And such things are a delicate matter, because dislocation can end up as a dislocation of memory. Much later, when in college, when my own boyfriend from Tulsa hangs himself in front of our dog, days after our very chaotic breakup, I do not sleep so well, and so I return to my home where my father no longer lurches, but limps, less dramatically, tending his yard.
That boyfriend should in a way, not be a part of this. He was not raised in our wasteland, he was raised in a nearby wasteland, a more urban wasteland, where at the age of thirteen he was kicked out of his house, and wandered on the streets until he was adopted into a neo-Nazi compound. In those days in Oklahoma neo-Nazis and the Klan were everywhere. Perhaps this is still the case? He was kept there, anyway, this boyfriend, and was often beaten, but then escaped and lived again on the streets until his mother finally took him back, and then like a lot of teen boys from that time became a S.H.A.R.P. and kept the boots and braces, and looked for fights with neo-Nazis in the clubs, but now listened to ska, and reggae and P-funk. We met when he was twenty-two, and he was in daily AA meetings, and living with his father, an alcoholic with only half a stomach and a wretched toupee. The father lived on social security checks and bought Milwaukee’s Best (Milwaukee’s Beast) a six-pack at a time, and every month hocked his VCR and then got it out of hock again when he got his social security check. The boyfriend lived a block from my college campus and I could walk over from my dorms. I was eighteen. Before this, the boyfriend lived for a year in a junkyard, where he thought he had contracted TB, and before that in a storage unit where he thought he might have contracted hantavirus, and then one day he fell in a concrete drainage ditch and had to have surgery on his spleen from the damage. Who paid? I asked. No one. It went to the indigent fund, he said. That was a different time indeed.
The first time we sleep together, this boyfriend and I, I see his horrific markings: a crucified skinhead in the center of his chest, a tall boot on his bicep, a pax medallion covering over what was once a swastika on his back. He hates them all, and won’t go in swimming without a shirt, for fear of scaring people. He scares himself. He looks scary without his clothes. He also walks with a limp, but since birth, because one leg is shorter than the other. Otherwise, he is nice-looking, and kind. He has learned ever so many lessons.
He wakes in the night screaming, often because he dreams he is being beaten by Nazis, or that he is beating Nazis, and I too return to having those dreams that came so often after my mom took me to see Raiders, where the Nazi in the snow raises his hand to show the burned emblem of the relic which points the way to the ark of the covenant. In my dream, when the Nazi raises his hand, in the snow, the burn on his palm is the same as the medallion on my boyfriend’s back. To what, I wonder, will this point the way? I too am awake screaming, except for me this is the fantasy of a horror, whereas for my boyfriend it is the dislocated memory of a real horror. To even speak it is a delicate matter, but one that as it turns out, is not long for this world.
My boyfriend hangs himself in summer, so I go home, away from college, and stay catatonic on the sofa, mostly, day and night with my dog. Now is the time to ask questions about Gene and about the grandfather because now we are all in the same club, the club where folks tend to kill themselves, and it is not just my town, but other towns in my region that kill.
But my dad prefers not to dwell on the past. It is good to remember the dead, but it is best, perhaps, not to remember those who went there willingly. You’re lucky, my dad says. How else would you ever have gotten out of that, he wonders? (Meaning that alliance with the doomed boyfriend.) You’re lucky, you’ll be safe now. It’s not a bad thing. It’s good.
How so? I lay catatonic on the sofa. Outside, my father limps in his garden. He wakes up at 4 a.m. and limps in the garden, he showers under the garden hose, he cooks his own breakfast on the griddle, and then goes to the Mullins Service Station and Rock Shop on Route 66 where he is now one of the old timers! The rock shop sold rocks in the time of the old man Mullins, and now no one ever goes into it, because who goes out of their way to buy rocks? The Mullins brothers (now in their seventies) have been doing oil changes and tire rotation for fifty years, though as the years go on, they do that sort of thing less and less, and sit around and jaw more and more with other old timers. It is a place where needling still prevails as an art form, and where there is venison chili often percolating in a crockpot, and sometimes when I have the energy to move or put on clothes, my dad takes me to the rock shop. I like the rock shop but the old timers don’t like it much when my dad brings me because having a girl around makes everyone careful of their language and makes it less fun to needle.
Do you boys have any pictures of Dennis Weaver? I ask. They think, they lean upon their stools, they consider.
No, they say.
Didn’t he never come in to buy some rocks? Maybe he came in to have his horse serviced? I say.
No, not to my knowledge they say, straightfaced, and they don’t even know I am needling them. Perhaps I am not good enough at it on account of being a girl.
My father and I ride around on our bicycles that summer. It is one of the things he can still do that does not make all his metal joints hurt. We take the old ‘round robin’ but the dogs that used to chase me are now long gone, and instead there is a neat little lawn with a water feature in place of their compound.
That summer, the summer of the dead boyfriend, there is a cable channel that plays all the finest reruns: Laugh-In, The Smothers Brothers, Carol Burnett and most beloved of all beloved spy programs, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. If only, in those days I had known about The Prisoner. It was only much, much later that I learned of The Prisoner. There, in the dislocation of an island, under the striped umbrellas, in his piped suit, or perched atop a penny-farthing, the prisoner is not a number but is a free man.