he doesn’t play ball, we’ll nuke his … country.
I begged for the Reagan shirt. Mom bought it for me on the condition I would not wear it to school, but I wore it anyway, the very next day. The gym teacher gave me a wink and a furtive thumbs-up. “How come you’re wearing that Ronald Reagan shirt?” my friend Scott Hurt asked. I didn’t know. There were two shirts for sale and I chose one.
“Democrat or Republican,” said my dad, “all of em’s crooks.” He shook his head at my Reagan shirt and told me the last vote he’d cast was for Richard Nixon, so he’d never vote again. We are all voting for crooks, yet we see ourselves as very different from a person who chooses the opposing crook. At what point did I come to hear Republican as a slur?
A Haddonfield neighbor who grew up in Georgia told my wife and me she was happy to see some more Southerners. I felt a tinge of pride at being so warmly called a Southerner, same as I’d felt insulted at the suggestion I would join the Republicans. Although I’ve never claimed either label. Although I once spent an hour trying to convince a near-stranger that Louisville was more Midwestern than Southern. He had written off the South so conclusively that it seemed easier for me to redraw the map than to change his mind. It’s a rare New Jerseyan who doesn’t see my leaving Kentucky as a move toward success. Mostly they congratulate me for having left the land of red-state Republicans. And now I’ve stumbled onto an exclave.
But if I can move to a garbage town, or a garbage state, what’s to say I can’t live in a garbage country? Our national elections are neck-and-neck races, each side certain the other is wrong, so most of us must believe America is 50% awful. Where do we draw the lines: Democrat vs. Republican? Rural vs. Urban? North vs. South? White vs. Not White? Rich vs. Poor? I like my news blunted by comedy; my mother likes hers panicked as a horror film trailer. You may not have much, her news tells her, but people less deserving are coming to take it; if the government would stop helping them take what’s yours, you might have been rich by now. My news makes fun of her for being so easily fooled. Mine tells me the rich—not the poor—are the villains, and I believe it.
I once saw a free concert—a rap group called Black Landlord—in Philly’s Rittenhouse Square and cheered along with the rest of the crowd when the MC pointed up at the expensive high-rises surrounding the park and said, “Fuck all those rich people up in them towers.” Weeks later, my department hired a new English professor and he moved right into one of those towers. He was no richer than I was. I was no less rich than he was. Yet I look at the people with houses bigger than mine and I harbor the illusion they do not deserve what they have. They were born rich, I tell myself. Or if they worked for it, they worked too hard, traded their lives for money, made a deal with the devil. Do I deserve what I have? Books about rap music bought me my house. Things could have gone very differently.
•
My Haddonfield neighbors convince themselves they’ve earned what they have and that they’re teaching their kids that hard work—not inheritance—will earn them a large home in a nice neighborhood. They assume I got here not only by hard work, but a legacy of it. “My father got up in the morning and put on his suit and went to the office,” a neighbor proclaimed. “I see people on food stamps and they’re perfectly happy to sit at home all day and wait for their handout to come in the mail. What kind of lesson is that for their kids? I mean, what did you see your dad get up and do in the morning?”
I saw my dad trade twenty dollars in food stamps for ten dollars in cash so that he could buy cigarettes. I saw my dad pull his own wisdom teeth with a pair of pliers and a bottle of Old Granddad. We didn’t have health insurance. My sister broke her arm when she jumped through our backyard sprinkler and landed on a beach ball; Daddy wanted to set it at home. I saw my mom, when she went to take a sip of her Pepsi, stop short and hold the bottle up to her eye like a pirate’s spyglass to make sure no roaches had crawled inside. Roaches infested our cabinets so we kept cereal boxes inside an old Styrofoam cooler on the kitchen table and stored our dishes inside our broken dishwasher. Fake brick paneling in the kitchen. Fake wood grain in the living room. What were we trying to hide?
Coalminers and war veterans on one side, farmers and schoolteachers on the other. My mom’s family made its living growing tobacco, the poison that killed my dad. The Japanese captured Papaw Hess during World War II and starved him until he was hungry enough to strangle and eat the chicken they tossed into his cell. He came home from the war different, I was told. Burned his son’s toys in the heat stove, laughed at him for carrying a baby doll, like a girl, until Daddy, seven years old, finally took an axe and chopped off the doll’s head. Daddy started smoking before he was ten years old, quit middle school to learn to rebuild cars. He spent months restoring a 1955 Chevrolet and, while he was serving in Viet Nam, Papaw sold it and spent the money.
Having taken his share of orders in the Air Force, my father refused to work for any boss but himself. He was too stubborn to look for a better-paying job painting cars for one of the lots down the road in the bigger town of Somerset. He played country guitar at late-night parties and slept through AM appointments while Mom dealt with customers. If it was a potential new paintjob, she’d pray they called back. If it was a friend or neighbor seeking a quick repair, she’d invite him into the house to try, himself, to shake Daddy awake. One morning, a man Mom knew from church stopped by and claimed he’d already paid, so she gave him his keys and he drove off with all Daddy’s hard work. When Daddy finally got out of bed and saw the car gone, he drove around town, raging, until he spotted the car parked in front of the Science Hill pool hall. He took a tire iron out of his trunk and smashed every part of that car that he’d fixed.
Daddy wasn’t home much and when he was he was in the body shop working and avoiding his family. I stayed in the house where I could watch TV and avoid him and his friends and the cars they worked on. I took Mom’s side because she talked about her side and he didn’t talk much. When she tried to talk to him, he broke a chair over the kitchen table. She asked her brother to talk to him, his brother to talk to him, but he would not listen to anyone. We were his wife and kids and he lived with us, but he also lived with some woman in a trailer behind Oran’s truck stop. When my dad was at home, I remember him most for his anger at me and my sisters for having woken him up watching our Saturday morning cartoons. He’d stomp through the kitchen to stir Folgers Crystals into a cup of microwaved water and sit silently at the table looking tired and introspective and put-out. He’d smoke a few cigarettes and then paint cars until it was time to play music again. Back home at 2:00 AM, still on a performer’s high, he’d brew a pot of coffee and paint some cars and finally go to sleep. He’d lie in bed until late in the afternoon, screaming, “Shut them kids up! I can’t take it.” He’d peel out of our gravel driveway and mom would say, “Well, you ran him off again. I hope you’re happy.”
My mother felt as tied to our house as my dad felt imprisoned by it. She told me I was going to go places in life, but she was scared to let me leave the front yard. She shook her head at the prospect of traveling an hour’s distance to take me to watch the Harlem Globetrotters at Lexington’s Rupp Arena, named after an old racist who never wanted to let black people play basketball. “I don’t know how to get there,” Mom would explain. “And even if I could get to Lexington I wouldn’t know how to drive once I got there.” She was comfortable driving only to places she’d already driven, and only until dusk, when she said her night blindness became too severe to drive anywhere at all. We left my friends’ autumn birthday parties before the cake, Mom wringing her hands and mouthing prayers that we’d make it home before nightfall. Back home, safely, she sat in her recliner underneath an electric blanket, her upper lip shiny with Vicks Vapo Rub, her eyes red and watery, toilet paper wadded in her fists and stuffed between the cushions, and anti-anxiety meds and a can of caffeine-free Pepsi on the floor beside her. “He’s not coming back this time. I just know it.”
My father didn’t want to be an auto-body man with a wife and three kids. He was good enough at guitar to believe it should make him famous. He wanted to be on stage at the Grand Ole Opry. And when my sisters or I pled for a trampoline or cable TV, he’d say, “Well we don’t always get what we want, do we? I wanted to be a famous guitar player.”
It wasn’t enough to be famous in small