How to Survive a Summer

by Nick White

  “How nice,” I said.

  Rumil said, “You’ll have to come back when it’s all finished—for his art show in the fall.” He nodded at Christopher to second the invitation. Instead, Christopher said, “You’ll see more tonight at the house—basically we have mirrors in every room. Like a fun house minus all the distortions.”

  My stomach was upset. Either from the fumes, the heat, or the hunger. I couldn’t tell which. Rumil must have read the discomfort on my face. He fished out his cell phone from his jeans pocket. “I can have a pizza here in ten minutes,” and he called a place supposedly just up the street and ordered us an extra-large pepperoni with jalapeño cheddar baked into the crust. “You eat meat, yeah?” he asked me, before he gave the person on the phone his credit card number. I told him I would eat just about anything at this point. From underneath the folds of his apron, Christopher produced a joint. “Smoke?” There was never a moment I least wanted to smoke than this one right now. I was woozy and hungry, and weed promised to aggravate both conditions. But I didn’t want to give Christopher more ammunition for disliking me. “Sure,” I said. He lit the joint with a Zippo. After puffing to get the cherry started, he offered it to me.

  This much became clear to me: The process of becoming adults had made them interesting people. Rumil, the entrepreneur of hooch-drenched snow cones, and Christopher, the quicksilver artist. By comparison, I was so completely uninteresting. So unchanged, really, since I was fifteen. Academia had provided me with a hole to hide in, to burrow away from life and hibernate, while everyone else—Rumil, Christopher, and even my father—had moved on. To prove I had nothing to prove, I partook of his weed. I sucked the sickly sweet taste into my lungs. When Rumil was finished with our order, I passed the joint to him.

  In a haze of smoke, our conversation turned to the movie. Neither of them had seen it Yet. I admitted to trying three times to watch it. Rumil wanted to know why I kept going back to see it. “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe to prove I could.”

  “It’s always there,” Rumil said. “The camp. Even when you forget about it.”

  Christopher said, “I just can’t believe Dolittle was the one who got to direct it—of all people in this world.”

  The name again—Dolittle—tumbling around in my head. I asked them what was so wrong with this Dolittle person. “Dolittle, Dolittle,” I repeated the name, rolled its syllables around on my tongue, half tweaking on Christopher’s stash already. “How do I know him?”

  A look passed from Christopher to Rumil, this look said, See here, this imbecile you have brought home? Rumil answered first: “Robert Dolittle—think about it for a second.” I wasn’t thinking fast enough for Christopher, who blurted, “Sparse, you bastard. Sparse.” The nickname worked on me like a splash of cold water.

  “You’re fucking kidding me.” I couldn’t believe it was him, the ultrathin black boy from Camp Levi. If I wasn’t so high, the news would have wrecked me. Sent me crawling under the worktable. Besides the three of us here, Sparse was the other camper who had survived the summer. In speaking his name, Christopher had inadvertently invoked the name of the one who hadn’t made it. His name we didn’t say. None of us could be fucked up enough to mention him, I didn’t think—and yet the memory of him invaded our circle anyway, bullying away every other thought in our smoke-addled heads.

  Rumil’s cell phone vibrated. He looked at the screen and said the pizza had arrived. He went outside to meet the delivery guy. I leaned back on my hands and tried to act casual. Like the information they’d just shared wasn’t overloading my puny brainpan. Christopher gazed down at his crotch and mumbled something. I said, “Huh?” but he didn’t repeat himself.

  My gaze traveled to Christopher’s worktable, where a medium-size mirror sat propped up at an angle, reflecting the complicated metalwork bracing the ceiling. A crack split down the middle of the glass, one Christopher would repair in the days to come. Apropos of nothing, I said, “‘Repair’ doesn’t seem like the right word when you fix a mirror, does it?”

  Christopher looked amused. “Oh? What word would you use, professor?”

  Rumil came back, balancing the oversize pizza box in one hand, clutching his phone in the other. “I hope y’all are hungry,” he said.

  Christopher slapped my knee. “What word then?” and I said, “I don’t know. Forget it.” But he said he didn’t want to forget it. Rumil set the pizza box down on the floor between us. The smell of grease and cheese broke over my face, reminding me of my hunger.

  “What are you two talking about?” Rumil said, and I felt my cheeks redden. I wanted to change the subject. I felt silly. But Christopher wouldn’t change the subject. He told Rumil how I had come up with another term for him to use when he resilvered mirrors. “He doesn’t like the word ‘repair.’” Christopher placed a hand over the lid of the pizza box. Clearly, no one could eat unless I finished my thought.

  “Okay, okay,” I said. “I was thinking that it’s more like you heal them instead of repair them.”

  Rumil said he thought that sounded kind of poetic. “Heal,” he said, marveling at the word.

  Christopher wasn’t so generous. He said we were high. “Fucking high,” he repeated. “Heal is something you do for the wounds of the living. Or heel is a command you give a dog.”

  —

  Our bellies full of pizza, our brains all cottony from medium-quality cannabis, we decided to cap off the night by seeing Proud Flesh. The idea came to us slowly, a plan formalizing when I told them what Bevy had told me about the gay clubs hosting these viewing parties. I said, “They seem to be making a to-do.”

  Christopher frowned. “They?” He went on to say how he doubted seriously the fervor had reached Memphis. Interested, Rumil searched for information on his phone. “Oh, wow!” he said, and turned the phone sideways and scrolled down. Sure enough, he told us, a club in Midtown had shown the film last night and was planning on a repeat this very evening. “You know the place, too.” Rumil flashed Christopher the screen of his phone. “The Joan Crawford,” he said for my benefit. “A dingy bear den—should we go, you think?”

  I told them Zeus’s experience at one of these parties. “And the film! It’s low-grade horror at best, a B movie.” I was shaking my head and using my hands to be convincing. In essence, I tried out my best Bevy impersonation, channeling all her disgust for the picture. It didn’t work. Christopher’s sleepy eyes flashed open for a second, the weed maybe wearing off. He said it would be an experience for us to venture into the masses while they were watching our movie. “Moving among them,” he said dreamily, “like celebrities incognito.” Later I would think he was only being contrarian, choosing the opposite to whatever opinion I had formed. Ultimately, the deciding vote went to Rumil, and he admitted to wanting to see the movie, too. “Of course, I’m curious,” he said to me, as if he were apologizing. “And I’d like it if we all saw it together, too. If we go, we can’t go as ourselves, though. We need to go as other people.” Christopher and I agreed even though I hadn’t a clue what he meant exactly until I was at their house twenty minutes later.

  Their home was a pale-brick two-story in the historic Central Gardens area. Ferns dangled like ear bobs from the eaves of their wide front porch. “My, my,” I said, “the snow-cone business must be booming.” Both of them remained silent as we climbed the steps to the porch. Rumil, his keys tinkling like bells, struggled to unlock the door. He was nervous, provoking Christopher to sigh and tap his foot. Neither of them could look at me or at each other. All my fault, I thought. I had forgotten how southerners didn’t like to talk money. If Christopher was keeping a mental list of all the ways I had fucked up tonight, he’d just gotten himself another prime example: “First he makes a jab about my art,” he would probably later say to Rumil, “and then he tries to make us feel guilty for our house—like he knows property values in Memphis.”

  At last Rumil got
the door open. He scurried ahead of us, going from room to room, turning on lights. Each time he hit a switch, there I was, materializing from the dark. My reflection appeared from several vantage points. They’d hung mirrors on the walls like most people hung artwork—to Christopher, I guess, they were. Determined to be nice, I said, “These are really great,” and I meant it, because they were, these wood-and-brass-framed mirrors. The rooms were mostly furnished with antiques. Claw-footed fainting couches, armoires, earthenware pottery. And not that crap suburban moms buy at those fancy import stores, either, all done up to look old. These pieces had been lived with and lived on by people, it seemed, for ages before finding their way into Rumil and Christopher’s home.

  I followed them to the kitchen (fully decked out with a space-age dishwasher, double sink, and a steel oven worth more than what I made in a year on my assistantship) and then on downstairs to the basement. In this subterranean room, there was a washer and dryer and a scattering of old furniture. They immediately seemed more comfortable down here, as if this were the room where they really lived and the ones upstairs were only for show when company came over.

  “These old biddies,” Rumil said, and kicked a burnt-orange couch. “I’ve been meaning to cart them off to Goodwill—I’ve owned that chair over there since junior year of college, if you can believe it.” He nodded to a La-Z-Boy, tattered and careworn. Clothes were piled on the seat—castoffs for both men and women, many of them vintage garments you’d wear as costumes. Rumil picked through the fabric and pulled out a leather vest. “For you, professor,” he said, and tossed it over. Rummaging through another mound of clothes on the coffee table, Christopher explained how they dabbled in drag. He found a pair of bedazzled blue jeans and held them to his waist. “Hey, I bet I can squeeze into these,” and Rumil, in a rare moment of sass, said, “Darling, the Crisco’s in the pantry.”

  The scheme was simple: We were to dress in clothes we wouldn’t dare wear in our everyday lives. Basically, we’d pretend to be other people. More for ourselves than for anybody else. An advanced game of playacting to psych ourselves up for the movie, Rumil had said. “To give us courage to watch the whole thing.”

  Rumil decided to go butch. He removed his earrings and combed out his hair gel, flattening his fauxhawk. He put on a big flannel button-down, sawdust-colored Carhartts, and a trucker’s cap that had once belonged to Christopher’s father eons ago and had been—until Rumil spotted it for his outfit—perched atop the dryer collecting loose change. Christopher and I were more flamboyant in our attire. He had to stretch out on the couch to zip up the sparkly jeans. They fit—if only barely. A thick ribbon of fat protruded above the waistband, which he hid under an oversize fuzzy top that resembled a Koosh ball. I tossed off my polo and slid on the leather vest. The thin hide stuck on my flesh like a second layer of skin. Then I stepped into a pair of Daisy Dukes. The hemline was cut so short the white cotton pockets flopped out on the sides of my legs like dog ears. For final touches, Rumil insisted on smearing Christopher’s mouth with lipstick. For me, he said I needed a little fairy dust and sprinkled silver glitter into my five-day-old scruff. When he was finished with us, we clomped back upstairs and gathered in front of the large mirror above the sofa in the living room. “I can’t tell,” Christopher said, “if we look really good or really bad.”

  Rumil squared his shoulders and took out his phone. The lens flashed, capturing us in our new outfits for time immemorial. In a deep voice, he said, “Why can’t it be both?”

  —

  We arrived at the Joan Crawford later than expected. We had trouble finding parking, eventually going back to their house and calling a taxi. The bar was in the heart of Midtown, a pink stucco building with blacked-out windows attached to a Mexican restaurant. By the entrance, a drag queen told us it was a fifteen-dollar cover and then asked if we’d like to donate any more to the cause. “What cause?” Christopher asked. She sat on a plastic chair with her legs crossed, the metal cash box on her lap. She was an undercooked Joan Crawford, circa Mildred Pierce, wearing pleated slacks, shoulders stacked with padding. “All of them,” she said, smiling, and when Christopher didn’t laugh, she told him he had lipstick on his teeth. After we forked over the cash, she seized a garbage bag from under the chair and doled out three plastic masks. All of them were the same princess design the killer wore in the movie.

  Rumil unfolded his mask and held it up to the light. “What the fuck?”

  “You wear it, sweetmeat.” The drag queen had grown tired of us, her manicured fingernails clicking along the metal cash box. “In or out,” she said. “No time for sissies.”

  Inside, the Joan Crawford had two rooms separated by a plaster wall chinked with holes. The entrance led us into the first one, the bar. Dingy and dimly lit, the room was disappointing in its plainness. I was expecting murals of the legendary film actress, posters of her most famous movies—Grand Hotel, The Women—cheeky references to her daughter’s sleazy tell-all. There was none of that, however. The only suggestion of the club’s namesake—besides the sassy drag queen at the door—was taped to the cash register: an autographed picture of Faye Dunaway from the late 1990s when she traveled to the South to shoot a movie based on a John Grisham novel.

  Proud Flesh had already started in the other room. I could hear the sounds of the first kill. Poor Blond Fred and the extreme close-up of his face. I told Christopher and Rumil to go on ahead without me. “I need a drink,” I said, “and I’ve already seen that part.” Rumil came close, and said, “Just come find us, okay?” I nodded. “Of course,” I said. His eyes were big, and butch clothing or no, he looked frightened. Christopher put out his hand, and Rumil took it. They eased through the doorway and disappeared into the shadowy other room. I waited around for the bartender, but nobody came. It finally occurred to me that I was the only person on this side of the Joan Crawford. I considered going behind the counter to help myself to the booze. But my own outlandish clothes had not made me very brave, so I followed my fellow campers into the other room and tried to spot them in the crowd.

  Finding them was complicated by the fact that everyone wore the princess masks. On most nights, this second room looked like it served as the dance floor. Tonight, people stood motionless, as if in a trance, and faced the wall at the far side of the room where the movie was being projected. Numbering about forty, the audience was quiet, almost reverent, like a congregation gobsmacked by the Holy Spirit. I stood in the back beside someone who kept turning toward me. As if he recognized me. Or like I didn’t belong. Finally, I said, “What?” causing several more princess faces to turn my way. The one beside me pointed to his face and then to the mask in my hand. “Okay, okay.” I slid the mask on. A layer of wet immediately formed on my forehead and the bridge of my nose. “Happy?” I said to him. He didn’t say. Once my face was covered, he lost interest and was reabsorbed by the story unfolding on the wall before us.

  —

  For me, the danger of studying film was losing the magic that had first lured me into the dark theater. I’ve known many professors who no longer take any joy from movies, who have seen a film too many times, scrutinizing every second, to ever really “see” it anymore. During my time in academe, I had critiqued shots, analyzed performances, broken down the choices of the director. I considered movies in terms of the historical contexts that produced them. I wrote, and rewrote, papers on scene development. All this, and still I loved them. Bette Davis’s arch and embattled Margo in All About Eve, the pillowy face of Rock Hudson in Giant. These gave me two hours—sometimes more—of peace. A total absorption in a story that overwhelmed my own with the spectacle of beautiful people and their beautiful problems. And perhaps it’s too simple and wrongheaded to suggest that film allowed me to forget that summer, but deep down I believed it did. That’s why Proud Flesh was such a violation. I had found a world—in study and practice—separate from the one I had been born into. Now my past was polluting it. Muta
ted, my story had cornered me. “Here!” it cried. “Look at me!”

  In truth, the popularity of Proud Flesh mystified me—as both a critic and a regular everyday cinephile. Here was a movie telling a story we had seen done several times before with much more sophistication and panache. I was stunned by the turnout at the Joan Crawford tonight. Surely these queers had better things to do. Better dance clubs to spirit through, to wag their bodies in. Better drugs to swallow with vats of liquor. Around me, the masks were neither terrifying nor campy nor even ironic. I would have preferred the violence that Zeus had experienced. Some ruckus to put life back into these stiff bodies, these queer lives made small by a story that had no right to captivate them. Sparse’s involvement was a puzzle I was still processing. I hadn’t determined if it was an act of betrayal or poor judgment. Maybe a bit of both.

  I was ready for the movie to be over. And as soon as the mask was revealed for the first time in the movie, the screen complied with my wish and went blank for intermission. The lights brightened. Our drag queen, the living homage to Joan Crawford, took to the platform, a microphone in hand. She introduced herself as Dixie Cups, inspiring mild applause from the audience. She asked everyone if that was the best they could do. Evidently it was, since no one responded with any more animation. She rolled her eyes. “Time for drinks,” she announced. “And time for the bathroom and time for”—she paused to glare—“dancing!” Dance music filled the room, and nobody gave a shit. Many of them funneled into the smaller bar area for drinks to fortify themselves, I suspected, for the rest of the movie to come.