Diary of a Misfit, page 40
“This one’s 1993,” he announced. “ ‘Life of a Misfit by Roy D. Hudgins, the Misfit. Heat gets worse every year.’ How about that? ‘Heat gets worse every year.’ I didn’t think that.”
Mark raised an eyebrow, and I wondered if he was suggesting Roy had noticed global warming before the rest of us had, but I didn’t know how Mark and Cheryl felt about climate change, and I didn’t want a political discussion to jeopardize the night, so I just nodded. Mark jumped forward a few pages, then he beamed when he spotted a sentence about himself:
The Kings went to Walmart today, and they got me a big sack of bird seed.
He held up the journal so Cheryl could see it. It was waterlogged and missing a cover. The pages were wrinkled, and at least half the sheets appeared to have burnt edges. After Cheryl looked at it, Mark set the journal down next to my feet. I wanted to touch it. I’d dreamed of this exact moment since 2009, and in my dreams, I always read the notebooks, but that night in the cabin, something stopped me. Maybe I was waiting for clearer permission. Mark had said we could look at the diaries, but I wasn’t sure yet what he meant by “look.” I left the journal near my feet.
Mark picked up an avocado-green 1987 edition, set it down, then opened the 1974 journal and skipped through until he found an entry Roy wrote in August after President Richard Nixon had resigned.
A day to go down in history. No man could stand under what they put on him. They saw all his mistakes, but they didn’t see any of the good things he did. The people voted Nixon president. We no longer have a free country.
Mark furrowed his brow. He said he’d have to read that entry again sometime. Already, Roy was starting to become real in ways I hadn’t expected. “We no longer have a free country” sounded like a populist rallying cry, the kind of pessimistic thing a rural Southerner would absolutely say in 2019, and yet, I was surprised to see Roy express it. I’d projected so much of myself onto him, I realized, that I’d assumed we’d agree on everything.
Mark thumbed through two other notebooks, then he settled down with the 1998 edition. It was a thick purple notebook, and Roy had shaded all the white letters on the front cover with a pink highlighter. Mark’s lips moved as he read silently to himself for three or four minutes. When he found an entry he wanted to share, he stood and read it out loud.
I went to Fred’s and bought a boiler and a few things. I tried to find some jeans, but the jeans they have in Delhi now is those big-legged jeans. Don’t want any of them. I don’t know what I’m going to do for jeans. I guess I’ll have to try to get to Rayville or Monroe. My little dog I call Little Bit is having puppies. I don’t know how many she will have yet. I cleaned the church this evening. I went to bed.
Mark kept skimming, but the entry unlocked something in me. Did Roy mean bell-bottoms or women’s jeans? People had told me he was only five feet tall, which might have made him too short for most men’s pants, but I assumed he’d always shopped in the men’s department. If he had, I wondered how he felt, straying to that side of the store. When I was younger and skinnier, I shopped in the little boy’s sections at Target and J.Crew. I loved the striped T-shirts and plaid button-downs I discovered there, but I always browsed as if I were under surveillance. Even in Portland, I waited until the departments were empty, then I slipped between the aisles and pretended to shop for someone else, an imaginary son I prepared myself to describe. When I found a piece I liked, I crouched someplace private and held it against my frame, measuring, without daring to try it on in the women’s fitting room. Had Roy sneaked through stores? Was it even possible to sneak in Delhi? I hadn’t worn boys’ clothes in several years, not since my hips grew too wide for guys’ tapered silhouettes. Still, I could feel that old fear rising inside me. I missed the T-shirts, but I did not miss shopping as if I were committing a crime.
Mark read for ten minutes or so, mostly entries about the weather, and eventually, I worked up the nerve to reach for one of the diaries near my feet. I chose the oldest one, a busted-up 1974 edition that no longer had a cover. It felt dusty in my hands. Along the top of the first page, Roy had scrawled, “Bury me in a pair of my pants and one of my blue shirts.”
I was looking for permission, some kind of proof that Roy wanted me to read these diaries, and I latched on to that directive as the evidence I needed. Didn’t “bury me” have an implied “you” lingering just before it? If Roy didn’t have any friends or family, who did he think would bury him? The sentence suggested to me that not only did Roy expect someone might read this journal, he expected they’d read it before he was in the ground.
When I looked up for affirmation, Mark nodded in a way I found inscrutable, so I turned back to the notebook, then read down the page. Underneath the burial instructions, Roy had written a kind of introduction. I read the words out loud, wondering if Mark and Cheryl heard them the way I did.
Roy Delois Hudgins, better known as Roy, born April 19, 1925, to the best of my knowledge. This will be a day by day record of my life as I live it in the year 1974, if possible, as long as I live, anyway, or as long as it’s possible for me to write. Five foot, 170 pounds, hair light, almost white, eyes kind of hazel or streaked, skin light, speckled and red, no money, no family, no friends, no sense.
Would Roy really have taken time to introduce himself if he thought no one would ever read these journals? I never wrote my name in my diaries. I never described what I looked like or when I was born. Later in the night, as I read through other notebooks, I saw that Roy had written introductions like that for every journal. In 1979, the preface covered the whole inside cover.
A misfit, says Webster’s Dictionary, is something different, something that don’t fit, something odd, well that’s me.
In this book, if it be the Lord’s will and nothing happens, will be my life as I live it day to day, what I do, what happened each day in my life, and my thoughts from time to time, for this book will be my companion to talk to for 1979, or as long as I live and am able to write in 1979.
My name is Roy Delois Hudgins, and I’m ugly, short, fat, and getting old. I’m a female dressed in men’s clothes. I live alone with two dogs and a bunch of cats, and I’m very, very stupid.
It feels insufficient to say I felt sad reading the introductions. I’d imagined that Roy might have been lonely or depressed, and Mark had told me repeatedly that Roy thought of himself as stupid, but something about seeing those adjectives strung together in one paragraph made my stomach hurt. Ugly. Fat. Stupid. Roy hadn’t used a single positive adjective to describe himself. Even when I was a teenager, when I felt most rejected by my mom and the church, I’d held on to some vision of myself as worthwhile. Maybe I was going to Hell, but I was smart. Maybe everyone I loved would turn against me, but I could write. I knew Roy had good traits. Every person I’d interviewed had listed at least a couple. He could play the guitar. He wrote songs. He was good at dominoes, and he was kind to children. Why didn’t he see any of that good in himself?
The Kings didn’t seem in any rush to leave, but I didn’t know how much time I had with the journals, so I skimmed. Mark was right: Most of them were about the weather. Roy noted every time he mowed a lawn, and he complained about both the heat and the cold. My mom would have loved that. She wasn’t happy unless the air was a perfect eighty degrees. Suddenly, I wished she and my grandma were in the cabin, reading with me. My grief caught in my throat, but I tried to swallow it down. This was supposed to be a happy moment, a moment Aubree and I had worked and waited for. I couldn’t spoil it by missing people.
I leafed past the spring and summer of 1974, then I stopped on a paragraph Roy wrote in October at 10:45 p.m. on a night he described as “dry, hot, and dusty.”
I just listened to Let The Bible Speak over T.V., and they really let me have it with both barrels. Our preacher did the same thing this morning. The way I dress is wrong, and I’ll have to agree with them, but there seems to be nothing I can do about it. Unless God works some kind of miracle in my life, there’s just nothing I can do about it on my own. Does God want one of his children to be miserable and unhappy? Unless God’s undeserved mercy forgives me I haven’t got a chance. I would feel as miserable in women’s clothes as a man would in a dress. that’s a real man
I used to ask myself questions like those. Why would God want me to be unhappy? Why would he make me this way? I hadn’t thought like that since I was a teenager, not since Ellen kissed me, and I stopped caring, but Roy was nearly fifty when he wrote this, and I wondered, as I read it, how I would have felt if I’d stayed in Louisiana. Would I have continued to hate myself? Would I have spent my life waiting for a miracle that never arrived? I looked up from the journal, and Mark shrugged.
“Roy went to that church for a long time,” he said. “I don’t guess they were too bad on her, or she wouldn’t have been able to stand it.”
Cheryl had been sitting silently in a leather chair, but she scooted to the seat’s edge after Mark said that. Her hands were clasped together, and her jaw was set in a way I found angry.
“You don’t pinpoint a person for what they wear when they go to church,” she said. “She was like she was, and if she wanted to go to church, you don’t say anything about it. That hurts.”
Cheryl looked at me for a moment, her mouth pursed firm, and I suddenly felt like I understood her in a new way. She’d told me no for so many years, I realized now, because she loved Roy. She’d seen other people harm him, and she wanted to do whatever she could to protect him, even in death.
I nodded. I told Cheryl I agreed with her, then she relaxed a bit into the chair. None of us talked for a minute, but I worried I was running out of time, so I turned back to the journals. Roy’s words surrounded me. I wanted to spend whole weeks reading through them, but Aubree and I were flying out the next day, and Mark said I couldn’t take the diaries with me. I kept picking up notebooks and turning the pages, hoping my eye would catch on the word “kidnap.” I assumed the answers I wanted must be in one of them. But which one? I shuffled through three or four, and eventually, I recognized a pattern. Every notebook ended with what Roy called his year in review. Most of the reviews chronicled all the ways Roy had suffered that year, and even the good ones read morose.
“This year wasn’t too bad,” he wrote in 1981. “In fact, it was a pretty good year. A few unpleasant things, like my dog Angel dying and the time I turned the table over on the kitten and had to get somebody to kill him for me, and my cat Slim dying, and all my aches and pains and complaints and self-pity.”
Every journal also included an index of what Roy titled “hard-to-spell words that i may be using from time to time.” It was a miserable list that started with the word itself:
Miserable, mental, spiritual, bicycle, medicine, unusual, usual, lightning, arthritis, physical, afraid, experiences, emotionally, attacked, degrees, pessimist, nervous, exist, energy, slept, severe like in storms, porch like front porch, phobia, air conditioner.
I read the words out loud, and Mark put his finger on his chin as if something had just become clear to him.
“That makes me wonder,” he said. “If Roy had all those words written down, she didn’t want somebody at some time to see that she was ignorant and didn’t know how to spell. If she wanted to make sure she spelled things right, then she expected somebody would read that.”
I felt the slightest speck of hope bloom inside me. I’d waited ten years for Mark to say he thought reading these journals was a good idea, and here he was, saying it. I didn’t exactly agree with his logic, but I didn’t tell Mark that because I wanted to feel good about reading Roy’s diaries. So I read on, searching for my own version of permission. I suspected I’d never know what Roy wanted, but as I flipped through the diaries he kept in the 1980s, I thought I found a bit of evidence. Every year, Roy pasted photographs of himself onto the pages. In one, a tiny square shot of his face in 1982, Roy wrote, “That’s old me.” That caption was something, wasn’t it? It seemed to be directed to someone, an unknown reader. I set the notebook aside, then gazed for a while at a Polaroid dated 1980. In it, Roy was standing in front of a white wall wearing a blue button-down tucked into jeans held up with a studded belt. He stared forward the way someone would when posing for their driver’s license. I don’t know if he was smiling or not, because he’d taken a Sharpie and blacked out his mouth. If the birth date listed on Roy’s tombstone was correct, he was fifty-five in this picture. His hair was all white, but I thought I spotted something youthful in his eyes. Maybe it was the plastic-frame glasses. I’d long worn the same kind.
I didn’t allow myself to acknowledge it that night, but of course I was still looking at Roy searching for signs of myself. The glasses were such a small connection, the kind of frames every hipster wears at some point, but I latched on to them anyway. I felt sheepish searching for those similarities. Why did I need Roy? I was thirty-five. I was married. I had a good career, and I knew plenty of gay and trans people. I told myself that night that I didn’t need Roy the way I had when I was eighteen, but I understand now that I was still looking to him as a North Star because none of the people I know now are from my place. They didn’t grow up with the same funky air and long-stretched vowels. They didn’t know my grandma, and they’d never faced the wrath of a small-town Louisiana preacher. I’ve filled in a lot of my own blanks over the years, but Roy was the first queer community I ever imagined for myself. Two decades later, holding his notebooks, I still felt the simple but keen-edged curiosity I first experienced at my grandma’s kitchen table. I wanted to know him.
Mark and I sat on the floor together for two hours. We read through dinner and the last bit of twinkling light, but time moved so much faster than I wanted it to. I knew I’d never be able to read every entry. I knew I’d miss things. Somehow that hurt as badly as reading nothing. Now that I held Roy’s words in my hands, I wanted to take my time with them. I didn’t even care if the entries were bombshells; I wanted to read every detail, every weather report and any other mundane item Roy saw fit to record. At some point, after I’d realized that I couldn’t read fast enough, I started taking pictures of pages. I told myself to calm down and savor the sentences I did get to read, but I couldn’t, not really, because I knew each page was just a piece of Roy’s bigger story. I felt desperate. I sped through the journals the way I’d once zipped through microfilm at the Monroe library. I kept hoping I’d see one sentence that answered everything, a personal confession to make up for the newspapers’ lack of coverage of stolen babies. I didn’t find the exact line I wanted, but eventually, I thought I found an answer in the middle of Roy’s 1974 year-end review.
Rejected at birth and rejected every sence, a born loser, a born complainer, that’s me. Old fatso, ugly, fat, and I can’t spell the other word.
“Rejected at birth.” Mark was right. Roy must have thought he’d been given up for adoption. That didn’t necessarily mean the story my grandmother told me was wrong. Roy was supposedly only three or four when Jewel took him, young enough that he may have forgotten his own origins. Maybe Jewel kidnapped Roy, then told him she’d adopted him. But if my grandma’s story was the real story, I thought, if Jewel did steal Roy, this entry seemed to suggest he never knew it. I looked up from the notebook and wondered how the stories we tell ourselves shape the people we become. Did Roy think he wasn’t worth loving because his birth mother gave him away? Would he have felt worse if Jewel had told him his real parents abused him? And what stories had I told myself? I’d grown up knowing that my mother never meant to get pregnant with me. She’d only turned to my father because she was so distraught about losing Cam. On good days, I told myself I was an accident. On bad ones, a mistake. But as I read Roy’s end-of-the-year review, I felt newly lucky. My mother kept me. She gave up college so she could have me. She married my father, and she stayed. Whatever else she did wrong when I was growing up, I knew she wanted me.
I ran my index finger over Roy’s words. “Rejected every sence.” The page was brittle, crinkled in the way paper turns after it gets wet. I imagined Roy settling down on New Year’s Eve. Maybe he sat at the wooden desk I’d seen in the pictures Ann McVay had shown me. Maybe he was drinking Coke from a glass bottle. I imagine he must have been hurting, but his handwriting didn’t look especially anguished. The ink was faint from lack of pressing. I touched his words again. He hadn’t borne down on the notebook, so the lines hadn’t left any tangible imprint.
I used my phone to take a few pictures of the page, then I set it aside and opened a rusted notebook with burnt edges and a yellow cover. On the front, Roy had written in black capital letters, “THE LIFE OF A MISFIT 1979 DAY BY DAY ROY D HUDGINS.” I thought I didn’t have enough time to read the entire journal, so I flipped to the back page to see how Roy had summarized the year. As always, I found, he’d written a New Year’s Eve wrap-up, but this one struck me as a little more existential.
In the ’70s, men became women, and women became men, and the men let their hair grow longer than most women. I no longer stand alone in the fact that you can’t tell the women from the men. The men tried to look as sloppy and ugly as they could. 20 years ago if we saw a man that looked like most of the men today looks we’d call him a bum and probably hide from him. And women, well, they decided they wanted to be like men.
Of course, I’m one to be talking about such things, but my problems started when I was a kid. And I know that there are jobs that men do that I can’t do, even though I’ve always wore men’s clothes and had to work like men. It was never because I thought I could handle everything and do everything men could do. It wasn’t really because I wanted to be equal with men. I was raised up confused and mixed-up and stupit. I mean, I am stupit. Good by.
