Ben Metcalf - Against the Country

For my mother’s well-being throughout this period, I regret that I was unable to arrange a sexual ingress upon her person. (She was my mother, after all, and although the picture of prettiness she did have that ringworm on her leg.) Such an act would have flattered her, of course, and seen me removed from the list of potential family faggots, though I might rightly have been added to the list of potential schizophrenics, which ailment was a great deal more prevalent on both sides of our tree, due no doubt to the continent’s cruel and continued work upon it, than was the far less bothersome moss of homosexuality. As it is I was probably thought a schizophrenic anyway, and possibly still am, and might even have lived up to that diagnosis, with a violent ideation, had my father asked me just one more time about the perfectly harmless goings-on inside my little room. 1

Oh, to have been a true country queen! To have been able to claim, in all honesty, a difference between myself and rural America large enough to exempt me from the mundane and brutal rites of passage there! To have been free to walk those roads in bare feet, my pantlegs rolled up, a swish in my ass and impertinence on my face and no care for who saw me from bus or truck or field, an advertisement and a dare! To have yearned for attention like anyone else and to have won it in such abundance! To have achieved, without formal effort, an obvious and irreducible celebrity, so that when national stardom failed to pan out one was bound to be less disappointed than so many of the town fags were! To have neutralized the bullies upon puberty with the realization that no points were to be scored upon a target not naturally considered a boy, as well as by the myth that such creatures employed an oriental fighting technique that in a single quick stroke to the genitals might ruin a natural boy’s reputation forever, which myth is real! To have been so fortunate! To have dropped out of high school, or else shimmied right through, with the understanding that no grade, regardless of how low or how high, could possibly compete with the mark one had already received! To have seen all one’s faults and one’s foibles, all one’s human allotment of pride and viciousness and dissent, boiled down into a single incurable ailment! To have known the advantage of a parent, or two, convinced that a miracle vaccine, or a doctrine, or a hobby, might at last be found! To have been studied like a bewitched cow and handled always with kid gloves! To have been hated with more zeal than one’s siblings yet somehow better loved! To have been wondered at, and prayed over, and above all feared! My God, but that is the thing: to have been feared!

I apologize to my mother, especially, for not having made more of an effort to conform to her wishes out there. Had I but known what a comfort it can be for adults to see just one of their predictions come true in a land that conspires against all prophets, and contrives against all hopes, I might have reconsidered those offers to be fellated in a bathroom stall or buggered in the woods along the cross-country course. I might have done more than simply befriend a few area faggots, and make enemies of certain others, and remain an unknown quantity to most. I might have learned something of what it was like to be a “real” farmboy beyond the fact that at least one of them liked to shove frozen hot dogs up his rectum and then put them back in the freezer for his sister to eat, even as he delivered this same sister from the clutches of a too-insistent football player by taking the offending testicles in hand one locker-room afternoon, and giving both hand and testicles a twist, and saying, softly, “You touch her again and they’re coming off.” This intelligence (does it not sparkle?) was gifted to me by a young man ignored by his own people on account of an anabaptist predilection, and by others on account of his being black, and by me, I am sorry to say, for both reasons until at last he came across with those matchless tales.

I have him to thank for any inkling I gained thereafter of who was, and who was not, and who only seemed to be, and of how in the last case I was bound to be disappointed but in the first case I might just be surprised. (Or was it the other way around?) I have him to thank also for my knowledge of how the Goochland fags reached out to one another with their fast hallway doubletalk, and their obvious (to anyone looking) signals at the football games, and their late-night flashes of headlight (not in every case seen or returned) meant to make for themselves, as Mr. Jefferson’s heteros all tried and failed to do, a commonality of instinct and vim.

Although I did not shine my own headlights into those woods, and blew no more than the trumpet at football games, and never learned enough of their language to say more than hi in an unlit parking lot, I did gain a respect for these people that was wholly unbegrudged and neither demanded nor proscribed by any personal politics of mine. (I had none then and only pretend to have some now.) Nor was my respect for their kind a mere novice respect, such as one might have for those who had ventured into town before one, alone or with like-minded others, to meet strangers at the roller rink, or on rides at the wanting state fair, or to seek a momentary solace at The Rocky Horror Picture Show , so that in time I might follow in a carload of my own sort, and grope a punkish tomboy forced by our number to sit too close to me, and be stopped at the Henrico County line by a trooper turned evil by the roads out there, who charged us with having too many in the car, which law we neither knew of nor agreed with but which nonetheless saw us headed back the opposite way, in chastened silence, toward those parched fields and those judgmental stands of pine.

Better, then, to have been a true country queen, for there were fewer of them, and hence fewer who were likely to be turned back before they could reach town and inseminate, or else be inseminated by, what paltry notions obtained there. Better to have had cause to study the southern laws with more thoroughness than my associates and I ever did, and so forgo a grand waste of expectation and gasoline, and so avoid a surrender to the truth that town welcomes not those who approach it head-on, in desperate and silly numbers, with colored hair and a conceit that they are different, but rather those who come forward quietly and obliquely, in smaller units, bearing with them an old and unassailable difference, to offer their openings to what suburban monsters await and to what corporations will, out of need and avarice on both ends, eventually agree to grant them employment.

1Mostly we were only listening to the radio up there, and I insist that we were well within our rights to seek out some idea of music beyond what Flatt and Scruggs had to offer, or the Carter Family, or the New Lost City Ramblers, blers, one of whose whooping bluegrass numbers actually inspired in me, while we still lived in town, a vivid and not wholly unprophetic nightmare. To be fair, my parents also played Buffy Sainte-Marie on the old town stereo they guarded jealously in their room, so that such phrases as “the love of a good man” and “I’m going to be a country girl again” acquired for the rest of us a hideous connotation. They gave Woody Guthrie a whirl too, and Arlo, and the young (that is, the rural) Bob Dylan, and Judy Collins (singing rural Bob Dylan), and the interchangeable Ian and Sylvia, and all those unctuous Weavers, and Odetta (who I admit was real fun when we were little), and Josh white (who I bet gives every kid the creeps), and the arthritic and comically slow Lightnin’ Hopkins, and later on some John Prine, and Ry Cooder, and Creedence Clearwater Revival, each song bearing with it, somewhere, in lyric or in intonation, an implication that the naturalistic choice was clearly the adult choice here, when in fact it was patently childish; the modest choice, when it seemed to inspire only a great arrogance; the human choice, when in fact it succored animal distrust and, given time, the political prerequisites of an organized death.