How to Survive a Summer

by Nick White

  “Look at this boy,” Mother Maude said to him, as he came closer to inspect me, the first camper for their new camp, though I didn’t know it yet. “Ain’t he Johnny made over?”

  The man I would come to know as Father Drake spat again, and said, “That is exactly what I’m afraid of.”

  FIVE

  ■

  QUICKSILVER

  When I was thirty or so miles from Memphis, Bevy called. She hadn’t heard from me in the requisite twelve hours and was mildly panicked. “Have you been watching the news?” were the first words out of her mouth. No, I told her, I had not. I’d stopped listening to NPR, and my iPod was hooked into the speakers instead. She took it upon herself to fill me in on the latest with Proud Flesh. Thanks to social media, she told me, during the two weeks of its release, the movie had garnered a cult following. No longer protesting the movie, queer groups flocked to it. “Can you believe this shit?” Bevy said, and the truth was that maybe I could. I asked her if she had gone to see it for herself, and she was quick to answer. “Not a fucking chance, dear heart.” She told me how the studio had just released a digital copy of the movie online two days ago. Now several gay clubs in U.S. cities were throwing viewing parties. “They all wear the killer’s mask,” Bevy said. “And act crazy and dance. All very tacky.” She was relieved to hear I hadn’t been to one while I’d been home. “Zeus went, and he had a time. Almost got himself killed.”

  The interstate branched into four lanes, each one packed bumper to bumper with vehicles. I was entering the industrial park on the city’s outer perimeter. My father must know this route well. He had probably thundered through this traffic in his massive semi countless times.

  Last night I had watched them for about an hour or so. The singing had been the highlight of the evening. Soon after, the mother and daughter shuffled off to their bedrooms. My father sprawled on the couch, watching late-night TV alone. I got sleepy watching him yawn and went back to my own room at the Days Inn in Hawshaw. When I woke up this morning, I hit the road. I was ready to return to academia and the great Middle West. Ready to pretend this wild notion of mine to go home hadn’t been a waste of time.

  “Are you even listening?” Bevy said. “Zeus was at that club downtown watching the movie and the event turned wild and . . .” She searched for the best way to describe what happened next. “He got jostled and then got into a fight with some queen who called him a tranny.” One thing led to another, she told me, fists were thrown, and the police were called. Zeus got arrested and was sent to a female jail. “All very humiliating.”

  “Is he okay?”

  Bevy scoffed. “Are any of us?”

  Doll was inching along as Bevy continued the story of Zeus’s trouble. He was home now, she said. Shaken up but physically unharmed. “But it brought up all this shit that happened to him a couple of years ago,” she added. “Back when he started the transition, and a group of bastards caught him out one night in the park and turned his ears to cauliflower.” She told me how during the beating they kept calling him a tranny. Ever since, the word has been a match to his fuse, she said. “I probably shouldn’t have told you so much. But, dammit, you just let me go on.” I assured her I would act every bit surprised should he ever tell me the story himself. “If we ever talk again, that is,” I said.

  The comment pissed her off. “I do not like,” she said, emphasizing each of her words, “being some go-between for you boys.” She had her own life, with her own problems. And she would appreciate it if I would ask her about them every now and then. I said I understood, and in the sincerest way I knew, I said, “And how are you, Bevy?” and she, in equally sincere tones, said, “Fuck you, Will. I am not good.” She explained how she spent most of her days studying for a test she no longer believed in. “And Alix is worried I’m not taking care of myself and eating too much processed food in my diet, but does she ever offer to cook? No—no, she doesn’t. It always falls to me.” The bar exam was in another month. She felt “totally” unprepared for it. I told her I was sorry because that’s what you say to other people about their problems when you can’t fix them. I was sure she would have given a similar response to mine had I the courage to share them.

  Traffic was moving again. I zoomed Doll into the exit lane. Soon, I was going down a residential street, passing large houses with deep front porches, the windows caged with iron bars. Bevy asked when I was coming back. “Don’t we need to talk about your dissertation?” and I told her I was stopping off in Memphis first to see an old friend. At this, she feigned shock. “You?” She gasped. “Friends?” But before hanging up, she said, more seriously, “Hey, I’m glad you’re headed back—I was, I don’t know, worried that I wouldn’t see you again. That you’d go off to Mississippi and disappear.”

  —

  Peering in on my father’s new life had been surprising. I wondered how he could have the emotional stamina to redo fatherhood and marriage. He had thrown himself into a new relationship at a time in life when most men his age were thinking about retirement and receiving AARP catalogs in the mail. Widowed, ousted from his church home, estranged from his queer son, my father had fashioned this whole other life for himself. What’s more, he seemed happy. Hence my other surprise—not at his happiness, but at my own response to it. I felt no jealousy, only this vague sense of pride that he’d possessed the gumption to carry on. Our familial bond had been all but extinguished in our years of silence, and yet enough of it still existed for me to feel sympathy for him. Didn’t at least one of us, I thought, deserve to be happy? Didn’t he deserve the peace of a normal life? The only way I knew how to not destroy what he had made was by turning around and leaving. Which was exactly what I did.

  When I got back to the motel, I e-mailed that survivor from camp I knew who still lived in Memphis. His name was Rumil. I told him that I would be in the area and wondered if he would like to meet up. Minutes later, Rumil replied, saying he would like that “very much.” He owned several snow-cone booths in the city and told me to meet him at the one off of Beale Street. “The flagship,” he had called it in the e-mail. Once I got downtown, I parked Doll in a garage a few blocks from the address he’d given me. We were to meet at noon. I was twenty minutes early, and I wandered down Beale, the neon signs dimmed in daylight and showing their age. I went by the statue of W. C. Handy then crossed into a little courtyard. A man in tight jeans and matching denim vest was playing a pedal steel guitar for a small crowd of onlookers. The case for the steel guitar was tossed open, inviting donations. The way he bent sound into music, that unmistakable twang of country, kept me in the courtyard listening for longer than I’d intended. He didn’t sing, but the songs were familiar country ballads—“Someday Soon” and “Aces.” Many of the people around me knew them by heart and hummed along.

  This Rainbow Ice location was a shotgun shack wedged between two boarded-up houses and painted in loud greens and purples and pinks. A large sign was perched atop the roof that boasted of more than a hundred different flavors, which were listed in alphabetical order. The line of customers curved from the service window half-hidden under the awning and spilled onto the sidewalk. I got behind the last person in line and looked around for Rumil. I wasn’t sure I’d even recognize him. He’d been fourteen last I knew him: a Filipino boy adopted by well-meaning white Christian parents.

  The line moved slowly. Customers stepped up to the window, stooped under the awning, and spoke to the person behind the glass. While waiting, I learned what separated Rumil’s operation from the ones I remembered from childhood: In the evenings, when Beale Street turned on its neon, customers could add liquor to their flavored ice. MUST SHOW ID FOR SHOTS was clearly displayed in a cursive font below the list of flavors on the sign. Over in the alleyway between Rainbow Ice and one of the boarded-up houses, a dingy picnic table stood in the grass. Two boys sat across from each other, slurping down their red and blue concoctions, their teeth tinted to match their f
lavors.

  I never heard him approach—only his voice, when he said, “I think I know a guy who can get us to the front of the line.” He had changed little. A foot shorter than I was, he wore a fauxhawk. His ears and nose had several piercings. Otherwise, he was still the boy I had met at Camp Levi: compactly made and beautiful. “God,” he said, looking me over. “You look just like a preacher!” He grabbed my shirt and pulled me into a hug. Pressing his face against my collarbone, he spoke into my chest. “These are crazy times, sweetie, crazy times—suddenly that summer is news?” He glanced up at me with water in his eyes. We had not mentioned the movie over e-mail. I tried to say something now about it but couldn’t, a sudden surge of emotion clogging my throat. He intertwined his arm in mine and escorted me around to the backyard of Rainbow Ice. “I keep thinking about going and seeing it,” he said, “and then turn scaredy-cat at the last minute.”

  Around back, Rumil opened the screen door and knocked on the wooden one until a husky trans woman opened up. She scowled at us. “What the fuck, Rummy!” she said. She had a shock of white hair and affected the stance and demeanor of a tired cafeteria lady, complete with a dishrag tossed over her shoulder. Rumil said that when she was finished with the cone she was making she should make us two medium coconuts with cream. She pursed her lips. “Or,” he said, “get out of the way and I’ll do it.” She gave him a smile then. “By all means, sugar.” Her voice dripped with sarcasm, and she stepped aside for us to enter. When he shuffled by her, she smacked him on the ass, and said to me, “You watch this little bottom—it’ll get you into trouble every time.”

  The contraption that shaved the ice looked like the offspring of an old-timey icebox and a meat slicer. Rumil opened a trapdoor on top and saw that the machine needed ice. So he hunched down to the minifreezer under the counter and hauled out a large block the size of my head. He dropped in the ice, then fitted the lid back over, and hit some buttons. “Here we go,” he said. “The only way to make snow in Memphis!” From a little chute on the side of the machine, a fine powder dusted into the Styrofoam cup Rumil had placed underneath to catch it. “When my partner and I ended things,” he told me, over the crunching of ice, “he got the house and the parrot; I got the dog, who soon after died, and this business, which took off.” He asked me if I was seeing anybody.

  “It’s complicated,” I said.

  He stared at the shaved ice collecting in the cup. “It always is.”

  Rumil selected a glass bottle of flavored syrup labeled coconut and gave healthy pours over each newly formed cone of ice. Then he went to the cabinet beneath the register and retrieved a bottle of Four Roses. “Let’s make the adult version,” he said. One splash for me and another for him. We decided to eat them outside on the plastic table in the alleyway. The pair of boys was still sitting there when we came out. Rumil said, “Shoo on home—grown-ups coming.” One of the boys tried to give him some attitude, something about how Rumil didn’t own the alleyway. “Ray Boy, I will call your mother right now,” Rumil said. “Gladly will I call her! Please give me a reason to watch her beat that ass.” Ray Boy gave a little nod, and off they went. Once we were alone, Rumil told me how he was not having kids unless he could get them sometime in their late teens. “After two years, send them to college—then have them take care of me when I am old and worn down.” Because of the heat, my snow cone had already melted down into a slush. I sipped it, the coconut flavoring mixing with the bourbon to form a poor man’s piña colada. “I have to believe that kids are worthwhile and that people have them for reasons other than selfishness.” Rumil’s eyes looked up from his snow cone. “Jesus, where am I going with this talk? Sorry.”

  A plane soared overhead, cutting the sky with sound. After we finished eating, he led me down Beale past all the specialty shops, and we eventually found our way to the river. Birds wheeled in the air. They might have been pelicans, but I wasn’t sure and was too shy around Rumil to ask. The river was churning, as brown as chocolate milk, its little waves capping and falling, capping and falling. “This is beautiful, isn’t it?” I yelled into the wind. He took my hand and held it as we tarried down the sidewalk overlooking the water. People milled about all around us. “You don’t worry about being public here?” I said. He looked surprised. “Why?” he asked. “Why would I ever?” He didn’t say anything else. He didn’t have to. His hand went limp and let mine go.

  We kept walking. He led me away from the water toward an area of the city full of abandoned warehouses and old factories. The brand names of companies long out of business were still tattooed into the dirty brick. We were to have dinner at a funky restaurant he had said was off the beaten track. I wondered if this was where he had meant, someplace new in someplace old and forgotten, full of hipsters. I didn’t mind. The snow cone had been my only food today, and I was getting hungry. When my stomach growled, he said, “I want to show you this before we get a bite to eat—a surprise.” He took me to one of the warehouses, and we stopped before the big sliding door. He snatched its handle and yanked it open, the door rumbling like a train sidling down the track. We stepped into the poorly lit room, a cavernous space thick with chemical smells. It was a workroom of sorts, filled with glass and wood and an assortment of tools. Only the glass, I realized, wasn’t really glass—it was mirrors. All shapes and sizes of them: on the walls, piled in the corner, propped up on pedestals. Rumil draped his arm around my shoulder.

  “You’re trembling,” he said. I asked him what this place was used for, and he said his boyfriend had a thing for mirrors. “A thing?” I told him I wasn’t being dense on purpose, and he smiled. “He silvers them,” he said. “That’s the technical term anyway.” We stood in front of a big oval one, the kind you might hang above a fireplace or in a dining room. Rumil’s arm was still across my shoulder when, without warning, another face appeared between ours in the reflection. The suddenness of it alarmed me, and I jumped, shaking loose from Rumil and nearly knocking the mirror off its stand. Shiny and round, the new face was babyish, familiar. Both of them were laughing.

  “You still got crazy-ass hair,” the new face said, and his voice—sort of girlish and deep at the same time—triggered his name from my mouth on reflex.

  “Christopher,” I said. “Dear Lord in heaven.”

  Both of them laughed. Rumil said, “Thought he just looked like a preacher and now he’s talking like one, too!”

  —

  At Camp Levi there had been five campers—the inaugural class. Here in this warehouse, surrounded by mirrors, three of us shared the same space again. The mirrors multiplied our bodies: A dozen Christophers and Rumils bemusedly stared at a dozen of me. They made a handsome couple. Their physical incongruity worked for them—Christopher, with his tall and soft body, towering over the small Rumil. I had so many questions for how this union came about. As if anticipating them, Christopher began to explain their coupledom, tucking a hand in the back pocket of Rumil’s skinny jeans and pulling him close. Their relationship—the romantic part of it, anyway—came about years after camp, he told me. Around the time Rumil and I were chatting online, he was also reaching out to the others from Camp Levi. Christopher turned out to be the most eager at reestablishing a friendship. “I was living in Baton Rouge,” Christopher said. “Fresh out of rehab and looking for healthy friends.” He didn’t mention the reason for his treatment, and I didn’t ask. At the time, both had boyfriends and weren’t looking. “I think we just needed each other to listen,” Rumil added. Like me, they had been withholding the events of that summer from the people in their adult lives. When Christopher drove up to Memphis to have dinner with Rumil, the conversation proved to be—according to them both—like a balm they never knew they needed for wounds they assumed had already healed. “It wasn’t like talking with him,” Rumil said. “Talking makes it sound too simple a thing for what happened. More like plugging my head into his head, and our thoughts sort of commingling and making one comp
lete thought.”

  I asked Christopher if I could sit down. But he didn’t keep chairs in the warehouse. “Sitting,” he said, “is the new smoking, and I’m prediabetic.” He said the floor was reasonably clean and that I was welcome to it. I plopped down and crossed my legs, waiting for the great swirl of thoughts and feelings to settle down inside me. Lower to the ground, the chemical smell thickened. I breathed through my mouth, the air tangy on my tongue. Rumil and Christopher followed me to the floor, sitting on either side. “You okay?” Rumil touched my leg, and I nodded, saying I thought so. The three of us formed a circle on the hard, cool ground, our knees barely touching. Rumil told us how his maternal grandfather had often warned of sitting on hard concrete: “Claimed it caused hemorrhoids,” and Christopher said, “Well, honey, if you haven’t got them already.” We laughed, the sound echoing in the high-ceilinged warehouse.

  The temperature in the building stayed somewhere between ninety and hundred degrees during the summertime. Christopher claimed that the place was perfect for silvering mirrors and, consequently, lousy for small talk. He charged ahead anyway with the conversation, defending the heat. Told me it allowed the reflective coating on the glass to set or, in his words, “precipitate.” I nodded along as he described the various ingredients he needed for mirror making—silver nitrate, Rochelle salt, distilled water. “It’s much easier to repair one,” he said, “than it is to make one wholesale.”

  As he spoke, Christopher gave me the impression he wasn’t all that pleased to see me. Nothing overt in his behavior. Just his state of being. The aggressive way he steered the conversation. The suspicious glances he threw my way as he talked and talked, never once letting me or Rumil add a word in. Mother Maude had used mirrors in our treatment at the camp. His obsession with them seemed to me to be obviously connected to our shared history. But I didn’t offer this opinion. If Christopher was nursing a grudge against me—and considering how I’d behaved at Camp Levi, I didn’t necessarily blame him—then rehashing the camp would only lead us into trouble. So I avoided it altogether. When he finally finished talking about mirrors, I put a very simple question to him: “When did you start this”—I was seconds away from saying “hobby” and only in the last breath nixed it for a more respectable word—“job?” Perhaps I would have offended him no matter what word I’d chosen to use. At any rate, he sighed. “Not a job,” he said. “It’s my art.” He was a graduate student at the University of Memphis, he made sure to mention. This collection of mirrors was part of a larger project.