Читать книгу Secrets of a Gay Marine Porn Star - Rich Merritt - Страница 12

I began first grade at Bob Jones Elementary School in late August 1973. Tabernacle had very much been a country church, with a country school. Hell, we were country people. Everything was country on our side of town. Bob Jones, on the other hand, was fifteen miles away, on the other side of town—the more affluent side. There was no bus that went that route. Instead, my mom got a job near the school so she could drive me there, go work, and then pick me up in the afternoon so we could go home together. She centered her whole life around me being at this school. I was very much aware that both my parents really sacrificed a lot to send me—and later my brother—to Bob Jones.

To my young eyes the school that calls itself the “Fortress of Fundamentalism” was quite imposing. It indeed felt like an exclusive place for the chosen few. First there was the tall, vine-covered fence that hid the school from the prying eyes of outsiders on the boulevard. That has since been replaced with an even more imposing wrought-iron fence, sort of like the new “Iron Curtain.” Then there was an enormous gatehouse where genuine guards stood at attention, monitoring every person and vehicle that passed through the entrance. A large lawn separated the fence from the nearest set of buildings on the campus, giving the guards plenty of time to aim at and shoot an intruder or a potential escapee, or at least that’s how I saw it through the eyes of a five-year-old. But it wasn’t all bad; in contrast to Tabernacle’s asphalt playground, Bob Jones had an expansive grassy playground and a huge swing set.

Bob Jones, Sr., was a famous evangelist in the early 1900s. He traveled the country from city to city preaching to men and women that they were worthless sinners in the hands of an angry God. Thousands of people crowded underneath huge outdoor tents each evening to hear Reverend Jones’s sermons when he came to town. Jones’s fiery message followed the same formula as most evangelists. Jones began by convincing the listener he or she was a sinner in need of a cure. Jones finished by convincing that listener that Jones had the only cure. No hustler ever peddled an elixir with more zeal than Robert Reynolds Jones. Over the years, tens of thousands of souls accepted Jones’s version of Almighty God.

Each generation has specific demons and the three generations of Reverend Bob Joneses reveal much about American culture and history in the twentieth century by the demon each man chose to exorcise from society. Dr. Bob Jones, Sr., was a leading spokesman for the temperance movement and prohibition. Dr. Bob Jones, Jr., achieved notoriety for his tirades against the pope, the Catholic Church, and quite often specific Catholic individuals. Although Dr. Jones III followed in the footsteps of his father and grandfather by sermonizing against both Catholics and alcohol, he would eventually stress a third evil in this axis.

“You know,” said University of Southern California Law School professor Charlie Whitebread, “what the temperance movement and prohibition were really all about was Protestant subjugation of the Catholic minority in this country.”

“Really?” I asked. “I’ve never thought of it that way.”

“Oh yes, yes indeed! Think about it. Protestants were established and had their grand churches and positions in society. Most Protestants also didn’t drink alcohol, as you know very well from your time at Bob Jones. The immigrant Catholics, on the other hand…where were they supposed to meet? Nowhere, except the bars and taverns. Shut those down and you’ve quelled a likely source of disruption of the current and accepted social order!”

“Wow, that makes a lot of sense,” I exclaimed.

Bob Jones, Sr., focused his travels on the heavily populated cities, rural areas, and farms of the Midwest because that was the center of the nation’s population in his day. In the wake of his revivals, where converts hit the “sawdust trail,” indicating they had walked down the sawdust-covered dirt aisles to buy his brand of religion, Protestant churches sprang up to perpetuate Jones’s version of salvation. Jones, however, was from the South, and that’s where he started his school.

As a child, I sat through many programs dedicated to the memory of “the Founder” after his death in the late 1960s. The programs stressed that when Bob Jones, Sr., founded his school in Florida in 1927, he absolutely refused to name the school after himself. Those close to him, however, insisted that the only way a new academic institution would succeed was if it were named after the world-famous evangelist. Bob Jones, in an act of extreme humility, chose not to do what he wanted, which would have been to name the school something else. Instead, he gave in to his advisors who insisted that the school be named “Bob Jones College.”

Bob Jones College quickly outgrew remote Florida and, in 1933, it moved to Cleveland, Tennessee. In the spring of 1947, the Reverend Fred Phelps, armed with his Bob Jones education, began his illustrious career as an evangelist persecuting homosexuals. Using his pulpit in Topeka as a base, Phelps has picketed gay and lesbian events all across the country. His fiery “God hates fags” brand of religious homophobia has even propelled him to protest at funerals of AIDS patients and victims of gay-bashing such as Matthew Shepard.

Personally, I don’t think Reverend Phelps is either homophobic or a minister but is simply the world’s most convincingly misunderstood performance artist. Regardless, Reverend Phelps and I got our start at the same place—Bob Jones.

Eventually Bob Jones College became Bob Jones University and in 1947 moved to its current location in Greenville, South Carolina, fifteen miles from the area where my ancestors had lived for five or more generations. Lots more generations, if you count my Cherokee Indian ancestors. Despite its southern location, the school has a heavily midwestern flavor. A majority of the students trace their roots to places like Michigan, Illinois, Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and Missouri, the same places where Rev. Bob Jones, Sr., evangelized.

Dr. Bob Jones III started the elementary school just before his daughter, Roxanne—who was a couple of years older than I was, and his son, Robert Reynolds Jones IV, who was in my class—started school. So the elementary school was relatively new. Many kids would complain a lot about South Carolina because their parents had brought them from somewhere else to attend Bob Jones. I took it personally. I thought, Well, if you don’t like it, go back to where you came from or shut up and quit complaining about it. The worst insult Momma could give someone was to call them a “Michigan Yankee.” She pronounced it as she had been taught to speak—phonetically, like “Mitch-i-gan.” There were lots of “Mitch-i-gan Yankees” at Bob Jones.

There was only one person I recognized at Bob Jones Elementary School—a girl named Melanie who had been to Tabernacle Kindergarten with me. Melanie was very pretty with large golden-blond curls and her eyes sparkled with energy and enthusiasm as she talked a mile a minute. I was happy to know her and we would become lifelong friends, but I also clung to her presence because we were two of the few in the school who were actually from South Carolina. Not only was Melanie from South Carolina, she was from my hometown in the country, Piedmont. Other than Melanie, I made no friends at first. Everybody else on the campus had their whole life intertwined with Bob Jones. Their families all ate in the same dining hall. They all went to church on the campus. My feelings of being separate and alone intensified. I went to school Monday through Friday, 8:00 a.m. to 2:30, and then fled to the safety of my house.

Although I recognized Melanie from Tabernacle Kindergarten, she and I weren’t formally introduced until the summer when we had to take an entrance exam to get into first grade at Bob Jones Elementary School. The exam was stupid, I thought, because we had just taken it at the end of kindergarten. How could these grownups be so inefficient? I was furious that they were wasting my precious time, so I hurried through the answers so that I could occupy my time with more worthwhile endeavors like looking at the pretty pictures all over the wall of the classroom.

To my horror, the lady giving us the exam approached me. After a year of Mrs. Hand, I expected the worst.

“Young man, we are only on question five; you’re very far ahead of us.”

The old lady looked sweet enough, but I didn’t trust her. I was too frightened to answer. I glanced over at Melanie. She had already turned six and was older than I was; hopefully she would say something.

In a pattern that would continue for the rest of our lives, Melanie called it like it was.

“We already took this test, so we already know all the answers!” she said, slamming her blue plastic pencil onto the small desk.

Today, the Web site for Bob Jones says, “Our school stresses high-quality academics with sound moral and spiritual values based on the Word of God. Our teachers are dedicated to the student’s welfare, and they are skillful in the handling of God’s Word to shape the life and character of each child.”

In Al Franken’s recent bestseller, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, he devotes an entire chapter to a clandestine visit he made to Bob Jones University. I almost fell out of my chair reading it. After the 2000 presidential election and George W. Bush’s ill-fated visit to BJU, most people developed a misguided perception about Bob Jones. Franken gets it right when he writes, “We’d come to Bob Jones expecting to encounter racist, intolerant homophobes. Instead, we found people who were welcoming, friendly, and extremely nice. A little weird, yes. And no doubt homophobic. But well-meaning. Kind of.”

Years later it would be very easy for me to reject the overt, hostile, ugly redneck racism, homophobia, and intolerance demonstrated toward other people by my relatives. However, BJU’s kinder gentler form of bigotry would take years and years of therapy, medication, and moving to the other coast to get it out of my head. Even now I’m afraid it still lurks in the deepest, darkest recesses of my mind.

What stands out most in my mind about Bob Jones is that we were told what we should believe about why we were born, what happened when we died, and everything in between. We were told what we should believe about God. Sure, that’s true of any religious school, but at Bob Jones we were as strict on ourselves and on each other as our teachers and parents. Most of us were really as devoted religiously as the adults. Of course there were a few who were rebellious, but they were the ones you noticed, who stood out. At Bob Jones if you so much uttered a sentence that was not acceptable by the school, you knew that someone was going to report you.

A common defense for the school is, “Well, no one is forced to go there.”

I was five years old, okay, so don’t give me that fucking bullshit. I went where I was told.

My first grade teacher was named Miss Kline and we were the first class of her teaching career. She was perhaps twenty-two years old but she looked even younger. She was quiet and calm and friendly. She didn’t get angry or yell. We all loved her; I know I did. After the terrible year I had in kindergarten, I would do anything for Miss Kline. The last thing I wanted to do was to disappoint her.

First graders did not have desks that opened from the top; rather, they were open in front enabling us to slide books, pens, and papers in and out of them. These desks were welded onto two metal legs on both sides of the desk. From inside the desk, you could feel an opening into the hollow interior of the desk’s legs.

We had to write with large blue plastic pencils that used replaceable lead, which we obtained in small, round containers. During a class lesson, my left hand was inside my desk, sliding my canister of lead along the bottom of the desk’s interior. To my dismay, the canister of lead fit perfectly inside the leg of the desk, and the canister slid all the way down the leg. There was no way I could get it out; the leg of the desk must have been a foot and a half long!

To a first-grader’s mind this was a life-threatening dilemma. My thoughts were only on that canister and what I was going to do to supply my pencil with lead. Worse, I was afraid that losing my lead might be bad enough to cause Miss Kline to give me a paddling. Mrs. Hand would have paddled for a lesser offense.

At the next break, I nervously approached Miss Kline’s desk, explaining that I couldn’t find my lead.

“Does anyone know where Richie’s lead is?” Miss Kline asked the class. I didn’t expect that! I simply wanted her to give me another canister. Of course no one knew where my lead was. It was trapped on the inside of the leg of my desk!

Miss Kline pressed the issue. “Did anyone take Richie’s lead?” Upping the charge to thievery made me feel even worse. Miss Kline ordered everyone to empty the contents of their desk. She walked around and inspected the students, looking for the culprit with two canisters of lead. This search, of course, turned up nothing.

She returned to the front of the classroom and told us to put our heads down on our desk. “Before I come around and begin searching your pockets,” she said in her calm, sweet voice, “I’m going to give you one last chance to confess what you have done. One of you took Richie’s lead. Jesus knows who did it. If you don’t confess that you are the one who took the lead, Jesus will be disappointed in you.”

This hadn’t started out as a lie. I simply wanted my canister of lead back. I kept silent about what happened to it, thinking that the truth would fade away and Miss Kline would simply give me a new piece of lead. Now my silence had turned me into a liar. The entire situation had turned into a complete dilemma. I could tell her the truth, or let her search every student in the class. I raised my head and walked up to her large desk at the front of the room.

Between sobs I managed to say, “I did it.” I still thought she might paddle me, but I could not lie to her any longer and I added, “It’s in my desk.”

“Why did you tell me that you didn’t have it?” She was disappointed in me, I could tell.

“Because…” I cried harder, “because, I got it stuck in my desk.”

She walked over to my desk and knelt down on her hands and knees beside it. I showed her the hole in the bottom of the desk where the leg attached. “It’s in there,” I said. Now, everyone’s eyes were on me.

Miss Kline emptied my desk and turned it upside down. She retrieved the lead and handed it to me. “Don’t lose it again, okay?”

“No, ma’am.”

I was too ashamed to look at my fellow students—I had been a goody-goody. Now they saw me as flawed. A liar. Almost willing to get them in trouble to save myself. A few minutes later, Miss Kline said, “Richie, come with me.”

This was it! Well, at least Miss Kline paddled her students in private. I followed her into the lobby. She seated me on the bench underneath our coat hooks and knelt down in front of me.

“Richie, you lied to me. I’m very disappointed.” She let this sink in before continuing. “Jesus doesn’t like it when we lie to Him.”

I started crying and shook my head.

“Have you ever accepted Jesus Christ into your heart as your Lord and Savior, Richie?” She asked.

So that’s what she wanted to see me in private about! Even though I had done something wrong, Miss Kline was being kind. No, I hadn’t been born again.

Through my tears I smiled. “No, ma’am.”

She asked me if I’d like to be born again and I eagerly agreed. I bowed my head and repeated a little prayer after Miss Kline. I told the Lord I wanted Him to forgive me of all my sins and to come into my heart. I felt so much better, my tears stopped flowing. I smiled.

“Why didn’t you tell me about losing your lead in the first place, Richie, why did you lie to me?”

“Because…I didn’t want you to paddle me,” I said.

Miss Kline looked shocked. “Why would I paddle you?”

“Because Mrs. Hand paddled me last year,” I said.

“I see,” Miss Kline said, not smiling.

I followed her back to the classroom. All eyes were on me, wondering what had been my fate. I didn’t say a word to anyone.

Years later, I learned that Miss Kline had informed my mother about the paddlings I had received at Tabernacle. My mother would tell people that, according to Miss Kline, I was the sweetest child she had ever met and that there was no reason anyone should have paddled me in kindergarten.

Unfortunately, this information was never shared with me, and I was left to think that I had somehow deserved the paddlings in kindergarten. Ever since then I’ve often had vivid thoughts of Mrs. Hand juxtaposed with Miss Kline. Certainly Mrs. Hand instilled emotional damage to her students. But the lessons taught by the gentle-faced Miss Kline were harmful in their own way although she, of course, didn’t mean them to be. It was overwhelming for a five-year-old to think that there is some God or Jesus up there looking down on him and that this Person actually cares whether he lies about the location of his canister of lead.

One of the major differences between Bob Jones University and other schools was the intensity of the religious beliefs and training. Even when you were just starting, religion was ingrained in every class. There was no separation at all.

Most of our textbooks were written by the Bob Jones University Printing Press. Every chapter, even in math, was somehow related to God. Especially science. Evolution, for example. Of course the idea of evolution being a legitimate science was never taught. Instead we were taught everything that was possibly wrong with the theory of evolution. We were made to believe that creation was the only way.

History was all relative to what’s in the Old and New Testaments of the Bible. But even our American history had a very slanted version to it. Psychology also had a very religion-based teaching. I took some psychology classes at Bob Jones and I didn’t learn a damn thing about psychology. Years later, when I started therapy I felt, Oh, this is what psychology is! The unconscious. I never heard of the unconscious. I took three psychology classes at Bob Jones and I never heard of the unconscious.

In the early classes I remember that the Old Testament was our history book for that particular period of history. Since then I’ve done a lot of reading on my own and I’ve found out that every Old Testament King of Israel would have the Old Testament completely rewritten to suit his political need. Yet we use this King James Version as “this is what happened in history” type of thing.

In the second grade I met a classmate who had the same name as the school. His great-grandfather had founded Bob Jones University, his grandfather was the former president and current chancellor, and his father was president. Like everyone else, I was extremely impressed with my classmate, Bob Jones IV—coming from the family of the school’s founder gave him a built-in popularity and an automatic aura of esteem. We were both bright, over-achievers, and I viewed him as something of a rival. Yet, he always seemed to be able to one-up me. My first conversation with him had something to do with the presidents of the United States. Our teacher had posted pictures of all of them on the wall. I pointed to the one I recognized and expressed admiration for this authority figure.

“He’s a liar!” Bobby declared.

How could the president be a liar? To me, the Watergate hearings had been an annoyance preempting Bewitched reruns that summer. I hadn’t understood their significance.

Over twenty years later Bob Jones IV, by then a reporter for a Christian news magazine in Washington, DC, would send me an e-mail about a different president. “Apparently there’s proof that he’s been having sex with a woman staffer in the White House. He’s going down!”

“No way,” I wrote back in defense of my Democratic president. “He’s not that stupid.”

But back in the second grade we didn’t worry so much about things like corruption in politics and sexual affairs. We learned about the U.S. mail system and played post office—the literal kind—with the other second grade class. I did my best, was always studious and polite, managed to be the teacher’s pet, but there was something—that unspoken something—that prevented me from being popular. When Valentine’s Day rolled around, Bobby’s little cardboard box was filled with Valentines from girls in both classes. The teachers rigged it so that every student got at least one Valentine’s Day card. Their system failed me. I didn’t receive a single one.

In third grade I had a shot at getting the “Student of the Month” award. I won it twice. I felt wonderful inside. Now they call that “validation.” Back then I just felt very proud of myself. As an adult, I often looked back at why I overachieved, why this “validation” of my worth was so important to me from such an early age. Maybe it was because there were no Valentines in my box. Maybe it was because my uncle and father referred to me as a sissy. Maybe it was because I couldn’t play ball with the other boys. Probably a combination of all of those things, mixed in with the extremely sensitive nature I was born with. And then there was Momma.

Momma still dominated my life, just as my brother Jimmy and I dominated hers. Because of the logistics of our academic situation, we spent a lot of time in the car with her. She was sacrificing a lot for us; I was always very aware of that.

She was caring and self-sacrificing and I wanted so much to please her. I also liked the way Mom looked. I thought she was beautiful. Yet, I never got the feeling that she believed I was proud of her. It made me sad that she was self-conscious and had somewhat of an inferiority complex. Early on I sensed this vulnerability in her and I tried to help her.

She was uncomfortable, for example, about her weight. When she was a young girl, Grandpa Schrader told her she looked like one of the cows on their dairy farm. That of course left a lasting wound in her. Now, she turned to me to help her control her hunger. After a trip to the grocery store, she’d give me the jar of peanuts she’d bought and tell me to hide them from her. She didn’t want to spoil her diet, but it was comforting for her to know they were in the house. I would hide them. Days later she’d beg me to tell her where I’d hidden them. I’d laugh and tell her no. She’d grow very serious about those peanuts and begin to cry—eventually I’d cave in. I couldn’t stand to see her cry. I’d cry, too.

She expressed her lack of self-worth in other ways. If she perceived one of my classmates’ parents as being smarter than she, or being a better speaker, she would just clam up. She would just stand there without saying a word. I tried harder to show her that I was proud of her, that she meant the world to me.

I also sensed that, if my mother didn’t feel pride in her own accomplishments, she wanted to experience it through me. So she always wanted me to be at my best. My mother wasn’t the type of person who pushed me overtly. But she knew how to get her way by being very passive-aggressive. In that sense she pushed very hard. I knew what she wanted and I knew if she didn’t get what she wanted she was going to pout. To keep her from pouting I would try to keep her content because if she was happy I was happy.

Maybe because she didn’t think much of herself, I tried all the more to allow her to take pride in my good qualities. I liked to hear my mom tell other people what a fine student I was. Her approval made me feel wonderful. As long as I got high grades she could brag about me, and that made me content.

I started doing things specifically to please her.

For example, I had never given much thought to how I wanted to wear my hair. At the time, I never really considered how I wanted to look at all. When I was a kid I had big puffy hair, really thick. It was the seventies and big hair was in, even on little boys. My mom liked my thick, wavy hair. As a result, I began parting it, brushing it, styling it in a way I knew pleased her. She was always complimenting me on my hair and pointing it out to other people: “Look, isn’t his hair just beautiful.” And she wonders why I turned gay.

But when a mother and son are as close as we were, complications are bound to come up. With us, they started relatively early.

Because we were so close, she felt comfortable asking me to help her in the kitchen. I wouldn’t do it because even I realized that, in the South at least, that was considered woman’s work. She wanted me to cook or clean up and I refused because it was starting to cross the line into overtly doing what a woman does. For once I stood my ground and would just let her pout. At some point, she succeeded in making me do the dishes. Okay. I would do the dishes but I would never help her cook. Eventually she quit pouting about it because she came to realize it was something I just wasn’t going to do. Now, of course, I wish I knew how to cook.

There was an unspoken, maybe even an unacknowledged, burden of having to fill too many needs in my mother’s life. Needs that no one else in the family seemed to be able to meet.

Her relationship was strikingly different with me than it was with my father or brother. She would confide things in me. She would tell me things, especially about her sister Lydia, how she drove her crazy. She would tell me about her mother, about how her mother overlooked her and favored her brother. I was her confidante about a lot of things.

She was easily upset and needy. My dad didn’t show emotion and my mom wanted to know how people felt. She wanted people to express themselves, so she could express herself, and I was the only one who did that. I also did almost everything I could to ensure she was happy. My dad wanted her to be happy, too, but he didn’t go to the lengths I went to to make sure it happened.

She probably trusted me more to be sensitive and to understand her fears. She herself was very sensitive. She knew I was very sympathetic. Jimmy didn’t seem to be sensitive to anything. Looking back I think he was, but I think he dealt with it in a very different way. He dealt with it by acting out; instead of crying he would fight. He would rebel. Jimmy deliberately antagonized her.

My brother was more typically a “boy.” That’s how our parents differentiated between us. “Jimmy’s definitely ‘boy.’” Well, what does that mean about me? I was left to wonder. “Richie is studious and smart and plays the piano. But Jimmy’s definitely boyish.”

Everyone started telling me how much I reminded them of my mother. I took after her side of the family and looked like her. The similarities weren’t just in how we looked, though. I was starting to develop a very strong, controlling side of my own. And because I couldn’t exhibit that control in my relationship with my mother, I took it out on poor Jimmy. The little guy essentially had two mothers, two very controlling, domineering mothers! No wonder he was so desperate to stake out his own turf.

Jimmy and I slept together in an old queen-sized bed made of wood that was painted white. It had a fancy design carved into the headboard. Before I’d go to sleep I would pick my nose and put the boogers on the back of this headboard. When I was eight, our parents bought us a nice new set of bedroom furniture with bunk beds. We thought that was really cool.

We fought a lot, mainly because Jimmy wouldn’t do what I would tell him to. This was probably normal brother stuff at this age, although sometimes it might have gotten out of hand. On one summer evening, we were sitting outside at our grandparents’ house next door with our aunt and uncles and cousins, eating watermelon and waiting on someone to make some homemade ice cream.

I was rolling in the grass about halfway down the hill. Jimmy was seated on the back steps of the house with Grandpa Merritt, holding medium-sized set of hedge trimmers. All I can plead now is temporary insanity, but I decided to dare my younger brother.

“Hey, Jimmy! I dare you to throw those at me. I bet you won’t do it.” He was only four years old. How far could he throw them?

In a nanosecond, all I saw was a pair of hedge trimmers flying through the air in my direction. I froze as they hit the ground, but bounced up, continuing their assault. I felt an intense pain course through my body as the metal blade hit my upper lip. I screamed and started running. I ran around to the front of our grandparents’ house, across the front of our house and back to the rear of our own house. I was moaning and wailing and blood was spurting out of my face. I thought I was going to die.

Momma came running out of the house to tend to me and Daddy gave Jimmy a pretty fierce spanking. Luckily, the cut wasn’t that bad, although I have a scar above my upper lip today. At the time we were angry with Jimmy, but now the only remark anyone makes is, “Boy, you sure were stupid to dare Jimmy to do something like that!”

Another time I hit him in the face with a horseshoe and he hit me in the back with a brick. Jimmy shot one of our cousins with a BB gun. Twice before he was even four years old he managed to put our dad’s Falcon into neutral, release the emergency brake, and roll the car down the hill toward the river. Both times the car stopped in the garden before going further down the hill into the water.

In our mother’s eyes, we were about as opposite as we could be. We both loved her we just demonstrated it different ways. I showed mine by wanting to please her most of the time. Sometimes, though, the resentment I felt for our mutual reliance on each other would come to the surface. The smarter I got, the dumber she seemed. Her grammar wasn’t very good and her accent was thick. At some point, our roles reversed and I started correcting her grammar. This hurt her. And yet, I’d do it anyway.

I’m sure Momma had a lot of pent-up rage. Animals were never allowed inside the house. She had grown up on a dairy farm and Momma had milked cows at 4:30 a.m. and gathered eggs from underneath the chickens, sticking her little hands in chicken shit every morning of her childhood. For a woman who spent her childhood on a farm, the thought of letting a filthy animal—and to her all animals were filthy—into the house was absurd. Only crazy city folks and white trash allowed such things.

We had outdoor cats as pets. We spent hard-earned money on cat food. My job every night was to fill the cat food bowl and set it outside for the cat. Momma noticed the cat getting skinny but saw that I was doing my duty every night. After careful surveillance, she learned the cause.

A stray dog was sneaking onto our property and eating the cat’s food. In her mind she also thought the beast also might be disease-ridden and bite one of her children. She did what she felt necessary. She grabbed a shotgun and shot the dog. The image of my hypersensitive Momma firing a gun at a defenseless animal startled me and stayed with me. Today, when I tell this story, my friends stare at me in disbelief. I know it seems shocking and cruel. I’ve come to look at it this way: my mother didn’t have control of the people in her life. She didn’t have control over the still-limited role women were allowed to play in the South. She didn’t have control of her appetite. This was a way of her exercising some power.

I like to think she only shot at the dog. I don’t know if she actually hit the dog or not. I never saw the dog again, but maybe it had learned its lesson and stayed away from the Merritt’s from then on. It did show a side of my mother that she couldn’t often express. When she absolutely felt the need to get her way, when something was intruding on the way she felt her life should be going, when she was up against the wall, she’d find a way of dealing with it. I learned my lesson.

Don’t fuck with Momma.

I was nine when I found out I would be getting a baby brother or sister. Momma and Daddy had always wanted a daughter. I had the feeling that they had wanted Jimmy to be a girl. Momma’s fascination with my hair undoubtedly stemmed from her desire for a daughter whom she could teach how to style her hair. So when Momma became pregnant again—they didn’t have sonograms then—they didn’t know for sure it would be a girl. However, we all had reasons why we thought it was going to be a girl. My mom was the same age that her mother was when she gave birth to her so it was just natural that it would be a girl. So said the logic of a nine-year-old.

Momma carried the baby full term but it died just before or during delivery. They named the dead infant Elizabeth. We had a funeral for Elizabeth and buried her in a little casket at the cemetery. Momma and Daddy had their own names and dates of birth affixed to the same grave plot. There was a blank spot for the other dates.

We all felt an incredible sense of loss. This was something the whole family had been looking forward to. After the baby was stillborn, especially when it was a girl, it was all that much more of God twisting the dagger and thrusting it into their hearts. It was devastating. She had been God’s little gift to us and He took her away and we didn’t understand why. She was going to make our family complete. I know in my mind I was planning all the things I was going to do with her over the years. I was going to be her big brother. I was going to take her to her piano recitals. Just encourage her. All the things I hadn’t done with Jimmy.

I had hoped that a new member in the family would help relieve some of the feelings of loneliness I had. These feelings had grown more intense as I had moved up in grade school, because I still hadn’t been able to make friends. Jimmy and I had such different interests and completely incongruent personalities that I’m not sure either of us had begun to feel the mythic “brotherly connection” that people talk about. I read books; Jimmy tinkered with motors for the go-cart and minibikes. I wasn’t a complete sissy—I still enjoyed riding these things, I was just clueless about how they worked.

Many nights before I would drift off to sleep, I would ask God to give me one really close friend. A boy who liked to do the same things I did—watch movies like The Sound of Music and West Side Story and read the same books—not play ball or fight. I’d also pray for magic powers like Samantha on Bewitched. That way, if God forgot to give me anything I wanted, I could just get it on my own.

A baby sister would have relieved those lonely feelings. By the time she started school, I would have my driver’s license and could take her to school and walk her inside and introduce her to the same teachers I had had nine years earlier. I would let her in on all the secrets that no one told you about at first but that you had to waste so much time figuring out. Things like why a candy bar that a sign said costs thirty cents would really cost thirty-two cents. Stuff like that. Jimmy never listened to me and I began to think he really didn’t like me all that much; Elizabeth would have clung to every word I said and she would have adored me.

It’s a traumatic event in any woman’s life to carry a baby to full term and then lose it. Momma cried a lot and, for once, there was nothing I could do to take the pain away. That crushed me. The death crushed me and then her anguish crushed me again. Our relationship had been about me making her happy before Elizabeth’s death; after that I wanted more than anything to make up for the loss.

One of the things that came out early in the therapy I would undergo years later was, “Where was your dad at this time? Why isn’t your mom getting this support and encouragement from your dad?” I don’t know. I never thought that she wasn’t getting emotional assistance from him, but looking back she wasn’t. At least not that I could see. By emotional assistance I mean, ordinarily a man and wife fill each other’s needs and my dad never met my mother’s emotional needs. Or maybe she just had too many for any one person to meet. I should know; my dad always said I was like my mother’s twin brother.

In defense of my father, I think lot of times a “true man” in the South doesn’t show his emotions so much. That might be one of the reasons why my mother was closer to me. I was more sensitive and I showed my feelings for her more. That’s why she confided in me; she told me things that my father wouldn’t have related to, or cared about, or have been sensitive to.

Daddy blamed God for Elizabeth’s death and became sullen and even quieter than ever. No one talked to anyone very much anymore. The loss had overwhelmed our little family. We were never the same after that.

The older I got, the more I learned about Momma’s attitudes about masculinity. I went with her to get her hair done. My aunt had recommended one of the men in her hair stylist class as the best hairdresser she’d ever met. Momma’s hair looked great but she was visibly disturbed about something. “I just couldn’t stand for that sissified Paul to touch my hair!” she exclaimed.

Twenty years later when I was at sea off the coast of Somalia and I still wasn’t out to her or my dad, in one of her letters to me she wrote, “I watched Philadelphia last night by myself. It was a very moving movie and I did some crying. I still say AIDS is a behavior problem thus there is a way of avoiding that disease. Denzel Washington and Tom Hanks did some great acting. The whole movie was done good. But, those people make me sick to my stomach. I have to do a lots of talking to me & the Lord about my attitude toward them. But they are very nauseating.”

Reading her letter then made me feel very icy and remote at first, like I was reading a book about someone else. Then I grew angry and cried alone for a few hours. It was my own fault. I hadn’t come out to her. I couldn’t blame her for hating me; she didn’t know that I was one of the people that she found so nauseating.

No, I was mad at her. I had planned to be with her for her fiftieth birthday after my return from being at sea. Those plans would entail a lot of complicated maneuverings, but I was willing to do that for her. Fuck that, I thought. If I made her nauseous, she could turn fifty without me.

After Elizabeth’s death, I turned to elementary school as a means of escape. My fourth grade teacher had taken a liking to me. I wasn’t imagining it. She moved my desk next to hers and even when she’d switch everyone else’s desks around, she’d leave mine right beside her own. I didn’t think there was anything wrong with this arrangement, especially after Momma’s miscarriage. My teacher comforted me and made my lunches for me for several days. The other kids called me “teacher’s pet.” Looking back, they were right. My relationship with her was a little weird, beyond student and teacher. She wanted a good son of her own and that was a role I felt most comfortable in.

My identity was being formed by now. In the third grade I had been exceptionally proud of my status as “Student of the Month.” The following year I liked being the “teacher’s pet.” In the fifth grade, I was in the top of my class. The top three in my class included: My friend from kindergarten, Melanie Runyan; the son of the president of the university, Bobby Jones IV, who was becoming my archrival; and me. My specialty was spelling. I won most of the spelling bees. When I didn’t, I’d automatically cry. I was ashamed of crying and I was ashamed of losing. So I learned the best way to avoid those shameful feelings was to win. At the end of the fifth grade I won the schoolwide spelling bee.

My winning word—“I-g-n-o-r-a-n-t.”

At the end of the sixth grade I was the odds-on favorite to win the schoolwide spelling bee again. I got cocky. I won the preliminary rounds from my class, but in front of the entire school, I made a complete idiot of myself.

My losing word—“N-e-c-e-c-a-r-i-l-l-y.” Even today I have to look it up.

One reason that I was such a good speller was that, in my spare time, when I wasn’t practicing the piano, I was reading books. My teacher turned everything into a contest, including spelling and reading. Mrs. Langston was my favorite teacher of all time and I was fortunate to have her in both the fifth and sixth grades. Before those years, the only things that seemed to matter to kids competitively were sports and popularity and I royally sucked at both. Now, however, I learned that I could be a winner in the things that were important to me. I won the fifth grade reading contest hands down and narrowly lost in the sixth grade to the new student, Leah Woods. Although Leah was a friend, I cursed her and her offspring for four generations.

Unfortunately, excelling in academics did not exempt me from Mrs. Langston’s desire that I be a well-rounded student. She was in her late twenties, attractive and in good shape herself, and she believed that her students should also be mentally, physically, and spiritually fit. In addition to our regular recess and gym time, occasionally she took us outside on nice days for games that she directed.

I dreaded these days. Once again I was the lonely kid on the playground. One time she spotted me lurking along the edge of the field, counting the minutes until we could go back inside and begin learning useful stuff again.

“Richie!” she shouted sternly in my direction. “All the boys are supposed to be playing soccer. Get over here now!” She pointed to a spot where she actually expected me to play a position on a team.

Almost frozen with fright, I slowly carried myself to my assigned location next to her. I could hear an audible groan from my “teammates.” I was angry with her. How could she, who I adored so much, be doing this me? This was worse than anything Mrs. Hand had ever done!

“Now, you can’t leave the field until you’ve kicked the ball at least three times!”

THREE TIMES?! Had the woman lost her mind? I looked around and saw that my nearest opponents were none other than Chuck Suthers and Gerald Porter, two of the best soccer players in the class. I could see their bared fangs through their wicked smiles and I could have sworn they were salivating. I was toast. The only reason I didn’t cry on the spot was because the intense terror had dried out my tear ducts.

The game resumed and as luck would have it the ball slowly rolled my way. To my complete shock, instinctively I moved my leg and foot and kicked the ball between a stunned Chuck and Gerald to an open teammate about fifteen feet away. He was able to run with it and put it in the goal.

Everyone cheered and gave me high-fives and patted me on the back. This felt awesome! If this is what it felt like to be the hero, I could get used to this.

“Very good, Richie!” exclaimed Mrs. Langston. “See, you can do it! Now just two more times and you can go back inside…unless you decide you want to stay.” Her smile was warm and genuine.

Of course I wanted to stay! Guys were grinning at me and nodding their heads and I was starting to feel…well, accepted. Not all the guys were happy, though. Chuck and Gerald were glaring and pacing back and forth like lions ready to pounce.

Mrs. Langston blew the whistle to restart the game and I was determined that the same thing would happen. My teammate to the left shouted, “Mine! Mine!” but I was oblivious to his communication. I saw the ball and raced toward it. I wanted that feeling again, and I was going to…

I kicked the ball…but to my horror, it went the wrong way! I had intercepted the ball from my own teammate and had kicked it directly into the feet of Gerald. He dribbled in place a bit and with a swift kick, passed it cleanly to Chuck, who scored a goal.

Petrified, I stared at Mrs. Langston. She had done this to me. Now I was going to get killed. My teammates, who had been cheering my name moments before now exuded more hatred than I had ever felt directed my way. The other team laughed but I knew no one would dare verbally abuse me with Mrs. Langston standing so close by. As angry as I was at her, she was the only thing protecting me from getting my skinny ass kicked at this moment. I looked at her, my eyes pleading for mercy.

“Okay,” she said, resigning herself to the hopelessness of my situation, “you can go back inside now if you want.”

With lightning speed, I darted inside the building. I went to the boys’ bathroom and cried my eyes out. I tried to remember that good feeling and wondered what I could do to get it back. I wanted the boys to admire me again. If only there were something I could do, something that I could be good at, that would make them like me. But right now, I couldn’t think of anything.