When I’d first moved to the hellhole of Gainesville, he called our house the first week and invited me to float down the Itchitucknee river on an inner tube. What a strange language coming through the phone holes. Itchetucknee? I had no idea on earth what he was talking about but I said yes.
The water of the Itchetucknee is ice-cube cold. And the river is not wide, but it is deep, and it has a current. Whitetail deer, raccoons, wild turkeys, wood ducks, and great blue herons can be seen from the river. And there are … well, snakes. But there is a kind of beauty to it. The aqua blue crystalline Ichetucknee flows six miles through shaded hammocks and wetlands before it joins the Santa Fe River. I floated next to my friend the artist for three hours. He asked me questions about my life. I asked about his. We laughed. We basked in the sun like reptiles. We swam like swimmers do when they’ve been freed from laps. At the end of the float I felt I’d known him for years.
I think it might be true that we spent every single day together except Sundays for nearly three years. Much of the time we’d meet at school and I’d go to English and French and he’d go to the art lab and then we’d leave round about lunch. Or we’d spend the whole day in the art lab together. Or we’d go to his house and eat sandwiches and listen to Pat Benatar between swim practices. Or nap together. His skin had almost no hair and was soft as velvet.
I don’t quite know how to describe how much I loved him. But it was a love I didn’t have a wit’s notion what to do with. I flirted as hard as I could, but he didn’t seem interested in me sexually. Other Hogtown guys seemed to want into my pants on a regular basis, even at 7-Eleven, but him? Never. So I had sex with Hogtown men. And I continued to get all up in it with girl swimmers. But nothing between me and the artist.
And yet he made me the most gorgeous burgundy silk prom dress you can imagine, with a drop down back and tiny crisscrossing straps in the front and near my ass - NO ONE had a cooler dress. It’s possible no one ever has. In any state.
And he made me a fetching short-waisted big-shouldered women’s 1950s blazer from a man’s suit coat that everyone at school drooled over.
And he cut my hair in a bob that turned heads.
And he applied make-up on my face (the only make-up I’d ever worn) and took fashion photos of me.
So the love I had just got deeper and deeper for this man, but there was nowhere to put it. It just built up in me like sperm must in men who aren’t getting any. Sometimes I thought I might faint in his presence, but he’d bake something and it would taste so good. He could make cheesecake, for christ’s sake. All I wanted was to be around him. All the time. His skin smelled like cocoa butter.
Days and days and days and days and days. Perhaps the happiest of my life to that point. Just underneath how much I hated the Florida.
Then one day my drunk-drawled mother told Jimmy Heaney’s mother in the Publix Grocery store aisle that she heard my artist was gay. What I’m saying is that my dumb ass mother outed my artist before he’d outed himself. He’s homosexual. In a southern drawl.
And he stopped.
He stopped calling me. He stopped seeing me. He stopped having me in his life at all.
You know what it felt like to have a beautiful gay man stop loving me?
Like being dead.
Suitcase
SOMETIMES I THINK I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN A SWIMMER. Everything collected in my memory curls like water around events in my life. Or maybe everything that’s ever happened to me I understand better if I picture it in a great, aqua, chlorinated pool. Not even Florida could kill the swimmer in me.
At my senior prom in Florida I armwrestled five boys about to become men. I lost once. After the dance we all got drunk and climbed the fence of the pool in Gainesville, Florida. We went skinny dipping in a 50-meter competition pool - the same pool I spent two hours every morning, two hours every evening in swimming. My body was stronger than it has ever been in my life. I looked like someone’s son. The biceps of a son. The jaw. The shoulders. My hair whiting out gender. Breastless. When it came time for everyone to make out, I did laps.
That summer was long and wet differently for me than it was for other people. The air got thick with more than heat. In June, letters began to arrive in our mailbox. They were scholar - ship offers. For swimming. Exit visas.
In the evenings, I’d go out to the mailbox. My breathing would jackknife in my lungs just before I opened the box, and I’d shuffle through our idiotic mail waiting to feel the weight of something different. Waiting for my leaving.
Five letters came.
The first scholarship letter was cool and weighted in my hands. It was from Brown. The red and black logo of Brown University on the envelope looked royal to me. I ran my fingertips across it. The envelop felt smooth - the paper announcing its difference. I smelled it. I closed my eyes. I held it against my heart. I walked it to the house almost believing in something.
Inside, I put it on the kitchen table. It sat there all through dinner - which we ate in the living room watching TV. Barney Miller. I could feel the blood in my ears.
After dinner, after Taxi, after my father smoked three cigarettes, he finally went into the kitchen. And my mother. And me.
We sat at the kitchen table like I guess families do. My mother and I breathing. He opened the letter more slowly than a retarded person. He read it silently. I watched his eyes. Blue like mine. In my head I swam laps. My mother sat to the side of me like a drunk lump patting her one hand with the other. I tried not to bite my tongue off.
Finally, he spoke. A¾ ride. At a Snob school. A snob school for silver spoon girls and rich assholes. My mother looked out the window into the Florida night. I stared at the paper with the Brown logo on it. And my name. I knew it wasn’t money. We had money. It was what came out of his mouth next, his cigarette smoke making shame swirls around my face. Did I think I was special? Like someone squeezing my neck. In my throat I swallowed language.
The second letter came from Notre Dame. Again we sat at the kitchen table, a mother, a father, a daughter. The cigarette smoke nearly cinematic. I sat in silence, my very skin knew the tyranny of speaking. My mother twisted a lock of hair until I thought it would lift off of her head. Why did he say no? Because he could.
The third letter came from Cornell.
The fourth from Purdue.
No.
At a kitchen table in Florida.
All the rooms of our house carried the weight of father. All of them except one. My bedroom held the wet and dark of my body. It smelled like my skin and chlorine and pot. The two windows in front had long been my portals to the night life of escaped girls. In July, on a night so thick with sweat lesser girls would have suffocated, alone in my bed I decided a leaving. I was leaving, and I didn’t care how. I masturbated so hard that night I scratched my skin raw. Just before I went to sleep, I pictured a suitcase. The biggest one we owned. It rested silently in the garage behind my father’s golf bag and boxes from former lives. Black and as big as a German Shepherd. Big enough to fit the rage of a girl.
At the preliminaries for State that year I sat in the locker rooms with Sienna Torres killing a fifth of vodka. If we’d been sons about to be men, I bet we would have taken one of our father’s cars and headed for Canada. Or took our first punches at authority, not minding the black eye. Instead we sat on the concrete underneath the disgusted gaze of shaved and wellbehaved athlete girls and drank.
Even loaded I qualified fifth for finals in breaststroke. At finals, a woman I didn’t know with stringy blond hair and glasses thick as a Florida cola bottle came up to me after I got second in the 100 breast. I swam a 1:07.9. She looked like a stoner. She said she was the coach at Texas Tech, and that though she couldn’t talk about it standing there like that, me dripping with water and underage rage, she would call me the next day to talk about a full ride. I didn’t say anything. When my breathing stilled, I looked up at my drunk mother in the stands. She was sort of rocking. I hoped she’d stay up there. My mother:
the only thing I knew of Texas sitting up in the stands, slurring her speech.
When the coach of Texas Tech called my home, my father was at work. I talked to the woman with the stringy hair and thick glasses on the phone. There was my mother’s voice, its sweet southern drawl curling around my shoulders - like honey does to bees - and there was this woman’s voice and there was me. Saying yes. Yes.
Wouldn’t it be great if that’s all there was to it? A mother’s voice soothing the way for her daughter to leave. Blonde swimmer girl gets on a plane, bye bye y’all.
A week later, when the papers came to sign, my father was at work. My mother signed them. I remember watching her hand, a little stunned. She had beautiful handwriting. Then she put them in the envelope, grabbed her car keys, and told me C’mawn. In her southern drawl liquor voice. In her real estate station wagon. Driving to the post office with her and watching her drop my freedom into the blue metal mouth of the mailbox-I almost loved her.
All the rest of July he raged. And August. Every day when he came home from work he’d find another way to fill the house with rage, shake the walls with shame, while the little women took it and took it. Sometimes I thought he might kill one of us. But I was not afraid. In the palm of my bedroom I could feel the walls pulse.
Once that summer during a rage run my father threw a plate at the sliding glass door. I waited for the shatter but nothing happened. Another night he ripped my swim bag to shit, my suit and goggles flying into the air. Once he followed me all the way to my bedroom door. I could feel his words at my smoldering shoulders. He stopped in the doorframe. When I turned to face him, he was shaking with anger. Then he said, “This is control. I’m controlling myself. You don’t know how far I can go.” We stared at each other.
I thought: this is your daughter leaving, motherfucker.
But other nights he’d become the man whose desire had twisted up inside him. The closer we got to my exit. On an August night with rain as hard as drums he sat me down on our living room couch. He put his arm around my shoulders. He rubbed my far arm with his big thumb in creepy circles. His voice was more calm than is possible to make a voice. Then he narrated what boys would want to do to me, how they would put their dirty hands up my skirt and part my legs and finger fuck me. How they would reach inside my shirt and fondle my tits and grab my breasts. Suck them. How disgusting boys would be, their hands, their hot hips and breath, their wanting in and up. And what they would do with their dicks, me sitting there next to him on the couch feeling the heat of him touching his dick even without looking, my skin making pins, clenching my teeth inside my mouth, and him saying how I should say no, and how I could find the strength to say no by remembering I was his daughter, that he was the only man for me.
In my head: this is how you know he is insane. This is why to leave now.
I’d thought of leaving before. In the run away ways, but also the year my mother tried to commit suicide, my sister made a courageous return from the sanctuary of graduate school to see if I wanted to come with her. I was 16. Her coming and asking me - somehow it had been enough to get me through two more years.
I thought about the secrets I had stored up inside my body. How many times I’d crawled out my bedroom window to get in a car. The unstoppable fire between my legs. A fire not his. I thought about vodka. Nearly drowning. By the time he sat me on the couch to tell me I was his, I was miles away from daughter. A black suitcase making shape and story in my dreams. I felt like there was a muscle between us. The muscle was my sexuality. Not his.
Our filial showdown happened in our garage the week before I left, next to my mother’s station wagon and my father’s Camaro Berlinetta. I went there that night to get the black suitcase out of the garage. I planned to take it to my room and fill it and fill it. When I found it, I unzipped its mouth. It smelled like cigarette smoke. I opened it, and inside were two of my father’s shirts from some trip. I stared at the shirts until my neck prickled with anger. I took a wad of cloth from one and shoved it in my mouth and bit it at hard as I could - so hard my head shook. Then I took them out and put them in the trash.
When I got back, I explored every compartment of the suitcase. A tube of Certs. Part of a wrapper from a pack of cigarettes. A comb. Two condoms. I picked it up and shook it. Finally it was empty of him. I zipped its mouth. I stood up to take the black suitcase to my room, and then there was my father. I heard him before I saw him, and when I turned to face him he was standing just underneath the lonely garage dangle of a bulb, his head weirdly illuminated. Then he began to yell, a slow nonsensical roll at first, but humming quickly into a roar. Like engines on Camaro Berlinettas do. He called me a slut, he named my sins, he listed all my mistakes and shortcomings and shameful behaviors - all the acting out that lived up and through me to bring me to this daughter moment.
Maybe they were all true. Maybe he was right. Maybe I would become the slut fuckup he said. But I was also a very good swimmer. And he was not.
He grabbed my arm at one point, and though I could feel the bruise forming, I never let go of the handle of the suitcase. I felt I could swing it into his head any time I wanted. Somehow that night my girl shame and fear were nowhere in the room. I thought the thought of somebody’s son. You don’t know how far I’ll go, motherfucker.
I looked him in the eyes. Blue on blue.
I felt the width of my shoulders and the square of my own jaw. My adrenaline rushed up like before a race. Nothing he was saying was beating me down. I think maybe he saw that, because he shifted gears and began to rage about what I was doing to my mother - did it make me happy that it would kill her? My leaving? Just like my selfish shit of a sister? Is that the kind of person I was? A selfish bitch who wanted to kill my mother? You and your sister - such high and mighty assholes - you think you are so much better than anyone else?
My sister and I, we were selfish. We wanted selves. There was no rage or love that could stop us. That’s what opened my mouth.
Fuck.
You.
Motherfucker.
I said it again, louder, and again, until I was screaming it, screaming with the lungs of a swimmer. Then I said get the fuck out of my way you fucking sadist, and I swung my suitcase back, and he drew up his full height of father and pulled his arm back and fisted up his hand until it white knuckled and his face went red and he clenched his teeth and those eyes, those rage filled father eyes … so I did what I was born to do. I leaned in as close to his face as I could and said do it. Suitcase ready.
It was his voice I used.
It seemed we’d die in that moment. But all it took to leave that room was this body I had. Though I did hear him breathing - out of breath - at my mighty back. And I did consider what being punched in the back of the skull might feel like. I believed I could take it.
I carried the suitcase to my bedroom. I went in. I closed the door behind me. I took off my clothes. My skin smelled like chlorine and sweat. Summer heat snuck through the screen of my window. I put my head down on my pillow. I waited. I heard a car go by. I heard a dog bark. I could hear a shiver of wind in the shrubs outside my window. And Cicadas. And frogs. I waited and waited. And then I didn’t. I put my hand between my legs. I parted my lips. The wet slid my fingers around and around and fast and hard. I closed my eyes. I thought about Sienna Torres shoving her fingers up my wide open cunt, as open as a mouth screaming motherfucker. I came so hard it shot out of me. I didn’t know until that night a girl body could do that. Shoot cum.
The first things I put in the black suitcase were a flask and a box with what used to be my mother’s hair.
Deliverance
TO BE BORN HAS MANY MEANINGS. HOW MANY TIMES WE leave a life, enter a new one. How it felt to fly out of the airport away from my family’s home at 18: watch the airport grow tiny and then the land go smaller and then the strip of shitty sand that is Florida recede and disappear. Girl in the sky weightless as water.
Where I was going was Lubbock, Texas. When I go
t to Lubbock, whatever Lubbock was, I felt positively delivered. My own room my own friends my own food my own alcohol my own music my own sex my own money my own thoughts my own body my my my freedom to be whoever wherever however rose like a volcano in me - like something that had been pressed down so far in a body it had to explode. What all college kids feel. Though only some of us are carrying daughter rage secrets in our skin and bones. When the plane landed in Lubbock my swim coach picked me up at the airport. The woman who had paid for me.
It took about two weeks for the Lubbockness to set in.
Until May of 2009, Lubbock, my friends, was dry. Not arid. Though it’s that too - arid enough to choke on. But it was Alcoholess. Except in bars and restaurants during certain times. To purchase “packaged” booze, you had to drive 25 minutes or more to a drive-through liquor barn type alcohol hut. Load up. Drive back. Stealthily sneak your load up at night through the side doors to the girl’s dorm - carrying giant suitcases of beer up several flights of stairs, or bottles shoved down your pants.
The environmental extremes in Lubbock are stockyard cow shit smell so pungent it makes your eyes water as well as causing a special gagging reflex, and hot wind orange dust storms so thick you can’t even see the hand in front of your face that also feel like you are being attacked by little Lubbock evil devil pins if you venture out.
Avenue Q, Buddy Holly Plaza. Big bronze Buddy Holly statue. Google it. Buddy, he’s circled by a walk of fame including greats like Waylon Jennings and the venerable Mac Davis. Budfest takes place during the first week of September, Buddy Holly’s birthday. During Budfest, drunk West Texans dress up like Buddy and his woman and … holler.
Prairie Dog town. Picture a very large dirt area contained by a cement fence in the middle of nowhere. A cement fence about knee-high. And inside the cement fence? A great many holes in the ground. And in the holes? Prairie dogs. So if you were drunk and high and sitting on the cement wall in the middle of the night, the thing to do would be shine a flashlight and then throw rocks at all the heads. Like a grown up whack-a-mole. What’s not to like?
The Chronology of Water Page 3
