During my father’s convalescence, I counted splinters. I’d never kept a real diary or journal like our one new English teacher at Forty-Five High said I should do over the summer—like she did—so I could lug it in to a psychotherapist years later and trace backwards my mental, spiritual, and moral demise. Here was my marbled Mead composition book: “Monday, 6 splinters in right hand; Tuesday, 3 in index finger, 1 in left palm; Wednesday—working with cedar—about 150 in both hands; Thursday, drank six-pack of Schlitz, took powdered aspirin for the first time, cussed Dad; Friday, 1 splinter in forehead, which felt good to extract; Saturday, 5 in hand; Sunday, didn’t go to church for the 844th straight time.”
My father had rolled his pickup truck out on roughly paved Dixie Drive, halfway between Graywood and Hodges. He told the cops he’d swerved from a deer. He told me it was a pack of dogs en route to the tree farm across from our house. It didn’t matter the truth—he’d been flat-out drunk and driving with Herbert Coleman, a man who sometimes helped Dad with heavy loads and otherwise played guitar at the Sunken Gardens Lounge when he wasn’t on first or second shift over at Forty-Five Cotton. I imagined that they sang songs about women they didn’t have, or women that they’d had but couldn’t take anymore. Sometimes Herbert Coleman showed up at our house unannounced to ask my father personal questions about my momma’s leaving, for he knew he would find a good hook or chorus there somewhere along the line. Herbert had sworn off marriage. He liked to say, “I’m of the firm belief that marriage is the number one cause of unhappy separations in America.” He thought he was some kind of Einstein or Svengali or Dr. Joyce Brothers.
If Mr. Coleman had ever had the money to buy a bus ticket to Hollywood, and if he’d found his way to that famous drugstore where stars got discovered, he could’ve been the next Marlon Brando/Clark Gable/Humphrey Bogart. He stood six-one, had curly black hair and blue eyes, owned a physique that any Olympic swimmer would’ve wanted. But he didn’t have bus fare. He worked as a doffer, or a spinner, or a picker, or whatever it was that men did inside Forty-Five Cotton for working-poor wages.
Anyway, that night Herbert Coleman got thrown from the pickup and bounced his head across the berm until he landed upside-down against a fence post that kept Frank Godfrey’s prizewinning Angus caged.
My dad had remained in the truck’s cab and only bounced around like so many beans inside a burbling crockpot. He broke those floating ribs, a knee, and half the bones in his right hand and wrist. He also suffered a circular burn on his forehead, which meant that he’d pushed in the cigarette lighter about ten seconds before losing control, that it had popped out unexpectedly, and so on. I figured that much out, all by myself.
Herbert Coleman would never sing again, really, though he didn’t get killed. He went from coma to half-wit in a matter of weeks.
All of this occurred the summer my father bought land once owned by men who’d needed sharecroppers some sixty to eighty years earlier. We went in and disboarded the out-buildings, the houses, and the barns. Later, we sold the land outright to land developers and the state. If my father wasn’t in a wheelchair, then he stood on crutches. When crutches didn’t support his upright body, then he leaned on a nearby tree or unfolded his body onto a stump and waved his arm for what I should do next. I pried and pried at two-by-twelves, then stacked them up to the side for later transport to our own yard.
At night we went to the hospital and sat in Herbert Coleman’s room. My father smoked cigarettes there next to the crank-up bed as Mr. Coleman—who liked to introduce himself to strangers at Herbert “Tarleton” Coleman—only barely breathed. He wore an IV “like the tapeworm I used to keep for a pet when I was a poor kid,” my father said nightly.
I would’ve written all of this in my notebook, had I been thinking of anything outside of splinters. I sat in the hospital room not looking at handsome Herbert Coleman half-dead. I pulled splinters out of my flesh and notched the numbers in a binder filled with lined sheets. I didn’t care about the new English teacher at Forty-Five High School, though I knew I’d be taking a course with her in the fall. Her name was Ms. Shaw. Her daddy sold insurance and was best friends with our state senator. My father said she couldn’t have gotten a job picking lint from a navel without those connections. Like always, I figured that she was just another woman who’d rebuffed my father’s advances, until he told me that she once held the title of Miss Graywood County, and that when she didn’t make the top ten in the Miss South Carolina pageant her father tried to prove collusion between judges and the mayor of Myrtle Beach. Her talent involved juggling on roller skates.
On this particular night I wrote down “Tuesday, 4 splinters in right hand. 3 in left hand. Crown of thorns.” It was at this point that I knew how I would show Ms. Shaw my supposed journal. I would hand it in on August 20 or thereabouts, and nod, and say I couldn’t wait to read some Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, those Brontës, and/or any of those other writers’ books any sane high-school student views as very boring, melodramatic writing.
WHEN IT LOOKED like Herbert Coleman would survive his head trauma and at least get to the point of singing the first verse of “Amazing Grace” in a language that resembled English, my father let me take off from hospital duty. He continued to go up there to Self Memorial Hospital in order to poke lit cigarettes into Herbert’s face, filter-end first. He’d either wheel or gimp himself up there and stay long after visiting hours should’ve ended. Most nights I stayed at home and wrote in my little notebook however many splinters I’d eased out with a needle or knife. On one late-June Friday, though, my friend Compton and I got invited, miraculously, to a pre-debutante-ball party, held at the Forty-Five Country Club, which was really nothing more than one tennis court, a nine-hole golf course, a swimming pool without a real diving board, and a one-room clubhouse lined with mirrors. The Forty-Five debs wouldn’t be presented until a week before Christmas, but their parents, sponsors, and escorts held bimonthly parties leading up to the big event.
Let me make sure that you understand the entire debutante process: in places like Birmingham, Atlanta, Charleston, and Richmond, eighteen-year-old female college freshmen who attended colleges like Hollins, Vassar, Smith, Wellesley, Bryn Mawr, Agnes Scott, and Randolph-Macon came back home to be presented to society in a way similar to that of royalty. These were the young daughters of tycoons and barons, people who vacationed in the Hamptons, Cape Cod, and the Riviera. In Forty-Five—and every tiny crossroads in South Carolina, at least—a girl with all of her teeth and the mental capacity to potentially complete a two-year technical college with a degree in secretary science could pretty much undergo the debutante process, complete with gowns, elbow-length gloves, and cheap tiaras.
Compton called me up on a Wednesday night and said, “Hey, man, did you get an invitation to Libby Belcher’s coming-out thing? Goddamn.”
I said, “I thought it was a joke. They must be worried no one will show up.”
Comp said, “Oh, we’re going, amigo. You better find a way to get your daddy a babysitter for Mr. Coleman.”
I didn’t tell him how Herbert Coleman had rounded the bend, so to speak. I said, “Do we have to get dressed up?” I didn’t own a suit, seeing as my father wouldn’t allow me to attend church services, and no one I knew had died yet.
Compton said, “It’s going to be a spectacle, buddy. It’ll be an event. You can wear my other suit. You can wear my other tie.”
I don’t want to come across as a mystic, or the kind of person who can comprehend scenes long before they happen, but I could tell that Comp had something in mind that would embarrass not only the future debutantes, but their escorts, sponsors, and family members alike. These debutantes’ boyfriends—who would all know only one woman in their lives—were the sons of cotton mill superintendents, or mill accountants, or lawyers whose only task was to defend the mill, or doctors who spent most of their time sewing fingers back on. Compton and I hated these smug, stupid boys, for the most part, and only hoped that—as my father liked to say—“showing off good-looking poontang at a high-school reunion twenty-five years down the road is the best revenge.”
But between the ages of birth and seventeen we were helpless and hopeless, and we knew our place in Forty-Five society. I said, “You going to spike the punch?” to Compton over the telephone. So much for my vivid and overactive imagination.
“Idiot,” he said. “We won’t have to do that. Armistead will spike the punch. Or Calhoun. Hell, I won’t even drink that stuff. We’ll be bringing our own flasks in, comrade.”
I didn’t goad him to let me in on his plan. I sat in the den with the telephone to my head, daydreaming about Libby Belcher’s mother and me making out in the middle of a sand trap, near a water hazard, while inside the clubhouse people danced to whatever bad music droned out from a portable record player.
I PUT ON Compton’s other suit a week later and drove us to the Forty-Five Country Club an hour before dusk. Libby Belcher and I had been mortal enemies since the third grade, so I wondered why we got invited, and if it had anything to do with how we were the only boys at the predeb party without real dates. There were single girls there—last year’s debutantes on summer vacation from Greenville Technical College, Central Northwest South Carolina Bible College, Andersonville College, and a variety of schools of cosmetology. And there were the debutantes’ younger sisters, all excited about their chance to undergo this same process in due time. Drunken fathers wearing plaid coats stood around with bourbon and Cokes, and mothers drank chilled red wine. Maybe it was my imagination, but when Compton and I walked in, it seemed like all conversation stopped and every person in attendance stared at us.
“Well, it’s Mendal and Comp,” Libby said. She approached us as if she was wearing ball bearings on her spangly gold shoes. “I really didn’t think y’all would come, but I’m glad you did.” She didn’t shake our hands or offer us a shallow hug. She turned to her escort, Jimmy Wingard, and said, “Jimmy, would you go get Comp and Mendal some punch, s’il vous plaît?” Then she took us to a table covered with typed name tags. Compton’s read COMPTON. Whoever made these pin-backed things mistyped my name. It came out MENIAL.
Either Earth, Wind, and Fire or the Commodores blared from the record player. This was my idea of Hades, of course. “Whatever you do, don’t drink the punch, Menial,” Compton said out of the side of his mouth. “This is a little like Mexico—pretend that you’re drinking it, but don’t. These people are not our allies, and you know it. Don’t be tricked. Never drink with the enemy.” It sounded like he’d rehearsed his little monologue; it sounded like something I’d heard a gangster say once in a 1940s movie that maybe had played in Forty-Five a couple years earlier.
Jimmy Wingard was a halfback on the Forty-Five High Speed Fire Ant football team, and once ran a kickoff back almost ten yards. He didn’t weigh more than 140 pounds and could’ve played offensive tackle—those lower-ranking mill boys weren’t much bigger—had his father, the mayor, not threatened Coach Pinky Dabbs. Jimmy walked to us and said, “Drink up, boys. We gone have fun tonight.” He also tried to cheat off of my test papers in every class.
At this point I still didn’t know about Compton’s plan, though later on in life he told me he had had about a thousand ideas. He and I milled around the outskirts of the dance floor, pouring our punch into various potted fake palmetto trees. We reached into our respective coat breast pockets and pulled out rum we’d poured earlier, Compton into an old cough medicine bottle, and me into a Welch’s grape jelly jar with a pop-top lid of sorts.
This party went on and on. People danced. Mr. Belcher made a toast between about every second song and progressively slurred his way through them. As the night went on—and as Jimmy Wingard, Bingham Bradham, Wingard McGaha, McGaha Scurry, Scurry Wimmer, and Wimmer Bingham brought us more and more punch—I began to realize that they had devised some kind of drink that only we supposedly would partake of, a purgative that should’ve sent us straight to the men’s room off to the side of the sad pro shop.
Were they dipping cups into a punch bowl set off to the side, designated for us only? No. I watched closely. Had they dipped already spiked punch, then squirted a little Visine into our allotments? Yes. I said to Comp, “I know what they’re doing. They’re putting eyedrops in our drinks, hoping we’ll get the squirts. I read all about this little trick one time. Some guy working at an airport bar flipped out and put Visine in everybody’s Bloody Marys, then told them to have a pleasant flight.”
Compton said, “Uh-huh. Keep pretending to drink. They think we’re just two poor boys who can’t keep up. This couldn’t’ve worked out any better if I’d found the right God and prayed, Menial.”
I said, “If you call me that again I’m going to kill you.”
How many goddamn songs had Earth, Wind, and Fire put out? I wanted to go back to my Jeep, back it straight into the clubhouse, and play a Frank Zappa, Blue Öyster Cult, Wishbone Ash, Allman Brothers, or Grateful Dead eight-track. I said, “Let’s go. Let’s blow this Popsicle stand. I want out of here. I’m out of rum, and the more people here see my name tag, the better the chances they’ll call me Menial for the rest of my life.” The part about being out of rum wasn’t true, because the rest of the quart of Captain Morgan was way beneath the passenger seat of the Jeep. “Come on, man. This is stupid.” I might’ve said I needed to go study for the SAT.
Compton looked at his watch. It wasn’t eleven o’clock yet. The dance floor thinned, and more and more people either took to love seats, chairs, and couches that lined the room, or plain left to skinny-dip in the over-chlorinated, aboveground pool. Libby Belcher came up and said, “Have y’all been drinking the punch?” She whispered, “We spiked it, you know. You don’t feel it?” Her left breast hung out to show a crescent of nipple.
I said, “We’re drinking, we’re drinking. What did you spike it with, though? Nothing will affect me unless it’s peach-bounce moonshine.”
Compton said, “Me and Menial were at a party last week down in Atlanta where the punch was spiked with LSD. Man, this ain’t nothing.”
One of Libby Belcher’s eyes went west, but she smiled like an everyday temptress. She leaned my way and said, “I kind of wish I was with you instead of Jimmy. Later on I’mo be sorry that I didn’t marry a man who went to a real college, I know. And it don’t matter to me that you’ve been with a black girl none.”
I didn’t break. Libby had referred to Shirley Ebo. I looked down Libby’s dress front and said, “Congratulations on your coming out.”
COMPTON HAD THOUGHT to bring gloves with him to the pre-debutante party. And let me make it clear that he was the one who put them on, that he was the one who shoved Jimmy Wingard’s little thin pecker into one end of the Chinese handcuffs. “This was worth the goddamn ten dollars it took me to win these things playing ring toss at the fair last year,” Compton said.
We had pretended to go out on a golf-course walk with everybody else, then circled around. Wingard and Bingham Bradham had passed out side by side thirty minutes earlier on a love seat that looked like the one I’d sat on in Shirley Ebo’s parents’ house more than a few times. My job was only to gently get Bingham’s right hand and stick one end of the Chinese handcuffs on his index finger. Compton unzipped Jimmy’s pants, pulled out his sorry pecker, and attached the other end of the handcuffs halfway down. For those of you unfamiliar with the intricacies of Chinese handcuffs, these devices are made from a raffia-like material that, when pulled lengthwise, can only tighten. They’re like eight inches of chitlins, and to release oneself from Chinese handcuffs—which are normally attached to one finger on one hand and one finger of the other hand—one must not become impatient and excitable and thus pull harder. It takes a cool, logical head, the ability to relax one’s fingers, and to twist clockwise properly.
I got the end of the Chinese handcuffs that held Bingham’s finger and slowly directed it onto Jimmy Wingard’s lap. Compton got out Jimmy’s thing, took the other end of the Chinese handcuffs, and slipped it on.
“This will end up the best thing that’s ever happened in the history of Forty-Five, South Carolina,” Comp whispered. He got up and walked to the record player. He set the stylus on a particular song. “You need to stand guard by the door. Let me know when everyone comes back.”
I pulled my jelly jar out and supped from its contents. I didn’t want my father knowing about all of this at first, but then realized how proud he’d be of my unsettling two privileged, safe boys’ lives. Here we go:
Mr. and Mrs. Belcher led the group of parents and teenagers back to the clubhouse. They had their arms around each other, and any anthropologist would’ve noticed how nothing but Love and Hope and Peaceful Existence and Confidence shown on their faces. Near-debutantes and their escorts followed, then other debutantes’ parents who would be throwing parties presently. Invited guests who would either be debutantes or escorts later on in life brought up the procession’s rear. Although I didn’t know what Compton would do in a matter of seconds, I knew that there was something wrong with this entire situation. That “Ignorance is bliss” cliché almost came to mind.
It didn’t, but it almost did. Me, I thought, “Disabled workers of the world, unite,” because it was the last thing my father had said to me before he went off to blow smoke in Herbert Coleman’s face.
I said, “Here they come, man.”
Comp nodded and smiled. He said, “I’m going to blast this music, and then you and I have to run out the back door there. We’ll come up from behind like we were out with everybody all along. And that’s what we’ll say.”
I said, “Okay.” Bingham Bradham still slept with his finger attached like an umbilical cord to Jimmy Wingard’s little penis.
Compton pushed the On switch, and we took off. The singer screamed out, “I was a lonely man,” just as we made our way out of the clubhouse.
We ran. We took off. Compton and I skirted the exterior of the clubhouse like two field rats running from a flash-light’s beam. We giggled like little debutantes ourselves. And when we entered the front of the Forty-Five Country Club clubhouse, Comp stood taller than he’d ever stood, for his trick had worked. We watched as Jimmy Wingard and Bingham Bradham danced the waltz of conjoined twins, hunched over, chaotic, and helpless.
Compton slid through the crowd to get a better view. Me, I stood back. Libby Belcher stared, knowing I had had something to do with it. When she came up and slapped my face, I could only say, “Hey. Teach you to call me Menial.” I said, “Shirley Ebo never hit me like that. And she’s going to a real college year after next, too.”
Libby said, “You’re behind all of this, ain’t you?” She became the district superintendent of schools twenty years later, which I love to point out now. Libby put her fists on her evening gown and said, “Somehow you turned it all around so’s they drank the enema.”
I shrugged. I looked at her daddy, who—and I’ll give him this, lawyer or not—laughed at the two boys’ awkward dance on the linoleum. I said, “Man. You should learn how to control who you invite to parties. I’m a little unnerved.” Word for word—that’s what I said. I wish I’d had a tape recorder to prove myself.
Dr. Scurry Bingham, who once told me I had gas when in actuality I had ripped a ligament in my side while lugging heart-pine lumber from point A to point B, said, “You boys just settle down. I’ll call an ambulance.” He looked at the people surrounding him and said, “I got connections, I got connections.”
Jimmy Wingard tried to run and hide from everyone. Bingham Bradham tagged along right at his side, all hunkered down and sideways. No one realized that it would’ve only took someone with a steady hand and a sharp knife to release these two fuckups. I would’ve volunteered if I’d’ve had the gloves in my possession.
MY FATHER SAT up in his worn, green, pathetic cloth chair. After Compton and I left the pre-debutante party we drove around—as we were wont to do anyway—laughing about our little prank, as if it were the best thing this side of disposable lighters. Compton came inside with me to help me regale my father with our escapade.
We didn’t get the homecoming we’d expected. After we told the story, my father sat up and said, “You should both be ashamed of yourselves. That’s one of the worst things I’ve ever heard of.”
In the previous dozen years or so I had witnessed my father gluing people’s mailboxes so they wouldn’t open, letting air out of their tires, placing fake auction notices in the newspaper so that strangers invaded an unsuspecting man’s Saturday morning, and so on. I’d seen Comp’s father do the same. My father had disguised his voice over the telephone daily one bleak winter and invited a hopeful cemetery-plot salesman over to all his enemies’ houses.
I had sat in the den and listened back then: “Yeah, this is Gray Dunlap, and I’m wanting to talk to someone about getting an entire crypt for my family.” My father would give the address of Mr. Dunlap’s house, hang up, then look at me and say, “I wish I could be a sweat bee flying around when that guy shows up and says, ‘Mr. Dunlap, I understand that you’ve finally come to grips with the inevitable.’”
My father knew the grave-plot seller’s speech because one Saturday a year earlier—and for all I knew maybe Comp’s father had sent the guy over as a practical joke—my father had listened to the pitch.
I pulled the Welch’s jelly jar from Compton’s borrowed coat pocket and said, “You want some rum, Daddy?”
He took it from me and set it on the end table. “You might be drinking too much. How’re you going to concentrate in college, boy?” He looked at Compton. “Either one of you. They ain’t gone be booze at every corner of the dorm when y’all go off to college. Maybe y’all should try to wean yourselves over this next-to-last summer. Those smart college boys ain’t gonna be too keen on your silly hoaxes. They won’t fall for them, and they’ll get even.”
I’ll give myself this: I never contradicted my father when I learned that he really didn’t know about college. I never pointed out that, first off, there was booze at every corner of the dorm, and that supposedly smart college boys—especially the ones from up north—did indeed fall for such pranks.
Compton said to my father, “Maybe you’re not getting a true visual of this situation. One end of the Chinese handcuffs was on Bingham Bradham’s index finger, and the other was on Jimmy Wingard’s tallywhacker, Mr. Dawes. They kept pulling and pulling it tighter.”
My father struggled up, grabbed his cane, took my jelly jar, and drank what was left. He said, “How would you like it if those boys did that to you? Y’all would be scarred for life. You’d never be able to come back to Forty-Five for the rest of your days.”
I didn’t say, “I have no intention of coming back here again anyway.” I didn’t say how they typed up MENIAL for my name tag. I said, “I’m sorry. I thought you’d think this was funny.”
“Well, maybe I would think it was funny if I could laugh without it killing my goddamn diaphragm.” He held his floating ribs.
I looked at Comp. I’m not one of those people who says later on that he saw a death mask on someone else’s face a day before that person died. But I foresaw the wrinkles and worry on Compton’s face—though I couldn’t know that he would eventually become a good veterinarian driven out of business down in Montgomery, Alabama, by a group of rabid right-to-life pinheads opposed to spaying God’s creatures—and knew that he would end up in Forty-Five sad, puzzled, and alone. In that moment, too, I understood that I would be bringing a smart wife back home to Forty-Five, that she wouldn’t be happy whatsoever, and that we would spend a year in my father’s cement-block house trying to sell off what leftover heart-pine wood, what sunken signs, my father had made me gather and store, that she and I would dig holes forever to uncover those things my progenitor understood, rightly, as valuable.
I never foresaw the wild local curs giving up and settling down.
My father limped to the phone, dialed up the hospital, and directed his call to Herbert Coleman’s room. I assume that Mr. Coleman answered, for my father said, “I got back home all right, and I remembered something I meant to tell you earlier.” Then he began singing “I’ll Fly Away.”
I threw my car keys to Compton and told him to drive himself home, then come back and get me in the morning. I told him I would pay him cash money to help me take a slave cabin down the next day on the old, old, old Latham land my father’d bought up thirty days beforehand. Compton shrugged okay.
My father continued singing. I went back to my bedroom and pulled out the journal. I wrote down what splinters I’d pulled out before putting on my borrowed suit. And then, without knowing that I’d do it, I began writing about what had happened at the party, and everything—and I mean everything—that had led to that day, empty or not.