Coal to Diamonds (8 page)

In high school I had an intense awakening. I’d been trying to make sense out of so much chaos for so long and it exploded. I looked around and I saw insanity, and I knew that there was something wrong but it wasn’t me, so I wasn’t going to act like I was anything less than excellent. It was a shaky conviction, but it was inside me. And I had the music to back me up. I had these movements—Riot Grrrl, grunge—happening in other places, cheering me on, wanting me to win, to triumph over the rapists and the ignorant racists and the mundane and the boring. There was a big life out there and I was starting to feel it. If I could just survive Arkansas, I’d maybe be able to get to it.

I started fighting back against what I saw. I started standing up to my teachers about things like abortion and racism and going against the grain by being one of the only girls who dared to take shop class instead of home economics. I was already cooking
and cleaning and sewing at home—why would I want to come to school and do that?

The topics I selected for my speech class really summed up my place within that school. I was actually liked by a lot of the teachers, in spite of how provocative I’d become. In Speech I did two final projects. One was on how to apply makeup, and the other was on violence against women around the world and how we still accept it every single day.

Senior year we were all required to take a class called Family Dynamics. You had to take it, everyone did. We were taught … family dynamics. STDs, birth control. By then we were all seventeen or eighteen years old. Some of us were nineteen or twenty: the flunkies. We were sitting at these tables taking tests with questions like “Are you pro-choice, yes or no?” Students graded one another’s papers, so everyone knew one another’s business. When we were through, the teacher asked the class,
Who said they are pro-choice?
Me and Tonya were the only ones who checked yes on that question. Even though half the girls in the class had been pregnant and half of those girls had probably had actual abortions. A third of the class had kids already, and half of those moms had had abortions as well. The truth was that girls were either having babies or having abortions. In Family Dynamics we were being taught how to avoid STDs and … how to pick out an engagement ring! Most of our parents didn’t even have engagement rings because we were so fucking poor. Most of us were getting free lunch at school each day.

Family Dynamics was insane, absurd, and offensive, but we took it seriously. We had to. The woman teaching us was the same woman who had taught our parents that shit, and it was about respect and tradition, and so we did our best to pass the test given on the difference between a princess-cut and a square-cut diamond. Those were the skills we were taught.

Meanwhile, my classmates’ gaydar was going off when I walked down the halls at school.
Are you a dyke?
Maybe it was my short, short hair. Or maybe it was that I’m actually a dyke. Either way, it’s uncomfortable to have people seeing your insides before you’re ready to show them. It made me so mad. It wasn’t like it is today. Things have gotten better for queers even in places like Arkansas. Now my little sister roams the halls at that same high school bragging about what a flaming bisexual she is. But I didn’t feel that cocky. All I had to do was think about what happened to Mr. Skate at Fun Time Skate Land and I wanted to crawl away and hide my queerness under a pile of babies.

Fun Time Skate Land was a roller rink in Judsonia. There was speculation that Mr. Skate was gay. He was very effeminate, round and balding, a soft bear. He was also a nice guy and all the kids really liked him. And we loved Fun Time Skate Land. The DJ booth was on the edge of the rink, and if you skated up to make a request you’d cause the needle to jump on the vinyl and the DJ would give you a dirty look. You could buy fat dill pickles from a big pickle jar. The one year I remember having a birthday party, my tenth, I had it at Fun Time Skate Land, and it was the best birthday I’ve ever had in my life. It was great. But it got shut down in the early ’90s because Mr. Skate had allegedly been out cruising and got busted.

For those of you who don’t know, cruising is a beloved pastime of lots of gay men: you go out into some area, like a park or a bathroom, and you meet up with other guys who want to have sex, and then you have sex. It happens in big cities and it happens in small towns. It happens in the Macy’s men’s bathrooms in San Francisco and the Fenway Victory Gardens in Boston and in too many truck stops to list all across the United States. Mr. Skate was allegedly cruising at Berryhill Park, a place that gets all lit up with Christmas lights. Unbeknownst to the locals ignorant of homosexual culture, it was where a guy could hang out and meet another guy for sex. Mr. Skate got busted by a cop there.

At that time, Judsonia wasn’t the only place in the United States that would have gladly persecuted a grown man for having an alternative lifestyle, but if you think about what was going on in 1991 in places like San Francisco and Chicago and D.C. and Olympia, Washington, where Riot Grrrl and homocore punk were brewing, and how that attitude impacted the mainstream, now we live in its aftermath, and things are a little different. All across the country, sending inspiration even into deep Arkansas, the efforts of people who cared about building a better world—one with more acceptance, more outrage toward violence—landed in the minds of real people, and things changed. It was our version of the sixties “revolution”—a loose group of young people who were rejecting the nihilist fashion-punk of the eighties and trying to build punk into a movement that included women, queers, and community values. The very idea that women should be allowed to play guitars and take the mic was in a lot of ways a revelation at the time; prioritizing inclusiveness in musical scenes was shocking because it reverberated outward into an insistence on inclusiveness as a value in life. We were just writing political sentiments into songs, or trying to get our zines into the world, and some people were creating spaces where girls could come and talk, for the first time, about violence that had been done to them. There were just small things, but they added up. It was like an excellent virus, everyone fighting to change their little part of the world and it all coming together like a puzzle.

It was at the start of the school day. I still had sleep crusting in my eyeliner—I had to wake up so early to haul myself all the way from Georgetown—when someone told me about Dean.

This girl grabbed me.
Did you hear? Dean got arrested for rape
. Was I so sleepy that I wasn’t hearing things right?
What?

Dean got arrested. For rape
. She was talking about my cousin.

The thing was, sexual abuse in my family went back so far, tracing it was impossible. Who knows what might have happened to Dean? If it was hard for girls to talk about their abuse, how much harder was it for a boy? Did something horrible happen to Dean to make him into that type of monster? Or maybe it was something else entirely. What made Uncle Lee Roy the sort of monster he was? My head hurt just thinking about all of it.

Two days later it was announced that Dean was being prosecuted for the rape of my two younger cousins, and everything suddenly made sense. The things that they had tried to tell me, that I hadn’t understood. With a few years under my belt, and a deeper understanding of feminism, I was able to put two and two
together. My sweet little cousin and the gold ring. Mom put that together, how Dean must have used the jewelry as a bribe to convince my cousin to do things with him. I was reeling with the severity of it. Laws had been broken. This stuff wasn’t actually supposed to be happening. My little cousins were taken away from Aunt Jannie’s, but they were sent back to their horrible mother. I truly don’t know where they’d have been better off.

Mom asked me if I’d ever noticed anything funny at Aunt Jannie’s. Funny? With Aunt Jannie herself setting the standard for normal behavior, what would it take for something to stand out?

Jeri won’t kiss me
, Jennifer said, nervously, one day.

He’s gay, I thought. I heard it from the same inner voice that told me
I’m gay
all the time—reverberating, ricocheting, resisting all my efforts to shut it up. This Jeri person had to be gay. He had to be! Boys started doing it with girls so young in Judsonia, and it’s all they ever did. It was unthinkable that a teenage boy with a proper girlfriend wouldn’t kiss her! If things were normal Jennifer would have had a couple of pregnancy scares by now, or a couple of abortions, maybe an actual kid toddling around. Gay, gay gay, gay gay. The word pulsed in my head, but I didn’t say it to Jennifer. It would break her heart and freak her out, and who knew, anyway? Maybe I was wrong. But I knew I wasn’t!
What else can I say?
Kurt Cobain says.
Everyone is gay
.

I was tremendously excited about this Jeri person and his probable gayness. I couldn’t wait to meet him. I didn’t want to act too eager, because I didn’t want Jennifer to get the wrong idea and think I was after her boyfriend. I mean, I was—just not like that. I was after another gay person to help quell the fears that I was
going to hell. I was scared of God. It’s hard to grow up in Arkansas and not be! The folks who want you to be spooked by their idea of God put a lot of time and money into their cause. There are big signs all over Arkansas saying,
WHAT WILL YOU DO WHEN THE END COMES?
and
GOD HAS HIS EYES ON YOU!
You see them when you’re out in the car. We’d drive past them in the school bus, or when we were heading back to Georgetown with my dad.
God has his eyes on you
. Oh, great. Then he knew I was queer and, according to the jabbering of folks I knew, the ones who professed to really know God’s opinion on things like homosexuality, I was going to be spending eternity in a lake of fire. I don’t know, none of it made sense, but I was scared anyway. I didn’t want anything bad to happen to me, and I didn’t want God to hate me.

The night I finally met Jeri almost never happened. Jennifer didn’t want to go to the seedy game room where all her friends were getting together. She twirled her stringy, perfectly grunge hair around her fingers and moped about it, but she finally agreed.

We met up with everyone at the depressing game room and decamped for Jeri’s house. I never cared what anyone thought about me until that night. I was half in myself and half too terrified to be there. I felt awkward and excited. I knew that these were the coolest people I had ever met. I wanted them to like me. Really, really bad! I worked hard to stay composed but not too cool—I wanted them to know I liked them, but not too much. My head spun with it all. There was Jeri, Jennifer’s maybe-secretly-gay boyfriend. There was Nathan, who I’d heard all about, but had never spoken to. There was Kathy, a city kid: very badass. Kathy lived in Searcy, a true city by any kind of local standard. Every weekend your mom would say,
I’m going to town
, by which she’d mean Searcy. My mom still says it. I loved going into town, and Kathy lived there!

The centerpiece of Jeri’s messy bedroom was his computer. Jeri was a crazy computer whiz. He still is. He had a computer program that let you take a picture of someone’s face and morph it into grotesque, hilarious images. These kids didn’t know me at all;
they were being so rude to me! Taking my picture and morphing it into a monster, making fun of me. They intimidated the shit out of me. They passed around rumpled zines from Jeri’s collection. I had never heard of zines, which were little magazines made by kids like us, chock full of whatever a person happened to be interested in, his drawings and writings, interviews he’d managed to score with bands he loved. Scrawled in ink or pounded out on a typewriter, then Xeroxed somehow into a little booklet and sent out into the world. People traded zines with one another, but if you were like us, living in Arkansas, you found zines the same way you found music and fashion: through mail order. Looking through Jeri’s zine collection, the fullness of Riot Grrrl philosophy and aesthetics overwhelmed me. It was a treasure chest of everything I cared about; my dreams were so in line with the dreams of all these strangers who had gotten them on paper and sent them out into the world. I could have sat there all night with my face in Jeri’s collection, but I wanted my new friends to think I was used to this kind of stuff.

Jeri had record players and bunches of records, and he played DJ as everyone talked, dropping names of bands I hadn’t heard of, laughing at jokes I couldn’t know were funny but somehow completely understood.

These kids were really creative; all of them drew. They were the coolest. They were products of Christian Arkansas who had recently escaped from the Christian youth groups that so many adolescents get shuffled into. They were getting old enough to think for themselves, and they were shuffling on out. Still, the Christian organization had left its mark on them. They were weirdly antisex. Everyone was creeped out by fornication, and it struck me as a strangely punk rock attitude. If punk is about being against the dominant culture, being antisex was way punk, because the culture that had been dominating me my whole life was wildly, inappropriately, abusively sexual. My new, unfriendly friends also refrained from drinking, taking drugs, or smoking. I hid my cigarettes
from them. I kept my pot smoking secret too, since they thought marijuana was so uncool. Before, I had never cared what anyone thought about my habits. Now all I wanted was their approval. I laughed at all their jokes. The things that came out of their mouths were ungodly! The jokes weren’t about fags, or black people, or at the expense of a girl. Their humor was avant-garde nonsense. It was a defining moment: for the first time, I got the joke! Jeri laughed at me for being such a dork, cracking up hysterically at their weirdo quips and observations. Nathan scoffed at my enthusiasm, and Kathy just regarded me silently. I was one of them.