Mississippi Sissy (26 page)

I don't remember much about being eleven, but I do recall Mrs. Thompson's fifth-grade class. For a Mississippi elementary school teacher, she possessed a sophisticated edge. Her full mouth was never without its dark smear of deep red lipstick. During her many pop quizzes, she'd sit at her desk waiting for us to finish, eyeing us all to make sure we didn't cheat, and take out her tube of lipstick and smear a fresh bit of color on her mouth. Next, she'd pull a fresh Kleenex out the box she always kept in her top drawer and blot her lips on it, her trash can full of discarded tissues precisely stained with the imprinted outline of her mouth. The luxuriant flair of her nostrils made her nose seem even flatter and she wore her hair in a chignon. There was a beauty mark on her cheek like the one I admired on the right cheek of
Gunsmoke's
Miss Kitty, played by Amanda Blake. Mrs. Thompson was my own Amanda Blake. She liked to wear tight belted dresses to show off her tall lithe figure and she was infamous among the students
for making us all memorize the poems “Winken, Blinken, and Nod” and “Annabel Lee” as well as all the bones of the body.

Mrs. Thompson was a baseball fanatic and got Miss Ishee's approval to suspend all her classes when the World Series was on. That year's first game between the St. Louis Cardinals and Mrs. Thompson's favorite team, the Boston Red Sox, was on a Wednesday afternoon and my pulse started racing when she and Miss Ishee wheeled in a television so we could watch it. Mrs. Thompson had told us that the Red Sox had finished ninth in their division the year before and it was “a bless-ed miracle” that they were in the World Series, that they hadn't won their division that year till the final day of the season, and that they hadn't won a pennant race since 1946. As much as I loved Mrs. Thompson, I had been rooting for the Cardinals since the December before, when the Yankees had traded Roger Maris to them. I was, in honor of my dead father, a Maris man, and when Maris got two big hits in that first game I screamed louder than anybody else in the room. Miss Ishee had walked back down the hall at game time to stand in the doorway and watch a few innings with us. When I screamed at Maris's hits she told me each time to pipe down. “That's right,” said Mrs. Thompson. “You keep that up, I'm gonna give you an F on your test Friday no matter how many bones you get right on that mimeographed skeleton. Bob Gibson keeps up this kind of pitchin' I've a good mind to break some bones in his leg myself all over again. Come on, Yaz!” she shouted at the image of Carl Yastrzemski striding to the plate and smoothed her chignon in anticipation of a Red Sox hit. Miss Ishee couldn't take her eyes off her.

I played a little baseball on a Little League team, believe it or not, peer pressure proving less a prod than that of the pneumatic paternal kind. The team was sponsored by Tower Loan Association and our colors were maroon and gray. Though I was still kidded about being a sissy by my meaner teammates, I had also inherited an innate athletic ability from my father. A speed demon, I could run faster around the
bases than any of the other kids my age. My grounding needed some improvement and I had to concentrate in order not to throw like a girl, but I still started every game at first base. The manager of the local Tower Loan company was a big hale-and-hearty fellow named James Moore, who volunteered to coach our team. His wife Yvette taught Special Education for those too academically slow to be put in regular classes at the elementary school. I hit a home run once, way over center field where the cars were parked between the Little League field and the one used by the girls for their softball games. The high school football coach, Ken Bramlett, who was calling the game, announced over the loud speaker that I had hit a “humdinger” as the crowd began to cheer in astonishment that I of all people had done such a thing. It was the first time I felt like a real boy, when Dave Marler's fast ball connected with the middle of the fattest part of the end of my bat, my hands completely relaxing, letting go of the wood where I had slightly choked up on the handle after they had felt no sting at all at the hit, only the perfection of the ball landing against the bat's sweetest spot. As I rounded second base, I thought of my father only a few years earlier being hit by that throw as he slid into second at Battlefield Park, and that white plastic neck brace he subsequently had to wear, the secret cool firmness of it against my legs when he told me to let go then “run like hell for home,” like the way I was running at that very moment to that plate with the same name where my teammates waited. I loved hitting that home run as much as I loved carrying around that awful secret my father and I shared. Both made me feel powerful in ways I could not quite understand. My amazed teammates swarmed around me at home plate. I looked over at Coach Moore, expecting his approval, wanting to see his own look of amazement on his jowly face. But he was still looking out beyond center field, his eyes focused on that spot of the fence over which my ball had sailed, yet also, seemingly, seeing something else farther away, something none of the rest of us could see. He
turned and looked into my eyes and what I saw was not amazement at all. A thought passed through me at that very moment, a slight shiver going through me—whether at the thought or the continued touching of my body by my swarming teammates, I'm not quite sure—but the shiver is as much a part of the memory as the perfect feel of that bat in my hand when I hit the pitch. The thought was the same one I had when another coach had looked into my eyes in that lounge at the Pelahatchie gym, a lounge that reeked of cold fried chicken and aftershave and my puked-up bits of popcorn. He
is sadder than I am,
I thought once more. After the game, Coach Moore bought me a congratulatory vanilla milkshake at the Tasty Freeze. He shook my hand. “Your daddy would be proud of what you done today, boy,” he said. Several Fridays later he was found outside of town behind a bulldozed mound of earth at a construction site, a hunting rifle beside his body. He had been missing for several days. “Shot hisself in the chest. Must have pulled that trigger with a toe. They found him with one shoe off,” said Pop, describing what had happened without explaining it.

________________

By the time I reached sixth grade, my nickname among my male classmates was “BD” for “Big Dick.” I was bigger than many of the boys around me and they had noticed how hair had begun to sprout under my arms and on my legs. When I pulled out my penis in the bathroom on the elementary school's sixth-grade wing, many of the boys looked over my shoulder to get a look. I only liked it, however, when Ricky Crimm dared Bobby Thompson to see it for himself, for I longed to look at Bobby's dick no matter what its size but could not summon the courage it would take to do such a thing.

Yet I had by that school year developed enough sassy sissy smarts (perhaps my budding confidence came from that nickname bestowed upon me) not only to convince my teacher, Mrs. Fikes, to let me write
about
Valley of the Dolls
for my second-semester book report, but also to let me try and direct my class in my own abridged version of the play
A Man for All Seasons,
a film version of which had won the Oscar for Best Picture the year before but had only recently been shown at a Saturday matinee at the Town Theatre in Forest. I had trouble following the story of Sir Thomas More's fight with Henry VIII, but reveled in the pageantry and accents and fierce debates that roiled the characters' lives, as well as the love they had for the power of their well-spoken words. Paul Scofield, who starred as More and won an Oscar of his own, fascinated me with his bemused demeanor, a more dignified Uncle Benny without the overalls but with that same cast to his eyes—knowing, wary, always lying in wait. I sat through the movie twice and made sure to buy a paperback copy of Robert Bolt's play when I was visiting Aunt Gladys in Jackson over the next weekend. I got as far as casting the play—writing the names of my classmates next to their character's names on the blackboard—but rehearsals fell apart when most of the cast preferred recess to rehearsing and complained that they could not comprehend what they had to read aloud. Some of their parents complained also when it became clear to them that Sir Thomas More was not a Baptist, a Methodist, or a Presbyterian but a Catholic, something slightly not Christian enough in those parts. There was a tiny local Catholic church in Forest but it was peopled with a Lebanese clan from the Delta who ran the town's department store, Thomas Great M, and the upper-level management of the Sunbeam plant, men and their families who had immigrated from up north. Once again, Miss Ishee had to step in and run interference for me when parents began to call her up about my latest endeavor.

I think Mrs. Fikes's allowing me to write that book report about
Valley of the Dolls
had a lot to do with how obviously disappointed I was at having to cancel my plans for
A Man for All Seasons.
“I liked
The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!
better anyway,” she said, naming a film that had lost out to A Man
for All Seasons
at the Oscars.
“But I am glad that
Who's Afraid of That Big Bad Virginia Woolf
one lost. I certainly didn't drive all the way to Jackson to see Elizabeth Taylor look like that,” she said. “And why must Hollywood always take the Lord's name in vain?” she asked, reminding me of those earlier years when she had also been my Sunday-school teacher, at Trinity Methodist. Trinity, before it moved into its modern A-framed linoleum-floored sanctuary where my mother had sung her solos and duets with Ozella Weems, had held its services in the offices of the old Farmers and Merchants Bank on Main Street. Mrs. Fikes's Sunday-school class had been in the bank's walk-in vault, its round entrance big enough for children but small enough that Mrs. Fikes had to duck to enter.
“Valley of the Dolls
can't be any worse than that Elizabeth Taylor movie. Virginia Woolf, poor thing, is probably still turning over in her grave even if Liz did win her an Academy Award for looking ugly and cussing a blue streak. Plus that movie was in black and white. I think movies should all be in color nowadays. No call for black and white—except, of course, in the school system starting next year,” she said, clucking her tongue at the prospect of teaching African-American children over at E. T Hawkins. “I'm going to miss this place. I love our little sixth-grade wing all to ourselves here.
Go
ahead and do your book report on
Valley of the Dolls,
Kevin. I'll deal with your grandmama.”

The novel had been out for a couple of years by then, and I had seen its author, Jackie Susann, on all the talk shows. I loved her throaty, Pucci-wearing glamour and yet, always aware of my own audience, knew that I was going to have to do a hatchet job on the book if I wanted an A on the report. Don't get me wrong. I loved reading every word of it. Jackie Susann was no Robert Bolt. She was easier to figure out. I'd lie out in one of my grandparents' green-and-white chaise longue lawn chairs in the backyard and read the chapters of the bitchy show biz saga, filled with pill popping and hot sex, while Kim and Karole played basketball at our goal attached to a creosote pole
next to the Derricks' cow pasture. During the last week in March, on the day after my birthday, Dave Marler (who later became an all-SEC quarterback at Mississippi State and a star of the Canadian football league with the Hamilton Tiger-Cats) and Bobby Thompson, both invited by Kim, came walking by me to fish in our pond as I was sunning in my bathing suit and finishing up the Susann. I was lying on my stomach feeling my hard-on, a perpetual one in those days, pressing against the lawn chair's plastic meshing. The combination of Susann's prose and Bobby's shirtless presence out by the pond, where he was casting his rod and reel, racked my body with a rush of hormones I had not known was humanly possible. When Bobby whooped at catching his second bass, I ejaculated without even touching myself, my fingers pressing down on the last of Susann's pages as I also pressed my body more forcefully against the mesh. I remember reading these two words as it happened—
civil war
—and, once I was over the pleasant shock of it all, grinning to myself (overly aware even then of my surroundings) at how appropriately Southern it all was: those words, the algae-scummed bass pond, my Mississippi backyard, the feelings that could get me lynched if I let on to why more than my heart leapt at that shirtless sight of a blond-haired boy named Bobby. As I contemplated writing this book, I looked up those two words again in Susann's novel when that memory came washing back over me. Could I have made them up, during all the times I recalled that moment when falling asleep at night and trying to lull myself into a dream state with thoughts of times in my life—some only as long as seconds—when happiness seemed possible? Sure enough, there they were—”civil” and “war”—two words that every Southern boy, whether a sissy or not, is confronted with more than any others as he matures and takes on a more modern world. “ ‘It's like a civil war with her emotions against her talent and physical strength,' ” Susann wrote. “ ‘One side had to give. Something had to be destroyed.' ” It was her character Anne speaking of another character, Neely. But she could have just as easily
been describing that sixth-grade boy who somehow sensed he belonged in that book and not in a place that still suffered from a hundred-year-old defeat, a place that had not matured, had not become, not really, more modern. Except for gasoline-powered vehicles and cathode-ray tubes, the Mississippi of the 1960s could have just as easily been the same as the one that existed in the 1860s, slavery no longer a “necessary evil,” as it was so often described by my history teachers, but the attitudes of slave owners still so deeply inculcated within the culture that I half-expected to see Scarlett O'Hara shopping at Thomas Great M or Jefferson Davis serving on a jury up at the county court house that anchored Forest's town square.