Sarah nodded, feeling overcome. “Fresh air. Oh yes, that could be good,” she agreed. “Let’s all go out on the porch and get some fresh air.”
THINGS TO DO
WHEN YOU’RE
GOTH IN THE
COUNTRY
When I was sixteen, I used to sit under the bell tower with my friends and smoke. Smoking was something to do. The little courtyard under the bell tower was like nothing else in the town. It looked European to us. A pointless enclave situated between three buildings with iron benches and a small stone fountain; that’s all it was. Completely impractical and unlike anything else. There was never anyone there. We were the only ones in town who were in any way interested in that courtyard. It was a hip pocket where the universe opened up in the middle of that ugly rural town and allowed things to seem cosmopolitan for one hundred and fifty square feet. All we did there was smoke because no one could see us back there and we were too young to legally smoke cigarettes. Cigarettes tasted better there. That taste they have when you don’t smoke often and it’s new, that’s what it was. The smell of Marlboros and Camels are two very different things, but both are savory when smoking is new to you, and taste like a fresh croissant in Paris your first day in town. That’s how cigarettes tasted to me there under the bell tower when I was sixteen.
One time, I’d been smoking too much for a few days, and cigarettes didn’t taste new anymore, they just tasted burning and sick. I was sitting on the ledge of the fountain under the bell tower, the fancy cobblestone under my boots, the thick foliage behind the fountain casting shade and a hot August sun at three o’clock. Sweat dripped down my nose. I pulled out a cigarette. My friends stood around preparing to do something: smoke. I said, “It’s too hot to smoke.” They all laughed and repeated what I’d said, “Too hot to smoke.” I felt very cool. I knew in that moment that, whatever happened, I was going to be all right, we all were, because we could find a way to be hip, even there in the middle of nowhere: Bible Belt, cow country, abandoned train-town. I lit a cigarette and forced it down, making myself sick. The bell tower started gonging. We all looked up into the sunlight reflecting off the windows of the bell tower.
There’s a girl I like to tell things to. She doesn’t like to be called a woman, even though she is. I like to tell her these pointless things because they are prizes the trick claw of my brain catches and drops into her lap, worthless as purple stuffed elephants but celebrated in the moment because they got hooked against the odds and extracted. She gives me these things too. We keep passing quarters, piling up pretty plastic toys that look so different hanging in a difficult claw than they did on the worthless heap of memory.
She looks like trash to me, and I like it. I’ve spent years polishing it away, worrying that people could see right through my bag. My cow-shaped under-chin when I tilt my head might be a tell. I check skin tone for smoothness and pockmarks. My stomach is a dead giveaway. But I’ve been assured none of these things are trash markers to anyone other than me. I’ve been assured it’s not visible to the outside world. Then I look at her, and it’s so obvious. The trash signs are everywhere, even through her queerness. Queerness un-trashes people a little, or it can. (Sometimes it goes in the opposite direction, though.) Still, I can see what she would be without the good sex, weird haircut, and interesting clothes, clear as a dump truck at dawn. And I know also, when I look at her, for all my polishing, my face must be the same sort of obviousness and there was never anything I could have done about it. Trash gets into the body and forms it, molds speech and jawlines. It scars the skin with acne kisses from too many greasy-fry dinners. Just overhearing things like Guns N’ Roses and Bon Jovi rots the teeth and yellows the eyes.
It’s something about things. Things like things that hurt. Like whipped cream. $2.49. Something I did that became a thing for a moment. A thing for a moment because it abstracted everything and right then I wanted nothing to do with anything anymore that wasn’t abstract and indecipherable; that wasn’t a vague term.
Whippets turn the world into vague terms. My cousin and I had the same feeling about these days. So we went to the store at dusk all year and purchased cans of generic whipped cream, the aerosol kind. Then we went to the park. Then the sun would be setting. Then we laid down our sixteen-year-old trashy girl bodies on the merry-go-round. Then we pushed with our feet so that we were spinning. Then we tilted the jagged plastic nozzles of the whipped cream aerosol canisters to our lips. You don’t shake the bottle. You don’t want any cream to come out. Just the gas. We pushed the nozzle sideways and sucked. Inhaled. The nozzles have jagged tips for decorating. If you are dressing an ice cream sundae, the jagged edge makes the whipped cream wavy. It makes patterns, like stars. The gas creamed us. The gas cut stars out of our minds. Made us soft edges left over. The park was always blue-gray and empty just after dusk, and newly cool, and we spun, and everything hummed and became a vague terminology of dusk-glowing trees, cement, and swing sets. Our minds were creamy stars poking through the dusk, waving us goodbye.
It’s something about things that hurt, how they stay and shape the body. Things that you seek pleasure in when you’re trashy. It makes you tell stories like this. Like we were basically huffing glue, but it seemed sweet because it smelled like whipped cream. It makes vague terminology very appealing.
I looked different than my cousin while we were tripping from fumes on the merry-go-round. I looked better. Which meant I was. I liked to draw upside-down crosses below my eyes, like two sacrilegious tears ending above my cheeks. I wanted to draw Jesus there on them, a black silhouette of him hanging upside down. I drew upside-down crosses under my eyes and purchased a silver grill cut with upside-down crucifixes I wore on my three upper front teeth, and went around the country roads on my mountain bike when I was fifteen. I liked to go stand in the middle of cornfields in the autumn in a black bowler and trench coat and pretend I’d painted the sky, grinning my upside-down silver Jesus grill toward the pink sunset.
I was like a cat that way: staring at skylines, staring at ghosts. We liked to go to the haunted bridge in the next town over. Three towns away there was a haunted ditch, and in the country roads between Nashville and Hoyleton, Illinois, there was a haunted bump. You had to know exactly where that haunted bump was or you would never find it since it was on an unmarked black tar road with only trees on one side and a cornfield on the other, repeating for miles, and no markers. The knowledge of where that bump was got passed down to you from other people, and then you had to really memorize it before you showed anyone else, be taken there a few times, or else you’d end up at the wrong bump in the road late at night and try to do that haunted thing that we did at that bump, and it wouldn’t work, because you weren’t paying enough attention and parked your car on some other, ordinary, everyday, non-haunted bump in that road. And then nothing would happen. Then you would just be some kids sitting in a car near a bump in the road waiting in vain to be haunted.
I experienced the bump haunting three times. I went looking for it, seeking out a fourth haunted bump experience, but by myself for once, and instead I saw a UFO that I had to drive very fast to get away from, and I never went back to that haunted bump again.
The haunted bump haunting was a very mechanical kind of haunting. If you situated yourself just right, it would happen every time like ghostly clockwork. It wasn’t as finicky as my haunted bridge. The ghost of the haunted bridge would only come out very sporadically, and even when she did, it was debatable what had actually happened. This bump’s manner of haunting was not debatable.
The thing you had to do was park your car three yards past the bump and facing east. This situates your car sloping down a not very steep hill, front pointing downhill with the bump uphill behind you. It’s very important that you understand exactly what I am saying about the situating of the car, or else it won’t be obvious why what is about to happen when you do this is so scary.
Okay. So now you’re sitting there. You’re sloping downhill
. Put the car in neutral. Turn it off. Leave it on. Either way. I usually turned it off so I could hear the cicadas for added effect. When the car is off and in neutral, it is natural that the car will roll forward, downhill. At first, it doesn’t move at all. For several minutes, it just sits there. But then, it starts rolling, backward, uphill, gaining speed as it goes, faster and faster, backward, uphill, in the middle of the dark woods, until it gets over that bump, all the way over by a few yards, and then the car slides off to the side of the road into the dirt shoulder. Then it stops. Then you’ve experienced the haunted bump.
What’s actually happening there is, a school bus crashed there in the sixties. Right there past that bump, and twenty kids died. The bus stalled in the middle of the road there and a drunk driver of a pickup truck crashed into it. The ghosts of those kids want to reverse their death over and over. Ghosts are very associative. So if you go there with any vehicle and stop where they crashed, which happens to be by that bump which is the only marker, they will come and push you back, then leave your car off to the side on the dirt shoulder, out of harm’s way.
I wonder how anyone found out about that haunted bump in the first place. It must have taken a lot of sitting around. There’s a lot of free time in the country.
My friends once tested the ghost children theory and went to the bump with bags of flour. They covered the car in flour and tossed it on the road there by that bump. Then they situated the car correctly for the haunting and sat in the car and waited. It rolled backward, uphill and all. The haunting worked as it did every time. Then they got out of the car and took out their flashlights, and they found children’s handprints in the flour that covered the car. About twenty pairs of them, and footprints in the flour on the road as well. Then they all pissed their pants.
I’ve only pissed my pants three times in my entire life, and always when I was sleeping. Once when I was just out of diapers. Once when I was thirteen and had pneumonia with a fever of 104. And once when I was seventeen. It was just a very bad dream. But I’d been cutting myself all day the day before I went to sleep in that nightmare. (Cutting is also something to do, like smoking.) And then, in the summers especially, maintenance of cutting adds some other activities. Self-mutilation in the summer requires styling the legs of black panty hose to be worn like chic longgloves over the blood-caked scabs. This way you can still wear T-shirts and be cool in the midwestern humidity.
There is nothing like pissing yourself from a nightmare, with scabs on your arms. Waking up, a year away from legal adulthood, to wet yellow sheets in the wavering sunlight below dust-drenched windows will make you understand your own fragility in a way only akin to suddenly realizing you are elderly. It’s a gray happening.
Nearly, but not quite, as shocking as surprise exorcisms. If you are going to be Goth in the country and really go for it, I would highly recommend a nonconsensual, surprise Southern Baptist exorcism. There’s just nothing else that can compete. That moment when your minister lays hands on you, and the faces of the congregation, people you thought you knew well, turn, doll-eyed and pitying, to begin praying some unknown demon out of you, their lips mouthing out whisperings of the same prayer in unison: that really is the pinnacle.
It’s going to take a lot to cause this occurrence. You will have to commit yourself to a very particular type of disturbance in order to get an entire congregation of Southern Baptists to conspire with God against your soul. You don’t have to do exactly what I did, but I’ll share my experience as a template that can be reworked and altered, specifically tailored for your own personal CG (country Goth) experience.
Always begin with the Bible. I took advantage of my church duties. Wednesday night Bible study was a rotation. There were twelve regular members, myself included. Mine was an enforced attendance. Each week, a different Bible study member selected the text to be read and studied. Every twelfth week was my week to select the text, read it aloud to the congregation, and then sit through an hour-long discussion. For this, I utilized Halloween paint. It is very important to approach all unpleasant tasks in life as a performance art piece, especially if you are a teenager. On Wednesday nights, I dressed like I was going to kill a Marilyn Manson concert. I approached the pulpit with my big red Bible, held my hands out like an offering, and spread the Bible open, the thick, soft pages resting splayed and flowing out like a woman’s thick parted thighs. My scabs healing underneath the hacked-up panty hose I wore on my arms. Chains rattling from my hips, and fucked-up Barbie doll-head necklaces hanging around my neck; Vietnam ear tokens honoring the violence of girlishness. There I stood before the congregation in the small steepled white church, under the empty cross, exposed rafters echoing barnyards, my eyes painted thick with black curlicues swirling up from my lids to around my temples, and upside-down black crosses resting like tears above my cheeks. My white powdered cheeks, sparkling fake-blood-red lips, and hot-pink dreadlocks sticking out from beneath a black bowler.
And I read them their Bible. I read the congregation their sacred text, dressed that way on their pulpit. I spoke in a booming, deepthroated voice that, at moments, devolved into a growl, echoing through their sanctuary like it was a black magic road show we were doing. I read them their Ezekiel. I read them their sacred book and I made it mine. I made their reverence my blasphemy, my sacrilege.
It was the word of the Lord I was reading, and more importantly, it was the word of their Lord saying through my horrible mouth, “And I will lay the dead carcasses of the children before their idols; and I will scatter your bones round about your altars.” And saying, “I will drench the land with your flowing blood all the way to the mountains, and the ravines will be filled with your flesh.” And saying, “And they shall know that I am the LORD, and that I have not said in vain that I would do this evil.”
It was like a song I was singing to them, like low screamcore, like they’d never heard the words so crisp and clear before. And the earth will become flesh and the birds will peck at the flesh until the rivers are rivers of blood, for I am the Lord your God, sort of thing. It was my best performance piece ever. It was the best because it was happening in real time, in real space, on holy ground, making righteous people question and gawk and quake a little. I would go so far as to say there was some quaking. And there was a woman named Betty there. That made it really terrific.
It’s things like this you will have to do to reach the pinnacle point (the pinnacle point being nonconsensual exorcism by people you have known all your life). Carving pentacles into your forehead with razor blades is always an option as well and requires less setup and performative skill. I prefer pentacles to pentagrams, as I find pentagrams to be a bit of an overkill, and rather silly as Satanism is so blasé and reactionary an endeavor. I also highly recommend being a homosexual. Rural Goth trash just reads better homo. If you are not already a homosexual, you can easily become one. I became one as young as the age of five, so it will be all the easier to do in adolescence at a time when most have a more developed aesthetic understanding of the libido.
Oh there are so many things to do.
You can harass military recruiters who set up tables in your school’s lunchroom by brandishing neon feather boas and dancing around them singing Adam Ant’s “You’re Just Too Physical” as reworked by Trent Reznor, for instance. You will definitely want to spend a lot of time in the old part of the cemetery, just hanging out, then tell people about it. If you are very ambitious, write some poems there. I always did. Try some necromancy just for kicks, if you are wanting to be a true professional. Don’t tell anyone about that. Some things we must keep to ourselves.
When I was very young, I had a voice in a well that I kept all to myself. As commanded by the voice in the well, our conversations were kept secret, and that was for the best, in retrospect, I am sure. The voice in the well was gray as the stone that housed it. It was a very grounded male voice of wisdom that told me many important things. It began telling me things when I was five years old; then wh
en I was eight, my family cemented the well and it was covered then and I couldn’t hear the voice anymore. But when I could it told me many important things. It told me to never grow up. It told me to always smell the grass. It told me the wind would guide and protect me and loved me unconditionally because I was exceptionally beautiful to the wind in my area. It told me where to find dead things.
I found many dead things guided by the voice in the well. One dead cow, legs pointing straight up toward the afternoon sky and stiff like Viagra meat. I found one dead dog gutted in the woods by a homeless man who’d been living there all summer. It was a golden retriever mix of something, and its belly was sliced open, full of maggots and flies so thick it looked like the thick love I had for the friend I found it with, and I would only have ever wanted to find something so perfectly fucked up with someone I loved as much as I loved that blond girl. The Air Force stole her perfect heart years later.
I found a nest of rabbits drowned in puddles; drowned by the bare hands of my six-year-old cousin who had spent the previous night glassy-eyed and babbling prophecies about stillborn kittens. So many dead birds fallen, innumerable deer, one dead squirrel I had known, and many dead classmates at funerals I attended during the summers when teenagers liked to have deadly wrecks or drown in lakes and flooded ponds. I found death in the eyes of friends who began enlisting in the military so they didn’t have to become farmers and break the legs of chickens with hormones. It was a deep well of death in their eyes and there were voices there too, but they were not my voice.
My voice in the well was gray and kind. My voice in the well was also probably dead. The voice in my well told me the most important thing and the most difficult thing. It told me empathy. Repeatedly. It told me, “Empathy. Child. Be a child. Be an empathetic child. Always. All we kill is ourselves.” It told me, “All we love is ourselves.” It told me, “All. We. Kill. Is. Our. Selves.”
Things to Do When You're Goth in the Country Page 19
