Calypso Read online

  “Oh brother,” my father moaned.

  We sketched a plan to return for Thanksgiving, and after saying good-bye to one another, my family splintered into groups and headed off to our respective homes. There’d been a breeze at the beach house, but once we left the island the air grew still. As the heat intensified, so did the general feeling of depression. Throughout the sixties and seventies, the road back to Raleigh took us past Smithfield and a billboard on the outskirts of town that read WELCOME TO KLAN COUNTRY. This time we took a different route, one my brother recommended. Hugh drove, and my father sat beside him. I slumped down in the backseat next to Amy, and every time I raised my head, I’d see the same soybean field or low-slung cinder-block building we’d seemingly passed twenty minutes earlier.

  We’d been on the road for a little more than an hour when we stopped at a farmers’ market. Inside an open-air pavilion, a woman offered complimentary plates of hummus served with a corn and black-bean salad, so we each accepted one and took seats on a bench. Twenty years earlier, the most a place like this might have offered was fried okra. Now there was organic coffee and artisanal goat cheese. Above our heads hung a sign that read WHISPERING DOVE RANCH, and just as I thought that we might be anywhere, I noticed that the music piped through the speakers was Christian—the new kind, which says that Jesus is awesome.

  Hugh brought my father a plastic cup of water. “You OK, Lou?”

  “Fine,” my father answered.

  “Why do you think she did it?” I asked as we stepped back into the sunlight. For that’s all any of us were thinking, had been thinking, since we got the news. Mustn’t Tiffany have hoped that whatever pills she’d taken wouldn’t be strong enough and that her failed attempt would lead her back into our fold? How could anyone purposefully leave us—us, of all people? This is how I thought of it, for though I’ve often lost faith in myself, I’ve never lost faith in my family, in my certainty that we are fundamentally better than everyone else. It’s an archaic belief, one I haven’t seriously reconsidered since my late teens, but still I hold it. Ours is the only club I’d ever wanted to be a member of, so I couldn’t imagine quitting. Backing off for a year or two was understandable, but to want out so badly that you’d take your own life?

  “I don’t know that it had anything to do with us,” my father said. But how could it have not? Doesn’t the blood of every suicide splash back on our faces?

  At the far end of the parking lot was a stand selling reptiles. In giant tanks were two pythons, each as big around as a fire hose. The heat seemed to suit them, and I watched as they raised their heads, testing the screened ceilings. Beside the snakes was a low pen corralling an alligator with its mouth banded shut. It wasn’t full-grown but perhaps an adolescent, around three feet long and grumpy-looking. A girl had stuck her arm through the wire and was stroking the thing’s back while it glared, seething. “I’d like to buy everything here just so I could kill it,” I said.

  My father mopped his forehead with a Kleenex. “I’m with you, brother.”

  When we were young and would set off for the beach, I’d look out the window at all the landmarks we drove by—the Purina silo on the south side of Raleigh, the Klan billboard—knowing that when we passed them a week later, I’d be miserable. Our vacation over, now there’d be nothing to live for until Christmas. My life is much fuller than it was back then, yet this return felt no different. “What time is it?” I asked Amy.

  And instead of saying “Who cares?” she snapped, “You tell me. You’re the one with a watch on.”

  At the airport a few hours later, I picked sand from my pockets and thought of our final moments at the beach house I’d bought. I was on the front porch with Phyllis, who had just locked the door, and we turned to see the others in the driveway below us. “So is that one of your sisters?” she asked, pointing to Gretchen.

  “It is,” I said. “And so are the two women standing on either side of her.”

  “Then you’ve got your brother,” she observed. “That makes five—wow. Now, that’s a big family.”

  I looked at the sunbaked cars we would soon be climbing into—furnaces, every one of them—and said, “Yes. It certainly is.”

  Little Guy

  I was sitting around the house one evening when I suddenly wondered how tall Rock Hudson was. It’s not often that I think of him, but I’d recently rewatched the movie Giant, so he was on my mind.

  One of the many things I’ll never understand is why a search on my computer might be different from a search on someone else’s—my sister Amy’s, for instance. She’ll go to Google, type in “What does a fifty-year-old woman look like?,” and summon pictures I can’t believe they allow on the Internet, unlocked, where just anyone can see them. I don’t mean Playboy shots but the sort you’d find in Hustler. It’s as if she’d asked, “What does the inside of a fifty-year-old woman look like?”

  I did the same search and got pictures of Meg Ryan and Brooke Shields, smiling.

  I said to Hugh, “This computer of mine is so…wholesome.”

  I said it again after looking up Rock Hudson. “How tall is…” I began, and before I could finish, Google interrupted me with “…Jesus? You want to know how tall Jesus was?”

  Well, OK, I thought. But it’s Rock Hudson I was really curious about.

  Were Amy to open her laptop and type “How tall is…” Google would finish her question with “…Tom Hardy’s dick?” With mine, though, it’s Jesus, who they’re guessing came in at around six feet, which is ridiculous in my opinion. What are the odds that he was both tall and handsome? Is he described that way in the Bible? In some of the early northern European paintings, Christ looks like you flushed him out from under a bridge, but in Sunday-school books and the sorts of pictures they sell at Christian supply stores, he falls somewhere between Kenny Loggins and Jared Leto, always doe-eyed and, of course, white, with brown—not black—hair, usually wavy. And he always has a fantastic body, shown at its best on the cross, which—face it—was practically designed to make a man’s stomach and shoulders look good.

  What would happen, I often wonder, if someone sculpted a morbidly obese Jesus with titties and acne scars, and hair on his back? On top of that, he should be short—five foot two at most. “Sacrilege!” people would shout. But why? Doing good deeds doesn’t make you good-looking. Take Jimmy Carter. Habitat for Humanity didn’t do a thing for those tombstone-size teeth of his. Or at least I remember his teeth as seeming pretty big. I should Google Image them. On Amy’s computer.

  At five-five, I never give much thought to my height until I do. Whenever I come across a man my size—at the airport, say, or in a hotel lobby—I squeak the way a one-year-old does when it spots a fellow baby. It’s all I can do not to toddle over and embrace the guy. Whenever I do say something—“Look, we’re the same height!”—it turns weird, though I don’t know why. Don’t fellow Porsche drivers acknowledge one another, or people walking the same breed of dog? With small straight men, I often get the feeling that they don’t want their shortness pointed out, that it’s like saying, “Look, I have a bald spot too!”

  I want to ask the guys my size if, like me, they find themselves being hit up for money a lot. Hugh and I will walk through one city or another and, while he’ll advance down the sidewalk uninterrupted, I’ll get stopped again and again. “Can you give me a dollar? A cigarette? Whatever’s in that bag you’re holding?”

  It’s not that I have a particularly friendly face, so I have to assume that my stature has something to do with it, especially when the request becomes a demand. “I said, ‘Give me a dollar.’”

  “Would you be talking to me this way if I were taller than you?” I want to ask the ten-year-old with his hand out.

  I know that short straight men sometimes have it hard when it comes to finding a girlfriend, but I thought that for people like myself—“pocket gays,” we’re sometimes called—it was no hindrance. In retrospect, I guess I wasn’t paying much attention. T
he Washington Post has a regular feature in which they send two people out on a date and then check in to see how it went. Recently the couple was gay. Both stood more than six feet and listed in their “Deal-Breakers” box “short men.” They did not, I noticed, exclude white supremacists or machine-gun owners.

  Who wants to date you anyway? I wondered, scowling at the photos.

  I’m not one of those short men who feels he got shafted. Yes, it’s hard to buy things off the rack, but that’s what tailors are for. I fit easily into airplane seats. I can blend into crowds when I want to. Added height would be of no more use to me than a square head, so who needs it? I like knowing how tall other people are, though, especially celebrities. That’s why I Googled Rock Hudson, who, at six foot five, had every right to appear in Giant. He towered over his costars in that picture, but with other actors it’s hard to tell.

  I once asked someone in the movie business how tall Paul Newman was. This was back when he was still alive and before I had the Internet. “Oh,” said this woman who’d worked with him on Mr. & Mrs. Bridge, “he’s tiny.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “He’s a shrimp,” the woman said. “In photos he seems average enough, but in real life you practically need a microscope to see him.”

  “So he’s, like, the size of a flu germ?”

  “Just about,” she said. “I’d put him at around five-nine.”

  “I’m four inches shorter,” I told her, “so what does that make me?”

  “Well…you know,” she said.

  Before I learned to never, under any circumstances, read anything about myself, I’d occasionally stumble upon an interview I’d given. Then I’d recall the journalist who wrote it and mistakenly wonder what his or her writing was like. In Australia a few years back, I was surprised when a woman I’d very much enjoyed talking to described me as “bonsai-size.” This didn’t offend me. Rather, I was taken aback. She might have been an inch or two taller than me, but it’s not like I came to her knees or anything. I’ve been called “diminutive” as well, and “elfin,” as if I sleep in a teacup.

  A few years ago I opened a paper in Ottawa and saw that the journalist I’d spoken to the day before had described me as “slight and effeminate.” Really? I thought. The first adjective seemed fair enough, but the second one threw me. I know I cross my legs a lot, but I don’t think my walk is especially ladylike. I don’t wave my hands around when I talk or address anyone as “Miss Thing.” In the end I decided the word was more about him than it was about me. But isn’t it often that way?

  It’s one thing for someone to describe you in print, to go through several drafts and, after careful consideration, choose the adjective “Lilliputian” over, say, “pint-size.” It’s another thing when they blurt it out. “You horrible little man,” an Englishwoman once said after I’d written something she didn’t like in her book. In 1987, while I was home for Christmas, my sister Tiffany got into a fight with my sister Gretchen. I came in at the very end, just as it was breaking up, and when I asked what was going on, Tiffany said, “Why don’t you go back to your room and write some more about being a faggot?”

  How long has that been in there? I wondered. It’s scary the things that come out when you’re mad at someone. Some years back at a small airport in Wisconsin, a TSA agent ordered me to take off my vest. “I’ve been wearing this for three weeks,” I told her. “Every day I’ve traveled to a different city, and this is the first time I’ve been asked to remove it.”

  The woman was maybe ten years older than me, which at the time would have put her in her early sixties. Her dyed hair was cut short and was carefully styled in a way that made me think of chocolate cake frosting. “I want it off now!” she barked.

  “It must be nice to hold such an important position,” I wanted to say as I started undoing the buttons. Then I thought of how snobbish that sounded and was ashamed of myself. Here I was, angry, and my first instinct was to attack her job—her class, really. Have I always been this person? I wondered as I walked through the archway in my stocking feet. What does it mean that my second option, “I’m so glad you’re not my grandmother,” wasn’t much better?

  I later wondered how this woman might have described me and realized that all she needed to say was “the jerk in the vest.” Actually, in this context, the word “jerk” is unnecessary. As with “the guy in the white boots,” I think it’s already implied. I mean, really, a vest! What was I thinking? It wasn’t the kind that came with a suit but rather a “worker’s vest,” modeled on one from the nineteenth century, with pockets for all my mule-skinning tools.

  She also might have described me as “the gay guy.” While this doesn’t bother me, I don’t think of it as the cornerstone of what I am. Given all my current options, I think I prefer “the little guy.” Who wants to waste his time bothering a person like that? So tiny. So inconsequential. A speck.

  Stepping Out

  I was at an Italian restaurant in Melbourne, listening as a woman named Lesley talked about her housekeeper, an immigrant to Australia who earlier that day had cleaned the bathroom countertops with a bottle of very expensive acne medication: “She’s afraid of the vacuum cleaner and can’t read or write a word of English, but other than that she’s marvelous.”

  Lesley works for a company that goes into developing countries and trains doctors to remove cataracts. “It’s incredibly rewarding,” she said as our antipasto plate arrived. “These are people who’ve been blind for years, and suddenly, miraculously, they can see again.” She brought up a man who’d been operated on in a remote area of China. “They took off the bandages, and for the first time in two decades he saw his wife. Then he opened his mouth and said, ‘You’re so…old.’”

  Lesley pushed back her shirtsleeve, and as she reached for an olive, I noticed a rubber bracelet on her left wrist. “Is that a watch?” I asked.

  “No,” she told me. “It’s a Fitbit. You sync it with your computer, and it tracks your physical activity.”

  I leaned closer, and as she tapped the thickest part of it, a number of glowing dots rose to the surface and danced back and forth. “It’s like a pedometer,” she continued, “but updated, and better. The goal is to take ten thousand steps per day, and once you do, it vibrates.”

  I forked some salami into my mouth. “Hard?”

  “No,” she said. “It’s just a tingle.”

  A few weeks later I bought a Fitbit of my own and discovered what she was talking about. Ten thousand steps, I learned, amounts to a little more than four miles for someone my size. It sounds like a lot, but you can cover that distance over the course of an average day without even trying, especially if you have stairs in your house and a steady flow of people who regularly knock, wanting you to accept a package or give them directions or just listen patiently as they talk about birds, which happens from time to time when I’m home in West Sussex. One April afternoon the person at my door hoped to sell me a wooden bench. It was bought, he said, for a client whose garden he was designing. “Last week she loved it, but now she’s decided to go with something else.” In the bright sunlight, the fellow’s hair was as orange as a Popsicle. “The company I ordered it from has a no-return policy, so I’m wondering if maybe you’d like to buy it.” He gestured toward an unmarked van idling in front of the house and seemed angry when I told him that I wasn’t interested. “You could at least take a look before making up your mind,” he said.

  I closed the door a couple of inches. “That’s OK.” Then, because it’s an excuse that works for just about everything, I added, “I’m American.”

  “Meaning?” he said.

  “We…stand up a lot,” I told him.

  “Oldest trick in the book,” my neighbor Thelma said when I told her what had happened. “That bench was stolen from someone’s garden, I guarantee it.”

  This was seconded by the fellow who came to empty our septic tank. “Pikeys,” he said.

  “Come again?”
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br />   “Tinkers,” he said. “Pikeys.”

  “That means Gypsies,” Thelma explained, adding that the politically correct word is “travelers.”

  I was traveling myself when I got my Fitbit, and because the tingle feels so good, not just as a sensation but also as a mark of accomplishment, I began pacing the airport rather than doing what I normally do, which is sit in the waiting area, wondering which of the many people around me will die first, and of what. I also started taking the stairs instead of the escalator and avoiding the moving sidewalk.

  “Every little bit helps,” my old friend Dawn, who frequently eats lunch while hula-hooping and has been known to visit her local Y three times a day, said. She had a Fitbit as well, and swore by it. Others I met weren’t quite so taken. These were people who had worn one until the battery died. Then, instead of recharging it, which couldn’t be simpler, they’d stuck it in a drawer, most likely with all the other devices they’d lost interest in over the years. To people like Dawn and me, people who are obsessive to begin with, the Fitbit is a digital trainer, perpetually egging us on. During the first few weeks that I had it, I’d return to my hotel at the end of the day, and when I discovered that I’d taken a total of, say, twelve thousand steps, I’d go out for another three thousand.