Ben Metcalf - Against the Country

God bless and keep our country faggots. One should never discount the amount of faggot in them, nor ever their helping of country.

What a joy there is in time travel, and what a fraudulence. In just thirteen paragraphs 2I have brought myself out of that wood-paneled womb where I was forced to take form and have rendered myself an almost viable being set to emerge from the faux-marble cunt of a now obsolete Richmond mall. Only pages prior I was younger still, and had yet to befriend a single homosexual, and had yet to do anything about my hair, and was possessed of no great delusions re God, and held no shotgun in my arms with which I might make a few bus-bound teenagers pretend to cringe and crawl. I am tempted to stick with this new and less indictable self, at a sudden seventeen, with a job in town (and a second at the county bank), and reliable use of a vehicle (if not of a reliable vehicle), and the prospect of imminent release can he but save his town money, and avoid collision with a drunk on some lonesome stretch of road, and dodge the impregnation of whichever country girl has lately caught his eye, and not lose sight of the fact that these last two eventualities would almost certainly amount to the same thing.

That thought is surely unkind to the girl, and possibly also to the drunk, but it does take us, with a considerable savings in pain, to the point where both I and the reader might be done with this trial, and its pretense, and its foolishness, were pain

and pretense and foolishness not the only themes still available to the honest American writer. Excepting, of course (though it is painful to bring up, and certainly a little foolish, and bound to be called pretentious by someone), honesty itself. I see, for instance, that I have avoided any mention of that distasteful episode wherein I attempted, in a moment of late-onset religiosity (which in human terms covered the better part of three years but here, I promise, will not last out the next paragraph), to convert my gay friend and informant to the one true path, which involved (the attempt, not the path, though I suppose the latter might also be depicted in this way) mornings with him in the high-school parking lot, and my indication of this (male) and that (female) ass, followed by the practical inquiry “Well, which is it?” I highly recommend this method to anyone who hopes to iron out the dimples in a friend’s sexuality, but in my case the interview was conducted unfairly, and made it clear that the female ass was what we were after here, which answer he dutifully gave, and which answer I did not believe, and which lie then caused me to question him further, and to judge his constant and exuberant singing of spirituals on bus trips (especially “Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” his curtain call) to be a barb and a blasphemy aimed in my personal direction, until at last I took him to see the wisest, most righteous adult I knew, and waited outside for him to emerge from this sit-down with the news that my mother had counseled him not to deny his inner gayness and had remained oddly silent on the question of whether his obvious interest in her second son was likely to bear him any fruit.

Because my theme for the moment is honesty, or else fraudulence (either one), I would like to confess, before I conveniently decide that my self-portrait here will only be damaged by further embellishments to its already broad strokes, that (a) the young man of whom I write was not the same country queen as I later encountered in the Regency Square Hardee’s (I allowed the reader to guess that he was, and I did so on purpose, and I am almost sorry for it); that (b) the above (“(a)”) is in no way meant to diminish my admiration for the talented Hardee’s worker, who was, to be clear, short and white and applaudingly cruel, whereas the friend I mean was tall and black and mostly kind and never, that I saw, went around barefoot (though by this I intend no judgment upon them that did); that (c) I am, or rather my extreme provincialism is, entirely at fault for any lapse in, or discontinuation of, whatever friendships I enjoyed then or have tolerated ever since, including that with this particular friend, who by geographical accident was able to transfer into a high school better able to teach him, and to appreciate his gifts, and perhaps even to accommodate his blackness, than the one he and I had hated together; that (d) nearly twenty years would then pass before I chanced to see him again, in a Richmond parking lot, whereupon I was relieved to learn that he was now living happily with a man, and so had taken my mother’s kind advice after all; except that (e) prior to this arrangement he had cohabitated with a woman, and had fathered a child by her, and although he loved the child, and was boastful of it, and would see to its well-being ever after, was fated to find disappointment in the company of the woman, and so was forced to quit it altogether; by which I came to understand that (f) to the debasement of himself, and to numerous others besides, he might just have opted, for a brief but crucial moment in an already delicate development, to prize my wisdom over that of my mother, which idea could not help but sicken me.

2And some liner notes.

Even here, though, my fraudulence betrays me, or else my honesty does, for I was not sickened on account of what harm I might have done a forgotten friend, nor because those charming country convictions I held in decades past were by now so inconsequential to my own experience that I was wholly unprepared for the impact they may at one point have had on someone else’s. Nor was I thrown, exactly, by the realization that this rider may have struck out for the false haven of heterosexuality regardless of what shove I ever gave him (which scenario would grant him all agency in the matter, yes, but anyhow fail to absolve me). No, what sickened me was not any one of these possibilities but rather the overall unknowability of the problem: I could not be sure that my mother’s good counsel had been either followed or ignored; I could not be sure that my own had been heard at all; I could not guarantee that this young man had for one moment sought out his way in any sinner save himself, and, honestly, who would? Ergo, I would never be able to trust in that faint yet sweet note of triumph (over my mother? over nature herself?) which sounded within me one sunburnt parking-lot day. That this is what sickened me, finally, ought to sicken just about anyone.

One last confession, before I cut short this shortcut across time’s mined macadam: the word “sicken,” and any variant of that marker lately employed to describe how at the moment of composition I thought and felt about memories of how I once thought and felt when certain other memories (progenitors at best of those above) first put out their feeble roots within me, now strikes me as so melodramatic as to be counted, if only by the calculus of an ever less dependable fraudulence, an ever more dependable lie.

Back, then, scurrying with shame and regret, to my little room, where at twelve or so I sat in the dark (by which I mean the literal and not the metaphorical dark, or not merely) until my brother moved in, his own room having been surrendered to our sister (and hers to the myth that endless work on an ancient and uninhabitable farmhouse will somehow elicit a charm that had never taken up residence there in the first place), and asked why I sat so in the shadows, and was told that the overhead was done in, whereupon he reached up and brushed it, just once, with his magical palm, and Lo! Light! I was plainly astonished by this twist after a year’s worth of evenings spent seated or prone in my doorway, trying to read by the bulb in the hall, which was not a hall so much as it was a four-by-four-foot square of bad wood at the top of a rickety staircase eventually destroyed altogether and replaced by newer steps my father came out of his depression to build, impressively and well, in a single weekend, when we had all of us resigned ourselves to the indefinite use of a ladder.