Wide Awake Now, page 11
“As soon as I got my license, I started to drive around. Then one night I drove into Gatlinburg and headed for the nearest bar. Something was calling me there—I can’t really explain it. Sure enough, I spotted a man at the bar who just looked like the picture of my daddy that my ma kept hidden in her bottom drawer. Only now my daddy was dressed like my ma and had tits to spare.
“I walked right on up to him and said, ‘My name is Sue. How do you do? You may be a woman, but I know you’re my daddy.’
“Now, that remark hit her hard. But she recovered quick, pushed me straight out of the bar and into the street. I couldn’t tell whether she was crying or whether it was just drinkin’ tears I was seeing. I started yelling at her, going, ‘Why did you name me Sue? Why? WHY?’ And she was laughing and crying and cursing and then smiling. ‘I’m Sue!’ I screamed. ‘I’m Sue!’ And finally she just looked at me and said, ‘I know you are, honey. I know.’ ”
Sue took a deep breath, then continued. “She said she knew this wasn’t an easy world, and thought, maybe right, maybe wrong, that having her around would make it harder. She said she named me Sue because she wanted me to know all the things I could be inside. That when I was born she looked in my eyes and saw the deepest kind of reflection, which made her feel that everything she’d done wrong could be done right by me. She said, ‘I gave you that name to leave you open to anything. Plus, I figured if you didn’t like it, you could always change it. I’m guessing you must’ve kept it for a reason.’
“I’d never told anyone why I’d kept it, but now with this woman who was my daddy standing in front of me, I could finally admit that the name felt right. That even though I was a boy—still am—there were parts of me that liked being a girl. I didn’t want to be a full girl or anything, like some of my friends or like my daddy. But I wanted to be a boy named Sue. There are lots of us out there—we know the names we’re called don’t really matter unless we feel that they’re right. And I guess that’s why I knew I had to help Stein and Martinez. Because they’re boys called Sue, too. And I know my daddy would be proud of me for standing up for them.”
“We’re proud of you, too, son,” Virgil said. “And that’s the truth.”
At this point, I couldn’t believe that I’d hesitated in considering whether or not to come. I realized how easy I had it, and how lucky I was. And what good was luck if you couldn’t pay it forward in some way? What good was good if you couldn’t make it last longer and spread it wide?
I needed words to fuel me. I didn’t need to be told what to do; I just needed to know that what I was doing had some worth. The words could be as simple as thank you or you’re welcome, or as complicated as a story or a speech. The words could come from Jimmy, or Janna, or Stein, or these random people who’d arrived on our bus.
It was enough to let me know that the words in my head weren’t alone.
They had a world in which to fit.
They would be heard and understood.
It felt like a lot to ask, in a world where people were so busy broadcasting themselves that there was hardly enough time or inclination to listen. But why not ask a lot? Why not demand that people step away from presenting themselves to the world in order to understand the world as it was and as it needed to be?
I wasn’t sure it was possible to focus on something so big. I’d never tried. Maybe because I felt safe, and when you’re safe, you don’t want to think too much about the things that are keeping you safe. It was possible that Elwood and Sue had understood the threat before I had.
The thing about having your eyes open is that you always have the option of closing them again.
I resisted the urge of safety. I tried to keep my eyes looking forward to the election we had to save, however we could.
sixteen
A few hours later, Stein addressed us.
* * *
—
“We will demonstrate peacefully and positively. We will show our opponents the power of peace, and send the world a message that we are a country that loves peace above all else. Our presence—millions upon millions of us—will be enough. We will raise our voices, but not our fists. We will show strength through solidarity, not aggression. Like the saints, we will go marching in…and we will march, and we will march, and we will march until justice prevails.”
* * *
—
I kept rolling the phrase power of peace over in my mind. It felt like our whole society had been designed to make us believe the opposite—violence was power, physical strength was power, victory on the battlefield was power.
At the same time, I thought: If there are so many forces trying to work against peace, then when it actually happens, it must be really powerful, to withstand all that’s aiming to tear it apart.
I wish I could say that everyone on this bus was talking about these things, about how to defend justice and empower peace. But it’s hard to live on that level. Instead, some people were napping. Others were texting. And still others were dealing with the human drama unfolding in our midst.
Jimmy was sitting now with Mira. It was like the whole geometry of the bus had shifted to allow Mira as much room as possible away from Keisha or Sara.
“I don’t know if I can ever trust her again,” Mira told Jimmy. I sat behind them, with Elwood napping on my shoulder. “What she did takes everything away.”
“You can’t just erase everything,” Jimmy replied.
“That’s easy for you to say. You have Duncan. You’re lucky.”
“I know,” Jimmy said. “I know.”
* * *
—
From the front of the bus, Mrs. Everett and Virgil started singing a song about how everything is everything, how what is meant to be will be.
“Change,” they sang, “it comes eventually.”
* * *
—
Clive drove the bus as far as he could take it—but eventually all the traffic became a standstill, and we knew we’d have to walk the rest of the way. We’d crossed through the ring of chainmarts that surrounded Topeka, all the familiar names from Anywhere USA greeting us with their usual indifference. Cars and buses filled all the parking lots, but nobody was shopping. They were all heading to the center of town.
Our bus was parked in front of a sports store. We gathered the bare-minimum supplies, planning on a few hours’ stay. Virgil took the lead, with Flora and Mrs. Everett beside him. Sara said she’d take up the rear. It was strange to see her and Virgil split like that—we were so used to them working in tandem. I couldn’t tell whether the Keisha thing had thrown off that tandem or whether they were simply applying the basic kindergarten-field-trip rule of having someone in front and someone in back to keep the kids from getting lost.
There was a good chance of getting lost, because thousands of people were streaming past us now, each street a tributary uniting at the center of Topeka. There were individuals and couples walking, for sure. But mostly there were groups. Church groups and youth groups and work groups. Groups of friends, groups of family, groups of volunteers. Although it was clear (from signs carried, from comments overheard) that some of the people had come to protest our protest, most were Stein/Martinez supporters experiencing the power of arrival. No matter how far they’d traveled or what they’d had to leave behind, they were—like us—galvanized by the enormity and the intensity of our mission. It was as if the rally was a large and powerful magnet; the closer we got, the stronger the pull.
Sara’s friend Joe and some of the other college-age volunteers split off into their own camp. Although nothing had been said, I felt that Jimmy and I had inherited Elwood as our buddy, because he needed some support as he ventured out into the world for the first time. His parents were not happy when he called to tell them where he was. My own parents were less angry but similarly nervous when I called with my own updates. The first time, I’d expected my father to be miffed at me for defying the law that he and my mother had laid down. But she must have gotten to him somehow, because all I received was an order to stay safe and to come back home as soon as it was over.
None of us needed a map of Topeka to know where we were headed. We just followed the flow, merging in with the other groups. We didn’t mingle—most groups kept to themselves at this point, concentrating on sticking together rather than making new friends. Gus and Glen were a major exception to this rule. In just a few hours, they’d become unquestionably inseparable. If Gus’s hand wasn’t on Glen’s shoulder, Glen’s hand was on Gus’s waist. Or their sides were so close together that it looked like a three-legged race. Gary and Ross, walking four steps behind, seemed amused. I still couldn’t tell them apart.
“Did they really just meet?” Elwood asked Jimmy and me.
“Yup,” Jimmy said.
“Wow,” Elwood replied, admiring. But his eyes didn’t grow wide until a few minutes later, when Jimmy told him that I was Jewish.
“That’s ultra cool,” Elwood said with an awed gasp.
Soon he was barraging me with questions about Torah reading and Yom Kippur and becoming a bar mitzvah and the story of Jacob wrestling with the angel. I answered him as best I could—about reading without vowels and repenting by throwing bread into a river and chanting something you don’t completely understand (and also still not knowing what Jacob’s ladder really means). None of these things had ever struck me as out of the ordinary, but explaining them to someone who found them extraordinary made me suddenly see a little more of their meaning. It also made me realize that a lot of the time when people talked about being Jewish, it was in the context of other people hating us. I was proud of all the times we’d survived attempts to annihilate us…but those events loomed so large that I didn’t get to be proud of the things from the happier times. I had to define my Jewishness in part by the very real threats against us.
While Elwood had struggled against being prevented from being a Jew, I’d been conscious of the things that I thought being a Jew might prevent me from becoming. Really, there weren’t that many—there had already been plenty of Jewish movie stars and senators and sports heroes and world leaders. The only office we didn’t seem able to attain was the Presidency…until Stein.
I wasn’t completely naive—I knew there were still plenty of people out there who’d like to keep us out of their private clubs. But still—once you knew there were enough people out there to vote for a Jew for President, you couldn’t help but feel that anything else was possible. It had been the same with the first Catholic President and the first Black President. And it was definitely the same with the first gay President, who happened to also be the first Jewish President…as long as we could make his election in Kansas stick.
And even then, I knew: The people who hated us would probably hate us even more. Stein would be their reason, their cover, for blanket attacks. Just like the election of the first Black President hadn’t erased racism, Stein’s election wouldn’t erase antisemitism or homophobia. It would inflame it…but that was no reason to leave the ceiling intact. You have to rise in order to rise above. You build something strong enough to withstand the backlash.
The closer we got to the center of the city, the closer the people were packed together. Some groups started cheers and chants—
“One-two-three-four / We won’t take this anymore / Five-six-seven-eight / Good will triumph over hate.”
“People say all over town / No way to keep a Stein vote down!”
“What do we want? / FAIRNESS! / Where we gonna get it? / KANSAS!”
* * *
—
—while other groups sang hymns and protest songs. As we all pressed together and heard the copters overhead, I could also hear Janna and Mandy whisper-singing behind me, a private golden thread of “Amazing Grace” sung not out of protest but out of faith. They had said their Sunday morning prayers earlier, and now their voices harmonized effortlessly, since it was a song they’d summoned so many times before to underscore their beliefs. It was amazing, and it was graceful, and it was that most rare of things—a sound that makes us see.
When they were through, we turned on the news and heard that the number of people alongside us was definitely over half a million, possibly over a million, with more and more arriving every minute.
After about an hour’s worth of walking, we reached downtown. The flatness of the land was mirrored in a flatness of architecture. The walls were bland or blank or brick, the windows empty or blinded. It felt like the kind of place that always seemed shut down. The locals looked shell-shocked for the most part, unprepared for this sudden invasion of easterners and westerners, northerners and southerners. A few, however, had decided to profit from the occasion and were selling bottles of water for ten dollars each. At this point, they had very few takers.
We fell in step with a church group as we reached the street leading to the rally. The police had divided the street roughly in half, with the Stein rallygoers veering to the left and the Decent protesters roped off to the right. The opposition candidate had decided to have his own rally in Wichita at the same time as Stein’s in Topeka, but there were still thousands of anti-Stein people here, yelling and jeering at us as we passed.
“Don’t pay them any attention,” Virgil warned.
Still, it was hard to ignore them. No matter how loud we chanted, their dissonance was thrown at us. So I looked, and Jimmy looked, and what we saw nearly stopped us cold. There were only a few signs with Stein’s opponent’s name on it—these people weren’t pro-him as much as anti-us. So instead of mass-produced campaign posters, there were hundreds of handwritten signs.
Stein Is a Sodemite.
The Meak Shall Not Inherit the U.S.A.
God Says Fags Should Die!
Go Home Jew Fags—This Country Isn’t 4 U.
I recoiled, tried to back away from them. But Jimmy took my hand and held it tight. Held it so everyone could see it. Held it to defy them.
We got their attention. Suddenly the yelling was directed at us. Telling us to go home. Telling us to die. Telling us we had no right to be here.
I could feel myself going defensively blank, shutting down. Which is exactly what hate wants to happen—a complete diminishment in the face of its fervor. People think these hateful things, and you know they do, and it saps you of energy you might otherwise be using to live your life. When they say them out loud, when they throw these words in your face, it’s meant to startle you into submission, shake you away from your foundation so they can knock your walls down.
I could sense Jimmy getting angrier and angrier. The pastor from the church group next to us tried to block us from the taunts, his face full of concern. One of the Decents decided to throw something at us—just a plastic juice bottle, not something that could really hurt. It hit the pastor instead, the leftover juice spraying the three of us.
That was it, as far as Jimmy was concerned. He was about to charge them, about to curse and yell and fight if he had to. And I—well, I held his hand tighter. Even as he started to pull away, I held on, dug in. He was surprised, but he didn’t let go. I pulled him forward a little. He resisted. Then the pastor looked at us and said, “Let’s keep walking. Just keep walking.” Brushing the juice off his jacket, asking if we were okay.
I wondered if anyone else had noticed. Then I got my answer: Janna and Mandy started singing “Amazing Grace” again—and this time it was loud, meant to be heard. The golden thread turned into a banner. The pastor joined in, and people all around us started to sing along. The Decents yelled louder, but they couldn’t break the harmony.
* * *
—
’Twas grace that taught my heart to fear,
And grace my fears relieved.
How precious did that grace appear
The hour I first believed.
* * *
—
The pastor could tell I was still shaken and Jimmy was still enraged. Even Elwood looked ready to go back and make some trouble.
“Don’t let them get to you,” the pastor told us. “All they have is hate, and in the end hate is worthless. They want for us to become hateful, too, and to forfeit His love in our anger. When faced with such hate, we can only embrace love tighter. As Paul said, ‘Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.’ ”
I had not let go of Jimmy’s hand. But now I tried to let my grip ease, to get us back to boyfriends instead of two boys under attack. We passed the last (for now) of the shouting Decents and made our way into the area in front of the Kansas statehouse.
Hearing that there were over half a million people present hadn’t prepared me at all for the sight of it—the enormity of it. There were people as far as my eye could see, and I was sure there were people beyond that as well. Bodies and banners and signs, clothes of all colors, faces of all ages. Children on their parents’ shoulders, people in wheelchairs. Muscle-shirted and journal-scribbling, picnic families and motorcycle gangsters. Holy Ghostwriter fans with bad haircuts and I’m 4 Stein 2 B Prez buttons. Proud Kansas voters for Stein, identifiable by their Proud Kansas Voters for Stein T-shirts, with Don’t mess with my vote written on the back. I couldn’t stop taking it all in.
