Diary of a Misfit, page 33
The weather hovered above seventy degrees on Christmas, and my mom told me she’d just started a new job keeping the books for an interior design company. I remember going to bed one night that week thinking that 2015 had been the best year of my life. It wasn’t illegal to be gay anymore. I was married, and my mom was no longer on pills. I was thirty-two, and I thought I’d spend every year after that one happy. But the plot of a life is never a straight line up. It arcs, bends, and sometimes turns back in on itself.
Chapter Nineteen
(April 2016)
IN THE SPRING of 2016, I found out that Aubree and I had won a spot in the Crossroads Film Festival in Jackson, Mississippi. We hadn’t finished our full-length documentary about Roy, but we’d submitted a shorter cut, one that focused on Pam Sykes, the lesbian who’d called to me from her pickup truck. The film is mostly about Pam’s relationship with her mother. At the time, I thought that plot just made good narrative sense—films need tension, and Pam and her mother had tension—but I’m sure I was working out some of my own demons as Aubree and I spliced together clips. It’s a sad movie, a glimpse of the life I might have had if I’d never moved or if my mother had never accepted me. Editing it made me feel grateful for my mom in new ways, and when the film festival’s organizers asked me to fly down to Jackson for the weekend, I asked her if she wanted to go with me. Aubree couldn’t attend, and Pam could only come in for one night, and I wanted to make a weekend of it. Plus, my mom and I had been talking since Christmas about taking a trip together. She wanted to go to Las Vegas to see Celine Dion, and I did, too, but for some reason, we’d never booked tickets.
“Look,” I said, when I called her. “I know it’s not Vegas or ‘My Heart Will Go On,’ but it is a weekend we can spend together back home in the South.”
I offered to pay for my mom’s airfare, but she told me she’d earned half a dozen paychecks since I last saw her. She wanted to buy the ticket herself. I smiled on the other end of the line. My mom really did seem like a new person.
We flew in a few days early so we could spend time with my grandmother. The weather was nice, mid-sixties and rising, so we rolled our windows down to let the air in as we drove from the airport to my grandma’s house. I kind of shrieked in happy recognition when the wind rushed past me.
“Do you smell that?” I asked.
Oregon’s air was thin and clean, neutral in a way that seemed empty. Louisiana smelled like honeysuckle and fish, like afternoon rain evaporating off hot pavement into a haze of cigarette smoke. It was a thick and briny scent, a little bit rotten, but it felt right to me.
“That’s the paper mill,” my mom said. “The funky stank of home.”
The carport door was hiked half-open when we coasted up to my grandma’s house. I peeked underneath and saw that both she and my aunt Ann were wearing cotton nightgowns even though it was the middle of the day and neighbors could see their bare legs. I ducked under the door, hugged them both, then watched as my mother let herself into the house.
When my mom reemerged ten minutes later, she was wearing a nightgown, too. Hers was sleeveless, hot pink, less threadbare than the ones her sister and mom were wearing. No one commented on what I now realized was the carport uniform, and I never asked why they spent so much time in their nightgowns. I didn’t change into my own pajamas—a pair of baggy shorts and an oversized T-shirt emblazoned with the Portland basketball team’s logo. My aunt, my grandma, and my mom lit a round of cigarettes, and I sat in my usual spot ten feet away.
They talked about essential oils for a while. Aunt Ann was taking classes online to become a certified distributor, and she’d set up vaporizers around the house, each one pumping out lavender or peppermint to calm everyone down. As they smoked, my grandma folded over herself. She looked withered. She didn’t have any teeth in her mouth, and I realized I had no idea whether she’d worn dentures or if she’d lost her teeth since Frankie and I visited the year before.
At some point, I held up my phone and started shooting video. My grandma said something, I’m not sure what, because I started recording just after she said whatever she said. It must have been upsetting. Afterward, my aunt sat slumped with her hand covering her face, and my mom lurched forward with an unlit cigarette.
“You say that every time, Mama,” my mother said. “We worry about you.”
Her voice was thin and breaking. My grandma poked a finger in the air.
“Well, y’all better start worrying because I’m hurting.”
My grandma’s voice was gruff. She’d always been mean when I was young, but I’d forgotten that because I’d spent so many good years talking about Roy and the olden days with her. She hadn’t used this tone, at least in my presence, since before I came out. But I could tell by the way my mom reacted that my grandma always spoke that way to her. My mom picked up her cigarette. She tried to light it, but when she flicked the wheel, no fire came out. She started to cry—a wet cry with real tears that made her voice quiver in a way that unsettled me. I’m sure I’d thought about my mother as a daughter before, but in that moment, I felt something clearer, more tender. Oh, I thought. You too are a daughter who longs for her mother to love her. I wanted to hug my mom, but I didn’t want to anger my grandma, so I stayed in my seat, filming. My mom tried the lighter again, then she caught her mother’s eye.
“Mama, I call you every minute that I’m not at work.”
“Rhonda, stop that. Stop it.”
My grandma stood. Her nightgown had bunched around her waist, so she pulled it down and shook her head at my mother. She hobbled toward the house, still telling my mother to stop crying. After she was gone, my mom and aunt each smoked one more cigarette, then they went inside to take naps that lasted the rest of the day. I walked around the block a few times. I drank three bottles of water and read the Matthew Desmond book Evicted until my aunt’s vaporizer ran out of peppermint oil. Sometime midafternoon, my grandma called my name.
“Casey, come get in bed with me,” she croaked.
I shuffled back to the bedroom. My grandma was a tiny lump under a pile of quilts. She’d lined the bed with her essential supplies—a walkie-talkie, the remote, a Maglite, and a Dove chocolate bar—so I pushed them aside, then lay on top of the covers next to her. Only her eyes peeked out, but she spoke to me from beneath the blankets.
“Have you learned anything new about Roy?” she asked.
“I got some pictures from Mark King,” I said. “I’ve been meaning to show them to you.”
I didn’t have the originals anymore, but I’d scanned the photos into my phone. I scrolled past cat pictures until I found the image I wanted to show my grandma. Roy was supposedly twenty in the shot. He was standing in a field with one leg propped on a wooden chair. His hair was slicked back, and his arms were filled with a guitar. It was the brooding photo that had made me wonder if my grandma had had a crush on Roy. I handed her my phone, and she tucked it under the covers with her, then she sighed.
“This is what I remember.”
“This is the person who came over and invited you?” I asked.
“Honey, yes. If you could just see what I saw as a young girl, all the kids on this shaky front porch, listening to him play the banjo. You either loved country music, or you went in the house and shut the doors and windows because you could hear it all over the neighborhood.”
She sighed again. She asked me if I’d ever heard the Rod Stewart song “Maggie May.” The mandolin solo at the end sounded like the songs Roy used to pluck on his banjo, she said.
“Promise me we’ll listen to it later,” she said.
I promised, then my grandma wiggled her way out from under the blankets, and I scooted closer to her so I could see the photo again.
“He looks like a country music star,” I said.
“He does. Look at his blue jeans rolled up. That was very popular back in that day. Wonder what was in his head.”
She touched the screen in a way I thought seemed full of longing.
“Roy was a fairly decent-looking man,” she said.
I wanted to ask if she’d had a crush on Roy. I knew I was running out of time, but I couldn’t bring myself to say the question out loud because I worried it would remind my grandma that I was gay. I don’t know why I feared that. She obviously knew and had known for fifteen years or maybe more, and she’d never said anything mean to me about it. But I worried if I suggested she’d had feelings for Roy that I’d be suggesting something big and scary about her own identity, something I suppose I hoped was true. It was that hope I was protecting, I realize now. It was a vulnerable longing to see myself in my grandmother. I worried if I spoke that hope aloud, she would destroy it, and I would feel alone again the way I had when I was young. My grandma must have sensed what I was thinking because she changed the subject suddenly.
“You could have your pappaw’s ring,” she said. “It’s in my top drawer.”
“What?”
“As an inheritance. You can have his gold ring.”
Almost everything else was already spoken for, she said. The cast-iron pot would go to her sister, Shirley, and half a dozen other people had laid claim to an old paint palette my grandma used back in her crafting days. She told me I could have a stack of months-old HGTV Magazines and a roll of pennies from 1983. She tried to give me an old bra, my grandfather’s tie, his ring.
“You might need your bra,” I said. “Why don’t we wait?”
She burrowed deeper under the quilt until only her eyebrows and her gray spikes were showing.
“Honey. You wait too long and there’ll be nothing left.”
* * *
—
THE NEXT MORNING, my mom was up and dressed by seven. She seemed to have slept off whatever nightgown blues she’d had the day before, and she told me she wanted to get on the road as soon as possible. We stopped in Delhi for lunch on our way east, and she didn’t seem nervous the way she had the last time we’d gone to the drugstore lunch counter. She even asked me to take a few photos with her under the pharmacy’s sign.
We meandered around Vicksburg for a bit, and by the time we made it into Jackson, it was late afternoon. I scanned the news on my phone as we sat in early rush-hour traffic. When the Clarion-Ledger’s website loaded, I gasped. That morning, the Mississippi Legislature had agreed to pass House Bill 1523, a law that would allow anyone in the state to discriminate against gay, lesbian, or transgender people. I can’t remember what I said to my mother, but my face must have given my feelings away. If I got sick in Mississippi, a doctor could refuse to treat me. Waiters could kick me out of restaurants, and shop owners could ban me, too.
I wasn’t surprised exactly. This kind of state-sanctioned discrimination often follows civil rights wins. The spate of 2004 referendums banning same-sex marriage were, in part, a response to Massachusetts legalizing gay marriage earlier that year. Mississippi’s bill felt like the same kind of reaction. We’d won the right to marry, and President Barack Obama’s Department of Education had just moved to expand protections for transgender students. Now conservative states were fighting back. North Carolina had already passed a similar bill in 2016, one that banned transgender people from using bathrooms that correspond with their gender identities. I assumed other Southern states would follow.
I told myself I was only in Mississippi for the weekend. Whatever happened there wouldn’t govern my normal life. But I felt sick. Jackson is where I went to college. It’s where I first kissed a girl. I still had lots of friends in town, and I’d always thought that I might live there again someday. That dream was dumb, I realized as I read the article out loud to my mother. I couldn’t live in Mississippi again. I wasn’t brave enough.
A woman on my mom’s flight had suggested we have dinner at Hal & Mal’s, the restaurant where I’d watched the 2004 presidential returns with my gay friends, so she drove straight there. When we climbed out, my mom wrapped her arm around my waist, and we teetered through the parking lot together, our hips too wide to let us walk straight.
“We look like the Monkees,” I said, laughing and slinging a foot over hers the way Davy Jones does in the opening credits of the TV show. My mom let go of me at the front of the restaurant. I grabbed the door handle, but she stopped me from tugging it open.
“What if someone kicks you out?”
Her brown eyes were impossibly big and terrified. I knew she’d felt bullied growing up, but I didn’t know if she’d ever studied a room and wondered if someone might cuss her out or beat her up or tell her God would banish her to Hell forever. I considered, for a moment, telling her about the time a security guard had kicked me out of the mall in Columbia, Missouri, for holding a girl’s hand. He’d followed us all the way to the entrance. He’d yelled that the mall was a place for families, and we had desecrated it. Another time, in rural Oregon, a woman had screamed at me and trapped me in a campsite bathroom after she saw me kiss my girlfriend on the cheek. I wanted to tell my mother that I knew how to endure. I’d survived those experiences, and I’d survived my mother’s own anger long ago, and I would survive whatever else happened to me, too. I suspected those stories would scare or hurt her, though, so I faked a cocky smile as I opened the door.
“It’s just a few days,” I said. “Then I’ll go home and be gay as I wanna be.”
We searched for a table inside, and I reminded myself that life in Portland was easy. Our governor was a bisexual woman. The speaker of the house was a lesbian. Once a week, the middle-aged straight guy who sat next to me at work made a point of telling me he believed in gay rights. “And how’s your wife?” he’d ask me, apropos of nothing.
My mom and I sat in a booth near the middle of the room. She kept fishing out the sugar packets and rearranging them nervously. I wasn’t sure how to calm her, so I checked my phone for new messages. No one had texted me. When the screen went dark, I stared at myself in the reflection. I looked especially gay, I thought. My T-shirt was a guy’s shirt. My hair was slicked. Every other woman in the room was wearing makeup and the kind of hair that requires tools and products. If anyone was wanting to kick out a lesbian tonight, I was the obvious choice.
My mom and I read through the menu, commenting on what sounded good or gross, and when our waitress walked up to take our order, I laughed in relief. She was a trans woman I’d known in college.
“I don’t think we’re going to get kicked out,” I whispered.
My mom ordered red beans and rice, and I chose hot tamales, the skinny, ground-beef-filled kind that people only make in Mississippi. They’re different from the tamales you order at a Mexican restaurant. There’s no masa, only cornmeal, and the tamales are served wet in a spicy sauce.
The waitress brought our dishes out fast, and she lingered as we ate. She said she was saving up to leave Mississippi. I told her I was glad I’d left, but I knew, even as I said it, that wasn’t exactly true. I forked a bite of hot tamale onto a saltine cracker and into my mouth.
“Actually, I miss it,” I said. “Parts of it, anyway.”
“I miss the South, too,” my mom said. “They don’t even have Walmart in Washington, DC. You have to walk to the grocery store, then carry all of your groceries back. I want to pull my car up to the front and use a buggy inside. And I sure as hell don’t ever want to see snow again.”
The waitress’s face fell, and I could tell she was thinking about the legislature’s anti-gay bill.
“Y’all want to trade places?” she asked.
Just before we paid, the waitress told us that the Human Rights Campaign was hosting a lip-sync battle at the bar next door. They were raising money to fight the bill, so my mom suggested we go.
We wandered over ten minutes later. The bar was dark and loud, and as my eyes adjusted, I saw three gay Black teenagers leaning in to hug two white lesbians, both of whom looked past retirement age. One of the lesbians stepped back to show off her three-piece suit. It was black and double-breasted, and she was wearing a gold tie underneath her vest.
“I’m crossdressing,” she told the teenagers. “I’m hoping to get arrested tonight.”
I didn’t know the woman or the boys, but watching them made me miss my old life in Jackson. I thought of the Queer Young Adult Network, the way we’d stuffed ourselves into a booth the night Mississippi voters decided we couldn’t get married. Before the network, we’d had a group we called the Quilting Club, though none of us knew how to sew. Every weekend, we’d crowd around a dinner table or a recorded episode of Queer as Folk, and we’d talk the way we couldn’t in public. I remembered that I used to read them the emails my mother wrote me after I first came out. They cried with me. They held me until I forgot I was losing my family. I didn’t have that kind of intimacy in Portland. The city was so flush with lesbians, they drifted in and out of my circle without comment. I felt suddenly wistful.
I didn’t know if Roy ever knew any gay or trans people. I didn’t know if he saw himself as a member of any group. As far as I could tell, he never had any role models to show him how one moves through life as a misfit. And I didn’t think he had a quilting club or a bar like this one. He might not have even known other people like him existed. When I was young, before I found my own real-life people, I learned about myself by trawling the internet for clues. I read online journals and excerpts from gay books, and when I was old enough to drive, I rented movies about gay and transgender people. But Roy learned how to be himself without the internet. Stone Butch Blues didn’t come out until the 1990s, and I’m not sure how Roy would have found a copy even then. Delhi didn’t have a bookstore. Louisiana’s newspapers did run stories on Christine Jorgensen and Billy Tipton, but those articles were sensationalized and judgmental. In 1953, a Monroe columnist described Jorgensen as “Miss—er, Mr.—er,” while a Shreveport reporter went with “shem.” And when Billy Tipton, a jazz musician who was born about a decade before Roy, died in 1989, Louisiana papers reported his death under headlines that said he was a she and jazz ‘man’ lived a lie. Mark King told me once that Roy subscribed to the Monroe paper, so maybe Roy saw those articles. If he did, I can’t imagine he felt any less alone. The newspapers only confirmed what preachers told Roy, and what lawmakers were now telling gay and trans people in Mississippi: You are not human to us.
