History Lessons

by Clifton Crais

  I dial my father’s number, then hide in my closet room. Lying in bed with a pillow around my ears, I hear my mother yelling. “I bet she’s not as good as me, is she Howard,” she’d tell him; half biting, half hoping my father would answer the way she wanted him to, with something redeemable from their estranged past.

  I suppose my mother must have called Dad and insisted he take me again, or one of my sisters told him to do something. She has no memory of this, nor can she provide any detailed reason for why I had to leave New Orleans except that I was “gettin’ in trouble.” There was never any conversation with me about what was happening, what I thought I wanted. No Don’t ya think it would be nice to go and visit your father for a while, out in sunny California kind of platitude, the sort of insouciant leading question that always means big things, and which generally sends waves of emotion across the faces of boys and girls who spend their childhoods shuttling between parents.

  My sisters don’t say much when I ask them, though they and others volunteer information on my numerous youthful indiscretions that seem humorous with the passage of time, especially in light of the apparent evidence that I’ve “made it.” Their eyes turn blank when I try pressing them for the exact reasons I moved to California, as if they were looking right through me and had returned to when their lives were elsewhere, to that indeterminate time between Barbie Doll dreams and adulthood when they survived by staying away from the apartment as much as possible. I realize there is something they won’t say. Or can’t.

  “Truthfully, I just don’t know,” one answers obliquely. “What do you think?”

  I want to argue back. Why do my sisters begin so many of their sentences with “truthfully”? It’s a Southern colloquialism, but part of me wants to rail that it’s a Southern inability to tell the truth.

  “Gettin’ in trouble” seems accurate, though. It was 1969 and 1970. I was ten and in fourth grade, skipping school, forging (with spectacular ineptitude) my mother’s signature on my report card. My Mom don’t write so well, I guess I told my teacher, cocking my head a little to one side. At home, I set the downstairs utility room on fire. Smoke started coming through the floorboards. Grandmother was just about to call the fire department when Kinta got home from work. My brother taught me how to siphon gas and hotwire cars, skills that were particularly useless since I didn’t know how to drive. There were other more practical skills like stuffing vending machines that would prove lucrative. Sometimes I’d return at the end of the day with a pocket full of dimes and quarters, enough for a meal at Domilise’s. I had started sniffing airplane glue, sitting in my room with a brown paper bag over my nose.

  I was also hanging out with my mother in neighborhood bars. One is still there, at the corner of Magazine and Napoleon, “Ms. Mae’s.” In the 1960s men who worked on the wharves that ran along the Mississippi River from the Irish Channel to Audubon Park came to the bar for its cheap beer. The owner kept an icebox filled with boiled crab, shrimp, and bright red crayfish, and I suppose I had my dinners there nursing a root beer or a creme soda as Mom got drunk. Many of the men were veterans from Korea or World War II; the younger ones were back from Khe Sanh, Saigon, or someplace else in Vietnam. Except for Mom few women came to the bar except as tattoos—Rita Hayworth, Marilyn Monroe, and other pinups lounging along the men’s tanned biceps.

  Then there was a wee problem with explosives. With a small arsenal of fireworks, especially cherry bombs, I tried blowing up the neighborhood. Cherry bombs were delicious explosives, more powerful than they are today, small and round with a good wick that left your hands smelling of saltpeter and your heart thumping. Best of all, they were waterproof. After a storm you could throw them into a puddle and imagine great World War II naval battles. Or you could drop them through someone’s bathroom window. Kaboom!

  Armed with cherry bombs, bottle rockets, Roman candles, and strings of Black Cat firecrackers, I was invincible—until a policeman chased me down. I made it about halfway up the backyard fence. The policeman dragged me to the car, ran his hands down my pants, pulled out a knife. I wasn’t cut out for life as a hardened criminal. It didn’t take more than a second before I ratted on my friends. Soon there were three of us heading downtown.

  Mom was at work, or in a bar. One of my sisters was the first to get home. I sat with my accomplices in a juvenile cell downtown. For some reason the authorities decided to release me with one of my cellmates. I sat in the bed of the pickup truck bumping slowly along Uptown’s evening roads, looking through the cab window and watching father and son talk. He had a bottle in his hand, wrapped in a brown paper bag. Father and son passed the bottle between them. I guess he was proud of his son, that being thrown in the clinker marked some rite of passage. At some point, the truck moseyed into a parked car. I jumped out and walked the rest of the way home.

  I know now that there were two moments in my childhood when I almost became a ward of the state. In Louisiana this usually takes some effort. Social services have never been especially robust. My behavior must have exasperated my mother and especially my grandmother. Ending up in a foster home or worse would be a final stain—the unequivocal mark that our family had collapsed, that in some basic way it no longer really even existed. The shame of failure can be especially pronounced among white Southerners, where the past is always a better place, and is just around the corner. We had our stories of the good days, of solid houses and nice clothes, but most of all of familial stability, civility, decorum. Foster care was unacceptable.

  I suspect sexuality explains why I headed out to California, as well as the peculiar silences I have encountered during my research. Siblings can recall particular crimes and misdemeanors even as they disclaim knowing why I left New Orleans. A patina of apprehensiveness settles over their recollections, a slight change of voice, a reticent look, as if there are memories without language lurking beneath the veils of consciousness. It seems they are withholding something, less by a willful act of dissimulation than through discomfort, perhaps even an inability, given their own sexual histories, to give voice to shadows.

  Sexuality and childhood together are so taboo, especially when involving an adult and a child, that it seems impossible ever to suggest that the two might coexist, that sex is a central feature of childhood and, sometimes, a terrible part of life. My sexual childhood remains verboten and unknowable, though I wonder if the specter of my becoming sexually deviant far outweighed my childhood shenanigans. What is clear is that homosexuality remains for Catholics in my family the greatest ignominy, the quintessential family failure. And I was effeminate, played with myself, was surrounded by women, and the only man in my life spent his time parading around his apartment in a tight Speedo with his semi-hard prick pointing heavenward. Blowing up the neighborhood was one thing but becoming gay was something altogether different.

  Flying to academic conferences I watch flight attendants plying a young child’s loneliness with drinks and games and think about what it must have been like saying good-bye to my mother in the New Orleans airport or seeing my father at the LAX terminal. Research tells me it was sometime late in the summer of 1970, when I was ten years old and about to begin fifth grade. I realize, as well, that the journey was a sociological statistic. I was one of thousands of children boarding buses, trains, and planes shuttling between parents, at a point in American history when nearly three quarters of marriages ended in divorce.

  I spent nearly a year with my father in Southern California, first in Burbank then at the bottom of a La Crescenta foothill in an apartment complex near the supermarket and a tangle of roads. At the end of the hallway there were two small beds, a closet, chest of drawers, and unadorned walls, a bare room meant for a visitor. I arrived with just a few clothes. I left with little more.

  My father was in his late fifties, with a shock of thick hair that had returned to white now that he had a job. Sabrina had gone back to New Orleans. His marriage to Dorothy the Witch had collapsed. He had long tired of children.
California had promised escape, a chance to begin again. He wanted a woman, preferably with some money.

  The summer I joined him, Dad met Letha, a widow with a house in La Crescenta and a garden of bright flowers and lush foliage and a lawn that glistened due to her dutiful summer watering. Letha was a Southerner like my father, though California had rinsed away most of her Alabama accent. For a lonely decade during her forties and early fifties she had cared for her husband while working as a secretary at the community college in Pasadena, adjusting his pillows and oxygen mask as he lay in front of the television suffocating from emphysema. Letha was a kind, bubbly woman, as eager as my father to begin again. They may have met at a square dance. Their romance unfolded to “take your partner” and “do-si-do” and “give your partner a twirl.” Dad bought a cowboy shirt, pants, and boots. Letha wore pink- and blue-checked skirts adorned with lace over full petticoats. Twice a week in the evenings, and sometimes on the weekend, I sat on a folding chair watching them dance to Western music spilling out of the school hall speaker.

  Letha’s house sat up the hill from our apartment. On the weekends I slept on a sofa bed, in the mornings watching cartoons while Letha pranced into the kitchen in a negligee and pink panties with lots of frills and a broad smile. During the week Dad and I subsisted on Morton pot pies and TV dinners, and in the mornings on Froot Loops and milk. I spent a lot of time by myself. I learned how to skateboard. My middle finger went numb from playing a Duncan yo-yo, spinning it wildly, trying to get the yo-yo to sleep or to walk along the ground. I stared, dumbfounded, at my father’s pornography. He had a magazine about a nudist colony, people standing about naked, men with flaccid penises and women with large, droopy breasts, all very peculiar compared to my experiences of watching women stripping in the French Quarter, with its smells of tobacco and beer and sex’s musk.

  Most of the week I was bored, stuck in the apartment and in California’s cement suburbia. In New Orleans I could bike around Uptown, riding high atop the levee that sat like an ancient Indian mound protecting New Orleans from the Mississippi, pedaling all the way to where the river turned north to Carrollton and the Black Pearl. I could stop for a while and watch the brown water form eddies and carrion trees float downstream, while tugs pushed barges toward the Irish Channel. Or zoom down Monkey Hill, then bike across Audubon Park for a spearmint sno-ball on Plum Street. There were neighborhoods to explore, filled with large homes of bright white clapboard and wrought iron fences and light dancing from cut-crystal doors polished clean by black servants. Reds and oranges turned to blues and purples. Fires leapt and cooled in the corner of my eye. I could take the bus downtown to the French Quarter, floating along with the crowds watching women in their moonlit skin, or I could go to the Everything Store and wander among the curios: New Orleans Saints shirts, velveteen toys, and Voodoo dolls, while children rolled a dime into a game and tried maneuvering silvery claws toward dozens of stuffed elephants, giraffes, and monkeys. In California, I just stewed.

  California was a hiatus; I was a temporary sojourner in my father’s new life. The school principal told Dad that I was spending far too much time alone. I was neglected, troubled. If the situation persisted the school would have to call Social Services. Something had to be done. It was time to return home.

  I realize now everyone had been sworn to secrecy. In my mind’s eye Grandmother appears distant, as if in the year apart we had drifted into different orbits. Perhaps it was because of the secret she was keeping, or she felt that welcoming me back to the apartment would make my leaving more painful, or it was simply old age and life’s tolls that explain her diffidence. There were no discussions of school or summer plans, the closet room sat unprepared and unwelcoming. Even on the Greyhound I had no clue that there had been discussions, arguments and accusations, agreements reached, new commitments to funnel money from California to wherever, a decision that I would be moving in with my sister Susan in Ocean Springs, Mississippi.

  I had just turned eleven, a scrawny kid with a mop of dark hair who had somehow managed his way through fifth grade. Mom had just turned fifty. My imagining of the bus ride is, and isn’t, a memory, more re-visitation than recollection, so that what appears before me seems truthful if also embellished. Tenses shift, the past becomes present again, and suddenly I can see the two of us sitting at a small round Formica table in the station waiting for a sonorous voice announcing our bus. Mom pulls a bottle from her purse. She tells me to get a sandwich. I wander around the station under the fluorescent lights, looking at the people standing at the ticket counters and the buses arriving, idling, and departing for various towns around the South, all the lonely faces in the crowd as if I am in a painting by Hopper. A man now sits with my mother.

  When we board, she tells me to sit toward the front of the bus. I look out the window, pressing my face against the glass, feeling the air-conditioning coming through the vents. The highway climbs above the city streets, so I could look at the top of the trees and at the diamond pattern of roof shingles as we passed by, some of the asbestos tiles gray with city dirt, most green, a few salmon-colored and cracked by the heat. In places the hard rains had washed the particles of color away. Away from the city, yellow pines nodded and moss hung from cypresses like a child’s kite snagged on a limb. Mom is behind me, drinking and making out with a man she had picked up at the station. She is loud and crude, and I wonder now why someone didn’t intervene. All along Highway 10 the two of them drink and kiss, the man running his hands across her breasts and up my mother’s dress, until I forget about them and listen to the steady beat of tires and Mississippi’s pine stands turn into a green blur.

  Until I moved in with my sister, I had lived poor. I had changed schools often, my clothes were usually tattered and dirty, and I was constantly sick with tonsillitis and bronchial infections. I was thin, poorly nourished if not malnourished. I had mostly raised myself and had grown up too fast. I had witnessed too much, lived in a near-permanent state of overstimulation. My mother was a suicidal, sexual drunk. My two sisters, the quintessence of Southern babes, were brunettes and stacked. There was Bobby down the road, and throughout the city plenty of mischief to get into.

  Eighteen years separated Susan and me. By the time our parents divorced, she had married and moved away. She was a foreigner to me, as if she was descended from another family, another epoch entirely, when our parents’ marriage had been a good enough one, and Mom had organized parties and hand-stitched dresses, and Dad had provided for his family and carved roast chicken for Sunday suppers. Susan became a woman before my mother began drinking heavily, leaving home for the Mississippi College of Women where she had studied art, then married a man with sugar blue eyes who would become a fighter pilot. She dreamed of wealth and style and beauty, and of seeing the world with her smart and witty husband. They lived in Southern England for two years, traveled to Europe. She took cooking classes at the Cordon Bleu. They held elaborate dinner parties of pheasant and Beef Wellington. She learned from a neighbor how to collect antiques—fine English furniture in mahogany, oak, and walnut. Joe restored an old green Jaguar from the 1940s. They were a regal couple, and in love. Joe would roar past the house in his F-4 Phantom, dipping his wings in affection.

  Yet theirs was a volatile marriage. Both were argumentative and headstrong. Susan wanted more than anyone could possibly provide, certainly more than Joe, who would never make it past Captain after he lost his wings in a crash that broke his back and left him in traction for months. Joe had a pilot’s exactitude that few could meet. He knew how to pick on someone’s weaknesses, turning his quick mind to cruelty. At the dinner table Joe would reduce me to tears, then tease me for crying, turning all “rubbery-faced,” he would laugh. I would struggle to steady myself, force a bit of food down, drink my milk, but the tears inevitably flowed, and I would run away in defeat.

  I do not know what conversations Susan and Joe had about my coming to live with them. She wanted a son but feared having another daug
hter. My gender was clear, though in my family’s eyes my sexuality was not. I imagine Joe was indifferent to my arrival; he generally disliked children, who, he thought, had nothing intelligent to say. It was for him something of a repeat history. Six years earlier, when my brother Gus was about sixteen, Susan and Joe had taken him in. Dad had called Susan, asked her to take Gus into her home. Our brother had just a few months earlier broken down the bathroom door and saved our mother from herself. Gus was distressed, shaken by watching Mom’s decline into mental illness. Mom moved to Mandeville. Gus moved to Tucson, where Joe was at advanced fighter school, learning how to dance away from MiG jets screaming down from above, breaking the sound barrier in the dead of night and nearly getting kicked out of the military.

  There is a photograph of Joe and my brother hunting mule deer high in Arizona’s scrub-covered mountains. Susan fed and clothed Gus; it was probably the first time in his life our brother had square meals and something like a routine. She had two children of her own, an infant in diapers, the other child toddling about, and a husband jealous for attention and unwilling to do much to keep the household afloat. Gus came to Tucson a broken child and a bewildered adolescent. He was also functionally illiterate. A teacher took him under her wing and helped our brother begin learning how to read and write.

  Six months later Gus was back in New Orleans. It had not worked out. It was all too much for my sister. The ordeal must have been terribly wounding—a poor, virtually uneducated kid who had witnessed his mother’s suicide attempt, saved by an older sibling and then sent back to New Orleans.

  Gus refused to return to the Chestnut Street apartment. With his best friend Terry, he found an apartment a few blocks away, going to Fortier High School in the day and working jobs to pay for rent and food before heading out to California for a few years. Terry and Gus saved each other as best they could. They managed their way through high school, but both ended up in Vietnam, Gus as an infantryman, Terry as a soldier loading the dead and wounded into Hueys, then washing away their blood after returning to base. Their lives inevitably brought them back to the city they called home, where they continued borrowing money from each other, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes and dope, shooting the shit, and watching over each other when one of them landed in the local VA hospital.