To this day, when anyone I love leaves home for longer than a few hours, I’m filled with dread that they will not return.
When Mother became pregnant about a month after Rena’s death, she prayed over and over and with much fervor that she’d give birth to twin girls: a single daughter would have invited inevitable comparisons to Rena, and as for another son, I guess one Tommy Rotten was more than enough for one household. The next March, my twin sisters Mary and Marian were born.
It gives one pause, does it not? You needn’t place it in a religious context, we can argue all night about the true identity of its source, but for me, at least, there is no denying the evidence of answered prayer.
Aside from love, which we may assume everybody except heart-numb psychopaths covet in one guise or another, average Christianized Americans (with whom I’ve a whole abattoir of bones to pick) really desire two things: they want to get rich and they want to go to heaven. (Apparently in that order.) And this despite the fact that their very own Lord and Savior explicitly warned that it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.
What’s up with that? Do they think Jesus was joking, just kidding around? Or does each would-be wealthy Christian believe that an exception will be made in his or her case; that at heaven’s gates his or her accumulation of property and cash will elicit a knowing, sympathetic wink -- as the needle’s eye is temporarily widened to let him or her squeeze through?
Rena wouldn’t have had that problem. The only possessions she left behind were her dolls -- and the toy tea set with which she entertained them daily.
6
snakes alive
Pink Baldwin claimed there was a ridge not far from Blowing Rock where huckleberry bushes grew as thick as the whiskers on Santa Claus’s chin. There was a problem, however: the ridge was populated almost as thickly with rattlesnakes. When the Baldwin family went berry picking up there, they were obliged to wear lengths of stovepipe over their legs for protection. According to Pink, the sound of rattlesnakes striking those stovepipes resembled rain falling on a tin roof.
My parents, an uncle and aunt of mine, and I were driving on the Mount Mitchell Highway after a scenic picnic lunch atop the highest peak east of the Rockies, when a large diamondback rattlesnake was seen sunning itself in the middle of the road ahead of us. Daddy stopped the car, whereupon I abruptly leaped out for a closer look. Just as swiftly, Daddy followed, grabbed me by the collar and practically threw me back in the car.
My father and uncle, for reasons doubtlessly as primal as they were on that occasion unnecessary -- a response embedded aeons ago in Homo sapiens DNA -- set about to kill the snake. The stones they hurled at it quickly aroused it from its stupor, at which point it fled across the road, racing into the ditch and up a steep embankment, disappearing into the underbrush. Naturally, we thought that was the end of it, and I alone, smarting from my rough treatment and ever ripe for adventure, was disappointed.
A minute later, however, we were in for a surprise. The snake, having turned around in the brush, came racing back down the bank, heading straight for its attackers, rattling furiously. It sounded like the Devil’s maracas at carnival time in hell, and it was enough to set father and uncle falling all over themselves to get back in the car. The big viper coiled, jaws agape, fangs glistening, as if daring its tormentors to confront it. Wisely, they declined.
What happened next was that Daddy drove over the angry reptile several times with the car before leaving it for dead. But was it? The whole incident had a kind of supernatural flavor, heightened by the fact that no one, including herpetologists to whom I’ve since described the encounter, could remember ever hearing of a rattlesnake, once out of danger, deliberately returning to challenge its human enemies. Most experts, frankly, were incredulous.
A few years ago, however, an amateur herpetologist with experience in Appalachia offered what seemed like an even more startling explanation. He suggested that the snake that came charging so fiercely down the embankment was not the same snake that had gone up it.
“Eastern diamondbacks often live in pairs,” he said, “especially during mating or brooding season. Could be that either the male or the female took it upon itself to go out of its way to show it wasn’t going to tolerate any threat to its mate.”
Had the cold-blooded reptile charged down that bank, risks be damned, to avenge the stoning of its partner, to demand satisfaction for the offense and intrusion? Had it died for honor? For love? If true, that casts the whole episode in a very different light: no longer just extraordinary and mysterious but romantic. In other words, right up my nothing if not serpentine alley.
My father was helping to string a new electrical line from Lenore up the mountain to Blowing Rock when the right-of-way crew flushed a good-size rattlesnake from its den. One of the workers pinned down the viper’s head with a shovel while a companion yanked out its fangs with his pliers. The agitated but now harmless snake they then stashed in the large wooden toolbox in the bed of their truck.
After work, back at the Lenore inn where the crew was lodged, they dispatched the cook’s helper, a colored man, out to the truck to retrieve “a mess of huckleberries” they claimed they’d picked that day. “They’re in the toolbox,” they told him, expressing a keen desire for huckleberry pancakes.
Much to the amusement of the jokers at the inn, there soon erupted a terrified scream, followed first by the crunch of running feet on the gravel drive, then the flap-flop of loose shoes disappearing down the highway. The poor fellow might have run all the way to Africa for all they knew because he never returned to the inn.
At least that’s how the story went. My father was a resolutely honest man, seldom disposed to narrative embellishment, yet it’s difficult not to detect in this anecdote, especially its climax, a whiff of the apocryphal. And it’s impossible not to detect the odor of racism.
Race, in those days, was hardly in the forefront of Blowing Rock consciousness. Not a single African American lived in the town or its environs. Even the wealthy summer people didn’t bring along their black servants when they came for the season, finding it cheaper and less bothersome to hire maids and other help from the local white population. All the blacks in my frame of reference were in the movies; and whether it was a sophisticated dancer such as Bill Robinson (hey, he was cool enough for Shirley Temple), a figure of fun such as Buckwheat in “Our Gang” comedies, or the native tribesmen (so strange, so far away) who shared the jungle with Tarzan, they lacked any relevance in my daily life.
Of course, I’d heard the occasional “N-word,” and while I realized it wasn’t exactly a compliment, even that epithet could possess a degree of ambiguity to me back then. For example, the time dear Aunt Mary expressed alarm at the way I’d dressed myself that morning. “Lordy mercy, Tommy! You can’t go around wearing red and orange together. Those are nigger colors.”
I have no idea how Aunt Mary came by that interesting piece of fashion information, but I do know that more than twenty years later, when I was at a civil rights gathering in defiantly segregationist King William County, Virginia, I noticed that the only person of either race wearing red and orange was me.
On one of our honeymoons, my wife Alexa and I rode elephants from northern Thailand to the border with Burma (for both humanitarian and poetic reasons, let’s refuse to call it Myanmar), a trip, at pachyderm pace, of three-plus days. Lumbering along atop an elephant’s head is not quite the wild, free, ecstatic experience it appears to be in Tarzan movies or the circus. For one thing, the elephant’s hair, though short, is stiff and wiry. One feels as if one’s posterior is bouncing on a beanbag chair made of steel wool.
In addition, elephants are given to cooling off (and it was summer in Thailand) by frequently misting themselves with any available water, often from a ditch. The rider, naturally, is sprayed along with his or her mount. It’s actually refreshing -- until one begins to notice that the spray conta
ins a certain amount of mucus. An elephant sprays with its trunk, which is, one is eventually reminded, its nose. At the end of each day, my bride and I were covered with a thin, slick coating of elephant snot.
Let’s forget viscid nasal secretions, however. I’ve been talking about snakes, and it happened that one afternoon a very long, very heavy serpent crossed the trail in front of our pachyderm party. One of the elephant drivers chased it down and dispatched it with his machete. We were told it was a sing snake. Sing is the Thai word for “lion.” If you’re a consumer of imported beers, you may recall that Thailand’s national brand is Singha. “Singha” was the name of a powerful lion figure from Southeast Asian mythology, although the beer, being a meek Buddhistic brew, seems more representative of bunny rabbits than of the king of beasts. Sing? Ha!
At any rate, our guide mentioned that the elephant drivers would be eating the sing snake for their dinner, whereupon I insisted that I must have some, as well. So, the men hacked off a chunk about seven inches in length, weighing about half a pound; wrapped it in a banana leaf, and, when we made camp, presented it to our cook.
The cook proceeded to prepare it nicely with sticky rice, bamboo shoots, and, as is the local custom, enough red chili paste to give heartburn to the Human Torch. Having de-snotted ourselves in a river, Alexa and I sat down on a palm log, bowls on our laps, chopsticks in hand, our hospitable palates poised to welcome in a culinary stranger.
Well, I can truthfully note in my résumé that I have dined upon lion snake. But what does lion snake taste like? I have no idea. Definitely not like the proverbial chicken -- unless that chicken had just reentered Earth’s atmosphere. Every one of my nine thousand taste buds was preoccupied with trying to protect itself from third-degree burns. For at least an hour after dinner, I felt as if I’d been gargling napalm, and as an antidote, no amount of Singha beer could cut the mustard.
In the African nation of Namibia in 2004, I was struck by a black mamba, one of the world’s deadliest reptiles. Compared to a black mamba bite, a rattlesnake bite is little more than a hickey. (Refer to Barbara Kingsolver’s splendid novel The Poisonwood Bible for a graphic description of the accumulating physical horrors a black mamba victim usually experiences in the fifteen minutes or so between the bite and death.)
Obviously, since I’m writing this account, I wasn’t bitten. The strike missed. It missed because the open electric cart in which my guide and I were seated (we had ridden out in the bush to observe up close and personal a mother and baby rhinoceros) lurched forward inches out of fang range at precisely the right instant. Suffice to say we didn’t stick around for a second chance. In black mamba baseball, it’s one strike you’re out.
The mamba was long, slender, and graceful, and in striking it rose so high it was virtually vertical, as if balanced momentarily on the tip of its tail. It resembled a self-propelled licorice whip from the Marquis de Sade’s candy shoppe, a sleek six-foot bold italic exclamation point meant to emphasize a single message: DIE! DIE! DIE!
As thrilled as I was to find the incident in the hours following its agreeable outcome, it was also, believe it or not, to arouse in me a lingering sibilation of romantic nostalgia: the fond memory of another black snake in a very different context from an earlier time.
During my ninth year, when I was in the fourth grade, my father moved us temporarily to Burnsville, North Carolina, likewise a mountain town, though lacking Blowing Rock’s altitude, scenic vistas, and seasonal gentrification. Our rented home on the outskirts of Burnsville was adjacent to the grounds of a defunct boarding school. One morning I awoke to a clamor, and from my window observed a multitude of brightly painted trucks and silver trailers filling the weedy campus next door.
As men began to unload heavy rope, wooden poles, and giant rolls of canvas from flatbed lorries and panel vans, I remembered the posters I’d recently seen downtown and realized that a circus was setting up practically in my own backyard! Shaking with excitement, barely taking time to dress (was I wearing red and orange?), I raced out into the vortex of activity intent upon finding a job and seeing the show. I accomplished both, but more importantly, I encountered the flesh-bound instrument of secret wisdom and cosmic love torture who was to animate my fantasies and billow the embers of my yearning for the rest of my life.
Her name was Bobbi. She was eleven -- an “older woman.” She had yellow hair that hung down to her waist and wore riding britches and black patent leather boots, the tops of which very nearly met the end of her tresses. And she had a snake: a pet blacksnake that she carried around the way an ordinary little girl might carry a doll. Bobbi’s right arm was tattooed with small scars, souvenirs of the many times the snake had bitten her. (It was an American racer, probably of the rather common Coluber constrictor subspecies, and obviously nonpoisonous.)
Bobbi was both the most exotic and romantic creature I’d ever met, a preadolescent living embodiment of Tarzan’s Jane; of Sheena, Queen of the Jungle; and though I had no clear notion of it then, of the feminine archetype to whom there clings an air of hidden knowledge, something strangely meaningful, equally nurturing and dangerous.
It was because of Bobbi that at a tender age I became a lifetime member of that exclusive order of men who believe a woman in pink circus tights holds all the secrets of the universe. She was not yet in tights but it was no great stretch to project for her a life in spotlights at the top of the tent, swinging by her hair; or else pirouetting atop the bare back of a prancing stallion in the center ring. As thousands cheered.
Bobbi was of the circus, born and bred. Her father was ringmaster and show manager; her mother -- billed on sideshow banners as “the Indestructible Woman” -- climbed twice daily, scantily clad, into a wooden coffinlike box through which about a dozen heavy swords one by one were driven. Bobbi -- beautiful, fearless, ever dramatic -- was a young goddess of the big top and I simply could not or cannot imagine an adulthood in which, as one of those so-called exotic dancers, she might hootchy her kootchy on a tawdry stage in the armless embrace of a burlesque boa constrictor.
Forget Toni and Nancy, forget Gwendolyn Berryman. Bobbi was on another plane entirely, and I was not so much in love as in awe. It was, of course, unrequited, although she, generally deprived of playmates, seemed fond enough of my company. When I wasn’t watering the llamas, shoveling monkey poop, or performing those other chores in the menagerie tent that was earning me a pass to the main show, Bobbi and I hung out on the lot; and when my duties were done, we’d walk the short distance to my house and play board games or improvise scenes with my toy train set. Out of deference to my mother, the blacksnake would be left behind in its cage.
On the second day (and I’m unsure quite how it transpired), Bobbi’s mom and dad came to lunch at our house. It must have seemed a bit surreal, the flamboyant ringmaster and the Indestructible Woman sitting at our dining room table eating soup and discussing the war (Pearl Harbor had been bombed six months earlier) with my parents. Nevertheless, lunch went well, so well in fact that Bobbi’s father (surely at his daughter’s instigation) invited me to go on the road with the show. And my parents said yes!
I didn’t go far. Only to the next stop, some fifty miles away. And after the performances there, after a couple of days of free cotton candy, curious conversations with clowns, and all the monkey manure I could muscle, Daddy drove over, picked me up, and took me home: Mother had been worrying. So much for “running away with the circus.”
7
step right up
No, I didn’t run away with it, but it might be fair to say that the circus ran away with me. As a teenager in Virginia, I performed sideshow and menagerie chores for Hunt Brothers, a show with more animals and a larger cast though, sadly, no Bobbi. (Except from afar or in my fantasies I would never see the likes of her again, although as an adult I made the mistake many times of projecting -- unfairly -- her image, her archetype, onto young women who, though lively and eccentric enough, were fundamentally unsuited for the role.
) I also worked brief stints as ticket seller and concessionaire on the midways of a number of carnivals and fairs. The moment the first vehicles in a garish caravan began to roll into one of the small Southern towns where we lived, I would be bicycling to the setup lot, looking for a chance, as the showfolk would say, to be “with it,” wishing I might leave town in their company.
The attraction for me wasn’t so much the fierce individualism and freedom from convention afforded by the transient life -- though the older I got the greater the appeal of the open road -- but rather the sheer exuberant gilding-the-lily poetics of the baroque spectacles themselves, the invitation to bask in the rainbowed prisms of a movable Oz from behind whose spangled curtains genuine wizards seldom failed to emerge.
The circus provided a separate reality, with an emphasis, if truth be told, on reality. In the lyrics of a popular song, the term “Barnum & Bailey world” was coined as a synonym for all that is phony and false. Certainly, there was deception, bombast, and ballyhoo aplenty, and even outright grifting in some of the smaller shows, but ultimately the old-fashioned circus was real to a degree rarely approached by most modern entertainments, including “reality TV.” Those snarling tigers swiping at a trainer in the center ring were flesh and fang and claw, not some Pixar animation; those aerialists working without a net literally risked their lives at every breathtaking performance. Beauty, novelty, mirth, and danger mingled in real time, real space a few yards from one’s place in the stands; posing the question “Which is the true phony, Barnum & Bailey or the Hollywood blockbuster; the Great Wallendas (whose seven-person high-wire pyramid I witnessed shortly before their fatal fall in Detroit), or the preposterous heroics generated on some studio geek’s computer?”