Diary of a Misfit, page 20
someone I’ll always want to talk to, someone who believes in me, someone who inspires me, someone who is good with money, someone who likes games, someone who makes conversation in new situations, someone who likes to travel, someone who likes sitcoms and indie movies, someone who bikes, someone who has friends and a life outside of our relationship, someone who will get along with my family
I wrote down part of a Leonard Cohen poem—“Marita please find me I am almost 30”—then pinned it to the wall behind my work computer as a reminder. Still, I felt untethered, marooned in a loneliness of my own making. I went to gay bars every weekend and kissed girls, sometimes two or three a night, but no one felt like my Marita. I waved off one woman who told me she’d never read a book, and I left another at the bar after she refused to dance to Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies.” I slept with someone I’d known online as a teenager, then, when she told me she loved me, I told her I was too broken for anything real. After that, I chased a British woman who refused to kiss me, and for a while, I dated a professor I knew from Mississippi, a sculptor who broke up with me every few weeks because the thirteen-year age gap between us was too embarrassing to admit to her friends. We’d reconnected and grown close after she moved to rural Washington, but she said she didn’t want me to be a part of her real life. We lived four hours and a generation away from each other. Our love was best left to private weekends.
Even with the breakups, the professor met most of the criteria on my list. We rode bikes together, and we watched great movies on the floor in her bedroom. She liked Boggle. She certainly had friends and a life outside of our relationship, but I worried that no one could meet the last line on my list. I’d been out of the closet for almost a decade. I’d dated four girls seriously, but I almost never told my brother or my parents about my love life.
I wanted the professor to be my Marita, though, so that fall, after one good date, I called my mom and told her about the person I spent hours driving to see every other weekend. I tried to emphasize the good parts. The professor had a tenure-track job. She was tall and artistic, gentle with the black Labrador she’d named after a body of water. But my mom was good at prying, and by the end of the conversation, I’d admitted that I hadn’t met any of the professor’s friends. Later that night, my mom emailed me a list of questions.
Do you find yourself hiding out when you are with her? You should be able to sing from the rooftops when you are in love and everybody should know it.
Why do you keep subjecting yourself to this? You are so smart and you have so much to offer.
Did I miss telling you something that gave you the feeling of self-importance?
The professor was from the Midwest, but I was drawn to the idea that she had lived in Mississippi when I had. Once, a few weeks after we started dating, I asked her over Facebook Messenger if she’d liked her time in the South, and she wrote back, “To me it felt like slavery had ended about two weeks prior to my arrival in Jackson. That is some scary, sad shit.”
I was at work when she replied, so I waited to respond until the end of the day, until both the bureau and the methadone clinic had cleared out. The professor was right. Mississippi did have some scary, sad truths. My college mascot had been a Confederate major, and in the fall of my freshman year, Mississippi voters overwhelmingly had chosen to keep the rebel battle insignia in the top left corner of the state’s flag. Those symbols were tangible relics of the deeper, far more disturbing truths I suspected the professor was referencing. I loved reading census tables, so I knew how bad the numbers were for Black Mississippians. The year before, the Black unemployment rate there had reached nearly 20 percent—more than triple the white rate. Black Mississippians had higher rates of poverty and lower rates of college graduation, and they were far more likely than white people to go to jail or prison.
I’d once thought that leaving was the best way to deal with the things I didn’t like about the South, but the older I got, the more I believed that those numbers were reasons I should return. It wasn’t right to flee and forget the injustices still happening there. If I moved back, I could write stories that exposed those inequities. Why did people care so much about Casey Anthony when every year in Mississippi, Black babies were twice as likely as white ones to die before their first birthday?
I read the professor’s message again, then clicked reply.
“I’m planning to move home so I can use journalism for good,” I wrote.
I typed six paragraphs in a fury. I told the professor about Roy. I said I planned to press the nursing home workers to find out more about how he died. If I could expose the mistreatment Roy endured, maybe I could make life easier for other people whose bodies and identities didn’t align the way other people thought they should.
I leaned back in my chair. Outside, I could hear a janitor emptying the hallway trash cans. I reread the first sentence of my email. “I’m planning to move home so I can use journalism for good.” I groaned. If that were true, I would have already investigated the nursing home. I would have taken the Times-Picayune job and moved to New Orleans and spent my career explaining how unequal the South was. But I hadn’t taken the job, and I wasn’t moving home. I was a coward, and I was staying in Portland.
Back then, people didn’t talk about “white privilege” as openly as we do now, but I knew I had advantages I didn’t know how to name. I’d grown up poor, but I’d won a big scholarship to a private college where white students were far more likely to graduate than Black ones. How many employers had given me jobs not because my résumé was impressive but because I reminded them of some younger version of themselves? In 2011, I was just beginning to reckon with the idea that my life had been any kind of charmed, and I didn’t know yet how to tell the professor I was ashamed at how little I’d done to make up for it.
I erased the email, then typed a new one, a message that left out the devastating statistics.
Going home now is such a hard experience. Even little things—the cigarette smoke everywhere, the styrofoam, the way EVERY stranger insists on calling me sir despite the fact that I’m pretty small and curvy—make me want to stand on a table and scream, “DO Y’ALL REALIZE IT DOES NOT HAVE TO BE THIS WAY?”
That is all complicated by the fact that it is my home and I love it immensely. People in Portland don’t tell stories the same way. They don’t say hi the same way. They don’t come at you directly the way Southerners do…On that note, I think I will leave work and go home and make some red beans and rice.
I turned off my computer, but I did not get up. I didn’t know why it bothered me so much when people in the South mistook me for a man. Roy had dealt with far worse. No one was going to push me out of a nursing home bed. And yet, when Southerners called me “sir,” I felt misunderstood, like something they could not or would not puzzle out.
I looked around my office, at the Leonard Cohen poem hanging behind my computer. I was free to look for my Marita in Portland, and no one on the West Coast ever mistook me for a man. But I didn’t feel like I exactly fit in there, either. People said I was too direct. At dinner parties, I talked too much. I interrupted people in a way that would have been acceptable back home but was considered rude in Portland. Maybe everyone who moves across the country to pursue life in a new culture feels this way, but I felt very alone that summer, as if I were the only one in the world who didn’t belong anywhere.
I stood. I said hello to the janitor on my way out, then I drove east toward the city, listening to country songs on loop until I parked outside my apartment, saw my cat in the window, and knew I was home.
* * *
—
I WORKED EVEN LONGER hours that fall, not because I was ambitious, though I was, but because I was lonely. No amount of time in a gay bar made me feel loved in the ways I wanted to be. Every dance floor was filled with the kind of people I’d dreamed about meeting when I was a teenager in Mississippi—girls with spiked hair, boys in ironic T-shirts—but the rap songs blared too loud for conversation, and often I drank so much I couldn’t have held one anyway. Sometimes, at the end of the party, I’d stumble toward someone, demanding to know where they were from and what pains had led them to these neon-strobed nights, but my questions never yielded deep answers. At least when I was working, I was having real conversations with people, even if they were one-sided, even if I was plumbing people for their secrets without ever giving up any of my own. I knew plenty of gay people that I might have called friends, but I didn’t know how to be vulnerable with them. I worried that if I fell and broke my hip in the middle of the night, none of my supposed friends would answer their phones and come over to help me. I have no idea why that was the scenario I feared. I was in my late twenties, not my seventies, but I thought about it over and over again as I slow-stepped toward the bathroom in the middle of the night.
The problem, I eventually decided, was that I knew too many people. If I focused all my energy on hanging out with a smaller group, I thought, I’d find the intimacy I wanted. Sometime that fall, I started telling people I’d decided I wanted only six friends. Six real friends, I’d say, friends I’ll hang out with every weekend, friends I can tell my secrets. I went out to dinner as if I were auditioning people. If a conversation lingered too long in the shallows, I excused myself early, then cried the whole way home.
Looking back, I did have people in my life who would have answered that broken-hip call. I had colleagues whose family lives were as painful as mine was, and friends who longed just as sharply to talk about heartbreak and disappointment. It was me who filled our weekends with loud music and video projects. I was the one who canceled plans last minute.
Now that a decade has passed, now that I know how everything turns out, I’m tempted to go back and tinker with the meaning of everything. I want to give myself a motive where it’s possible I felt none. I want to say I ran away from people and opportunities then because I was afraid of being vulnerable, but the truth is, most days, I didn’t know why I did anything. I skated from thing to thing, searching for the one development that would make me happy. I wanted so much at twenty-eight. I wanted to feel safe and inspired and excited and understood and challenged and turned on and supported and dazed and comfortable, and I wanted to be a superstar at work. I wanted This American Life to hire me, and I wanted to know how to make perfect podcasts without even trying, and I wanted to become Kate Boo, and I wanted a girlfriend who dressed well, and I wanted the cool gays to think I was cool, and I wanted to make things, and I wanted my mother to stay awake and engaged for at least one visit. I wanted to stop myself from feeling disappointed when she inevitably slept through the days I needed her. I wanted my parents to pay off the debt they’d accrued in my name. I wanted the easy life I had in Portland, but I wanted that feeling of inexplicable rightness I felt every time I stepped out into Louisiana’s sun. I wanted that feeling of “rightness” to contain not a single trace of fear. I wanted my ex-girlfriend to keep baking cookies for me, and I thought for a while that I wanted her back. I wanted to have great sex, and I didn’t want to be scared of sex, and I wanted someone to love me, and I didn’t want to be scared of love, and I wanted to be close to people, and I didn’t want to be scared of that either. Most of all, I wanted to stop wanting, and so I went to bars, and I chugged cheap beers until my wants blurred into dull aches.
* * *
—
AUBREE AND I BOOKED tickets for another Delhi trip that December. A few days before we flew south, a friend emailed me and asked if I’d hang out with her friend Frankie, a lesbian who did improv comedy and had just moved to Portland. Initially, I told my friend I was too busy to meet anyone new. I wanted to cull the number of people in my life, not add to it. But a few days later, I reconsidered. The professor and I were broken up that week and I was aching, so I looked Frankie up on Facebook to see if she was cute.
Her interests page loaded first. She liked Star Trek and The Simpsons, hiking and a bunch of environmental groups in Idaho. I didn’t appreciate any of those, but when I clicked her profile picture to make it bigger, I reconsidered. Frankie had a squinty smile and super-straight teeth. She was wearing a hoodie, a gray one pulled tight around her face, so I couldn’t see what her hair looked like beyond the sweep of brown bangs that poked out from the hood, and yet, even obscured, I could tell she was cute. Even better, she seemed like an adult, the kind of person who would work an office job, not a late-night gig at a bar. She’d probably read a book, I thought. She’d probably dance to “Single Ladies.”
Maybe it was magic or maybe I just wanted it to be true, but when I looked at that photo, I felt something inside me click into place. Marita.
“Oh my god,” I said out loud to myself. “We are going to get married.”
Chapter Eleven
(December 2011)
I TOLD MYSELF REPEATEDLY in my twenties that I didn’t care about family, but every time Aubree and I flew south, I roped another relative into joining my crew. In December of 2011, that relative was my cousin Christopher. His mom had stopped talking to my mother years earlier for reasons I didn’t quite understand, but Christopher and I were as close as I allowed myself to be with family. He was, by all measures, my coolest relative. Plus, he knew how to record audio. He played in a seven-piece band in Fort Worth, and otherwise roamed the world making strange money and looking for fun. He was a year older than I was, and we’d grown up more or less alongside each other, save for the years his family lived on an army base in Okinawa, but he seemed fluently Southern in ways I didn’t know how to be. He hunted wild hogs. He dipped tobacco, and in high school, he rode and fought bulls on the small-town rodeo circuit. When Aubree and I picked him up at the Shreveport bus station, he was wearing a flannel shirt and a faded trucker hat from Texas. I was wearing the expensive jacket I bought in New York along with a pair of black boots made out of leather so thin, they’d started to rub away at the ankles. Christopher ran out of the bus station, laughing.
“Let’s do this,” he said. “Let’s call somebody, go knock on someone’s door.”
“You’re not nervous?” I asked.
He grinned big. Nothing seemed to scare him.
“Hell, no. The worst they can do is blow us off, but it’s not going to happen. People are going to want to talk.”
He tossed his duffel bag into the trunk and jumped into the back seat. I couldn’t help smiling. Christopher has an easy, inviting air, and his arms are always open, as if he’s waiting to bear-hug anyone who crosses his path. He can talk to anyone about anything, and his eyes are the kind of blue that somehow seems both mysterious and friendly. I’ve never met anyone who isn’t drawn to him. Just being around him juiced me up, so I gunned it out of the parking lot, and Christopher cackled, knowing I usually drive slow.
* * *
—
THE DRIVE EAST TOOK about two hours, and we spent most of it talking about Louisiana. Christopher told me about Bonnie and Clyde and bass fishing, and I realized I didn’t actually know much about my home state. I knew far more about Oregon. Because I’d written so many wonky development stories, I could cite the zoning codes of almost any neighborhood. I’d learned a little about every governor who’d served in Oregon for at least the last thirty years, and I could even name most of the current senators, but I had no idea who was leading Louisiana that year. My ignorance bothered me. How could I know so little about the place that had such a hold on me?
Halfway to Delhi, my phone buzzed, and when I looked, I saw my mom’s number on the caller ID. I was driving, but I hadn’t heard from her in a while, so I answered, and she talked without stopping or breathing.
“Are you in Delhi? Someone called about the flyer. He remembers Roy from age three and has music that Roy wrote.”
* * *
—
LATER THAT NIGHT, AFTER we’d settled into the cabin, I pulled out my notebook and looked at the number my mother had given me. Aubree was cooking down collard greens, and Christopher was fishing off the back deck, so I tucked myself into the bottom bunk, then dialed. A man answered on the first ring.
“You callin’ about Roy, ain’t you? I can tell by the long-distance.”
The man’s name was Archie Lee Harrell. He said he’d lived next to Roy and the Ellises in a tar-paper shack outside the city limits in the 1930s. Archie didn’t sound old, but the dates suggested he was at least in his seventies.
“So when you want to come do the interview?” he asked. “You want to come now?”
My stomach rumbled, hungry for whatever Christopher was catching.
“What about tomorrow?” I asked.
Archie told me to be there first thing. He lived on Edgar Street, a few houses down from where Mary Rundell had played us the gospel song eight months earlier. When we arrived the next morning, I saw that Archie’s house looked like all the others on the block. It was white and single-story, and the driveway was covered but not enclosed. An American flag swayed from a pole in the front yard, high above the house.
Archie answered the door wearing a khaki jumpsuit. He smiled, and I could see he’d lost all but two of his top teeth. Still, there was something handsome about him. His hair was a wavy gray, and his eyes were so light and inscrutable they could have been green or blue or brown. He waved us inside. Both the carpet and his walls were brown, but the Christmas tree lights gave the room a green-and-red sheen. Archie pointed toward the kitchen and a set of built-in shelves that held mason jars full of vegetables he said his wife had preserved from their garden.
