I do not recall my grandfather. He died when I was a year old. His estate was modest, and I only inherited two things—a birdhouse and his disdain of closed-in spaces. My will contains strict instructions that I am to be cremated, a last visit to the cosmic woodstove, the fire’s heat warming my rickety bones one more time. It is against my every instinct to be six feet under, ensconced in cement, a lid of steel scant inches from my nose, the air close and basement damp, the worms and rust consuming.
My Illinois kin passed most of their daylight underground, picking away at coal, then crawling out and spending the remaining hours outside, sitting in scalloped metal chairs in their backyards, the western sun soaking into their bones, building up a reservoir of light against the next day’s gloom. We visited them every summer, driving the four hours to Valier, Illinois, where our relatives lived in a row—Gulleys, Mackeys, Brownings, and Genesios. Everyone in town was related to us, connected by generations of liaisons, some recognized by the church, others not. Feuds from the 1920s were as fresh as yesterday.
“Your great-grandmother Gulley and your great-grandmother Mackey had a fistfight there,” my great-uncle Johnny told me, some fifty years later, pointing to a spot in the street. “I was six years old, and Mrs. Gulley had a new electric washer and yelled across the street to Mrs. Mackey that she was too poor to have an electric washer. They met right there in the middle of the street, slapping and scratching and pulling hair.”
Decades later, he was still embarrassed by it. “But we don’t talk about it,” he said.
“Then what happened?” I persisted, knowing the most interesting topics were the ones people were loathe to discuss.
“Well, Mrs. Gulley’s son married Mrs. Mackey’s daughter, that would be your grandparents, and things worked themselves out.”
When my grandmother wrote her memoir, she left out the story of her mother and mother-in-law duking it out on the streets of Valier and simply noted, “Both our families were pleased with the union.”
There is no humiliation so deep that can’t be remedied with a little public relations.
Whenever we visited Valier, the women would reside in the refined luxury of my aunt Hazel’s home, while the males stayed at our cousin Pooner’s house. Pooner was married to Barbara, a small, nervous woman always at the ready, awaiting the slightest hint from Pooner that he might need something. “Do you want some iced tea?” she’d ask him hourly. “How about some chicken, honey? Want me to fry up a chicken?”
Pooner would smile, nod his head, then rattle the ice in his near-empty glass, his signal that the tea situation was getting dire.
Our relatives in Valier ate chicken morning, noon, and night. Great plates of brown, crusty, fried chickens, necks freshly wrung, who just the day before had been in ignorant chicken bliss, scratching in the dirt and eating bugs, unaware of their fate.
After a while, my relatives came to resemble chickens—heavy on the top with chicken-like legs, fleet of foot. They ran races in Pooner’s side yard. Cousins and uncles, well into their fifties, lining up, pawing at the ground, straining at the bit, then bursting from the blocks and running, their arms pumping, crossing the finish line, then strutting about the yard, struggling mightily to disguise their shortness of breath. These men were in heart attack country and the nearest hospital with a cardiac unit was in Carbondale, thirty miles down Highway 51. Their wives would pace back and forth on the sidelines, wringing their hands.
Barbara would take Pooner by the hand and lead him to a lawn chair. “How about a chicken?”
The children would also race—my brothers and I and our cousin thrice-removed, Lori, whom I secretly loved, but knew I couldn’t marry because we would have deformed children, little ankle-biters with three chicken legs.
On our last night at Pooner’s we would dispense with the chicken and drive to the next town to the Maid-Rite and eat hamburgers and drink flat Coke in Styrofoam cups. On the way back we would stop at my cousin David’s, who lived in a yellow house that had a pool. While we swam, the adults would sit by the pool and visit. That evening, my father would take his annual swim, mounting the diving board, his stomach glowing white in the moonlight, then swan dive into the deep end and swim the length and back underwater. It was amazing to watch, my father slipping gracefully into the water with scarcely a ripple. He would reminisce about diving in the 1956 Olympics, which we believed, since he was our father and would never lie to us.
My father’s participation in sports was limited to one grand exhibit each year—one dive, one basketball shot, one pitch—each of them spectacular. Every fall, when our neighborhood basketball season was well under way, he would emerge from the house, stand at the edge of our gravel court, forty feet from the hoop attached to the front of the barn. He would clap his hands for the basketball, bounce it three times, no more, no less, then heave the ball in a high arc toward the basket and cleanly through it. He would turn and walk back in the house, never speaking a word. In baseball, it was always one pitch, blazing fast and right down the pipe. And that one poetic swan dive at my cousin David’s each summer. We could have sold tickets.
This dramatic flair was typical of the men in my family. They could rise to any occasion, but only once. Sustained excellence had never been their strong suit. They hit it big in their youth, peaking early, which gave them something to talk about the rest of their lives. Each summer they would gather under the maple trees in Pooner’s backyard and relive their past glories, many of them having to do with elaborate pranks they’d pulled off in their heady days of youth. They would wheeze with laughter, their round sides heaving in and out, recalling things they’d done that would have gotten their offspring grounded for life.
I looked forward to our annual visits to Valier and was especially fascinated by Pooner, who had a number of hobbies and indulged them with an unequaled fervor, embracing one pastime after another, never doing anything halfway. When he took up fishing, he had a pond built in the field behind his house. When his wife expressed an interest in sewing, he added a sewing annex to their home. Then came golf, and he had a driving range installed. After muskrats weakened the dam on his pond, he took up varmint control, purchasing a wide assortment of armament, most of it conventional, but some that wasn’t, including what I now suspect were tactical nuclear weapons. Pooner was never one to let the customary constraints of money or law dampen his enthusiasm. Since the other adults we knew valued moderation and restraint, we children were inordinately fond of Pooner, knowing he could always be depended upon to be interesting.
Pooner’s little brother, Clarence, father of Lori, lived next door to Pooner and Barbara. Clarence owned the only Harley-Davidson motorcycle in town and consequently served as the town’s volunteer policeman, with the authority to arrest anyone he wanted for the slimmest of reasons. He would take us for rides through town on his Harley, looking for ne’er-do-wells to incarcerate. Clarence was a rogue male, a bull elephant; he kept girlie magazines in his bathroom, which led to an outbreak of colonic activity among my brothers and me, requiring frequent trips to the restroom.
At its peak, Valier had roughly seven hundred residents, a grocer, a hardware store, a Gulf gas station, Pinky’s candy store, and an auto body shop. My second cousin Virginia had married a man named Barney, who served as the school superintendent in the neighboring town. Virginia and Barney were our family’s success story. They lived in a brick ranch house, had a dishwasher, garbage disposal, and bought a new car every two years. The rest of the family was eating their dust.
Barney was too dignified to run footraces. He would sit in the scalloped metal chair in his suit and tie, his hair neatly combed, the embodiment of dignity. His father, Pinky, had owned the candy store, and was well regarded until he put a pool table in the back room of the store and was placed on every prayer list in town. Methodists, Baptists, Pentecostals, and Presbyterians laid aside their differences to unite on the one thing they could agree—that Pinky Genesio was headed straight to hel
l.
My dad was in awe of Barney Genesio and pointed to him as the archetype of excellence. “That Barney Genesio, he’s really something. Probably the greatest man in our family. It’s a great family that can give the world a Barney Genesio,” my father would say whenever Barney’s name was mentioned. Technically, our family had not produced Barney. He had married into us, but this was a genealogical nicety my father was willing to overlook. Indeed, my dad often adopted famous persons into our family, declaring them to be great-great uncles or third cousins or some other distant relation.
I grew up convinced I was the great-great nephew of Alvin C. York, the World War I hero and Medal of Honor winner, whom the movie Sergeant York portrayed, starring Gary Cooper. Coincidentally, we were also related to Gary Cooper. “I’m not sure exactly how,” my father said. “But it’s on your grandmother’s side. One of her uncles married a Cooper.”
On our visits to Valier, my father and cousins would sit underneath the maple trees and speculate, spinning out a thin string of conversation, like a spider building a web, attaching our family to some well-known personality. One evening, my cousin Clarence mentioned The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour, then playing on Wednesday nights.
“We’re related to her, you know,” my father said.
“Related to who?” I asked.
“Cher,” Dad said. “She was a Mackey on your grandmother’s side.”
My grandmother Mackey’s family was so large they could have formed their own country. Invariably, every famous person we were related to was on the Mackey side of our family tree.
Clarence frowned. “I thought Cher was a Cherokee.”
“Yep, that’s right,” Dad said. “She’s one of the Cherokee Mackeys.”
“How come I never heard of this until now?” Clarence asked.
“Beats me,” Dad said. “She used to come to the family reunions when she was a kid. Tall, skinny kid. Long black hair.”
“I didn’t know she was a Mackey,” Pooner said. “Is that her last name? Cher Mackey?”
“Must be,” my father said, clearly relieved no one present seemed to know Cher’s last name.
When I returned to school in the fall, I told all my friends I was related to Cher. Since none of them knew her last name, it was an easy sell, and my standing among my peers rose. Being related to Cher turned out to be the highlight of my younger years, and I spoke about our kinship eagerly and often to anyone who would listen. I also told them about my humble origins, descended as I was from Belgian glassworkers and miners of coal, just to let them know I was as common as the next man, a regular Joe, who although related to famous people, never let it go to my head.
Chapter 8
Miss Huddleston
When I was in the sixth grade, I nearly died. Nearly dying is vastly superior to dying. It is every bit as dramatic, but not as permanent. My parents took me to several doctors, none of whom were able to diagnose my illness. I was tired all the time, irritable, and perspired constantly. My mother had been suffering the same symptoms, and for a while I thought I was menopausal, but that turned out not to be the case.
Peanut was a great fan of Ripley’s Believe It or Not! and enjoyed nothing more than working an odd fact into conversation whenever he could. “Maybe you have the plague,” he said, then pointed out, rather cheerfully, that it had killed seventy-five million people in the Middle Ages. “All it takes is one flea bite and you’re a goner. I read about it in Ripley’s Believe It or Not!”
Fleas, we had. Our dog Zipper was thick with them and had scratched her fur off down to the pink, with the exception of a few tufts of fur she couldn’t reach. She looked like a victim of radiation poisoning.
I spent three weeks on the living room couch, eating cherry popsicles and watching reruns of Petticoat Junction. Peanut had told me that in the opening credits of the show, when Bobbie Jo, Billie Jo, and Betty Jo were swimming in the water tank, you could see them naked if you looked closely. I’d never seen a naked woman before, though not for lack of trying. Like generations of youth before me, I scoured each issue of the National Geographic in our school library, hoping to glimpse an uncovered breast. Mrs. McNeff, the school librarian, was diligent about removing such pictures from the Geographic, but had missed one and Billy Grubb had found it. Billy Grubb had a nose for depravity and was voted Most Likely to Become a Pervert our senior year of high school.
All I ever saw of Bobbie Jo, Billie Jo, and Betty Jo were their necks and a hint of collarbone, and even that was fuzzy. We lived thirty miles from the television tower and Petticoat Junction came in blurry, even when I wrapped tin foil around the antenna. Even so, I became enchanted with the madcap antics of Eb Dawson, Newt Kiley, and Floyd Smoot, and was hooked on the show by the end of the first week.
It was a splendid three weeks, my poor health notwithstanding. My brother Doug told my teacher, Miss Huddleston, I was dying, so she never bothered sending home any homework. Instead, she had the class make an It’s-Been-Nice-Knowing-You card, and had everyone at school sign it, even Roydeena Feltner, who wrote that she was sorry for hitting me and that I was the bravest person she’d ever met.
Eventually, my mother took me to Dr. Kirtley, who tested me for mononucleosis.
“They call it the kissing disease, you know,” Dr. Kirtley said. “Somebody been kissing you?” He winked at my mother.
I had two aunts—big-lipped women who wore bright orange lipstick and stuck their lips to my cheeks like suction cups. Whenever they were within arm’s length, they’d pull me to them and glom on to my cheek like a sucker fish. Now it appeared they had infected me. Killed by my big-lipped aunts.
Fortunately, the test for mono came back negative. Dr. Kirtley ran more tests, which came up empty, so my parents began losing interest and gave me up for dead. I was the runt of the litter anyway and the prospects for my survival had always been dim. Child mortality rates were higher then, and people had extra kids to make up for the ones they lost. As concern for my well-being waned, I sensed I was on my own health-wise; my resolve deepened, and I began to recover. But for three weeks, the buzzards were circling.
The worst part of missing school was being away from Miss Huddleston, who looked a lot like Betty Jo. Every teacher I’d ever had was a hundred years old, with large flaps of fat underneath their upper arms that jiggled when they wrote on the chalkboard. But Miss Huddleston was lovely beyond compare—proof of God’s creative benevolence.
That year someone in the school office decreed that we should be taught sex education and assigned another lovely young teacher, whose name now eludes me, to instruct us. Truancy among the boys plummeted to record lows. Kent Fender, never a diligent scholar, began skipping lunch to arrive early at sex education for a front-row seat. We took careful notes, asked probing questions, and urged our teacher to draw illustrations on the chalkboard.
Thoroughly galvanized by the curriculum, Kent Fender ordered a pair of x-ray glasses from the back of a comic book (“See through walls! See through clothes! Surprise and amaze your friends!”) and brought them to school for further research. Unfortunately, he was careless in their use, and slipped them on just as Mrs. Stanley—all four hundred pounds, not including her beard—walked into our classroom and into his x-ray vision. Kent let out a shriek, fainted dead away, and the glasses were broken in the fall.
Of course, some of my peers would urge our teacher to delve into the more curious aspects of human sexuality.
“Tell us about hermaphrodites,” Suds Norton said when the teacher was explaining the differences between men and women. He turned to Kent Fender. “There’s some people, they’re born with a winkie and an angina. The doctors just lop off the winkie, but sometimes they get it wrong, so you end up with a man who’s winkieless.”
Suds Norton was an expert on sexuality, having glanced through a Playboy magazine behind the counter at the Rexall drugstore. Suds had voyeurism down to a fine art. He would give Peanut a quarter to distract the pharmacist with a conversation
about various poxes and diseases, then duck behind the counter, peruse the magazine, sketching the more salient features, which he showed to our teacher and got sent to the principal’s office.
As attractive as our sex education teacher was, I still believed Miss Huddleston was vastly superior. To my great delight, Miss Huddleston seemed genuinely fond of me. She would pause from her instruction to pat me on the head, calling me her little monkey. I did all I could to encourage her affection, staying after school to wash the chalkboard, clap the erasers, and empty the pencil sharpener. I had been an indifferent student, but wanting desperately to please her, my grades soared.
“I sure will miss you next year,” she said one late winter day, patting me on the head.
The realization hit me like a thunderbolt. In trying to impress her, I had wrecked my chances of getting to repeat sixth grade with Miss Huddleston. The seventh grade was in another building across town. I wouldn’t even be able to glimpse her in the hallway. Faced with this sorry predicament, my only option was to get in so much trouble I would be held back.
My opportunity came the very next day, when I brought a magnifying glass to school and used it to concentrate the sun’s rays onto the vinyl roof of Mr. Leavitt’s car during recess. I waited until Mrs. Stanley was watching, lest my delinquency go unnoticed.
A thin curl of blue smoke rose from the roof. Mrs. Stanley began waddling toward me, her face darkening.
“What do you think you’re doing?” she asked.
“Burning a hole in Mr. Leavitt’s car,” I answered helpfully.
“We’ll see about that,” she said, seizing me by the ear, twisting and cracking the cartilage, then goose-stepped me to Principal Peter’s office, where she deposited me in the straight-back chair across from his desk and, quivering with indignation, said, “You’ll never believe what I caught this young man doing.”
I Love You, Miss Huddleston Page 5
