Memoir 4

It’s no wonder I turned out like I did, given the arid terrarium into which I was hatched.

My sister, older than me by almost two years, resented me from the beginning and never hesitated to show and tell her dislike for her younger brother. In our teen years and into our twenties, she used to tell me that she hated me, that she used to wish I would die when she would watch me in my playpen or running through the yard. I was never shocked by her admissions or her venom; they made perfect sense because I saw and felt them every day.

And though we have largely mended fences between us and now enjoy the most peaceful season of our sibling life together, some things can never be aired, can never be healed, can never be solved. Our personalities and perspectives being what they are, we have a tense and tacit agreement that the dogs of Resentment and Guilt and Retribution will be allowed to sleep.

Seeing my father twice yearly at most meant that any influence he had on me was genetic, not artistic. I carry this lack of his presence and imprint every day, and this lack is noticeable in my patterns and interests and abilities. I was in my twenties before I ever used a power tool, in my fifties before I ever pulled the cord on a chainsaw. I have never balanced a checkbook in my life, I never knew what I wanted to do with my life, I never understood what the hell the balding guidance counselor was talking about, I was fired from the first job I ever had. And none of these items was ever addressed or rued by my father, because in our crumbs of hours together, he drove us towards fun and laughter, towards movies and then chili dogs at the little local municipal airport where we watched prop-jobs take off and land, and he never marred those times with guidance or lectures or parental prodding.

The only male family members with whom I had contact were two uncles: my mother’s younger brother and her brother-in-law. Neither of them ever showed the tiniest glimmer of interest in or concern for me, the skinny, nervous boy. Mother’s brother, Uncle Gene, was a man whom to this day conjures in my mind the word “sniveling” when I think of him. Cuckolded many times over by his floozy wife with her red gash of a mouth and ample bottom flattened out by all those White Shouldered hours at the Ranch House bar on the eastern edge of town. Father to three criminal children who mocked him in front of strangers and scorned him to his face at family gatherings. The male of the three was ruined by his father’s fawning attention, always chasing the boy around to protect him or bail him out, trying to groom him into Little League stardom and hopefully an athletic scholarship so he could avoid becoming a second generation produce manager at a dingy market. The boy, now almost sixty, sells cars at a gravel lot and still sees a parole officer regularly. But he never had to share his father’s attention with his cousin.

Mother’s brother-in-law, Danny, had married my aunt Roxanne after her first quickie marriage to an itinerant mechanic, an honest-to-god gypsy, had ended in a blurry weekend of threats and violence and tribal drama. Danny was an ex-Navy man, stocky and blocky and surly, who resembled Claude Akins and had that actor’s same stingy smile and suspicious eyes, eyes that looked as if they needed, instead of lids, a key inserted into a strip of metal and twisted back like the way you open a can of Spam or Treet. Uncle Danny drove a yellow feed truck and sat in his yellow Chevy on the side of the house and sipped from pints of Rebel Yell and cultivated a thatch of black coconut grass on his chest and was bronzed until he looked like his cooked skin would split from all those hours outside. He enjoyed holding his venison tenderloin red-brown arm next to my slender ice-white one and sneering, “Looks like a little girl’s arm, boy.” He pronounced the word boy like “boah,” but that spelling doesn’t do it justice. The enunciation was like a Doppler effect, like a jet taking off over your head, and the word carried its own payload. Danny’s daughters abandoned him after Aunt Roxanne died of lung cancer, and he spent his last years mowing his little lawn with a push mower and cooking his own leathery fried eggs in his dark kitchen until the cancer took him in its generous and indiscriminate pincers.

Uncle Gene knew sports, and Uncle Danny knew manual labor, and neither of them burned a single calorie in trying to impart anything to me during my pliable years, to act as pillar of cloud or fire while I wandered in the wilderness of solitary boyhood. Danny was simply a brute, coarse and chortling, and I don’t think he knew any better. The toothy and sanctimonious Gene, with his Doublemint gum and his Assemblies of God deacontude was a far more sinister and active participant in the sketched outline of my life, and after I reveal his role here, in later pages, no honest reader will fail to despise him at least a fraction as deeply as I do.

I was herded and shepherded by women, and in retrospect I’m amazed that I didn’t learn to lisp or bitchtalk or become a florist or a tailor or a funeral home director, still surprised that I didn’t leave my little town for New York or Los Angeles and disappear into the urine-scalded gutters of those lauded Gomorrahs like too many fatherless boys have done over the past century. I wasn’t molested, and I didn’t turn effeminate (though Uncle Danny enjoyed referring to me as “sissyboy” when he knew I was within earshot). I stuck it out and endured what God’s taut racket served at me.

But there was a cost, and suffering, and these things came to me on moss-softened feet, came to me down there in the southern South, came to me in open approach, with me watching them grow near, and I learned the taste of dread. Do you, today, reading these words, do you know how dread tastes? I will tell you, then. It tastes like the fear-sweat on the upper lip of a blonde boy who lives in a mean world that has drawn a bead on him and his kind.

I remember my first fight and my second one. My first was when I was seven. My friend Bobby and I had fallen out with each other, and I can’t remember why. After school one day, he pushed me down and began pummeling me while I scrambled around in the grass that covered the vacant lot at First Avenue and Pullen Street. I managed to land a few blows of my own, and then some friends pulled us apart, and we gasped our breath back into our little bodies while leaning forward, hands on denimed knees, and one of us – I think it was Bobby – began to laugh, and the other one joined in, and all the other boys laughed too, and we were friends again, and we walked on home, arms around each other’s shoulders in the way that boys in the Sixties would do.

My second fight was in my eleventh year, that year that was so central and so formative for my life in so many ways. I was at my friend Sidney’s house. Little Sidney, or Junior as his siblings called him, was the runt eldest child in a large family even poorer than my own. Sidney’s father was a meal little drunk who worked at the sawmill and came home to the same meal every night: cornbread and kidney beans and lumpy mashed potatoes, fixed by a Margaret Hamilton twin who flinched when Sidney Sr. was near because he was given to punching her in the face with his knobby little fist if she looked at him wrong or complained about anything. Then after supper, he would wash his face, change into a fresh t-shirt, and stroll down to the Oasis Cafe by the railroad tracks downtown, and drink beer until he staggered home and vomited all over the bathroom. Sidney Jr. and his six siblings, smudge-faced and sour-smelling, spent their nights and weekends cowering from the little raisin-eyed tyrant who always had one hand on his belt, ready to unbuckle it and unleash it.

But I enjoyed playing at Sidney’s house because his jittery little mother didn’t mind if we tracked in dirt or yelled like wild Indians while we were playing, and she would always find a Coke to pour into little cups, dividing that one green-glassed bottle between the eight of us, and the Coke was always cold, and I seem to remember that we were all laughing almost all the time when I was over at their house.

There was a black boy who lived somewhere over on the other side of the railroad tracks, a boy named Sooky. Sooky was probably about fourteen, but he looked to be about six feet tall, and had the menacing, muddy eyes of a felon. One day when I was at Sidney’s and we children were all out in the front yard playing kickball, Sooky sauntered by, his dark face a mask of disdain for the dirty little white children having their fun, and I happened to lock eyes with him. Something about my expression seemed to enrage him, and he ran over to the yard and began cursing me, cursing me with words I’d never even heard before. Sidney and his siblings all scattered to the porch, and then ran inside. I looked for them, and they were all standing behind the screen door, watching us with the same expressions they wore when their daddy came home from work each day.

I turned back to my tormentor, and he closed the distance between us with one long stride and punched me in the forehead, punched me so hard. My world went white and I heard that peculiar whanging sound for the first time in my life, the sound that tells you that the other fellow has nailed you a really solid one. When I regained my senses, I saw Sooky’s legs, ashy-black above his white socks, before me. I rolled to my feet and slammed into him as hard as I could. It was like running into a tree; I bounced off him. The black boy reached down and took a fistful of my hair and punched me again, this time striking me on the cheek. All the fight went out of me. Then Sooky started laughing, that phlegmy Hyeh hyeh hyeh I’ve heard so many times in my life when in the presence of black people. He left me lying on the grass, holding my throbbing head, and strutted on down the street and crossed the railroad trackd. I looked at the house and saw the children still watching me. And their skinny mother was there watching me, too, and she never moved an inch to help me, or to comfort me. Sidney and the rest of them melted into the dim interior of the dirty little house, and I was left there alone. So I got myself to my feet and went on home. I have no memory of what happened when I got home or how I explained the knot on my forehead or the swollen abrasion of my cheek to Mother.

I do, however, remember how I felt in the days after this thin scrap of a “fight.” I didn’t know how to put a name to what I felt, but I opened my arms and embraced the feeling and learned its nomenclature inside and out, and when I was a man some years later, I learned that this feeling was called impotent rage. I was impotent to help myself, and I was in the grip of that most dangerous kind of rage, the kind that can ride a human being into madness if no way to check it can be discovered. Who could I tell? To whom could I confide?

I folded the incident away, but I was ever aware of its place inside me. It was waiting, and it was cold and patient, and I knew this.

~ S.K. Orr

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