Green （1978）
When I said nothing, she seemed to falter. “You’re Oren, right?”
“Yes.”
“I’m Mary Jane, but I prefer MJ. Only my parents call me Mary Jane.”
I nodded, wondering why this bright pixie of a girl dressed in green denim overalls was talking to me.
She tried again. “Is it OK if we walk to class together?”
I shrugged and she fell into step beside me. I guess she was unnerved by my silence because she suddenly asked, “So, Oren, where did you grow up? I can tell you’re not from around here.”
“On a farm—my grandfather’s farm.”
“So, you were raised by your grandfather?”
Reared. I started to correct her, thought better of it. I was unsure how to answer her. I don’t feel anyone, least of all my grandfather, reared me. I feel more like I reared myself, pulling myself, like a wounded wolf in a forest, from milestone to milestone.
“Yes,” I said.
“Don’t you have parents?”
“They died.”
“Oh. I’m so sorry—”
“Don’t be. It was a long time ago.”
My parents had been driving the Buick Electra 225—Grampy Eddie’s beloved “deuce and a quarter.” They were also drunk.
The Electra collided with a tanker truck making a late delivery to Locust Hollow’s only gas station and exploded.
We’d buried what we could find of them—rags, teeth, bones, a hank of hair—and pretended they’d been whole in their caskets.
I can still see Reverend Jack in his sooty cassock standing over my parents’ grave and thundering about sin and retribution but uttering nary a word about forgiveness and redemption.
Calming down, he’d concluded the graveside service, “We therefore commit these bodies to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust…”
I’d found it deeply unfair that having been raised in ashes and dust, having returned to the ashes and dust of her childhood the summer before, when my grandmother had died, that again and for all eternity my mother would be consigned to ashes and dust. It had especially hurt because I knew how much she hated moving back to the farm.
A few years after we moved to the farm, after my brothers were born, I overheard my mother tell my father, “I hate it here. I blame Eddie.”
“Eddie?” my father repeated, sounding puzzled.
“Yes. Eddie. If he hadn’t gone and gotten his fool head shot off over a woman, we would never have moved back here.”
I’d wanted to hear the rest of their conversation—I was then of an age where I was curious about the world of adults—but being a kid, the need for sleep surpassed my curiosity and I fell asleep before I heard any more.
I no longer remember my parents’ faces or the sound of their voices. I do remember the smell of corn whiskey on their breath and, in hard times, the sugary smell of MD 20/20.
“So, you’ve no other family?” MJ asked.
I thought of my stupid, violent brothers. “No,” I said.
“I can’t imagine not having a family,” she said. “My mom is one of three children, and my dad, Octavio, is eight of nine. I have, like, forty-two cousins. I can’t imagine not having family.”
When I shrugged, she nudged my shoulder with hers. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll be your family.”
“I have Jackson,” I said.
“So now you have Jackson and me.” After a moment, she added, “You can count on me. I’m an only child. I always wanted a brother, though, and now I feel like I have one.”
She was so kind, I thought. Vivienne Leigh as Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire might have always depended on the kindness of strangers, but outside of my parents—for a time, before we moved to the farm—and Jackson, there hasn’t been anyone I can count on to show me kindness.
And certainly, there were no strangers in Locust Hollow.
“So, you and Jackson…?” MJ queried, interrupting my thoughts.
“What about us?”
She drew a breath, seeming to marshal her strength. “So, are you…like…lovers?”
I looked at her. “We are.”
“But he doesn’t go to school here?”
“No. He’s not the college type. That’s why we live off campus.”
“Are you two runaways?”
I snorted. “Eighteen-year-olds don’t run away. They write themselves new stories,” I said looking off into the distance.
Unlike back in Locust Hollow—I refuse to call it “home”; it was never my home; home is where Jackson is—MJ is interested in us, in learning about us. Instead of repeating rumors or speculating, she asks us questions. She doesn’t treat us like foul curiosities in a shop window.
When we first met, MJ seemed intrigued by the novelty of two guys so openly paired up, by our easy affection, and seemed to hold us in different esteem. But then the novelty wore off and we are just her friends now.
That’s another new thing for us here—friends.
There’s Faiz and Sue P and Pauline. Pauline is a big-boned girl, buxom, with a washtub-sized ass; she looks like every cartoon figure of a sexpot you’ve ever seen.
She’s a freshman like us, but she’s twenty-one.
“I took a gap year that turned into three,” she admits, shrugging charmingly; and Diogenes Alejandro Xenos Sanchez, whose mad romantic mother named him after a character in Harold Robbins’ The Adventurers.
He goes by DAX like the character in the book and is the only other gay guy Jackson and I have ever met.
“So is your dick head purple?” I asked him when MJ introduced us.
“Ah. You’ve read the book.”
I nodded. “I’ve read practically all of Harold Robbins.”
“What about Jacqueline Susann?” DAX asked.
“Of course. And Kyle Onstott and Lancer Horner—”
“Mandingo. Falconhurst Fancy. Master of Falconhurst—”
“The Tattooed Rood was one of my favorites.”
Jackson looked from one of us to the other, then shrugged. MJ tried not to roll her eyes but failed.
“How did you get your hands on those books?” DAX asked. “They were pretty forbidden.”
“I found my grandmother’s stash. Until then, I thought she’d only ever taken care of my grandfather and baked. Reading those books, I really wished I’d gotten to know her—to thank her, I mean. Those books taught me everything I know about sex.”
DAX stared at me for a minute as if measuring me. “What about Child of the Sun?”
“The one where the future emperor of Rome loved men? Oh, man, that book changed everything for me.”
“Me, too.” He grinned. “So you’re…”
“Yeah, we both are,” I said indicating Jackson. “We’re a couple.”
“Did your mother really name you after a character in a novel?” MJ asked, appalled.
“Oh, yeah. When I was seven, she had it legally changed—my name before that was Jorge. By the time I was ten, her hopes that I would be some kind of lady killer, like the original DAX, were dashed.” He laughed, a light tinkling sound as bright as his hair.
“You have gray hair,” Jackson said suddenly, staring at DAX’s tangle of silvery hair.
“Yes,” DAX said. He sounded amused. “All the men in my family start turning gray at puberty.”
Monday, February 20, 1978, University City—“So, Jackson is a preacher’s kid?” MJ asked, chewing her gum furiously.
I looked up from my textbook and nodded.
“Is he, like, super religious? Should I not curse in front of him?”
I laughed. MJ is pretty foul-mouthed. “No, He doesn’t really believe in his father’s notion of God and religion. Actually, he thinks he’s full of shit.”
MJ seemed scandalized. “What about you? Do you think his father is full of shit?”
“I do. I think all religious leaders are. I mean, I don’t believe in organized religion. It’s just a bunch of power-mad men exploiting people’s desires and fears. Dante reserves a special Circle in hell for them.”
“The Eighth Circle, right?”
I looked at her in surprise. How many people our age have read Dante’s Inferno? “Yes, Bolgia, two to be exact—”
“Upside down in shit and howling mad.”
I didn’t want to admit to her how pleasing I find picturing Reverend Jack and his congregation upside down in shit—shit thrown at them by Reverend Jack and his Bible—as they howl and fight amongst themselves, so instead I laughed. “Yes.”
“But that was for flatterers. How do preachers fit in?”
“They flatter the faithful by assuring them they are walking in the path of righteousness and then play on their fear that others not following the same path threatens their sanctity with eternal damnation, thus turning people against each other.”
MJ popped her gum as she does when she is in deep thought.
“OK, enough talk about religion. We have work to do.” We were supposed to be looking at the central tenets of change management theory and using them to create a strategy for a corporate merger scenario our organizational psychology professor had assigned us.
Sunday, March 19, 1978, University City—DAX, awed by Jackson’s pervasive but easy masculinity, and after declaring him the last of the great men, has assigned him the title, “his butch hotness,” which I think embarrasses Jackson.
DAX uses the term much as one would use His Majesty to refer to the King of England: “How was his butch hotness when you left for class this morning?” “Do you and his butch hotness want to go see The Rocky Horror Picture Show this weekend?”
I think this masculinity of Jackson’s, his ability to “pass,” will serve him well, as tomorrow he will start his plumbing apprenticeship.
He says the guys he’s met are “all right,” though a bit aggressive and rowdy.
If they notice his reticence to talk about women or his straightforward disinterest in female staff members of their company, they chalk it up to “shyness” and his being a preacher’s kid.
He’ll apprentice for five years; he’ll have to get 2,000 hours of on-the-job training and 224 hours of classroom instruction each of the five years. I’ll graduate before he finishes his apprenticeship, but once he’s done, he’ll have his journeyman plumber’s license.
It feels good to be able to plan a future together.
Friday, March 24, 1978, University City—I was reorganizing the director of student living’s files when Noel, our student receptionist, stuck his head in the door and said, “Here come the Ning sisters right on schedule.”