So this piece is a sort of commission. My mother recently asked me to write about the wedding of one my cousins. What follows is a first draft of a story that is already well on its way (at least in oral form) to entering the standard library of twice-told family gossip sagas. Those of you who’ve sat in on dinners at my house may have heard versions of this story before.

First, a little background. This particular cousin is the fourth child of my father’s eldest brother. More precisely, she is the eldest daughter – with a younger brother and sister – of his second wife. Her father (my uncle) was, unfortunately, diagnosed rather late life with a serious form of mental illnes. So late, in fact, that upon his (temporary) confinement in an institution, he had already managed to (a) get an M.D. in, you guessed it, psychiatry, (b) marry twice and have six kids, and (c) establish a thriving medical practice in the shithole of a southwest Louisiana gas-and-oil burg where he had settled with his second wife. Said wife worked then (and still does) as a company doctor on retainer, diagnosing workplace-related injuries (read: she tells people that no, they weren’t injured on the job so no, they cannot apply for disability, and no she’s never heard of this entity called “OSHA”). After the divorce – because it turns out that despite all the disgusting patriarchal nonsense about “covenant marriage” in Louisiana, it is still possible to divorce your husband in cases of diagnosed insanity – she made another poor marital choice, taking as her second husband an abusive drunk. The one time I visited this aunt and her family, the main thing I noted about their house – apart from the obvious architectural elements borrowed from plantation gothic – was that, to paraphrase Didion, it possessed only enough shelving for one set of Lladro figurines, and contained less than half a dozen books.

All six of my uncle’s children adopted religious regimens of varying stripes of evangelical Protestantism. Some members of the broader family, who will remain anonymous (cough, cough), have suggested a straightforward connection between the disorder of growing up the child of a crazy person (and, in the younger children’s case, the step-child of a boozer about whom much darker things are rumored), and the comforting strictures of fundamentalism.

So, given this childhood drawn straight out of a V.C. Andrews novel, what follows should not (sadly) surprise. My cousin was accepted at the “liberal arts” state school (read: the college they created once it became clear that LSU was actually going to have to admit more than just a couple of lightly-complected “good” negros). Promising news right? Finally, she was going to escape her fate, right? Well… eventually she would (this story does have a happy ending), but not without some major mis-steps along the way.

To wit: The very first day of school – even before classes had started – she showed up at her dorm bright and early and met some of her hallmates. One of them was so drunk that he literally shambled down the steps and fell into my cousin. So what did this bright-eyed young girl from the provinces say when accosted by this uncouth, unpromising, unmannered lout? Did she say “excuse me?” Did she say, “ugh, get off me!” Did she turn and look around for the aid of some better-bred cavalier to save her?

No. In her own words, she said to herself, and I quote, “This is the man Jesus wants me to marry.”

Now, to be fair, the man who would become her first husband was pretty good-looking. If you like that sort of thing, I mean: lumpy alcoholic cracker trash has never really turned my crank. Apparently it turns my cousin’s, though. For not only did she marry him, she dropped out of her fancy liberal arts college — for which she had earned a four-year full ride — and followed him to an unaccredited Bible institute in fecking Pensacola. There he pursued his calling to become a Pentecostal minister. She, meanwhile, took classes at the local junior college and sold shoes in order to pay the rent.

When they announced their engagement, my father and I decided to show our support and attend the wedding. My father also, bless his heart, plumped down enough cash to finance two tickets to California and three nights’ stay at a B&B in Mendocino for their honeymoon. In return, he asked only that my cousin promise not to start having babies before she had earned her BA. To her credit, my cousin kept that promise.

So we flew to New Orleans and rented a car, driving the breadth of America’s cloaca, through cane fields and over the various distributaries of the Mississippi, past big signs with advertisements for Cracker Barrel, drunk-driving lawyers, and the priesthood (seriously, “Become a Priest! We have a great life!” Gee, methinks there might be a Foucauldian moment of insisting a little too much in that statement. It was the exclamation points, really, that give the game away). We drove directly to the church, which was conveniently located right on the main drag out of town. Not because it was a megachurch, mind you, but rather because it was…

wait for it…

…a reclaimed strip bar. And not just any strip bar, but the kind of low-rent, wouldn’t-stand-up-in-a-hard-rain, ramshackle tin-roofed juke joint whose most permanent feature was surely the pole on the bar in the back of the “sanctuary.”

Sometimes life just hands you things you couldn’t make up if you tried.

This was my cousin’s family’s church, it turned out; I later learned that it was “CMA” or Christian Missionary Alliance, one of the cadet branches of the Pentecostal dynasty.

True to their heritage as iconoclasts, the church contained little in the way of frippery: it was really just one big room, with rows of industrial-grade upholstered stackable chairs, facing a cheap-as-they-come laminate lectern and “choir loft,” which is to say a cordoned-off bandstand with enough equipment to (literally, I expect) blow the roof off. Part of the service included musical selections led by the minister (alternately on harmonica and steel guitar) backed by his wife (vocals) and 3 parishioners on drums, bass, and a second (electric) guitar. Much to my disappointment, there was no fiddle (it hung, unused, on the wall, instead of the absent cross). Needless to add, there was no dancing. Though there was a lot of swaying, closed eyes, murmuring, and hand-waving that reminded me of nothing so much as a bunched of X-ed out ravers.

Anywho, the wedding service itself was standard, except for the double homily. The hosting minister gave what I thought was a very appropriate set of remarks about how marriage was a journey, one where you didn’t always know precisely where you were headed. In such moments, like on any journey, a couple should work together to read the map, perhaps ask for directions, and in any case keep faith they would reach their destination. I was impressed and cheered by this message.

My cheer was interrupted, however, when a large gentlemen with a Tom Selleck mustache, pin-stripe suit, alligator-skin shoes and heavy, chunky, silver jewelry stood up. The man had some serious bling: bracelet and wedding band and, if I recall, one of those pinky rings with a large chunk of onyx in it. I briefly noticed his ur-blond slip of a wife, whose figure can best be described as “boobs on a stick,” before being pulled back by a cultivated basso-profundo voice saying “let us praiaiaiaiase the Holy Name of Jesus.” It occurred to me later that the precise timbre of his voice could only have been achieved after much practice, likely with the aid of recording equipment.

This gentleman was, of course, the husband’s minister and mentor at the Pensacola Bible Institute and College of Bob (or whatever it was called). He performed the actual vows and gave a second homily.

It was somewhere along about here that my father turned to me and whispered “I bet that man’s done time.”

And people think I got my bitchy streak from my mother.

I don’t really remember any of the details of his sermon, with the exception of that he found it necessary to go on at some length about how we would know this marriage by its “fruits” and the fruits of this marriage would be, in fact, the “fruits of [my cousin's] womb.”

I’m sorry, but there is nothing like a fundamentalist for reminding his assembled flock that the purpose of a marriage is not, in fact, fidelity, or promises made to God, or the delights of companionship, or even of “cleaving to one’s wife, so that two are made one.”

No, a marriage is, not to put too fine a point one it, about getting your goddamned bone on.

In response to this message, my father and I did the only thing we could think of. Once the service was over, we went back to the pole and gossiped with the only other reasonable people present, namely my cousin John and his wife. I believe we traded tips on how to mix martinis.

The marriage lasted approximately two years before the husband went back on the sauce, even “kicking it up a notch” (to quote another Lousianan) with a lot of drugs and not a few whores to boot.

You want the happy ending? My cousin went on to earn herself an MA, and is currently teaching the children of expats while residing in Montpellier. Rumour has it she spends her time chasing hot Canadians across Paris, living out her own personal version of “Amelie.” As she is 6-foot tall and weighs approximately 150 pounds, I imagine she pursues these activities with not a little success.

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So this was the third year that we spent Thanksgiving in LA with my mom’s family. These little jaunts have produced all kinds of hilarity for the family archives.

The first year, we stayed at the Embassy Suites in Arcadia because my cousin was working there and swung us an incredible deal on our rooms. Among our other adventures that visit, we trooped up to Sierra Madre to the (former) home of my uncle and his wife, a charming woman known throughout the family as “that bitch your aunt L****” (or TBYAL for short). The house was an ur-piece of L.A. stupidity: you looked out the back window and stared into the wall of green that constituted the 60% grade slope of the ravine. Someday, and probably not too far into the future, that house will end up a pile of rubble strewn along Colorado Boulevard. My aunt regaled us with tales about all the animals she had rescued and adopted. The partner, bless his heart, somehow managed not to spew coffee and pie out of his nose when TBYAL asked him, with a straight face, “would you like to pet my possum?”

Possums, by the way, have viciously long claws.

That visit also occasioned the discovery of our new favorite Chinese restaurant in the Southland. It turns out that when you ask the staff at the Getty for a recommendation for lunch, they send you to a place called “Bamboo” on Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks. I recommend the orange beef in particular.

We took Thanksgiving dinner, in case you were wondering, at the in-house restaurant of the hotel. Yes, Virginia, I have in fact eaten turkey and stuffing at the Jamaican Me Crazy Lounge.

The second year was far less exciting: we had our meal at Marie Callendar’s, and then repaired to my grandmother’s house for, and I quote, some dago red. I was the DD that evening – and driving my grandmother’s pumpkin-orange Ford Explorer to boot – and so had planned on being temperate. When I turned down a second glass my grandmother – also with a straight face, the Cudlips being that sort of woman, whether born or married-in – said, “whatever, the car’s insured. Aren’t you?”

Needless to add, I had a second glass.

This year (our third), we went down the weekend before, to celebrate my grandmother’s 83rd birthday. TBYAL was not in attendance, as she had since moved to Bellingham Washington, with beasts in tow. Her husband, however – newly re-christened “Diamond Jim” for reasons I’ll save for another post – did show up. Though it is also worth noting that my uncle was approximately an hour late for Sunday brunch because he had to meet a “friend” to “deliver a pie.” For the record, it was my grandmother (she of the straight face) who was first to ask, “so is this friend male or female?”

Brunch, by the way, was largely liquid. It’s amazing what happens when you mix cranberry-cherry juice and Andre.

It was on this third trip that I began to reconsider the hermeneutics through which I normally interpret my mother’s family. In the past I have been known to joke that while my father’s family is a Faulkner novel, mom’s is a Travis Tritt song. This visit caused me, finally, to look at Mr. Tritt’s discography. It was was far less evocative than I had imagined. I have thus begun to look around for some alternative source of inspiration.

The proximate cause of this paradigm shift occured during a post-pie-and-mimosa triptophan haze as I leafed through a photo album I had never seen before. I suspect it had been kept buried deep in some box in the garage for many, many years. It contained, in brief, all the pictures my grandmother had taken in preparation for her first husband’s – my biological grandfather – return from the war.

As with any family photo album, it is difficult to see the pictures simply for what they depict, and not for all that would come later. It is difficult to appreciate simply for what they are the photos of the rakishly handsome sailor in painted-on pants, mugging with a fire hose and, in another picture, a three-foot mortar shell. Or the snaps of a giddily-happy couple honeymooning on the beach in Santa Barbara, and in a different set, camping in the mountains of Colorado with their infant daughter, my mother (these taken after V-J day). Or those of three tall sisters – straight faces in every case – standing in front of their first “adult” home – a brick apartment block steps from the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver and far, far away from the one-horse burg where they had spent their childhood. Or the sequence displaying all of the womenfolk gathered around the table in the living room of the big white Craftsman bungalow on Grape Street, playing cards to pass the time while their husbands were away (my grandfather in his white t-shirt, looking incongruously like Stanley Kowalski, seems distinctly out of place among his sisters-in-law and their cousins).

Even more touching, in their own way, were the diacritics: “My first home!,” and with it, “The Man of the House!” (the exclamation points hers). In the pictures to which they referred, a not-yet-pregnant, still-blushing Winnie flings out her arms in joy at the 600 square foot pine clapboard studio (stove, but not fridge, included) that she bought with gas stamps. On the next page, “When First We Met…” described a paired set of pictures, the newlyweds in matched flannel shirts (no doubt both his) camping somewhere in the San Gabriels. Or “Jim and Bob hunting,” where my grandfather stands, in the desert, a double-barreled shotgun in his fist.

Or, the series of my grandmother, sitting in what was almost certainly one of only two chairs in that tiny little house, next to a small table which surely doubled for dining and cards, on which were placed “the roses and corsage Jim sent me on my birthday.” Followed, more heartbreakingly, by two pictures, titled “Also, the nightie and slip.”

My grandmother, in her youth, bore a striking resemblance to Judy Garland.

Yes, indeed, difficult to see what was then and not what was to come. Difficult to see the simple joy of a 19 year old girl who had finally, successfully, fled Nebraska. Difficult to see the independence betokened by the absence (in the LA pictures) of the two older sisters and their even taller, unsmiling, mother. Difficult to know what to make of my grandmother, simultaneously showing off her calf and her pregnancy, with her leg hooped up on the running board of a long dark Hudson.

The pictures depict, simply, a girl who may not have quite known what she was in for, but also surely a girl who walked right straight into whatever life had to offer. This I can square with the woman my grandmother became: a woman far from innocent (my two favorite quotes of hers: “if there’s any glamour left in sin, I sure as hell want some!” and, upon viewing a photo my mom took in Greece, of a couple of ancient kouri statues, “Ooh, porn!”), a woman of set jaw and firm opinions; most especially a woman who neither gives nor expects pity.

More difficult, then, is what to make of all those pictures of my biological grandfather, long since dead and barely mourned. All those moments where he, who never held a steady job after the war, was “man of the house.” Those pictures where he’s the “first love,” seen through the stage scrim of the divorce. Or the one where he’s holding my mother’s hand – “daddy with his little girl” — followed hard by with the inescapable knowledge that five years later he would abandon daughter, and two younger sons, and a wife so ill with TB that they shut her up in a sanitarium for two years. I look at all these pictures of innocence and I see loss. I look at love and I see recrimination. I look at fatherhood and I see abandonment. I look at a promisingly handsome soldier just back from the war, ready to take on the best economy this nation has ever seen, and what I see is 30 years of booze, cigars, whoring, and cashing pissant dividend checks to bet on the ponies at Santa Anita.

I note, in passing, that the Arcadia Embassy Suites sits less than half a mile from the track.

When he died, my mother (who hadn’t spoken to him in two decades) had to consult a lawyer to find out what one could do with a box full of uncashed checks from barely solvent mining companies based in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. What does one make of the legacy of a man so dysfunctional he can’t even cash his own inheritance, not even to waste in dissipation?

When his mother had died, apparently they’d found a similar box in her closet. Perhaps it was genetic, this reluctance at the end of life to continue living off of unearned rent.

I suppose there’s a lesson in there somewhere. But whatever the lesson, it is not one one can learn from listening to Travis Tritt, or any other C&W “artist,” for that matter.

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So, why did it take me 30-someodd years to realize that I woulda/coulda/shoulda been exhibit A in an English class?

A colleague asked me recently how to pluralize and possessivify (are those words?  Probably not…) my name.  After discussion with the partner, I came up with the following, the certainty of which I’m still not sure:

singular (obviously): …iss

plural (fairly obvious): …isses

singular possessive (this starts getting troublesome): …iss’s

plural possessive (whoah!): …isses’

We shall leave the pronunciation of the latter for another time.

This is not an entirely theoretical exercise.  I have corresponded over e-mail with one person who shares my given name (a middle-aged female librarian at a large state school in one of square states in the middle).  I am also given to understand that there is yet a third person, whose given name is only one letter different, who served both as the dean of “a major research university cum country club” and as the first chief executive of that bete noir of many a paroiac’s fantasy: the Council on Foreign Relations.  It wasn’t until I was in graduate school that I learned about either doppleganger, the world wide web being useful for nothing if not procrastination from writing one’s thesis.

The librarian, it turns out, was also named for a maternal ancestor (directly maternal in her case.  I’m not sure there exists an appropriate anthropological term for my naming linkage: pater-mater-paternal?  Or, more precisely and baroquely, pater-mater-pater-putative-paternal?). 

There being no “definitive biography,” I have not yet discovered the provenance of the dean’s first name.  Presumably it all goes back to Kentucky/West Virginia.  In my own case, the pater-mater-pater in question (of whom there are too many stories to tell here; suffice it to say he was a great and good man) spent many a summer with his namesake, a man who made his living trading ass — mules, people, mules – between Kentucky and Alabama.  Said summers were apparently and primarily for the purpose of getting out from under the thumb of his father and wicked stepmother.  The father was a Tennesseean and a [therefore?] thoroughly questionable character: family myth has it that he founded the Klan in his home county, but then suppressed it when he was elected sheriff.  Not because he had become a racial liberal, mind you, but rather because he could now accomplish legally what the Klan had formerly been used to doing outside the law.   On the other hand, he was not a fan of gun-play: he would stop his grandchildren (i.e., my great-uncles and their siblings) from shooting at each other, even in pretense, such was his leftover horror at what he had witnessed in the Civil War.  His father was even more disreputable: further family lore has it that he fled the Confederacy just before the surrender at Appomatox, never to be seen again — though there is speculation that he might have ended up in Brazil, the better to continue exploiting profit from the bodies and labor of black slaves.  

This descent, from slaveholder, to “redemptionist” and gun-control advocate avant la lettre, to Methodist minister, has sometimes struck me a Southern sort of reverse Buddenbrooks.

All of this leaves aside the far more interesting, and entirely unconfirmed, story of the daughter (perhaps a great-aunt of the Grand Wizard?  Totally unclear) of a farmer in Ice’s Ferry, [West] Virginia, who was kidnapped by the Shawnees.  She married one of her kidnappers and bore him a son.  The son later became known to history as Tecumsah (as in “and the prophet.”  The prophet being his full-blooded Shawnee half-brother.). 

The partner is, needless to say, often baffled and bemused and the degree of ancestor-worship that goes on in my family.

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