One of the men turns, gestures at me with his hand holding a beer. “What you looking at, wetback? You got a problem?”
“No,” I say. My hands shake with nervous fear.
I’m scared, but I feel a twinge of pride as I walk inside the store for controlling my temper, not spitting back in his face, “Yeah, I got a problem with you.”
For once, I do the right thing.
I think it over as I go down the aisles picking up toilet paper and toothpaste. It’s a blessing and a miracle that I’m even standing here and witnessing this country store. I have no illusion of ever being free enough of my pride not to react and leap into a fight with these guys or any others. I’m conditioned, used to fighting as the course of action. But I’ve learned, after reading books, that most people don’t react that way. So I’m proud to hold my ground.
My friend Denise would be pleased to see how I handle this, buying groceries and walking home instead of ending up in jail for fighting turtle killers. However, to counter the pleasure I feel in avoiding a conflict, I won’t lie and tell you I’m brave, because I’m not. As I stood there with them staring down at me with hateful glares, a frightening expectation of violence overwhelmed me. I envisioned my own demise. It had always been the dread that filled the space between me and my opponents. It wasn’t so much the beating in store for me, but that the violent history of my past weighed heavy in the space between them and me. The history of my father’s car driving up late at night and me in the bed with my brother and sister, all of us terrified at my father’s drunken footsteps as they approached the front of door. Then there was the noise of broken lamps and bodies hitting the floor, screams and growls, me hiding under the covers clutching my sister and brother, waiting in the dark for the moment when the door opened. A slant of light cutting into the darkness, my drunken dad lifting me up, carrying me out like a suitcase into the car . . . or he beating my mother or my mother yelling at him . . . or so many other dreadful moments that lay like hot coals burning me, scorching me before I even dared think of owning up to my wrongs. I was terrified, filled with the dread of things to come, of the impending end of life, the end of Orlando.
It’s an incredible morning. I never have heard so many birds chirping madly in the forest behind BJ’s house. Blissful September. I am so happy with the gray cast of days, the smell of greens on the air, the scent of toast, coffee. And me? I’m in the first new pajamas I’ve ever worn. I walk outside, smoke a cigarette, look around with no guard to yell at me. There are no steel cell doors clanging, no intercoms screeching out numbers or work details. Orders for us to shower or eat or sleep or turn lights off don’t exist.
I try cooking my first burgers. I end up burning them as I watch crows glean the fields. I make my first salad, take my first bath, plant my first pine tree next to the door, take walks in the morning at my own speed; I don’t have to roll out of my bunk at any particular time, can sleep as long as I want. I sit at the table for the first time, eat with Lila to enjoy the green chili soup and fried potatoes I’ve made. I open the windows to let in the chill September morning scented with the smell of burnt cinnamon from the forest leaf mulch, the aroma of warm dirt giving off its stored resins to the brisk dawn chill.
Cloudy mornings make me feel like writing. I try a poem about the conquistadores coming north, fighting with the Indians, the pueblos in New Mexico, but I end up laughing at my poem because the Indians and conquistadores were making love and trading and living with each other in peace.
There is so much I never knew that there is no way to feel but sorry that I can never catch up. I just resign myself to the fact that I don’t know much. I bury myself in books about the Europeans slaughtering the natives, raping women, throwing infants off pyramids, burning entire cities, enslaving millions. . . . I consume enough violence in the pages of Lila’s history books to last me a lifetime.
While reading, sometimes I lift my eyes and gaze at the space in front of me. Sometimes a few tears run down my cheeks. Sometimes I bite my lip trying not to cry from gratitude. I am a great pretender, appearing tough on the outside and really vulnerable inside. You have to know this is the way it has to be, otherwise in the aggressive environments I grew up in, I would have been squashed under cruel heels like a cockroach. My cockiness was my defense, and there was no such thing as a supportive environment, essential as it seems for a growing kid. I held my own with a brazen exterior. Also, my resistance to adults who were kind was based on resentment—I could not trust anyone. My defiant thinking showed its fear of kindness. I could not believe people who had not gone through what I had; they were undeserving of my approval or acceptance. I considered them beneath me. I dismissed teachers and counselors offering me constructive feedback, people who wanted to believe in me. I didn’t need them, because when I really did, they were never around: after work they went home, had money, food, clothes, went shopping at malls.
I was their paycheck. I paid for their lawns and swimming pools and birthday parties and their kids living in nice dorms or apartments. I was only their work-place kid, their part-time problem. Arrogant, outlaw-cool, I told myself I’d rather get the respect of a thug or someone who beat on me than of a fair-weather stranger only around to collect a check for what he claims is the work he does “helping me.”
Despite all of this distancing of myself from those who sought to aid me in my times of distress, to be honest, as much of a risk-taker as I was, I knew I was the luckiest Come Back Kid of all time . . . whether you want to call it God or the Creator, I felt it, felt this thing stirring in me. I was saved by this mysterious uplift in my spirit that always came on when I needed it. I don’t know how to explain it, but it was a kindling of growing light in my spirit that filled my thinking with an adamant passion that, if I only had one break in life, I would take the journey to freedom and see what was out there for myself my way.
I sit on the doorstep looking up at the stars. Between the stars, I see my brother’s face. He’s standing on the other side of the fence the night we planned to run away together to grandma’s. I knew it wasn’t just a fence that separated us.
Back in the early sixties when we were in the orphanage, I never thought about. Nor at Green Mill. It didn’t come to me until now, as I write this in 2019. That fence where my brother and I stood that evening, when I begged him to come with me, to climb over and follow me, was much more than a fence. It separated our worlds. I can see his face now before me, his brown eyes filled with fear. I knew he’d be behind that fence forever, that he was gentle and sensitive and caring and loving and that when four older boys raped him, when they beat him up, something that made him a loving child in the world had been taken and burned to ash. I knew for a fact he would always live behind a fence. I understood, looking into his face, that we had to go our own ways in life, that’d he stand there forever behind the mother-fence, his fear fence, behind the drug-fence, always behind a fence afraid to come over into a universe brimming with freedom. See his small, gentle hands clutching the wire with the barbs piercing deep into his palms like a young Christ, the metal thorns digging deeper and deeper as he gripped them with ever more fierce desperation, until they punctured his heart and stabbed at the last hope, bits of his flesh left on the fence like some animal’s fur that had tried to escape but failed. His failure was fatal, and he’d do his best to hide from the pain or numb it with drugs. He’d live as a slave to it, always roaming along fence lines, looking over into freedom, under the illusion he was safe, that the adults ordering his day would give him true freedom, would come with wire cutters and send him on; he’d wait forever not knowing it would never come. Still, he believed that things would turn okay if only he obeyed the adults. Instead, I would have the unknown universe to explore, the freedom I dreamed of, the same freedom the crawdads, praying mantis, grasshoppers, deer and rabbits have. Me climbing over that fence that night meant we would live with two different hearts, in two separate countries—one of hope and the other of despair—a
nd that I would be led on by the stars and moon in my life, stars I found I could never get enough of. Many evenings I’d find myself sitting on Lila’s stoop, wondering how it could be that all those stars and planets went on forever.
The word forever got me. I couldn’t think of something as forever, especially since my whole life up to that point was always broken up into bureaucratic or religious blocks, schedules: wake up, march to Mass every morning at six am; move me here, take me there, move me to the next dorm, the next cell, the next housing unit. . . . Nothing was forever except my imprisonment, my abandonment. When it came to the world and me in it, I lived in the context of waiting: waiting for my mom to come back, waiting for chowtime, waiting for rec field, waiting for my time to get done, waiting for Jesus to step in and save me, waiting for my hurt to go away, waiting for prayers to work their power, waiting, waiting, waiting. . . . Time and how it worked was always in the hands of my overseers. I never controlled it, never had it in my dominion to shape and form and plan a goal at the end of such-and-such a time. They decided my life, they decided my day, every hour, every minute . . . except when I broke the perimeters and took Time back.
It was one night in 1964. I was six. I stood at the fence boundary of the orphanage. Earlier in the week, I pleaded with my brother to come with me. He agreed, and we planned our escape . . . to our happiness. We’d find our parents. I told him they were being held hostage behind locked doors. He agreed. “Let’s save Mom.” When the lights were off in the dorm, the nun turned in, closed her door and we snuck out from our separate dorms and met under the apple tree. We walked to the fence; I climbed over, creeped low in the irrigation ditch. All I could think was that the stars would guide us to our parents—that’s how it worked in Disney movies, how it worked with baby Jesus being born and the Three Kings. I picked a star that was going to take us to her. I felt like a star, glowing with light in Heaven because I was at last free like them. I rose, leapt out of the ditch, jumped through the fields, panting as I turned to tell my brother, We did it! We did it! But he was not there.
I searched the dark, dashed back, turning along the ditch to the fence to find Camilo standing on the other side.
“What happened?”
“I’m not going, Orlando.”
“What do you mean? I know the way, you don’t have to worry. It’ll be okay. We follow the stars. They’ll take us. I talked to God already, and he says it’s okay, he’ll make sure we’re okay.”
“You don’t even know where Mom is, stupid. She’s gone.”
I grabbed the fence and yanked it, angrily replying, “No she isn’t! She wants us to come save her!”
“Oh yeah, where is she?”
“That’s why we’re going to see Grandma and Grandpa. They’ll help us—they know. And besides, all we have to do is follow the stars. She told me in my dream, I talk to her there.”
“You don’t even know the way. You’re going to be in bad trouble, get the beating of your life or get lost and killed.”
“No. Just follow the moon over there. See it, she’s waiting on us to go now, so we better.”
Camilo lowered his head. He vanished in the dark, headed back to the dorms. I ran fast as I could in the direction I thought Grandpa lived. I looked up at the sky and stars and said, “I’m coming, just don’t leave me. I’m right behind you.”
I can still do it. Sometimes the stars disappear behind trees or behind hills or buildings, but they always come back up, and I am right behind them.
I felt alive, full of adventure, looked forward to what was coming: the embrace from Grandma, the food, the love, kisses, tears. “Let’s run away. Let’s run, let’s run,” I kept saying to myself aloud. And I answered, “Yes, okay, I am doing it.”
After hours and miles, the sun rose on the horizon, I found a place under a bridge to fall asleep. I awoke later to someone picking me up. A policeman.
They took me back. Camilo was right: I was beaten with paddles by four nuns taking turns. But I vowed to try again. After I could walk, shower and my welts went down and turned from black to purple to red, I could run. I would.
Many times after that, many paddles later, I ran away, all the way into my seventh year. I ran, kept running, but never found my mom.
As the memories recede, I’m back in Green Mill. I haven’t changed much. It’s mid-September, pines shake with the breeze at dawn, crows swoop and herons glide in and perch on logs in ponds. I’m having the time of my life here, still guided by the stars. I’m out in the wild; on one side the coastal plain, on the other the Appalachian mountains and me in the Piedmont foothills. That’s me sitting on a doorstep at night in Green Mill, the same stars burning all over the world as they did on my runaway nights . . . cattails and saw grass, bullfrogs.
I tried it their way—that is, the way of the nuns when they told me prayer had the power to do miracles. I needed those miracles as much as I needed air to breathe. I tried kneeling at the altar, God knows, for days, weeks, months, saying hundreds of Our Fathers and Hail Marys that Father Gallagher gave me for penance. I knew there were some things I could not even talk to God about, like the same Father Gallagher who propped us on his lap, fondled our butts, stuck his fingers in our anuses, played with our penises and sodomized the older boys (my brother included). I had to keep that secret, or God would burn me to a crisp, even if I whispered it.
I knelt on the marble ledge of the side altar knowing all this, certain God had a plan, that it was okay, that were supposed to let Father do nasty stuff; otherwise he might tell God not to bring our parents back. Because he was God’s emissary, his servant, God’s power came through him to us. So really, I thought, God was fine with him doing that.
I looked up at the life-sized holy ones—St. Anthony, Baby Jesus, Our Virgin Mary—studied their creamy faces with the softest brown eyes, their beautiful, long, slender fingers extended in such a way that I knew they were blessing me. I knelt until I grew calluses on my kneecaps, crossed myself with Holy Water a thousand times, stood erect in the choir loft and sang the loudest any kid ever sang—sang more sincerely, more passionately than anyone ever did, thinking the louder I was, the more likely He could hear me and listen.
I studied hard for my first Communion, sunlight stabbing my eyes blind where I stood on the steps in the front of the big building where visitors entered. This was the driveway where the official had dropped us off one night. This was where I then wore a white shirt and black tie and polished black shoes and smiled, squinting my eyes, at the camera. I held a tulip in my right hand, a Bible and black rosary in my left.
Even now, I blame the sun for my tears as I wondered if my mom would show up. It was a special day, almost every kid’s family was there: grandmas, grandpas, aunts, uncles, cousins, brothers, sisters—they all came that day. Lines of cars pulled around the oval-shaped, gravel driveway.
She never did. Nights after that, I knelt at my cot, clasped my tiny hands and prayed for the Lord to fix things. I promised to obey Him, even become a priest, obey the nuns and even take on all kinds of extra chores. I’d collect the sheets on the third floor of the main building, where the older boys slept, roll them into huge bundles, tie them and pull the huge bundles down the long fire-escape tube-slide attached to the side of the 3-story building that went all the way down onto the courtyard. From there, I’d lug them to the laundryroom across the courtyard, help wash them, alongside the nuns dressed in white smocks, white veils and white aprons. We’d sweat together in the midst of the big ironing machines, in the billowing steam and acrid detergents. From there, I’d go up to the classrooms, dust-mop hallways to a gleam, then varnish the classroom desks, sweep the three floors of stairs and head to the kitchen to work the massive iron vats for oatmeal, toast dozens of loaves of bread, make cheese sandwiches and push the hot food carts down long corridors to the dining room. Afterwards I’d clean the washroom and pick up the toys in the playroom. Mom never showed up.
One winter day, wrapped in sweater and ca
p, I buffed the chapel tiles, paused, approached the saints, I begged for love. I wanted for them to show me they were with me, but they did not appear or give me anything. I stared at their placid features smiling down on me. I sat in a pew and wept. I believed I was the worst boy ever born. I must have been, for even saints did not love me. I had made my mother run off. There was nothing left for me to do but run, as fast as I could, into the darkness beyond the fence line; to see what I could find.
Now in Green Mill, decades later, I find myself preferring this altar, this benign penance of bookstores and the books within. Books are places without fences. No false Gods. Just human beings working out their problems, some worse than mine, as best they can. There are human beings with terrible flaws, who did wrong to their loved ones, betrayed them, left them, even murdered them. Humans and their wars, people who shocked me by the horror they were capable of, who cried, stole and ran away from their worst fears. They lied, cheated and were all alone in the world.
Lila and I now spend more time together. The days are chilly but refreshing. She arranged her work schedule to work more from home. I like that, I need her around, find the days more pleasant with a woman close to me. I find these to be the best days of my life.
We go into Chapel Hill to visit her friends. I buy my first books: Levertov, Tranströmer, Levine, Alarcón, Baraka, Coleman, Strand, Maggie Estep. We go with her sister Nancy to Ocracoke Island on the Outer Banks, where I fish for Atlantic blues. I visit the home of Thomas Wolfe in Asheville, drive to Raleigh to hear poets read.
Often I am out with Nancy and her family going to the coast, or with her oldest sister Kimberly at Longfield Federal prison facility, where I read poetry to the inmates or with Lila and a poetry publisher in Chapel Hill. Also the neighbor Peter Chambers, his dog Hitman and I tramp around the forest and fish the ponds so brimming with bigmouth bass that we throw many back.
American Orphan Page 8
