Pimpgnosis

“I am not sure that it is possible for anyone brought up in the East to appreciate entire what New York, the idea of New York, means to those of us who came out of the West and the South.  To an Eastern child, particularly a child who has always had an uncle on Wall Street and who has spent several hundred Saturdays first at F.A. O. Schwarz and being fitted for shoes at Best’s and then waiting under the Biltmore clock and dancing to Lester Lanin, New York is a just a city, albeit the city, a plausible place for people to live.  But to those of us who came from places where no one had heard of Lester Lanin and Grand Central Station was a Saturday radio program, where Wall Street and Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue were not places at all but abstractions (“Money,” and “High Fashion,” and “The Hucksters”), New York was no mere city.  It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself.  To think of “living” there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane; one does not “live” at Xanadu.”

I have never wanted to live in Los Angeles.  Not Hollywood, nor Westwood.  Not Malibu, Rancho Palos Verdes, Silver Lake, nor Santa Monica.  Nor, and this most especially, in the further reaches of the urban metastasis that laps at the oak-studded hillsides of Simi Valley, the poppy carpeted bluffs above Laguna Niguel, the glittering sands of Palm Springs, the “American Riviera” of Santa Barbara.

In this want of desire, I am, it would appear, a freak.  I am an insufficiently socialized child of the 20th century. 

There are, generally speaking, two attitudes towards LA: covetousness, and the fascination of the abomination, often mixed in various proportions according to the cocktail fashions of the day.  In the former category fall every sitcom and reality show you’ve ever seen – from “The Brady Bunch” to “The Real Housewives of Orange County.”  It is a tangy aperitif, usually brightly colored and packed full of empty calories, meant to whet the consumptive appetite for everything that constitutes the good life of America, as spun through the blender of the popular culture mix-master of contemporary television and movies.  In the second category fall the disaster movies and horror flicks, the “breaking story!”-segments on the news regarding O.J. Simpson, Michael Jackson, Amber Alerts, and cultists.  It is the all-too-familiar Los Angeles of the noirs, from Chinatown and LA Confidential to Salton Sea and the Big Lebowski, Chandler and Cain.  It is the LA of resentment, of the kind of envy that leads to violence and spiritual degradation. 

I don’t know that LA.  Or, more precisely, I know it only in fantasy.  My LA, the LA that I know from the several hundred Saturdays, first at the Marie Callender’s in Monrovia and then waiting at the La Brea Tar Pits before walking (!) up to Fairfax for lunch, is someplace else.  It is not an Estoril.  It is not a Utopia.  It is not a VH1 special. 

The LA I know consists of sitting on a felt-covered folding chair, under a great canvas tent in the middle of a near-treeless expanse of the southwestern corner of Live Oak Memorial Park in Monrovia.  Listening to my grandmother’s ex-sister-in-law eulogize her dead brother when it’s 95 degrees, accompanied by a carefully chosen selection of old-time gospel tunes. 

Listening to a Four Square Gospel lay leader refer to the dear departed as “Dude” has got to be the weirdest thing that’s happened to me recently.

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How I discovered what it means to be a member of the cadet branch.

My father and I arrived at the church approximately 45 minutes in advance of the service.  Which is to say, about a half-hour early.  Which is to say, with precisely nothing to do, since we couldn’t really be of much assistance at that point in the proceedings. 

Dad sidled down a hallway and began chatting with the bride’s paternal grandparents, chatting being his second-favorite way of killing time (political organizing being the first).  I proceeded to take the tour, this being my second-favored method, absent a book.  Unfortunately for me, there were no docents to haze.

What I discovered on my little architectural tour reminded me of two stories, plus one point of fact (facts being, of course, merely notionally privileged pieces of narratives). 

First the fact: so far as I know there is only one member of my family who has ever made it into the Who’s Who (the “real” Who’s Who, I mean.  Not the one for high school students that you have to pay to get into): namely a federal circuit court judge.  As a nugget of information, this fact doesn’t admit of much, of course.  One might link this fact to any number of potential stories: the general under-achievingness of the rest of the family, who never made it on to the national radar screen.  The probable insufficiency as marker of achievement of any publication that routinely accepts self-nominations accompanied by a subscription fee.  Or to the laziness of the narrator, who hasn’t actually looked through said publication in at least a decade, during which time any number of people might have been added to the list – including (just as a for instance), the current incumbent of the executive secretaryship of one of the top 5 largest labor councils in the country.  In any case, there is the fact, lying like a penny in the road, just waiting for some lucky person to come along, pick it up, give it a shine, and put it into circulation.

Some narratives, of course, are rather old pieces of copper, still knocking about.  Like the story that gets told every effing reunion, generally in response to a question from a younger cousin, as to whether or not everyone there constitutes “the whole family.”   If the young cousin is observant, some variant of this question may arise after a tour of the town’s “founder’s cemetery,” or after the ritual recitation of the genealogy.  In both cases there are glaring instances of whole swathes of people unaccounted for among those present; branches off the family tree that don’t appear to lead anywhere, big plots in the graveyard where lie plenty of planted people with my last name, people who don’t appear in the official lists of revered ancestors.  If, as is more often the case, the young cousin is simply rude, the question may simply be in reference to the small(ish) number of attendees at the annual potluck.  Either way, the same response is given to the call: that, yes, there are other, more distant cousins living nearby.  But either they have never been invited or (depending on who’s telling the story) choose not to come to the reunion.

Why?  Because, way back in about 1890, the patriarch of the clan (a man with the fantabulous name of Edmund Napoleon) decided to strike out on his own in business.  He had 7 strapping sons (I’m descended from #4) who could easily lend a hand putting together a nice operation assembling reapers and other such farm equipment.  Mechanized agricultural implements to make more efficient the process of extracting produce from a soil so recently used solely to grow cotton.  So the revered patriarch took out a loan from the bank to finance his operation.  This was not so difficult; the economy was expanding, he had inherited a good chunk of land from his own father [19] and, lucky for him, he happened to be related to the family that owned the bank. 

Things went swimmingly for a short while – just how long is never really made clear no matter who’s telling the story.  The important point is that the crash of ’92 happened, and the cousins that held the note called the loan. 

In some versions of the telling, they didn’t just repossess the factory.  They sent their boys in to smash all the machinery as well, saying “it’s just business, E.N.  Just business.”

Bob Faulkner once remarked that in the South it ain’t just that the past is important; hell, in the South, the past ain’t even past.  And even though this incident took place 117 years ago, (a) we still tell it, and (b) they’ve never come to the reunion. 

A rather odd piece of copper, indeed.  Sometimes accompanied with one of the stencils used to identify the crates in which the reapers and seed distributors were packed, or full-color prints of the adverts that illustrated the sides of the produce boxes (Coweta Prize Winners!) that E.N. and sons sold to the Atlanta market.

Other narratives are of rather more recent mint.  Approximately 4 years ago, da partner flew to Atlanta for a consulting gig.  Actually the project was in Pritchard, Alabama (outside of Mobile), which meant they had to drive the length of I-85.  Which meant they had to drive through Newnan, occasioning my partner to say “oh, my in-laws live here.” [20]

“That’s interesting.  What are your in-laws named?”

My partner, not suspecting, told them.  At which point a hush fell over the car.

“Really?  Would those be the same people that own 90% of the developable land in the county?”

“No.  But I now have a gold ticket to teasing the shit out of my labor-organizer father-in-law for the rest of his days.”

For whatever reason, that particular story that came to mind as I gazed up at the utterly standard stained-glass windows[21] of Newnan First Methodist. 

A goodly portion of the names gracing the dedicatory panels of those windows happen to be the same as my own. 

Such a co-inky-dink tends to produce a kind of vertigo. 

I am used to attending family reunions and hearing stories about births and deaths, marriages and migrations, the bad business dealings and the means by which one recovers from them. 

I am not used to being present in that particular church.  Our family reunions occur in the basement of Moreland Methodist, in the little country village some 10 miles south of Newnan. 

I am certainly not used to reflecting upon the names or history of those whose births and deaths we do not record, whose marries we do not recognize, about whose migrations we simply do not care.  About the success of whose business dealings we most assuredly do not care.  Even when we tell stories about those business dealings year after year, we the outcome of those business dealings is simply not part of the story.  We care about the process, you see.  It’s a matter of character.

Or something.  Whatever.  In any case, I am not used, in the least bit, to facing the incontrovertible evidence of the outcomes of those business dealings.  Outcomes that include endowing the Christian Education chapel, donating the money necessary to build a wing of the local old-folks home, aand having the central windows above the front entrance of the church on the square bear one’s name.

Thankfully or no, I had precious little time to reflect upon the matter at that time, as along about then, the ceremony started.

As the readers of this blog may know, we tend to take wedding seriously — at least in my dad’s family, that is.  On Mom’s side the have a decided tendency toward Tahoe and Universal Life ministers.  The Southerners, by contrast, prefer upper-middle church liturgy, with floral arrangements, catered receptions, and tasteful musical accompaniment.

This was that.  Only with a mid-Georgia twist. 

Some cousins do this whole package well.  I, for instance, like to think that I matched my cousin John in these matters.  He and his wife had their ceremony at First Prez of Pensacola, officiated by a (gasp!) woman minister, plus a rehearsal dinner at the yacht club, and a reception at an old tobacco factory – at which his father drank scotch out of an Acqua Panna bottle, because otherwise there was only serving beer and wine. 

Other cousins do this less well.  My cousin Rivers got married in Menominee, Wisconsin, at a ceremony that involved the exchange of purity rings, a lengthy homily by the minister detailing in disturbingly specific detail what precisely a purity ring symbolizes, the singing of such putting-the-fun-in-fundamentalism classics as “Trust and Obey,”[22] and a cake-and-punch reception, the highlight of which involved watching my cousin and his new bride literally peel out of the parking lot in their new SUV.  Presumably to get on with the business of smashing their purity rings.

This wedding lay somewhere in between.  On the one hand, it was officiated by the bride’s grandfather, otherwise known as Big Art.[23]  Uncle Art has a rich baritone that is perfectly suited for filling a large edifice with the ringing tones of the Methodist Book of Worship.  Moreover, the musical selection included an a capella rendition of “The Prayer” by two of the New York cousins.

My cousin Luke sounds astonishingly like Andrea Bocelli.  Thankfully, his sister Anna has a far lovelier voice than Celine Dion.[24] 

On the other hand, the ceremony involved a quite overt point of blasphemy that is too technical to go into here.[25] 

Otherwise, everything went off without a hitch. 

On the way out, we stopped to chat briefly with the wedding planner and her husband, who were seated at the back of the church:

Husband: “So, how are ya’ll connected to these folks?”

Pater: “Oh, I’m the bride’s great-uncle.  We’re Camps.”

Husband: “Really?  Any relation to Judge Jack?”

Pater: “Sure!  We claim kin to all the horse thieves and gamblers in this county.”

Husband: “Sweetie, what did he just sell his 2000 acres for?”

Wedding Planner: “Eighteen million.”

Moi: “Really?  Whenabouts was this?”

Husband: “Oh, about a year ago.”

Moi: “Hunh.  Good for him.  He got out at the top of the market then.”

There being really rather little to say at this point, we all adjourned to the reception. 

[19] The thoughtful reader should at this point note a rather glaring lacunum in the narrative. 

[20] This was not, strictly speaking, true.  However, it is also irrelevant to the thread of the narrative.

[21] Even if you are not Methodist, you have surely seen these windows.  They came out of a catalogue from the Tiffany & Co. factory in approximately 1926, and a substantial proportion of the mainline Protestant churches of that era ordered a set.  For that matter, even if you are not Protestant, but simply attended my wedding, you saw these windows.  Of course, the church in which da partner and I were married had a substantially more expensive version than what was on offer at Newnan First Methodist.

[22] Pay no attention to the fact that this hymn appears in the United Methodist Hymnal.  This is an inconvenient piece of inconsistency.

[23] Uncle Art once declined to sign an open letter from Methodist ministers proclaiming that Christian brotherhood included people of all races, both black and white.  For this sin of omission he was rewarded by not having his house fired upon, nor was his family physically assaulted in the street, nor did he lose his job and have to leave the state of Mississippi.  Unlike 22 of his fellow pastors in that conference.   He is, in other words, one on whom the moral lesson of the previous installment in this series would be utterly lost.

[24] Yes all 7 children have Biblical names.  Six of them come from the New Testament.

[25] The bride and groom took the Eucharist as part of their marriage.  As noted quite explicitly in the Methodist Hymnal, if this is to be done, (a) all of those present must be invited to partake (that’s why we call it communion, for pity’s sake), and (b) the marriage is ritually part of the eucharist, not the other way around.  Jesus is the reason for the season, not to put too fine a fucking point on this particular matter of doctrine.  Neither was true in this particular case.  I believe that I was the only person to take note of this problem.

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A story my father never told me ‘til today. 

My father and I stayed at the Comfort Inn.  When we awoke the next morning we found ourselves with very little to do, as the ceremony wasn’t until 5 p.m.[14]  I decided to try and find a decent paper, at least so that I might better pass the time hanging out in the hotel’s breakfast bar.

This was a mistake.  Not a serious mistake, but a mistake nonetheless.  It turns out that while it is possible to obtain a decent paper in Newnan Georgia, doing so requires either the use of the car or the kind of suburban hiking that involves a non-trivial risk to life and limb.  Such as one might incur while walking, for lack of a sidewalk, in the drainage verge of a state highway.   Thankfully I was wearing boots, and so protected against chiggers, poison ivy, and copperheads.

I’m kidding about the copperheads.  I didn’t see any snakes. 

I’m not kidding about the chiggers or the poison ivy.

Despite the wildlife, I was able to procure a New York Times.  On the first day.  On the second day – Sunday – I had rather less luck.  Not that anyone at either RaceTrack or Barnes&Noble could explain to me why, precisely, I might find it difficult to procure a Times on a Sunday morning in a small town in Georgia. 

Perhaps they thought I was just another carpet-bagging dipshit, unsatisfied with the Journal-Constitution. [15]

Or perhaps they were ignorant crackers.  Who wouldn’t know the Sabbath if it came up and walloped them upside the head with a “no booze on the Lord’s Day you sinning son of a bitch!” Carrie Nation-type admonition.  Which is to say, maybe the Times simply doesn’t deliver outside the Atlanta metro on Sundays. 

It must have been the attempt at walking in a pedestrian-hostile environment that made me cranky.  Perhaps if I had done what I was supposed to do – sit in the hotel lobby and fatten myself on Belgian waffles spread with margarine and maple-flavored, caramel-colored corn syrup, washed down with reconstituted orange juice and the kind of coffee described by Orwell in 1984, all while listening to Matt Lauer or Glenn Beck or whoever tell me what I’m supposed to think about the news of the day – I would have been contentedly uncritical. 

But I digress. 

My father and I finished our Times and found ourselves with rather little to do.  I suggested we try to find decent coffee.  My father proposed that we drive towards the interstate and stake out a Starbucks.  I demurred, and (this being one of the reasons I had decided to DD) pointed the car instead towards downtown, to search out an independent establishment. 

We found one, on the courthouse square, in a space that clearly used to be a dry-goods store[16].  They had a long, low, darkly varnished oak counter, graceful high ceilings, and the kind of distressed brick walls that provide a suitable backdrop for displaying a collection of watercolors drawn from nature.  For sale, of course, the proceeds to benefit some local committee or other.  Perhaps the Garden Club, now that I think of it. 

We sat against the plate-glass window, my father and I, sipping our green-tea frappes and looking out at the statue on the courthouse steps, commemorating the fallen Confederate heros. 

And my father told me the story of how he went to a Klan rally, once, in graduate school.  As a sociological experiment.  An exercise in ethnographic participant-observation, if you will. 

It was not a story I had heard before. 

I thought I had heard all of my father’s stories.

How the rally was advertised in the paper (this being 1967, in North Carolina), which was how he found out about it in the first place.  How it was advertised as a family event and, yes, attendees were encouraged to bring their wives and children.  How my father invited all the other graduate students, some of whom even decided this might be a good idea. 

But one of whom – an Episcopal priest – pulled him aside and told him that it would be a very bad idea.  Not for any deep theoretical or even theological reasons, mind you.  Not because to participate in rituals of evil is, in a very basic sense, to reproduce evil.  Rather because he suspected that my father and his buddies quite literally had no idea what they were in for. 

My father was set on this little adventure.  So the priest proceeded to give him some advice; namely that if he wanted to leave, he should say so.  That the Klan will always let you leave a rally if you ask.[17] 

The merry band of graduate students took two cars.  My father drove a ’55 Chevy, with three passengers.  Another couple took their VW bug. 

This was a mistake.  A rather serious mistake, it turns out, compounded by the fact that the husband sported a full, untrimmed beard and the wife wore flip-flops. 

As my father and his five friends walked into the rally, the security detail began methodically to thwack their long flashlights into their palms.  By the sound of the metal against flesh, so my father reports, one could tell they were weighted with lead. 

They then threaded their way into the crowd towards the front of the stage.  Along about this time, they evidently made their second mistake.  They forgot to clap. 

This was the most serious mistake of all.  That’s when the beating started. 

In his attempts to make it back to the entrance – blocked by a human wall of security guards – my father got separated from his friends.  However, he remembered the priest’s advice.  And the second he said the magic words “I want to leave,” the wall opened (in his words, “the seas parted”) and he was allowed to walk through, unmolested, to safety. 

My father went straight to a state trooper – parked in his car near the entrance so as to better “secure peace and order,” presumably – to report that his friends were being beaten inside the rally.  The trooper did not even acknowledge my father’s presence in this world, much less his complaint.  It was the reporter from the Daily Tar Heel who, overhearing my father’s pleadings and calling for his fellow photographer, yelled something like “Come quick!  Someone’s being beaten inside!”  This caused a change of heart in the men guarding the gate, who let the hippies on through.

Like all family stories, this one comes with a lesson: when at a Klan rally, clap as loudly as you can. 

This is not the real lesson, of course. 

The real lesson remained unspoken, and did not hit me until later.  It is the kind of lesson that, to the degree that it can be taught at all, must be taught sotto voce.  Such as an Episcopal priest might adopt when pulling aside a fellow Christian for pastoral counseling before our Christian friend goes out to witness some of the darkest rituals in the contemporary repertoire of evil.  Sotto voce, because to articulate the meaning bald-facedly would be to put the wrong spin on the moral, would be to focus on a few not quite entirely extraneous aspects: “the Klan will always let you leave if you ask,” “when at a Klan rally, clap as loudly as you can” – these fly rather far from the mark, though they are neither untrue nor, for that matter, unhelpful. 

In fact, even to give such advice in so many words is to render those words implausibly ridiculous.  Who among us, in this day and age, expect to find ourselves at a Klan rally?  Speaking personally and just for myself: if I have any say in the matter at all, I do not intend ever to be in the kind of situation where such advice may be helpful. 

That I cannot imagine being, willfully, in the kind of situation where such advice would be useful should connote, more than anything else, the degree to which the lesson of this particular story is troubling.  It should connote, in other words, not the degree to which this advice is “useful,” but rather the degree to which this advice is not something I am interested in hearing.

In fact, and more troublingly, this lesson may not admit of learning expect through experience.  My father was told what to expect – by a man of God, no less – and still he went into the mouth of the beast.

I was in that kind of situation too, once.  For four years running. 

The lesson that I learned from those four years – the lesson which my father did not try to articulate to me until I myself had escaped the net of evil – was what I took away from my time in Texas.  When I say I’m not sorry I lived there but I thank God every day that He let me leave, people always look at me with a cocked eye.  Because it sounds ridiculous to attempt to say it more precisely: that Texas is designed, with care and exactitude, for people like me.  And that it was in rejecting that apparatus of privilege that I kept (for now at least) possession of my soul.  It doesn’t quite make sense when I try to explain that, for instance, sure Texas is “homophobic,” but that’s not really the point.  It’s the racial, gender, and class privileges that are so poisonous.  That the people with whom I dealt on a day-to-day basis did not care, really did not care, that I slept with a man.  And that while that was nice and all, it didn’t make up for everything else.  It didn’t make up for the fact that living there involved substantial privileges, privileges that I rejected, specifically and with full knowledge of the consequences: resigning a tenure-track position at a Research I university, abandoning mineral rights to a property at ground zero of a natural gas boom, walking away from an easy avenue into a political career, declining a potential offer of membership at a country club, resigning the chairship of the Christian education committee at my church.  All of these privileges, and more[18], were offered to me.  Privileges for which I had merely to clap my hands and they would appear, like dishes on a silver platter. 

So. 

The lesson, ladies and gentlemen, is this.  If you ever find yourself at a Klan rally, you have two options: start clapping, or leave.  Because there is only one way in which Klan rallies ever end.  And either you participate in that ending, or you reject it.  If you elect to clap, start clapping like there is no fucking tomorrow, because they’re watching.  And if you’re not clapping, there are always the flashlights weighted with lead.  If you elect to leave, don’t expect to do it by the back door.  Because if you are there of your own volition, then you came by the front door.  Which means you leave by the front door.  And that means that you have to own, publicly, the fact that you want to leave.  They’ll let you – you – leave.  Maybe not your friends, but you.  But you have to ask.  You have to tell the man, to his face, “I want to leave.”

As goes without saying, this advice does not apply to everyone.  Sorry.

What does one do, upon the receipt of such advice? 

My father and I got up to leave the coffeehouse, to go attend my cousin’s wedding at the First Methodist Church of Newnan. 

Before we did so, he remarked upon how much he liked the art.  In particular, he drew my attention to one piece that portrayed a woman, seated upon the ground, facing away from the viewer and looking back towards a gate that leads to a path overgrown with wisteria.  I agreed that it was the best of the bunch, noting that it was thematically similar to a piece by an artist whose name escaped me at the moment, of a woman in a similar position, on a sloped field of ripe wheat, and at the top of a hill in the background there was a weatherbeaten house.

Without missing a beat, my father said “Wyeth.  You’re thinking of Andrew Wyeth.  And you’re right, this is the Southern version of that.”[19]

My father plays a good game as redneck labor thug, but every so often the cultural capital sneaks out before he can hide it.

[14] In the immortal words of the bride’s mother: why on earth didn’t they move it up an hour?  They then could have made it a nuts and mints reception.

[15] Random “fun fact”: The Uncle Remus stories were first serialized by a white reporter in one of the predecessor papers to the AJC.

[16] Espresso Lane (http://www.espressolanenewnan.com/home.html).  Voted by the readers of Lifestyles Magazine to be the best coffee in the Southern Arc.  Wondering what the Southern Arc is?  That would be Carroll, Douglas, Coweta, Fayette, Clayton, and Henry counties.  Or in other words, the southern exurban ring of Atlanta.  The fact that my instincts led me straight to this place says, I think, something about the mystical workings of cultural capital. 

[17] By “you,” of course, he evidently referred only to whites, such as my father.  I don’t know if it was this same conversation, or some other, that my father mentioned to the priest that he had one great-grandmother of uncertain racial heritage.  The priest stated in reply that if he thought he had one single drop of black blood running through his veins, he would eat his Colt. 

[18] This “and more” might best be summed up by the phrase “Don’t leave.  We’ll find you a new friend!”

[19] Christina’s World: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christina’s_World.

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Pulled-Pork Sandwiches and Seven-Point Pitch

At any family function, major or minor, we play Setback.  Also known as Pitch.  Some play a 5-point game (high, low, jack, joker and game, winner is first to 11 points).  Others, such as my father and I, play a 7-point game (the above-mentioned plus an additional jack and joker, with the winning score set at 25).  The game can be enjoyed by 2, 3, or 4 players; a 4-player game goes most quickly, while a 2-player game (which involves the use of a dummy third hand) can drag somewhat. 

We play setback at family reunions, and tell stories while we deal.  We play it at funerals, to keep our hands busy while we remember the dead.  We play it between-times, when we visit some far-flung wing of the cousinage, as a mechanism to remind ourselves of what we have in common.  And we most certainly play it at weddings, the better to inculcate the assembled into the central cultural referents of the family. 

That first night, we played setback with my New York cousins (who were used to the 5-point game) as well as with my two Atlanta cousins. 

It was my first time meeting many of those present.  Including the groom, with whom I shook hands briefly before he jetted out for his bachelor party.  Which consisted, by report, of going to see the new Star Trek.  I had only the vaguest of impressions of the fellow.  They consisted largely of noticing the disjunct between his short stature (5’ 6”?) and his, frankly, jacked-out neck and chest.  The boy – and I use the phrase with all intent, as he only just this May graduated from college – is clearly a devotee of body-building. 

But it was also my first time meeting many of these New York and Atlanta cousins.  You discover things about people when you play setback with them.  You discover whether or not they are amenable to playing cards at all; not everyone is.  My mother, for instance, has declined to play setback on every occasion she has been asked.  You discover what style of bidding they prefer.  My father plays a somewhat more aggressive game than I do: he’ll bid three even on a singleton ace, and has been known to bid four on less than that in a tight game.  You discover just how attentive someone is to cards laid and cards held; as there are only six in a hand the play goes pretty quick and its generally relatively straightforward to know who might be holding when you’re trying to decide whether or not to risk playing a vulnerable point.  My cousin Mary talks in a ditzy manner but is sharp as a tack; we won as partners in 9 hands, a short game.  My cousin Boone – quite a bit younger and so less experienced, but also at 15 perhaps somewhat hormonally driven – plays silently and recklessly.  He partnered with my dad in a separate foursome, and they lost. 

You also discover who is willing to swear.  As did one of my younger New York cousins, Elizabeth.  In code, to be sure: “WTF.”  Answered with the mock threat from Mom to tell Dad, back in Binghamton. 

And you discover who drinks.  For instance, one of the swearer’s two elder sisters (Gewurztraminer), as well as one of my country cousins, to wit the bride’s sister, the matron of honor (Pinot Grigio). 

This was all new to me.  The only place and time at family gatherings in which I generally feel safe to swear (or drink) is at my Uncle Tom’s place on the river.  That my cousin Sara[6] felt free to offer wine to others, in her own mother’s house, caused me to raise my eyebrow.  I did not, however, partake.  I chose for at least two reasons to be the DD that weekend.  That my cousin Elizabeth felt free to swear, even in code, shocked me – I who am known widely in the family as that Yankee child so ill-bred at the age of 7 to exclaim at one family dinner (at Uncle Tom’s place, on the river), “Wow.  That is some fuckin’ good chicken.”

This was all new to me in part because I had never met many of these New York kin, my cousin Mary’s children.  It is sometimes easy for me to focus on the fact that my father was the first to leave the South, but worth remembering that Mary was the second to do so.  I’ve never heard all the details: I know only that she did so after a first, failed, marriage to a man who beat her on their honeymoon.  She called her brother, Arthur (Little Art), and he drove all night from Atlanta to Brunswick, Georgia – 5 hours on lonely roads if you’re white and a preacher’s son and so not afraid of being hassled for speeding by the troopers – loaded her into his daddy’s Cadillac[7] and took her back to Dalton (6 hours) where she filed immediately for an annulment.  Sometime thereafter she married a good man, converted to Catholicism, moved to New York, and raised seven smart good-looking kids. 

Seven children.  The mind boggles.  The woman spent 63 months of her life – 5 years, in other words – pregnant.  And every single one of them a delight to know. 

I had also never really met my Atlanta cousins, at least when they were of an age when they might remember it.  This here is a more delicate matter.  The last time I had seen the elder brother (Boone), he was possibly a year old and his parents were still married and still in the ministry.  They lived in a big old Craftsman in Edgewood on a hill where, my cousin Art assured me, the artists who painted the Cyclorama had stood while sketching out the Battle of Atlanta. 

That the Cyclorama was painted by a dozen Germans, working in a studio in Milwaukee, from drawings they made in 1885, was a set of details that either escaped by 12-year-old imagination or which my cousin Art declined to share with me.  Perhaps I was too focused on the octagonal hand-wound pocket-watch [8] handed down from an ancestor of Art’s then-wife, Melissa.[9]

But there they all were: six-sevenths of the New York brood, both of the Atlanta cousins (Boone and Molly-Emma[10]), the bride’s two sisters, and – this an absolutely standard family touch – two unrelated friends of the bride’s younger sister, staying over and gamely participating in the fun.  Playing setback with their crazy California uncle Bill and eating pulled-pork sandwiches on enriched-white bread burger buns until stuffed like ticks.

The bride’s father, you see, runs a side-business smoking pork butts. 

There was a time, maybe when I lived in Boston, when I would have laughed at the conjunction of those last three words.  But that was before Chris – the bride’s father – showed his true colors.  He was one of the few people to call me when I was in the hospital, the first time, with a catastrophic subcutaneous staph infection in my ankle.[11]  Bless his heart, he spent twenty minutes describing his latest purchase: a metal smoker made out of HVAC sheeting, big enough to smoke a whole pig.  Not only that, he described in precise terms what happens when you smoke a whole pig: how the skin turns first yellow, then pink, before it darkens to deeper shades of red, violet, and black.  How the eyes burst and the flesh begins to swell and tighten.  How any hair that hasn’t first been shaved chars, straightening out before falling off, leaving minute pin-prick holes.  How at last the carcass begins to sweat fat drops of melted grease that sizzle and smoke on the super-heated reflective metal paneling, this being the point at which you can be assured that it is, for all intents and purposes, done.

The only way I managed to get the poor man to shut up about his smoked pork butts was to point out that the process he was describing in such colorful detail was remarkably similar to what was then happening to my right leg.

I ate three pulled-pork sandwiches that first night.  With the hot BBQ sauce. 

That was some fuckin’ good pork. 

I did not try the cole slaw, however.  As much as my cousin Mary gushed about how simply delicious it was, I declined to sully the purity of my pulled-pork extravaganza with anything approaching the healthfulness of a chopped cruciferous vegetable.  Even if it were drowned in watery mayonnaise.

No one, upon gentle questioning by my father, could tell us much about the groom.  Other than that he and my cousin had met at Georgia College, known prior to 1967 as Georgia State College for Women.[12]  And that he intends as a career to manage his father’s properties: 125 rental apartments (everyone was quite precise about this number) in Milledgeville. 

My father did put one direct query to the bride: he asked my cousin whether she had yet been camping in the rain with her intended.  This is a relic of my grandmother’s general marital advice to all of her children.  It being her view that until you have done so, you do not know a true test of adversity.  It followed that you therefore did not know whether you love each other enough to be on speaking terms the morning after such a trial.[13]  My cousin’s reply?

Her fiancé does not camp.  His neck is too stiff from body-building to admit of sleeping on the ground.

When we left my cousin Julie’s house that night, I noticed there were no fireflies.  I remember a time when there used to be fireflies in the summertime in Georgia. 

[6] Named for her great-great-grandmother, the skipped generation in the train of Julias.

[7] What is a Methodist preacher doing driving a Cadillac, you might ask?  A good question, my friend.  A good question.

[8] In full disclosure, I was mentally comparing it to the one my mother’s mother had given me for my 11th birthday.  It was her own father’s pocketwatch, and while perhaps not as aesthetically daring in design – it is a plain orb, with the plainest of lettering, the only fancy touch being the initials FAJ engraved on the reverse – it is heavier and more substantial.  A banker’s watch.  It is also intact and still in good working order; Little Art carelessly cracked the case of his wife’s heirloom when he tried to open it for winding. 

[9] The men in my family do not have good luck with wives named Melissa.  This particular one left her husband for another woman.  She is now, by report, doing quite well as a therapist and sometime lecturer in psychology at Emory.  And back to dating men. 

[10] As a discerning reader might guess from the names of her children, Little Art’s ex-wife is not from Georgia.  Rather she is from Tennessee. 

[11] The true measure of friendship lies is whether you visit someone in the hospital.  I will owe a debt to the end of my days to the website editor for his service in this regard.  He spent a cheering hour with me at UCD Med Center the second time I succumbed to the staph; cheering me not least with jokes about how best to enjoy the meds I was prescribed.

[12] Among its alumnae are Flannery O’Connor and my grandmother. 

[13] It only occurs to me now that this is somewhat curious advice to be given by a Sunday school teacher and sometime missionary.

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The Preamble

So I went to Georgia for a cousin’s wedding recently.  Technically, it was my first cousin once removed, because I was taught over many years to remember such distinctions.*

It was the first time since leaving Texas that I had been back to the Confederacy.  Not, I must admit, the first time I had been south of the Mason-Dixon.  Maryland and DC were, after all, enslaved back in the day, and I was just there this past November for a conference.  However, they were also union territory.  Not that the Federal Army allowed any Marylanders on the front lines during the Civil War, mind you: they were too worried that the good recruits of the Old Line State would turn their guns around and start firing on the men in blue.  So they were kept safely in the back along with the boys and the baggage.

But this is a distinction that is not, perhaps, really worth remembering in this day and age of Michael Steele.

Where was I?

Oh, right.  Georgia.

It is hard to wrap my mind around Georgia, even now, especially now.  Texas is… easier in some respects to understand.  Easier to disparage, certainly — and certainly simpler to typecast.  It is ugly, for one thing.  And ugliness is always easy to box up and put away, set aside in a category all its own.  It is also Baptist, where Georgia was once the first overseas missionary field for the Wesley brothers.  In both respects (ugliness and Baptistry), one — that vague but ever-present “one” — is moved to say: “No.  I reject you.  You’re different from the others.  You’re not beautiful and never were.  You’re a heretic and always will be.  You’re dry and sterile and in no wise like my green and Methodist Georgia.”

Lies, all lies. 

Not because Texas isn’t ugly; it is the ugliest, richest, belle at the whole damn ball.  And not because Baptists probably now outnumber Methodists in Georgia – hell, they may have always done so, but I simply haven’t the heart to check.  It is a lie because both states are entirely, utterly Southern.  Texas is simply at one end of a spectrum along which one will surely find Georgia, but likely not find such places California.  Or Minnesota.  Or Massachusetts.   Despite all that foetid horseshit peddled at the Alamo, or in Austin at SXSW, Texas had 250,000 slaves in bondage until 6/15/1865, the day General Gordon Granger landed in Galveston and reminded everyone that the Emancipation Proclamation had been passed two years earlier.  It is today still the site of “Southern” Methodist University.  So just as sure as bourbon is brown, and cotton white, and clay red in the Empire State of the South, Texas is deeply, indelibly Southern.  To reject Texas for any real reason, for any reason related to its cultural core is, necessarily, to reject Georgia also. 

So surely having lived there — Texas, I mean — I am not so easily seduced by Georgia’s charms, right?

This is not, precisely speaking, a lie.  But it is far, far from true. 

Despite that troubling “my” three paragraphs above, I never was seduced by Georgia.   Flirted with, certainly, but not seduced by.  Gone there the first Saturday in August most every summer of my life, to sit with the bawd in her own house and pass the time of day over a glass of sweet tea and a pineapple sandwich.  But never known her on more intimate terms, no. 

Just as a “for instance,” I never applied to Emory or to Georgia Tech.  Not for undergrad, not for my PhD, and not for a job.  The closest I ever really came was William and Mary.

And isn’t that a thought.  Me and all those Virginia debutantes fighting over the navy boys.  I wouldn’t have lasted one bloody second at that blasted institution.

My grandfather never understood why I didn’t apply to Emory.  I never explained it to him when he was alive, and I’m not sure I could now.

Da spouse, perhaps, understands better than I why I didn’t even think twice about the two great Atlanta schools (either of which would have been appropriate, given the family ties[2]).  But that’s leaving aside the rather pedestrian points that, at least at any of the times that I would have considered them, they weren’t actually hiring in my sub-field, neither is known as center for the study of social movements and politics, and my mother would have slapped me silly before she’d a let me turn down Stanford. 

The real reason I didn’t apply to Emory (at least) is that I’d probably still be there now.  And maybe I knew that, even at the tender age of 17.  Knew that if I’d gone there, I’d be just another Southern faggot, drunk on moonlight and magnolia, thinking the corner of Piedmont and 10th really was something other than the best paste jewel mock-up of urban life on the market.  Thinking that drinking a latte at Outwrite while writing an essay critiquing C. Vann Woodward’s cynical vision of the New South meant that I had died and gone to heaven.

Thinking, in other words, that I was the socialite, and not the chambermaid, in the Maupassant story.

All of this, believe it or not, on my mind as I stepped off the plane with my father at Hartsfield.  It was on my mind when we picked up our rented PT Cruiser and got on I-85 at Camp Creek Parkway.[3]  It was on my mind when we drove the winding exurban byways of Coweta County, along roads with names like “Sargent” and “Welcome” and “Mt. Carmel,” past three-quarter-acre farmettes with catfish ponds and lovingly clipped lawns and every so often a pony, but nary a vegetable patch to be seen.  And it was certainly on my mind as rolled up at my cousin Julie’s[4] house, fetchingly situated on a hill overlooking what most assuredly was once a cotton field,[5] the house to which all the assembled had repaired after the rehearsal dinner. 

[1] For those of you who are wondering, this means that her mother is my first cousin.  Had I children, they would be second cousins to the bride.

[2] One great-grandfather graduated from, and then later taught at, Georgia Tech.  One of his great-grandchildren, which is to say one of my second cousins, also went there.  My grandfather had his M.D. from Emory.  Another great-grandfather (Preacher Pa), went to Emory when it was still out in the country and known as Oxford College.  In retirement he returned to serve there as chaplain.  By then it was known as Little Emory, the two-year school to which they send you to when you can’t get into Big Emory.   Such as happened in the case of my cousin Little Art, though not for my cousin Wey.  Which always made me wonder why Wey had to go and get his D.Div from someplace up in Pennsylvania.  I never did hear where Little Art went to seminary, but it very well may have been Emory.  Not that it matters now that he’s abandoned his calling and manages a bed-and-breakfast and a “supper-club” (his own mother’s words, not mine) in Lake Junaluska.  Oddly, no-one ever mentioned Auburn as a reasonable alternative, even though the family connections there are equally baroque.  My great-grandfather the academic ended his career there (after a stint at Texas Tech).  One of his grandsons — i.e., my father’s cousin Walter — managed the groundskeeping squad for their athletic fields.  Two of his children – and which sort of cousin would that be, gentle reader? — took their B.A.s there.

[3] The answer is “yes,” but distant.  Likely as distant as the fellow who bet his money on the bobtail nag at the races.

[4] Named for her mother, her grand-mother, and ultimately her great-great-grandmother, the rather fetchingly named Julia Juvernia Venona Cotton.

[5] The answer is “no,” they do not live in an old plantation mansion.  We are not gentry, shabby, aspiring, déclassé, or otherwise.  We are preachers and teachers and in all ways professional middle-class Methodists.  This particular couple work as an insurance agent and a middle-school teacher.  They live in an absolutely standard California-style ranch house with a cathedral ceiling living room, a fieldstone fireplace, an inset bookcase with some reference books but rather more ceramic and glass angels, three bedrooms and two baths, an attached garage, a family room/entertainment center, and, yes, a pool.  It has never been clear to me whether or not they own the slope of the hill between their home and the road, as there has never been anything planted there except a broad swatch of closely-cut grass.

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After that it goes into syndication and becomes part of the endless merry-go-round of pop culture foam. 

I went to a May Day party about a month ago.  Not the dancing-around-the-maypole kind of party.  But a full-on “It’s time for your inner Communist to Partaaayyy!” party. 

It was, as might be predicted, in the Mission.  Upon entering the apartment, each guest was served a slice of apple and a shot of vodka.   They were then escorted to the HUAC room. 

There they were deposed by yours truly, as well as by a woman who shares a patronymic with a certain senator from Wisconsin. 

What made people acutely uncomfortable — besides the lamp we shone in their faces — was that I had them swear on a Bible to tell the truth.  It turns out that there’s nothing that gives improv a real edge like real blasphemy.* 

What the guests did not discover until they were cleared by the committee is that their testimony was being simulcast (on Skype) to the rest of the party.  

The rest of the apartment was split into three areas:

- Russia, where the drinks were,

- Cuba, where the food was, and

- China, where there was nothing. 

Broadcast onto the wall of the Cuba room was “Soy Cuba,” a three-hour epic of the revolution.   That it was narrated in the second-person voice only made the propaganda more disturbing.

The booze consisted of something like 12 different kinds of vodka.

I haven’t drunk hard liquor like that since I was in grad school.  I had forgotten just how crazy people get on the high-proof shit.  That party didn’t wind down until 4 in the morning. 

What should not have surprised me in the least, this being a commie-themed party in San Francisco, was that everyone brought their family relics.  One guy came with “Diary of Lei Feng” posters he’d gathered as a kid when his mom had a temporary academic position in the PRC.   One woman did up her hair in a Ukrainian corona, then wore a trench coat and hawked razor blades and TP the whole night.  I brought an autographed UFW flag.  Another fellow brought the lyrics to “There once was a Union Maid” and “Solidarity Forever.”

We did, in fact, sing all the verses to “Solidarity Forever.”  That is one fuck-all long song, by the way. 

There is a lesson in all this, I believe.  Something about the guilt of liberalism, and it goes sort of like this:

All of us there that night grew up in the baroque last act of the Cold War, graduating high school and entering college just when the whole rotten superstructure of Russian Communism finally came crashing down.   And we were seduced, just a little bit, by the lure of Marxism.  By the sophomoric logical pieties of a utopian alternative to the crass meanness of Reaganite conservatism. By the promise of a fix. 

And so what did we do with our lives? 

We became non-profit entrepreneurs.  And professors.  And dutifully composting labor lawyers.  And urban planners. 

We chose to the path of amelioration, in other words.  And it brought us comfort within the gnashing maw of capitalism. 

Because we who graduated high school in 1991 knew better than anyone that Communism was a mirage.  

And so we turned our ideals into exactly the kind of soft-pedal secular WWJDism that we (properly) mocked when we had heard it preached without irony in after-school specials.

We chose compromise.  And knowing we were therefore compromised, what else is there to do but celebrate the farce?

This is why, perhaps, I was told to put away my tattered UFW flag.  Because it was too real.  Too much an actual relic of something wholly good done to improve the world.

*One guest absolutely refused to take the oath on a false Bible.  By which she meant, in her lilting Caribbean accent, anything other than the King James.  I had only the NRSV, borrowed from my host’s collection of mandatory freshman core readings.  God love Stanford, sneaking in religious education through the back door of the ”structured” liberal arts.

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With all due apologies to William Shakespeare…

“Oh that we now had here a hundred thousand donors to do the work to come. 

That’s what political consultants say.   But no, my friends — if we are marked for the ballot box, we are enough to make all Californians proud; and if to sue, or testify, or just to live our own sweet lives, then the fewer we are the greater share of honour. 

It’s true: I wish not one couple more were married back last summer.  I do not covet money, nor do I care what fancy firms sign up to make our radio ads.  I do not quite care what silly TV spots may say — such stupidity is all beside the point.   No; our own words and deeds are all the armor, all the message that we need.  If it be bad policy to think that door-knocks and postcards are the fairest way to win, then I am the worst politician alive. 

In faith, my friends, wish not we had one more consultant on our side.  I would not lose so great an honor as to be part of your company, would not share it with one blessed couple more.  Instead proclaim it, friends, in every way you can, that those who have no stomach for for this fight, let them depart.  Sit by the sidelines.  Watch TV.  Wait for the lawyers to do our work in federal courts. 

I would not die to be in such a company as that.  Such as fear to cast their fellowship in sweaty grassroots politics.  This decision came on Memorial Day — know you what this feast day celebrates?  It  celebrates all who died to unshackle slaves; all who fell that we might be free, my friends. 

You who outlive this day, and come safe home to make a marriage, will stand a tip-toe when this day is named in times to come.  You will rouse your fellows at the name of Proposition 8.   You who outlive this day and make a marriage will yearly on the vigil feast your neighbors and say “tomorrow is Memorial Day.”  Then will we stretch out our hands and show our rings and say “This is what I won on Memorial Day.”

Old men will die, and some will forget; but we will remember the rights we won and the feats we did to win our marriages.  Then shall all our names, those that knocked on doors, or wrote a letter, be in our flowing cups sweetly remembered. 

This story will we teach our children.  And Memorial Day shall never go by, from this day to the ending of the age, but we in it shall be remembered. 

We few, we 18,000, we band of married couples.  For all today who walk with us shall be our friends.  Be they straight or gay, and all that’s in between, but this day shall queer all conditions; and gentlemen asleep tonight in Fresno or Anaheim will weep with shame, and curse themselves they were not here; holding their values cheap while any speaks that walked with us upon Memorial Day.”

Okay, yeah, it’s cheesy.  I guess I just needed to get that out of my system.  But God I wish somebody had given if not that speech, than something equivalent.

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The Southerner will say some version of: “What’s the use of educating black people?  They just hold it against you.”

The Westerner will make the following argument: that gun control is a bourgeois plot to enslave the proletariat.

For the record, the Westerner had a halfway-decent argument, one that earned something in the (ahem) high B range.

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When did they go totally corporate?

And why didn’t I make the same connection when they showed up at the Harvard Coop, back in like 2000? 

This has something, I’m sure, to do with the seductive power of branding.  Or perhaps with my naivete.  Which amounts to the same thing, of course.

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Really?  Sacramento makes the front page of the New York Times two days running?  

On a slightly related note: when did the writing in that rag get so, well, dirty?  

“Is this what a bottom looks like?”

And — curse the editors!* — “Mrs. Astor answered that she would “rather have Boysie and Girlsie,” her dachshunds, than her son and his wife, whom she described as a bitch.”

*In an earlier version of the article, I swear to G*d the sentence read “whom she described with a word that might be used to refer to Girlsie.”  What, after 5 p.m. NSFW becomes okay for the general public?

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