Essie told me she had beaten breast cancer. This came as a surprise to me and I found myself eyeing her bosom, wondering which side had been affected. “Like when I had that cancer,” prefaced many of Essie’s utterings that day. The cancer was evidence of how bad luck could strike out of the blue, and her reprieve was testament to good luck and God’s grace. It was the reason for her practical disposition, her vision of the world as black-and-white, her role as a doer rather than an observer or complainer. She was, for example, a die-hard Bulldog fan, and if anyone thought she was crazy to drive all over the state—even clear up to Fairfax—for the high school football team’s away games, why, that was their problem.
“When Gordon came home,” she said, “it was like a test God was giving us. ‘Here,’ He said, ‘let’s see what you all do now.’ And there wasn’t two ways about it—I knew what I was going to do.”
I asked Essie to tell me about Gordon, to help me understand who he had been. Essie had made coffee and she sat opposite me.
She was a natural storyteller—the opposite of Gordon. Talking was clearly therapeutic for her. She frequently made little detours to provide background for the main theme that she was pursuing. I had no occasion to interrupt her except to relieve myself of the coffee. Essie kept going without a pause for over two hours. Her daughters sat through most of it, listening as if to a fable they had heard many times before and never tired of. Often Essie would turn to them and say, “Isn’t that right, children,” and Sabatha and Joy would nod vigorously, tears coming to their eyes whenever their mother brushed away her tears. Joy was two years younger than Sabatha.
Essie was the third of four children. The first child, Robert Lee, died two days after birth of “strangulation.” Essie said this word to me as if I should know exactly what it meant. Just like “HIV factor” or “the cancer.”
After Robert Lee came Herman, a confident and happy child who was head of the household when the father was away. Then came Essie, then Gordon.
Their mother was a coal miner’s daughter from up in Pikeville. Essie’s father repaired diesel engines at the Bullet mines till they didn’t need him anymore. He went down to Tennessee, to Knoxville, to work, driving long-distance trucks. He could have visited more often than he did. By the time their father returned for good, the children had grown up, they had bonded among themselves; they had little use for their father;
The harsh, damp surroundings of Preacher’s Creek toughened the children, made them as resilient as the abandoned railway tiers that dotted the hollow, enabled them to weather the measles, the mumps, the assorted broken bones, scarlet fever and even typhoid.
All but Gordon. Gordon was a sickly child, prone to the croup, the bronchitis (for which he had been hospitalized six times between the age of four and seven) and, most important, prone to “fits,” the local appellation for seizures. His mother had taken him to Richmond, to Charlottesville, and even to Emory in Atlanta in search of diagnosis and treatment of the fits. Nothing was found; she was told that Gordon would grow out of them.
More than once, Essie and Herman had huddled around Gordon in the schoolyard while he had a convulsion. They recognized the eyeball rolling and the stiffening of his arms. They cleared space for him, knowing the violent limb-thrashing and the guttural sounds would soon follow. They lashed out at any kid who wanted to make a comedy out of Gordon’s misfortune. When the jerking movements stopped, they took him to the bathroom and helped him wash. A phone call brought Uncle Matthew, who ran the feed store and had a car to take him on home.
Those fits punctuated Gordon’s family’s memories of his childhood. Because of the fits, he was forbidden to climb, swim or play contact sports. He was too frail to survive such games anyway. Instead he became a Looney Tunes aficionado, mimicking the voices of Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd with uncanny accuracy, taking on the persona of one or another cartoon hero for weeks at a time.
He became a collector of boxes—those days it was tobacco tins and matchboxes but in later life it would become small brass boxes, jewelry and music boxes, boxes made of beads, or out of ivory. Exotic seashells soon sat between the boxes, in the boxes, on top of the boxes. If his siblings led an engaging and exciting outer life in the hollow, Gordon soon developed an equally colorful inner world.
In his early teens, Gordon outgrew his fits. He put on inches, developed a style, became vivacious, even dated. He began to distinguish himself from his school peers, most of whom had emerged from the black wood-frame shacks of the coal camps. After their schooling, it was clear that most would return there. But equally clear was the fact that Gordon would not. He had metamorphosed into a dazzling self-creation, aware of a world far larger than their little hollow. It was as if he came from a different planet than the others. His mind was abuzz with projects and plans. Muddy Waters and Coltrane played constantly in his room; he talked incessantly and was always happy, ready at a moment’s notice to imitate his high school teachers, or the preacher at church, or the preacher’s wife. The family was caught up in his excitement and it became a ritual for them all to sit on their mother’s bed at night and recount the day’s events, a performance for which Gordon was both ringmaster and star. To his family, Gordon’s transformation was nothing short of a miracle.
“Gordon always had it in his mind that he wanted to go to the University of Virginia in Charlottesville,” Essie told me. “I never heard him speak of another university. He was smart too—boy was he smart. He could draw—I’d say he should have been an artist. I think that was what God had planned for him. Sabatha, fetch the two paintings in my room to show Doc.”
Sabatha returned with a framed picture in each hand. The paintings were actually pencil drawings painstakingly shaded with crayon. The first was of the head and torso of a bare-chested Frankie Vallee look-alike—a latter-day ephebe in the Chippendale mold. The lines were clean. A great deal of effort had been expended on the shiny black curls and the eyes, which were too big. The upper torso showed the deltoids carefully defined and the pectoral muscles forming interleaves with the abdominal muscles. The trapezius muscles were a trifle exaggerated, looking like webs extending from either side of his neck. Despite—or perhaps because of—the technical innocence of the drawing, it was sensual.
The second picture was of a southern belle drawn in profile. She wore a shoulderless, antebellum costume. Elaborate blond curls spilled down to her collarbones; a tear emerged from the corner of one eye. This drawing was better proportioned than the other one, but it too, despite the shading, had a one-dimensional quality. Essie and Sabatha hovered over me as I studied the paintings.
“Pa went with him for the interview for University of Virginia. It was the year Pa got back for good. It looked for sure like Gordon would get a scholarship. But then Pa says to the committee that the Vines never did take handouts and didn’t need any now. Well, Gordon was admitted to ‘U.Va.’ but Pa never came through with the money. That just tore Gordon up.”
When Essie, a year after graduating from high school, moved into an apartment in Kingsport, Gordon soon joined her. They were just an hour from Blackwood. Essie worked third shift in the ammunition factory. Gordon got a job there working first shift. They cooked together, shared a car, and on the rare occasions when their days off coincided, they partied together.
Gordon was a tidy roommate and a daring cook with the ability to take his mother’s best dishes to new heights and combine them with exotic inventions of his own. His whirlwind social life included Essie and it seemed they were always on their way to an antique show, or back from a county fair, or heading to a quilt display.
“I used to wonder how in the world could he be so good, so capable of always doing something different, something unique that he had thought up. It was a God-given talent.”
In the years that followed, I heard different but strangely similar versions of this story from families of gay men: There was always the God-given talent that accompanied their God-given sexuality, always the special
creativity and humor. This fascinated me. Was it part of the subconscious effort to compensate for their difference? Was the charm and talent as biologically determined as the sexuality?
One gay man had told me how he had begun to feel tense and restless at his family house. His parents used to hear him laughing and carrying on on the phone with his friends; they knew he was the life of the party when he was with his friends. “How come you can’t be like that with us?” his parents would ask. “You don’t understand,” he would say. His natural state was to be happy and to laugh, but it went along with his being gay. He found it difficult to hide his gayness and maintain his outward fun persona. I am still haunted by this remark. I have grown to realize through years of treating gay men how few of their families were able to see their sons’ best, most engaging selves.
I asked Essie if she met many of Gordon’s friends.
“I seen some of the friends he hung out with. They’d come home and—to be quite frank—I didn’t like some of them. I told him so. I said, ‘Gordon, you be careful now. You watch out.’ ”
“You mean they were gay men?”
“Yes. I knew then that Gordon was gay. But I didn’t have any special word for it, you understand? I didn’t think too much about it, you know? He was just Gordon; it seemed like such a miracle that he had survived his childhood. Who could have asked for anything more? Even now, I can’t think of him as gay. Gay may have been what he did, but it wasn’t who he was. He was our Gordo before he was anything else.”
I wondered how Gordon, if he could be made to talk, would have reacted to this statement about him: gay was what he did, but it wasn’t who he was.
Essie returned to Blackwood after a year. She married and the next year had Sabatha. Gordon remained in Kingsport. After six months he called to say he had just landed a wonderful job in Atlanta. He sounded ecstatic and already far away. Kingsport had been a huge improvement on their little hollow, but Atlanta—Atlanta was Mecca. He was off and Essie was happy for him.
Essie and her mother went once to see Gordon in Atlanta. “Gordo always knew exactly what he wanted. And I tell you what—he found what he wanted in Atlanta. He was the kind that would rather have waited to get exactly what he wanted than have something second-rate. He had talked about a cocker spaniel—a black cocker spaniel—as long as I can remember. Well, when I went to visit him in Atlanta, we open the door and out comes this beautiful cocker spaniel! Lord, it had the prettiest black fur and ears just like wings!
“He lived with this guy, John, a flight attendant for an airline—a real nice guy, we liked him just fine. They shared a beautiful townhouse, right there on a lake. For the longest time I had heard him say, ‘If I ever have a place of my own, it’ll be on a lake . . .’ and here it was, come true.
“He had a brand new Monte Carlo. And because of John’s job, he was traveling to places we never dreamed of: Mexico, Paris, New Orleans for Mardi Gras.
“Sabatha, fetch me that tutu and them tassels Gordo brought me.”
I fingered the tassels and the gossamer G-string sewn into the transparent tutu. I pictured Essie in them. Essie, seeing the expression on my face, burst out laughing, which set the rest of us off. “He called me up to tell me how he and John went into a bar in New Orleans and saw this woman wearing this thing here and how she was able to set them tassels a-spinning in opposite directions. ‘Essie, it’s the most amazing thing I ever seen. Why, when I come home, I’m going to show you how to do it!’ ”
“And tell him about the box collection,” Sabatha said.
“Oh, Lord, don’t let’s start on that!”
And Essie didn’t start on that. What she wanted to tell me next was too compelling for her to digress:
“One year, Gordo didn’t call on Mother’s Day. You have to know Gordo, but it’s something unimaginable for him. I mean, he loved his Mama to death. Then Mama’s birthday came and went with still no call. Then to beat it all, Gordo’s roommate calls one day to say that he hadn’t seen Gordo for weeks! Did we know where he was?”
Essie and her mother went hurrying down to Atlanta. “It was as if Gordon had dug a hole in the earth and pulled the lid over himself. Trudie—the cocker spaniel—he’d given to his neighbor just the week before. The Monte Carlo was parked outside the bank that financed it; the keys were in the ignition and all the papers were in the glove box.”
They had nothing to go on. The police, since he was over twenty-one, could not declare him a missing person until seven years had elapsed. “All we heard were rumors.”
According to the rumors, Gordon’s roommate might be facing charges of sexual misconduct with a minor. Even though Gordon was not involved, it might have prompted him to flee.
The only thing Gordon had not taken care of before he ran was a diamond ring he had purchased. For the next three years Gordon’s mother made the payments on the ring. According to Essie, each of the payments represented a sort of offering to the memory of her prodigal son, or perhaps an offering to a deity that might, if she kept up the payments, eventually return both the ring and the young man who wore it.
“Now, I refused to give up. I said, ‘Mama, let’s get us a P.I.’ ”
I must have looked puzzled, because Essie explained: “P.I.: private investigator! Well, Mama hemmed and hawed. And so I just went ahead and did it, though God knows I sure as hell couldn’t afford it.”
The P.I. from Atlanta followed Gordo’s trail through North Carolina, Georgia and Alabama, to Tallahassee, Florida, where Gordon had lived with an older man and his children. When the older man had died, the children were sent to foster homes and the trail disappeared.
“If I was you,” the private detective advised her, “I’d give him up for dead. That way, if he shows up . . . why, it’ll be one hell of a surprise.”
ON MOTHER’S DAY, exactly four years to the day of Gordon’s disappearance, Essie walked into her mother’s house from work to pick up her kids. Her mother was frying okra. The phone rang.
Essie heard Gordon’s voice: “Hey, Essie. What you doing?”
She screamed at her mother to pick up the other phone.
Gordon said to his mother, “What you doing, Mama?”
Amidst her mother’s sobs and the spluttering of oil on the stove, Essie found herself shouting, unable to stop herself, happy, but so very angry: “WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN? WHY HAVE YOU NOT CALLED ALL THESE YEARS? WHAT DID YOU THINK . . . ?”
Her mother hushed her. Gordon didn’t seem to mind. He was strangely calm. Gordon’s father stood near the phone, listening, tears streaming down his cheeks. He grinned from ear to ear but did not reach for the phone.
“I’m fine, Mama,” Gordo said. “I’m fine, Essie.”
He gave them his number and his new address. Told them his name was now Brian Clark. He asked for them to come down to Florida and see him. He told them again and again that he was fine.
They dialed his number ten times that night, assuring themselves each time he picked up that he was alive, and that he would stay till they arrived.
The next day Essie, her kids and her parents piled into Essie’s car and set out for Jacksonville, Florida. The family had agreed on the way down not to pry, not to ask too many questions about the years that had been lost. Whatever had made Gordon disappear for so long was to be his business.
It seemed to me remarkable that it was always Essie who took the initiative. Essie and her mother had gone to Atlanta to look for him. Essie had hired the private investigator. They went in Essie’s car to Jacksonville. Essie had brought him to see me. I asked her about this.
She looked puzzled, as if the question had never occurred to her. “I guess you could say that the family more or less looked to me to do this or that. My brother is involved with his own family. And I just did what I had to do.”
I was silent, thinking how utterly outward-oriented, almost unaware of herself Essie was. It was reflected in her laughter, it was evident in the way she responded to each family cri
sis.
“Go on, Essie.” I had interrupted her train of thought.
“In Florida, Gordon was in what you call a studio apartment. It was a new development on a waterway, beautiful—wasn’t it, children? He looked older. His hairline had kind of gone back and there was gray right here, over his temples. In the neighboring flats were other young men. They were all his friends. They were all single, and they were all of them working like Gordon at Dolphin-Haven. It was kind of a restaurant chain, you see.”
The family stayed a week, up late every night caucusing on Gordon’s waterbed just as they had on their mother’s bed in the old days. His mother kept touching him, touching his hair, his wrists, as if only the feel of his flesh could convince her he was really alive. On the drive back to Virginia their mood was celebratory: God had blessed them by bringing Gordon back to life. They had a special service at church to thank God for answering their prayers. “Let me tell you,” Essie said. “I never lost faith. I prayed for him every single day.”
Christmas came and the family once again—this time with Gordon’s brother and his children—trooped down to Florida in two cars, each loaded with presents.
It was the first time they had celebrated Christmas outside of Virginia, outside of their little hollow. When they reached Jacksonville it was seventy degrees.
“Growing up, come Christmas, Gordo would be the one to show us how to celebrate. As if he was the only one who knew how to have fun, how to make us do Christmas right. He always did the tree. One year, when he was in Kingsport, Mama had done the tree. Well, when Gordon came up on Christmas Eve, he took it all down and did it all over again—he was up half the night for that. He was like that. And the tree was just perfect!”
In photographs that Essie showed me of the Jacksonville Christmas, Gordon’s face is wreathed in smiles and the tree is splendid. The gifts he bought for each member of the family were exquisite—he was making up for four lost years. It was on his mother that he lavished the most elaborate present yet—his diamond ring, the one he had acquired years before in Atlanta and that she had continued to pay for.