If Jack's in Love
Page 26
“Go,” I said.
Mom spun around to give me a reproachful look and then her eyes were diverted by something behind me.
“Your father is waving. Turn and wave good-bye to him.”
But I didn’t.
I wasn’t going to look back ever again.
a note from the author
When my friends and I were twelve or thirteen, the arbiter in matters of taste, fashion and style was a kid who lived at the end of my street, named Barry. Barry had a subscription to Arnold Gingrich’s Esquire. He wore the first alligator shirts I ever saw and he made known to us the importance of the alligator for pectoral adornment, as opposed to the horse, or the dolphin. This was in 1967, when kids all over the country were sporting love beads and Nehru jackets. I myself was well on my way to becoming a hippie until Barry set me on a (perhaps) less evolved track. Still, I thought he knew everything worth knowing. Looking back, I believe it might have been Barry, more than my parents or the Catholic school I attended, who truly educated me.
One thing I learned from him was how crucial it was to have nothing to do with the Smiths. (Let’s call them the Smiths.) My neighborhood was a tidy place, a working neighborhood, southern in tone without being redneck. The people were decent. They kept nice houses and nice lawns. In those days there was no guarantee the neighborhood kids would go to college. I remember how shocked I was when a guy who sold pot to the neighborhood kids got accepted into Princeton. I never even knew him to read a book. He must have done it on the side, when no one was watching.
The Smiths lived on a marginal road that had been cut through the trees to allow access to other, nicer streets. Theirs was the only house on the road. There was no pop in the house, just a mom and several hyperactive kids. The mom was a sight to behold, bone-thin, scraggly, narrow-lipped. At another, more populist time she could have been a heroine in a Steinbeck novel. When she called her kids to supper she shrieked. She was abusive and drunken, an irrationally angry woman. No one in our neighborhood had much compassion for her, or, for that matter, for any whose tough luck placed them low on the social scale. I guess we were only a step above that horror ourselves. It’s why the folks on my mother’s side, who were kind of country, didn’t like country music. It was too close to home.
Maybe that was the problem people had with the Smiths. People never want to be reminded of what they might have been, or might be. One of the Smiths, named David, was my age. He used to come around on his bicycle to harass us, but only because we never let him play with us. He’d shout names and we’d tell him to get lost. He never fought, he just came around and hollered obscenities. I remember his face, livid, purple, contorted by pain, rage and rejection. There was something ritualistic about his interaction with the neighborhood. We let him know he shouldn’t be there. It wasn’t his neighborhood.
Barry had laid down the law concerning him. Smith was scum, white trash. His name was never mentioned except in the most contemptuous of tones. “Get out of here, no one wants you.” “Who invited you?” Occasionally, in a weak moment, David would catch your eye and try to appeal to you, looking for reason, civility and gentleness. That was tough. Then you’d have to put him in his place. I remember one day, against all convention, he parked his bike and sat on the steps in front of Barry’s house. Barry made a point of hosing the steps down afterwards.
For all I know, David might have been a nice boy. He might have had talent, decency and goodness. Since I was no kinder to him than anyone else was, I never found out. I didn’t insult him to his face, but I took care to speak of him behind his back with the appropriate measure of scorn.
Now I wonder why. Being Catholic, I was out of place in that WASP neighborhood. My friends went to public schools, I to parochial. I rode a different school bus and stood on a different corner every morning waiting for it. I was overly sensitive to such differences. The dormer windows on my house faced the back yard, whereas every other house on the block had dormer windows facing the front. Our telephone exchange began with 288. Why did everyone else have 282? Did the others take note? Did they see that I was marked? And then there was my father, who was an auditor with the IRS. My friends’ fathers were bricklayers and truck drivers. Their fathers taught them the basics of baseball, how to fish, how to hunt. My dad painted depressing street scenes from his impoverished New Orleans childhood and took me on long drives into the country, looking for UFOs.
I wasn’t ostracized but socially I felt myself on thin ice. I liked books, and I hid what I was reading when my friends came to visit. One time my buddy Stanley told me his parents wouldn’t let him hang around with me because I was a Catholic. I talked him out of that. Another friend’s dad expressed his jubilation when JFK, that Vatican front man, got shot in Dallas. (Remembering himself, he later offered me an apology.) I had the deep longing of the outsider, the genuine outsider, to be an insider. The worst thing anyone could call me was “weird.” “Wetta, you’re so weird.” I was told that constantly, often at moments when I was priding myself on seeming normal. What was so weird about me? It didn’t matter that the words were spoken with affection. I wanted to be like everybody else.
Considering the level of brutality kids suffer when they’re thought of as outsiders, I never had it all that bad. My friends accepted that I couldn’t fish, couldn’t fire a gun, didn’t know how to fix cars. They adjusted to my limitations, seemed to like it that I was wistful and poetic. I dated girls; I got invited to parties.
A kind of tolerance exists even among those who might be considered narrow. Tolerance from working people is the real thing because there’s nothing patronizing about it. The people I grew up with were polite and agreeable, which must have made it all the worse for David Smith. What does it mean when everyone is friendly and pleasant and gets vicious only when you come around? Like I say, I never had it as bad as he did. But maybe I felt things might turn if I wasn’t careful. It’s a good idea to be normal.
The Smiths of the world serve a cautionary purpose. There’s something sacrificial about them. They perform a social function. They set a bottom, a defining limit, to what we dread and fear about ourselves, and reassure us that we haven’t reached it yet.
What happened to David Smith? Did he become a criminal, a sociopath? Maybe he adjusted. Maybe he’s a saint. When I run into people from the old neighborhood they usually can tell me something about the whereabouts of our contemporaries. But no one ever says a thing about David. I’ve thought about him many times over the years and even suffered for his memory. To tell the truth, this book was written, if anything, as a kind of homage to him. Still, I’ve never bothered to ask anyone what happened to him because I’m sure no one would know.
acknowledgments
I would like to thank Amy Einhorn, Alice Tasman and Anna Jardine for their advice, encouragement and support.
about the author
Stephen Wetta grew up in the ’60s and ’70s, was influenced by the music and the literature of the time, drank, used drugs, got into financial trouble, and spent far too much time reading and writing. He knocked around for years at different jobs, didn’t like any of them, and got sober without wanting to. Somehow he wound up with a Ph.D. and worked for ten years as an adjunct. His academic career was singularly undistinguished, and he was eventually hired full-time by a school that couldn’t get rid of him, shortly before he was jailed for tax evasion. If Jack’s in Love is his first novel.