Diary of a Misfit, page 24
“What happened to Lana?” I asked.
“She moved to Seattle.”
A train rushed past, and Aubree called cut. While we waited for the engines to chug forward, I imagined Lana out west, living free and unafraid. Did she miss Louisiana? Did she walk down the street unabashedly holding a woman’s hand the way I held Frankie’s?
The train pushed east until it disappeared. Pam cleared her throat.
“You know,” she said, “I’ve decided there are places I want to see, things I want to do. When my mother dies, I’ll go.”
Pam told us she wanted to buy a travel trailer. She planned to go to Gatlinburg, Tennessee, then all the way to Wyoming to the Grand Tetons. She’d see every national park.
“Someday.”
I wanted to tell Pam that she didn’t have to wait. She could go now, leave her mother the way I’d left mine, and she could find her own Frankie someplace out west. Life would be easier. She could find a daytime job and rent a house on a street where no one asked if she was a man or a woman. Maybe she could even go to Seattle and reunite with Lana. She wouldn’t have to depend on dogs as her only companions.
But I didn’t tell Pam any of that because even as I allowed myself to think it, I knew that no city cured loneliness. It didn’t matter that I lived in the lesbian capital of the United States. It didn’t matter that I had a girlfriend and the downtown newspaper job I’d spent so many years wanting. I was missing something, in Portland as much as I ever had in Louisiana, and no amount of running could change it.
Chapter Thirteen
(December 2012)
SOON AFTER I STARTED working on the documentary, people began telling me they thought I should put myself in the film. Aubree said it needed a narrator, someone to link all the interviews together, and Frankie agreed, but I didn’t want to be in front of the camera. Every book I’d ever read about journalism said the best reporters were invisible. I worried my bosses would think less of me if they saw me making myself the story. Plus, I didn’t want anyone to suspect I was only curious about Roy because I was gay. I didn’t even know how Roy identified. Maybe he was gay or maybe he was transgender or maybe he lived as a man because his parents made him dress that way when he was young. Whatever the truth was, I told myself, it had nothing to do with me.
People in Delhi saw through that.
The day after we interviewed Pam, I called another woman I hoped to film. When I told her what the movie was about, the woman asked me why I was interested in Roy. I started to tell her what I’d told Archie—my grandmother grew up on Hell Street and wanted to know more about Roy’s life—but the woman cut me off.
“I get why your grandmother’s interested, but that’s not what I asked. I asked why are you. Nobody’s that nice to their grandma. Why are you, personally, interested in a morphodite?”
“You’re breaking up,” I said, pretending I couldn’t hear her. “My service is bad. I’ll have to call you back.”
I hung up, turned my phone off, then tucked it into my back pocket, just in case.
After I got off the phone, Aubree, Christopher, and I piled into the car, then we set out to do more reporting. We’d flown down close to Christmas again, and all the tiny houses were lit up with red and green bulbs. On Main Street, First Baptist was playing “O Little Town of Bethlehem” in the same key it had three years earlier when I visited with my mom. Delhi hadn’t changed much since that first trip. Hot Wings Heaven was still closed, and barber shops still dotted the main drag. The highway and all the potholed streets looked the same, too, but I felt different somehow.
I thought about my mom as I looped around town. I still couldn’t believe Pam had given up her life to take care of her mother. I hadn’t even called my mom this trip to tell her I was in Louisiana. She was in the hospital again, and anyway, she and my dad had moved to Tyler, Texas. Their house was only three and a half hours away from Delhi, so I could’ve driven over, could’ve even stayed until Christmas, but I didn’t plan to do that. Instead, I drove my mom’s old streets, and I imagined the girl she had been. I stopped at the squat brick house Golden and Rita Mae used to own, and I cruised past the wood-frame hulk my grandparents rented in the 1970s, then I steered toward the house my mom was living in when Cam died. I don’t know if Aubree or Christopher wondered why I started each trip with these meandering drives. Aubree usually shot footage from the window, and Christopher sat in the back seat, napping or eating a PayDay candy bar for breakfast. I’m not even sure what I hoped to accomplish. I’d seen all these houses before. I’d looked them up on Google Maps, and I’d taken my own photos, too. But I had to see them, in person, every trip.
Eventually, after I’d driven by all my mom’s places, I pulled into the library parking lot, then called a woman Archie had told me might be willing to talk. Her name was Lou Rogers. Both she and her husband had lived on Chatham Street, and she knew my grandma’s sister, Shirley. Lou sounded hesitant when she answered, but after we’d talked for twenty minutes, she gave me her address and told me to come over.
Lou lived in Epps, a tiny community north of Delhi, and the drive up was long and country. Half the homes we saw were barns. We passed a donkey and a Shetland pony, and I had to swerve three times to avoid bumping into slow-moving tractors.
Epps is about half the size of Delhi, but the two places have a lot in common. They both have slightly more Black residents than white, and both have among the lowest median incomes in the country. In 2012, an average woman in either town earned just above $12,000 a year. I got the feeling, driving up, that the entire region’s best days were behind it. In Epps, as in Delhi, most businesses looked forever closed. Their exteriors were so decayed that I could only make out the name of one, Ruth & Reds, an Italian place whose faded sign showed a Native American waiting outside a teepee for pizza.
The streets on the west side of Epps were named Honeysuckle and Magnolia, but Lou lived in the east, an area where most roads were named by numbers. I turned left on the one she’d told me to look for, a single-lane asphalt strip filled in with gravel. Lou and her husband didn’t have a paved driveway, but they did have a lot of land, so I parked on a patch of dead leaves next to a pickup truck. Their house was a big wood-frame that looked like a cabin but wasn’t one. As we unloaded all of our equipment and walked toward the house, I could see Lou waiting in the doorway. She was in her sixties, and she kept her hair cut short and blown back in a way that seemed more utilitarian than stylish, but I could tell she’d been beautiful once. Her skin was smooth, her eyebrows perfectly shaped, and she was trimmer than most people we’d interviewed.
“No pictures!” she called from the doorway. “No pictures.”
She covered her face, and I explained to her that the project was a documentary.
“Can’t you do me like they do on America’s Most Wanted?” she asked. “With the blacked-out face and the voice distorted?”
We followed her and a yipping black Chihuahua inside, toward a living room filled with plants and Christmas lights. The cameras were off for a while, so I don’t know how we persuaded Lou to go on with her real face and actual voice, but she doesn’t look uncomfortable in the footage, and she didn’t seem to hold anything back. Once the cameras were on, Lou gracefully lowered herself somewhere near the middle of the couch. “Casey, sit next to Lou,” Aubree suggested. “I want you both in the shot.”
I sat down, but I scooted as close to the edge as I could. I knew I might be ruining the perfect framing Aubree wanted, but I didn’t care. I didn’t want to be in the movie.
“So,” I said to Lou. “Do you mind introducing yourself?”
Lou took a deep breath, clasped her hands together, then looked at me as if there were no video cameras in the room. She told me she’d gotten married and left Hell Street when she was sixteen, but she’d tried, for a while, to keep in touch with Roy. They went to the Church of Christ together for many years, and she even sat next to Roy in the back pew. Some weekends, Lou and her husband would drive over to play checkers or guitar with Roy, but they’d stopped doing that years ago. Lou said she felt guilty about that now.
“I think that’s why Roy got so bad,” she said. “You can imagine her having to go to the doctor. She just didn’t go. And nobody was there to say, ‘Something’s wrong. Come on, let me take you to the doctor.’ We should have been. But we had our own family.”
Lou picked at a piece of fuzz on the couch. She said she and her husband had both tried, later, to check on Roy, but they waited too long. By then, Roy had stopped bathing, and his dementia was so advanced he didn’t remember either of them. After Roy went into the nursing home, Lou went up there to visit him, but when they sat down at a table, Roy didn’t recognize or even seem to notice Lou. He babbled on in words that were barely words, and Lou found it too unbearable to witness. Roy was a songwriter, Lou reminded me, someone who’d always known how to string a perfect sentence together. She never went back to see him a second time.
“Then,” Lou said, “the man wouldn’t let us have the pictures after Roy died.”
Lou looked down and twisted her wedding ring around her finger. She shrugged in a way that suggested she was annoyed but resigned.
“What man?” I asked.
“Roy’s neighbor. Mark King.”
For years, Lou explained, Roy had kept pictures of her and her husband tacked to the walls of his house. Some of them were old photos, snapshots from the 1950s and ’60s, pictures of Lou and her husband when they were kids. After Roy died, Lou heard that Mark King had taken most of Roy’s stuff, so she drove down to Chatham Street to ask for the pictures. Cheryl King answered the door.
At first, Lou said, Cheryl was friendly. She knew Lou because she’d taught one of Lou’s daughters PE at the junior high. When Lou asked if she could have Roy’s old pictures, Cheryl said yes. She disappeared into a back room, but when she returned, Mark was with her. He said he wasn’t sure he was willing to hand over any of Roy’s things. He told Lou to give him some time to think.
“So I waited a month or two,” Lou said. “Then I went back.”
The second time Lou visited, Mark didn’t let her inside. He stuck his head out of the screen door and told her he’d decided he wanted to keep Roy’s old photos.
I didn’t understand, so I asked Lou why Mark decided to keep the photos.
“I don’t know,” she said. “They were nothing to him.”
Lou and I looked at each other. She clasped her hands back together.
“Now, the journals would have really been interesting,” she said. “I would have loved to have gotten my hands on those.”
Lou was probably the least dramatic person we interviewed for the film. Her words didn’t jump up and down the way my relatives’ did, and her accent sounded muted in comparison. She didn’t gesture much when she talked, and she didn’t reposition herself on the couch even once. But she smiled a tiny bit when she mentioned the journals, and that was enough to make my hands burn with some kind of nervous excitement. Christopher and I had started thinking that maybe Mark was bluffing. Maybe he didn’t have any of Roy’s stuff. But Lou—steady-voiced, even-keeled Lou—was offering me something like proof. The journals were real. Mark had them. My mystery was solvable. All I had to do was persuade Mark to let me see Roy’s diaries.
“What did they look like?” I asked.
“They were thick spiral notebooks. Probably started when my husband was a little boy. Roy had lots of them. I think she wanted people, after she was gone, to know what kind of life she led. Why else would she have kept them? I know she didn’t plan on them ending up like they are now. I think she did it for a purpose, for people to know what it was like living like that. But as it turned out, we won’t ever know.”
Lou’s mouth turned ever so slightly into a frown. I told her I had asked Mark about Roy’s journals, and he’d refused to share them.
“It doesn’t seem right to make this documentary without including Roy’s own thoughts,” I said.
Lou unclasped her hands. Her eyes lit up, then she sprung off the couch.
“I’ve got a Bible of hers that’s got her name wrote on it,” she said. “She’s got a lot marked in it.”
Lou disappeared down a hall. She returned a few minutes later holding a red King James Version Bible just slightly bigger than my hands. She sat down on the couch and set the Bible between us. I stared at it for a while before I picked it up. The leather felt cool in my hands, and I felt a kind of power, holding something Roy had held. I knew how personal a person’s Bible could be. My mom had always used hers like a journal, and so had I, back when I lived in Louisiana. The Bible was a place where I could reveal myself, where I could confess and struggle and seek mercy. Holding Roy’s Bible, I realized I must have gotten rid of mine at some point. I didn’t remember when or how, though. I couldn’t even remember what my Bible looked like. I know I used to have strong feelings about the different editions, but I couldn’t recall which one I’d preferred. Did I like the New International Version because it was readable? Or had I hated it because it seemed dumbed down compared to the stately King James? How had I forgotten something that once seemed to matter so much?
I pushed back the cover of Roy’s Bible, carefully, as if it were an artifact on loan from a museum. Inside the front flap, Roy had stamped his name and address. I smiled. I had always thought only rich people had stamps with their names and address on them. My family never lived anywhere long enough to memorialize our address in a stamp, and I wondered if Roy felt the kind of pride I knew I’d feel if I ever owned one. A stamp meant you were somebody, you belonged somewhere, even if it was just a shotgun house on Hell Street.
I flipped the pages slowly at first, looking for some sign of Roy, but he hadn’t marked much in the earliest books. Lou scooted closer toward me, so I moved faster, turning pages ten at a time until I found something, tiny blue marks scratched alongside verses. It’s hard to explain what I felt when I first saw Roy’s handwriting. It was better than the stamp and almost better than seeing the photos Ann McVay had given me on the first trip. These lines were Roy’s lines, marks he made with the same hand he used to play the banjo that lured my grandmother across the street. I ran my finger over the grooves his pen left behind, and I felt like I’d discovered some kind of portal to the past.
Roy’s handwriting was small and slanty. Most of his letters were capital letters, though occasionally a lowercase h would slip in between a capital C and R. In the book of Isaiah, he used a pink pen to make notes about the Devil and the king of Babylon. He underlined New Testament verses about love. He highlighted the ones about sin. Roy wrote throughout his Bible, but no book was as marked up as 1 Corinthians. He’d underlined and highlighted verses, and he’d penciled questions alongside the edge. His letters were so tiny and messy in chapter 11, I had to hold the Bible close to my face to decipher each one. This was the chapter Lynda had told us about, the one that suggests women shouldn’t cut their hair. Roy had underlined the verse Lynda had recited to me the year before—“But if a woman have long hair, it is a glory to her: for her hair is given her for a covering”—but in the margins, he’d written a cursive commentary: “Power is not a hat or a covering.”
Was Roy pushing back against the Pentecostals? Lynda and Archie had talked about Roy as if he were a victim, someone who’d been shamed and pushed out of the church. I believed them because that’s what happened to me. Even after I started to believe that Leviticus didn’t mean exactly what my pastor said it did, I didn’t dare write any challenging notes in my Bible. I didn’t send the Gomes book I read in college to anyone at my church. I just disappeared. I somehow still didn’t have the strength to tell Pamela or anyone else from church that I was gay and no longer believed there was anything sinful about that.
I read Roy’s words again—“Power is not a hat or a covering”—then I turned to chapter 12, a passage that suggests Christians are supposed to be unified. Roy had covered the page in penciled thoughts. Along the bottom, he’d written “divers,” “different,” “schism,” and “division.” He’d underlined a dozen words, and next to verse 23, a line that says we must bestow more honor on those we think to be less honorable, Roy had written “ME?”
The question mark looked crooked and unsure. I knew that feeling. I’d pushed it away long ago, but I remembered what it felt like to sit in the pew and listen to the preacher and wonder if the unconditional love he promised was meant for me.
I wanted to sit with that page for the rest of the afternoon, but Lou looked up, so I flipped forward to the end of chapter 15. Roy had used red and blue crayons to highlight the page. I scanned through it, and every verse seemed to be about bodies or flesh: “God giveth it a body as it hath pleased him.” “It is sown a natural body.” “How are the dead raised up, and with what body?”
The verses might have depressed anyone living in a shell they felt was wrong, but Roy, again, had written his own thoughts along the bottom of the page. No one takes their body to the afterlife, he’d noted. No “body” is forever.
“FIRST BODY FLESH, SECOND BODY SPIRIT,” he wrote. “We shall be changed.”
I read the words out loud to Lou, and she took her glasses off, then gazed at me.
“I think she was hoping for a better life, after,” Lou said.
After. How many years had I spent waiting for “after”? I’d never dreamed of a different body, but as a kid, I thought constantly about that mansion my mother promised me. Even though she told me we wouldn’t know each other in Heaven, I pictured my mansion as a place where she and I would live together, happy in a way we never seemed to manage on earth. She would be clear-brained and free of ghosts, and I would be the kind of daughter who didn’t disappoint her.
