I’m four. We’re living in Bakersfield, California, in a two-bedroom ranch with a sagging front porch and a dirt driveway. My father is in the living room watching football and I’m in my parent’s bedroom with the door closed. I’m perched on a stool in front of my mother’s vanity, staring into the mirror. The TV blares in the background. I’m holding my mother’s lipstick; it’s a brilliant, fire engine red. I encircle my lips with a wide, yet perfectly symmetrical smile. The color glides on easily, like glue from a brand-new glue stick. Satisfied, I uncap a tube of Crest, squirt a white blob into my palm, and smear some over my cheeks, across my forehead, around my eyes. I am transformed. It’s all exactly as I’d imagined, until the toothpaste starts to sting.
“Mommma!”
It’s my father who comes running first. Footsteps thunder down the hall like he’s mad before he even knows what I’ve done. The door bangs open. When he sees me, his face contorts and he takes a step back. “Gregory! What the fuck?” He lunges at me, yanks me off the stool by the elbow, and drags me into the bathroom where he scrapes my face with a dry washcloth that feels like sandpaper. He’s carving up my cheeks, smearing toothpaste into my eyes so now they’re on fire and I can’t see. I’m shrieking. I’m hysterical. I think I’m going blind.
“Hold still, damnit!” He’s got me in a headlock.
My mother finally appears– a blurry image in the doorway. An apparition. A mirage. Something that seems good at first but never materializes into anything useful.
My father raises a hand to stop her from crossing the threshold. “No! You’ve done enough already.”
Afterwards, I’m in the front yard, drawing in the dirt with a stick, when I hear my parents arguing in the kitchen about my fascination with clowns.
“It’s obsessive,” my father shouts, “The way he goes on and on about them all goddamn day.”
“Lots of kids get focused on one topic at this age,” my mother says.
“An excuse to put on makeup, most likely,” he snarls.
By the age of four, two things have become clear to me: my father considers me to be an aberration and he blames my mother for it. Although I despise my father, I believe him on both counts.
*
I’m five. My father gets a job driving a tractor trailer and for a while, things are a little bit better. He’s gone during the week, and while he’s away, my mother plays paper dolls and nail salon with me. We dress up for a game I call “circus act,” and my mother rigs up a sheet to look like the big top, and announces all of my various entrances, using a carrot for a microphone. For dinner, we have macaroni and cheese, or eggs in a basket.
When my father returns home on the weekends, he parks the eighteen-wheeler straight across our front yard, jamming it in, so there’s no room to dig in the dirt and make mud pies. Like his truck does outside, inside the house my father takes up a lot of space. He lounges on the couch, feet on the coffee table, newspapers and beer cans strewn about. My mother serves him bloody steak with fat clinging to its sides and tells me to stay in my room. I see her at bedtime when she comes to read me a story and tuck me in.
“You baby that boy,” I hear him say, every time she leaves my room. My mother doesn’t answer him. Just sniffs loudly. She does that a lot.
Something happens to my father’s truck and he loses his job. My parents begin to argue more. Even when I lie in bed with my pillow crushed around my head, I can hear them. They fight about money but mostly they fight about me.
When my father finally leaves us, I know why. “I didn’t sign up for this,” he tells my mother, letting the screen door bang behind him.
For three weeks, my mother doesn’t get out of bed. When she does, she’s very tippy. There are no more circus acts. The refrigerator is mostly empty, just a bunch of condiments, and one lime that keeps rolling around in the bottom drawer, getting more and more brown and hard. I eat whatever I can find in the pantry–croutons, taco shells, uncooked oatmeal. Grownups wearing suits come to our door. “Don’t answer it!” my mother slurs from her bed, so I hide in my room, wondering why not. “They might have food,” I whisper-shout back, but we don’t check and see. At night I pray for my mother to get better.
Kindergarten starts but I only go on the days that my mother wakes up and walks me to the bus stop. They serve free lunch in the cafeteria and at snack time my teacher, Miss Benfield, passes out graham crackers to the kids who don’t have any. One day I get sick and can’t go to school and have my graham crackers. I’m burning up so bad that my mother says that’s it, she’s driving me to the doctor. Instead we drive into a tree.
*
I’m six and I’m standing on the doorstep of my Aunt Carol’s house with my mother. The house is in Birmingham, Alabama–on a street called Happy Haven Lane. We had to take two trains and a bus to get there. It’s the biggest house I’ve ever seen– brick, with a lot of roof peaks. It reminds me of a castle. It’s pouring out and I’m holding the clown doll that my mother bought me at the gas station down the road. The surprising thing about the doll is that I hadn’t even asked for it. We’d only stopped at the Shell station to use the bathroom, but when my mother saw the clown, she ran to me, holding the doll out with a wild expression on her face. “It’s a good sign!” she cried out, too forcefully to be convincing. At the register, she unfolded dollar bills and pushed them over to the gas station attendant one by one. She was a dollar short, but the man just said, “Go on, take it.”
On the walk from the gas station to my Aunt Carol’s, the rain started coming down hard, so now my mother and I are both standing on the doorstep, sopping wet. My clown doll is soaked too, but my mother says not to worry, that it will be fine by morning. My mother likes to think that lots of things will be fine that won’t be. My aunt’s doorbell is right at my eye level and my mother lets me press it. She knows how I like pressing buttons. The chime rings out long and strong, like church bells. When my Aunt Carol opens the door and looks at us, her face goes weird. You can always tell what people really think about you by the face they make in that split second after they lay eyes on you. She’s scared, but she’s twisting her mouth into a smile. My mother is busy pretending not to cry. She’s turning her face away and wiping her nose on her sleeve, but I can see. I see everything. “It’s only for a little while,” she tells my aunt, handing her my Winnie the Pooh suitcase. I can tell from my aunt’s expression that we both know that my mother is lying. She does that a lot.
*
I’m eight. I haven’t seen my mother in two years, but now she’s standing in the driveway next to a rust-colored car, arguing with my Aunt Carol. She’s wearing a dress, but her hair is all crazy and Aunt Carol is yelling at her. I’m hiding in my bedroom, crouched low and peeking out at them through the closed curtains.
“You’re high,” My Aunt Carol yells. This doesn’t make any sense because my mother is standing on the ground right next to her. “You’re gonna scare him!”
I can’t hear what my mother says in return, but I can see that she’s brought something with her and is pushing it into my aunt’s hands. It’s another clown doll. Bigger, with sparkly suspenders and a matching bow tie. I’ve still got the other one, but it has a ripped shirt and I’ve lost the hat.
“He doesn’t like clowns anymore!” my aunt screams. “And he certainly doesn’t play with dolls!” Neither of these things are true. My aunt doesn’t know that I keep the clown doll under my mattress. At night I reach down and rub its satin shirt between my forefinger and thumb.
My mother is sitting in her rust-colored car now. My aunt throws the doll through an open rear window, while my mother is backing up, herky-jerky like. I think about running outside and chasing after her and I even stand up, but then I stop myself. My aunt is right about one thing. My mother does scare me. Her car bucks all the way down the long stretch of driveway until all I see is a rust-colored dot and then nothing at all. I never see my mother again.
*
I’m sixteen. I’m still living in Alabama with my Aunt Carol and my Uncle Jackson, who cook me three square meals a day (my Uncle Jackson’s expression), and sign me up for things like scouts and baseball, activities I’m not all that interested in, but do anyway because it seems important to my aunt and uncle. We’ve recently moved to the coast, to a town called Fairhope. It’s the year after Katrina. A lot of homes in these parts were damaged by the storm. My Uncle Jackson owns a construction company and business is booming. He says it’s an absolute goldmine down here.
Our house in Fairhope is bigger than the one we had in Birmingham, with even more roof peaks. It’s still just the three of us, (my aunt and uncle couldn’t have children of their own), but the house is never empty. My Aunt Carol hosts a lot of church events – bible studies, lady’s teas and whatnot, and before long she’s got what she calls “a good group going.” I’m the new kid in school. In class, I remember not to cross my legs at the knee and when I’m called on, I keep the register of my voice down low where it belongs. The town is known for its historic homes and moss-covered oaks. It’s a beautiful place, but on the walk home from school I’m always on the lookout for hooligans– thugs who I imagine might drive up from behind, catcalling from the back of a truck, looking to Matthew Sheppard me. It makes me nervous to walk home alone, but in Fairhope I’m alone a lot. I don’t have a good group going.
*
I’m seventeen. I’ve found a circle of close friends– Becky, Rachel, and Sarah, who, like me, can recite Saturday Night Live sketches by heart, and have an abiding love of Beyonce. We cruise around with the car windows rolled down and the radio blasting. It’s almost June and school’s just let out. Fireflies spatter the night sky, and the air feels charged and full of possibility. The crepe myrtles lining our driveway are in full bloom. For the first time in my life, I’m able to take in this beauty that surrounds me. It inflates my chest, like helium. I am buoyant.
It’s a Tuesday afternoon. As soon as I walk in the front door, I see them sitting in the living room– my aunt and uncle and our church Reverend, who goes by the name Pastor Petey. “Why don’t you come in and join us Gregory?” they say. I know exactly why they’ve asked me to sit down. It’s the day after my aunt caught me kissing Pat Lemarco in his Jeep Wrangler. Beautiful Pat, with his great jawline and gentle eyes and funny-as-fuck sense of humor. Pat, who embraces his own queerness and wants to know what I’m waiting for. Pat, who takes me sailing for the first time, and on hikes through bogs and meadows, where he can name every wildflower. He’s a wizard. A shaman. And fearless. He’s that too. It’s Pat who takes me skinny dipping in the quarry at night. Pat, who presses up against me, setting all of my nerve endings on fire. He whispers in my ear that he has so much more to show me this summer. I want to know all the things.
But now, I’m sitting in the living room with my back pressed against this wingback chair. My aunt is smiling but her face looks like it’s about to crack in two. I see what’s happening here. I see everything. This is an intervention.
It’s Pastor Petey who suggests the camp.
“It’s a wonderful opportunity,” he says.
The adults trade theories in front of me, theories about how I’ve come to be the way that I am, none of them placing blame directly on me.
“We know you didn’t get a proper upbringing in those formative years, and we’re just trying to do right by you,” my Aunt Carol says.
The money is no problem, my aunt and uncle say in chorus; they’re happy to pay for it.
“And it’s not cheap, mind you,” my Uncle Jackson adds, “but it’ll be worth every penny if it sticks.”
If it sticks.
“We’re concerned about you, son,” Pastor Petey says.
Camp pamphlets are laid out on the coffee table with photos of smiling boys standing in front of lakes and mountains. The boys have caught fish. They’ve shot ducks. They’re wearing hand carved wooden crosses around their necks and they’re smiling, but not in a faggy way.
Next comes the science part of the presentation. Pie charts are shown with suicide statistics dispensed. “As you can see right here,” Pastor Petey says, stabbing a chubby forefinger at a red pie slice, “Suicide rates are significantly higher for homosexuals.” The sibilant s sounds spew from his mouth like buckshot.
A week later my duffle bag is ready, even if I am not. My aunt has stuffed it with what she calls the essentials– jeans, toiletries, a raincoat, a bible. My uncle is waiting for me in the Ford pickup with the engine running. Before I leave, I duck into my room and grab the clown doll that my mother gave me, from under my mattress. It’s the old battered one with the ripped shirt and missing hat. I shove it to the bottom of my duffle, for a reason I don’t fully understand.
Most of the campers at Body and Soul fall into one of two categories–the sullen type or the crying type. For three nights straight, a boy named Charlie whimpers in his bunk, until one of the sullen types tells him to shut the fuck up already. Our days go by slowly. There’s almost no fishing. Our schedule includes things like prayer circle, support group, and aversion therapy. Aversion therapy is when they make us drink ipecac syrup while looking at pictures of queer men with their arms draped around each other. The ipecac syrup starts working after about twenty minutes. They give us orange buckets to puke into. Some of the boys pray for the treatment to work. Others pray for it to all be over. I don’t do either. I am done with praying.
By the time I return to Fairhope, three months will have gone by. From the outside, I will seem like a different person. My friend Becky will ask if they passed out tranquilizers at camp, but they didn’t, and I won’t feel tranquil, exactly. By then, I won’t feel anything at all. Summer will have faded into fall and Pat will have already left for college. An oil stain will mark the corner of his driveway where his Jeep Wrangler used to be. The doll my mother gave me will have been confiscated by counselors and burned in a ceremonial bonfire. And the crape myrtles lining our driveway, will have all dried up, no remnant of their blooming selves left to admire.
–
Alison Bullock’s short fiction has appeared in Peatsmoke, The Coachella Review, The Writing Disorder, Halfway Down the Stairs, Idle Ink, Bright Flash Literary Review, Funny Pearls, Anti-Heroin Chic, and elsewhere. She lives in Massachusetts.
© 2023, Alison Bullock
Halfway Down the Stairs 