Red （1975）
Since I can remember, I’ve admired and envied my classmates, boys who were handsome, muscular, athletic, manly despite their childish ways, even as I preferred kneading dough in a warm kitchen or scrubbing copper pots until they shone to hacking through ice to capture fish comatose from the cold or wringing the necks of defenseless chickens too dumb to close their mouths during a rainstorm.
I spent all of freshman year and last term wanting to be like Rio, to look like him, to speak with his deep voice, to attract friends and teachers’ praise.
To have his confidence. He is so at ease with the knowledge that he is good-looking that he seems the slightest bit cocky, which doesn’t detract at all from his allure.
Rio. I’d thought I simply wanted to look like this handsome boy I admired, be him; I wanted to be strong and handsome and manly.
It wasn’t until I saw Rio, who was wearing a tight red polo shirt in homeroom this morning—he was in Mexico over Christmas break, so he is darker, and he seems to have gotten handsomer and more muscular while he was away—that I realized I don’t want to be him so much as I want to be with him.
It was, I realized suddenly, that simple and that profound.
I want to touch him, to feel his hands around my waist. I want to feel his warm breath on my neck.
I want to press my lips against his, to hold his hand as we walk down a deserted country road.
I want to swim naked with him up at the quarry.
With this sudden clarity, I now understand why I would rush home from school to catch the four-thirty movie whenever it was Elvis Presley Week.
I hadn’t understood why I loved watching him, with his slicked-back pompadour, his long body sheathed in tight shirts and form-fitting pants, and the sound of his voice.
Mesmerized, I’d watched his movies: Viva Las Vegas; Jailhouse Rock; King Creole; Blue Suede Shoes; Blue Hawaii.
Later, I’d been equally enthralled by David Cassidy in The Partridge Family, with his flowing protein-enriched hair and his skintight bellbottoms.
They told us about wet dreams, calling them “nocturnal emissions” in sex-ed class, but our teacher made them sound akin to wetting the bed and thus shameful for a teenager to fall prey to.
The viscous stickiness was nothing like pee and its expulsion was far more pleasurable than the simple act of pissing.
I didn’t go to school today, claiming to be sick.
I’ve spent most of the day lying in bed, with my eyes closed and breathing deeply, trying to bring on another dream. So far, no luck.
Tuesday, June 24, 1975, Locust Hollow—The evening was failing, light slipping from the sky.
I lay on my bed, my arms behind my head, and luxuriated in the feeling of having nothing to do.
School was over and I had no chores to do, which is unusual.
Reverend Jack is fond of declaring idle hands are the devil’s workshop, so my grandfather endeavors to keep these hands of mine busy.
And on the farm, something always needs doing: animals need to be fed; shit needs to be raked; something needs to be plucked out of the ground, striated with dirt and fertilizer.
Though my brothers, under Grandfather’s tutelage, only seem to engage in play and mischief and the violence of pigeon shooting.
My hands and my mind, free to wander, inevitably—for he filled every corner of my mind—drifted to images of Rio.
Rio, shirtless in boxer shorts in the locker room, a thin coat of sweat like mineral oil clinging to his shoulders and chest. It’s hot in my room at the top of the house; we don’t have air conditioning.
The two window fans in my bedroom window do nothing to cool the air because my grandfather insists on putting them in the windows backwards so they can “draw the hot air out.”
No one in Locust Hollow has air conditioning—even window units are too expensive—except Reverend Jack, who has it in his house and in his office at the church, though the church itself, where we sweat all spring and summer as if sweat could purge sin like tears can release grief, remains without air conditioning.
But no one in the congregation seems to mind because they think Reverend Jack needs to be comfortable and cool to craft his fiery inspirational sermons—grounded in fire and brimstone and hell’s heat—that guide his flock.
My hand drifted to my dick. After, I tossed the sock under my bed with the one from yesterday, and the one from the day before, and the day before that, feeling guilty as if I’d stolen something from Rio when he wasn’t looking.
I drifted into sleep, swearing I would stop doing this.
Maybe I would start joining my brothers and our grandfather in their relentless shooting of pigeons, strangling of chickens, and tossing around a football in the dust—all of which they did with seeming joy and all for reasons I simply cannot fathom.
Sunday, July 1975, Locust Hollow—Locust Hollow, where we live—if you can call my existence in this hopeless place after my parents uprooted us from Springfield, living—where the farm is above all a story of failure and loss.
Throughout the Hollow’s history, industry has swept in, like a plague of locusts, consuming its resources, then abandoning its fleshless carcass, leaving rusty bones to bleach and decay in the sun.
First there were the stone quarries dug out of the hills that surrounded the town, depleted their treasures, then abandoned them.
Then came the steel mills, now shuttered and rusting.
There’s still a blouse and shirt factory in the next town, though.
That’s where most people in Locust Hollow work.
I work three afternoons and Saturday mornings at Lewisohn’s, the lone department store in town—a family-owned emporium that sells “seconds” and last season’s fashions at discounted prices.
Even the rarefied imported chocolates are discounted, as they are typically nearing their “best by” date.
I’m spared working Sundays because Locust Hollow still has blue laws on the books so no business is open after six p.m. on Wednesdays or on Sundays, so the populace, in need of saving, can attend Wednesday evening Bible study and spend all day Sunday in church repenting their sins and praying for others too firmly in the devil’s grasp to come to church to pray for themselves.
Mostly, I work so I can save for college and get the hell out of this godforsaken town—but also to escape my grandfather’s ill will, my brothers’ savagery, and the general gloom of the farm.
It hasn’t always been like this; I haven’t always been discontented.
Everything changed the summer after my grandmother died.
I remember her as a rotund woman with graying hair.
In my mind’s eye, I see her moving about the kitchen with purpose, covered in flour and speckled with blood.
After we moved to the farm following Grandma’s death, my world grew slowly dimmer, darkening until I found myself at midnight on the crest of a great crater, stumbling from place to place, foothold to foothold.
My mother got pregnant in rapid succession and gave birth to my brothers.
There followed the smell of alcohol and shouted words.
Grief and violence blew past me like tumbleweed.
Friday, August 15, 1975, Locust Hollow—Every August, the migrant fruit workers arrive to pick pears, switching to apples in the early fall. By the end of October, they are gone.
To earn extra money, I join in the fruit picking in August, picking in the afternoons and Sundays once school starts, gathering pears and apples beside the migrant workers until the end of October.
It is a gypsy’s life, itinerant, drifting from farm to farm, state to state, following the picking season like a carelessly drawn map.
The migrant workers’ stories, when I can bridge the language barrier, are fascinating.
Theirs is a hard life, grounded in insecurity and often cruelty.
So not much different to my own. There is a kind of freedom and hope in their lives I can’t help envying.
Perhaps with a change in landscape, their situation would improve.
At any rate, within weeks, the people around them, their landscape would change; mine never does.
Every year since I turned fourteen, I’ve joined in the fruit picking.
Near the end of each summer, which is when picking season starts, hope would be conceived within me.
By the end of picking season, which coincides with the start of midterms, hope, nurtured, prayed for, would be stillborn, brown, crumbled, trampled underfoot, and left to blow in the fall winds as carelessly as the falling leaves.
This year felt different, though—I could feel it from the beginning. And I was sure this year would be different; the child, hope, would be carried to term this time and grow and thrive.
Usually, the same workers return year after year, and you begin to recognize them.
Sometimes, though, there are new faces. This year, one of the new workers, a guy a little older than I named Juan, really stands out.
He’s good-looking and broad-shouldered with an easy manner and a tumult of dark hair.
He picks more fruit than anyone. I like watching him as his muscles shift beneath his bronze skin with his quick, efficient movements.
I was standing near the converted school bus that sells cuchifritos, a variety of Puerto Rican foods that are usually pork based and fried.
The bus is only open during picking season and is quite popular with the migrant workers.
They serve blood sausage, fried potato balls stuffed with meat, fried pork skin, and plantains.
They sell juices that seem exotic to me: passionfruit, pineapple, coconut.