougher than those Berkley Barons you pulled up your skirts for—but I know in my heart that we are men, Betty, and that we’ll make a good show of it.” Then, almost an afterthought, he looked over at me and said: “Barnes, you got the start.”

This wasn’t really a revelation to anyone—I was the third pitcher of three, after all, it was my turn to start—and his delivery wasn’t exactly the moment in a movie where the music comes up, but hearing those words I was thrilled and terrified just the same. Soon as Skip left for more coffee, I called home and told my wife the news.

“I can’t believe it, Helen,” I said. “Here is my chance finally to do something extraordinary in my life. It’s my chance on behalf of the entire Atlanta Braves organization to give them

Yankees the what fer. I just hope I don’t blow it.”

Now, I fully expected my wife to be supportive of me. I expected her to say the right thing, whatever that was—maybe something about the triumph of middle-aged men over adversity, or at least to tell me how much I wasn’t going to blow it. But I didn’t expect she’d go one further:

“Do you think I could come watch you?” she asked. “I’d love to see you pitch, Eugene. And

Bobby said he’d like to come see you, too. He has a buddy who’d drive. Of course, he didn’t know you’d be starting pitcher against the Yankees. I’m sure he’d come see you now.”

Did I, at that moment, foresee the possibility of failure in front of my family? I did. Did I foresee the possibility that I might, in fact, humiliate myself in front of both wife and son, a man’s ultimate nightmare and the subject of many made-for-TV movies? Yes. But you see, I’d come to camp to claim importance for myself, to stake claim to bravery, resilience, resolve, and things like that. What good were those words if I didn’t walk the walk, toe the line, carry a big

47 stick? It’s like Yogi Berra once said, though I won’t quote it here, because he was a Yankee.

Besides, Helen was holding on, waiting for an answer, and I just didn’t see a graceful way out of it.

So I said: “Helen, I promise to make you proud.” Strange how much easier it felt when I had only Braves history on my shoulders. But now I had to put on my back the entire weight of my manhood.

That night I learned many men felt the same—not about my manhood, of course, but their own. We were all worried we’d blunder in front of our families, that we’d be the one to commit the error, misplay the ball, or even stumble on our own damn feet that would cost us the big game. But as we talked about our fears, we realized—without saying as much, in a mushy way—that at least we were united in this, our anxieties, and that none of us were enduring them alone. We were a team, goddammit. We were for real. The last team I’d been a part of was at

Independent Vikings of America, when they passed me up for a promotion and gave it to a college boy named Barry who promptly called a meeting and said we were all part of something called the quality team, and that quality team had no I, even though quality does. But this was different. Here we were not united by that worst of motivations, a company’s bottom line, but by our own bottom line, which was simple: We wanted to make our families proud.

It’s a reasonable thing for men to want.

The rickety bus ride down the next morning—the bus shook like we were trying to break gravity—the men and I engaged in positive reinforcement, to take our minds off the fact we were

48 nervous as hell. We recounted tales from Braves history of men struggling against hardship and coming out on top—there was the 1914 Boston Braves, who rallied to win 61 of their last 81, going from fifteen out to ten up and finally to sweep the War-to-End-All-Wars World Series. Of course there was the ’91 team, a favorite example of washouts making good. There was the story of Sid Bream, who in the deciding game of the ’92 NLCS scored from second on a seeing- eye-single to advance the team to the Big Game, despite the fact his knees were made of space- age plastic. And of course the fabled Hank Aaron, who broke Babe Ruth’s all-time home run record and who was, as you know, black.

But soon as we saw the stadium, the positive reinforcement ended and the nervous farts began.

Our bus passed through high, ornamented gates, which had wrought-iron baseball bats on top like the spires of a castle. We shook to a stop in front of the stadium itself, which gleamed like ivory—we had to avert our eyes, pull down our shades even to look upon it.

Skip waddled off the bus, grabbed his gear from the underbelly, and told us candy-asses to move it. He led us in through the players’ entrance, through the climate-perfect fairways of the stadium, lined with men and women in tuxedoes standing behind wet bars, some standing there holding silver trays with champagne and dangerous-looking hors d'oeuvres—I reached for one as

I passed and had my hand smacked. He led us down the stairs to the underground, or what seemed like underground, through to the visitor’s locker room—which looked like it had been ordered from some catalogue magnates pass around behind the middle-class’s back—and then through to the dugout.

And then we caught glimpse of the field. It was a brilliant, blinding, unearthly green. It was the color money would be if it breathed.

“Jesus,” I said.

“You ain’t kidding,” Skip said.

The stands were already bustling with fans, and I strained from the dugout, seeing if I could

spot my family. I glanced around at my teammates, who had this stunned, bloodless look on

their faces. All that talk on the bus of famous Braves and triumphing over whatnot apparently

hadn’t stuck—sitting on the dugout bench, staring off at that pristine field, they looked like men

waiting to face a firing squad. Fans continued to line their way into the seats. I could hear a few

trying to start up a chant already. Let’s Go Yanks. Or maybe it was Scalp Those Braves.

Whichever, it was highly insensitive.

“Alright,” Skip said, using his surly, I’m Motivated voice, “Let’s go take BP.”

The Braves Fantasy Team, Prime-of-Life League, didn’t move.

“Come on, shitbags!” Skip shouted again. “Time to be men! Now grab a bat and leave this goddamn dugout!”

Begrudgingly the men stood and walked over to choose the rifle they’d be shot with. Skip said one more let’s go, clapped his hands together, and then charged out onto the field. It was like watching Braveheart with Wilfred Brimley in the lead. Soon as the team followed suit, giving up the safety of the dugout, the crowd began to boo. I didn’t have to go, because of the

DH, so I stayed behind and watched practice. Skip lobbed the ball toward them, maybe five miles an hour, but the batters, scared shitless, swung through air, sending the crowd roaring with catcalls and laughter. It was the saddest thing I’d ever seen. Every miss increased the odds that the next batter would miss, until finally it looked like they were having trouble just holding the bat upright, like they were trying to swing a barbell.

Mercifully BP finally ended—Morris my bunkmate looked like he was trying to bunt, the

50 dummy—and the team scrambled back to the dugout while fans chucked foam cups full of beer and/or urine down on them, having their fun. But Skip didn’t let on if he was worried and warned us not to get our spirits down or our blood pressures up. He clapped his hands a few fast times and did the Let’s Go. He pumped his fist and did the Yeah. He said maybe the batters should choke up more.

“You better go get loose,” Skip said to me. He slapped me on the shoulder like buddies do.

“You’re throwing the cheese today, boy.” I knew in my heart that he knew in his heart that I had no cheese, but I appreciated the gesture just the same. He pointed me to the bullpen—I was grateful I didn’t have to warm up in full view of the riot out there, like my teammates had—but as I started toward the pen the Yankees team ran out for their warm-ups, and, big mistake, I hung out for a moment to get a look at them.

The Yankees men filled their uniforms like men, muscular and fit, not a beer gut among them.

I watched them one by one take the plate and crush the ball, many of them knocking it right into the stands, and the throngs responded with as much enthusiasm to their swings as they had derision to ours. Shutters clicked. Grown men did the Arsenio dog woof. Women threw undergarments. Each batter dug in, choked up, and clobbered the ball into the ionosphere, one after the other, every batter up. If you closed your eyes it sounded, the hits and the noise of crowd, like a thunderhead rumbling.

It took me a minute or two to realize just what I was seeing. I believe I was paralyzed from the bladder up. But the next batter knocked his pitch into the stands with a round, feline, powerful swing. It was recognizable. And so I recognized it.

“Wait one fucking minute,” I said, shaking my pointer finger at the field. “That’s not the

Yankees Fantasy Camp. That’s the fucking Yankees.”

It was true. Derek Jeter stood at the plate with that stance of his that looks like he’s doing the plate a favor. He put another ball into the cheap seats.

My teammates clambered to the front of the dugout to see for themselves, and almost immediately the swearing began. It was what the fuck and what the hell and what the shit this and that. A few of them, obviously a bit goosey from the hardships of the week, broke down in tears.

Skip put up his hands defensively, as if to ask what was the problem? “I told you you were

playing against the Yankees,” he said. “Didn’t I say that? Right?”

“You said Yankees,” I shouted at him. “But you didn’t say it was the New York Fucking

Yankees!”

Skip spit out a sunflower seed that stuck to the side of his face. “I said, Barnes, you’re

starting Friday against the Yankees. Tell me I didn’t say that.”

Yes, that’s what he’d said, I said, but surely he could see how I might’ve misunderstood him.

Skip chewed on his sunflower seeds and adjusted the seam on his crotch and then began this

long story, the point of which was, this was how Steinbrenner liked to spend his Februarys.

Steinbrenner always brought the Yankees down to play against the fantasy-league teams, so he

could sit in his luxury box with his roast suckling pig and fresh pineapple slices and the finest

champagne and a bottle of baby oil, and he feasted on pig until his skin glazed, he sipped

champagne until he was high, then he baby-oiled himself and watched the Yankees beat the

living hell out of some pitiable fatass team like ours and quote pleasured himself. The Yankees

Fantasy Campers themselves had been sent down to Venezuela, where they sat dark hours in a

warehouse without proper ventilation, stitching baseballs and finishing Yankees merchandise.

“This is no secret,” Skip shrugged, like he thought we should’ve known. “It happens every

year.”

The public address announcer came on and welcomed everyone to this exhibition between the

Atlanta Braves Prime-of-Life Fantasy Camp and Your New York Yankees.

“Shouldn’t you go warm up?” Skip asked.

“I won’t do it,” I said. I dropped my glove. “I’m not going out there.”

“Yes you goddamn will!” Skip fired back.

“No I won’t!”

“Yes, you will!”

“No I won’t!”

“Yes you will!”

“You can’t make me,” I said.

Skip lunged for me and grabbed me by the shoulders, and for a moment I braced myself for a head-butt. But instead he stared me straight in the eyes, saying nothing, just staring and breathing through his nose. In another context, out in the real world, such an embrace would be either embarrassing or threatening. It looked like he might be getting ready to kiss me. Or perhaps the head-butt.

“You may be a rookie, Barnes” he said at last, whistling through his nostrils, “but by God,

you are a Brave. You are in the dugout. You are in the uniform. You have a frikkin’ tomahawk

on your chest.”

I dropped my head slowly, and I saw that he was right. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the other men looking down at their chests to see if they got one, too.

“They’re going to kill me,” I said.

“They certainly are,” Skip agreed. The PA started reading off our lineup and the booing in

53 the stands resumed.

“I can’t throw for shit,” I said. “My family is out there.”

“Barnes,” Skip said, “I have a story which I believe fits this occasion perfectly. It’s about my father and my relationship with him, it’s sentimental and momentous, and the payoff is my father looking at me and saying, Going Home. But I don’t have time to tell it to you now, so pretend I just did. The point is go out there and pitch like you’ve got a pair.”

I realize now that with the noise of the crowd I couldn’t possibly have heard what I thought I did at that moment. But I swear, standing there, staring my skipper in the face, my teammates looking to me for leadership, I swear I heard my wife’s voice rising above the ridicule of the crowd, rising above the stadium itself, telling me I could do it. I swear I heard my son and his drunk frat buddies hollering something about the triumph of middle-aged men over adversity, about the links between fathers and sons, et cetera, and yelling for those Yankees to come get some. I swear I thought my teammates began slow-clapping like in the movies. Maybe I was having a mild stroke.

I reached down and retrieved my glove from the dugout floor, slid it on, smacked my fist a few hard times into the leather. “I’m going to need a ball,” I said.

Skip reached into his pocket and pulled out one of his balls. He handed it over and told me to give them hell, and he called me Stumpy. It was the first nickname I’d ever had.

I raced out of the dugout and back toward the bullpen, ignoring the catcalls, dodging the urine-cups, and I had time to throw a dozen or so warm-up pitches before our lead-off batters struck out swinging. Then, my moment come, I charged out of the bullpen for the mound, ignoring and dodging the et cetera, and I took my place on the rubber, my rightful place, the rubber I’d waited my life for.

I faced twenty-one batters and gave up twenty-one hits, all of them homers. I went zero-

thirds of an inning.

But to be honest it didn’t matter, because I didn’t see any of it. You see, my brain seized as soon as I let go of that first pitch. So I didn’t have to watch the unloading that followed, I didn’t

hear the howls of laughter from the goddamned Floridian Yankee fans. I didn’t notice any of it.

In my mind the last thing I saw was that first fastball hanging in the air, halfway to the plate, and

it had not yet been crushed, had not yet left the park. Maybe the reason I say that is because this

is the only picture Helen took, the only picture I still have from my start. Maybe she took fifty of

them, I don’t know. But Helen is a good woman, and she loves me, and so the first pitch is the

only one that remains. I have it framed at my desk at Independent Vikings of America, and

many of the men I work with come into my office just to look at it. In that picture it is still a perfect game, the ball forever untouched. In that picture there is possibility. Maybe the batter swings and misses. Maybe he’s taking right down the middle. In that frozen moment I am balanced on one leg, my arm is extended, and the small white thing is resting there, faultless, a strike all the way.

Butterfinger

I was almost Ernest Hemingway, came very close, but in the end it was given to someone who looks like Hemingway. He’s old with the gut and the beard of snow, with the wide white smile betraying his alcoholism, his depression. I really can’t blame them for going with him, he looks the part, but the man is quite the prick. I wanted to be young Hemingway because I’m young and thin and my hair is dark, but no one wants a young Hemingway. So I was lucky to get

Fitzgerald, and I have been Fitzgerald here at The Western Canon Literary All-Stars Living Wax

Museum Theme Park and Batting Cages ever since.

The man who hired me is named Sol Gorgeous, which I recently learned is not his real name.

It’s his show business name, for tax purposes, he says. Sol Gorgeous can be summed up in three words: cigar, smarm, stink. Actually I can think of two more: rotten and bastard. But that’s three, if you count the and. I am the young Fitzgerald, the only kind that ever was, and my mind is already slipping from the booze.

I sometimes come in on time and Sol Gorgeous says, What the fuck is wrong with you?

“I hired you to be F. Scott Fitzgerald,” he spits from behind his cigar. He has a bad habit of clenching it in his teeth when he talks, to stress the fact he is fat, and gross, and my boss.

“Fucking Scott Fitzgerald, you think he would be here on time?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “He was erratic.”

“Now you’re thinking,” Sol Gorgeous says. “But I don’t want you at your station on time, god dammit. Unless you’re being erratic about it. But don’t be erratic all the time, be mostly like he was.”

Sol Gorgeous considers himself an innovator, an entrepreneur. He says there’s been an interest in dead writers ever since that movie a while back, what was it called? He says you have

to strike while the iron is hot, you have to go where the money is, you have to know when to

hold and fold them. He owns two other living wax museums: critical condition rock stars and

discredited politicians. There are rumors that all of these are fronts, that Sol Gorgeous makes his

money fixing and then betting on sporting events. But being a liberal arts graduate and mostly

unemployable, I have little room to be moral about it.

So I have some time to kill before my shift, and I think about going out to the batting cages to

get in a few swings. Maybe I’ll go to my station a half hour late, I think, or maybe twenty-nine

minutes, which is more unpredictable and poetic.

It’s already warming up outside, and my suit is heavy and hot and scratching the hell out of

me. But I have some time to kill, so I walk out.

Hemingway is there.

He’s surrounded by young dark-skinned boys with Spanish accents, or at least they look like

they’d have Spanish accents, and I can’t tell if they’re patrons or part of the show. It’d be just

like him to bring some Spanish-looking boys to follow him around, to carry his rifles and his

elephant gun. I really hate that Hemingway.

He’s taking big cuts at fastballs, zipping toward him on the rapid setting, and he’s making

contact with them all, with a fat, loud smack of the bat. His jacket is off and his sleeves are rolled

to the elbow, and his suit vest is unbuttoned and flapping when he swings. Likewise his tie is undone and hanging around his open collar, and his chest is peeking with glistening white tufts

of macho cotton hair. He’s saying when he swings, “In Cuba the swings move the warm air.

The breeze in Cuba is the baseball breeze. Tough men swing and the warm breeze stirs.”

Hemingway is always saying shit like this, to anyone who’ll listen. And he’s always hassling

me, picking on me, berating me in front of patrons and the other writers, and more than once he

has hit me in the back of the neck with his fist.

I stop dead when I see him and think about sneaking back inside, but he spots me and makes a scene of it. “Boys, there is Scott Fitzgerald,” he says, and he points the barrel of the bat my direction. “He died eating a Butterfinger, the pussy.”

Unfortunately this is true, the most humiliating part of my job. Every day I end my shift by eating a Butterfinger and collapsing on the floor. Not many people ever stay to watch me, and the few who do usually laugh. But Hemingway’s death always draws a crowd. He sits in a masculine oak chair, smoke from a burning cubano hanging in the air, and puts the broad, smooth barrel of the shotgun in his mouth and debates and cries and makes moaning, I’ve-got-a- gun-in-my-mouth sounds. By the time he actually blows his head off, the crowd is weepy and clapping, like they’d lived through fucking Hamlet. I’ve seen it many times, because I always finish dying long before he does. It doesn’t take much to die from a Butterfinger.

The young Spanish boys stare at me with their round white eyes. I make a halfhearted wave and they ignore me. Hemingway hits the next ball twice as hard, and the sound booms like a rifle report. “Have a swing,” he says to me, though not looking my direction. He smacks another one just as hard.

“Maybe later,” I say, pretending to look at my pocket watch, which I accidentally left on the dashboard of my Corolla. “My night was late. We threw the greatest affair ever last night, Zelda and I. We danced The Charleston and bathed in gin. We are known for our carousing.”

He looks at me with his contemptuous Hemingway huh? “No, fuck that,” he says. “Come take a swing. You didn’t party last night. I bet you sat home watching the boob tube and then spanked it and went to sleep.”

He’s right about this, and I stutter. The Spanish boys are looking at me again, but now

they’re smirking, daring me. So I walk over and start undoing my heavy suit. First the threadstriped jacket, then unbuttoning my vest, unknotting my foppish tie. I roll up my sleeves and grab a helmet and a bat. I hear him whisper something to the boys, and they laugh and say si

in a way meant to humiliate me.

Hemingway offers me the cage, and I step up, set my feet, bend my knees, choke up on the

bat. Before the first ball flies, he leaps for me and hits me with his fist on the back of my neck. I

stagger, stop myself from falling by propping on the bat, and manage to right myself in time to

take a fastball to the nuts.

He says Tender is the Night is a fag title.

When I get to my station, Zelda is already drunk. It’s nine twenty nine in the morning.

“There you are, love,” she slurs and swings around with her arms out, the beads around her neck rustling together and making percussive popping noises. “Love, I have been awaiting for your arrival, come here kiss me.”

Zelda talks this way constantly, never breaking character, and I’ve begun to suspect she’s not playing a character but merely psychotic.

“It’s too early, there’s no one watching, I don’t feel like it,” I tell her. “I just got hit in the balls.”

“Have a driiiink,” she slurs in her slinky, feline, insane way. “Drink with me, Scott. We have such a wonderful relationship when we’re drunk.”

My real name is Scott, by the way, and I’m also a writer, like most everybody who works

here. So is she talking to Fitzgerald me, or me me? And if it’s me me, does that mean we are somehow in love? She gets this look in her eye which means she’s about to break something, so

I agree to take a drink.

We spend our entire shift sitting in a replica of the Fitzgeralds’ Parisian living room. You can tell it’s Parisian because there’s a big fake window with the Eiffel Tower painted on it. But the real Fitzgeralds’ flat must have been bigger, big enough for their wild parties and their flappers and their tin lizzies or whatever. Big enough, too, so that Scott and Zelda wouldn’t have to spend all day sitting together in one room, like this one. I can understand why.

So we sit and get drunk a while and smoke cigarettes. We make small talk, and I don’t know if we are making small talk as the Fitzgeralds or as us. If it matters. We are a living wax museum, the two of us—the dead writer and wife come back to life. Except I know we are both dying. I know we are dying because I can watch the clock on the wall, set to Paris time, and I know no matter how brilliant I am today, no matter what elegant, heartaching passage I quote when schoolchildren stop by and ask who the hell we’re supposed to be, no matter what story I try to write today that I will believe, for the fleeting moment, is the best thing I’ve ever dared to write, the story I was finally meant to write, I know at the end of the day death is waiting for us both, she in a madhouse fire, and me with my crispity, crunchity, chocolaty cardiac fate.

When Zelda passes out on the couch I try to write. Not as Fitzgerald, but as me, though sometimes I don’t remember the difference. In the corner of the living room sits a small, spare table and chair, and a prehistoric Royal typewriter, metal cased and alien. I always make the first

clacks tentatively, making sure she won’t wake— Zelda is snoring and her skirt is up her thigh, showing garter—before I write in earnest.

I feel it makes the parkgoing experience more singular to see the writer at work.

More to the point, I’m trying to work on a new short story. My style of late has become predictable and staid, and so now I’m working to make my style unpredictable and unstaid, et cetera. An editor recently handwrote his rejection of my short story “Burnouts in Love” which said, I have read this story before—many times, by writers more talented than you. Thank you for your interest in Wigwam. So I’m trying to break through with my style, but I sometimes have a difficult time writing at my station, on the job, with people watching me.

I remember hearing that Hemingway used to write in public, in a window booth at Botin’s in

Spain, and my balls start to hurt again.

Around noon a family walks by. The little boy is dressed in a baseball uniform, so I guess they came for the cages and stayed for the culture. Most of the time the patrons never speak when I’m working—we call them patrons rather than, say, customers or spectators or saps, Sol

Gorgeous says it’s an attempt to sophisticate the place the fuck up—but the little boy speaks. He says: “I see her cooch.”

I stop typing and get up from my desk. Part of my job consists of being a tour guide for my writer, so I walk stage front, trying to walk like Fitzgerald, who I have never seen walk.

“Why, hello there,” I say to the little boy, and I nod at the parents. “Did I hear you ask a question about F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby and This Side of Paradise? I was a member of the so-called Lost Generation—.”

The boy points at my fake couch, my fake wife. “I said, I can see her cooter.”

I look back at Zelda. I can see her cooter, too.

“Oh. Well,” I say. “Well. I was born in St. Paul, Minnesota.”

“I thought this place was supposed to be family friendly,” the father says. He’s a brawny guy and looks like he could be trouble, so I excuse myself and walk back to Zelda and close her legs.

She stirs for a moment, makes a kissy mouth in the air, then resumes snoring.

The mother and father seem satisfied by this, but the boy looks a little disappointed. I stroll back in my sophisticated jazz age way. “I was educated at Princeton,” I say.

“What were you typing?” the mother asks.

“I’m working on what will be my last novel,” I tell her, dishonest but informative. “It’s called The Last Tycoon, but unfortunately it will remain unfinished at the time of my death at age

44, around five o’clock today.”

The father asks how I die and I say, grizzly bear.

“So now you’re working on it again, trying to finish it,” the mother says. “How wonderful.”

I smile politely. “Yes, ma’am, that’s true. But I’m afraid I won’t ever finish it, you know.

Not before five o’clock, not today or not ever.”

“But that won’t stop you from working on it,” the mother offers.

I say that’s right, and then I use my serious Fitzgerald voice. “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

“How wonderful,” the mother says again. “What a wonderful testament to the artistic spirit.”

The little boy in the baseball outfit says, this place is bullcrap, and the mother pinches his ear hard.

When they finally leave I return to my work, but I find the family has taken me out of it. I look

back at what I’d written—the prose feeble, the situations contrived, the characters bores. I stare a while longer, but I only clack out a few more terrible words.

Zelda eventually comes out of her coma and throws her gin bottle at me. She says I’m a lousy lover, a mouse of a man, that she would eat my face off if it wouldn’t destroy her buzz.

She says I will never be a great writer, like Hemingway. She says Hemingway felt her up the other day, and that his hands were steady and strong.

She gets up shakily, balancing on our coffee table, and mutters that she needs a burrito before she gets burned to death today. She stumbles off the stage—right off the front, bumping her way past a few patrons—and heads toward the commissary.

I struggle one last time to write, but nothing comes. So I sit on the couch and watch the clock and wish the Fitzgeralds had cable. When my shift is finally done, I stand up and walk stage front with my candy bar. There is an elderly couple standing there, my only audience. I rip the wrapper off dramatically and shove the candy halfway down my throat, then I fall straight back, clutching my chest, smacking hard against the floor. I twitch a few times for effect, but I think the old couple has already left.

After a short while I get up and collect my sheave of failed prose into my briefcase and head

out for the day. On the way out I pass Poe shivering in his gutter, and overhear Kafka from his

deathbed giving orders to destroy the damn things, destroy them all, promise me.

I pass Virginia Woolf and see that something’s wrong. She’s standing out in the hallway, soaking wet, heaving for breath. She says the goddamn trap door didn’t open—she put the rocks in her pockets and sank to the bottom and started beating on the trap door, but nothing happened.

She says she almost drowned.

Sol Gorgeous is talking to her and telling her to calm the fuck down.

Virginia says she’s a writer, goddammit, she doesn’t need this. She says she has an MFA,

from a quality institution. She says she’s so tired when she gets home she can’t write a thing.

And oh yes, she says, I almost fucking drowned.

Sol says something I can’t hear, but then he says, Where have you published? Who is your

publisher? He says, I can find many out of work chick writers to drown for ten bucks an hour,

and Virginia begins to back down. She gets back in the tank.

I pass Hemingway, his station crowded with fascinated onlookers, watching him die. He’s

holding the shotgun in his mouth and hamming it up, gurgling and pleading with himself. When

he sees me he takes the shotgun out of his mouth, and for a moment I brace myself for the worst.

But he doesn’t ridicule me. Instead he merely shakes his head—the most grandfatherly the old

bastard has ever seemed—before he swallows the barrel of the gun and hooks his big toe on the trigger.

Then he blows his head off.

In a strange way I think he’s lucky, because at least he’s taken some control over it.

But for the rest of us, for every writer here, we are all racing against death, never forgetting how quickly death can come, before you’ve found a stride or before you’ve begun to look for one. It’s a lightning strike, a strong tide, or sometimes a simple yellow wrapper, harmless as a child.

The South Will Rise Again

Things had been going poorly for Russell ever since the time he was shot in the head. It was an

accident, of course, a hunting buddy’s butterfingers. The bullet struck just above the eye, exited

out the back of the head, and had still somehow managed to miss every vital thing inside. The

doctors called it a miracle. Russell’s wife began telling everyone it was because her husband’s

brain was the size of a walnut.

Russell came home wrapped in a turban of gauze, his eyes weak and dreamy. His four-year-

old daughter glared at him like he was Frankenstein.

“It’s OK, honey,” Russell said calmly. “I got shot in the head is all.”

His daughter, horrified and pigtailed, kept her distance. For a while.

And Russell’s wife, Pammy Sue, wasn’t thrilled to see him sitting at home, either. She’d

been having an affair with the mailman, really less an affair than long afternoons of meaningless sex every weekday while a large, indiscreet US Postal Service van sat in her driveway. As soon as Russell was released from the hospital, the mailman stopped going anywhere near their house.

Russell and Pammy Sue didn’t get a single parcel for two and a half weeks.

Pammy Sue was noticeably irritated. Though she wondered if Russell noticed. He was

difficult to read, having been shot in the head.

He sat slumped on the couch in his funky bathrobe, eating cereal and staring at the television

like he’d never seen one before. He took turns watching whatever came on with a faraway look

on his face, the kind of look an infant has, both fascination and easy distraction. He hadn’t

shaved in a while, and tiny milk droplets clung to his whiskers. He reeked of milk and feet.

“How long do you think you’ll be recuperating?” she asked him. She’d begun asking this on a semi-regular basis since his first day home and was yet to receive a good response. He’d only

been in the hospital overnight, after all. The doctors said he could go back to his normal routine whenever he felt like it. His x-rays had come back clean and clear. He shouldn’t be alive at all, they said, but they couldn’t find anything wrong with him except the bullethole in his head.

Russell crunched a mouthful of corn flakes. On TV there was a man who was his own mother on Jerry Springer. This had somehow started a fight.

“Russell, did you hear me?” she asked him again. “I asked how long you think you’ll be?

Any ideas?” She sat down beside him and leaned forward until her hairdo strategically blocked the set. “Russell? Honey? Are you listening to me?”

Russell’s eyes drifted toward her, almost independent from the mood of the rest of his face.

He seemed hesitant to have the conversation. After Springer was Divorce Court, which he’d grown to love.

“I’m not so sure, honey,” was his regular response. He looked her dead in the eyes, which was just the way it looked. He seemed to be thinking about something somewhere else. He tried to smile and milk came shooting out his teeth. “I don’t know when I’ll feel better, honestly. In fact I think I feel worse every day since I got shot in the head.”

He slouched around the house in his bathrobe and his slippers and sometimes got turned around and lost. His wife put some of his familiar items out, hoping they’d jog his brain into working and help get his skinny ass back out of the house. She put a stack of Juggs in the bathroom and then found Russell and their daughter ripping out the pages and making paper airplanes. Her daughter’s plane was a sharp stealth bomber that could fly across two rooms.

Russell’s looked suspiciously like a rock-shaped crumpled-up boob.

His dumb buddies came around regularly, hollering for him and making a mess. She hoped these guys would convince him to go out, get drunk, remind him what life was like and where he

usually lived it. They brought in bottles of Jim Beam and poured him tall glasses that he sniffed at like a turned off rabbit. They sat around and got drunk and told their new nigger jokes, the ones they’d heard on the job, wherever that was. They punched him on the shoulder and in the ribs and got him in headlocks and called him nicknames like Scooter. She could tell which friends they were—hunting, fishing, drinking, all of these— by what name they called him. But

Russell himself didn’t seem to know who they were. In fact it seemed like he was afraid of the smell of whiskey and was scared of the noise and didn’t get the jokes because he always laughed at the set-up—there was this Rainbow-PUSH meeting—and then looked completely confused at

the punch. His buddies were afraid the head wound had turned him progressive.

“Ballsack,” his dumb buddies said, “you ain’t looking too good.”

“I’m not feeling too good,” Ballsack admitted.

“You got some kind of brain damage? Some kind of loose screw up there?”

“I think it’s something,” Russell said. He rubbed his bandaged forehead.

When they got down to the bottom of the bottle his friends decided to sign his bandages.

“Hold still, Ballsack” they said, trying to keep him from wriggling free. They had a Bic ballpoint. They doodled across his forehead and around the back: the Stars and Bars, a 3 with wings, a cartoon hand flipping the bird. One of them drew a bullet and then put the Do Not sign over it. One of the guys, who prided himself a sensitive artiste, drew a squiggly snake cut into parts, and over it he wrote the word UNTIE. The guys got a kick out of that.

“Look at that damn thing!” they said. “Look at that damn snake on your head!”

But even his good buddies coming by and bothering him didn’t seem to snap him out of it. In fact he looked a little relieved whenever they left. Each new group that came by saw what the other got to write on his bandages and wanted to, too. After a while his eyelids drooped under

the weight of them, shifting down uncomfortably during all the grafitti-ing, and they looked to be

the only thing holding his brains in, as if the mush between his ears had turned to mud and was

sinking down slowly toward his cheeks.

Around the one-month mark Pammy Sue ripped them off his head. She’d been drinking since breakfast and got it into her brain that he was afraid to go out because he looked like a grotesque freak. By this point they were really just hanging on; they’d taken too much abuse and had as many scrawls as a subway, or what she guessed a subway looked like. She decided that if he

could see he was okay underneath, he might be ready to re-face the world. So she called him into

the bathroom and tugged them hard.

“See?” she said. “Look at yourself in the mirror. You look all right.”

Russell looked at himself in the mirror. Right on his right temple was a brown mark like a

nipple.

“See?” she said. “See? Lookin’ good!”

But Russell seemed unimpressed. He slid his bandage back on, shuffled into the kitchen and

found some Oreo’s, and then he took them to the couch to watch some tube.

It occurred to her, of course, that he might be faking it to avoid returning to his job selling

craptainment at the Camelot music in the mall. He’d pulled a stunt like that before. This had been a few years back when he worked the grill at Hardee’s and burned his hand severely in the three a.m. fry grease trying to retrieve his watch. The burns were bad, as were probably the next

few batches of fries, but in typical Russell fashion he’d fucked it all up by milking his infirmity

so long that his bosses got suspicious and sent a private eye out to their place, who caught

Russell on video in the front yard beating up their junked cinderblocked Pinto with a sledgehammer just for fun. After that he was no longer a valued member of the Hardee’s third- shift family.

So he could be faking it.

His bosses at work had begun to call almost daily. They told him they really missed their number four best salesman of corporate soundalike dung.

“Russell, we know you’ve been through a shock,” they told him, trying to sound sympathetic,

“but we could really use you on the floor. It’s almost the Fourth of July. It’s the holiday rush.”

On the floor was where they sold the CDs. They’d hoped some name recognition and place association might help recover him from his bullet-inflicted stupor. But it hadn’t worked.

“Bosses, I tell you, I’d really like to come back,” Russell told them between spoons of cereal.

“But I really think I feel worse every day since I got shot in the head.”

“Could you come in on Saturday?”

“No.”

“How about just for a little bit?” they asked.

“No.”

“How about an hour?”

“An hour?”

“Yes, on Saturday?”

“When?”

“On Saturday?”

“No.”

She sat in the breakfast nook with the receiver to her ear, barely breathing into it, drinking vodka tonics, her third by noon, and studying his conversations with his bosses, looking for some minor slip up, some sign of self-awareness or high- or low-consciousness that might let her know if he was faking it. But she’d found nothing, none. She stretched the phone cord into the living room so she could stare at him, too. But he simply sat there and chewed his breakfast and watched the tube and told his bosses he didn’t feel good. He didn’t see her standing there, not from peripheral vision and not when she stretched the cord in front of the television and blocked the set. He told his bosses to call him back after Guiding Light.

If he was faking it then he was sticking with it, which would be the first thing he’d ever stuck to in his life, outside of literally.

But there was another possibility to consider, besides the possible deadbeating and faking, though she’d tried her best to keep this second choice out of her mind, since it was no more reassuring. And that possibility was, her husband was now retarded.

There seemed to be some evidence for this.

Before the bullet Russell had been foul-mouthed, short-tempered, unresponsive, uncomplicated, unavailable, a brute, a husband, a beast. He spent his time at home getting drunk in the garage where he didn’t have to see her and spent his time away from home getting drunk somewhere else. He forgot birthdays and blew right past anniversaries. He stayed out all night with his dumb buddies, stumbled in late, passed out quick, rarely bothered her. He was in every way unavailable. It had been the perfect marriage. It was just the kind of the marriage her

Momma had.

But now there were substantial changes to his demeanor to suggest that he might, indeed, be retarded. For the most part when his wife walked through the room he seemed happy to see her.

Even when she got drunk and started throwing things at him—which was how they’d always

communicated before—all he did was take cover and yell for help. He hummed tunes to himself

that she couldn’t quite make out and snapped his fingers to some invisible beat. At bedtime he slept not on the far end, as far away as he could get and still have an ass cheek on, but curled up tight behind his wife, even trying in the middle of the night to hold her hand, not in an affectionate way but like a child, too much palm and grip, as if scared by a dream. His foul temper and mouth, which had shared space together since they started dating in the sixth grade, had inexplicably soothed. His daughter asked why daddy got so sober.

These pointed to brain damage, pure and sure.

But every time she settled on this, began to feel at first sympathy and then panic, she remembered the dumb videotape they got in the mail, forty-five minutes of Russell out in his boxers and a wife beater beating up their Pinto.

He was faking. He had to be.

She decided to test him, to be proactive instead of postactive or whatever, like on Oprah. She took to waiting until he was hunkered waist deep into the icebox and would spring up behind him, and instead of yelling “Boo!” she’d yell, “I KNOW YOU’RE FAKING, YOU SON OF A

BITCH!” Surely it would scare him and he’d hit his head out of reflex, or otherwise break character, and the game would be up. The worst that could happen was that Russell really was still sick, and he might seize up and have a quick heart attack right there in the freezer.

It was worth the risk.

But Russell never flinched, not even a twitch. He simply turned around with his glassy eyes and his mawkish half-smile and said they were outta ice cream.

She could have started believing him then, if she’d chosen to. But she had no idea what she’d

do if she really were stuck with this new Russell for the rest of her life. He’d always been the

man and she’d been the woman in the relationship, and furthermore she liked being the woman,

liked her husband being the awful, unreliable, good for nothing sack of shit she was taught a

husband had a right to be. It was at least something she understood, whereas head trauma, not so

much. So she decided to keep testing him for a while, to draw out his ruse once and for all by

practicing something she knew to be, from taking a night class once, called civil disobedience.

She started by putting huge bleach stains in everything he owned, from his bowling shirt to his pool-league shirt to his happy, funky briefs. She refused to cook, not even in the microwave;

she stopped cleaning or even touching the cleaning products except for the bleach ruining his

clothes.

She followed this up by kicking out all of his dumb buddies who’d dropped by one night with

some fag jokes and banning them outright.

“You want to see these jokers?” she demanded of Russell. “You’ll have to go out to see

them. Don’t you want to go out? Get drunk?”

Russell smiled at her hopefully, a gawky half-grin from a junior high yearbook.

“That’s it, then,” she said. “I’m through. You can tell these jokers goodbye.”

“Goodbye, jokers,” Russell waved.

Finally, having exhausted all other options, Pammy Sue developed what she believed to be

the definitive test of her husband’s faculties. It was so obvious, she wondered why she hadn’t

thought of it before. She invited the mailman to continue their affair. Right there, in her house.

He could come over any time he wanted.

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” the mailman asked. He was twenty-five years old, wore a

moustache and some scraggly sideburns, was not terribly bright, and was the best piece of ass

Pammy Sue ever had.

“Don’t worry,” Pammy Sue told him. “My husband is brain dead from the gunshot. He

probably won’t even realize you’re there.”

So the mailman once again resumed his special delivery to Pammy Sue, and afterwards the

mailman would sit around in the living room with Russell and chitchat.

“You’re the mailman?” Russell would say.

“Yeah, man,” said the mailman. “You got shot in the head?”

“You better believe it.” On television, Montel said you better stop sleeping with your cousin

or you’ll get her pregnant again, fool.

“Montel,” the mailman laughed. “Tells it like it is, man.”

Russell and the mailman would sit for a few minutes, seemingly interested in the show,

watching the white trash make morons of themselves, snorting up a laugh whenever somebody

swung at somebody, and then Russell would inevitably turn to the mailman and say, “Who are you again?”

“I’m delivering the mail,” the mailman said, being patient and understanding.

“Oh.”

“You see?” the mailman asked, holding up his mailbag.

“I see,” Russell said, though his eyebrows were wrinkled and confused. “And how long have you been here?”

“About three hours,” the mailman replied.

Russell nodded, said ok, wrinkled his eyebrows, and went back to watching TV. After Montel

they usually caught reruns of The Newlywed Game and had a couple of brews.

Pammy Sue was furious.

“Are you gonna let me do this to you?” she’d scream at Russell, even with the mailman there.

“Are you seriously going to let this guy screw your wife in your own home while you’re here?

Would you sink so low?”

“Honey, you’re being a little hard on him,” the mailman said.

“Honey don’t be so hard on me,” Russell added.

“That’s what I’m talking about!” Pammy Sue said. “He’s faking it, goddammit!”

“Honey, is that really necessary?” the mailman said.

“Is that really necessary?” Russell said right behind him.

“That’s what I’m talking about!” Pammy Sue shouted.

Six weeks after the gunshot, unable to deal with this polite retard who looked like the sorry

bastard she’d married, Pammy Sue decided to move out of their house and move in with the

mailman. She took their daughter, the Dodge Neon, most of the silverware, and all the cash. She

left her number at the mailman’s house and dared Russell to sprout some balls, stand up for your

life, be a man.

Russell watched them go and waved bye-bye.

He stood in the front door the rest of the day, waiting for them to come back. He slept there overnight and had screen-door marks on his face when he woke up. Then he went foraging in their half-stocked and half-disgusting kitchen for some food.

In the hours and days that followed Russell’s house became like something out of Dante, if in

Dante Hell were full of refuse and smelled like spoiled eggs. It had been weeks since Pammy

Sue cleaned, and Russell had to make paths through rooms with his slippered feet. He found his remote control in a popcorn bag and sat on the couch watching television from the time he woke,

Beverly Exercise at 5:30 am, until the time he fell sleep in the same spot, in the same position.

His robe became a second skin. His house could be smelled from the street. A few neighbors

came over with a bag of lime and dusted the yard but they didn’t ring the doorbell. Their

neighborliness ended where their nose began.

His bosses from Camelot Music in the mall finally called him up and told him to go fuck

himself, they’d hire someone else.

“And don’t you come in this store,” the fat boss added. “You come in this store and we will

mess you up.”

“Can I still shop there?” Russell asked them.

“You come in this store,” his boss repeated, “we will mess you up.”

Russell shuffled through his house and scrounged for food and watched television alone for

the next two weeks. He ate everything in the cabinets regardless of expiration and in the

evenings he rode out sweats and fought bacteria. His home began shutting down as the first of

the month arrived, system by system like a deathbed patient. He lost water first, then the gas;

both of these had been shut off in the past and thus were first on the kill list at their respective

companies. Then the cable company shut off his TV. He found some tin foil stuck away in the

bottom of a cabinet, back in business, and he pierced foil globes to his rabbit ears.

Once an hour or so he’d check on the door and made sure it was unlocked, check the clock.

His wife and daughter were taking their time.

Finally word got out that it was safe to go back over to Russell’s—somebody saw Pammy Sue making out with the mailman at Dairy Queen—and so one of his old bar buddies came by to check up on him. His name was Earl, no real last name, and he sometimes shot pool with

Russell in the late-night league. Southern Comfort kamikaze, he reminded Russell. That was his thing. Plastic cups lined in rows, and he passed them out to pool buddies and women with bright, spread makeup, he liked the women who looked like trashy raccoons.

Earl shook his head with his mouth hanging open. “Christ,” he said. “This is one dirty motherfucking house.”

“Yes, I think you’re right.”

“I mean it,” Earl said, hands on his hips, shaking his head, stunned. “You know, fuck!” He looked at the carpet, followed up the walls, and looked straight up at the ceiling for no reason.

Earl looked like someone evolution had let by, skinny, dull, slackfaced, mustachioed with a greasy, accidental sideburn growing on his lip, dumbo ears, and difficult gingivitis. He dressed in jeans and faded black-almost-to-bluish t-shirts with blurred-out tour dates for bands that hadn’t released a record in years.

“I think I should call somebody,” he said. “This is some fucked up shit.”

Russell looked ashamed, ready to cry, with the wobble chin, and he shook his head looking down at his feet. “Pammy Sue left.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“I was fired from my job because I sustained bulletal injury.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“I haven’t been on my lucky streak.”

“Yeah, I know,” Earl said. “That’s some rough, bad shit you went through.”

“Yeah, I know,” Russell said.

Earl called a friend of a mechanic who went fishing with a guy whose sister cleaned houses for a living and said it was an emergency.

“We’re at DefCon fucking Five,” he said, having always wanted to say that. “I can’t even breathe, this place is such a fuckhole. Make sure whoever you send has a strong stomach.”

When he hung up, the phone company realized the phone was still connected, and they quickly cut it off.

While they waited on the cleaning lady to arrive, Earl and Russell shot the shit, adjusted the rabbit ears, reworked the tin foil. Montel was red and green vertical hold ghosts, quick phantom images, funhouse mirror television, blinking to bright, intrusive blue screen when it felt like it.

Living like this, in such a mess, was what college must be like, they guessed.

“So what did it feel like?” Earl said finally, deciding he couldn’t wait any longer.

“What did what?”

“You know,” he said, and he raised his pointer-finger to his head and pulled back his thumb, cocked it with a click of his throat.

“Oh,” Russell said. “I don’t think I’ll ever want to do it again.”

“My granddaddy was shot in the head,” Earl said, and he told the story of his grandfather, a private first class who had been shot in the head at Normandy by Germans.

“What were the Germans doing?” Russell asked

“They were shooting my granddaddy in the head,” his friend said. “But he lived through it and bore seed afterwards. He’s one of a long line, a great line of noble men in our family who have been shot in wars, our great family tradition.”

Earl took his cue and pulled up his Judas Priest T-shirt to reveal a scar in the bloom of a flushed, fat flower on his ribcage.

“Desert Storm,” he said, looking down with love at the fleshy shape on his ribs. He quickly added: “Friendly fire.”

“It was lucky you were hit,” Russell said.

“Damn right,” Earl said. “I would’ve broken the chain. All the men in my family have been war wounded for generations, you see? Now my son, whenever I have one, will have to go off and get shot in a war, too. It’s a tremendous responsibility.”

Montel flickered into existence, said don’t be such an a-hole, flickered back into nothingness.

“My great-great granddaddy fought in the war,” Earl said with a look of pride and awe and trance, the shell-shocked happy look of a quick car wreck. “The war to end all wars. Yankees put a bullet in his leg but he came home and bore seed, thirteen children in thirteen years. Those

Yankees couldn't stop him from doing what he did best.” He winked, gave Russell’s elbow a nudge.

Russell blushed. “Well, that was lucky.”

“Hell yes, he was lucky, he could’ve been much worse. He could’ve come out looking like you.”

“Yes,” Russell said.

“But the Yankees won the war. My great-great granddaddy would live, but the Confederacy would perish. Never will we see her likes again. We underestimated the Yankees, and they tore

us a new one.”

Earl nodded his head like he’d decided on something and looked up at Russell as if weighing him, not judging but still searching into the man’s bandaged, blood-rusted soul, into his character, as if deciding whether to share some ancient, secret knowledge with him. He put his

index fingers beneath his nose and played with his ratty moustache.

“You know—what happens down here is the Yankees’ fault,” he said. “From the strip mall to

the unemployment line to the, I don’t know. Everything.”

“Everything,” Russell repeated, right behind him.

“See, this is what happened,” Earl continued. “We were a free land down here, a free land

unto ourselves and beholden to no one, and we were invaded by a hostile force known as the

United States Army."

“We were?”

“You’ve forgotten it. Maybe you forgot it when you got shot in the head, that’s ok, or maybe

you never knew it, but that’s what happened.”

“I don’t understand,” Russell said.

“Here’s the thing,” Earl said, shifting in his seat and trying to look serious. “When things go

wrong you find someone to blame. I feel sorry for people who can’t blame their problems on

Yankees. When things go wrong, I bet those people blame God. Dangerous.”

Russell looked liked he was trying to say two things at once. His bullethole became

puckered.

“So your wife left you.”

“Uh, yes.”

“For the mailman.”

“Uh, yes, the mailman.”

“I bet he was a Yankee,” Earl said.

“I don’t think so,” Russell said helpfully. “I think he’s from Raleigh.”

“He may have been faking it. They come in disguise and take our women. Some of them are

Jews.”

Russell had heard of Jews, of course, like everyone had. They wore beanies without

propellers. He’d seen pictures.

“You said you were fired from your job.”

“Yes.”

“Is your boss a Yankee?”

“They’re Italian,” Russell said.

“See, I told you,” Earl said enthusiastically.

“Aren’t there Italians from the South?” Russell asked.

“Not many, friend. Not many.”

“I’m banned from the Camelot in the mall,” Russell added.

“And who shot you in the head?”

Russell told him who it was, a local boy, and they both agreed that he was a good guy.

“Well, accidents happen. But you could just have easily been shot by a Yankee.”

“I didn’t know they were so dangerous,” Russell said.

“They’re the fucking worst,” Earl said. “We’re a good people down here,” he continued.

“We only lack the light to see our way. One day, the South will be free. The South will rise again, my friend.”

“When will that be?” Russell asked.

“I assure you it will come virgin soon,” Earl said.

The doorbell shrilled, sharp and grating, announcing that the maid had finally shown up. She

was a fat, ugly girl, glazed with sweat, hands large as hams, and she looked much better when

she frowned, because her mouth stayed closed. She stared at Russell in disgust, like a sideshow.

“Did you really get shot in the head?” she asked quietly. She had a voice fat and low, like the rest of her.

“Yes.”

“What did it feel like?”

“It hurt.”

While the maid, whose name was Rudelle after her mother or someone like that, cleaned the apartment and occasionally cursed when she saw something she didn’t like, the men had more small talk.

“I bet I’ve got something which might interest you, friend,” Earl said with satisfaction. “I bet you’d be interested in seeing it.”

“What is it?”

“It’s a real life Civil War reenactment. I’m part of a company which fights for the South in these reenactments on the fair grounds.”

“You fight?”

“No, we reenact,” Earl corrected. “If we fought, we’d win for sure. Those Yankees are real

pussies. They teach at the community college.”

“Pussies,” Russell repeated.

“But it’s as close as you can get to being there for the real Civil War. Without all that

gangrene and abscess, you know?”

Russell said he knew.

“And I’ve got this other club I belong to,” Earl said seriously. “You might like to see it. We get together and stockpile weapons. And we play cards.”

Russell didn’t say no, which was close enough to yes for Earl.

“When the cycle comes back around, you’re in. I can’t believe we never hung out like this before. We can be buds.” Rudelle the maid shrieked at something she found growing in a sink.

In the weeks that followed, Russell and the guy he sometimes shot pool with hung out like heterosexuals do. Earl paid his friend’s modest bills, got the stuff that had been shut off turned back on, kept the stuff that should have been cut off running strong.

They were inseparable—they went to the mall together, to the salon, to the movies, and to get ice cream, where they enjoyed pistachio and mint chocolate chip. They watched the melting cream dribble down each other’s chins and laughed like schoolboys.

Earl introduced Russell to his buddies in the bowling league as “the guy who was shot in the head.”

“Oh, so you’re that guy,” the bowlers all said, nodding their heads and pointing.

“Back atcha,” Russell said, smiling and giving them the thumbs up.

One time Russell joined in on league night and bowled a fifty. Twice, he threw his ball into someone else’s lane. But nobody was hurt.

During this time, Earl made Russell his pet project, his apostle—he’d never had an apostle before, he said, someone so agreeable and ready to learn. But Russell’s mind was like a sponge,

Earl said, like a sponge with a bullethole. So Earl taught his friend the things he needed to know.

He talked about the Civil War and Civil Rights and how he liked some black guys, like Eddie

Murphy, and how the South would rise again. It would be like a phoenix, he said, rising from the asses.

Earl sometimes talked about the pride of the South, the family. He talked about church cookouts and cold watermelon on the warmest fucking hellhole days of the summer. And he talked about the slow pace of life in the South. “You won’t find anything like that up north,” he said, waving a finger. “Fried chicken skins, graham cracker pies, pure grain alcohol. We know how to live.”

And then sometimes Earl talked about his father, who had been laid off from work when Earl was ten and who used to drink a lot and beat up his girlfriend, not Earl’s mother, a teenage girl who wore plastic fingernails and who was there because Earl’s mom had left long ago. And sometimes Earl talked about being awkward in high school, and how awkward he had been with the girls there, and how he never got to talk to any but the ugly ones. “Just the ugly ones,” he repeated.

And sometimes, in strange moments, Earl talked about the North as if it were a land he’d never seen, a land you read about in fairy tales, with skyscrapers which seemed to cleave into the night sky, fitting like the perfect teeth of a key into the shocked, bruised, starless lock of the skyline, forgetful office lights stories high the only stars a city could see. It was a land where things arcane and abstract and obscene happened. Like New York, or some damn place like that.

He spoke in a whisper: “I’d like to see it.”

And sometimes Russell would enter the conversation and talk about Pammy Sue, and how he missed her laying down in the bed beside him at night. He talked about her like she was the

girlfriend who had gone away for the summer and would return sometime soon, in the turning of

the fall, just before it began to grow cold.

Russell smiled when he talked about her. “She rides in the mail truck now,” he’d say.

When the first of the month arrived, Earl took Russell to meet his militia group.

“Hey guys,” someone called out. “It’s the guy who shot himself in the head.”

Everyone at the meeting, mostly skinny guys with moustaches and camouflage, hooted for

him. Everyone knew about the guy who shot himself in the head.

“I didn’t shoot myself in the head,” Russell told them. Russell told them he’d been shot, and

when he told them who it was who had shot him, they all knew him and agreed that he was a

good guy.

“That son of a bitch,” one of the men exclaimed. “That crazy son of a bitch shot you in the

head.”

When the meeting got down to business, the men turned down the lights and all sat on metal

folding chairs. There was a spotlight and a lectern in front of them, and one of the men, an older

gentleman dressed in a fine camouflage suit and tie, finally got up to speak.

“It’s good to see all of you here tonight, brothers,” the old man said. “And it’s good to see some new faces here tonight, most notably Russell, the man who shot himself in the head.”

A new spotlight, which was really a guy standing on a chair with a mag-lite, beamed down on

Russell, and the group members clapped and whooped.

“It’s a testimony to the human spirit,” the old camouflage man said. “The man shoots himself

in the head and comes back strong and comes to our group to help stockpile weapons. Let’s hear

it for him!”

The small crowd again clapped and whooped some more, but Russell couldn’t see any of

them because some asshole was shining a mag-lite in his eyes.

Then the speaker settled into his message and seemed to speak for, from, and to the heart of

everyone there. He talked about unemployment and the corporate mentality. He talked about

broken lives and broken marriages, broken people. He talked about the emptiness of it all, about

the inescapability and ultimate inexhaustible loneliness of life, and about people who had

nothing at all and nothing to lose. He talked about every man in the room, every man outside the

room who bore the yoke but who didn’t recognize the beast. And he discussed how the beast

had come to the South, riding a violent wind which blew from the north.

“They were unstoppable,” he said. “They were the army of the angel of death. And make no

mistake brothers, sisters”—he nodded at a muscular woman in a Mylar vest, and she nodded

back, pursed her lips—“make no mistake the Federal Oppressive States of America are still on

our backs, breathing down our necks, sitting in their Washington offices and operating our lives

by remote control.”

After the speech, cookies and punch were served.

Russell stood by the refreshments and ate cookies by the handful. He washed it down with

punch, and the front of his shirt bore bright red splotches of fruit flavor.

The old man in the camouflage mingled around the room for a while, shaking hands and making everyone feel at home, and when he got to Russell he asked how it felt getting shot in the

head. Russell said, “Dammit, it hurt.”

“I bet,” the old man laughed, wide-mouthed, crummy teeth small and bronze as candies. “I

bet that hurt like a bitch.”

Every corner of the rented prefab room had a small table set up, splayed across with an assortment of guns, and the men behind the tables said you can never be too careful, the federal government will be coming back to finish what they started—eventually—and we have auto, semi, silenced, legal, street, sawed off, and best value. It was the Tupperware party of the demented, and Russell was upset he didn’t actually have any money.

Earl said, “Buddy, you’ve been through some difficult, traumatic, stressful, and life-shaking times lately. So let me buy you a handgun.”

The metal was cool and pleasant to the touch, and Earl had to stop him from putting it to his face.

In the days following the militia meeting and firearms sale, Russell took to leaving the house with his gun in his pocket. He would walk to the end of his street and back in slow, showy strides, always looking around wildly for something he never seemed to see. It was like watching a spy movie, or a movie about some international intrigue, except that it starred a mental patient.

Russell walked down to the supermarket with his gun in his front jeans pocket, and he wore it into the store to buy some mayonnaise and Fruit Loops with a wad of bills Earl had left at his place. The cashier was a pretty thing, and she either didn’t notice the gun or just didn’t care.

In the meantime, Russell had commenced his life. He dirtied up the place again and watched television—back to cable, living well. Every few days, Earl would come over, occasionally with

the girl who was the sister of the friend of the brother-in-law who knew someone, and she’d clean his apartment.

One day, Pammy Sue even called and told Russell she loved him, that he was a major dickwad, and she kept repeating herself, “I love you” and “dickwad” for almost an hour. When she finally hung up, Russell cried.

Mere days later he spotted them all walking together into Blockbuster, his wife and his daughter walking alongside and holding hands with the mailman. He stood by the front window for a while and watched them, his face pressed against the glass, until the manager came out with a broom and shooed him off.

Then, one day from out of the blue, Earl arrived unannounced and told Russell it was time to relive Dixie’s dramatic decline. It was time for Earl to join the South’s boys in gray and fight against the ruthlessness of northern aggression and time for Russell to watch. And you could bring a picnic lunch.

Russell said he would enjoy watching history come alive.

It had to be at the fairgrounds, the same one that hosted the country music festivals and traveling amusement parks, the kind of traveling show which bolts a Ferris Wheel to the ground and hopes for the best. Earl said it was the only place that could “hold the crowd.”

Thirty-one spectators.

Earl’s troop was to the right, just off the highway and crouching in some bushes, although

Russell could see them. On the other side of the fairgrounds, the Yankees were all standing

around smoking cigarettes and talking on cell phones.

The battle was the Battle of Snake Place, which was, Earl had told Russell on the ride over,

the eleventh or twelfth biggest Civil War battle in that part of the state.

“It was big, man,” Earl assured him. “It was a bloodbath.”

Earl also told Russell to watch how those pasty-faced fags from the community college would be all snooty as the Yankees. They always were, Earl said, because they always knew they were

going to win. “They don’t even try as hard as we do.”

Sure enough, Russell watched the Yankees intently as he waited for the show to begin. One

of them, a Union officer, was scratching his butt. On Earl’s side, the Confederate side, everyone

was still crouching behind bushes.

Russell stood beside a young mother with three young, very homely, very loud children.

“We come to these every time they have them,” she said to Russell, making small talk. “It’s

interesting to see something like this, you know, reenacted. But it’s kind of like watching a great

movie with a lousy ending. It’s too bad we can’t win one of these one times.”

After a while of the Yankees standing around, the Confederates crouching, and the crowd

getting fidgety, finally an announcer, a bald guy from City Hall or the chamber of commerce or

somewhere, walked into the middle of the field. He didn’t have a microphone, so he had to yell.

“Hear ye, hear ye,” he screamed. “It is now time to step back into the past, all the way to the

Battle of Snake Place, a battle which our boys fought valiantly but which they ultimately lost,

and then the Yankee troops had their way with our women and infected out bloodline. Take it

away, boys.”

When the bald guy had made it off the field, the first shot rang out from the Dixie side, and a

plume of smoke caught the air and snaked into the breeze. A shot went up from the Yankee side,

and the Yankees began to move.

“You’ll never take us alive!” one of the confederate actors yelled, raising his rifle in the air,

and another confederate badgered the Yankees to Come Get Some.

The Union troops ignored the heckling and marched slowly, almost apathetically, toward their

enemies, many of them without even raising their guns. One of the Union troops, a general,

caught himself on some briars and swore loudly.

The Southern troops, on the other hand, approached stealthily, gracefully, although they were

crouching through a wide-open field. Some of the Rebels fired shots into the air, others yelled

slogans like Distemper Tyrannous and Fire Back, Dickweeds!

The spectators tensed as the rival armies moved slowly toward each other. The young mother

Russell had been talking to leaned down to one of her children and told them not to look, the

South was about to get butchered, again. She pointed at the Union army. One of the Union soldiers was tying his shoe.

Russell stepped forward from the crowd, brought out his gun, stuck clumsily in his front jeans pocket, leveled it straight, and fired.

It was a thunderous noise, comparatively, a noise which jolted the crowd. On the field, a

Union soldier who had been walking along with his rifle on his shoulder went down in a jerky motion, and blood erupted from his neck in a dark spray.

Most everyone on the field stopped dead. A few random soldiers kept walking as if it were part of the show.

A second shot rang out and caught a Union general on the shoulder. The general screamed and hit the ground, clutching his arm. He said “mother” and “fucker.”

Russell walked onto the field, handgun drawn, and continued firing on the Yankees. They

were going down in clumps, in some kind of synchronized and brutal beauty, as if they’d practiced this a million times, spraying brilliant ribbons of blood.

“It’s payback time, Yankees!” Russell screamed as he advanced. “You goddamn Yankee mailmen!”

Someone on the Confederate side, a genteel, white-goateed officer, crawled over to Earl, who had hit the deck as soon as the real firing started, and said, “Hey Earl, isn’t that your buddy, the guy who shot himself in the head?”

Earl looked up to see Russell walking like the Terminator after a Union soldier who was running, flapping his arms, screaming like a girl.

“Jesus Christ!” Earl said. “It’s fucking Russell!”

“You shouldn’t have given him a firearm,” the wise old soldier said.

Earl sprang to his feet and took off, charging across the fairgrounds which last fall had smelled like cotton candy and caramel apples, the fairgrounds where he’d had too much to drink on Labor Day, the fairgrounds which had been transformed, for this brief Saturday morning, into the representation of the entire small southern town, the entire small southern state, the entire small southern South. He charged over bleeding Union bodies, over blue-coated community college professors with red, glossy wounds, charging away from everything the South had once been, toward everything the South had become, and he launched into the air and took Russell down at the knees.

90 The Form of the Joke

For seven years Harold Martin taught people how to laugh in Wednesday night sessions at The

Institute for Unrecognized Medicines in Cincinnati, Ohio, and while during this time he mended no broken bones, made no lame to walk, and put into remission no medical or mental ailment, he did convince a number of people with ordinarily bleak outlooks on life that laughter promoted physical and emotional well being and that they should lighten the hell up.

His methodologies tended toward the tried and true—utilizing puns and repartee, demonstrating breathing exercises to make the ha-ha sound, encouraging the practice of self- tickling and self-massage, sometimes using props such as the rubber clown nose, rubber chicken neck, anything rubber was funny—and these revealed a comedic and therapeutic temperament in line with the exaggerated physical comedy of the old-time vaudevillian, which he believed to be in every sense good medicine, safe and effective, and easily tolerated. He could make his fat, ruddy face fatter and ruddier by holding his breath. He could fart on command and in pitch.

He’d never once resorted to working blue. He was a natural.

Harold’s sessions cut across demographic lines—men and women, young and old, white- collar, blue-collar, and pink-slipped, some very bright and others not so much—but all of them shared the simple fact and scars of their suffering, their faces and brows in deep furrowed frowns, their hearts dragging behind them on the floor. They were what comedians might call a tough crowd, except that for these people there was something actually, diagnostically, perhaps even spiritually wrong with them, they weren’t just being jackasses. But Harold had learned that the best way to break through suffering to the sufferer was the element of surprise, and for this reason he tended to wait until the session had seated themselves before coming in wearing the clown nose, or an Uncle Miltie dress, or sometimes shirtless, letting his man-boobs hang free, or

91 once pantsless, wearing nothing below the waist but hard black shoes and a sleek matching

Speedo with the words How’s My Driving? stamped on the butt.

“Hi, I’m Harold,” Harold would say. “And I’m not a crazy person, I’m your laugh therapist.”

Generally this stunt proved successful and provoked a quick laugh or two, though these tended to be a few minutes after the fact, once the initial Shock and Awe had worn off. In the interim he would further break the ice by telling a string of corny jokes that were not funny and which became funny the more of them he told precisely because they were not funny. Then, once everyone in the room had finally dropped their shoulders and relaxed and had stopped staring at his clown nose, man-boobs, or frail, pasty knees, Harold would begin the session in earnest by explaining how he’d gotten his start in laugh therapy.

“My wife had cancer,” he explained. “This was ten years ago, she was in her early forties at the time. She owned a flower business…I mean she owns a flower business. She still owns it.

She survived and she beat the cancer. We’ve been married thirty-three years and she’s still

doing just fine. In fact I saw her just this morning.

“But at the time, of course, it was touch and go. We weren’t at all sure she was going to

make it. She’d been tired for six months or so before we got the diagnosis. Just not herself, running out of energy, losing her breath, sleeping as soon as she got home but she’d never get rested. I thought she was working too hard. I’d say to her, Eunice, you know there are other florists in town, don’t you? You don’t really have to grow every flower that gets sold in this

town, do you? I don’t know if she really grew them, but you see what I mean.

“So she kept working and kept feeling not herself, and finally we took her in for a check-up,

and that’s when we had a name for it: stomach cancer. When the doctor came back in the room

he had this look on his face like his lung had collapsed, and he wouldn’t look at us, he just

92 looked at the floor, back at the doorknob, down at his shoes. That’s when I knew we were in for it.

“If you’ve never been in a spot like that—and maybe some of you have been, maybe some of you are right now, which is why you’re here—but if you’ve never been, I can tell you, life becomes so fragile. And terrifying, too. Every breath seems like it’s full of death and worry.

You want to just hold your breath and stop time, stop the clock, not breathe any more of the disease in. But of course holding your breath, all you get is dizzy.”

Here the support groupers fidgeted—as if unsure whether they should laugh at this but too bothered to fake it—and a few of them, realizing they’d been holding their own breaths, released them in distraught sighs.

“So we did everything we could think of, everything we could. The doctors had her swallow barium tablets to see how much damage was there. That was the terrible joke from that time:

What do you do with stomach cancer patients? Barium. It was unfunny then and it’s unfunny now. But the stain showed it was spread all over her stomach, they couldn’t cut it out. We tried chemotherapy thinking that it might shrink the size of the problem so the doctors could open her up. But those treatments, they were horrible. Killing the disease by killing the patient. Anyone here know about that? How awful it is? A few hands? Okay, one or two.

“I’m sure there are others of you out there with different problems, I should say different problems than cancer, that led you here tonight. This world is full of stress and trouble, I can see it all over your faces.” Harold did a quick scan across the room. “What about you, sweetheart?

What’s your name?”

“Brenda,” said a mousy young woman seated across from him.

“Brenda, what’s your problem, honey?” Harold asked. “You’re not looking too good.”

93 “I got Post Traumatic Stress Disorder from watching TV,” Brenda said. “I watch a lot of news programs.”

“Oh, television’s the worst,” Harold said. “I’d say stop watching TV altogether, unless you’re going to watch something beneficial like a sitcom. No news, and no news magazines, like that 48 Hours, Inside Edition, Unsolved Mysteries, Dateline Monday, Dateline Wednesday,

A Current Affair, C-Span, and Good Morning Tri-State. That stuff rots your soul. Give me a ho-

ho hee-hee, Brenda.”

“Ho-ho,” Brenda said. “Hee-hee.”

“That’s good,” Harold said. “You just keep sitting there hee-ing and ho-ing to yourself,

silently. That’s one of the techniques I’m about to teach you, shortly. What about you, son?”

“Hi, my name’s James.”

“Hey, that’s a poem,” Harold said.

“I’m an alcoholic,” James admitted. “I drink too much and my wife left me.”

“James, that reminds me of a little joke. A man walks into a bar and he tells the bartender,

I’m an alcoholic, I drink too much and my wife left me. Have you heard this one?”

“No, sir, I don’t think so.”

“Okay, good. So the bartender looks at him and tells him, Stop drinking too much. Exercise,

take regular walks, and eat a diet rich in Omega-3 fatty acids. Go buy some Jerry Clower, a

personal favorite of mine is Clower Power. And then once you’re happy again, James, maybe

your wife will come back to you.

“You see what I’m getting at here, people. I mean we’ve all got our cross to bear, and we’ve

all got to find a way to bear it. For us it was cancer, and after we tried all the conventional

means—and the only thing chemo did was make my wife sicker—that’s when we tried the

94 unconventional. I mean we tried everything. I quit my job at the bank and cashed out our

savings, and my full-time job became looking for a miracle. We did exhaustive research, we read

every respectable journal and witchdoctor brochure we could get our hands on. We tried vitamin

therapy, herb therapy, aromatherapy, oxygen therapy, anti-oxygen therapy, acupuncture, we even

drank our own urine. Hey, don’t knock it,” Harold told the wrinkled noses. “You’d be surprised

what stuff you’d do, for just a little hope.”

He said they held fast to their Christian beliefs but in the meantime got literature on

Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Mohammedism, and so-on-ism. He said they prayed to every

God whose name they could pronounce. “We went to this guy,” Harold said. “He pulled

chicken livers out of Eunice’s boobs. But of course amateur theatrics don’t do anything for

cancer.

“So how did we find the right thing?” he asked rhetorically. “What was the answer? I’ll tell

you, though many of you might’ve already guessed: the answer is laughter. One of the biggest causes for disease in this world is stress. It can age you, it can make your hair fall out, it can give you bad teeth, bad breath, mental problems, erectile dysfunction, and quite possibly it can give you stomach cancer. This world is naturally stressful. The more we know of it, the more stressed out we become. That’s why our smartest people tend to be asocially morbid. And the natural defense against stress, and against stress-related disease, is laughter.”

He raised his hand so he could count off on fingers. “Did you know that laughing increases endorphins to the brain? Did you know that it relaxes blood pressure and improves digestion?

Did you know that it actually fights off disease? Anybody here know all that? Anybody?

Antibody?

“I’d stumbled onto a piece in the USA Today that said just that, that laughter therapy was

95 gaining ground if not respectability in the fighting of disease, and I thought, what did we have to lose? So I read up on the subject, from pop and real psychology to the Journal of American

Medicine to Reader’s Digest’s ‘Humor in Uniform.’ And I started making my wife laugh every day, as much as I could. We began by doing laughing exercises, like the ones I’m about to teach you. And we watched sitcoms on television…nothing degrading or sexually explicit like that

Murphy Brown but the old stuff. Ralph Kramden. Archie Bunker. Fred Sanford. I mean good

clean fun. And since I can fart on command, I’d have her pull my finger a bunch of times a day.

Breaking wind, I don’t care what they say, that’s funny.

“So the next time we went into the doctor’s office…well, you know what they said. It had

shrunken, the cancer, actually shrunken to a manageable size. So the doctors cut my wife open

and took out the bad parts, and we’ve been laughing and enjoying life together ever since. I gave

up banking for good, I went back to school and got my Master’s degree in psychology with an

emphasis in humor studies, and I’ve given over my life to it. It’s all outlook, people. You’ve got

to be a positive person. Don’t be one of those sour-pussies who says that life is dark and

depressing. Sure it’s dark and depressing, but it’s mostly pretty good! Life’s life! There’s no

shock so great that you can’t get past it with the use of humor. In fact, I’d say the bigger the

shock, the better your chances are to heal. That’s why Bob Hope used to kill at USO shows.

“You’ve got to humor yourselves. You’ve got to tickle each other’s funny bones and have

yours tickled by someone, too. You’ve got to laugh, people! I mean, come on. Right?”

Having finished the introduction, Harold would then teach the brokenhearted assembled how to

96 laugh: you opened your mouth and said ha. Other derivations included the he and ho, previously discussed, both of which were widely accepted. There was also the maniacal titter, the start-and- stop old-car-on-a-winter-morning slow-cranking cackle, the giggle, popular with teens and other foolish people, the snicker, the guffaw, the chortle, the belly laugh, and the impressive beverage- through-the-nose. It didn’t matter which of these you settled on, he explained to them, so long as the choice was a natural fit. “It’s like the Hindu Aum,” he said to them. “It’s the sound that resonates through you into the universe. So pick a good one.”

Here the session spent a few moments trying to do just that, all of them going at once, each person finding his or her own system or sound, while Harold paced the perimeter like a sideline coach. Every now and then when someone finally got it, Harold would slap that person on the back and tell him or her good hustle. When he caught someone else struggling—their chortle, for instance, turning into suffocation—he’d get up in their grill and offer some firm but fair direction that fell somewhere between a high school choral director and Lamaze. “Use the diaphragm, use the diaphragm!” he’d yell, putting his hand flat against the struggler’s struggling stomach. “Push that laugh out! Use the muscles! You’re doing it! That’s right! You’re giving

birth to happiness!”

It didn’t matter that the participants felt like stumps doing the exercise, Harold explained over

the brays and the ruckus of the fake-laughing, nor did it matter that the majority of them, though

they were indeed laughing fakely, still actually felt tragic, despondent, beyond redemption, and

perhaps now publicly humiliated. The physical act itself fooled the brain. Your brain is

receiving the message, he told them, even if it hasn’t relayed it back to your soul. All you had to

do was make the sound, make the face, squeeze your buttocks, use the diaphragm, and the brain

would respond. Laughing people are happy people, Harold promised them, even if they’re really

97 dying inside.

Then, after a brief intermission so his students could catch their light-headed breaths, Harold

dedicated the remainder of his session to the examination of other methods of making oneself laugh, from the conventional to the educational to the mildly uncomfortable. Sometimes these were audio-visual in nature, as when he wheeled in the old TV/VCR combo to screen clips from

Marx Brothers movies, or when he brought in his small boombox to play selections from his own private stash of clean jokes on tape. Sometimes these engaged the intellectual, offering serious studies of the unserious science through the examination of international forms of humor such as

the Middle Eastern tragic irony, the Irish limerick, the Polack joke, to distinctly American forms

such as the deadpan ridiculousness of Mark Twain, the wit and wisdom of Ben Franklin and Will

Rogers, the Presidential podium humor of Richard M. Nixon. Harold once hosted a dozens

night. Everyone there said, Your Momma’s so fat.

Sometimes Harold would bring in a guest motivational speaker for the second half of class,

someone who had survived a traumatic experience themselves and could offer a personal

testimonial of how the simple act of fooling oneself into being happy had fended off misfortune

and had actually changed a life.

These motivational speakers tended, more often than not, to be his wife.

“Say hello to the class, honey,” Harold would nudge her. “They’ve been wondering about

you.”

“Hello,” Eunice Martin said, scanning her husband’s students uneasily. She held tight to her

fake pearls—one of her nervous habits, Harold knew. She did it every time she came in.

For their part, Harold’s depressive stumps stared back at her with awe and fear, like she’d

crawled out of a grave.

98 “She’s a little shy,” Harold told the session. “Honey, do you want to speak a little bit? Do you want to talk about laughter and how we cured you?”

“There’s not much to tell,” his wife told them. She took a few deep, long sighs. “I had stomach cancer and somehow I beat it. And Harold thinks it’s because of laughter.”

“Anything else?” Harold prompted. “This is quite a thrill for the students.”

“We cleaned out our bank account,” Eunice Martin said. “Just about every last dime. I always thought we’d be retired by now.”

“Okay,” Harold said.

“But instead, we moved into a smaller house, to a neighborhood that’s not nearly as nice.

There used to be a cocktail bar in the clubhouse of our old living community. In the summers we’d have parties there and everyone wore white. We don’t see those friends much anymore.”

“Okay,” Harold said.

“Meanwhile Harold over here changed careers at age fifty-seven,” she said, pointing at him with her elbow. “And it pays next to nothing. All the cancer really wiped us out. We’ll be working for the rest of our lives, I guess.”

“That’s right,” Harold said, backing her up. “And the thing is, the cure was right in front of our faces the whole time. And it was free. We didn’t need to spend a dime. The answer was laughter, and laughter doesn’t cost a thing. That’s what they call in the humor business irony.

Isn’t that funny?” he asked the class.

“Hysterical,” his wife answered.

“Let’s open up the floor,” Harold suggested. “Take some questions.”

Harold’s student Sherrie, a plain-looking hypochondriac, raised her hand. “Did laughter cure you of cancer?” she asked.

99 “I have no idea,” his wife said. “It was like the twenty-fifth thing we tried. So it could have been one of those first twenty-four things, I guess. I don’t know.”

She raised her flat palms and shrugged her shoulders.

“Because Mr. Martin said it did,” Sherrie pushed. “I was just wondering because I think I have cancer, too.”

“I’d get a mammogram,” Eunice advised. “Because you might.”

“Gimme a ho-ho, Sherrie,” Harold asked.

“Ho-ho,” his student said nervously.

Harold opened up the floor to more questions: What did it feel like, not dying? Did she see a bright light? What advice did she have for people who were depressed, going through a difficult divorce, or addicted to prescription medication? Did she really drink her own urine? His wife answered these questions as best she could through clenched teeth.

“Does she have a laugh sound?” one of his students, the bald-headed commitmentphobe with the fu-manchu, asked. “Can we hear it?”

“How about it honey?” Harold asked. “Do you want to demonstrate the laugh technique?”

“I don’t think so,” she said, fiddling with her faux pearls at a higher speed. “No, no…”

“Oh come on,” Harold goaded. “I think the whole class would like to hear it. Right class?

You’d like to hear it, right?”

His stumps nodded.

Eunice Martin cleared her throat, opened her mouth, and released her fake laugh. It was a noise somewhere between a broken siren and a bear cub with a thorn in its paw. It drew out for a while.

“Listen to that,” Harold said, smiling proudly. “It’s the fountain of youth.”

100

In this manner Harold helped men and women from all over the greater metropolitan area better their lives, lower their heart rates, improve their digestions, have more hope—the Wednesday

night sessions for beginners, Thursday night sessions for the seasoned and the weathered, and

Friday nights for hopeless lost causes. He’d also, in the process, made kind of a name for

himself in the dubious field. Of the very low minority of the very low minority of medical

professionals who practiced this particular form of therapy, he’d finally reached a status for

himself that might be called mildly recognized. He’d been invited to speak at liberal arts

colleges, correctional facilities, and mental institutions as far as Indianapolis. He’d once been

honored as Channel 5’s Person of the Day for his personal contributions to “Keep Cincinnati

Smiling,” a kind of feel-good promotional campaign the network had launched during a slow news month. All of this raised the public awareness of the Institute for Unrecognized Medicines, and in flattering and mostly favorable ways, not a troubleshooter alert in sight. And for Harold, the modest recognition confirmed not only that he’d found his true life’s work, but, much more importantly, that his life’s work had turned out to be true.

His favorite and his final measure of public approval—the one of which he was most proud— came when he was featured as a guest on the local NPR’s “Things Going On In and Around

Cincinnati and the Surrounding Area,” a show that had meant Sunday mornings from 9-10 for him for years. Harold and his wife appeared on the show together to discuss the benefits of laughter in our lives, and he even demonstrated the laughing exercise, provoking a flood of interested and encouraging calls and freaking out the elderly host of the show.

101 He then told the story of how he came to laugh therapy, of his wife’s long illness and their

hope for a cure, and how they’d lived happily-ever-laughter ever since. He said that the experience had changed them both—he held her hand tight as he spoke—said it had changed

their conceptions of the truly valuable things in life, and how they never missed their bigger and nicer old house, their pontoon boat, the golf afternoons, or all of their former friends, because they were now embarrassed by Harold’s bizarre new career. He said that life was a matter of perspective, as good as you made it, that the horrors of the world and the stresses of everyday life, once reduced to the ridiculous, could be dissected, dealt with, or at the very least downgraded and then healthily dismissed. And he reminded the flustered old host and her inquiring audience the same thing he reminded his own audience three times a week: that no matter how difficult life seemed to be, no matter how meaningless, horrifying, agonizing, terrorizing, mutilating, disfiguring, despondent, indifferent, indiscriminate, disagreeable, ulcer- forming, habit-forming, cardiac-inducing, bowel-irritating or full-of-crap, there was still neither shock-so-great nor spirit-so-low, he promised, that couldn’t be overcome or uplifted, respectively, with the use of humor.

“What a fantastic outlook on life,” the waddle-necked host of the show said. “What a refreshing and positive view. It’s just a pleasure. Mrs. Martin, as the woman who started this entire business, in a sense, what do you think of your husband’s interesting vocation and his unique view on life?”

“I’m tired of fake laughing,” Eunice Martin said flatly. “I’m ready to live a little.”

“Is that right?” the old host asked, suddenly intrigued.

“See there?” Harold chuckled. “See what a great sense of humor she has?”

“Fifty-seven is too late to find some new life’s work,” his wife said. “I don’t mean to sound

102 ungrateful, but we should be out partying and enjoying life by now. I wish he’d go back to

banking for a little bit so we could save up some money and get our pontoon boat back.”

“Is that right?” the host asked again.

“See there?” Harold asked. “She’s a card.”

“I’m sick of fake laughing and wishful thinking,” she said. “I want a cruise. This is the prime of our lives, and the clock’s ticking. Laughter’s not going to solve anything. I mean Hell,

I could die tomorrow. I could be walking down the street and something falls on my head and it’s over. I’m ready to live, dammit.”

“See there?” Harold asked the listening audience. “It’s a strange sense of humor, but it’s a keeper.”

Five days after the interview aired, the bottom fell out.

Harold had spent the better part of his morning sitting in his home office, preparing for that night’s Friday session of the hopeless. Eunice had gone out for some light shopping—she’d been testy for a few days, short with him, and she’d said she needed some air, or had she said some space?—and had asked him before she left to stop studying for those depressed cranks sometime in the afternoon and hang a curtain in the small kitchen window, shaped too funny for brackets.

Around one o’clock the telephone rang. He figured this to be a gentle reminder, which was fortunate, as he’d completely forgotten.

“I got it up this morning,” he fibbed when he picked up the phone. He then stood up to go

103 make it true. “It’s hanging there already, honey.”

From the other end of the line he heard lazy street sounds, a few slow-purring cars go by, the light-rock favorites of al fresco lunch music. He heard a few people standing around, buzzing with hesitant respect or something like it, just out of phoneshot. But no one spoke. He thought at first that his wife had accidentally hit her cell phone again. He’d listened to a good bit of her shopping this way.

“Eunice?” he said. “Eunice, did you hit the Send again?”

“Hello?” the voice asked. It was a man’s voice, baritone, behaved and yet somehow still bossy. “Hello, is this Mr. Martin?”

“Yes,” Harold said. “Yes, this is me.”

“Sir, this is Officer Richardson of Fairfield Police,” the man said. “I’m afraid there’s been an accident.”

For a moment this didn’t fully register with him. For a moment Harold thought his wife had been booked. “An accident?” he repeated. “Did you say there’s been an accident?”

The officer cleared his throat. “Yes sir,” the officer said. His sirs sounded like orders. “I’m sorry, sir.”

“What kind of accident?” Harold asked. “Is my wife all right?”

He hadn’t waited for an answer before fumbling around for his shoes, patting his front pockets for keys.

But Officer Richardson refused to elaborate. Rather he said Harold could meet him at Mercy

Hospital, where his wife was being taken and where he could find out more details. He apologized again and said it was against departmental policy to “discuss such matters” over the phone, that he’d already broken the rules by calling Harold instead of dropping by, and by using

104 the deceased’s own cell phone. He then apologized for saying “the deceased” and assured

Harold that even if it wasn’t against departmental policy to “discuss such matters” this way, it wouldn’t make much difference. What happened to his wife, he said, wouldn’t be believed over the phone.

Harold made it to Mercy Hospital in record time by driving dangerously.

In the ER he was met by the self-same Officer Richardson, who looked just like he sounded, and by a young but already-graying resident whose immaturity and no-position made it his responsibility to deliver bad and unpleasant news.

“I’m so sorry,” the young doctor said. “The paramedics tried their best at the scene, but of course there wasn’t much they could do for her.”

“Oh my God,” Harold said.

“I know this must be difficult.”

“Oh my God,” Harold said. The hospital waiting room waiters looked down at their magazines, rubbed their eyes, paid them no attention. “What happened?”

But here the young resident could only shake his head, put a hand to his too-square jaw. He said it was the damndest thing he’d ever seen, in his three months of being a doctor.

He looked over at the cop for help.

His wife had stopped for a light lunch in the business district at Fairfield, the cop said—he told Harold the name of the place and asked if he knew it. He seemed to be stalling, or maybe this was just procedure. He said that his wife sat down and ordered, that she sipped her water while she waited for her lunch, a spring salad, and flipped through the pages of a trashy book.

He said that her order was delivered lightning quick, per the restaurant’s weekday lunchday guarantee, and her waitress had asked if there was anything else she needed. His wife had

105 responded that she was just great, so her waitress walked back inside. Fifteen seconds later, according to the earwitness accounts, there was a crash that sounded like a penny off a skyscraper.

Out of the corner of his eye Harold could see the young doctor having a hard time. He had his arms crossed in front of him professionally and his head bowed reverently and he was nodding along with what the policeman said, he appeared to be trying to appear solemn and no- nonsense, but there was something happening with his mouth. His lips kept trying to work against him, tried to curl up and around his teeth in a smile, the way lips sometimes do when delivering bad news, for no good reason, though here the doctor was just listening to some. He looked like a horse smacking a sugarcube. Like he was fighting off a sneeze. Harold thought this kid was a lousy doctor.

Finally the cop put them all out of their misery by getting to the point: “Your wife was killed by a meteorite, sir,” he said. Once it was out, the young doctor beside him looked almost relieved. The cop, of course, was business all the way. “I’m very sorry, sir,” the cop said dispassionately.

“She was almost certainly dead on the spot,” the doctor added, recomposing himself seriously. “I can assure you it would have been peaceful. I mean, after the impact.”

Harold stared at them in disbelief.

“My wife was killed by a rock falling from the sky?” he said.

“Yes,” the doctor said. His lip curl was creeping back. He bit the inside of his cheek, visibly.

“Did it destroy the whole restaurant?” Harold asked. “Did it decimate everything?”

“No sir,” the cop answered, shaking his head. “It just struck your wife.”

“A meteorite hit and it didn’t destroy everything?”

106 “It wasn’t the one that killed the dinosaurs,” the cop said. “It was a small one. I’m afraid nothing and no one else was hurt. It didn’t even break a plate.”

“That’s not possible,” Harold said.

“It’s possible,” the cop corrected. “It’s just extremely, extremely unlikely.”

“She’d beaten cancer,” Harold told the resident, or maybe the cop, or maybe he told no one in particular. “She had cancer, and she beat it.”

“It’s a freak thing, sir,” the cop assured him.

“It’s very freak,” the doctor said sympathetically. “I’m so sorry.”

“And she was killed by a meteor,” Harold said incredulously. “Falling from the sky.”

“I know,” the doctor said, scratching his chin. “Life is funny.”

He was led by the elbow to a room marked off for BEREAVEMENT, where he could sit in quiet contemplation and fill out paperwork. He scrawled his name across the bottom lines of papers without reading them. He didn’t want to risk seeing his wife’s name printed there in block letters. He looked around the room at the stone-shock faces, half a dozen, all staring straight ahead. He thought he might be having a heart attack. His father had died of one about his age.

The darkly lit room had only a few half-sized lamps, but these gave off spiked harsh light that hurt his eyes. His blood pressure felt dammed up and forced. He feared he might rupture a vessel.

“You’re not having a heart attack,” the hospital’s grief counselor said when she arrived. She was the kind of sharp professional woman who wore a taut bun in her hair. Harold shook her

107 hand, cold as death. She spoke to him in a serene golf voice. “I assure you you are just grieving, and that this will sometimes feel strange. It will feel like a heart flutter, a flit, or a full turn. It will feel a thing inside of you gnawing like a void. It will hurt.”

“I feel it,” Harold said. He grasped at his heart. “I feel it here.”

“What you feel is normal,” she said. “But again, I give you my best reassurance, this, too, will pass. What you are feeling is the natural and necessary loss when we feel at the transition of one of our loved ones to the next and more peaceful state of existence. Oh,” she said. She’d been scanning his paperwork behind him to make sure he’d signed the right places with his right name. “Sorry,” she apologized. She pointed at the page. “You have to initial.”

Harold initialed: here, here, and here, and then here.

In the meantime the grief counselor told him what he could expect. “You’re going to have trouble with memory, trouble with time,” she told him. “Memory and time have no idea what to do with grief.”

She pointed. Here, here, and here. And then one here and one here.

“You’re going to start having weird thoughts,” she said. “You’re going to think that she’s not gone, that things you do have an effect on her, even now, that you might help her come back.

You’re going to keep buying her brand of deodorant, for instance, just in case she needs it.

You’re going to park to one side, even if you have the whole garage. You won’t for the life of you sleep in the middle of the bed.”

One here. And one here. And one more. And one more. And then one more here. And then one here. Here, here, here, here….

“And finally you’re going to think there’s nothing to live for. That there can’t possibly be a better day coming. But I promise you, Harold, there is. My best promise to you. There is

108 always another day just around the bend. Unless something unexpected happens.”

Here, here, and then here.

“This is a lot of initialing,” Harold said.

“I’ll take those,” the grief counselor said. In return she handed him some literature on death

and dying and told him to have a read-through. It couldn’t leave the room, of course, but in

terms of good info it was chock full. She told him that saying goodbye was a natural part of

saying hello. She said you don’t know why to say goodbye without hello, and vice versa. And

she told him he might want to find some kind of longer-term approach for dealing with his pain.

Some kind of therapy. In fact she’d just heard about a program on the local NPR where you rely on humor and force yourself to laugh.

In the corner of the bereavement room a television was set to a daytime soap, the one in

which handsome doctors and nurses give bad news, betray one another, make love, look devious, scheme.

“You’re going to feel some shock,” she warned him

“I’m there,” Harold told her. “I’m there.”

Harold and his grief counselor were met in the bereavement room by his bad-news doctor and his cop. A few moments later they were all joined by the hospital’s gray-suited chaplain.

“How are you holding up?” the doctor asked. He’d found his bedside manner again, if not his common sense.

“My Eunice,” Harold told him.

109 “Right,” the doctor said. “Listen, I’m afraid there’s one last thing here. If you don’t mind.”

He carried a clipboard under his arm so he could wrench his hands. “I’m afraid we need you to come down and make a positive ID.”

Harold repeated: “A positive ID.”

“Yes,” the young doctor said. He swallowed hard. “On the body.”

“I know on the body, for fuck’s sake,” Harold said. “I know what you mean.”

“Hold on there,” cautioned the cop.

“It’s totally up to you,” his grief counselor told him. She reached her cold hand down to his and gave it a lifeless squeeze. “It’ll be all right.”

“It’s just a formality,” the doctor assured him. “All we need is a look.”

“Holy Mother of God,” Harold gasped.

“I’m here,” the gray-suited chaplain said. He moved a step closer to Harold and wafted a faint whiff of booze.

“Is she going to look…?” Harold asked. “Will she look…?”

“Yes,” the doctor said. “She’ll look like that. But all we need is a glance, Harold. It’ll be all right.”

“Holy God,” Harold repeated in a sharp, short breath.

“I’m right here,” the chaplain said again.

He was helped down the bright hallways, the sharp right turns, down the elevator and finally to the floor that held the morgue. This hallway looked the same as the others. Harold thought it

110 should’ve looked darker and dimmed, more respectful, quieter and with little traffic. But it was fluorescent with sick jaundiced light and with traffic moving past, gurneys with squeaky wheels and nurses on their lunch break walking and chatting, wearing their paper footies and green paper hairnets. The doctor and the cop practically carried him by the elbows to the far wall outside the morgue and leaned him up against it.

“It’s right through there,” the doctor pointed. “Through those black swinging doors. You can take all the time you need. The three of us are going to go in, make sure everything’s set.

You can take a few minutes. Just get yourself together. Whenever you’re ready, head through the doors.”

“Okay,” Harold said, though it wasn’t, not at all. He was glad to be leaning because his legs had gone funny. Though between the concrete block wall he leaned against and his heart beating through chest he felt between a rock and a hard place. “Okay.”

“You going to be all right?” the doctor asked.

“Yes.”

“All right then,” the doctor said. “We’ll see you in a minute.” He turned back toward his colleagues and nodded. Then the priest, the cop, and the doctor walked into the morgue.

So it was up to him.

“Okay,” he said to himself. “Okay.”

Though he knew better.

He tried to clear his head, but he was having trouble directing his thoughts. In fact he was having trouble having thoughts. He could feel his blood pressure beating in his teeth.

Everything around him—the hallway, the hospital staff, the patients mumbling by—had taken on a heightened look, a distorted look, so sharp in focus that they seemed blurred. The nurses and

111 patients who walked by did so oblivious to him. It was like watching television from inside the television.

He closed his eyes and leaned full back, and he felt his heart trying to pin him to the wall. He had to open his mouth to breathe.

Harold tried his best to concentrate, to slow his heart down using relaxation techniques he couldn’t remember anymore. He decided that he could force himself to go in, force his thinking to make his feet move, force his heart and brain off and emotionally blunt himself from the deed.

Then he could go home, where he suddenly found himself wishing he were, though he realized just as quickly that their small home was going to be a lot bigger and more quiet and haunted as a church. Still he needed to be there rather than here, where he could draw the shades, turn off the lights, and die a little inside.

All he had to do was go in.

All he had to do was go in and—.

He didn’t think he could do it.

But then as he stared at the black double doors and tried to visualize himself walking through, tried to visualize what he would find there—the three complete strangers, the priest, the doctor, and the cop, really less strangers as professionals, and really less professionals than types; and his wife, on a table under a sheet, his wife whom he’d lost forever in a manner miserable and unexpected and full of tragicomic nihilism; knowing that this is what he would find, these four waiting for him—something about the situation suddenly seemed familiar to him. He felt a vague sense of relief and understanding that he didn’t understand feeling, the sense that what waited for him through the doors was a sense of resolution, but not in terms of grief or loss or any of that. He couldn’t define it. It was like waiting anxiety, but the kind of anxiety you walk

112 into voluntarily, ready for and wanting release. Like a surprise party someone let slip. Or…

And then it hit him: it was exactly like a joke.

It was exactly like the form of the joke.

“Wait a second,” he said.

But as soon as the thought hit him his brain stopped waiting, the no-thought between his ears suddenly sharpened into precision, and every disparate locked joint of the afternoon fell simply and suddenly into its sensible right place. He did not wait a second because this was a moment of realization. The realization was, this was the form of the joke. In fact this moment of realization itself, the realization that it was the form of the joke, was the form of the joke. His realization of it was also its proof.

Harold’s heart had stopped thumping him back toward the concrete. It had suddenly begun to move forward again, but in slow, unsure beats, cautiously. A green-scrubbed doctor walked past him and stared.

“Wait a second.”

Harold paid the doctor’s look back no mind because he’d remembered all about the form of the joke. That the form of the joke is dissonance, the heart of the humor conflict, contradiction, and the resulting anxiety, suspended momentarily in reluctance and aggression before resolving into recognition, acceptance, enlightenment. He knew all of this because he had a Master’s degree. He’d read Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious and had gotten all the way through. He appreciated Freud the prose stylist.

“Wait a second.”

Bewilderment succeeded by illumination.

His entire afternoon had been bewilderment kicking him in the face. The juxtaposition of

113 dreadful opposites. The laugh instructor withering inside. The cancer survivor felled by meteor.

These type things did not happen randomly, by chance, by nature, but by design, by form.

Bringing too-obvious unlikes together for harsh and too-obvious comic effect. This had been structured and arranged by plan. There could be no such thing as the comic atheist.

He realized that his entire afternoon had been a set-up to a joke: the lousy doctor who he realized now was not a lousy doctor but a lousy actor, a lousy joke-teller. He couldn’t keep a straight face. The stereotypical cop, the stereotypical grief counselor, the semi-drunk chaplain, all of them demonstrating subtle and unscrupulous absurdist callousness. Making him participate in degrading, demeaning, circus-like activity in the middle of grief. Signing his initials forty-two times. Seeing the body. All of this was too ridiculous and one-dimensional to be realistically believed. Such was not life, nor was it nuance. This was coming down Broad

Street all the way.

“Wait a second.”

He didn’t know why he hadn’t seen it earlier: His wife was playing a joke on him. She meant to teach him some important lesson about life or get his attention or something. He’d go in, walk up to the slab, she’d jump up and yell boo. He’d wet himself and be forever changed. It was didactic humor. The old laugh and learn.

Or perhaps this was all about money—maybe she’d put him on a hidden camera show, a game show, a reality show, so they could take their earnings and buy back their pontoon. For all he knew that crappy doctor might be a Funt. He’d be humiliated on national television. Fine with him.

He didn’t know or care what her particular reason was; he didn’t care that she’d taken things this far. He could take the joke. It could come at his expense. He could get a good laugh from

114 it. In fact, he desperately, desperately needed one.

“My wife is alive,” he told a boxy passing nurse.

All that was left was the punch line. All he had to do to spring the trap, finish the joke, retrieve his wife once again from death, achieve resolution and absolution—and the joke must be resolved, he told himself, otherwise all is godlessness—all he needed to do was to walk through those black swinging doors and agree to be the butt.

He found his legs and righted himself. His mind and his heart were clear.

“Let’s do it,” Harold said out loud. “Lay it on me.”

He took two steps toward the double doors and fell down dead.

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Boardwalk Elvis

Boardwalk Elvis walked and chafed.

It was Memorial Day weekend, the second-best weekend of the entire summer for boardwalk

Elvising. Vendors with cotton candy and caramel apples lined the pier, stands with five-dollar cokes and three-dollar hot dogs, and flocks of zincnosed out-of-towners who might get a charge from meeting a boardwalk Elvis. Barechested college boys bullied and bustled their way around the promenade, families with small pets and small children on leashes walked and held hands, high school kids gossiped and dove in and out of video arcades. Bikini girls skated by and smiled, bursting from red, white and blue scraps, and Boardwalk raised an index finger. “Girls,” he said, and he pointed the finger like a gun.

He walked past a pack of frat boys with their shirts tied around their waists, swigging beer and scanning the beach for sunbathers.

“Hey,” one of them said, nudging his buddies. “It’s Boardwalk E!”

“Boardwalk E!” they slurred, raising their arms and whooping like sports fans.

“Thank you,” E said. “Thank you very much.”

He strutted the boardwalk and swiveled his hips and made Elvis noises to himself, and when the mood hit him he stopped in the middle of the crowd and struck a pose—the Aloha From

Hawaii, the Jailhouse Rock, the Too Much Bacon. He passed an elderly couple holding hands and he spoke politely, but neither made eye contact with him. He passed through a group of

Jehovah’s Witnesses and came out the other side with some literature. He passed a round of shaggy hippies playing hackysack, and he returned one of their volleys off the side of the pier.

He passed a twenty-something mother in a sundress bent down to her child.

“Look,” she said, pointing at him. “Do you know who that is?”

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“Elvis,” the little girl said.

“Do you want to take a picture with him?” the mother asked.

“No.”

“Hey there, little lady,” Elvis said, sauntering up to her. He curled his lip. “Wanna get a

photo with Boardwalk E?”

The little girl bit her cheek and shook her head as if refusing medicine.

“Come on,” the mother said, fishing through her oversized purse for her disposable camera.

“I want to get one.”

Boardwalk Elvis knelt down beside her. “Come on, little lady,” he said, reaching for her.

The girl moved slowly and stiffly, her arms straight down at her sides, and positioned herself beside the man who wore a polyester jumpsuit on a ninety-six-degree day. She wrinkled her nose.

“Get closer,” the mother said, gesturing. “Put your arm around him.”

“Let me be your teddy bear,” Elvis said.

She did as she was told and put a cautious arm on his back.

“Now smile!”

Boardwalk E put a hand in the air, forking finger and thumb straight out in the Hawaiian handsign for love. The little girl squinted and snarled.

“That’s perfect,” said the mother, snapping the picture. “That’s going to be great.”

“Glad I could help you, ma’am,” Elvis said, rising to his feet. The girl ran to her mother’s side.

“She acts the same way with Santa Claus.”

“I like Santa’s style,” said Boardwalk E in his exaggerated Tupelo drawl. “Both Santa and

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the Boardwalk E want to bring smiles to little snaggletooth faces.”

“That’s great,” the mother said as she shuffled her camera back into her purse. “Thank you so much.”

“That’ll be five dollars,” said Boardwalk.

“Oh,” blushed the mother, and began rummaging her purse for money. “All I have is a ten,” she said.

“Thank you, thank you very much,” he said.

Boardwalk E strolled through the crowds on the pier and slurped at a snow cone. He could feel a rash starting under his jumpsuit.

It was an occupational hazard and happened every season. This was still a brand-new year for him, just the start. Spring break was always the first pitch of the year, the first weekend that tourists were back at Formosa Beach, but Memorial Day weekend was the real starting point.

After this, when June was here, the vacationers would become more frequent, and Boardwalk E would find his stride. By July 4th, the rash might be getting out of hand, but the attention would be staggering.

“Sufferin for muh art,” Boardwalk said to himself, nodding his head. He bobbed and danced along the pier to the sounds of someone somewhere’s boombox.

Business had been good most of the afternoon. He’d already taken six pictures for a total loot of forty-two dollars—two with children, two with adults, two with drunk rednecks. And he’d made two dollars by singing “Hound Dog” to a family’s cocker spaniel, which had licked its

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balls throughout the performance.

But money wasn’t the important thing—he would do it for free, he always said, which was mostly what happened. He was an artist, his canvas himself, his strut, his sneer, his pelvis, and artists weren’t in it for the money, they were in it for the high. There were plenty of them on the boardwalk—a juggler or two, a gang of whiteface mimes that roamed around pretending to tug ropes or open doors, every so often a granola with a guitar—and surely, he thought, their dreams were no more or less foolish or impractical than his.

Boardwalk E walked past a group of high school kids, boys in oversized jeans which barely hung onto their butts and girls in cutoffs and bikini tops. They had been talking loudly, sharing cigarettes, laughing, cursing, hooting it up, until they saw him. They stared at him.

“Say, how’s it goin’?” Boardwalk asked as he passed. He shot the finger-gun.

“Shut up, dickhead,” laughed one of the boys.

Boardwalk stopped.

The boy who spoke—a bucktooth-looking bastard with a beard scraggly and pubic—muttered something under his breath that sounded like homo, and the other kids, the girls in particular, laughed.

“I’m sorry,” Elvis twanged. “What did you say?”

“Nothing, dickhead.” The girls laughed again, raised white-filtered cigarettes to their lips between glittered fingernails.

“Say,” Elvis said, “that’s no way to speak to your elders, son.”

“I’m not your son, dickhead,” the bucktooth said.

“He’s not your son, dickhead,” said the fat kid beside him.

Boardwalk sighed and stepped closer. The kids raised from their slouches and squared their

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shoulders for a rumble, like maybe they’d seen on tv. “Look, kids, there’s no need to get rude.

We all want to have a good time here.”

“Why don’t you get your rocks off somewhere else?” the first boy said.

“Now wait just a minute.”

“Can’t you get your rocks off somewhere else, dickhead?” the fat boy repeated.

“Now wait just a minute.”

“You smell bad,” said one of the girls.

“Thank you very much,” Boardwalk Elvis said, and walked on.

He remembered hearing that the first time Elvis played the Grand Ole Opry he was told he should go back to driving a truck, and the first time he played Vegas in 1956 the bluehairs in the audience booed. He thought there must be a thousand stories like this, stories of struggle and artists failing, maybe even people like Mozart, and he thought he’d have to check that out one day.

He’d become accustomed to humiliation over the years and generally took it in stride. A shop owner once turned a hose on him for standing in front of the man’s emporium of cheap, breakable crap. Another time, he’d happened upon a beach party thrown by a local politician for kids with prosthetic limbs, complete with Nerf Tetherball and a camera crew. He’d barely bitten into his first hotdog when the politician’s goons roughed him up and threw his lunch in the sand.

Boardwalk was still just warming up; it would take a while to perfect his act again. The locals could be spiteful as they wanted to be, but once the season was in full swing the tourists

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would flock to see him. By the Fourth of July, he would be the hottest sequined property on the boardwalk.

He stopped in front of a group of college girls in thong bikinis who were standing around on the pier and letting people watch them.

“Say there, little ladies,” Boardwalk said. He got in his judo stance and did some quick jabbing and stabbing into the air.

One of the girls rolled her eyes.

“I’m the Boardwalk Elvis,” Boardwalk Elvis said. “I’m a hunka burnin’ love.” He fluttered his arms and did some more judo.

“No thank you,” one of the girls said.

“No thank you to what?” he asked.

One girl put her cell phone to her ear and pretended to talk.

“Aren’t you burning up in that?” asked the tallest girl, a thin redhead with death-pale skin who looked like she needed more SPF.

“It’s a little warm in here,” Boardwalk answered. “But it’s a small price to pay for entertaining you lovely ladies.”

The brunette with the pug face and the cell phone sneered. “We’re not that easily entertained,” she said.

“Thank you very much,” Boardwalk said.

He strutted the pier end to end, making friends and influencing people. The heat bore down on him, reflecting off the white of his jumpsuit and storing in the black of his massive pompadour wig. Soon he was wet with sweat, but still he kept on, strutting and stumbling along and muttering to himself about sufferin and sac-ruh-fice. A few people heard him talking to

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himself and turned to stare.

“How’s it goin’?” he said, and shot them the finger-gun. “All right.”

His wife had warned him that morning to take it easy. Forecasters were calling for a scorcher,

highs pushing ninety-seven, she’d said, and besides, polyester was not a fabric that breathed.

She’d woken up early and laid out his jumpsuit for him, along with a few dollars for water.

By the time Boardwalk began to suit up, Marsha was dressed in her neat nursing scrubs, ready to

leave for work. They stood together in the bathroom using the mirror, she fixing her makeup and

he applying muttonchops.

“Don’t push yourself too hard, drink lots of water, take some breaks,” she said, lining her eyelids. “I don’t want you to die in that outfit.”

The first time they met, he was Elvis at a supermarket. Nothing promotional—he was just shopping. She’d paid for two of his items when the twelve-items-or-less woman gave him grief for fourteen. One of them was a bottle of wine. They drank it at her place, and in the morning he deliberately left his pompadour so he could see her again.

It was not that she was the only person who understood him—she didn’t entirely, made no secret of it, and furthermore she cared more for the Godfather of Soul than for the King—but she had consistently been the only person to accept him, whether she understood him or not.

She brought him to meet her parents just after he proposed, and he dressed normal. But the grace had barely hit amen when her father asked, So what do you do for a living? At the time he was a telemarketer and said so, but her father narrowed his eyes and said, You know what I mean.

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So he gave a broad explanation of Elvising: You put on an Elvis costume and walk around, maybe sing “Hawaiian Love Song” at a few weddings. He said it was a form of art, like painting or writing or interpretive dance. He said nobody really chooses their dream, right? It kind of chooses them, right? Her father got drunk on Jack Daniels and started calling Marsha’s old boyfriends on the phone. Her mother locked herself in the bathroom and made inhuman moaning sounds. It looked dire.

But Marsha stuck up for him, stood her ground, sobered her father up and calmed her mother down, and over the years his relationship with her parents had mellowed into something like cordiality. He went fishing with her father once, and the only sharp thing that passed between them the whole afternoon was a hook.

He was tightening his oversized belt when she came in to kiss him goodbye.

“I’ll come out and see you in a few days,” she said, checking her watch. “Give you some time to get your bearings first. Okay, gotta go.”

She leaned forward and kissed him on the muttonchop, and watching the kiss in the mirror— she so reasonable and smart in her uniform, and he so obviously not—he felt a twinge of guilt.

“Do you ever wish I’d grow up?” he asked meekly.

“No,” she said, straightening his big fake hair. “No, I like the child I married.”

She headed out the door of their apartment in a rush, and the last thing she called out was, “Be careful.”

“Don’t worry about me, little lady,” he called back, and he reassured her that nothing could possibly go wrong.

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By four o’clock, Boardwalk Elvis was close to heatstroke. His head both ached and drifted, like

an anvil floating on a balloon string. His heart lurched and fumbled. He could feel his blood

pressure beating in his eyes.

He ordered a second snow cone and slurped it down quickly, making his temples feel dull and

ready to split. Tourists continued to approach him for pictures, but the last few had also asked if

he was feeling okay.

“It’s the heat,” Boardwalk said. “Not to worry, though. Boardwalk E is fine. Heat ain’t nothing but a bunny in traffic.”

The tourists said, Excuse me?

“A traffic bunny,” Boardwalk repeated a little louder. “Not the band Traffic, though they did have some fine songs.”

Boardwalk Elvis realized he wasn’t faking it well when he staggered into a hot dog vendor and took down a stack of red and white Coca-Cola cups. He apologized and said it was the traffic bunny, polyester don’t breathe. Havin some trouble.

The vendor filled a cup with ice water.

“Take this and sit down and sip it,” the man said. “And if you feel dizzy like you’re about to die, don’t do it here.”

“Thank you very much,” he said.

Boardwalk staggered to the strip where the restaurants and small shops selling Formosa

Beach half-shirts were. He sat down close to a store wall, where at least a moderate shade cooled the ground. He wouldn’t mind if any of the owners came out and hosed him off today.

He sipped the ice water slowly, his heartrate beginning to calm. He watched the families and

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the kids pass slowly, on their way nowhere, walking in lazy, flip-flopping strides.

Sweat rolled into his eyes and settled in, stinging. He took off his oversized Elvis sunglasses

and wiped at them with a sequined sleeve.

When he opened his eyes, Boardwalk Elvis saw a little boy with an ice-cream cone

staring down at him.

“Are you alive?” the boy asked. He licked his cone.

“Most definitely, little fella,” Boardwalk E said, his mouth dry as sand. He sipped his water.

“I thought you might be dead.”

“Well, then, thanks for checking up,” E said. “But I’m still alive, you know. Still kicking.”

“I’ve never seen a dead body before,” the boy said.

“Me neither.”

The boy licked his cone again, sending a line of drool and vanilla down his chin and onto his

shirt. He looked to be eight or nine, Boardwalk thought, but he wasn’t sure. He had a close summer haircut and was missing a front tooth.

Boardwalk rose to his feet slowly, swaying like a giant, gaudy oak that threatened to fall.

“Are you here on vacation, little fella?”

“Are you a superhero?” the boy asked, ignoring the question.

“No, little fella,” Boardwalk E drawled, trying to get back into character. “I’m Boardwalk

Elvis.”

“What’s that?” the boy asked, squinting his eyes.

“I’m an Elvis that comes down to the boardwalk,” he said.

“Why?”

“To bring snaggletooth grins to kids and stuff,” Elvis said. He rubbed the frosty, water-

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beaded cup across his face.

“You’re not a superhero?”

“I hate to tell you this,” Boardwalk E said, “but superheroes don’t exist.”

“Neither does Elvis,” the boy answered. “He’s dead.”

Boardwalk E took turns sipping from his water and rubbing the cup across his cheeks and

forehead. The boy watched, not speaking, obviously waiting for a reply.

“Well yes, he’s dead,” Boardwalk said finally, putting his shades back on. He pretended to check the watch he wasn’t wearing. “Long as the music lives on, so will the King. So time to move on now, I guess.”

“So what do you do?” asked the boy. “Where is your guitar?”

“I don’t bring it anymore. My fingers get too sweaty to play.” This was a lie. He didn’t own a guitar.

“Does someone pay you to come out here dressed like that?”

“No.”

“Nobody pays you?”

“No,” he sighed. “Nobody pays the Boardwalk E. Unless you want to take a picture.”

“Nope,” the boy said. “So if you don’t get paid and if you’re not a superhero, why do you dress up like that and walk around in the middle of the summer?”

“You ask a lot of questions,” Boardwalk Elvis said. “Don’t you have somewhere you have to be?”

“Nope.”

The boy dribbled more ice cream onto his shirt.

“How do you make a living?” he asked.

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“How do you make a living?” Elvis snapped back.

“I’m a kid, I don’t have to.”

“My wife works,” Elvis said. He was suddenly very disinterested in this conversation.

“Your wife works?”

“Yes.”

“While you dress like Elvis and walk around in the sun?”

“Yes,” Elvis huffed.

“You’re a butthole,” said the boy with a grin. “Your wife should leave you.”

“Fuck off, kid,” Boardwalk said.

“Billy,” called a woman from several stores down. “Come on, let’s go eat.”

“That cone’s gonna ruin your appetite,” Boardwalk warned.

“That’s my mom,” the boy said. “She’s married to a bum, too.”

For a moment he had the urge to grab the little shit by his neck and squeeze, just lift him off

the ground and shake him until his eyes bugged out, but the boy had already turned and started to

walk toward his mother. When he got a few feet away, the boy turned back and said, “You

really oughtta be a superhero or something. Use that suit for a force of good. Least then you’d

have a reason to walk around dressed like such a butthole all the time.” With that he scurried off into the crowd.

Boardwalk Elvis decided he needed a drink.

Bananas was right on the strip, a frequent end-of-the-day stop on Boardwalk’s route. It was a

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bar where old men watched and talked about baseball while their wives walked the pier and let cellulite wobble out of their bathing suits.

“Frank,” Boardwalk E said, “hit me again.”

“No one actually says that,” said Frank the bartender.

“What do they say?”

“They say, ‘May I have another?’” the bartender said, mixing up a bourbon and Schweppes.

“Guys who come in here all fucking important and say hit me again, I usually do.”

Frank laid the drink in front of him. “Three seventy-five.”

Boardwalk stuck his hand into the back pocket he’d sewn on the jumpsuit himself, handed the bartender a crumpled five.

He had been here for hours already, though he wasn’t sure exactly how long. He drank bourbon after bourbon and told Frank everything.

“This has been a shitty day, really shitty,” Elvis said, beginning to slur his words. “I tell you, between the sun and all those little shits running around out there…”

“You still mad at that little kid?”

“Damn right.”

“I’ve wondered myself why you dress up and walk around like that,” Frank said.

“I do it for the fans.” Boardwalk E took a long, cool swallow of liquor, making obscene gulping sounds.

Frank the bartender lit a cigarette. “Sounds like the fans appreciate it,” he said. “Did you see any of that game today?”

“The fans do appreciate it,” Boardwalk said. “That’s why I do it.”

“Motherfucking O’s blew another one,” Frank said. “I don’t know what they’re doing with

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all that payroll, but they’re not putting it on the field.”

“Otherwise I’d hang it up, even after all these years.”

“It’s that bullpen,” Frank said, shaking his head, and Boardwalk said something about art don’t exist in no vacuum.

“Yes, I do it for the fans, that’s what it all comes down to,” Boardwalk Elvis said. “You see

what a hit I am with the fans, right?”

“Actually all I ever really hear is how people think you’re a retard.” Frank reached under the

bar and produced a wooden bowl. “Want some peanuts?”

Boardwalk Elvis put down his drink.

“What?” he asked. “What did you say?”

“People think you’re retarded,” Frank continued. “They think you’re one of these people who

get jobs at McDonald’s under their let-a-fucking-retard-get-your-fries program.”

“No they don’t!”

“I saw that game,” said the only other patron at the bar, an old man with a face like a scrotum.

“Worst goddamn bullpen out there if you ask me, excuse my French, and that’s a shame, because

I’ve been an O’s fan for years.”

“Whoa, hold on a second,” Elvis said, interrupting. “Go back to what you were saying

before.”

“It’s the pitching,” Frank repeated.

“No, about what people think of me.”

“I shouldn’t have said anything,” the bartender conceded. “Just forget it. Let me get you

another on the house.”

Frank mixed another drink and laid it on the bar.

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“But maybe you should think about retiring,” said Frank. “Or maybe just take a little break,

that’s all. Give people around here a summer to miss you, see what happens.”

“What if they don’t miss me?”

“Then you don’t want to be where you’re not wanted. No big deal. Nobody understands you,

I don’t think. Nobody knows what the fuck you think you’re doing. It’s no big deal.” Frank shrugged for emphasis before moving to the other end of the bar and resuming conversation with the old man about the demise of the Birds.

Boardwalk E gulped his drink in silence. He felt woozy, the combination of sun and liquor, but the bourbon was smooth and made his stomach and bowels feel pleasantly loose. He eavesdropped on the baseball conversation and cringed over his day. He’d had bad days before—many of them—but he’d always taken well his rejection, his abuse, as the kind of necessary effort that makes the pearl. He’d even had a bad year, a depressing stab at Vegas in his twenties, living in a markedly inefficient efficiency, strutting the streets of the strip, struggling to stand out against a horde of sequined amateurs—men and women who’d moved to the Mecca-This-Side-of-Memphis to perform their misunderstood métier and who, like him, believed enough in the calling never to let rejection settle in their pelvises. He’d come to terms long ago with the fact that being an artist sometimes meant allowing yourself to look like a fool.

He might’ve hung it up when he left Las Vegas for Formosa Beach, it might’ve even been the smart thing to do, the move itself might have been cause for resignation, but he’d been steadfast despite daily setbacks and derision, sometimes entire seasons of derision, in his belief that he served an important function, bringing the King to the boardwalk’s summer days. He accepted rejection with shrugs, with the necessary shrug of the artist, they just don’t get it, and continued to wake and suit up and head back to the boardwalk secure in the fact that the problem was

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sometimes the audience.

But Boardwalk, bellied-up at the bar and staring into his bourbon, replaying the events of the

day, was beginning to wonder if he’d been misleading himself these years, a mechanism perhaps

necessary but a mechanism nevertheless. He’d been cursed before, he’d been sunstricken,

forsaken, dismissed, but these trials had never shaken his good faith in his faithful, simple art.

But for whatever reason—maybe not just the heat or the derision but the anxiety of beginning

again, the fearful dare-you-to of one more risk—his trials today suggested something that had

never before occurred to him, at least not this hard. For the first time in his career as Boardwalk

E, he realized that the problem might not, after all, be the audience.

He finished his watery, complimentary drink, sipping slow and deliberate as a teatime

aristocrat. It was beginning to darken outside, which meant it was later than he wanted. He rose

from his barstool and swayed to find his footing.

“Too much money and not enough brains,” Frank was saying. “Hey, Boardwalk, you want another?”

“I don’t think I like you anymore,” Boardwalk Elvis slurred. “Not right now, anyway.” With

that, he straightened his jumpsuit, straightened his wig, and stumbled out into the humid summer

evening.

The walk home was short; he and Marsha lived a few blocks from the boardwalk in a dilapidated

building that the City of Formosa Beach wanted either to declare historic or knock down to build

condos. It was nice enough for the two of them, had a tiny balcony for each apartment, a

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kitchen, a bath, a living and bedroom, and a nook for breakfasting. In other words it had everything.

Boardwalk E bumbled across the street.

He kept his eyes on the sidewalk and walked in stilted, slightly drunk strides. The streets in

the neighborhood weren’t well-lit, but he was able to see from the reflection of the half-moon off

his jumpsuit. Once he realized he was still wearing sunglasses, seeing was even easier.

“Retard at McDonald’s,” he muttered.

He stumbled slightly on a break in the pavement, but caught himself from falling.

Boardwalk Elvis listened to the sound of his feet on the sidewalk and tried to imagine how he

would explain his day to Marsha, who was not going to be pleased to see her husband coming in

half-stewed. But he did not fear a confrontation—they rarely fought, or even raised their voices

to one another. She told him once that the men she’d been with before him had all been abusive

in some way, by virtue of their temper, or their tongue, or sometimes their presence in a room.

But she knew from their first meeting that he was different; he tried to make a joke on himself

here, different yeah, ha ha, but she’d hear none of it. What made him different was his heart.

His heart, she said, was true.

Maybe she secretly thought him absurd, like everyone did, maybe she found his hopes

foolish, like her father had said that first night, before he lunged over the dining room table at

him with fork in hand. But if she did, she’d never even hinted as much in her manner or words,

never even allowed him to disparage himself in her presence. Somehow it made him feel better,

that someone cared enough for him to excuse the fact that everyone in town thought him

challenged.

But what was so fucking ridiculous about him? What was the problem? He hurt no one,

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wronged no one, wanted nothing more than for people to accept him. If that was ridiculous, the entire world was.

He stewed in his thoughts and walked on autopilot, listening to the squish of his heart and the shallow of his breath. It was a march of shame, all these sad, lonesome noises. Slowly, though, as he listened to the loafing, straggling, sloshy, drunk thoughts and the stumbling footfalls which matched, Boardwalk E realized that he heard something more, something. Boardwalk Elvis heard a noise.

He stopped and cocked his head.

Formosa Beach had its share of sounds specific to itself, the rough of wind coming in from over the waters, the hiss of tide meeting and leaving shore, the barely perceivable hum of humid static in the air. But Boardwalk Elvis was sure he heard more.

The noise was close, coming from his left, from a small patch of dirt and crabgrass between two apartment buildings.

He strained his eyes. He could see shapes of something, shapes of several somethings in the half-moon light. His vision began adjusting to the distance and the darkness, and Boardwalk E took several tentative steps toward the shapes.

At first, he was unsure just what he was seeing or hearing. The sounds were almost non- sounds; they were whimpers, moans and gasps, short, sharp breaths, stifled grunts. Copulation sounds were his first thought, and a sting of anticipation shot through his jumpsuit.

Squinting, he could see three people standing almost in a circle, their backs to him. They were circled around a person on the ground, the source of the grunts, moans, and whimpers. The men standing over were raising their legs and bringing their feet down on the prone man, on his body, his neck and head.

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Boardwalk watched for almost a full minute before he realized what he was watching. He

decided that he should start walking again before anyone noticed him. So a guy was getting beat

up, big deal, not his problem.

He had taken three steps before he heard the voice of the little shithead on the walk come

back to him: Use that suit for a force of good. Least you’d have a reason to walk around dressed

like such a butthole all the time.

He’d taken another when he heard his wife: “Your heart is true.”

He thought he should keep walking. He thought the liquor was doing his thinking for him.

He thought this day was ready to be over, get on home, just keep walking. But his shifting sense of self, which had taken a beating all day, shifted again, or more accurately stumbled, and before he knew it the decision had been made.

Boardwalk stopped. He turned toward the scene.

“Hey there,” he called out. He’d tried to put some gut into it, but his voice was flimsy as tin.

The beating stopped in mid-beat, kicking legs frozen in mid-kick, and the standing men turned to face Boardwalk Elvis with their legs cocked, suspended in mid-air. They looked like baffled flamingoes.

“Hey, there,” Boardwalk repeated, trying to sound authoritative. He raised a pointed finger at them like Superman. “Say, I think you oughtta leave him alone.”

Boardwalk moved slowly, cautiously, toward them, though his knees were shaking inside his jumpsuit. The attackers stood still with their legs in the air, but it was their faces, their expressions, that big E noticed as he drew closer. Their mouths were wide open, their eyebrows befuddled, crooked. The person on the ground, rather than taking the opportunity to run, looked at him the same way.

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“So, move on now,” E said. “Move on and go about something else.”

“What the fuck?” said one of the attackers.

“What the fuck?” said the guy on the ground.

“What?” asked Boardwalk Elvis defensively.

The huddled men put their feet down.

“Is that Elvis?” asked one attacker.

“That’s right, it’s Elvis,” Boardwalk E said. “Defender of the Boardwalk who knows judo.

So leave that little guy alone.”

There was silence for a moment that felt longer than a moment, silence but for the breeze from the ocean and the distant quiet crash of the tide. Then one of the attackers smiled and laughed. Ditto the second, ditto the third, ditto even the guy on the ground.

Boardwalk Elvis was the only one not laughing.

“I’m serious,” he said.

“You look it,” one of the men snickered.

The attackers mumbled something between themselves, something low with menace, and began walking slowly in Boardwalk’s direction. They continued to chuckle randomly.

“Good,” Boardwalk said. “So I guess you’re gonna leave him alone now.”

The men continued to advance.

“Well, my work here is done,” Elvis said. With that, he turned and ran.

Now Boardwalk Elvis was headed home listening to four sets of footfalls on the sidewalk, and three of those were getting louder. He began flailing his arms and screaming for help, no longer in a velvet-smooth drawl but in a nasal, high-pitched New Jersey whine.

“Help! Help!” he screamed, and he vaguely remembered something that someone, somewhere

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had told him about yelling “fire” instead of “help,” because who in their right mind would help a total stranger?

Boardwalk was running blindly toward his apartment, running as fast as his suede shoes would take him. He was a block and a half away, within eyeshot, when one of the guys jumped onto his back, sending him plummeting down onto the sidewalk.

Immediately there were sneakered feet on him: in his gut, on his back, his face. The attackers were kicking him, and worse, they were talking, too.

“This is for ‘In the Ghetto!’” someone said, and kicked him in the head, sending his wig flying off.

“Here’s for ‘Suspicious Minds!’” said another, chortling like a giddy pig, and kicked him in the groin.

“Viva Las Vegas!” said the third, and Boardwalk E, despite the kick to the chest, despite the swelling pain in his crotch, wondered how anyone could not like that song.

Boardwalk felt sick, like consciousness was a small, dim candle in the middle of a pitch-black church, and he heard a ringing in his ears. The ringing was actually more of a scream, a twirling, diving noise, and he thought that he might be passing out until one of his attackers said, “C’mon man, cops.”

Suddenly the kicks were gone, the laughing gone, but Boardwalk Elvis cringed anyway. He felt blood in his eyes. He could smell it and taste it, and he wondered how he possibly knew what blood smelled or tasted like.

Boardwalk crawled to his feet as the sirens moved closer. He squinted and saw the flashing blues of Formosa Beach’s finest and, in his peripheral eye, bathed in that blue light, a shadow outline of a person standing in front of him. Boardwalk thought it might be the guy who had

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been beaten first, but he wasn’t sure and honestly didn’t care.

“Fella,” the bystander said. “Are you all right?”

The police car skidded to a stop.

“Well, well, well,” said the policeman, getting out of his car. “Somebody beat up the

Boardwalk Elvis.”

“They kicked the shit out of him,” the bystander said.

“What happened?” the cop asked.

“I’m not sure,” E said, dazed. He put a hand on his head and felt the thin wisps of his own emerging baldness instead of Elvis Presley’s pompadour. Baldness and blood.

“They kicked the shit out of him,” the bystander repeated.

“What do you remember?”

“I was walking home, and I saw them beating someone.” Boardwalk looked down at his chest. His jumpsuit was spattered in blood. “I was walking home, and I saw these guys…”

“You got beat up watching somebody else get beat up?” the cop asked.

“I was walking home and I saw these guys…”

“They kicked the shit out of him.”

“No, they didn’t,” Boardwalk protested, though the guy pretty much had it right.

“Are you O.K.?” asked the cop. Boardwalk had seen this cop before and knew that he didn’t care for men who dressed up like Elvis. “Do you need to go to the hospital?”

“I just want to go home,” Boardwalk said. “I live a block or so.”

“You don’t need stitches?”

“No, I’m going home.”

“I’ll need to give you a ride,” the cop said.

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Boardwalk E turned to him. The cop had his arms crossed with authority. “What?”

“I have to give you a ride home,” the cop said, “so you won’t sue us later for not giving you a ride home.”

“That’s okay,” E said. “I won’t sue. I just want to walk home alone.”

The cop stepped forward and put his hand on Boardwalk’s arm.

“I’m afraid I insist,” he said.

Boardwalk got in and rode a block. The patrol car pulled up to his apartment complex, lights flashing. When they stopped, the cop gave his siren a little squeal, just, Boardwalk suspected, to attract some attention.

“Thanks,” Boardwalk said.

“Whatever,” said the cop.

The car pulled away and Boardwalk Elvis saw that many of his neighbors were out on their porches, enjoying the evening. All were gawking at him, and he didn’t blame them: He looked like hell, wig missing, bloody jumpsuit, staggering like a drunk. Boardwalk tottered to the outside staircase and began limping up the stairs.

On his way up, he passed an elderly neighbor who he often spoke with on such nights, sitting out on his porch, enjoying a cool beer. The old man shook his head in disbelief at the sight walking past him.

“Simon,” the old man said, “What the hell are you doing?”

Boardwalk ignored him, focused on the stairs, focused on the ground, focused on moving a foot in front of the other. He lumbered to his door and opened it. Marsha was there, and immediately she rushed to him and was screaming, and ran her palms on his bloody face, and put her arms around him, and cried like a widow. She supported his weight with her own and led

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him to the couch where he finally collapsed, and Simon looked up at his wife, smiled a bloody, broken smile and said I’m home, baby. Home to stay.

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Bearing A Cross

Our town held elections in that year—not long after the terrorist attacks— in which Bible

thumpers came out in support of a Bible thumper, elected him in a landslide, and voted to turn

the town of Walhalla, SC, into a theocratic form of government. To our credit, I think we went into theocracy with the best of intentions. We were going to be a model for the rest of South

Carolina and maybe the world. We would practice the Golden Rule, keep God’s commandments, and most of all we’d be spiritually insulated from harm or terrorist attack.

Needless to say, the experiment ended poorly, with the town’s churches marshalling their

forces and small arms and then marching on Main Street. But hindsight’s twenty-twenty, as The

Book says. Anyway, I don’t mean that we intended to turn our town into the kind of crazy

religion-state you see on National Geographic, with public executions, crushed dissent, military

force, all that. We simply decided to give our town over to Jesus Christ, and to enforce Old

Testament law.

I mention the terror attacks because I believe they played an important role in our deciding to

become Jesus Town. How could they not? On that terrible morning everyone watched what

happened on TV—we either went home from work or never left for work in the first place. And

those things we saw shook us: the plume of black smoke over the city, spread out and crawling

around like some kind of beast; and then people on the World Wide Web finding faces in the

smoke, devil-faces, horned and laughing. Then in the days that followed to learn there was

something called a jihad, a whole force of foreigners that followed Mohammed and who’d

declared war on us, all of us. These things put the town of Walhalla on high alert and had her

citizens in an Armageddon state of mind. So South Carolina had about a zero chance of being

hit, sure, but that morning anything seemed possible; the enemy was everywhere. I called my

sister down at the Piggly Wiggly and told her to go home for the day, she wasn’t safe. That

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morning we were all New Yorkers—a miracle in itself—and you could smell the sulfur burning

off her buildings from here.

Of course preachers did their part by preaching The End of the World at the Wednesday night

service the next night. Really they’d been preaching it a lot longer than that, but we just paid

more attention now. A couple of local ministers claimed to have found reference to the attack in the Bible, to a tower being smote. But all of our preachers made it clear: Our days were numbered. Our children would never make it to their proms. We’d never see a Gamecock winning season. Out front they changed the sign from The End Is Near to The End Is Here.

It’s easy to see now how we were all overreacting, fortifying ourselves for the Final Battle

Between Good and Evil, but what do you want? We were shaken. We lined up at the Food Mart

for bottled water and for canned goods. We stopped at the hardware store for some duct tape and

plastic. We went to the pawn shop and bought semi-automatic personal protection. And of

course we hung our flags, dusted off our Lee Greenwood, located our Bibles, and we worried.

But it was the trauma of the event, you understand.

I guess the only people in town who didn’t rush right out for supplies were those who still had

some left over, from the Y2K.

In the middle of all this apocalptizing we voted for mayor.

For the twenty years before, our mayor had always been a guy named Buck, who’d managed

to hold the office so long primarily because he always ran for reelection uncontested. In fact,

because he ran uncontested you could hardly say he ran at all. He didn’t break a sprint. He

141 didn’t print out any fliers or shake any hands. He didn’t take a safe or controversial stance on an issue because there was never an issue to take a stance on. He was the only guy who ever wanted the job, so he got reelected. He spent most of his time sitting at the lunch counter, drinking coffee with the other old men and smoking cigarettes. His pants bagged around his butt and every move he made was at half-speed. Once a year he’d get up on stage at Walhalla’s main event, the state’s only completely dry Octoberfest, and he’d sing half a verse of “Proud Mary,” which left him winded until the next October. But that once-a-year was about the extent of his campaigning and his energy. It had always been enough to win reelection against nobody else.

But in the days that followed the attack, as our townspeople found ourselves in the unfamiliar territory of intro- and outerspection, one of the first things we had to reconsider was our old coot

Buck. People started wondering: what would happen if something bad were to happen? Really bad? Final-Days bad? Would our mayor be capable of leading us into global or perhaps even cosmic conflict? We had to face the facts. He couldn’t’ve fought an Arab if his life depended on it. In fact it was a miracle he’d fought off Joe Camel this long. The world had changed…didn’t that mean we needed to change, too? To act decisively or even overreact? It seemed highly likely. But Buck, though a coot, was still our coot and had feelings, so even as our anxieties about the fate of Christian democracy and the inevitability of Arab attack began to rise, we kept them hidden, which made them rise, which we kept hidden, which made them rise, which we kept hidden. I don’t mean we hid them from each other, of course. Only from Buck. But behind his back we had quite a chat going on. That’s how things build momentum, get reckless, in a town like ours.

In the first week in October, 2001, our reckless and irresponsible disquiet found the volume when Wayne H. Butts entered the race.

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All of us knew Wayne Butts, or thought we did, and none of us cared for him much, or didn’t think we did. He ran a shop in town, vacuum cleaner sales and repair, dealing in barely-rebuilt old console models that couldn’t suck dirt out of a sandbox. He went to church Sunday mornings but wasn’t what you’d call a missionary. His wife was active in the community as a gossip. The two of them dressed in old polyester patterns that had been dizzying even when they were new, and they rode around town in a beat-up Ford Falcon. He’d bought his wife a facelift for her fiftieth birthday that made her look on the verge of constant orgasm.

First light on the first Monday in October, Wayne and his wife steered their old Falcon down to the courthouse and filled out the necessary paperwork for a mayoral run—after the staff finally found some of the forms yellowing in the bottom of a closet. Then they drove down to our local unpowerful FM station, where Wayne announced himself a candidate for mayor during the ten to eleven-thirty installment of Tradeo.

“We all know who’s behind this,” Wayne said. “I mean, don’t we?”

“It’s the Moslems,” Shirley Butts said.

“That’s right, it’s the Moslems.” Wayne sounded indignant and incensed—you could almost see him sitting there in the studios, sputtering on, running a white handkerchief over his fat ham face for effect, the sensory power of FM radio. “This world has changed, and we all watched it happen. Now old-fashioned values don’t look so old-fashioned anymore. Now our security can no longer be taken for granted. And our very way of life, our Christian way of life, wherein people have the right to worship in whatever Protestant way they choose, or no way at all, at your own risk, suddenly this inalien right has been attacked. But it’s not just the Moslems: It’s our hedonism, our paganism, our humanism, and our lack of uncompromising fundamentalism.

They’ve got the fundamentalism. What do we have? Shirley, hon? Do you have something to

143 say?”

Shirley leaned in close to her microphone, making it squeal. “I think it’s time for dynamic new leadership,” she said.

Tradeo went to the phone lines, white-hot with calls: Push mower, gas powered, needed some work, fifteen dollars or would trade for push mower, gas powered, worked all the time.

Then a few calls from people who were surprised Wayne Butts was running for mayor against

Buck, our old coot, but these same people all said they liked what Wayne had to say, that it was refreshing to hear a candidate who based his beliefs on what he believed rather than straight facts. A few more fearful and passionate callers added to Wayne’s basic argument, saying that we had the attack coming to us, God had sent it, for the gays and the abortion and thong underwear, and they urged him to keep on telling the truth. Then four hand towels, incredibly used, Elmer Fudd print. Would trade for absolutely anything.

“Let me say, I’ve known our former mayor for many years,” Wayne Butts said. “And he’s been a great mayor, in those times when we didn’t really need a mayor. But now we’ve got

Moslems coming. They’re a religious army that’s going to attack us because we are religious, and because God loves the United States. And we were founded on the principles of God. Now,

I’m not proposing anything too drastic for our great town here. All I’m saying is that we shift our form of government to the far right, reform our public education, remove contraception from the Revco so the kids can’t have sex, and then declare ourselves the first town in the country openly devoted to the teachings of Jesus Christ, as interpreted by us and by people like us. Now if that’s crazy, call me a dangerous nutjob. Who’s with me?”

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By Election Day, the answer to that question was clear: We were all with him, every single one of us. Wayne took 3,725 votes to Buck’s absolute zero, with one sole abstention, probably Buck taking the high road or else completely confused.

It was hard not to vote for him. His platform was one-pronged, and the prong was a good one: If we had any hopes of winning this new kind of war, a Holy War between the infidel and us, if we hoped to smite the Moslems, bomb them where they slept, kill them where they ate, if we wanted to bring Jesus Christ to the Middle East and then banish the souls of all those who’d heard and still did not believe to an everlasting suffering of blinding, blackened, fiery torment, the only way we were going to git er dun was to become better Christians. It wasn’t enough to have God on our side, Wayne warned us—which we knew we already did—but we had to be on

God’s side.

Who in their right mind casts a ballot against God?

But in our defense let it be said that Wayne Butts had more going for him than just Divine

Right (though anything you invoke after Divine Right is really just piling on). He also ran a

campaign. He ran an Honest-To-God campaign. He’d printed up buttons and he bought a

bullhorn. He bracketed one of those loudspeakers shaped like an anus to the roof of his Falcon

and he drove down Main Street booming the sound of his voice and his message, his driving and

his fumbling with the radio, the crinkle-paper of the Hardee’s breakfast biscuit wrapper, and the

occasional five-star cushion rip.

He made the Sunday-morning rounds at the churches, sported his best awful suits, spoke from

the pulpits, sat in with the choirs and sang off-key. Buck sat in church and held the hymnal

upside down. Wayne went to all the restaurants in town, the Sunday buffets and the mid-

145 afternoon workday lunches, he interrupted dinners and shook hands. Buck sat in the same spot he always did and drank his coffee with the same old men and didn’t shake a single hand until

Wayne came in one afternoon and worked his way around the room, finally reaching out for

Buck’s hand and asking for his vote.

Wayne went up to and invigorated children: “Well hello there, little boys and girls,” he would say. “When you die, do you want to be with Jesus? Or burning in a lake of fire?”

“Jeeeee-sus!” the kids would yell. The simple faith of children.

“Do you love America or Mohammed?”

“A-meeeeeeeee-ri-ca,” they said.

“Do you want to support all our brave men and women in uniform? Or do you want to give aid to the enemy?”

“Su-poooooooooort our brave meeeeeeeeeen and wehhhhhhhhhhhhh-men in uni-form!”

“And who do you want for mayor come November 6?”

Silence.

Kids.

But the real political play of the season came on the last Saturday in October, at our all-dry

Octoberfest. The fairgrounds had been bringing in the crowds all weekend, from all over the area, men and women who wanted to forget the troubles of the world for a while, forget that our special forces had gone into Afghanistan a couple of weeks before and were finding God-Knew-

What over there, men and women who wanted simply to breathe in that best fall air rich with chimney smoke, eat some smoked meats, and not drink. But on Saturday night the crowd was packed to the elbows, more than anyone could have imagined. Some were just people who wanted to have a good time, yes. But more were waiting to see what would happen when Buck

146 got up that night to do his once-a-year half-a-verse butchering of his song. Maybe these people were undecided in their voting and wanted to see what Buck the candidate might accomplish as

Buck the Entertainer, without all the mess that comes with an examination of the issues. Maybe it had nothing to do with politics but instead the enjoyment of grotesquerie, of watching someone or anyone make a fool of himself in a public forum. Maybe these two are the exact same thing.

Regardless, the two-liter cokes flowed, the funnel cake hardened, the down-home bands took and then gave up the stage, until about 10 p.m., when the crowd started to get excited as the headliner, the Chatahoochee Boys From Dixie, neared the end of their set and had just one more announcement to make.

“Those of y’all who are regulars know how we like to end Octoberfest,” the goofy lead singer told the whispering, starting-to-stir crowd. “Buck, where are you, son? Let’s do this.”

The Chatahoochee Boys fired immediately into song, got the big wheel started and then kept on turnin’, and then Buck meandered onstage and reached a mike, started singing in the middle of a verse, bent his knees and bounced on them in a bad dance, kept time with his right hand in a karate chop full of arthritis, stopped singing when he felt like it and then shuffled off stage. The

Chatahoochee Boys thanked everyone for coming out tonight, and when the song finally stopped—in that big last crescendo bands do, strumming real fast and the drummer drumming nuts—an eerie silence fell upon the alcohol-free Octoberfest. Folks’ hands covered their own mouths. Others cried and hugged each other tight. Still others looked up to the sky or down at the ground and shook their heads why, why, why. It was an inspiring display of incompetence and ineptitude, but it was a thing of the past; our days when we could get away with being incompetent and inept were over.

But then suddenly, dramatically, the breakers were breaked, the stage went completely dark,

147 and a brief pause later a single light shone down on a polyester silhouette. It was Wayne Butts, of course, strapped into a guitar.

“I hope y’all don’t mind,” he said. “But I’d like to sing y’all a little song, if you’d be so kind.”

Before he received an answer to the question he wasn’t asking, he started strumming—just him alone up there, his awful chording ability, his half-flat pitch, but delivered with great feeling—and he began to play this meaningful medley of patriotic songs, or were they gospel songs? He kept switching between the two every few words so you couldn’t tell which from which, but there were eagles flying and Christian Soldiers marching, people getting washed in the blood the color of which doesn’t run, and the whole thing worked its way back around to that

Toby Keith song about fitting a boot up your butt.

It probably goes without saying: From there the election was a lock.

His inspired if unproficient performance touched our town to its core. His simple act of fumbling through key changes earned the unassuming hearts and minds of all of us present that night, even all of us who weren’t but heard about it, and he’d done it in a classy and down-home manner that around here passes for masterful political theatre. He soon thereafter earned the support of our local organizations, from the Legion of Decency to the Unreformed and

Unpenitent Elks to the Daughters of both the American Revolution and the Confederacy. He earned the support of our local paper, the Razorback Rag, which gave him a rating of four fat pigs. And of course he re-reenergized the base, meaning our ministers, who rose before their congregations the morning after the medley and told everyone there they had a moral obligation to vote in this election, that as preachers they couldn’t legally get up here and tell you who to vote for, what with the First Amendment, but if you loved the Lord and loved the United States,

148 didn’t want your children learning Arabic, and didn’t like the idea of Talibon in cheap foreign- made pickup trucks cluttering up Main Street Walhalla, you should probably vote for Brother

Wayne.

Which is what we did, November 6th. We went out in force, voted theocratic, and we lived happily ever after. For about a month.

I guess we should have thought things through. But what did we know about theocracy?

How could we have any idea what to expect? I suppose we thought it would bring a certain measure of perfection to our town, a measure of certainty, of calm. I suppose we expected things to become so clear, we’d no longer have to think about them. I think we thought it’d be like paradise, that folks would sup on milk and honey, begin dressing Amish, would bow at the waist when they met you on the street, holding their hands over their hearts in a sign of reverence and goodwill like on the Landroo episode of Star Trek.

But in the beginning, at least, the real shock of becoming a theocracy was that it was no real shock at all. No one dined on milk and honey, no one dressed Amish, the people who smiled at you on the street kept doing so and the buttholes stayed buttholes. In other words our theocratic town looked a lot like our old town. I think we were a little disappointed by that, and perhaps a bit lulled by it, too. At the very least we’d expected someone from the comedy channel to send a fake reporter down here to file a story on us that made us look like idiots. But no one seemed to notice what had happened to us, not even the towns down the road. Not that they ever paid attention to us before.

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Brother Wayne himself was to blame for some of the relative ease with which we’d made the transition. In his Election Night victory speech he’d promised sweeping reforms that would be signed into law the very next day, which was not really his first day in office but which he’d declared would be, a sweeping reform right there. And his first day in office he made good on this by issuing no fewer than a half-dozen proclamations, legally binding, intended to begin to form a public policy that promised to be batty with his love for the Lord. He printed these out and had them tacked to telephone poles, slid under windshield wipers; he guest-hosted a half- hour on Unpowerful FM and discussed their ecumenical implications. But these—and the few weeks’ worth that followed—tended to be more philosophical, tackling some of the important issues, those matters which displease the Lord the most, such as sex. In fact his first proclamation was released at eight in the morning sharp—he must’ve had it ready—and dealt with the abortion and the gays. He outlawed them both outright and made strict punishments for both, which boiled down to beating the offender over the head with something, somewhere in public. But this legislation turned out to have no practical value whatsoever, as no one in town practiced either abortion or gayness. Likewise his proclamations on liberalism and moral relativism, disseminating the theory of evolution, having intimate relations with the lights turned on. None of us did any of that. Even his more practical proclamations had little practical value.

He said we should construct a Town Square Christmas display that would be religious in theme and would take into account no other faith. He said we should love our neighbor as ourself, but to report to police anyone who spoke in a foreign accent. He suggested we discourage the intermingling of the races. Check.

Maybe we’d been living in a theocracy all along and just didn’t know it.

Meanwhile the mundane and necessary business of city government moved forward

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apparently unhindered by the transition: Our utilities continued to be utilized, our roads

continued to be tarred, our trash pickup was unreliable as ever. Undoubtedly this was due to the fact that Wayne kept Buck’s old City Hall staff and asked them to keep doing whatever it was they did, proving the staff’s competence in maintaining the civil order regardless of who filled the mayor’s office, case in point Buck, who after the election went back to his lunch counter and resumed sitting, possibly waiting his chance for another election, another Octoberfest, another cup of coffee, or I suppose it was possible he didn’t know he’d lost.

For these reasons above all—our mayor’s issuing of fatwahs so obvious as to be trivial and the fact that none of us had been put out by even so much a dip in our water pressure—our transition into Jesus Town seemed an unqualified success. And as November found its full chill, our spirits found surprising warmth in a springtime of uplifting good news, which we interpreted as a sign of God being pleased with us, including our US forces moving through Afghanistan

Alhambra-sounding city by Alhambra-sounding city and Carolina beating Clemson, Hallelujah.

Our respectful nativity went up in Town Square, and the Plastic Baby Jesus had never seemed so holy nor American. And of course no one was as enthused and easily re-enthused by our success than our ministers, those Grass Roots, who read each one of Brother Wayne’s new proclamations as if it had come straight from the Press Upstairs and then reread the missives from the pulpit on Sunday mornings, pointing out for their congregations the scriptural basis for each new policy or tenet or, if they couldn’t find one, making one up on the spot.

But the truth about theocracy—and this is what we hadn’t really considered before—is that, once

151 it moves beyond the superficial and the abstract, it can get a bit intrusive. Brother Wayne had spent his first month in office crusading against deviates and degenerates, doubters and disbelievers, batterers, repulsives, defectives of all sort, which had been fine with all of us, since we had none of those types in our town to begin with. But a month in he’d stopped looking for degenerates and defectives, or maybe he just couldn’t find any, and instead he turned his attention toward us.

He began by going back on Tradeo and denouncing our patriotism.

“We are in a war,” he reminded the listening audience helpfully. “But do you know how many yellow ribbons I saw on the asses of cars on the way over here? Do you know? Twenty or so, twenty-five, maybe thirty tops. Maybe thirty-seven or forty. And do you know how many

American flags I saw flying from homes or from mobile homes? About as many. What’s wrong with you people? We are in a war. Am I to assume that those of you who don’t have a yellow ribbon bumper sticker don’t support the war, don’t support our troops, and are in fact dangerous dissenters giving comfort to the enemy? Yes, I think that’s fair. I want to see some patriotism here, people. I want to see some unity that borders on dangerous. From this moment on, I decree that you must put a bumper sticker on your car, which you can purchase at City Hall for

$10.99. I assure you, proceeds from the sale—and it’s just about all profit on these things—will go toward some legitimate thing for our town. I’ll figure out what once I see the cash.”

Brother Wayne had put some thought into the design: They were yellow ribbon stickers.

They were stickers shaped like yellow ribbons. You know. Though he’d put a cross in the middle to make his point. Of course, those of us who hadn’t stickered our bumpers hadn’t not done it because we didn’t support the troops or the war, but because we didn’t like shit on our bumpers. It had merely been a matter of personal choice. Still, it was a decent looking sticker,

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and you could be fined for not having it, so we were happy to slap it on. The demand for these

stickers grew so great—by law—that Brother Wayne designed an entire line of patriotic

paraphernalia, from flag pins to keychains to leisurewear. He put out a Xerox catalog at taxpayer

expense. He himself modeled the men’s suit. It was the style of suit he always wore except for dizzying plaid it was thirteen stripes, fifty blue stars, and a tie with one rabid-looking eagle.

Sister Shirley modeled the women’s wear, what looked to be three big flags stitched together in a

boxy loose-fitting gown that stretched from shoulders to floor, with enough material left over to

wrap around the head, covering everything but a slit for her eyes.

But his poor-selling items were not his dumbest idea.

His dumbest might’ve been to pick a fight with our high school mascot.

He’d stormed into Tradeo one morning claiming to have stayed up all night reading his Bible

and praying for guidance when Leviticus struck him and made him suddenly realize the big

problem with our football program, the state’s losingest. “Do you know what God writes in the

Bible about pigs?” he spat onto the microphone. “He calls them swine. He says they have a

split hoof but do not chew the cud. I don’t think it takes a scholar to see what I’m saying here.

Our mascot is the Razorback.” His voice was full of tin and fumbling, nervous as car keys. “It’s

not bad enough a football is a pigskin, I guess, but we call our team the Razorbacks? Do you

people wonder why our team is so completely incompetent? It’s the reason winning athletes being interviewed thank Jesus Christ for the victory. Because Jesus Christ has been watching

and has used his supernatural powers to affect the outcome of the game. That’s why we produce

the worst high school athletes in the state! It’s the Razorback. It’s not because our players are

smokers.”

Tradeo went to the phone lines and people were unreceptive.

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“What are you talking about?” the callers all said. “We’ve been the Razorbacks forever. I’m a Razorback,” they said.

“Then you’re an abomination to God,” Brother Wayne said.

“My daddy was a Razorback.”

“I don’t see anything wrong with it. It’s for the kids.”

“You’re not a Back Booster. You’re a Back Buster.”

“How are these people getting through, Hicks?” Brother Wayne demanded of the host.

“Don’t you have some sort of screening process?”

“This is Tradeo,” the old host said.

The mayor shuffled up his King James and his briefcase of notes and he left.

For the rest of the show the citizens of Walhalla called in to bash Brother Wayne over the head with his own thick dumbness. It was that forum of democratic debate and good-natured character assassination that is FM talk radio. Most people called up chuckling. A few called so mad they could piss. But the fact of the matter was there’d been no harm done. In fact it had been a useful exercise, to find out where the lines were.

The next morning we woke to the Seraphim. The Walhalla Seraphim. In fact every public

Razorback in town had been replaced by a hideous dark scaled serpentine angel with six wings and four heads and a demonic grin. When the football coach got to school and saw the thing sticking off the front sign he stumped up and tried to pry it off with his can-o-bean fingers. But it appeared protected by an electric shock of some kind he couldn’t figure out. He tried for a while anyway. He kicked it. He cursed and swung at it like he’d come home drunk.

Then there was the time a few days after that when Brother Wayne outlawed almost everything.

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On the early morning of Monday, December 17th, Brother Wayne dashed off a quick,

handwritten proclamation For Immediate Release—he’d learned his lesson about using

democratic public forums for such things, he’d use undemocratic prose from this point on—in

which he ordered the Walhalla Police Department, the entire force, both of them, to raid the local

convenience store of its Busch Light, gentlemen’s magazines, and flashing boob lighters in the

first battle in the War on Hedonism. They were further ordered to raid the local video store of

everything you’d be embarrassed to watch in front of your mother, which turned out to be, in

City Hall’s judgement, just about everything on the shelves. The police left only the family- friendly entertainment, the documentaries on sharks and the Civil War, the Best of the Best of

Andy Griffith, and the harmless animated children’s programs on Noah’s Ark, Jonah and the

Whale, the Passion of the Christ.

Immediately the talk began around town, the telling and retelling of what happened, the constructed and reconstructed accounts of the proclamation that preceded the conflict, which looked like three long squiggles, and even seemingly firsthand accounts of the raids themselves; hearsay is what a town like ours does best. In the first case Herschel, the owner of the Super

Convenience Mart, had been irate and tried to block the police, arguing with them the entire time he was plundered. He said he had a right to sell these items, he had a license to sell alcohol by authority of both the state of South Carolina and the Federal government, and he pointed to it, framed on the wall. He said ATF controls all that, and SLED. He kept saying, this is a Federal case, this is a Federal case, and he kept saying that even as the cops pulled away with two black- and-whites’ worth of his hedonistic stuff. Across town, Big Homely Ed of Big Homely Ed’s

Video had taken it even worse, calling up people despondently, trying to tell them he’d been robbed, he’d been robbed, but he couldn’t really further the story in any meaningful way because

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he was sobbing too hard to be fully understood.

Is this the point where things went too far? Is this the point where our town stood up to the

strong-arm tactics of City Hall once and for all and reclaimed ourselves as a democracy? No.

Because we were afraid to do so for fear of sounding unpatriotic, or maybe I mean unchristian.

And the reason governments like that exist is because people keep quiet, and the reason people

keep quiet is because governments like that exist. (We’ve since put that on a bumper sticker

ourselves, $10.99, looks sharp.) Even our paper, the Razorback Rag, refused to stand up to City

Hall’s overreaching. In fact they’d quickly changed their name in all the pig discussion to simply RR, like a humor magazine, or a pirate one, due to the ban, though they insisted they’d not changed their name at all but merely their logo. For the same reason no one wants to eat

Kentucky Fried Rat.

Regardless, the town of West Union is three miles down the road, where you could buy beer and boobie lighters and rent videos all at the Jumbo King, and eat a hamburger, too, if you wanted. The only people directly put out were Herschel and Big Homely Ed, both of whom we felt sorry for, sure, but their government-imposed imposition had been like a form of Eminent

Domain, that old government standby. This is called rationalization.

In church the following Sunday, Christmas Eve Eve, our ministers put their best faces on

Brother Wayne’s reforms. They claimed a War on Hedonism, the new catch-phrase, was a good thing, a sign of ethical progress for our town. And even if the measures used to fight the war might seem to some of us a bit extreme—say raiding sovereign businesses, for one—the results were likely pleasing to the Lord.

“They took all our beer,” some in the congregation said.

“I think that’s wonderful,” the ministers said. “Banish the demon drink far away.”

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“They took all the movies.”

“The filmcapades of Hollywood and Gomorrah,” the ministers said.

“They said they know who amongst us rented the booby movies.”

“Um,” the ministers said. “Well.”

But the point is, we let it all happen. We accepted each new intrusion and thus invited the next, and when something truly hideous and in need of attention came walking up the street, we looked the other way, which is the polite, Christian thing to do.

On Christmas Eve, things got much worse.

Brother Wayne issued a proclamation to further define his previous one. It was posted on the

World Wide Web, stapled to telephone poles; it blew with the wind down Main Street. It read, in its entirety:

To: The Town of Walhalla From: Wayne H. Butts, Mayor Re: War On Hedon

To my constituents: Merry Christmas! Last week I issued a statement regarding Hedonism and I declared open war on it in our town. So far I have seen signs of good progress. Or I thought that I had, by removing those things that corrupt the soul, such as alcohol and cinema. But then I got to thinking, I wasn’t really hitting the problem. Declaring a War on Hedonism is a good idea, but when it comes right down to it, it was a dumb idea, because I was missing the target. I’m fighting symptoms of a disease rather than the cause. Removing Busch Light doesn’t do

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anything for that. The cause of sin is the Devil and I fight the Devil every day. I’m fighting him even as I type this, hard. But I can’t kill the Devil so I have to look for Plan B. So the next obvious cause of disease is that crud in every one of your black hearts. Your secret sins. Your fun sins, your pet sins, all that human nature. How does one fight secret sin? If secret sin is the cause of external seeable sin? I have a plan. Operation Righteous Indignation is over, and now Operation Exposure to the Light of Day is begun. What this means, when you offend God in some way, you will be issued a ticket. But then I thought, a ticket isn’t good enough. You can throw that away. What really conquers sin, vanishes evil? What get to the root of it and snap it? The only one thing I know of, the blood of the Lamb. Also, public shame. So that’s where I’m going with this.

From now on, when you get caught doing something you will be issued a sign to wear. Open container, you will be given a sign to hang around your neck telling people you’re a damn drunk. Parking violation, that’s a sign, maybe Doesn’t Follow Directions. But whatever you get caught with, we’ll determine the sin and post it on you. I mean, let’s be real, DUIs get a yellow tag and pervs get a yard sign, and that’s already, in the whole country. It’s a very American thing I’m talking about here, and it goes back to the righteousness of our forebears and pilgrims. It’s a vision of America. I’m not calling you drunk-driving pervs, but your sin is going to hang around your neck, whatever it is. But then, I thought, or I’m thinking right now, that signs can be thrown away just as easy as a ticket, so how about something you’re stuck with and can’t lose or hide in your open shame?

So what say a big wooden cross? Not so big you can’t carry it but big enough to be a complete annoyance. Cumbersome. I’ll get right on that. And when you get a ticket in the next few days for your secret sins, take these tickets into City Hall and redeem them for your cross. And your cross, in turn, will redeem YOU. Those of you who think I’m kidding can go jump. If you think I’m crazy go jump again. You elected me and if I’m so crazy what does that say about you, smart guy?

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I see nothing blasphemous about this idea.

In Love of the Lord, Wayne

Appended to the bottom of the letter, a picture of Wayne and Shirley, their Christmas card. It

was the first real close look many of us had gotten of Wayne since the election. His hairline had sunken back in his forehead and his eyes looked full-on black, as if removed, rolled in oil, and repotted back into his head. Shirley stood beside him but at a distance, hoping to sneak her way sideways out of frame. Her frown was difficult to read, because of the facelift.

Our Christmas Days were contained, paranoid affairs, full of the fear of the Lord rather than

His Grace, and with each new gift unwrapped we wondered what secret sin about us had just been revealed. Whether our wife’s selfless gift-giving exposed our pride in the form of a monogrammed bowling ball, as well as perhaps our sloth and drunkenness. Whether our gifts of silk pajamas to them revealed both our lust and our tendency to give gifts to our wives that eventually gave back to us. We worried about our children, second-guessing the fake costume jewelry, pink boa, and blood-red lipstick of the “How Old Am I Again?” playset, and we double- checked the rating on those X-Boxes to find they contained extreme gore and violence, adult language, adult situations, and plenty of malicious intent.

Across town our ministers spent their Christmases in the same state of apprehension, hunkered down in their own modest homes festering holiday ulcers that had nothing to do with gravy. In fact they’d not been able to eat a single sprinkled cookie, nor enjoy the thinnest cut of ham. It was an emergency.

Our dreams over the holiday were the worst of all, sugarplumless and strange, crucified and

159 unseasonal, chalk-dust dreams of a barefooted Savior on a Holy Land road, dragging His own heavy death toward Golgotha.

On the morning of the 26th the first of our citizenry began bearing a cross. It was for noise violation, gross intoxication, and the discharging of firearms. Etched across the horizontal bar was a single word: Roughneck. Billy Giles had thrown the cross into the bed of his pickup and was driving it up and down Main Street, half-hanging out his window, thumbing back for people to take a look at it. I think he was proud.

Billy and his brothers spent every Christmas Night hanging out at their farmhouse getting pissed on OFC, and then once their judgement was fully impaired they broke out the shotguns and took turns in the back yard firing off shells at nothing in particular. From what we’d heard, they’d spent the beginning of this Christmas Night like the rest of us, in quiet and worried contemplation over current events, except that they decided to break out the OFC anyway. Then, after a few straight drinks, they wondered what would really happen to them if they did get ticketed. After all, if they didn’t get fall-down drunk and fire off a few rounds, hadn’t the terrorists already won? So they stopped thinking and started drinking, and just after midnight duck-for-your-lives season was open. Where the three other Giles boys were, and thus the three other crosses, we didn’t know. Maybe they were still sleeping it off. Either that, in jail, or at the

ER getting a finger sewed back on. But Billy didn’t seem too worried. It was the first time he’d been first in just about anything.

But then by mid-morning there were a few more—simple infractions, a speeding ticket, a

160 library fine, that kind of thing—and then, a few more. In the holiday post-bustle, it was something interesting to watch. It was even, perhaps, mildly funny. Had we been scared of this?

Harmless public humiliation? The steps of City Hall became a runway for disbelieving perp walks, otherwise upstanding men and women who’d been cited for something and who shuffled into the building with their heads hung low, muttering to themselves. It was almost like a guilty pleasure, and a few people started standing outside City Hall and rubbernecking. Then, even better, someone from City Hall came out and issued them a ticket for rubbernecking, and then these people did their perp walks inside. Their crosses said, Judge Not.

By nightfall City Hall had formed a line. It moved an inch at a time and reached a block back.

It shuffled straight ahead without conversation, like a line you’d see in Warsaw, in black-and- white film reels, rather than Walhalla. Many of the same men and women standing there, sunken-faced, had been mildly entertained by the whole business earlier in the day, when it had been someone’s else’s sin. Behind City Hall one could hear the sound of incessant hammering, nailing, sawing, two or three or more carpenters back there, unseen, churning out crosses the way carpenters in old Westerns churn out coffins. Brother Wayne’s office light, facing east toward the road, burned on into the small hours. Every now and then you could see him, a fat dark shape moving quickly past the pane.

Obviously we had a problem. But we didn’t know just how big a problem until the next morning, when sunrise revealed a town absolutely clumsy with crosses. They were leaned on buildings, abandoned on streets, planted into the lawn-space around City Hall, for temporary measures, we guessed, but the image reminded us of some things we’d rather have forgotten.

Municipal Square looked to be a loading-zone for shame. Crosses were strapped to the hoods of cars or stuck halfway out of barely-closed trunks. It looked like the Holy Land gift shop had

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exploded over our town. And most distressing, the line standing in front of City Hall had

become twice as long and twice as slow as before, seemingly overnight.

Then we discovered, as people began talking and spreading whatever rumors they had, that

there’d been nothing “seemingly” about “overnight.” Brother Wayne had ordered his police

force on twilight, door-to-door, room-to-room campaigns, conducting raids without warrants or

due process on private property and on sleepy-eyed, confused citizens—young and old alike,

men and women, Baptists and non-Baptists—rummaging through closets and chester drawers for

signs of some ticketable secret sin. But that didn’t make any sense, we pressed the rumorers

who’d spread the rumor to us. Our town had two count-em two cops, and if you put them both

together you’d still get only about half a cop. How could they’ve had time, the energy to go door-to-door issuing this many tickets? It made no logistical sense. But then the rumorers said it was because Brother Wayne had apparently brought in some fresh blood from somewhere else.

Brand new members of the Walhalla PD. These brand new members dressed all in black, no badge, no insignia, not even a gun belt that anyone saw. Eyewitnesses recalled them bone-thin and tall, maybe seven feet, thin men all seeming to be from some other part of the world—not that they looked Asian or Norwegian but that they had some trait that was hard to identify. They had hollow sockets and starved cheeks, as if they’d all been held upside down and drained of their blood. They spoke in a dialect like outer space music. There were either four of them who worked their way miraculously across town, one minute on the far side, the next on the near, or there were multiple groups of the same four. One of the four always asked the lady of the house for coffee, meaning the can full of grounds that he could eat with a spoon.

And there’d apparently been some confusion as to the whereabouts that night of our own

Brother Wayne. His office light stayed on all until morning, a single glowing eye facing the

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street and overlooking the fenced-in rear of the courthouse, where stand-up lights had been brought back for the carpenters we couldn’t see, casting a red, rolling fog so that they could keep on making racket, though they were all likely half-dead from exertion. And it was clear that

Brother Wayne had been in his office all night—he’d occasionally drift past the window and cast his foul shadow. But then several townspeople claimed to have spotted Brother Wayne in different parts of the town over night, and more or less at the same time. Some claimed to have seen him north toward the mountain, walking along the dark road which led to our spooky State-

Park forest, rumored to be home to devil worshippers, confederate ghosts, certainly an inbred or two. One such person seeing him was Beaulah Leigh, who leaned out her window and called to him prithee—I think she said, Hey Mayor whatcha doin walkin’ without reflective gear?—and whose prithee went unreturned. Over by Dairy Queen someone claimed to have seen Brother

Wayne around midnight walking the train tracks, accompanied by a much larger and much- harder-to-see individual who looked like a cross between a linebacker and a hunchbacker and who walked hobbled up, sort of like a goat. Again the spotter called out prithee, which the spotted left unrecognized and unreturned. Maybe Brother Wayne had been consorting with God knows what kind of corruption and sleaze…he was, after all, a politician. Maybe he had a twin brother, one of them good, the other of them evil and mustachioed, and our town was being torn apart in their yin-yang struggle. Maybe Brother Wayne had figured out teleportation. Maybe so.

But to be honest this rumormongering—while answering some of our questions and besides that being moderately entertaining—really didn’t do that much for us. For the men and women of our town being called upon to take up our cross, who stood in line, or had done so already, or would be doing so soon, what mattered was not where Brother Wayne had spent his night or to which agency or entity he’d sold his soul but figuring out what could be done to derail the

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runaway train of incompetence, brute force, and moral authority that had become our local

government.

By the 28th some in our town had taken up that question with full force. A few began standing

outside City Hall—across the street, where there was room—and holding up signs protesting

Operation Exposure to the Light of Day. Some began publicly questioning Brother Wayne’s

tactics and theology, even his qualifications for being mayor, much less being a mouthpiece for

Jehovah. And a few among us—the most high-falutin’ and humanistic—began preaching a gospel of peaceful and mindful resistance, claiming that corrupt governments are sanctioned by public apathy, by acquiescence, and that the simple act of refusing to participate could change the system. Of course City Hall tried to discredit these broadminded radicals as quickly as possible—all of them schoolteachers, librarians, people who could read—by issuing more crosses. Those who publicly criticized City Hall’s tactics would be issued a cross that read,

Agitator. Those who flat refused, Traitor. Failure to pick up your cross would result in its going back to the woodshed, where carved beneath your original sin it would now also read, Failure to

Pick Up Cross.

But our broadminded radicals would not be denied. They formed a picket line five or six strong, they trained each other in how to bear a serious blow to the head. They broke out their posterboard and their sharpies and their wooden sticks and their acoustic guitars, and for good measure they brought out thick logging chains, in case they had to chain themselves to something. They sang We Shall Overcome, though they knew only those three of the words. In the face of the line headed in, the line of Those Who Would Not seemed by comparison insignificant, and versus the sound of the carpentry behind City Hall their three repeated words of the Negro spiritual could only be mouthed for justice.

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Yet here’s the surprising thing: it almost worked. Even these small acts of civil disobedience began to have what they call a rippling effect. Because our government couldn’t keep up with the demand and redemand for crosses.

Every time someone new refused to participate in the system, the system slowed down that much more to accommodate the refusal. Every time someone from City Hall would walk across the street and tell our radicals, “Your cross is ready,” and every time our radicals would say back

“Shove it up your ass, pig,” their crosses were dragged back behind City Hall for more work.

Thus it was gridlock. It was cross-lock. It was subtle and patriotic sabotage. Believe me, no one was more surprised by this than our broadminded radicals, whose honorable proposals had been intended more or less as a meaningless, bloodless, abstract gesture, which is how broadminded radicals like to fight. But this time, we couldn’t believe it, their passive Ghandi hand-wringing had shown some real-world results. It was like germs accidentally killing the aliens in War of the Worlds.

Brother Wayne tried his best to remain on-message even as the hammering and nailing slowed and stopped. He tried his best to ignore reality and stick stubbornly to his plan, even if it had been jackass to begin. He grabbed his old campaign bullhorn and leaned out his office window and bellowed for our hippies to come get their damn crosses. But by this time it was no use. By that point we’d tasted freedom, democracy had taken root, and besides we were running out of carpenters, as one of them had to be airlifted to Oconee Memorial that Saturday the 29th with chest pains. The line in front of City Hall broke rank, ripped up their violations, and returned home. Our sanitation department looked at the mess on Main Street and shook their heads.

And just like that it was over. Or at any rate it should have been.

165

Broadminded radicalism and peaceful nonviolent protest had won out over well-intentioned and legally elected tyranny.

It was a red-letter day for the blue-stated people in our red-stated town.

But Brother Wayne had always been—or at least since he’d been elected—a man with his blinders on. His right eye didn’t know what his left eye was doing. His view of reality extended about two feet in front of his face. He could have and should have taken Shirley and skipped town, sneaked into exile further south, maybe somewhere near Columbia, where nobody would care to look. But instead Brother Wayne sent out his four policemen—who despite being thin and French were strong as ox—to drag everyone who’d refused to pick up their cross into Town

Square. To be nailed to their cross.

Sunrise broke in clouds of cotton-soaked blood. To the sounds of screaming, and of spikes driven deep into bone. Our eighty-six-year-old dissenting librarian, who had no one to come get her after being abducted in the middle of the night and crucified, had tried to walk home herself.

She’d made it a clumsy, osteoporosis mile, trailing blood across the sidewalks and pavement like an abstract painting.

We tried to wrestle her into the back of one of our pickups, to get a shawl over her bare shoulders, which of course would not reach around the cross, tried to get her safely back home, and as we stood there doing so Brother Wayne’s City Hall flunkies came around tacking fliers to telephone poles, one final proclamation marked For Immediate Release. In it, he said the War on Human Nature was going well. That exposing secret sin had made us stronger. He said that

166 heretofore City Hall would get rid of all unclaimed crosses by nailing them straight to their rightful owners. And he said that, effective immediately, in order to Keep Walhalla Green, he’d discontinued the manufacture of new crosses. From now on when you received a ticket, you could bring it on down to City Hall to have your sin tattooed on you—one on the forehead, one on the forearm, and one on the palm of your hand.

Our ministers read this proclamation at church later that morning—of course packed wall to wall with fright, the same kinds of crowds we’d seen right after 9/11—and they finally admitted their mistake.

“We thought a theocratic town would be a good idea,” they said. “And more important, we thought Brother Wayne was the kind of man who could make it work. But now we have come to a different conclusion altogether about Brother Wayne, and the nature of mixing government and religion. We have come to believe that Brother Wayne is really the Anti-Christ.

“He’ll never give up his power, brothers and sisters. He’ll say that we got what we deserved for voting for him. But tattooing on the forehead is a sure-fire sign of demonism. He’s in league with the Devil. Which means, of course, there’s only one thing we can do, brothers and sisters of our town:

“Go get your weapons! Brandish your firearms! Go get the armaments you purchased to fight the Arabs! And bring them here, to our churches! We will fortify and march on Main

Street! We will rescue this town from the goat-claw clutches of Satan! This is a Holy War!

Between Good and Evil! And our very souls are at stake.”

It was a relief to hear a public official make so much sense.

We drove home from church, took off our Sunday best, and dug out our fatigues.

We armed ourselves and then piled into our respective church vans—the whole town’s

167

worth—and we charged toward Main Street at speeds upwards of thirty-five miles an hour. The

rattle of automatic rifles chattered all that day and into the night. Our young men in town took up arms with us, some of them as young as twelve, though all had fired automatic weapons before. We told them what they did was for God, for our town, but not to get hurt or their

mothers would kill us. We let them smoke cigarettes and tie dirty bandannas around their heads.

In this manner we reclaimed Walhalla block by block, fighting off Brother Wayne’s groups of

four out-of-town policemen all the way. It really wasn’t so hard to get past them. Once you

finally killed one of the four, the other three just ran around in circles, bumping into each other,

like defective toys. Then you could just move past them if you wanted, to the next set of four, or

stay behind a moment and slay them. Which is what a lot of us decided to do. And just before

midnight we finally reached our beleaguered City Hall, burst our way in through the front, and

found Wayne and Shirley hunkered down in the basement. We brought them out into Town

Square, jeered at them, pelted them with stones, and then for good measure we knelt them down

and cut off their heads. It was a horrible thing to do and to have to see. I can still picture

Shirley’s head there rolling on the ground, fully make-uped and hairdo’ed, like a Barbie Make

Me Pretty. It’s likely to be an image I’ll carry with me for the rest of my life.

You might think it would be difficult to go back to our old lives after all this ordeal, after the

bloodshed and lay-waste of theocracy, the intolerance and the single-minded barbarism, the

crucifixion. But thankfully this wasn’t the case. In fact we pretty much just picked right up. In

a couple of weeks it was like the whole thing never happened. We even found Buck

sitting…well, you know where he was sitting…and we gave him his old job back. He didn’t

complain or hold any grudge. He’s been running things for us ever since.

But the reason we keep telling this story—and we do, to anyone who’ll listen—is so we can

168

remind ourselves of what happened and where we went wrong, and because we believe the story to be relevant, that it might teach valuable lessons to those places around our great nation, our on-fire world, who begin to follow the same path we did. But not really about religion or

politics, of course. I mean, they got out of hand here, but both are necessary institutions, and

after all you can’t blame the bushel for the apples. And of course none of us in our town has any

hard feelings toward God in this. None of this was His fault. How could it be? It’s Man that’s

the real culprit in this mess, Man who is deceitful, malicious, cruel, and petty. Man is to blame

for his own inhumanity. Man and his sin are to blame, and of course Satan. These are the things

that bring suffering to the world, and things to be feared. Whereas God is Kindness. God is

Judgement. God is Love.

169

The UFOs

I was in therapy, recovering from a Southern Baptist upbringing. Four times a day I attended special sessions designed for people with my problem—I was shown pictures of dinosaurs and made to scream like a Big Bang, whatever that sounds like. I was instructed to pleasure myself at night and made to observe in the morning that my man-part had not withered off. I was told that generosity is the mark of civilization, that we are charged with our own lives and destiny, that we are obliged to no one’s judgement other than the reach and compassion of our own conscience. This last part kept me up a few nights, worrying.

This was at the Hold On Center For Not Letting Go, a recovery facility so exclusive and secretive, that’s not even its real name. It’s located in the mountains somewhere, though what mountains, the exact location, no one knows…no one but the staff and doctors, the patients’ families, the HMOs, presumably the government, and the random and never-late Dominoes

Pizzaman. The patients themselves have no idea. It’s not the kind of place you check yourself into—it’s more the kind of place where roughneck orderlies break into your apartment in the middle of the night and put a hood over your head, and the next thing you know you’re eating cafeteria food. The Center offers tough love, holistic medicine, cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy, eastern meditation, rustic decor, and meatloaf Thursdays. It’s not a bad place to find yourself, if you’re kidnapped in the middle of the night.

The patients here are checked in rather than checking themselves in, almost always by their families, meaning their mother and father, because 1. If they are bad enough to need this place, they can’t be trusted to make their own appointment, and 2. If they are bad enough to need this place, their parents are what they have left. Their lovers have dried their tears and packed their bags, moved to other cities, their friends have come to let the machine get it, to talk to their shoes

170 in awkward meetings at the grocery store, and their employers have adopted a suspicious and pretend-caring distance, as mandated by federal law, if they’re still involved at all. I’m the exception to all this: My parents still claim Jesus is the answer, and cheaper than prescription medication. So I called the Center myself, put a hanky over the receiver, spoke in a mock-

Spanish accent, gave them a physical description of myself and address, left the door unlocked, set out milk and cookies, readied a bag with cartons of cigarettes, and waited. The Lord helps those who help themselves, dammit.

It was just this kind of thinking that my therapy was meant to cure, and which didn’t exactly take: the entrenched disposition, the automatic aphorism…the mental tapes that get stuck on play, my therapist called them. Other times she called it the dog returning to its vomit, but this was generally when I’d been particularly hard that day.

Most of the time, though, she was understanding, patient, reminding me gently that there is no

God, or that there is a God and He’s a God of love, whichever I felt more comfortable with.

“But which one is it?” I’d ask. “Those sound like two different things to me.”

“Which one would you like it to be?” my therapist responded. Redirection, that old magician’s trick.

Of course, if I’d known the answer to her question, I would’ve acted on it by then, I wouldn’t’ve had to have myself kidnapped and committed. I wouldn’t have been sitting in her office dressed in a paper gown like an asshole.

“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “I guess if there was no God, and I could be sure of it, then I could get used to that, maybe even learn to enjoy myself.” I thought about it a second. “But if there is a God, even if He’s a God of love, then there’s still a chance that it could sour and go south and turn into hellfire and damnation and all that, right? Because, as you know, love hurts.

171 Nazareth. I mean the band, not Jesus of.”

My therapist scribbled some notes and nodded, though it wasn’t what you’d call an approving nod.

“You keep steering us back toward Jehovah,” my therapist said. “Angry Jehovah. Isn’t it possible that there’s a conception of God out there that’s different than that? That the idea of

God you have might be nothing like God as He actually is?”

I’d tried to honestly explain to her the underpinnings of my condition—my childhood in the deep South, in a tucked-away corner of a superstitious little county where the church was not just the religious but the social, political, and pseudo-scientific center and the shallow pool in which potential mates and cousins waded; I told her of my parents’ discouragement of pursuing a higher education for fear that it would undo my faith, about which they’d been partly right; I told her of my twenties spent spiraling out of control while Jack Daniel and Jesus Christ duked it out for possession of my soul, and how I would still sometimes go to bed a drunk, happy atheist only to wake up a doomed, brimstone-smelling backslider. And of course there was my difficult transition into a subscriber to The New York Times, pledger to PBS, and voter of the Democratic ticket. I tried to explain all of this to her in terms she might easily understand, so that we could aggressively target the problem. But I later learned that she’d grown up Unitarian Universalist, and thus had no idea what I was talking about.

“I don’t know,” I said again. “I think it’s just as likely that God, if He exists, is just as vengeful and full of wrath as I’ve been taught. I guess that makes as much sense to me as anything else.”

This was the sticking point in my Existential Diagnosis™. We’d been here before.

My therapist stopped scribbling and started getting frustrated.

172 “Baker,” she said. “Let me ask you a few things. All right? Do you really believe that, if there’s a God, He’s got both the time and inclination, out of everything else He’s got to do— make a universe, scatter some stars—do you really think that with everything He’s got to do, or maybe He’s a She,”—I winced, hard— “do you think that He or She would take the time to look down and spy on you and keep notes on you just so He or She could have the pleasure of damning your soul to Hell?”

“I don’t like it,” I said. “But it sounds reasonable.”

“It doesn’t sound reasonable,” she corrected. “It sounds paranoid and narcissistic. Isn’t it possible that God is the loving, nurturing, creative force behind everything, behind the universe and the stars, all humanity? Isn’t it possible that there might be a God who created existence out of nothingness and then allowed it to evolve, sprout gills, grow lungs, learn to walk upright?

Isn’t it possible that there is a benevolent being in the universe who loves us all and accepts us all as we are and doesn’t want to punish or condemn us, torture us, who wants only for us to be happy and to live in harmony with one another on His planet? Isn’t that possible?”

The Southern Baptist in me had already figured this one out.

“No,” I said slowly. I was confused and horrified. “No, I don’t think so. None of that.”

My therapist stared at me open-mouthed. “Why the hell not?” she asked.

“Because,” I said. “Because it’s the human thing to do. It’s the spiteful thing. It’s the emotional thing. We are made in His image. Because it’s human and recognizable. Hell, it’s what I’d do! You know? I pass homeless people all the time and I pat the pocket that doesn’t have any change. I get excited when students skip class because I don’t have to bother with their papers anymore. I squash spiders instead of taking them outside! My God yes! Yes! He takes shortcuts. He holds grudges. He keeps tabs. He’s keeping score! He’s a madman! He’s a

173 madman! Have mercy on me!”

Generally at this point I would lose it for a while and my therapist would push a button for backup, two biceped goons who took turns holding me down and shoving pictures of Cro-

Magnon Man in my face.

The Existential Diagnosis™ is the imperfect bread and butter of this place. On the night you are first checked in, you undergo a battery of examinations and cross-examinations both physical and psychological, from ink blot and word association to mild detox, preliminary deprogramming, a check of BP and for VD. Your results are recorded both by whitecoats watching for verbal and nonverbal cues and by electrodes Frankensteining from your temples.

Then the information is fed into a computer, a trained technician reads the printout, and the nameless dread and suffering of your life is suddenly named.

But the diagnosis itself is not a cure. Rather it’s a baseline, the crux of spiritual disorder that allows other, more recognizable disorders to exist. In psychology this is called co-morbidity, and it’s every bit as fun as it sounds. The Existential Diagnosis™ identifies the root but the therapy is designed not only to cut the root but prune the tree, the prunes being the disorders that branched from the root. But you have to attack the root before you can branch the prunes. It’s an imperfect metaphor, granted.

For example, I have been diagnosed with Southern Baptist Disorder, meaning that I have been fucked up by the thought of His terrible, merciless strength: Part of me wants to believe, part of me refuses to, and part of me believes regardless. This is a serious dilemma, though I’m sure to

174 those who don’t know better it sounds cerebral, abstract, harmless. But I am co-morbid with disorders you can easily see: alcoholism, fear of commitment, manic depression, anxiety and panic disorder, paranoia, hypochondria, fear of death, bottomed self-esteem, liberal self-loathing, fear of being watched, fear of being judged, fear of everything. It takes a lot of energy to be this afraid. It takes more than a man has.

For another example of the dysfunction function there’s my roommate JD. JD is the lead singer of a famous rock band—you’ve heard of them. In fact you might own one of their albums. They cut four in all, earning them critical acclaim, heavy radio and MTV rotation, and a depressed following of flannel-wearing fans, all of whom thought their parents were dickheads.

Unfortunately JD took the band’s success as an opportunity to drop his shit. He developed a serious drinking problem. He developed a taste for the worst drug, the one you take with a hot spoon. He developed an indiscriminate sex problem, first with groupies and hangers-on and then with anything. He displayed difficult borderline personality traits, he slammed between huddled introvert and public monster. He thought himself either the savior of art or its least funny joke.

He ran into legal trouble. He completed a few dozen heartbreaking, unpublished lyrics. Finally he launched on a bender around a turn into a tree, and soon thereafter he found himself hooded in the middle of the night, kidnapped, and then released into the wild of the Hold On Center For

Not Letting Go. They did the tests, they fed the information into the machine. He was diagnosed with Serious Artist Disorder. Meaning, he wanted to die.

If you’ve ever seen VH1 Behind the Music you know that such a person can be hard to live with and even harder to lose. Sometimes he seemed serious about his recovery, he’d talk about the future, consider taking up Kabbalah. But then he’d try to write in this state of seeming clarity and nothing would happen, which would lead to despondency, to his standing in front of the

175 mirror staring into his own bloodshot eyes for answers that weren’t there. He’d spend a few days walking around the facility in stone silence, his arms crossed like he wanted to fold himself over.

He’d look thin and white as paper, and as easy to rip apart. And then for no reason the fog would break—or the switch would trip, that’s how quick it was—and he’d be back to his self- destructive self, a force of nature, a façade, a disaster. He’d start hatching schemes to break out of our room, undermine the establishment, find the pharmaceutical stash, pull the prank of all pranks, locate the spyhole in the girls’ locker room. But I was stuck with him—not only as my roommate but also in every one of my co-morbid sessions. That’s the co-morbidity of co- morbidity. It’s amazing how many different existential crises lead a brother straight to booze.

Or maybe it’s not amazing at all.

In my afternoon alcohol recovery session—the most traditional session offered by the center, a

Twelve-Step program—JD would brag that he was the only member of the class still stuck on

Step One. Whereas I, trying my ass off, was stuck on Step Two. The Higher Power.

“I just don’t get it,” Grace, my alcohol counselor, said. “You don’t have to figure out the secrets of the universe on Step Two, Baker. I thought you believed in God?”

“I do,” I said, distressed.

“Then what’s the problem?”

“It’s just that I don’t know what to make of Him,” I said.

“Oh come on,” Grace said. She took off her glasses—these pancake-shaped, old-style Joyce

Carol Oates’—so she could smack herself in the face. “You don’t have to make anything of

Him! This isn’t Gnosticism, Baker! You’re not starting a sect! All you have to do is believe that a Higher Power exists and then give yourself over to Him, one hundred percent.”

“Yikes,” I said.

176 This was in front of the whole class. It had been my turn to report some progress.

“I’m really sorry,” I told everyone. “I’m trying, I really am. I’m having trouble with it. I guess I just don’t get it.”

But I could tell just by looking, when the progress reports mercifully worked their way past me and around the room, there were a few people in class who somehow had gotten it. This second step is a big one, the proverbial and literal step of faith, like descending a hill in the dark, risking your footing, your neck, risking death. But for those few in the class who’d tried the step and who’d somehow landed a foot on the next, there was this look of relieved austerity, of pacified contentment. As if they’d resigned themselves to the yoke, and the yoke had set them free.

“Don’t let those Holy Rollers get you down,” JD said when it was over. He had on his paper gown with leather pants underneath. “Let’s go hang out with the sex addicts forum. Troll for skanks.”

Which is what we did every afternoon after the alcohol session…we went to all the sessions, whether or not we had the disorder. JD went, of course, to troll for skanks, which loosely translated means, he went to hit on women of fragile emotional standing in order to fill the meaningless void within him with an even more meaningless void, if he could. I attended them because I figured one form of spiritual brokenness is as bad and familiar as the next. It’s not even that these sessions tended toward Twelve Steps or the Higher Power like the alcohol session, or like my therapy for SBD. In fact they had no overt spirituality about them, most of them, preferring instead the more respected religions of science and pseudo-science. But every session had those few who looked to be getting it, which always looked, to me, like a matter of faith. Faith in medicine, maybe. Faith in doctors or counselors. Faith in oneself, the exact

177 opposite of religion. But a matter of faith nevertheless, a belief in something greater than or equal to the sum of our sad human parts. I thought I might see something in one of those sessions that would rouse in me the crucial thing that had died, the thing that required a bit of resurrection if I were to and wanted to live. And so JD trolled and I paid close attention, and in this way we met our dysfunctional brothers and sisters at the center we might not’ve met otherwise, both those who were by then veterans of the place and those who came in their first day knock-kneed and uncertain, wringing their hands, afraid of the other shoe about to drop.

Which is how I met Marie. Her first morning at the Hold On Center—three-and-a-half weeks into my stay—she came into Friday A.M. Schizophrenics, one of the sessions I wasn’t supposed to be in but sat in anyway, eight-thirty sharp, right after biscuits and coffee. But she didn’t look knock-kneed or uncertain, not fretful or hesitant; she didn’t reach an arm across herself the way other first-timers do, holding their opposite elbows for dear life. Rather she came in friendly and quiet, smiling slightly, half-hidden behind a Bettie Page haircut but with bangs, and she made eye contact around the room and nodded whenever someone looked back at her. She took a seat in the half-empty circle of chairs as if she were at a coffee house book club and not a madhouse.

It’d break your heart, if you were me or otherwise.

JD was still half-asleep and slumped in the chair beside me. When he finally woke up about halfway through the session—he was on rock star time, mornings weren’t good for him—he elbowed my ribs.

“Hubba Hubba,” he mouthed. He had to mouth it and be quiet, because around the room people were sipping black coffee and talking about schizophrenia.

He was right on, for the wrong reason. She was beautiful, but I thought it had to do with the fact that she looked like she didn’t belong here. Of course there were telltale signs of a hard

178 life…the frame of her face still belonged to her childhood but her features revealed late nights and worried mornings, anxious habits, smoke and coffee, stimulants instead of sleep. These probably slip right past the average person, but they are signs mostly to people like me, who first came to recognize them and their meaning from staring in the mirror. She had peculiar frown marks, upturned like cartoon tears, from where she’d forced a smile through them. Her forehead had become lined, prematurely, wrinkles deep as question marks. I don’t mean to say these were defects. In fact these reinforced the girl beneath. In her twenties, I guessed, her early twenties, the time of life when her peers most embraced their adolescence and apologized for it the least.

There remained some of that same fire to her, though it smoldered, covered by ash. I know it sounds like I fell in love with her, the way I’m saying all this. But in a place like this no one falls in love with anyone. It wouldn’t be fair. Nevertheless, if not for these small signs and for the powder-white paper clothes, Marie might’ve been a woman you met on the street and fell immediately in love with.

She didn’t look like the kind of girl who might suffer from schizophrenia. Not at all.

Nor did she look like the kind of girl who talks to UFOs.

If JD had been on his game, he would’ve made a straight line to her when the hour was up. But

JD at that particular moment had given up women. A few days before he’d gotten involved with

Shelby, a heavyset nurse’s assistant and part-time Goth who owned a record collection. She’d led him into an examination room to take his vitals and then realized who he was. Shelby then proceeded to gush and fawn over him for a while, two things JD always found irresistible. She

179 said she had his band’s first two albums and that they’d really meant something to her at a certain point in her life, a few years back. She named off some of the tracks and told him what she liked about them. She said she admired his integrity as a lyric poet. He told me he banged her hard on the cold tile floor and that afterwards she’d offered to get him some contraband if he wanted…street legal, of course. He’d gotten a square bottle of whiskey from her and then kissed her on the mouth, slapped her ass, said thanks. But it didn’t take long after the exchange before she’d started knocking on our door looking for him, leaving him awkward post-it notes of her hours for the week and her phone number. JD responded to her advances by cowering in our room with the lights off and the radio down, sipping his square-bottled whiskey, sneaking to sessions like a tiptoeing private eye from a TV show, sticking close to the walls, and when he saw her coming down the hallway he’d duck into the nearest unlocked room or behind a fichus.

This went on five straight days. So he’d decided to lay low with the ladies until the whole Shelby thing blew over. A place like this is too small to pull a double dip, especially with an employee, who had access to your charts and your dosages. He said the last thing he needed right now was a scene, though if you observed his behavior on a day-to-day basis you’d think it was the first thing. So JD was not on his game, and as a result I didn’t speak to Marie until a couple of days had passed, despite the frequency with which I saw her. Because I can’t go right up to anyone if

I’m not drunk. And I am not JD.

But I found myself thinking and wondering about her; I even began believing I might discover something about her by piecing together where I’d seen her, the sessions she’d attended.

The schizophrenics group, of course. The Friday afternoon Bipolar Buddies, one of my own, and then later that first night at the discussion group for dissociative identity disorder, which changed its name every week or so. I saw her twice on Saturday, the noon-sharp Bag Lunch of

180 Self-Respect and later in the popular Saturday night Metaphysics 101, a class that sometimes delved into heady and difficult issues but mostly just relaxed, per the instruction of our stoned ponytail of a teacher; the lights were always dimmed, the music a low rumble of meditation, the room always sick-sweet with incense. You didn’t have to subscribe to a dogma or read Sanskrit to come away from the class feeling calm and fine. Hence its appeal. But what this information added up to—as if these simple things could add up to anything about a person—I didn’t know.

It’s a common misconception, that you can know something just by what you see.

It was so common, I learned, that Marie had been wondering the same about me.

“You’re in my classes,” she said.

I was not at that particular moment in her classes but rather standing in the cafeteria line waiting for a Sloppy Joe. In fact there were no classes on Sundays. It was designated a day of recreation, a day of reflection, a day of rest. I hated them.

I turned around to see whose finger was poking me in the ribs, and there she was.

“Oh yeah,” I said. “Hey.” It was the best I could do, given the short notice.

“You’re in my classes,” she repeated.

“Yeah, I am,” I said. “A few of them. Yeah.”

“Hold still,” the lunch lady said. I’d been holding my tray up for a manwiching while looking back to talk, and given that everything from the floors to the ceiling to your paper booties to your scratchy paper clothes was white, Sloppy Joe day required some attention. “Stop squiggling, dammit!”

I held my tray up to her. She slopped some on.

“I’ve got a seat over there,” she said, pointing over there. “Would you like to come sit with me?”

181 “Sure,” I said. I smiled and nodded at the same time. “I’m Baker.”

“I’m Marie,” Marie said.

“Yes,” I said. “I know.”

Her parents had paid for her to be kidnapped and shipped to the Hold On Center on the night before night before last. It was right before midnight when two hairy gorillas in muscle shirts broke through the pine door of the apartment where she’d been staying—it was “this guy’s” apartment, not her boyfriend, she made a point of saying here, though the import of the information, to protect her chastity, or to imply she did have a boyfriend though this gentleman wasn’t him, or just FMI, I couldn’t be sure—and then a hooding and a plane ride later she was here. It was her fifth committal in a year and a half, though the places she’d been before were institutions, meaning she’d been institutionalized, or hospitals, meaning she’d been hospitalized.

She’d never been “centered” before, she said.

“It’s a nice place, I guess,” she said. “I’ve been to places like this, but never places like this.

I didn’t know my parents had this much money. I guess the other places they sent me were super savers.” She picked at her lunch, which she called a meatless Sloppy Joe. It was a bun. “I thought those other places were the last resort. I’ve been to plenty of places that looked like last resorts, to me anyway. Real end of the road type stuff. Barbed wire and, you know, straps on the beds. Like in the movies. But this place, this is really a last resort. The other places were bargain basement. You don’t put someone up for these bucks unless you’re praying it’ll take.”

“Why do they have you committed?” I asked. I realized this was a roundabout way of asking

182 what I wanted to. “What’s your Existential Diagnosis?”

“Ha,” she said. “You’re hitting on me.”

“No I’m not,” I said. Or I lied. I had no idea.

“I guess mine’s the same as yours, right?” She tore off a bit of bread and placed it on her tongue. “I mean, we’re in the same classes together.”

Yes. Ahem.

“I have Southern Baptist Disorder,” I said. Her eyes got big but her eyebrows scrunched. I’d seen the look before. “I’m torn between thinking there’s not a God, not knowing there’s a God, and being scared to death of Him,” I explained. “And there’s a lot of other stuff.”

“Yikes,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said.

“That must take up a lot of energy.” She was asking.

“My God,” I said. I rolled my eyes, tried to roll my whole face. “My God.”

“So you’re religious?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Yes. No.”

“I’ve known some Southern Baptists,” she said. She pointed a black-finernailed finger for emphasis. “Those people are crazy.”

At mention of the word, a few oversensitive heads craned our direction.

“Someone else,” I said. I held up my hands defensively and pushed them back. “False alarm.”

“So you’re not schizophrenic?” she asked.

“Um, no,” I said. “I just attend the session. I attend all the sessions, actually. All of them I can.”

183 “So then you’re a masochist,” she said. Her eyebrows stretched out. “Into self-flagellation.”

“No, no,” I said. “Just Southern Baptist Disorder.”

“That’s okay,” she said, and then she leaned in close to whisper: “I’m not schizophrenic, either. They’ll figure that out soon enough.”

“What are you, then? You never answered me.”

She straightened her posture and raised her voice back to normal.

“I’m horny as a goat,” she said. Again a few heads, but for different reasons. “And I love

Star Trek.”

“Wow,” I said. I didn’t elaborate.

“I dress up and go to the conventions. I have this Klingon outfit that I wear. It’s this black leather bustiere covered in spikes and straps and it really pushes my tits out.” I peeked down quick at her small boobs. “I have a long black cape and I wear fishnets and I carry this traditional Klingon bladed weapon, the ghonDoq.”

“Wow,” I said again.

“But it’s all for fun,” she said. “It’s just a hobby. A hobby I love. I have a website where I model this stuff in erotic poses.”

“Wow.”

“My parents hate it. They think it shows some kind of dissociative identity disorder. And there’s the horniness, like I said—I just wear my sex on my sleeve. But I don’t sleep around.

I’m not promiscuous, just horny. It’s not a self-esteem issue. I’m not looking for validation.

What’s more natural than sex, being sexual? Oh I forgot, Southern Baptist. Never mind.”

“That’s all?” I asked. “That’s all they committed you for?”

“Well,” she said. “I’ve also had what you might call paranormal experiences. I guess these

184 are all related. The doctors say it’s all related. They say I have Unreality Disorder.”

“Oh,”

“And I speak to UFOs,” she explained.

“Oh,” I said.

She picked at her bun again and pushed it around her plate. I decided to pick at mine.

“I’ve been communicating with them for a while now. I’ve been hearing them for a while longer, but finally they began talking back. It’s fantastic. I think my parents think I’m going to join a cult, that I’m going to hurt myself.” She paused. “That guy, Robert. That guy I was staying with. He’s a member of a group of likeminded people.”

“Were you going to hurt yourself?” I asked.

“They’re the kindest people in the world,” she said in a voice that sounded like she’d answered the question before. “They’re open-minded and they’re tolerant and they’re just as gentle as snow. They wouldn’t hurt anybody anywhere, themselves included. We’d just get together and we’d talk and laugh and then we’d summon the UFOs. You know. Try to communicate. And then we’d eat bean dip. Watch Trek reruns. I hadn’t been attending that long. I guess I can’t go back. Those goons broke Robert’s door.”

“They’re a cult?” I asked.

“They’re just harmless geeks,” she said. She shrugged. “That’s it.”

I was still trying to fit all this together. “Were there orgies?”

Marie smiled at me. “Baker,” she said. “You beast.”

185 Her parents had found her online blog and her open display of erotic Klingon photography. Both of these had been up for a few years by the time they were discovered, but it took them that long to realize you could use the computer to search for information on people you know. Their first reaction was horror at the fact their daughter’s buttocks had been bared to the world. Their baby girl. And those buttocks had been ripe for the picking for anyone to see, anyone who did the right snooping. Their saving grace might be that no one they knew could’ve recognize her, because of the ridged Klingon headgear.

And then they read her blog.

“Of course they freaked,” she said. “Of course.”

On her blog she chronicled her experiences one by one, in the loving precision of a poet: her first at the age twenty-one, a miraculous, world-changing occurrence while camping near Boone,

North Carolina, an encounter of the First Kind, meaning she saw something. Then a second six months later, this time while driving alone at night around the winding Blue Ridge

Parkway…she’d been driving in the pitch-dark, zoned on music, and her first notice of something odd was the fact that her headlights were catching pairs of eyes in the woods to either side of the road. Hundreds or more pairs. All of them glinted in the headlights. Animals stood lined up in the woods watching the road. Then the engine died. Her second UFO flooded the road with white light, hovered so close to the hood of her car it made her fillings hurt. In fact she had one replaced. A physical remembrance. Her second UFO and she was already on the

Second Kind.

“But that’s not the norm, you know,” she said. “I didn’t just keep notching my bedpost on close encounters. It took me three years before I met one of them face to face. That’s the third, of course. The Third Kind. This was at a hotel in Chicago.”

186 “Oh?” I tried to sound comfortable.

“In the bar, goofball. The bar. He walked up to me and said hello in his language and I knew right away he was something other than human.”

“What did it sound like?” I asked. “His language?”

“Like a wrench dragging wind chimes,” she said. She seemed proud of herself. “That’s from my blog.”

“And how did you know he wasn’t human? Besides the wrench?” By this point I was trying to keep up. I hadn’t meant to sound condescending. I had no reason to be. To be condescending you have to know something the other person doesn’t.

But even if she thought I was talking down she kept on. She thought about it and shook her head half-sideways, not like no but like remembering a lover you’d forgotten. “I guess I don’t know. I guess I just knew. He was short. He looked happy. He was bald.”

“Shit,” I said.

“Right,” she said. “Hope for dumpy, bald, happy guys everywhere. Find the crazy girl in the bar. But he didn’t hit on me, Baker. He didn’t travel all that way for that. I’m sure he could’ve found someone to hit on between here and there. Wherever there is. Hell, wherever here is. He just came in and had a ginger ale and said hello and told me everything would be fine. He said everything was going to be fine.”

Such cosmic optimism stirred my tar pit of a heart. “Everything?” I asked. “Everything as in human history? The fate of the world? Everything is going to be fine?

“That’s what he said.”

“He didn’t get more specific?”

“No, not specific,” she said. “He didn’t say too much. In fact he didn’t say too much at all.

187 All he said was ‘everything.’” She caught herself and laughed a great high laugh. A trapped mouse-squeal of a laugh. “Listen to that! All he said was everything. I sound like a song lyric.”

“I’ll have to remember that,” I said.

“And after that—after I met my favorite Martian—all these little communication centers just came on in me. It was a great, strange feeling. It’s still just the best. This is Fifth Kind. It makes me want to cry.”

“What does it feel like?” I asked. Because I actually wanted to know. I’d asked a similar question in one of the spirituality sessions of our special speaker for the day, this man who was a professional pray-er. He came into places like ours—places bone dry of hope—and taught people how to pray. It opens you up to contact with the Beyond, the Almighty, so on. But I kept asking the wrong questions of him. I kept asking three or four at a time, actually, monopolizing our classwork. I asked where did you feel it? In what part of the brain? Is it right on top? Right on top in the back? Right on top in the front? In the baby leftover soft spot? Because I’d felt something there, once or twice before. Is it right up front where a hangover sits? Is it up by the eyes, toward the sinuses? How do you know you’re doing it right? Is it a pinch, a burn? Is there a way to measure it, make sure you’re doing it right? Finally he said, It’s not in the brain, dumbass.

Marie tried to be more helpful. “I can’t explain it,” she said.

“Try me,” I said. “I understood wrench on windchimes.”

“It feels very ancient and very new,” she tried. “It feels like you’re lighting up, switching on like a computer, and then it also feels like someone filling you up with air, like one of those old- timey bellows, those accordion-ribbed things you use to stoke a fire. You feel like you’re expanding and you feel like you’re getting small. You rise up in the air and you fall right down

188 through your feet.”

I was beside myself. It sounded, at the moment, like something I’d kill for.

“And your parents want to commit you for that?” I asked.

“My parents want to commit me,” she tapped a black-polished finger on her temple, “for this.”

But the more I came to know of her over the course of our conversations—and this was not just one long conversation, mind you, but many of them over full mornings and afternoons, stretching into evenings and lights-out, for the first few days I’d known her and then a few more days and then for the rest of my stay, briefly interrupted here and there by the therapies I’d paid for and was still doing my best to use—the more I came to know of her, the more I realized my first reaction to her had been right: She didn’t belong here. This was a place for a person who’d either lost something or was looking for something they’d lost or never had. Marie, on the other hand, had been checked in precisely because she’d found something. Her parents had mistaken her near-religious epiphany for emotional and mental unraveling—I admit, these are often hard to tell apart—and had decided the best cure for their daughter’s disease was to remove the cure she’d discovered on her own. No, not simply on her own; she’d been Chosen. How many of us spend our entire lives looking toward the heavens for answers? Marie’s answers had floated down from the heavens and found her.

Of course I could understand how her parents might have been alarmed by some of the things

Marie believed in, or claimed to believe in, or believed she had the power to do or might some

189 day, including and likely not limited to teleportation, telekinesis, remote viewing, time travel, fruitarianism, mesmerism, Atlantis, El Chupacabra, astral projection, the Illuminati, and folie simultanée. And the fact that she revealed to me that it wasn’t just steamy photos and dress up but that she considered herself part of the Klingon Empire. Parmaq, she said. Her Klingon name. Love.

Marie might have handled the whole thing differently. She might’ve revealed her beliefs to her parents long before; she could have presented herself to her parents, her real self, saying,

Here I am, I’m your daughter, these are my beliefs, rather than having them stumble upon them on a paranormal blog site, leaving them scrambling to come to terms. Her parents need not have accepted these beliefs as their own in order to accept or understand Marie. I’m not sure I believed them all. I’m not even sure I understand what all of them mean.

But none of this negates the fact that Marie came into this place saved already. Saved and whole and in a manner holy, jpegs of her bare butt notwithstanding. That she might be irradiated of a special fire, one from somewhere, admittedly, from outer space, that she might, in turn, save others who might be desperate and desolate and crying out for exactly something safe and saved, whole, and in a manner holy.

My therapist stopped her scribbling and stared me in the face.

“Baker,” she said.

That she might offer a measure of hope to the…

“Baker,” my therapist repeated. “What are you talking about?”

“What?” I asked.

I hadn’t realized that I’d been speaking.

“I asked you how you were feeling, like five minutes ago,” she said. “You know, How’s it

190 going?” My therapist creased her thick Unitarian eyebrow. “What are you talking about?”

I retraced my steps.

“I was thinking about Marie,” I said. “I was thinking about everything she’s had to go through.”

“That’s very generous of you,” my therapist replied. “For a moment there it sounded like you were talking about you.”

“I’m not sure I follow,” I said.

“You can’t just replace God with a relationship, Baker,” she said. “You can’t make a girl you’ve met in a—well, let’s say it—in a psychiatric facility some kind of salvation or escape or release. You can’t expect to find yourself simply by putting yourself into the bosoms of another.”

“It’s not like that,” I said.

“It’s not like that meaning, that’s not what you’re trying to do here? Or it’s not like that meaning, this one is different?”

Fucking therapists.

“But this one happens to be different,” I said. “Don’t you see? It’s precisely because I met her in a get-your-sanity facility that makes it different. We share the same problems. We’ve shared some of the same experiences.” I thought for a moment more. “And she’s mildly crazy,”

I offered.

“You’ve done this before,” my therapist warned. “And it’s always turned out to be the wrong decision.”

“When have I done this before?” I huffed.

She held up a file folder a phone directory thick. “I can read you some names.”

191 “But just be a romantic for a minute and not a therapist,” I said. “What if this one is, through some miracle…” I stopped. “By some Divine…” I stopped.

“All of these past relationships, you’ve described in two ways, starting one way and ending the other.” She didn’t even look down at her papers. “First you meet them and you fall in love and you quote fall down on your knees before them. And then once you’re together and when you realize your problems haven’t gone away, you are quote damned and scared as Hell.”

“You’re not even quoting,” I said. “You’re paraphrasing.”

“Women are not God, Baker,” my therapist said. “And relationships are not salvation. The problem is yours and yours alone and you’ll have to fix it, meaning actually come to terms, if you ever want anything in your life to function properly. And that doesn’t mean finding something to take the place of that conception of God that’s wrong to begin with. You don’t need something to worship, and you don’t need something to fear. You need something to believe.”

“Wow, you’re completely off base,” I said.

“Well what do I know?” she asked. She rubbed her forehead, hard.

“Don’t let that quack get you down,” JD said back in the room. He sipped the last of his whiskey. The place reeked of stale booze. Sooner or later he’d have to leave and bang another nurse if he wanted to keep numb. “You got something really beautiful in your life,” he said.

“It’s really spiritual.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“So when am I going to meet this little girlfriend of yours, anyway?” he asked.

I’d been purposely avoiding bringing Marie back to the room for just this reason.

“Oh, probably soon, I’d guess.”

192 “I bet she’s a peach.”

“Yes,” I said. “She is.”

And yes, indeed, she was.

But my therapist, of course, was right. I believed myself in love with Marie—maybe I did— though we were not in love in any conventional or even unconventional sense, were not a couple, had never discussed being as much. I enjoyed spending time with her, and I felt a deep connection, deep admiration, not a small measure of sympathy—the kind I rarely reserve for myself—for her troubles. But for all this I still found myself in the same dilemma. When I sat in on the Survivors of Recent Traumas meetings—and the people in this session had always seen the worst of the worst—I typically found my fear, rage, disgust, everything but my faith. Marie happened to be with me one session when a woman stood up and declared that she’d come to this place because God had taken her husband of slow cancer, her daughter of hospital-contracted

HIV, her home of a hurricane, her brother of a drug overdose, and her sanity of worry. “God’s taken all these things from me,” she said. “But I have been blessed with this place and you people, and I believe I’m now willing to go out in the world again and to praise Him.” And I stood up and said what are you talking about? What do you mean? Praise whom? I couldn’t get it past my head and thus couldn’t keep it from coming out of my mouth, even though this woman’s misery was that much more than mine, and though it was her time on the floor to say what she wished, not mine to feel insult for her.

I cared for Marie immensely—and I still think about her now—but even being with her, I missed the important part of myself that I’d been missing, or had never really known, when I checked in. And my time at the Hold On Center was just about up. So I made up my mind just to try to enjoy the stay I had left. I didn’t have to undo thirty-plus years in six weeks, after all,

193 though I admit I’d wanted to. I’d perhaps bettered myself in some respects—I’d never conquered Step Two, admittedly, but I told anyone who wanted to know I was an alcoholic, I had

Step One whupped—but now I only had a little time left, and I didn’t want to waste it on God. I know my existential literature.

Thus Marie and I passed my final days in relative tranquility and guiltlessness. We spent time outside in the courtyard, in the perfect April weather, watching the line of deep-green trees around the institute and behind it further up to the top of the mountains. April was beautiful wherever we were. And then my time was up. Marie and I saw a movie in the lobby, then walked slow back to my room, and then said our good-byes. I asked if I could look her up when we were out, and she said sure, though once she started scribbling her information she didn’t know where to put.

“This is my parents’ number,” she said. “But God knows if I’ll end up back somewhere like this or when. I might even run away and crash on someone’s couch, until I get kidnapped again.”

“That’s okay,” I said.

“No, give me yours.”

I wrote down my home address and my phone number. I should have given her my email address, or found out the name of her blog. I’ve tried looking for it a few times, but though I must have heard it, I can’t even remember Marie’s last name. It’s up to her to contact me, though I’ve been out eight months now and I’ve heard nothing. So she’s likely one more of those people who you meet in your life, share the moment with, and then that person slips away to the mystery they’d been before. Maybe it’s just as well. But I still hope she’ll call.

We hugged good night and goodbye. I thought about trying to kiss her, but I didn’t want to

194 spoil everything at the last moment, as I sometimes have the ability to do. So we let that hug be it, she eased out of it after a minute, and then she walked away toward her room.

I packed my things up and said so long to JD.

“Oh, I’ll be seeing you again,” he said. “We’re buds.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Lay off the heavy stuff, JD.”

He hugged me a smelly rock star hug.

“Be quiet on your way out tomorrow morning,” he said. “I don’t like long good-byes.”

With that, I finished my packing, got under the covers, and waited for sleep.

But she came back for me.

I woke in the total darkness of the room with Marie lying on my chest. She had one small, cold hand over my mouth, the way you wake someone up in the movies, the other pointer- fingered over her lips in a shush.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” she said. “It’s your last night.”

We snuck down the hallway quiet as kids breaking curfew. We tiptoed toward the door to the courtyard outside.

“It’s not locked,” she whispered. “I rigged it.”

She turned the knob slowly, and the door barely made a click.

Outside the night was perfect and clear. I looked straight up to the sky and saw glittered stars spilled as perfect and random as abstract paint.

“Wow,” I breathed.

195 “You ain’t seen nothing,” she whispered.

I followed the glow of her paper gown through the courtyard to the back wall. It was covered in ivy and thick twined branches.

“How do you feel about climbing?” she asked.

“I feel great,” I said, telling the truth.

We hopped the wall and came down on the other side free. Behind the center stretched pitch- black mountain and forest. At the treeline the stars resumed. It was disorienting at first, as if the world had been turned upside down.

“Follow my gown,” Marie said.

She led us into the woods along a trail she had no business seeing in the dark. When we were far enough advanced she raised her whisper up.

“I’ve been out here a few times,” she said. “My God what a view.”

“It’s beautiful,” I said.

“No, I mean the view where we’re going,” she said. “It’s not far. Oh, we’ll have to scale the building to get back in. You okay with that?”

“I’m leaving,” I said. “I can’t get expelled.”

She led us further up a steeper part of trail, through the darkness, until the darkness opened up at a turn to a bald face of rock overlooking everything. The rock, at least, showed some light.

We were in no danger of falling. In fact it felt—it being the night, the sky, the hills and treelines swaying below us and above us on all sides—as comfortable and safe as the womb.

“Here,” she said, and she reached under her paper gown. She brought out a champagne- shaped bottle.

“I’m an alcoholic,” I said. “I admit that I’m powerless against alcohol.”

196 For some reason we kept our voices to a low whisper even though we were far away. It felt right.

“It’s sparkling grape juice,” she said. “It’s apropos.”

“Where’d you get sparkling grape juice?”

“From the kitchen, dummy,” she said. “They don’t sell it in the machines.”

She screwed off the top and took a pull. She handed it off to me.

“We might be camping somewhere” she said, “and not fugitives from mental health.”

“It’s freedom,” I agreed.

For a while we just sat there, looking out over God’s country, the sea of moving treetops, the shapes of hills where they’d been cut out by rivers before time. For a while this was exactly the conversation we needed. It was all we needed. When we spoke up again we asked general questions of each other and each other’s lives—we discussed my teaching, but only briefly, as it seemed to be not relevant to anything. She asked how far a drive Savannah would be to

Asheville, and she told me I should come up. But then we both remembered, we’d already covered this. She didn’t know where she’d be when she got out, or in what state. Neither did I.

This talk threatened to bring up important matters, and we let it drop.

We polished off our bottle, but by then we’d moved close enough to one another to share, and for the warmth. She put her small hand in mine, and I was grateful. We held hands instead of conversation for a while, which felt right. Then it was probably late, I had an early morning, and we both had a wall to climb. I stood up and dusted myself off.

“Wait,” she said, and she stood up.

I braced myself for a kiss that didn’t come. My chest squeezed me tight.

She smiled and nodded to herself, to someone. “They want to meet you.”

197 I didn’t know what to say. So I said okay.

She smiled and nodded again—a kind of let’s do this—and then she assumed a perfect stance.

She spread her arms out at sharp, even protractor angles. She closed her eyes, lifted her head, sent out the signal.

I should say now, I did not see a UFO that night. But I watched her for a while, in her perfect still. I watched her send out her signal, a happy supplicant, and I knew in my heart immediately it was going home.

I did not see a UFO. But after a few more minutes the wind began to rumble and shift and stir, roll suddenly, re-crest, and break like waves. It was the kind of sudden wind you only appreciate standing in a forest. It was the kind of wind that draws out a forest’s best and wettest sound. The arms of trees began first to bow toward us, then to flex, turn, a ritual dance. The wind picked up dirt specks that began hitting my arms and my face. I kept my eyes on Marie, who the whole time stood in this same position, arms out, with her eyes closed, but with each new burst of wind the thin smile on her face began to spread. Her hair whipped around her with a life of its own. The forest around us sounded like a flood.

I did not see a UFO. But at a certain point I realized that of everything around us, everything

I saw and heard and felt, Marie was in control. I knew with perfect certainty that something out there in the night sky—which I still had not looked up at—had heard the call and had responded.

And this thing I saw and felt and heard, this was an overheard form of communication. This was a form of contact. Marie’s smile had opened up to beautiful, crooked teeth. And I knew at that moment that if I looked up in the stars I would see the thin dot as it crept from millions of miles, an atom of light moving among all the rest of those set and stationary stars, becoming slowly bigger and brighter and no longer a dot but something with shape, cut and imperfect on its edges

198 like a rough jewel.

I did not see a UFO. But I knew it was there, waiting over us, because I felt its presence, like you feel the presence of a figure in the dark. I felt it as sure as I felt Marie’s presence, felt its movement closer to us bending the wind and the sound and the boughs of trees, and here I was just a standby, a witness. I felt my heart drop and drift toward it. Everything was pitch-dark.

But I knew if I looked up toward heaven there would be cold-white columns beaming down on the bald rock where we stood, bathing everything in blindness and in pure snow, illuminated.

199 The Beginning of Thought Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and the Aesthetics of the Protest Novel

In his 1963 essay “Black Boys and Native Sons,” Irving Howe, left-leaning literary critic and

one-time New York Intellectual, defends the idea of the “protest” novel, the work of literature

that intends to expose social ills and encourage reform. Specifically, Howe champions Richard

Wright’s 1940 novel Native Son, saying that, the day the novel appeared,

American culture was changed forever. No matter how much qualifying the book might

later need, it made impossible a repetition of the old lies. In all its crudeness, melodrama,

and claustrophobia of vision, Richard Wright's novel brought out into the open, as no one

ever had before, the hatred, fear, and violence that have crippled and may yet destroy our

culture. (par. 6)

Howe goes on to praise the novel for its militancy, for its “black wrath of retribution” which

exhibits the rage of the black man in a narrative reminiscent of the stark, uncompromising social

novels of Steinbeck, Sinclair, and Dreiser. Interestingly, though, much of Howe’s argument is devoted not to trumpeting the virtues of Wright’s novel but to dismissing the works of two of

Wright’s literary successors, James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, writers who, Howe claims, if they have moved “beyond Wright's harsh naturalism and toward more supple modes of fiction,” have done so only because “Wright had been there first, courageous enough to release the full weight of his anger” (par. 7). Howe argues that Baldwin and Ellison, and writers of their generation, fail in that they reject struggle and confrontation, reject the role of the writer as spokesman for the Negro cause in America, the implication being that Wright understands the realities of what it means to be a Negro in America and that Baldwin and Ellison, somehow, do not.

While the literary feud between Baldwin and Wright had been going on since the 1949

200 publication of Baldwin’s polemic “Everybody’s Protest Novel” in which Baldwin dismisses the form of protest fiction as dishonest, simplistic, and, ultimately, a “rejection of life” and names both Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Native Son as examples—an act which was characterized by many as a betrayal of Wright, given that Wright had been instrumental in helping Baldwin’s career—it seems clear that Ellison had no desire to enter this feud before being introduced into it by Howe.

Indeed, Ellison had reviewed Native Son for the magazine New Masses, and the review had been

favorable. Nevertheless, Ellison publicly responded to Howe in “The World and the Jug,”

saying that in his view the deficiencies of the political novel rarely involve politics but rather

“the simple failure of craft, bad writing; the desire to have protest perform the difficult tasks of art” (137), recalling Baldwin’s criticisms of craft in the political novel, wherein complication is reduced to dimensionlessness for the sake of sentiment or propaganda or both.

It is my intention in this essay to examine the novels in question, Wright’s Native Son and

Ellison’s Invisible Man, in order to illustrate the difference between protest literature, the work of social criticism that intends to be art, and the novel, the work of art which is intrinsically social. Specifically, I will argue that the aims of protest literature are in conflict with the aesthetic aims of the novelist, and that Ellison’s Invisible Man succeeds as political protest due not to the author’s political objectives but rather his artistic ones.

Politics vs. Poetics

In his 1937 manifesto “A Blueprint for Negro Writing,” Richard Wright argues that Negro literature, rather than catering to an elite and marginal black bourgeoisie—meaning, primarily to

201 an educated, literary audience—should be a literature of the masses, a literature which both

reflects and shapes Negro consciousness and daily living. Wright even goes so far as to charge

the Negro writer with responsibilities left by the Negro church, whose “moral authority” was on

the decline. “[The Negro writer] is being called upon to do no less,” Wright proclaims, “than

create values by which his race is to struggle, love, and die” (200).

The social and moral obligation Wright claims as the province of the artist is, to some extent,

a reaction to the aesthetic practices and philosophies of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, to

those “prim and decorous ambassadors who went a-begging to white America” and who were received by the white population as “though they were French poodles who do clever tricks”

(194-5). One of those principal ambassadors was Alain Locke, the Harvard-educated critic and philosopher who helped bring national and international attention to the Harlem Renaissance in his 1926 anthology of black writing entitled The New Negro. In his foreword to that book,

Locke promotes an aesthetic in line with the Duboisian idea of a “talented tenth,” an elite segment of articulate, artistic Negroes speaking for the remaining (implied: inarticulate) ninety- percent of the population. Locke claims the purpose of The New Negro is to “let the Negro speak for himself,” so long as he is culturally eloquent (xxv).

For Wright, the notion that black literature should aim for an audience of a “talented tenth” who, as David Levering Lewis says in his study When Harlem Was In Vogue, “would not have

filled a Liberty Hall quorum…[yet] were to lead ten million Afro-Americans into an era of

opportunity and justice” was at best delusional, at worst irresponsible. But it is interesting to

note that, while this brand of elitism led Wright to produce his manifesto of Negro writing and its

social responsibility to the masses, Wright seems to trumpet the same philosophy of literature

and its function: namely, that literature, written necessarily by the few, is not only capable of

202 leading social change but that doing so is its foremost purpose. Furthermore, Wright seems to say that, in conveying the social message to the masses, all else in literature is secondary— perhaps even, to a point, expendable—including aspects of the aesthetic:

Negro writers should seek through the medium of their craft to play as meaningful a role

in the affairs of men as do other professionals. But if their writing is demanded to

perform the social office of other professions, then the autonomy of craft is lost and

writing detrimentally fused with other interests…If the sensory vehicle of imaginative

writing is required to carry too great a load of didactic material, the artistic sense is

submerged. (203)

What seems in this passage like a warning to the writer to pay careful attention to craft might be better interpreted as a statement of Wright’s beliefs in the burden of literature: Wright has already argued that the function of Negro artist is to take up didacticism, to “create values,” where social institutions such as the church have failed. Thus a more straightforward restatement might be: If the sensory vehicle of imaginative writing is required to carry too great a load of didactic material, which it well may, the artistic sense must necessarily become submerged.

By contrast Ellison, in an interview which appears in Shadow and Act as “The Art of Fiction,” claims that, while most social realist fiction of the thirties sought primarily to serve as a moral compass, to expose social injustice, “I wasn’t, and am not, primarily concerned with injustice, but with art.” But while Ellison makes clear in this statement that his chief concern as a writer is craft, he quickly follows with another that recalls James Baldwin’s differentiation that all literature might be protest, but not all protest is literature:

I recognize no dichotomy between art and protest. Dostoyevsky’s Notes from

203 Underground is, among other things, a protest against the limitations of nineteenth-

century rationalism; Don Quixote, Man’s Fate, Oedipus Rex, The Trial—all these

embody protest, even against the limitation of human life itself. If social protest is

antithetical to art, what, then, shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain? One hears a

lot of complaints about the so-called “protest novel,” especially when written by

Negroes; but it seems to me that the critics could more accurately complain about their

lack of craftsmanship and their provincialism. (169) [Emphasis mine.]

Thus marks the distinction between Wright’s approach toward the political and the poetic—the two being not only distinguishable but, when faced with the decision, inequitable, preferring the political—and Ellison’s, in which the “moral effort to see and recognize the truth of the self and of the world, and the artistic effort to say the truth are regarded as aspects of the same process”

(Warren 21). Put another way, and again recalling Baldwin, for Ellison literature is intrinsically political, intrinsically social, but the political, without consideration of craft, is not intrinsically literature.

In his essay “On Initiation Rites and Power,” delivered as a speech at West Point in 1974,

Ellison makes several remarks that further define and differentiate his approach to the social aims and abilities of fiction against Wright’s. “If literature has any general function within

[society] and throughout the world,” Ellison says,

it must serve at its best as a study in comparative humanity…I don’t think that it’s a

function of writing to tell the reader what it feels like to be a Negro. I think the function

of literature, all literature that’s worthy of the name, is to remind us of our common

humanity and the cost of that humanity. (56)

Ellison’s view of the function of literature is that it necessarily strives to illuminate a human

204 truth, to which Negro social protest contributes but which it does not, in and of itself,

encapsulate.

Perhaps it is best to look at these philosophies in action in the novels themselves, to see the

effect these differing views on the novel and its social import have on the work.

Richard Wright’s Literary Offenses

In Native Son Bigger is depicted as an automaton, driven equally by his hatred for and fear of

white society. That Bigger is constantly at the mercy of forces beyond his control, that he is ever

acted-upon and never fully acting, is, to a large degree, Wright’s point. But while such a

powerless portrayal may well make a political statement, it rarely—as even the critics who

defend the book are keenly aware—makes for a compelling, complete character. Bigger’s

journey toward self-actualization is in all ways hindered by the ruling society—he is a character,

in short, in search of characteristics. The common defense in Wright scholarship is: 1) if Bigger

lacks definition, it is because definition is made impossible not by the novelist but by society,

both the one depicted in the novel and the society external to it, and 2) because Bigger is denied

agency, it is only “through violence that Bigger Thomas [can] attain a sense of accomplishment”

(Schraufnagel 28). But such a defense does not completely address Baldwin’s criticism, which

suggests that Bigger’s homicides do little to change him, that, even in such expression, he

remains a man without means.

Consider Bigger’s actions and reactions in the scene where he—quite accidentally—kills

Mary Dalton. Carrying her home, sneaking her into bed due to her drunkenness, Bigger is

205 startled by the blind Mrs. Dalton, who appears at Mary’s doorway and calls out to her. Realizing the implications of a black man being found in a white girl’s bedroom, particularly a white girl made defenseless by booze, Bigger panics. What follows is an unsubtle scene in which Bigger is compelled to suffocate Mary out of fear of the form of Mrs. Dalton, who becomes an otherworldly—and obviously metaphorical—presence in the darkness:

He turned and a hysterical terror seized him, as though he were falling from a great

height in a dream. A white blur was standing by the door, silent, ghostlike. It filled his

eyes and gripped his body. It was Mrs. Dalton. He wanted to knock her out of the way

and bolt from the room.

“Mary!” she spoke softly, questioningly.

Bigger held his breath. Mary mumbled again; he bent over her, his fists clenched on

fear. He knew that Mrs. Dalton could not see him; but he knew that if Mary spoke she

would come to the side of the bed and discover him, touch him. He waited tensely,

afraid to move for fear of bumping into something in the dark and betraying his

presence…

He felt Mary trying to rise and quickly he pushed her head back to the pillow…

Mary mumbled and tried to rise again. Frantically he caught a corner of the pillow and

brought it to her lips. He had to stop her from mumbling, or he would be caught. Mrs.

Dalton was moving slowly toward him and he grew tight and full, as though about to

explode. Mary’s fingernails tore at his hands and he caught the pillow and covered her

entire face with it, firmly….Again Mary’s body heaved and he held the pillow in a grip

that took all of his strength. For a long time he felt the sharp pain of her fingernails biting

into his wrists. The white blur was still…

206 He clenched his teeth and held his breath, intimidated to the core by the awesome

white blur floating toward him. (73-75)

Such is the moment where Bigger first finds “definition.” But it is not a moment of volition, not

a moment where Bigger defines himself but rather where he is defined, again, by the external, by

the situation imposed on him by—Wright will not let us forget in the scene—whiteness. His

actions are mandated, as are his earlier inactions, by fear. Bigger does not respond to the

murder, when he realizes he’s committed one, with euphoria or direction but, rather, with terror:

“He was a murderer, a black murderer. He had killed a white woman. He had to get away from

here. Mrs. Dalton had been in the room while he was there, but she had not known it. But, had

she? No! Yes!” (75). Bigger races through plans to avoid detection, to hide the crime, to

solidify a story and an alibi. Then he forces Mary’s body into a large trunk, carries her down to

the basement, dismembers her body, and feeds it to the Dalton family furnace.

But for the panicked thing it is, what the murder of Mary Dalton is not is an act of defiance or

definition; the murder is not action but reaction. It is only after Bigger hides the evidence of his

crime that he begins to rethink the act—in a sense, to recast it—as one which has provided him a

sense of authority, a sense of autonomy. The following morning, sitting at the breakfast table

with his family in the squalor of their rat-infested apartment, Bigger, almost fantasizing, begins to defend and deform the murder into something far removed from the unpremeditated work it was:

The thought of what he had done, the awful horror of it, the daring associated with such

actions, formed for him for the first time in his fear-ridden life a barrier of protection

between him and a world he feared. He had murdered and had created a new life for

himself. It was something that was all his own, and it was the first time in his life he had

207 anything that others could not take from him. (90)

Despite this declaration, Bigger’s behavior from this point on—from his faking of a ransom demand in order to divert suspicion from himself toward Jan and the Communists to his bludgeoning Bessie to keep his secret safe—seems to indicate that, far from being emboldened by some newfound sense of self, his principal motivation remains fear of discovery, fear of the repercussions he might face from white society.

Wright scholar Donald Gibson sees Bigger achieve definition in his “epiphanic” declamation to Boris Max, delivered as his execution draws near and the novel itself draws to a close:

I didn’t want to kill!…But what I killed for, I am! It must’ve been pretty deep in me to

make me kill! I must have felt it awful hard to murder…What I killed for must’ve been

good!…When a man kills, it’s for something…I didn’t know I was really alive in this

world until I felt things hard enough to kill for them! (358)

For Gibson, this climactic passage indicates in Bigger an understanding and acceptance of himself and the consequences of his actions. But what Gibson fails to recognize is that this statement is, again, a reinterpretation of an impulsive act. In fact, Bigger’s words seem as much justification as anything: what he killed for must’ve been good, must’ve been overpowering, he must’ve felt it hard to murder. This last statement is particularly ironic: in reality Bigger found it quite simple to murder, given the alternative of being discovered in Mary’s room. But the irony is the reader’s, not Bigger’s, and this points to one of the crucial flaws in Wright’s approach both to his protagonist and novel.

In “How Bigger Was Born,” Wright claims that the character is based on several real people the author had known “going back to [his] childhood, and there was not just one Bigger, but many of them” (par. 7). He goes on to explain characteristics of five “Biggers” who influenced

208 the creation of his protagonist: the braggadocio; the hater; the “bad nigger”; the rebel, for whom

rebellion and oppression were psychological and who ended up in an insane asylum; and, finally, the antagonist. But in crafting Bigger, Wright’s intention was not to present the complication and humanity of these men—rendered heartbreakingly in “How Bigger Was Born”—but to make

him instead into a “representative symbol of the Negro's uncertain position in America” (par.

73). In so doing, Wright denies Bigger the opportunity for development for the sake of making a

point: Bigger is unsophisticated, insignificant, incapable of understanding either complication or conflict, and thus the conflict of the novel is external to its pages: it exists in society.

Consequently Bigger is never given the chance—by Wright—to question or confront the society bearing down on him but is merely mastered by it. Even Wright’s titles for the novel’s three sections—Fear, Flight, and Fate—indicate Bigger’s existence is defined solely in relation to externals: fear of, flight from, and finally the inescapable, inevitable future. Bigger is a Native

Son whose birth into an oppressive culture has determined his existence and fate; even his identity as a murderer is something he can make no claim to.

But if Bigger remains flat, more symbolic than substantial, the white characters in the novel fare no better. Every white anti-Communist is devious and racist, whereas every white

Communist is progressive, forgiving, and idealistic, even when one of those Communists, Jan, has just lost his girlfriend Mary because Bigger has murdered her, dismembered her, and stuck her in a furnace. As Trudier Harris points out in her essay “Native Sons and Foreign Daughters,” even the black female characters in the novel are shallow and stereotypical, with Wright’s manipulation of them for political rather than artistic reasons leading them to “act antithetically to their natural and social impulses…their plights become melodrama, their lives inconsequential”(82)

209 Perhaps the worst offender to the novelistic aesthetic is the lawyer Boris Max, who appears in

the novel simply to deliver long monologues on the virtues of Communism and the defects of the

oppressive society which has created Bigger Thomas. Thus Max’s function in the novel is to serve as the grandstanding “voice of the writer…Max expresses attitudes inseparable from the

attitudes of the author. Indeed Max is Wright’s spokesman” (Gibson, The Politics of Literary

Expression 36). Max’s twenty-two-page defense of Bigger is in large part the “defense” of the

book—that society forces men like Bigger toward unspeakable acts because such are the only

avenues allowed them—but the heavy-handed, sermonic speech recalls Baldwin’s comments on

Uncle Tom’s Cabin: It is material suited to the impassioned pamphleteer, but hardly material to

sustain a novel. Each of these characters, white or black, male or female, represents a political ideal at the expense of narrative reason, behaving in ways which further Wright’s political

themes and not in the ways complex human beings behave.

Likewise, Wright uses metaphor in Native Son as a nun does a ruler. The novel opens

famously with the ringing of an alarm clock, with the Thomases waking to find their squalid

ghetto apartment infested by a rat, which becomes Bigger’s first victim. That the alarm clock is

a wake-up call not simply for the characters but for Wright’s readership—drawing attention to

the social suspension of the Negro and its dangerous repercussions—seems unmistakable, but aesthetically it is obvious and trite, metaphor for the sake not of aestheticism but didacticism.

Consider also the “blind” Mrs. Dalton, who believes her liberal ideas to be progressive but who is, in reality, unable to see social relations clearly. (Wright does double duty in the aforementioned scene where Bigger suffocates Mary, in which Mrs. Dalton, moving in the darkness in her nightgown, becomes the oppressive, stalking “whiteness” which encourages his

murder; Wright gets the point across, if unsubltly.)

210 In the end Wright’s devaluation of craft, despite his best intentions in writing the book,

diminishes the delivery of his message to the point where even his supporters are forced to admit

that, while Native Son is perhaps historically important, it is “not a great [novel] from a literary standpoint” (Schraufnagel 30). If Wright’s aims are propagandistic, then he has achieved a measure of success—certainly no one who reads the book will misunderstand Wright’s politics.

But as a novel Native Son is a failure, a 500-page exercise in moralizing which, due to its

insistence of message over artistic method, lacks the essential humanity the book argues for. In

reducing character and symbolism to the social, Wright diminishes the impact these characters

and symbols have, thereby diminishing their intended effect as protest. In other words, Native

Son, and in the larger sense political literature, because of its willing limitation of form, tends to disserve both the political and the literary.

The Art of Comparative Humanity

But whereas the impact of Wright’s moral is weakened by his de-emphasizing certain aesthetic concerns, Invisible Man, despite Ellison’s claims that he is disinterested in exposing injustice, actually succeeds as a novel of social ideas due to Ellison’s attention, first and foremost, to aspects of craft.

First, consider Ellison’s characterization of his protagonist compared to Wright’s. Despite the fact that both characters are essentially on the same journey—the search for the self and for meaning in the midst of an oppressive society—Ellison’s narrator, unlike Bigger, is a character who is not only capable of change but who is constantly engaged in the act of revision. Indeed,

211 the term is appropriate: Invisible Man, the narrator, begins the book by ironically “revealing” his invisibility to the reader, saying that he is invisible “simply because people refuse to see me…When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me” (3). Invisible, living in a “warm hole” underground, living off power siphoned from Monopolated Light & Power, the narrator admits he was not always this way, that though he is now fully aware of his own form, “I myself, after existing some twenty years, did not become alive until I discovered my invisibility” (7).

The narrator then flashes back twenty years to a time when he was “looking for [himself] and asking everyone except [himself]” what he should be, to a time before he’d recognized his own invisibility (15). Thus the character’s process of revision in the novel—given those around him have no real vision of him to begin with—is his alone; it is the narrator’s viewing and reviewing

of himself that finally allows him definition, even as he becomes more aware of his “invisibility”

to others.

Ellison’s narrator is a character always in a state of redefinition, evolving chapter by chapter,

and painfully, from naivete of himself and his surroundings to autonomy and awareness, ending

(and beginning) with the narrator’s literal separation from society, both white and black, into

selfhood. While Bigger is a character propelled by social forces, a character defined by those

forces and denied any opportunity to exist but in relation to them, Invisible Man’s agency

develops as he slowly becomes aware of and finally begins to reject limited and limiting social

strictures and views. (The wide-eyed, though blindfolded, narrator of the Battle Royal is

certainly not the same narrator who assumes the identity of Reinhart toward the novel’s end—

what has changed is not the potential perils inherent in the social situations Invisible Man faces

but his understanding of, and mastery over, them.)

212 Moreover, it is important to note that Ellison’s dynamic protagonist serves functions both aesthetic and social. In “Working Notes for Invisible Man,” published in 1995’s The Collected

Essays, Ellison reflects on the question of crucial importance both to his novel and Wright’s: the

effect of white society on the psychology of the African-American. But while Wright intends his

protagonist to symbolize the singular hatred and fear created in him—created, indeed, in the

black consciousness—by white oppression, for Ellison this conflict is one from which

personalities of extreme complexity emerge, personalities which in a short span of years

move from the level of the folk to that of the sophisticate, who combine enough potential

forms of Western personality to fill many lives (343).

Invisible Man is not only a more dynamic character than Bigger but more sympathetic, more

recognizable and human, in that there exists for him, in his developing sense of definition, the

possibility for both success and failure. Bigger’s perils are God-like in their inevitability, with

Wright suggesting his outcome is merely a result of his nativity into a nation which in due time

turns the black man into hunter and hunted. But Invisible Man’s fate is predestined neither by his environment nor, more importantly, by his author. Certainly there are forces moving against him throughout, as in Native Son, designed to “keep this Nigger Boy running,” but while for

Bigger life, well-being, and dignity are made impossible by society from birth, for Invisible Man there remains hope for all of these, and thus there is genuine danger—eliciting from the reader genuine sympathy—when his life, his well-being, and his dignity are threatened. Invisible Man’s journey between the prologue and epilogue is one of constant development, leading finally to his understanding, as the critic Tony Tanner asserts, that

he is not free to reorganize and order the world, but he can at least exercise the freedom

to arrange and name his perceptions of the world …His most important affirmation may

213 be, not of any pattern in the outside world, but of the patterning of his own mind. (89)

Interestingly this passage, which defines the nature of the narrator’s development over the course

of the novel, is equally relevant to the debate over the social aims and abilities of literature.

Substitute “the writer” for “he,” and thus the differentiation is made between Wright’s beliefs

and Ellison’s: the writer cannot restructure or reshape society, but he does have the ability to

structure and shape narrative. His authority, in other words, is not over culture but craft.

Ellison’s complex characterization extends equally to the novel’s supporting cast and

situations. While there seem to be parallels between many of those characters and real

individuals and social institutions—Dr. Bledsoe and his Tuskegee-styled university, the pseudo-

Communist Brotherhood, the messianic Marcus Garvey of Ras the Destroyer—Ellison’s

tendency, unlike Wright’s, is to complicate these figures, their motivations, and their messages

rather than to simplify them. Indeed, as H. William Rice points out in Ralph Ellison and the

Politics of the Novel, Ellison complicates the reader’s attempt at discerning message by the

simple inclusion of some of his secondary characters, given that there is a “curious absence of

contemporary figures in Ellison’s gallery of allusions…most of the figures alluded to in Invisible

Man were prominent in African-American politics long before its 1952 publication date” (44).

Thus when one tries to determine absolutist political doctrine from Ellison’s characters in the novel—for instance, the startling, seemingly metaphorical act of Invisible Man’s spearing Ras the Destroyer’s mouth shut as the charismatic figure attempts to incite a race riot—the human message is perhaps clear (here a warning against both violent revolt and social manipulation, as the whites secretly want the riot) if the specific political message (ostensibly against Garvey, twelve years dead) is less so.

As with his characterization of the Invisible Man, Ellison’s deliberate complexity of his

214 secondary characters again serves purposes both aesthetic—making them more than mouthpieces

for particular doctrines—and political, as he explains in “On Initiation Rites and Power”:

I did not want to describe an existing Socialist or Communist or Marxist political

group…primarily because it would have allowed the reader to escape confronting certain

political patterns, patterns which still exist and of which our two major political parties

are guilty in their relationships to Negro Americans. But what I wanted to do at the same

time was to touch upon certain techniques of struggle, of political struggle, certain

concepts of equality and political possibility which were very much present in our

society…political parties, all political parties, are basically concerned with power and

with maintaining power, not with humanitarian issues in the raw and abstract state. (60)

Furthermore it is interesting to note that, just as Bigger and the Invisible Man share essentially the same mission but diverge in their authors’ approaches, the metaphors in Invisible Man are

often similar to, indeed the same as, the metaphors employed in Native Son. There is blindness illustrating social and personal shortsightedness—not only in the blindfolded young black men fighting for the white audience at the Battle Royal or the character of Reverend Homer Barbee but in every character who tries to correctly “see” the narrator. In other words, this blindness is

not that of race but blindness to human character, the character of the individual, moving the

metaphor beyond schisms of black and white, good and evil, oppressor and oppressed.

There is also the menacing, omnipresent whiteness of The Liberty Paints Plant, where the narrator almost literally loses his mind to lobotomy. But Ellison’s dreamlike, blinding-white depiction of the lobotomy scene in chapter 11 raises more questions than answers, calling into question, even, as Kerry McSweeney notes in Invisible Man: Race and Identity, “whether the

things described in chapter 11 really took place.” The importance of the scene and the metaphor,

215 McSweeney says, is not in the concrete denotation of its discernable represented, as in the

ghostly white presence that drives Bigger to murder in Native Son; what makes the narrator’s near-lobotomy unforgettable is not that Ellison explains what it is meant to represent but the

haunting artistry of the scene, its nightmare imagery which evokes the psychological distress of

the narrator in the reader. Ellison does not need to offer a literal meaning of the metaphor—one

does not need to know the blinding whiteness of the room represents industrialization or

government or monotheism or fill-in-the-blank to understand, and to experience, the horrifying

effect of the “vast whiteness” of the factory operating room (indeed the inability to reduce the

images to recognizable associative relationships amplifies the anxiety, the sense of alienation, of

the scene). Yet this has not stopped critics from attempting to make a more concrete connection

between the image and its “meaning,” and the fact that those critics interpret the scene in an

abundance of ways— the “historic exploitation of the Negro by American industry”

(Schraufnagel 82); an attempt to “remake the invisible man into the mechanical man he had been

before” (Vogler 147); an experiment designed to destroy “his capacity to resist social demand,

acquiescence to social requirements” (Gibson, The Politics of Literary Expression 86)—

illustrates the scene’s (and the book’s) brilliance not only as a work of art, but in its importance,

its achievement, as a novel of ideas.

It is exactly the book’s pliancy in examining difficult political, social, and racial issues, its

refusal to engage in and, more importantly, to believe the worn tropes of the political novel, that

has kept Ellison’s undeserved reputation as a writer disinterested in the political in tact. But to

promote a political fiction that is ideological, demagogic, and rigid is to assent to a politics of

oppression, the very thing that political art, indeed, moral, humanistic art, should seek to

undermine. Invisible Man does not intend, as does Native Son, to answer questions but rather to

216 provoke them, does not intend to settle debate but rather to promote it, and thus the triumph of the book is that it “indicates that protest can be an integral part of a supreme artistic creation”

(Schraufnagel 87). Invisible Man is not propaganda, not the end of thought, but an act of creation, an act of questioning, an act of instigation, the beginning of thought.

217 WORKS CITED

Baldwin, James. “Alas, Poor Richard.” Nobody Knows My Name. New York: Vintage, 1993. 181-200. ---. “Everybody’s Protest Novel.” Notes of a Native Son. New York: Bantam, 1964. 9-17. ---. “Many Thousands Gone.” Notes of a Native Son. New York: Bantam, 1964. 18-36.

Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Vintage, 1990. ---. “On Initiation Rites and Power.” Going to the Territory. New York: Vintage, 1987. 39- 63. ---. “Recent Negro Fiction (Review of Native Son)." New Masses 40 (5 August 1941): 22-26. Rpt. in Richard Wright: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. Ed. Henry Louis Gates and K.A. Appiah. New York: Amistad P, 1993. 11-18. ---. “The Art of Fiction.” Shadow and Act. New York: Vintage, 1972. 167-186. ---. “The World and the Jug.” Shadow and Act. New York: Vintage, 1972. 107-143. ---. “Working Notes for Invisible Man.” The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison. Ed. John F. Callahan. New York: The Modern Library, 2003. 341-350.

Gibson, Donald B. The Politics of Literary Expression. Westport, CT: Greenwood P, 1981. ---. “Wright’s Invisible Native Son.” Richard Wright: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Richard Macksey and Frank E. Moorer. Englewood Cliffs, N.J: Prentice-Hall, 1984. 95- 105.

Harris, Trudier. “Native Sons and Foreign Daughters.” New Essays on Native Son. Ed. Keneth Kinnamon. New York: Cambridge, UP. 1990. 63-84.

Howe, Irving. “Black Boys and Native Sons.” Dissent (Autumn 1963): 353-68.

Lewis, David Levering. When Harlem Was In Vogue. New York: Oxford UP, 1981.

Locke, Alain. “Foreword.” The New Negro. New York: Simon & Shuster, 1997. xxv-xxvii.

McSweeney, Kerry. Invisible Man: Race and Identity. Boston: Twayne, 1988.

Rice, H. William. Ralph Ellison and the Politics of the Novel. New York: Lexington Books, 2003.

Schraufnagel, Noel. From Apology to Protest: The Black American Novel. Deland, FL: Everett/Edwards, 1973.

Tanner, Tony. “The Music of Invisibility.” Ralph Ellison: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. John Hersey. Englewood Cliffs, N.J: Prentice-Hall, 1974. 80-94.

Vogler, Thomas A. “Invisible Man: Somebody’s Protest Novel.” Ralph Ellison: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. John Hersey. Englewood Cliffs, N.J: Prentice-Hall, 1974. 127-150.

218

Warren, Robert Penn. “The Unity of Experience.” Ralph Ellison: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. John Hersey. Englewood Cliffs, N.J: Prentice-Hall, 1974. 21-26.

Wright, Richard. “A Blueprint for Negro Writing.” The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader. Ed. David Levering Lewis. New York: Penguin, 1995. 194-205. ---. “How Bigger Was Born.” Anthology of Thirties Prose. Ed. Sarah White. May 2001. Accessed June 2004. ---. Native Son. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1940.

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