Diary of a Misfit, page 39
“It was very easy to talk to her freely and openly about the things that affected me in my life, being different, a lesbian, a dyke, or whatever, and I found that very enjoyable,” Pam said, mumbling as she said all the words for gay. “She’s very adamant about being open. Me, I just been kind of doing my own thing, hiding in the closet. And I was fascinated that someone could be so open. If I was going to be in a relationship with this person, I knew I was going to have to learn how to be open the way she is.”
The woman had urged Pam to buy a rainbow flag, and she’d bought her that unicorn I’d spotted earlier in the truck. Those totems would have been small gestures in Portland—in some neighborhoods, they wouldn’t even be cause for a second glance—but I knew how big a risk flying a pride flag in Delhi might be.
“Are you scared to be out here now?” I asked.
“Out here?” Pam asked, looking down at the pier.
“Not out on this dock, but in Delhi. Can you imagine going to the grocery store and saying ‘my wife’?”
Pam was quiet for a few moments, then she shook her head. No, she said, she couldn’t imagine telling people in Delhi she was dating a woman. She hadn’t told her mother she’d fallen in love, and she hadn’t told anyone that she’d gone online and bought a ring.
I raised my eyebrows.
“A ring?”
“Now that it’s legal in some states, we talked about maybe doing it in the Vermont mountains.”
It took me a minute to understand what Pam was saying. The Supreme Court had legalized gay marriage four years earlier, but Pam still thought she could only get married in liberal places like Vermont.
“It’s legal in every state,” I said.
“I know it’s legal in Vermont.”
“You do know it’s legal in Louisiana, right?” I asked.
“No, not really,” Pam said. “It’s like Mississippi, they don’t recognize it.”
I told her, again, that she could legally marry a woman anywhere in the United States, but I knew the law was only words on paper in some places. Who in Delhi would agree to host the ceremony? What caterer would consent? I wouldn’t have tried to plan a gay wedding there. Hell, I’d spent my whole USA Today reporting trip in New Orleans trying to hide my wedding ring because I feared my sources would find out I was married to a woman. I told myself I didn’t want to make anyone uncomfortable. I wanted to be safe. But at night, alone in my hotel room, I was embarrassed by my shame. I’d been out of the closet for seventeen years, and I still felt like hiding every time I visited Louisiana. It didn’t matter that most of the people I loved there were dead. The state itself had an inexplicable hold on me. I wanted to tell myself that it was just a place, that its people were just people and their judgments held no real bearing on my life. But my fear felt reflexive, like something I couldn’t control, and I didn’t know what to do with that. How can a place be so right in some ways and so limiting in others? How could I barrel down the interstate, free and connected in a way I never felt in Portland, when I still hid such an essential part of myself?
My phone buzzed in my pocket. I snaked it out and saw Mark had left me a voicemail. In the video footage Aubree shot, I look remarkably calm, but that seems crazy to me now. Yes, Mark had said he would come by the cabin the next morning, but I hadn’t really believed him. I thought he’d make up another excuse when I called, but instead, here he was, calling me. Why didn’t I jump around celebrating as if the voicemail itself were a huge win? It had to be good news, didn’t it? Mark could have ignored us if he didn’t want us to know anything. Maybe I was afraid to get my hopes up again, so I didn’t even smile. Instead, I turned on my speakerphone and played the message for Aubree and Pam.
“Casey, Cheryl and I’d like to come talk to y’all now, if you’re not busy. Call me back and see if we can go ahead and have our talk today and get that done.”
My eyes widened a bit. I can’t remember how I felt in that moment, but I know that I called Mark back, and we agreed to meet at the cabin in fifteen minutes. As soon as I hung up, I let myself hope again. I sped around the lake. Mark knew what I wanted, and he’d called and he’d asked to talk sooner. Maybe he wanted money for the journals. I’d been against paying for them when I first started, but now I felt desperate to read Roy’s words, and I was willing to give Mark whatever he wanted.
* * *
—
MARK AND CHERYL made it to the cabin a few minutes after we did. Aubree led them on a tour of its two bedrooms, and Mark marveled at how high the ceilings were.
“You won’t feel cramped in these,” he said. “But it’s probably hard to heat and cool it.”
We sat at the kitchen table, but none of us brought up Roy. We talked about people we knew who’d died in the past few years, and eventually we talked about records. Mark had two thousand albums and another nine thousand 45s, mostly country singles and what he called “Black music.” He said he loved Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder. I told him I’d just bought a steel drum record from Trinidad. We both paused for a second, and I knew it was time. Music had been the impetus of this whole project—it was Roy’s banjo that lured my grandmother across the street in 1952—so it seemed the best way to transition into the question I knew I had to ask one last time.
“When we first started this,” I said, “one of the ladies who used to live on Chatham Street said she had a tape of Roy singing, but she lost it in a divorce.”
I’d tried to get this tape. I’d spent two whole years bugging the woman on Facebook, and I’d begged her to ask her ex-husband for the tape. She’d strung me along for several months. She’d promised to reach out to him, but eventually, she’d told me to give up. Her ex had thrown the tape out.
“A tape?” Mark asked. “Wow. I never heard Roy play and sing except maybe a couple of times when we first moved there. After that, we didn’t hear it anymore.”
That tape was lost to time, but I knew the journals weren’t. Roy must have wanted some kind of legacy. Why else would he have written songs? Why would he have sent them off to the Judds or the Whites or the other bands no one remembered? Why would he have typed “YOU CAN’T GET TO HEAVEN BY GOING THROUGH HELL” for Mary Rundell all those years ago? People write, I think, because they want to be understood and remembered.
I cleared my throat and tried to look at Mark as plaintively as I could.
“We definitely understand that y’all want to protect Roy, but the longer we’ve worked on this story, the more I’ve thought that it doesn’t make sense to do it without hearing Roy’s own perspective.”
Mark laughed a deep, almost sinister, laugh. It scared me. He laughed like he’d been waiting for me to ask this question, like he’d suspected I had bad intentions, and I’d proven him right. I didn’t want to keep talking, but I knew I had to. I couldn’t tell Roy’s story, I said again, unless Roy got to tell part of it himself. Mark shook his head no.
“Just knowing Royce, she was a private person.”
My chest seized up. Maybe Mark was right. He’d known Roy way better than Pam or my grandmother had, and so he was probably the closest I’d ever get to understanding how Roy might have responded to my inquiries. I swallowed hard.
“I was kind of the same way until they came along,” Pam said, pointing at me and Aubree. “Now I’m like, ‘Wow, I’m sharing my story, and it’s not hurting anything.’ Hopefully these stories that we’re telling today will inspire someone, if nothing else, to continue on with their life. That’s one reason that I’m truly inspired by all this because that’s my goal, to be able to help someone. I’m a misfit. Maybe I could help change somebody’s way of thinking about misfits. Roy, we had a lot of similarities in our lifestyle, the way we dressed, whatever. Seeing this person in this town, doing what she does, and living how she does, that gave me a little inspiration to say ‘I’m not going to change for everybody. I’m going to be like I’m going to be.’ ”
I knew Pam was braving something big. She didn’t use the words “gay” or “lesbian” or “transgender,” but “misfit” said enough. She was coming out to Mark and Cheryl. She was telling them the very secret she’d just told me on the dock she wasn’t ready to share, and she was doing it just so I could read Roy’s journals. I felt painfully moved, but I didn’t join in with my own confession.
I suspected the Kings already knew we were queer. We all had short hair, and we were wearing the kinds of boots lesbians wear—heavy shoes with wide toes and soles suited to hiking. I suspected the Kings wouldn’t judge me if I did tell them I was gay. They were still taking care of Keith, after all. How homophobic could they be? But I didn’t tell them. Instead, I told Mark that Roy was the kind of person the world should remember. Every day, newspapers and magazines chronicle the lives of powerful people, but I’d spent a decade returning to this small town because I believed that regular people deserved the same thing.
Mark listened without interrupting. When Pam and I finished our spiels, he put his hands on the table. He tried to let us down gently.
“Royce didn’t want her stuff to be given to anybody else,” he said.
I told Mark he didn’t have to give me the journals. We could just look at them together. He shook his head no.
“But if we go over what she’s written, we are kinda giving it. Do y’all believe in karma? Cheryl and I have a lot of bad luck. We have bad luck with our family. I would really feel funny about the karma.”
I didn’t feel bold, just out of options, so I asked Mark one more time if he could imagine any situation in which he’d show me even part of the journals. Cheryl shook her head no, more vigorously than Mark ever had.
“It’s karma,” she said.
She cut her eyes at Mark in a way I’d seen my mom do with my dad hundreds of times. It was a look that said “Back me up on this.” Mark seemed to take the hint.
“Y’all, I just don’t feel comfortable,” he said. “I’m worried about doing that. Royce, one thing is, she said she’d curse ya. She said, ‘You have this. If you give it away, you’re cursed, I curse you.’ ”
I remembered the curse that Roy had written on the back of one of the Cave Theater playbills Mark had shown me a few years earlier. But did the curse apply to showing people Roy’s stuff? I didn’t think so. I’d taken a picture of the playbill, and I’d read it so many times, I had the words memorized: If you keep all my foolish things, you shall have good luck. If you throw them away, you shall have very bad luck for my curse shall be on you.
I waited a beat, shook my head, then reminded Mark that I’d seen the playbills.
“It said if you throw my stuff away, I’ll curse you,” I said.
“Well, all right,” Mark said. “I just feel kind of spooky about that.”
Cheryl folded her arms in a way that suggested she was ready to leave. I assumed she was the one who didn’t want us to see Roy’s journals, but it didn’t matter who or what the reason was, I realized. I’d asked the Kings repeatedly for nearly a decade, and they had remained resolute. They weren’t going to give me Roy’s journals.
“Okay, then,” I said. “Well.”
Mark stood and Cheryl stood, so I stood, too. We talked about the weekend as if we were people who might see each other again, but I felt very sure that some chapter in my life had suddenly come to an end. I walked them to the door. We didn’t shake hands. Pam was late for the night shift, so she followed Mark and Cheryl out. When they left, I turned toward Aubree’s camera and grimaced. I’d tried everything, I thought. The project was dead.
Aubree turned the camera off, and we stood in the middle of the cabin, unsure of what to do. I realized we’d probably never stay there again. Outside, the sun was setting in pink and purple bars, but I felt too defeated to look at something pretty for the last time. I grabbed a beer from the fridge. The cabin’s walls were covered in posters advertising bass-fishing spots, and I studied them for a few minutes, then I sat on the floor. I tore the beer’s label away.
When I was young, I used to pray every time I wanted something. My mother taught me that desires are meant to be spoken, so I used to whisper my wants. I asked God for toys and TV dinners, straight As, and blank VHS tapes I planned to fill with Christian music videos. I hadn’t made that kind of request in nearly two decades, not since I came out, not since my preacher asked God to take me. I no longer asked any celestial being to give me things, and I wasn’t even sure if I believed in heaven anymore, but something in the cabin quieted me that evening. Something told me to ask. I didn’t feel close to God anymore, though, so I shut my eyes and prayed to my mom and grandmother.
“If y’all are up there, can you talk to Roy?”
I suppose I wanted them to broker some kind of celestial deal. I wanted permission, a sign that I hadn’t wasted a decade searching for something that shouldn’t be found. I didn’t want to put this story out there unless Roy got to tell part of it.
I prayed in fragments, half sentences that were both pleading and apologetic. I didn’t say amen. I opened my eyes, and when I looked up, I saw headlights sweeping across the cabin wall. No one drives that deep into the park by accident, and there weren’t any cabins farther in than ours, so I knew what those headlights meant. I jumped up. I stashed my beer outside on the deck, then I ran to the front door. I knew before I opened it that Mark would be standing on the other side.
Chapter Twenty-Four
(2019)
I OPENED THE DOOR, and Mark strolled in as if our afternoon talk had never happened. He was holding three trash bags, one black and two white, each bulging with the kind of square corners I knew had to be notebooks.
“Y’all,” he said, “these things are in pretty bad shape, but you can look at them if you want to.”
Cheryl appeared holding gloves and disinfectant. In the video Aubree shot, I look absolutely nonplussed, but I remember I was working hard to appear that way. I wanted the Kings to feel like this moment was no big deal, like they weren’t risking a curse to betray a friend, so I didn’t even ask them why they’d changed their minds when they’d been so certain of their “no” an hour earlier. Instead, I trailed Mark through the living room. Every second felt like a lifetime, but I can see in the video timestamps how quickly the whole thing unfolded. Less than a minute after I opened the door, Mark was kneeling on the cabin floor, wearing a pair of brown gardening gloves, and digging into one of the bags. I was standing, nervously shifting from one foot to the other, making small talk as if this moment were one we’d all planned and anticipated together.
“Wow,” I said, looking at the bags. “There’s a lot of them.”
I started clearing my laptop and battery chargers off the kitchen table so Mark could spread the journals out, but he didn’t move from the spot he’d claimed on the ground. With absolutely no ceremony, Mark pulled out a faded green notebook from 1992, and he started reading silently to himself.
“I told you,” he said. “Royce, by gosh, she wrote in cursive. And you can read it. It’s good cursive.”
I was standing a few feet away, so I bent toward Mark to look over his shoulder at a page from May 1992, and there they were—the words I’d spent a decade imagining. Roy had covered the top half in big, loopy black letters, and he’d penned an update later in the day with red ink.
It wasn’t bad here last night, and we didn’t get any rain. The high was 91 degrees, but I cut the church yard and finished my yard. I put a partition on the shed and put the two old pieces of lawn mowers I had in it. Now, I got a little more room in the junk room. Well, that’s how my day went. I’m sure tired tonight, but I’m sure glad I was able to do what I did.
Mark chuckled, but my heart sank. Had I really spent a whole decade waiting to read about lawn mower parts?
Mark flipped a few pages, then he set 1992 on the floor and dug out a Mead notebook marked “1984, The Complaints of a Misfit.” He laughed again.
“Complaints! I guess that’s the reason Royce and I got along so good. Both of us are negative.”
Mark kept hauling journals out of trash bags until eventually they encircled him. I tried to count them, but I was too hyped to tally past twenty. I’d always imagined Roy wrote in the marble composition books I used to use in elementary school, but his diaries were one-subject notebooks, the spiral-bound kind my mom used to buy at Walmart two for a dollar. They were mostly teal and blue, a little bit moldy and rusted along the metal spines, and Roy had used a Magic Marker to name and date each one. Aubree and I had started calling our project “Diary of a Misfit,” but as I looked over Mark’s shoulder, I saw that he had gotten the names of Roy’s journals just slightly wrong. Roy had named his 1980 diary “Life of a Misfit,” and he called the 1978 edition “Day by Day Life of a Misfit.” I smiled, dazed at what was unfolding in front of me. I was grateful Mark had remembered wrong—his title was punchier, more memorable than the ones Roy himself had chosen.
Mark didn’t settle into any one journal for long. He’d pick one up, read a random sentence, then set it aside. Occasionally, he lifted one so I could see. Some of the ink had run down the pages, but mostly, Roy’s words were legible. Even standing a few feet away, I could make out whole paragraphs detailing the heat and the rain.
“I’m telling you,” Mark said, “sixty percent of it’s probably weather. Royce had to work outside, so she was really interested in the weather.”
Mark placed three journals next to my feet. My Blundstone boots were muddy, and I worried if I moved, some of the mud might flake off onto Roy’s notebooks. I don’t know why that scared me. Most of the journals were covered in a brown silt Mark told me might be dog excrement, but still, I didn’t want to add my dirt to the time capsule. I watched as Mark emptied out the other trash bags. As far as I could tell, Roy had written every year from 1972 to 2001. Once Mark had them spread out the way he wanted, he sat down in the nest of journals. He plucked one from the pile.
