America, You Sexy Bitch (31 page)

The one time that really mattered, that left an everlasting painful mark on my and my family’s lives, though, was during the 2000 presidential race, when Karl Rove started an underground whisper campaign about my father, alleging that Bridget was “his illegitimate black love child.” Yes, sick, fucked up, a disgusting and embarrassing scar that will forever remain on presidential politics and South Carolina history. I was furious, upset, and heartbroken when it happened, and even now if I think about it, it makes me want to vomit. Karl Rove is a pathetic excuse for a human being and has never publicly apologized for his cowardice and culpability for what was said about my little sister in South Carolina during the 2000 race. So am I aware of and have I had experiences with racism and race baiting? Yes, I can honestly say that I have. That incident will forever be a part of my family’s narrative and my little sister’s life. It is a permanent reminder to me about the dark and evil side
that politics can sometimes have and that, unfortunately, our country can sometimes feed into.

 

Michael:
Memphis sports a modest strip of bars and restaurants running about five blocks along Beale Street. It’s got a festive look, lots of neon signs, and wailing harmonicas blasting from bars, but the area is pretty dead. One of the bars is offering walk-up Jell-O shots, so I order one for everybody. Stephie doesn’t want hers so I take it. I’ve never had a Jell-O shot before because it seemed like something only sorority girls did, but I knock mine back and then gulp Stephie’s. I think about ordering a third but Meghan seems to think I’ll collapse.

“That’s some serious shit,” she warns me, and I think I detect in her tone the barest trace of awe. Yes, friends, I double-fisted strawberry Jell-O shots because that’s the kind of hard-living man I am.

Across the street, a blues band is playing a set outside. It’s not a formal concert space, just a concrete area between two bars. The audience comes and goes and is fifty-fifty white tourists and black locals. The two groups self-segregate, with the whites closer to the sidewalk, the blacks closer to the band. I don’t know if they’re aware that they’re doing it; it just sort of happens like that, the way salad dressing separates if left alone too long.

There are a lot of Republicans, and at least one prominent Democrat (Geraldine Ferraro), who argued during the 2008 election that the primary reason Obama was gaining so much traction was because of his race. It was a strange argument to make: that a black man was succeeding in his quest for the presidency precisely
because
of his race and not in spite of it. Furthermore, it’s an argument I happen to agree with.

I don’t think Barack Obama, freshman senator from Illinois, two years removed from being a state representative, would have been elected to the presidency if he were not a black man. A similarly qualified white man would not have gotten the nomination. My question: is that a bad thing? Americans wanted so much to put our troubled racial history behind us that we were willing to hand
the presidency of the United States to a guy who, no matter how smart and—I’m going to say it, ARTICULATE—was probably not ready for the job.

That said, I don’t think we would have elected him if we did not feel him capable, or had he not spoken to our deepest desires about who we wanted to become as a nation and how we wanted to portray ourselves to the world after eight years of a Brooks Brothers cowboy in the Oval Office.

For the record, I voted for Obama both in the general election and the primaries, and I would be lying if I said my vote didn’t have anything to do with race. It did. Electing Barack Obama was an important step for the country, an affirmation of our hope (and change) for ourselves. It was something we needed to do, and I’m glad we did it even when he acts like a total wuss.

Meghan has wandered off by herself so she’s missing the band, who are great. The singer is one of those classic bluesmen, growling and shouting and mopping his head with a white rag. The band behind him churns away, the white people keep time vertically, the black people horizontally, swaying instead of bopping. It’s a small thing, I guess, but I can’t help but I notice. When the band passes the hat I put in ten bucks, then Stephie and I wander off to meet Meghan for dinner. (I would like to point out that Stephie doesn’t put any money in the hat because she is obviously a racist.)

 

Meghan:
Downtown Memphis or “Beale Street” is kind of like a weird hybrid of Bourbon Street in New Orleans and the Broadway strip in Nashville, except smaller and with blues bars instead of country bars. We have been doing our fair share of drinking on the trip, or more accurately, I have been doing a fair share of the drinking on the trip, and eating pretty much total crap the entire time. The best it seems to get is pulled-pork BBQ and pretzels, so I am starting to feel really bloated. That combined with the heat, and I don’t know how I am going to brave another night hitting the Jack Daniels. Michael kicks off the evening by buying Jell-O shots, and slamming two.

“You should be careful they aren’t filled with Everclear, because that stuff will knock you on your ass,” I sort of half-yell at Michael as we slowly start walking away from the outdoor stand selling the shots.

“They aren’t filled with Everclear,” Michael answers without even turning around, then looking at me dismissively. I secretly hope they are, as I have yet to see Michael really wasted, and I’m getting sick of him and Stephie just watching me get tipsy by myself. It’s starting to make me feel self-conscious, and besides, it isn’t that fun to get my buzz on alone.

As we make our way farther and farther down Beale Street, we stop to watch a blues band playing on a small bandstand in an open concrete area. We are not the only tourists there; in fact, there are quite a few standing around listening to the music, bobbing their heads, and sort of half dancing. The band is really good. They display the sort of raw, entrancing talent that may be common to places like Memphis, but a rarity everywhere else. The three of us stand around, also half dancing, clapping a little, and listening to the music.

At some point Michael wanders off to the other end of the area and dances by himself, completely fixated on the lead singer of the band. I wonder what is going through Michael’s mind. Don’t get me wrong, the lead singer is extremely talented, but Michael looks so fixated, I wonder if he’s never seen a live blues musician before. This is the thing about Michael: traveling with him is kind of like traveling with a kid at Disneyland who wanders off if you don’t watch him or keep him entertained. He complains about me texting too much, but most of the time I’m just killing time, waiting for him to wander back around to find me. He also lacks a little bit of chivalry. I am incredibly spoiled; my father, my brothers, my grandfather, ex-boyfriends, agents, friends, friends’ boyfriends, they are all pretty much chivalrous men. I love men who treat me like a lady: opening doors, ordering drinks, offering me an arm when I’m wearing high heels. Michael isn’t really like that. It’s neither here nor there, but I have a tendency to get very nervous in
large crowds. I chalk it up to spending an entire childhood at political rallies and encountering a few too many crazy people at them. When Michael wanders, my anxiety spikes, especially if we’re someplace I’ve never been. I’m sure he doesn’t do it on purpose, but it drives me absolutely crazy. I’m not saying I need looking after like a child, but if I’m going to go on the road with a full-grown man, I prefer he be a little more considerate of the two ladies traveling with him.

So while we’re watching the band, I am getting overheated and standing alone to the side, and I tell Stephie I’m going to go find us dinner. I wander back up the Memphis strip—neon signs for different blues bars, different restaurants, some of them looking extremely cheesy in a Señor Frog’s sort of way.

We end up at a restaurant next to BB King’s bar. I am happy to be inside, out of the humidity. I am happy that a beefsteak tomato salad is on the menu, and I am happy that I’m in Memphis with Stephie and Michael, right at this moment. As much as Michael drives me crazy at times, wandering off, saying things that I sometimes perceive to be insensitive, we have all definitely reached a genuine comfort level with each other. Stephie never bugs me. She is an anomaly among human beings: sweet, understanding, open, and with a dark, dirty sense of humor underneath that innocent layer. Stephie is salt of the earth, and she is invited to anything I ever do or anywhere I ever go for the rest of my life.

I order an extremely dirty martini with blue-cheese-stuffed olives, the tomato salad, and a big, fat New York strip steak. Michael finally asks a question that I can tell he has been curious about for a while.

“What exactly does your family do?” he asks. “I mean, like, how do you guys make the bulk of your income?” Translation: Meghan, I’ve been to your house, your family has a lot of dough. Where does it come from? I almost spit out my Grey Goose on him, look up, and sort of half sing, “Lord have mercy, ahhh! Okay. Okay.”

Whatever else is going on in America, one cannot deny that the demagoguing of success and wealth has been a somewhat more recent
trend. I am not embarrassed by the success my family, and my grandfather in particular, built. I think it’s incredible and I am very proud of all the accomplishments in my family. I think my late grandfather Jim Hensley is exactly what the American Dream is all about. He started out as a bellman in Phoenix, Arizona, and went on to build an incredibly successful and lucrative beer distributorship. I am proud of all of that and painfully, painfully aware of all the opportunities I have been handed because of his hard work, and the hard work and success of my mother and father. I only have to wake up and read my Twitter feed every morning if I want to be told that I’m a spoiled rich bitch who has been handed everything. My hope is that as Americans we stop judging and ridiculing those who have achieved great success, especially through hard work and perseverance.

After I explain my grandfather’s business to Michael, he moves along quite quickly, wanting me to tell him a bad relationship or dating story. That has become a weird game with the three of us, me sharing my rocky and colorful past relationship stories, which always make everyone laugh, and then Stephie and I make fun of Michael for getting married as a teenager.

 

Michael:
Our stay at the Heartbreak Hotel that night is uneventful. Thank goodness they do not pipe Elvis music into the rooms. Mine is bland and featureless, except for the black-and-white photo of midcareer King wailing into a microphone. Something about the photo is itching at me. The way his face is scrunched up, the flamboyant way he splays his hand, the intensity with which he’s singing—all of it reminds me of somebody, but it takes me a minute to figure out who. Then it hits me: the singer from the band we saw on the street. Elvis looks just like that guy, plus a rhinestone-studded jumpsuit.

Whether it was cultural pilferage or just the natural and inevitable next step in America’s evolution, Elvis was the first white guy to transport black music fully into the mainstream. He was James Dean and Little Richard and Eminem all rolled into one, the
first true white rock ‘n’ roll rebel. I bet white America would have eventually embraced rock ‘n’ roll even without him, but Elvis introduced black and white America to each other in a new way, embodying all of America’s cross currents of race and sex, piousness and excess. He was a contrarian even to himself, a drug addict who volunteered to become an “Agent at Large” for Nixon’s war on drugs. He was, in the end, the perfect expression of the American Dream, self-made, brilliant but flawed. All the similarities between Elvis and Bill Clinton I thought about back in Little Rock come bubbling back at me, but I also think you could draw a (less obvious) line from Elvis to Obama.

Just as Elvis was probably inevitable, so was Obama. Eventually somebody other than a white guy was going to be elected president. It might have happened earlier if Colin Powell had decided to run in 2000, but he didn’t, so the job fell to Obama. Both Elvis and Obama represent the collision of cultures, which is how America has always marked its own progress, from 1492 on. In Elvis’s case, the collision was musical, in Obama’s case biological. Both men were charismatic, inspirational figures who energized America and, then, the world. Both won Nobel Peace Prizes (except Elvis). Both were scorned and both did a lot to earn that scorn; hopefully Obama never makes any movies like
Blue Hawaii.

It scares me that there aren’t more Obamas in Congress. Why doesn’t our legislative branch represent more of who we are as a nation? Congress is something like 85 percent white. As I write this, there are only two African American Republican congressmen. Before that, an entire decade went by when there were none. If the stereotypical image of Republicans is as smug, old white guys it’s because, for the most part, they are. Democrats are better on this front. They’ve got their fair share of smug old white guys too, but they’ve also got some smug black guys, ladies, and Latinos. They’ve got an entire smug rainbow.

A fair question would be to ask if it matters. Should congressmen physically resemble their constituents? What about financially? Does that affect their ability to govern fairly? Although I have no
empirical data to support my conclusion, the answer is yes. I take that back. The actual answer is,
fuck
yes. If we really have government “of the people, by the people, for the people,” then that’s what it should be. Not “of the people, by some of the people, for the people.” Our government should be as diverse as its citizenry. Which is why I would like to be the first to nominate my North Little Rock transsexual friend, Ursula, to run for Congress.

I turn off the light and think that our trip to Graceland in the morning is bound to disappoint. People expect the King to live in a castle, but by all accounts Graceland is architecturally unexceptional, a grand but normal house built on a human scale. Personally, I’m kind of excited to tour the grounds and house, to see the actual toilet where Elvis took his final, drugged-out dump.