“I—”
“You said, ‘George Hazelwood, suck my dick.’”
“I did not.” I didn’t even know what it meant to suck somebody’s dick. I don’t think I had ever heard the word dick before, but even I could figure out that, whatever it meant, it wasn’t something you said to a fat, greasy, lard-soaked classmate in front of the bank.
“That’s right. You said, ‘George Hazelwood, you suck my dick.’”
They were stupid, they were socially and economically dispossessed, and they didn’t know I was wearing my brother’s old clothes. They thought I was one of Them, the ones they did yard work for, the ones whose silver their mothers cleaned, the ones whose driveways their drunken fathers plowed when it snowed or whose garbage they carried to the dump.
Then George Hazelwood pulled something out of his pocket. “You see this?” he said. “This here is a switchblade. My brother brought it back from the army. It’s got a real long blade on it.” And then he pushed a button, and the blade flashed out and it was, in fact, really long and it looked really sharp, and I was surrounded by a group of my actual classmates who had pulled a knife on me in the middle of a perfect Saturday afternoon on which I was going to acquire the one thing that was going to make all the difference, just by signing my mother’s name in Mr. Swink’s book.
I was very short at the time. The autumn grass was up over my waist. I weighed ninety pounds. George Hazelwood wasn’t much taller, and he never would be, but he was so fat and he had a switchblade in his hand.
George Hazelwood was quivering with venom. He was like an enormously fat, dirty-nailed, acned, pig-eyed redneck pudding, and the thing that was clear and steady in my eye was the faces of the boys around me, and the very long, very sharp blade that was getting closer to my face. I could tell that these boys really didn’t admire me very much. You could tell they didn’t think a new flannel shirt or a sharp pair of Keds would make much difference in my general persona.
“We don’t like that. We don’t like that kind of talk, do we, George?” Henry was not about to let go of this.
“I don’t suck dick,” said George, and he said it in such a way that I knew, whatever sucking dick was, it was just not in George’s best interest to do it. Not at all. “That wasn’t very nice.”
“I didn’t say it.”
“Yes you did. Nobody says shit like that to me.”
He was kind of like this guy who moved to town later in my life, when I was a teenager. He called himself the Wild Man of Chicago, so I guess he had lived there, and he wanted in the worst way to kill a local real estate broker who had crossed him in some vague way. There was no apparent reason for this, nobody knew what the source of the dispute was, or how long ago it had taken place, but there was also no reason to believe that the Wild Man wasn’t serious when he said it.
“And you know how I’m going to do it?” said the Wild Man. “I’m going to sneak into his house one night, when he’s in the shower before going to bed, and I’m going to stab him in the heart while he’s standing there. And you want to know why? Because that is the most humiliating way for a man to die. Nekkid.”
George Hazelwood was kind of like a juvenile version of the Wild Man. “You see this knife?” he said. And I really, really did. I really did see the knife in George Hazelwood’s hand.
“You just might get to town missing one of your ears. I just maybe might have to cut one of your ears off.”
That’s when I said the stupid thing. It was one of the most stupid things I have ever said, and the humiliation of it haunts me still.
I said, “George, I seriously doubt it.” My tone was so acerbic, so dripping with hauteur and acid, you would have thought I was one of the characters in a Noël Coward play. You would have thought I was Lew Ayres playing the drunken brother in Holiday, by Philip Barry. I was twelve years old. I was four-foot-eleven and I chose that exact moment to behave like an asshole toward a fat juvenile delinquent with a switchblade in his hand.
The minute I said it, I knew it was the wrong thing to say. It was worse than saying “Suck my dick,” because at least only tough guys said something like that, whereas etiolated wimps said, “I seriously doubt it.”
The switchblade moved up until it was just under the lobe of my ear. I could feel how sharp it was. George Hazelwood’s hand was steady as a rock and the other boys’ eyes gleamed with bloodlust and impatience. George was standing so close to me I could smell the wood smoke in his pathetically worn shirt.
Then we heard it. We heard singing. We heard a group of girls singing “Over hill, over dale,” and then a flag appeared on the crest of the hill behind us, blowing and snapping in the breeze, and it was carried by Kathleen McKenna, who marched resolutely over the hill in full Girl Scout regalia, leading a troop of other Girl Scouts who marched double file singing, “Over hill, over dale,” Girl Scouts who wore not only their full uniforms, berets and everything, but also sashes with all their medals for making slipknots and starting fires with two sticks of wood and whatnot. They were so young and healthy and white.
Kathleen saw me and waved, although she did not veer from her chosen course. In fact, all the girls waved in their Hitler youth fervor, and when I looked up again, George Hazelwood and his troop of boys had vanished. They just weren’t there anymore and my ear was still on my head. I had been improbably saved from mutilation by the Girl Scouts of America.
I calmly walked on to town and bought the whatever it was. I did get nervous about walking home, though, and I called my mother and she said, “Oh, all right,” and she came and got me from Mr. Swink’s. I never told anybody why I had decided not to walk back from town, right in the middle of naptime.
When I saw George and Henry and the gang at school, they averted their eyes; in fact, they averted their eyes until the actual days when they all, one by one, dropped out of school.
The thing I bought made absolutely no difference at all, and I have spent my whole life looking over hill, over dale for one thing and another, the one thing that would make the difference between who I was and who I wanted to be. An Italian suit or a cashmere sweater, bought from a saleswoman at Bergdorf’s who knows me by name. She even called me after 9/11 to see if I was intact. A fancy car. A lovely house with an orchard on the beach in a country where I did not speak the language. Having my underwear ironed by a woman from Granada. Christmas. A touch on the cheek from some loving hand, some kiss on the mouth, some tangled embrace in the dark, however awkward; one obsession after another, knowing everything would fail, like the sneakers or the flannel shirt, knowing nothing would last, but something, something that would tell me that, finally, I was not helpless, I was not small, I was not weak or ugly or poor, that I didn’t have some fat redneck holding a knife to my ear on a beautiful day when I could see the mountains indigo blue beyond the sharp edge of the switchblade.
Some something that would mitigate the terrible beauty and unassuageable sadness of life.
I have never found it. I will look forever.
How I Went On
Here’s my question: How did they go on? Knowing what they knew, and knowing that each knew the thing the other knew, although my grandmother, I suppose, was alone in what she knew; I mean, I guess she never told anybody. I know she never told anybody, never discussed what she probably couldn’t hold in her mind after I had told her what had happened, after what I told her, even if I understood what had happened myself. I mean, nobody knew, because years after, after I had been in the hospital, in the bin, my aunt said to me she thought I’d had a breakdown because I was sad about my mother’s breast cancer and I just thought, Jesus. I mean, you don’t have a psychotic break and slit your wrists because your mother has only one breast. My grandmother went on with her daughter’s wedding and her husband’s dying, went on baking bread and making a breakfast for herself, every morning, and carrying it on a lap tray up to her bedroom so she could have breakfast in bed, couldn’t deal with what had happened only the night before, be
cause it was so far outside the realm of what her life, even her life as a nurse, as the wife of a doctor, had taught her was possible. How did they go on? Any of them? All of them?
How did they go on doing the things that people do, getting up in the morning, getting dressed, making coffee in a mottled old tin percolator on the stove, waiting for the brown liquid to bubble up in the little glass bell, waiting for hope or for the next party, serving breakfast for a family of five, going off to work in cars on which the windshields were frozen over with frost so that the morning glare glittered and blinded you when you turned out of the driveway onto the highway, into the east, teaching young cadets the brazen march of British history, bathing, putting on girdles, putting on lipstick, putting curlers in their hair, giving my grandmother a perm every month or so, playing bridge on Wednesdays—every Wednesday—with limeade and cucumber sandwiches with the edges cut off and paprika sprinkled on top for color, reading, reading the New Yorker, reading the novels of John Updike and John Cheever and Walker Percy and writing reviews of these novels for the Roanoke Times, reviews that were witty and astute, discussing these novels with their professor friends and their wives, the wives who in those days didn’t do anything except raise children and keep up so they could be smart and witty at cocktail parties, discussing these books in the winter when snow was falling and I had made popcorn for the grownups because it was a cheap hors d’oeuvres and there was a fire in the fireplace?
How did they go on ironing clothes and polishing the silver and teaching us to make snow angels and snow ice cream and real burnt sugar and almond ice cream from my grandmother’s famous recipe in a hand-cranked freezer in the summer, buying shaved ice in big brown paper bags from the ice house, leaving their socks on the floor and their suits thrown on chairs for my mother to pick up—that’s how spoiled he was—and sending off to Thalheimer’s in Richmond for tweed Davidow suits, one a year because they were so expensive? How did they go on making ends meet, giving us birthday parties, making marvelous cakes shaped like lambs and covered with coconut for Easter, buying cows by the quarter and keeping them butchered in the freezer in the cabin where there was also a real icebox, the old-fashioned kind you used to keep cool with ice, helping children with their homework, helping us with the intricacies of algebra, watching as we made grades that would make any parent proud, my brother and me, watching my sister struggle in school because she had a teacher in sixth grade who told her she would never be as smart as her brothers, trying to help her through the trauma, trying to get her to study and stop coloring her hair, she was so beautiful, and giving her riding lessons, and sending my brother and sister off to dancing school, my sister in white gloves, where they learned to waltz and fox-trot and do the box step, but not me, leaving me out of it, leaving me to watch as my friends went to dancing school and I didn’t, when all the nice children in town went to dancing school in suits and ties and crinolines and white gloves when they were twelve, reading the novels of Salinger and endless cheap mysteries, going to dances where they wore white dinner jackets and dresses down to the floor, learning to cook French food in cooking classes once a week, letting me start sending my shirts to the laundry when I was thirteen because I was old enough, lying in bed and hearing me in my bed tell stories to the whole family, an endless story of my real parents, Solly and Blanche—Jewish—who had carelessly lost me one day, left me behind in their travels, Solly and Blanche who were truck drivers and carried cabbages from coast to coast and left me in the back one day with the vegetables and hit a bump in the road so I bounced out of the truck just as my parents were driving by and so my parents had adopted me (my parents weren’t my real parents), trying to write novels and poems themselves and coming up short, mixing cocktails and giving and going to endless parties, sending my brother off to a fancy prep school on his godfather’s money, letting a family friend, who remembered being in the womb, or so he said, who could recite Paradise Lost in its entirety, or so he said, buy me my first suit, a heavy gray wool tiny suit, so I could go off to the Cuban Embassy in Washington and receive a medal they had awarded to my grandfather because he had done a remarkably brave thing and helped find the cure for yellow fever in Cuba with Walter Reed but my grandfather had died and my grandmother was too bereft to go herself, and I was named after him, so I went in a sweltering wool suit on a hot Washington day, than which there is no hotter, me a little boy of six among all these sweet old people who were also getting medals, who didn’t look so very brave or valorous anymore, just kind and happy and old, and the Cuban ambassador kissed me on my cheek and my picture was in the paper it was so cute, and making crab salad to put in hollowed out tomatoes for a summer supper, letting each child have one thing he wouldn’t eat because one day my brother said if he ate sweet potatoes he would throw up and my mother made him and he threw up all over the table? How did they go on?
How did they go on buying us new shoes in the store where they had a machine where you stood on a step in your new shoes and stuck your feet inside and looked through a little window to see an X-ray of your toes inside the shoes to see if they fit, so probably we’re all going to get cancer from all those rays, but it was fun anyway, we didn’t know, or putting on earrings or tying a necktie, or going to see my grandmother, my father’s mother, who didn’t think my mother was good enough, and my mother hated going there, hated every minute of it, and going to the beach for two weeks every summer until my father inherited $100,000 in 1964 and after that we had Mustang convertibles and went to the beach for three weeks, and my mother loved the beach and went in the water once a year in bathing suits that were beautiful and fit her beautifully, bathing suits of white pique with strawberries embroidered on them, bathing suits with little skirts, and we’d take everything to the beach, all our groceries because everything at the beach was too expensive, and beach chairs and coolers and bed linens so we looked like the Joads, and reading Josephine Tey mysteries and passing them on to us, the story of the sick detective who decides to solve the mystery of Richard III and the little princes in the tower, and reading John Fowles and Tom Wolfe, who came from Richmond, who once appeared in Richmond in khakis and a plain blue shirt and said he was traveling incognito, whose first book I reviewed for the Roanoke Times, at the age of thirteen, how did they continue?
How did they go on gardening, my father putting in an elaborate garden every year and then mostly abandoning it, or at least abandoning the parts that required too much labor, my mother putting in a beautiful rose garden and being proud of it and then uprooting all the roses and moving them farther from the house, for the sun, she said, and then farther and farther, until finally it was just too far to walk and she didn’t take care of them anymore and they all died, rust and beetles and black spot and mildew, neglect, and making me go back into the store and return a pack of Life Savers I’d stolen from the A&P where they had live lobsters in tanks and I walked into the store in dead mortification, but Bertha Townes saw me and gave me a nickel to pay for the candy, and living through the illnesses, the mumps and strep throat, which had killed my aunt Sally Page, and measles and whooping cough and the cuts and scrapes and broken bones that children get by the dozens, and my sister getting a pussy willow bud so buried in her ear and getting so hysterical about it that she had to go to the hospital and be put under a general anesthetic before they could get it out, and the dead dogs, darling Frederick the dachsund and Bruce Catton the beagle and James Bond and Moll Flanders the basset hounds, and Leamus the cat, who wandered in from the cold, like the spy, and the oyster stew a few days before Christmas and the big dinner on Christmas Eve and writing a letter to Santa, which we burned in the fireplace, watching the ashes go up the chimney and fly on through the cold night sky to the North Pole, and listening, every Christmas Eve, to an old record of Charles Laughton reading Mr. Pickwick’s Christmas until we all knew it by heart, and making us line up on the steps on Christmas morning in the order of our ages, until my father had gotten the fire going in the fireplace a
nd my mother had made her first cup of coffee, the percolator all ready from the night before, and serving us Thanksgiving dinner on Wednesday night because my mother hated Thanksgiving, she thought somebody would force her to eat dinner at some odd hour, so we had nothing to do all day Thanksgiving, except listen to VMI play VPI on the radio, and the endless laundry and the endless ironing and the conversation and the fights, and having a big party on the Fourth of July, with fireworks brought all the way from the Keystone Fireworks Corporation in Pennsylvania that you shot out of a four-inch mortar in the back yard dense with trees and nobody cared, and nobody thought of the danger and everybody left the minute the fireworks were over because it was dark and the children were overstimulated, the smoke hanging thick and acrid in a cloud over the back yard, like a battlefield in World War I, and making love in the bed in which it happened, in which it began, the bed I threw out last year, they must have, they were obsessed with each other, they thought they were the couple everybody wanted to be, and listening to me weeping and telling the story of how the McClouds threw me out of their house in a blizzard at nine o’clock at night because they were drunk and crazy, saying who did I think I was and how my family thought we were better than anybody else, which we did, actually, but it went on for hours while they served me SpaghettiOs out of the cold can and powdered milk they hadn’t even bothered to stir up while their children sat silent and mortified across the room and finally they threw me out even though it was snowing so hard you could barely see your hand in front of your face, all because I was an hour late to come over and spend the night because there was a blizzard and I had to wait until the cocktail party broke up and Pax and Sis drove me in because my father wasn’t going to put down his drink and get in a car in that weather if he didn’t have to and I should have called but I didn’t, or maybe I did and they forgot because the McClouds were so drunk, and when they threw me out I struggled up a hill to get to my aunt’s, my little overnight bag in my hand, but I kept crying and falling and I was twelve and when I got to my aunt’s house she thought I’d been in a car accident because I was crying too hard to tell her what really happened so she felt all my bones to see if anything was broken, and Skip had to bring his Jeep and drive me home and my grandmother listened to the whole story and said, “Well, you lie down with the dogs, you get up with the fleas”; how did they go on changing the sheets when you were sick, making you change your pajamas and move into their bed while she put fresh, clean sheets on your bed and waited for your fever to go down, her hand so cool on your hot forehead, on your hair, how did they do it?