Spotlit and sparkling, a spinning mirrored disco ball is slowly raised to the top of the darkened tent. As it ascends, a live parrot, twirling round and round, is hanging from the ball by its beak. And all the while an organ, fully amplified, all stops out, a panting, red-faced ringmaster at its keyboard, is playing “The Impossible Dream.” Ta da!
Well, I guess you had to be there. I’ve attended many a circus, major and minor, in America and abroad; seen many a performance, thrilling and routine, but it is the one just described -- kind of cheesy, sort of dumb, falling so audaciously and yet so sweetly on the far side of reason -- that will forever occupy the center ring in my heart.
Incidentally, the following morning I stopped by the market and asked for the poster, wishing to add it to my meager collection of circus memorabilia. The poster wasn’t there. According to a clerk, someone from the show had picked it up earlier so that it could be displayed in another town. Turns out, this circus with one elephant and one parrot also had only one poster.
8
yes, virginia
A silk scarf is smoothed out upon a flat metal plate. A frying pan is placed atop the scarf. An egg is cracked and dropped in the pan. The egg fries, soon cooked to perfection, although there was no flame and the scarf does not burn or even scorch. My father was among tens of thousands who watched in astonishment this demonstration in one of the science pavilions at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1933.
Long after his buddies had left the pavilion, perhaps to check out Sally Rand’s scandalous “fan dance,” my father lingered behind, observing the confounding demonstration several more times. By the time he got home to Blowing Rock, he’d figured out how it worked.
The device was an early prototype of the microwave oven, though nobody used that term in 1933; and Daddy proceeded to build one just like the one he’d seen in Chicago. Not surprisingly, it attracted attention from miles around. People kept showing up at the electric company offices, pleading to see the trick. Daddy’s friends urged him to charge admission, but he declined, having not a grain of greed in his gullet. For his family, he was always a “good provider,” as they say, but he had scant interest in money per se. He soon gave the device to an associate, who, charging the curious ten cents apiece to see it in action, enjoyed a nice little sideline before the primitive microwave sputtered one day and ran out of magic. His friend might have persuaded Daddy to rebuild it, but it was summer, hens had quit laying, and the price of eggs was cutting into profits.
George T. Robbins dropped out of school in the eighth grade. At eighteen, he went to work as a lineman, climbing poles for the regional electrical utility. By the time he was fifty, the homemade microwave long since forgotten, he was a division manager for Virginia Electric Power Company. At VEPCO, there were 250 electrical engineers working under him, and colleagues said that he knew all of them. A kind of natural genius in his field (a couple of his inventions remain in use today), he surely would have risen to an even higher executive position were it not for the fact that he talked like a character from the Li’l Abner comic strip. In elocution and grammar, he never transcended his lack of formal education or his hillbilly roots.
For whatever reason, the electrician gene, the carpenter gene, the mechanic gene, all so dominant in my father, are totally recessive in me. My whole life I’ve been bored to within an inch of rigor mortis by the very sight of a slide rule; likewise a screwdriver, unless, of course, we’re talking orange juice and vodka. I have, however, found ways to override my lack of talent for -- and total disinterest in -- the role of handyman.
For example, I once owned a secondhand 1969 Mercury Montego convertible, which, by the time I gave it to a relative, was showing an excess of two hundred thousand miles on its odometer. This car ran like Joan Rivers, on and on, defying detractors, requiring no repairs beyond the cosmetic, leaving newer models in its dust. Its extreme durability I attributed to the fact that in all the years I owned the vehicle, I never looked under its hood. Not even once. Rather, I imagined (and visualized) that in place of an engine, there was a ball of mystic white light under there that kept the car going. And going. And going.
Only recently it occurred to me that I might successfully apply this strategy to my own body. Avoiding intrusive medical tests, and disavowing the presence of oozy organs, fetid tubes, and yards of slimy coils, I’ve begun to picture my abdominal cavity occupied instead by a single glowing globe, a radiant mandala, a holy pearl of purest ray serene. How’s it working? So far so good -- although I haven’t yet canceled my health insurance.
Everybody’s heard a fish story: two bass on one hook, an ancient trout that outwits generations of anglers, a biblical putz swallowed by a whale, the ubiquitous big one that got away. Ultimately, however, there’s only one fish story, as persistent as it is true, and it goes like this: big fish swallow little fish. That’s the story behind business in American -- and behind my family’s move to Virginia. Northwest Carolina Utilities, the company that lit the lamps in Blowing Rock, was swallowed by the slightly bigger firm that took us to Burnsville; then that one was ingested by East Coast Electric, which moved us to a succession of towns in eastern Virginia; only to be gobbled up in turn by VEPCO, the great white shark that eventually beached my father at its corporate headquarters in Richmond.
Our first stop in Virginia was Urbanna, a fishing village situated where the Rappahannock River, a mile wide near its mouth, empties into Chesapeake Bay. Crabs could be netted inside the town limits, seagulls paraded down Main Street, and the place proved salty in more ways than one. It may be no accident that Urbanna is in the country of Middlesex, accent on the last syllable.
In Urbanna we lived in a grand old house, a colonial brick manor with white columns, solid marble steps, ornate fireplaces, and enough rooms to accommodate Jesus and all twelve apostles, although Judas would have had to sleep on the sun porch. We rented the ground floor and two-thirds of the second. The owner, widow of a sea captain, shared an upstairs apartment with her grown daughter, a young divorcée apparently not thought unattractive by gentlemen callers. Mother was outraged at having come upon the saucy brunette washing the hair of one of her beaux. In retrospect, I’m guessing it was an activity, real or imagined, other than hair washing that upset my Baptist mom (after all, “cleanliness is next to godliness”). But for years thereafter “shampoo” was associated in my callow consciousness with some sort of wicked pleasure.
As befitting, perhaps, a boy not quite eleven, I personally had only one intimate encounter with the shameless shampooer (destined forever, at least in my mother’s mind, to wear a scarlet S on her bodice). She beckoned me into her bedroom one day, saying, a bit cryptically, that she had something interesting to show me. Any ill-formed hopes I might have harbored were abruptly dashed when she lifted not her skirts but the lid of a cardboard box that had arrived, she said, in the morning mail.
She lit a cigarette (doubtlessly another reason why Mother thought her a hussy) and studied my face as I stared, bewildered, at the contents of the package: a big blob of gooey goop. Predominately brown and creamy white, the mess was dotted with nodules of primary color, looking overall as if it could have been the droppings of a mythological bird, some gigantic fruit-eating cross between a pterodactyl and a peacock.
If my thoughts ran toward the ornithological they weren’t so far off, because eventually she confided, “It’s an egg.”
“Huh?”
“An Easter egg.”
“It is?”
“It was.” The dissolute shampooer laughed. Then she explained. For Easter, which was now a month or more in our rearview mirror, a sailor boyfriend stationed in Brooklyn had sent her an especially large candy egg: chocolate on the outside, vanilla cream and candied fruit in its interior. The suitor had neglected to include the state name legibly in the address (this was well before the advent of zip codes) and some myopic postal clerk had directed the package not to Urbanna but to Havana. As in Cuba.
In its weeks of t
ravel -- New York to Havana to Urbanna -- the egg (it was nearly the size of a football) must have encountered sufficient hot weather to rather thoroughly melt it. And with it, I surmised, the sailor’s hopes.
If Tommy Rotten longed to stick in his finger and lick it (careful: sublimation is in the mind of the beholder), he refrained; and having now shared her story of a good egg gone bad, this small-town femme fatale indicated that show-and-tell was over. I shambled from her chamber, but in the decades since, I’ve rarely seen a chocolate egg without entertaining, however briefly, thoughts of life’s vagaries, its impermanence. And whenever I’ve mailed a package to a desirable woman, I’ve been especially careful to address it correctly.
Urbanna’s saltiness was by no means limited to our landlady’s sultry daughter. It, oddly enough, flavored even the elementary school, in whose grade five I was enrolled upon our arrival from North Carolina in April. I entered the class just as its teacher was leaving. She had joined the WACs, which in and of itself wasn’t strange: America was at war and it was a patriotic thing for an unmarried woman to do. (Evidently, the shampooer was no patriot.) But why would a popular, conscientious teacher choose to bail out on her class with only two months remaining in the school year? Couldn’t her enlistment have been delayed until June?
School administrators never said as much, but I had to wonder if the teacher wasn’t fired. Why? When I write that she was popular, I’m guilty of understatement. She was, by her pupils, adored, and much of their adoration was due to the freewheeling freedom of expression she not only allowed but encouraged. No subject was taboo in her class, and while pupils lacked the knowledge or experience to discuss anything too explicitly sexual, both their conversation and their papers (the teacher was big on written assignments) were peppered with kiddie innuendo.
For children, a slim though messy line separates the sexual from the scatological, and the themes these Urbanna fifth graders composed were ablaze not only with “hells” and “damns,” but “poops” and “pees” and “farts” and “snots,” alongside frequent references to “tongue kissing.” Once I recovered from the shock, I jumped in with merry abandon, filling my first paper with every penciled profligacy I could imagine while staying true, of course, to the subject at hand (Tommy Rotten had his literary standards).
Alas, the changing of the guard was then under way, and my paper, assigned by the libertine teacher, was graded by her conservative successor. It came back to me so marked with red ink it appeared to be hemorrhaging. It was difficult to look at it and not think of the carnage in Europe. The red F it sported was so large and bright it could have been seen by enemy aircraft, even at night. I protested this threat to national security -- and for my trouble, ended up in the principal’s office, where I was so shamed I actually cried.
For the fifth grade, the era of official permissiveness was definitely over, although outside of the classroom, “salty” remained the spice du jour. Behind the school building there was an expansive grassy field, extending a great many yards beyond the portion designated as an actual playground. The field ended in swampy woods, and just inside the tree line, invisible from the school proper, was a narrow ravine. Each afternoon at recess, weather allowing, a group of a dozen or more fifth- and sixth-grade boys would disappear into those woods, and not, as one might assume, to smoke cigarettes.
I don’t remember if native curiosity prompted me to follow the group one day or if, on the reputation of my notorious heavily censored paper, I was invited along, but I became a willing witness to, though never a participant in, a ritualistic and perhaps atavistic contest. The rules were not complicated: the boys would line up along the brink, open their flies and compete to see who could direct their pee the greatest distance across the gully. Whether lunch money was wagered or it was all for glory I cannot recall, but competition was spirited.
Boys are hopelessly coarse, even disgusting creatures (all too few change with maturity), so recreation such as this shouldn’t really surprise anyone. What is a bit surprising is that it was a spectator sport -- and the spectators were of that opposite, generally finer-grained sex. It’s true: at every recess a small gaggle of girls, no more than four or five, would slip into the woods to watch the proceedings. Invariably, one or more of the boys would beg a girl to give him “luck.” The bestowing of luck consisted of the girl touching the boy’s penis, a gesture that produced, along with multiple giggles, a junior erection, which could, it seemed, add an appreciable velocity to the lucky boy’s urinary propulsion, producing a trajectory that sometimes reached the opposite bank.
Thus are champions -- and legends -- made. Could it have been, I wonder, a similar exhibition that gave McDonald’s the idea for its golden arches?
I don’t suppose there’s a category in Guinness for long-distance urination, though admittedly I’ve not looked to see. Certainly, this was my one and only encounter with the sport. We moved upriver to Kilmarnock, Virginia, late that summer, so I have no clear idea how the youth of salty Urbanna might have interacted upon attaining puberty; how, if at all, the peeing competitions affected later relationships. Maybe, as she grew older, an Urbanna girl would change a guy’s luck by shampooing him.
Despite the brevity of our stay in Urbanna, the place left a mark on me that persists to this day. Fresh from pre–Great Society, pre-network-TV Appalachia, I spoke with an accent that would have made the cast of The Beverly Hillbillies sound like the Royal Academy performing King Lear. There’s no way I can accurately reproduce on paper the way I pronounced, for example, words such as “night” or “ice” or “grass,” although I can report that I said “far” for “fire” and “hain’t” for “ain’t,” which could be a bit confusing since back in Blowing Rock we called a ghost a “haint.” Imagine someone exclaiming, “Looky thar in the winder! Hain’t that a haint?”
Naturally, the pupils at my new school made fun of the way I talked: kids are blunt in their reaction to deviations from their particular social norms. Alas, I was mocked by Urbanna’s adults, as well. Once when Mother sent me to the store to buy a pound of sliced ham for supper, the butcher stared at me incomprehensibly, then demanded I repeat my order again and again. “Slyced hame,” I kept saying, pronouncing “ham” as if it rhymed with “came” or “lame.” Eventually, my order was filled, though not before I had to point at what I wanted and everyone in the store enjoyed a laugh at my expense.
Spurred by ridicule, I soon commenced to devote much time and effort to altering my manner of speech, practicing off and on throughout the day, laboring to talk as if I were somehow indigenous to tidewater Virginia. The results were not pretty. Sure, “hain’t” was no longer in my vocabulary and I could now order flesh of the pig without embarrassment, but overall what happened was that my elocution flattened out permanently into a kind of deflated Okie drawl.
Today, my voice sounds as if it’s been strained through Davy Crockett’s underwear. While to my mind’s ear, I might sound like an Oxford-educated intellectual, I have only to hear myself on tape to realize that in actuality mine is the voice of a can of cheap dog food -- if a can of cheap dog food could speak. It’s a Skippy voice. Not even that, a generic brand with a plain brown label. Thanks, at least in part, to the jeerers and sneerers of Urbanna, I’m going through life with a voice that might be visualized as something scraped off the kitchen floor of a fast-food restaurant by a pimply teenage dishwasher at closing time on Friday night. Or else that little pile of smashed potato chips left on the rubberized seat cushion of a motorized wheelchair belonging to a 365-pound retired female professional wrestler named Grandma Moses. Or else . . . well, you get the picture.
In one of my early novels, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, the protagonist, Sissy Hankshaw, is born with abnormally large thumbs. Rather than submit meekly to the deformity, she elects to turn the tables on it, exploit it, have fun with it, make an art of it, ride it all the way to glory. I’m not as wise as Sissy, but I have in recent years come to accept my voice, even cheerfu
lly embrace it -- although there are delusional moments (usually while lecturing or reading aloud in public) when I’m still convinced I’m sounding a lot like Jeremy Irons.
There’s an area of tidewater Virginia known widely and semiofficially as the Northern Neck. It is, indeed, a “neck” of sorts; which is to say a peninsula: bordered on the south by the Rappahannock River, on the north by the Potomac, terminating at the Chesapeake Bay. There are four counties in the Neck, each just far enough downwind from Washington, D.C., to escape moral contamination.
Kilmarnock is the largest town in the Neck; Warsaw the most vibrant, though “vibrant” may be too fancy a word for any community in this region of farmers and fishermen. Our family alighted on Kilmarnock like flies landing on a horse biscuit, shooed away by the swishing tail of circumstance before we could savor a proper taste. Our home there, for the few months it lasted, was a plain single-story clapboard cottage, bereft of marble, of ornament, of any upper chamber where a sexy Samaritan might assist in the tonsorial hygiene of needy gentlemen.
The house was situated at the far end of town, piney woods behind and on one side of it; on the other side, a vacant field. The only neighbors were across the road and we rarely saw them, so it was months before I learned that my sixth-grade teacher lived there, the very one who slapped my face for “sassy” behavior. (I suspect that I, a devotee of atlases, had corrected her none too diplomatically in front of the class for some shocking display of geographic ignorance, à la Sarah Palin.) Moreover, our house sat back quite a distance from the road, so overall it’s fair to say we were a trifle isolated, a fact that made Mother uneasy, especially since Daddy was usually only home on weekends. No doubt it was due to Mother’s nervousness that on weeknights she, my twin sisters (then age four), and I all slept in the same smallish bedroom.