ABSTRACT The History of the World: Or, Dewayne Boyce, As I Recall Helena Hunt Director: Michael-John DePalma, Ph.D. University of New Hampshire This creative nonfiction thesis is composed of a set of personal essays that reflect on the author’s relationship with her family, primarily her mother and grandfather. It shows, through an often fragmented and lyrical style, the inheritance they give to and receive from one another, beginning with the traditions of storytelling and deception that are embedded in the text itself. The collection triangulates certain themes and preoccupations, leaving and later returning to the same ideas, people, and occurrences to find new insights and reflections. They are meant to echo an individual’s reflection on his or her own life and family past, as one returns to familiar images again and again and recreates what one cannot remember. By the end of this collection, some hope is offered from the repeated cycle of family addiction and manipulation, though that salvation is only found in the same familiar patterns of behavior. APPROVED BY DIRECTOR OF HONORS THESIS: ———————————————————————— Dr. Michael-John DePalma, English Department APPROVED BY THE HONORS PROGRAM: ——————————————————— Dr. Elizabeth Corey, Director DATE: _____________________ ! ! ! THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD: OR, DEWAYNE BOYCE, AS I RECALL A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Baylor University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Honors Program By Helena Hunt Waco, Texas May 2016 ! ! ! TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter One: Introduction . 1 Chapter Two: Blue Monday . 14 Chapter Three: How to: Care for Gillbert . 43 Chapter Four: September Twentieth . 63 Chapter Five: The Land That Was Promised to Us . 81 Chapter Six: Index of Addiction . 94 Bibliography . .120 ii ! ! ! CHAPTER ONE Introduction My Grandpa D.B.’s obituary is in the August 22nd edition of the Quay County Sun. It starts, “Dewayne Mobley, age 72, of Tucumcari NM, passed away Wednesday, August 15, 2012, at his home in Tucumcari.” It tells when he was born, who survived him, and when services will be held. The obituary gives the wrong hometown for my mom, and it includes the names of his stepdaughters, whom he hated. I read that obituary and recognized nothing of my own Grandpa D.B. in it. It may say that he enjoyed gardening, but it said nothing of the hours he spent weeding without a shirt on, hours that turned into years of skin cancer. It says he has nine grandchildren and two great-grandchildren, but it doesn’t say that only four of them were actually related to him, but he saw them even less than the others. It listed his latest wedding, but none of the others, and it doesn’t say why he married Pollyanne Brady in 1998 even though they met in 1956. That obituary is why I wrote these pages, which number in the hundreds by now and will, God willing, allow me to graduate with my Bachelor’s. This was a man who told stories and, when he was alive, made a legend of his life. Even if he doesn’t deserve it, I want to make a legend of his death too. This man who fascinated and repelled me all through my childhood, who sprayed me with a water gun and then called me H.C. because he was D.B., was meant for greatness, not the back of the obituary pages. Everyone knew it, especially him, but no one was ever quite able to help him get it. As always, I want to be his favorite grandchild in that sea of nine and give it to him in my own meager way. ! "! The problem, of course, is that I barely knew my grandpa, or I knew only the old man who spent hours in his garden and loved his pets more than children. I only knew what stories had been passed down to me from my mom and my grandma, pieces of a man I idolized all the more for never having known him. But, of course, they didn’t really know him either. He was largely absent from their lives, having divorced my grandma and left the family when my mom was only twelve. Stories are what they know of him as well, and so all we have now are stories that orbit around a dark sun that is still at the center of our universe. The obituary tells the truth, but telling the truth about Dewayne Boyce Mobley won’t reveal much about who he is. *** He died on the day I moved into college for my freshman year. My mom got the call from his wife Pollyanne in our hotel room, and when she started to cry I held her and looked into our vague hotel mirror and tried to make myself cry as well. The tears didn’t come until two days later, but then I only cried for myself because my parents had just left me alone. I felt a lurking sense of guilt whenever my thoughts went back to Grandpa D.B., as on the first birthday I had after he died. It was his birthday too; he would have been seventy-three, I realized, because he was exactly fifty-five years older than me. I tried to atone by making a flower crown for my young cousin, who also shared our birthday, fourteen years after mine and sixty-nine after my grandpa’s. I continued with this game of hide-and-seek until my junior year, when I took a creative nonfiction class. We were assigned a lyric essay, one of those intangible genres which I’ve attempted several times in this collection. I was trying to come up with a topic when I found two toy dinosaurs that a friend had given me. I busied my hands with them as my grandpa ! #! did with his cigarettes, and my mind went to my young obsession with dinosaurs and the museum in Tucumcari where my mom had always taken me to escape from his stifling brick house. And then the memories of my grandpa that college had buried began to shift and resettle. I remembered the rock he gave me when I was four and followed him into his hedges. He told me it was a piece of shit, petrified dinosaur shit. I took it home and put it on my nightstand. I remember how he greeted me as his birthday twin when we got to his house and ignored my sister, and the nickname, H.C., that only he had ever called me. I wanted to be better than the obituary, to do my grandpa the justice that it doesn’t want to. Bret Lott says creative nonfiction is “for better and worse, in triumph and failure, the attempt to keep from passing altogether away the lives we have lived.”1 But I wasn’t just trying to preserve my own life, as most memoirists do. I wanted to do that too, of course. I couldn’t be honest about my grandpa without being honest about myself, and why I had forgotten him for almost three years. But more than that, more than any narcissistic sense of self-preservation, I wanted to preserve him. I wanted to take this man, who was nothing special but who perhaps could have been, and represent him so others would be as enchanted and intrigued by him as I was before he died. More than anything else, though, I wanted to make myself feel the full weight of his death— everything that was lost with him, and what the rest of the family might be able to carry on. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1 Bret Lott, “Toward a Definition of Creative Nonfiction,” Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction 2, no. 1 (2000), 197. ! $! I had all of Lynn Bloom’s four purposes for the creative nonfiction essay.2 I wanted to get to the truth of my grandpa’s experience, and of my relationship with him. I wanted to figure out his place in my life, something that never made much sense to me. I wanted to “set the record straight,” positioning him as more than the con man he is often remembered as. And I wanted to tell a story almost as good as one he would have told, because Grandpa D.B. was, among other things, a storyteller—one of many traits I think I’ve inherited from him, even if in diluted form. The source material for this entire thesis is those stories, usually told by mom to me as I grew up. I wanted more than anything to be a part of one of his stories and a part of one of hers. “Blue Monday” is an attempt to show what happened when I tried to be like my mom in one of the stories she told me about her young dating and married life. Although her stories were told as warnings against making the same mistakes, I wanted more than anything to repeat them. I looked through her yearbook to find the few pictures of her and imagined if she would have liked me then, if she would have noticed me at all from behind her black eyeliner. This may be the feeling that she has about her dad as well, so maybe that’s why she does it to me as well. But the person you most want to please only ever tells stories that you aren’t a part of. My grandpa didn’t care much for emotional truths or probably the truth in general, but he did place a very high value on a good story.