As I Lay Dreaming of S-Town

As I Lay Dreaming of S-Town

Terry Barr

        “…and us setting in the house in the winter, listening to it, [and] I would think what a shame Darl couldn’t be here to enjoy it too. But it is better so for him. This world is not his world; this life his life” (261).
        It was in graduate school that I first read Faulkner’s minor masterpiece, As I Lay Dying. As in much of Faulkner, I didn’t understand exactly what the lines above meant, what exactly Cash meant about his younger brother, Darl. In fact, I wasn’t sure about most of the novel; I understood what happened, but I didn’t approach it or retreat from it with the same somberness and gravity that I did with Absalom, Absalom!, The Sound and the Fury, or Light in August. So much of the Bundren family and their journey to bury Addie, their wife/mother, fell out of my head. Except these lines, and though I couldn’t quite figure out their literal or emotive meaning, I kept hearing their haunting echo.
        It’s been almost forty years since that first reading, and I’ve read and taught the novel many times since. I am not a Faulkner scholar, but I do understand what Cash is saying about Darl now, and that understanding is focused on what it means to be a Southern misfit, especially within your own family.
        At the novel’s end, the Bundrens decide they must commit Darl to the asylum in Jackson, or else the constable will arrest him for burning a barn, lock him in a cell somewhere for good, and, more importantly perhaps, force the Bundrens to pay for all damages. Cash convinces his brother that this course is best, though only after his other brother and sister, Jewel and Dewey Dell, and their father, Anse, jump on Darl, hold him down, and then shut him up in the wagon that will transport him to his new forever home.
        Sure, Darl has strangely prophetic visions, and he torments Jewel, his half-brother, mercilessly with the circumstances of Jewel’s engendering. Yes, he burns down a neighbor’s barn, mainly because his mother’s odorous and rotting corpse outrages him. He’s a strange one, especially to the other Bundrens.
        A family misfit.
        He’s dangerous, too, because God knows what else he’d do if he wasn’t bound for Jackson. His maniacal laughter ends his farewell section—a most disquieting end, and one that has staying power for most readers, and certainly for me.
        Maybe within my memory I’ve always understood Darl, but as I listened and re-listened to Serial and This American Life’s podcast, S-Town—the story of rural horologist John B. McLemore—my understanding of Darl, and Cash’s words about him, have carbonized.
        The mystery of John B. McLemore is not the mystery we encounter as the podcast begins. Through the work’s seven chapters, we go inside Bibb County, Alabama, inside John, his family, those he hangs with, those he maybe loves, and certainly those he hates. By the end, and certainly in the trial that is proceeding in the series’ aftermath, those John loved and those he hated might be one and the same.
        Read the S-Town discussion page on Facebook, and you’ll see that John’s tormentors—his vultures and scavengers—are legion, with none of them agreeing on the villain’s identity. Everyone in Bibb County, it seems, wants to find John B’s “buried gold;” everyone has wondered how much he was truly worth. His surviving relatives and friends, like Tyler Goodson, believe they have rights to his property, that John B. meant to will them his left-behind goods and dogs, if only he had taken the time to draw up that will before he “transitioned.”
        The Tuscaloosa (Alabama) News, which I read daily online, featured a story recently about Tyler Goodson and his impending October trial for stealing John’s property. Tyler denies the charge because he claims to know what John B meant him to have. The writer and narrator of S-Town, Brian Reed, might have to testify at the trial because S-Town uncovered certain evidence that could possibly determine the outcome of Tyler’s trial.
        Though I don’t know any of these characters, I feel invested in their story. I do tangentially know Tyler Goodson’s lawyer, JD Terry, the son of my childhood neighbor in Bessemer, a town mentioned in S-Town near Bibb County and where Reed stays in the Best Western motel. More crucially for me, Chapter Two of the podcast features Tyler Goodson’s tattoo parlor deep in the heart of my hometown. It is this setting, this place of business, that reveals the sort of misfit John B is and links him to Faulkner’s Darl: men with visions; men who are tolerated and liked some of the time, but who are too different to be accepted by those they sometimes choose to, sometimes must, hang around.
        Listening again to Chapter Two of S-Town unsettles me. One of the only places away from his home that John B visited was Tyler’s tattoo parlor. Although John B hated tattoos and rednecks and drug users, he loved Tyler, and he felt accepted by the hangers-on there. The shop itself included the parlor in front and, through a secret door, a bar that included a stripper’s pole. Brian Reed also entered this world and heard things that made his hair and soul curl.
        Of course, before his work on this story, Reed had never been to Bessemer. He’s half-Jewish (full disclosure, as I am). And he’s married to an African-American woman (full disclosure, my wife is Persian). And what he heard in Tyler’s shop shook him. Yet, he escaped.
        He could escape.
        No one ganged up on Brian, and no one really ganged up on John B either. Everybody knew, however, just how different John B was from them: that he was highly educated, unlike them. That he no longer hated African-Americans, unlike them.
        That he was gay, unlike them.
        When John B finally left Bibb County, and this world, no one had jumped on him to do so. Instead, he left because he understood just how different he was from his Bibb County Shit-Town fellow citizens. From his family. He kept asking Reed, and surely himself, why he chose to stay in Woodstock, Bibb County, Alabama, for as long as he did. That he didn’t leave sooner makes me thankful but also makes me wonder.
        I am thankful that I did leave, though I go back several times a year to see my mother and friends.
        But I wonder not only about John B’s life, but about the other John B’s I knew: older men I’ve judged, younger men I’ve counseled. Schoolmates I’ve ditched.
        I now understand things about them that eluded me the first time through, just as I wondered about Darl after reading As I Lay Dying that first time.
        Things about misfits, what makes them so, and how I respond to them, these people who have suffered and been ganged up on. Who have left this world, or maybe wish they had.
                                                                #
        This world is not their world.
        Since I teach at a small liberal arts college, I am freshman advisor to many kinds of students, not all of whom want to major in English. Most, though, do have a sense of who they are and who they want to be. On occasion, they want my input. “Help me decide whether to take Biology or Chemistry.” “What could I do if I major in English?” Rarely, do I get one who has tested very highly on the placement exam but has “other issues.”
        Like Michael.
        Extremely quiet, awkward, Michael was sitting very still on that first day in my office with his mother and stepfather. The parents asked questions about credit hours, meal plans, and dorm life.
        Michael said nothing.
        In those days freshmen would arrive and check-in on a Friday and then have the entire weekend for orientation, outdoor team-building activities, street parties, and even church. Michael actually lived in the tiny town where our college was nestled. Late that afternoon, after his parents had returned home, Michael reappeared in my office. He stood just inside the door, shifting his feet and mumbling something I couldn’t get.
        Michael had soft blond hair, wore thick glasses, and didn’t quite fit his baggy jeans. He was trying for long sideburns and a goatee, but his facial hair still had that downy fuzz that marks a guy who hasn’t begun shaving and might never need to.
        “Michael,” I asked, “is something wrong?”
        He wouldn’t look at me and kept shifting his oversized white Reeboks.
        Finally he looked up and almost whispered,
        “I’m homesick.”
        I understood. I remembered.
        When my own parents dropped me off at college and then drove the 25 miles back to our house, I felt that stomachache that periodically plagued me all the way back to kindergarten, perhaps even earlier when I’d be sent to play at another kid’s house. At college, though, I knew my roommate, and at supper that first night I met others and soon was attending organizational meetings at the newspaper and entertainment committee offices.
        I was able to adjust to new situations.
        I could sense Michael wasn’t.
        “Well, you don’t absolutely need to be here, Michael. Where does your family live?”
        “Oh, just about a mile away.”
        “Well, then if you’re having a hard time, just go on home. We won’t be registering for classes until Monday.”
        He half-smiled and thanked me. I thought about Michael over that weekend and the dread, I’m sure, he was feeling when Sunday night came upon him.
        I wondered then and still do now whether or not I did the right thing by him.
        In spite of everything, he lasted; he remained my advisee, declaring his English major when he was a sophomore. Almost four years later, on the verge of graduating, Michael dropped by my office again.
        “Sir, the registrar says I need one more science class to graduate.”
        I didn’t believe this could be true. I am usually OCD about students’ records and ensuring that they have taken their core courses. True enough, though, after checking Michael’s online file, I found that he was short a science credit. Three hours short, which meant he’d have to enroll in summer school, and his straitened family would have to choke up additional funds.
        And that someone would have to break this news to his anxious mother.
        On the following day Michael was scheduled to present his senior thesis, which his proud parents would attend.
        “Will you help me tell them,” he asked.
        It was the last thing I wanted to do, but it was also partly my fault, and wholly my responsibility.
        “Yes, Michael, I will.”
        Though he struggled through his thesis because, obviously, public speaking was not Michael’s strong suit, he made it and passed his seminar. After the presentation, I followed Michael and his clearly relieved mother out into the rotunda of our class building. Michael kept trying to slow his mother down, but she seemed to sense that the sooner she got out of there the better, as if someone might rush her and tell her that this was all an illusion—that something was wrong with this day, this time, this world of Michael.
        Of course, something was:
        “Mrs ____, I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but Michael and I made a mistake in keeping up with his credits. He’s going to need to pass one more science class to graduate.”
        I had never seen a person literally sink before. But she caught herself before she hit: “Well, what does he have to do?”
        I told her. I assured her that he would be able to walk at graduation, and after he passed the summer school class, the college would mail his diploma to him.
        She sighed and looked to the ceiling as if somehow she knew this would happen.
        “Well, all right. Come on Michael.”
        Michael looked back at me then:
        “Thank you, sir.”
        Michael passed his science class, and then he graduated. That was six years ago, when he walked out of the college and into—or perhaps out of—this world.
        I don’t know what happened to him afterward. One of my colleagues who remembers him well recently told me that Michael came to him one day, threatening suicide. At least he asked for help, then. And now?
        I keep telling myself, his life is not my life.
                                                                #
        In my life in Bessemer—so close to John B’s “shit-town” of Woodstock that I could drive there sooner than I could listen to an entire episode of the podcast—I could have applied Cash Bundren’s words about brother Darl to quite a few people I knew. I could even say that like Dewey Dell and Jewel, and like the men at Tyler Goodson’s tattoo parlor, Black Sheep Ink, I at least thought about and sometimes did jump on some of these characters.
        In Chapter Two, Brian speaks at length with the guys at Black Sheep Ink about John B, out of John B’s presence. They have been discussing John B’s penchant for launching into “tirades” about how they’re all “failures;” about how they’ll “never amount to nothing;” about how they don’t understand or care about realities like climate change and our over-consumption of fossil-fuels. While they might eye-roll John B or smile at each other as he rants,
        “These guys dish it out, too. They tease John for his many
        peculiarities, like how he’ll devour whatever leftover food is
        around, no matter how old or rock-hard it is, his inability to buy
        new shoes to alleviate his athlete’s foot, which he’s allegedly had
        for three years, his extemporaneous solving of math problems, his
        utter aversion to being in a room with more than two or three
        people at a time, his living with his mom his whole life, his being a
        loner. It’s friendly, though. They like John. After all, John is the
        granddaddy of all black sheep, so this crew gets him. They truly
        seem to accept him, though that doesn’t stop them from wondering.”
        So much to wonder about John B: his money, his lifestyle, why he wants to hang around the tattoo parlor guys when he hates so much about them, especially their racism and their tattoos. Tyler Goodson will later tell Brian Reed that he loves John B, that whenever he leaves John B’s house, they both say “I love you, man.” Tyler understands that John B’s orientation might be way different than his own, but he says that his friend has never tried anything with him.
        I keep seeing scenes of this tattoo parlor, of John B’s haranguing the assembled others who are so unlike him. Of their joking with him, accepting him in a certain way, but never fully. I believe that if it came down to it, they would use him, hurt him, and gang up on him for his money and his property. Though they are all black sheep—as is the entire Bundren family—John B is a misfit too far.
        As I might say about Lewis Mincey, a kid I knew in Bessemer. A kid who so closely resembled A Confederacy of Dunces’ main character, Ignatius J. Reilly, that when I first read that novel in grad school, I thought my life was being self-reflected:
        “Shifting from one hip to the other in his lumbering, elephantine
        fashion, Ignatius sent waves of flesh rippling beneath the tweed
        and flannel, waves that broke upon button and seams….It seemed
        as if his whole being was ready to burst from his swollen suede
        desert boots” (1-2).
        Lewis Mincey described to a tee.
        “Elephantine,” over six feet tall in high school, weighing, I’m guessing, close to 275 (not a one of them muscle pounds), with knees that touched at the cap, and feet almost at right angles from each other. These attributes helped him in one way:
        His ability to spell out words with his body.
        In tenth grade English class, in our afternoon Thespian Club meetings and play rehearsals, our teacher often called on Lewis to spell things, and Lewis, of course, didn’t exactly need the prompting. I can see him now, contorting:
        “This is my ‘Y,’ this is my ‘P.’ Now my ‘Q’ needs work.”
        His classmates encouraged him, if encouraged is the right word. Egged him on? Provoked him? Asked for him to provide that day’s entertainment, something we could rehash later that night as we phoned ourselves into delirium.
        And delirium is right.
        In my junior year of high school, the Thespian Club went to our regional convention in Birmingham, where my friends Jimbo and Mary Jane and I performed a one-act play for competition. Some of our other friends, our stage crew, went, too, and these guys, along with our advisor, got hotel rooms. The cast went back to our family homes after that first night of the convention because our performance came early the next morning, and the last thing we needed was to stay out most of the night getting shit-faced drunk, as our crew did.
        I pick the phrase “shit-faced” carefully. I think hearing it, we all get a certain image of a goofy grin, slobber dripping from a drunken mouth, eyes crossed or nearly there.
        What most of us don’t, won’t, can’t, imagine is what the crew reported to us the next day. Lewis was one of this crew, and given his stature and girth, he could knock back plenty of beer and whiskey, which he did that night.
        How do we measure phrases and degrees of “holding one’s liquor?”
        For Lewis, the other crew members didn’t measure in the usual form, the degree of hurling that so many of us achieve when we’ve imbibed too heavily. No, they used another yardstick:
        “We lost him at some point,” they said, “and when we got back to the room, he was passed out in his own shit.”
        Apparently it was everywhere: the bed, the carpet, all over the bathroom.
        It’s crude of me to report this, I know. I do so, however, because like those who actually saw it, I went back to school the next week and reported on the scene of Lewis’s defecating humiliation far and wide. Lewis never had a chance after that night, if he ever did before. Still, he finished high school, was even the co-star of his senior play, Aristophenes’ The Birds.
        I had graduated the previous year but came back to see those of my friends who were still performing.
        Was Lewis my friend? Did he consider himself to be my or anyone else’s friend, or was he just a kid who never fit with us, or with himself?
        He was actually quite funny in his own way and, no doubt, brighter than most in our school. I lost track of him after that play, and it seems to me that a number of years back, I heard he committed suicide. I am not being intentionally vague about Lewis’s end; I really don’t remember the details, and so far, no one I knew back then remembers either, which is about as sad a testament to Lewis as I can say.
        I knew Lewis early on. When we were little boys, I know we travelled the same kid birthday party circuits. My mother has recorded in my “Baby Book” a party at a friend’s house, and among the “guests” (we were all two or three years old) is Lewis Mincey.
        I do remember one other scene, though.
        When I was seven, my grandmother, who lived with us, staged one of her notorious ladies’ bridge parties on a night my parents had gone to the movies. She invited Lewis’s grandmother who lived on the next block over from us. She was babysitting Lewis, so she brought him over to play with me. What we did together I can’t remember, but at 8:30, I had to go to bed as my parents would never let me stay up even a second past my bedtime. The card party raged on, however, and ol’ Lewis had to figure out some strategy for survival.
        In that drifty period before I fell asleep, I heard him. I wasn’t allowed to shut my bedroom doors, which accessed both my parents’ bedroom and the hallway leading to our breakfast room. When I heard what I heard, I sat up. There was Lewis, standing there by my bed staring at me, and before I could register what he was intending or doing, his grandmother called for him.
        Then, my grandmother shut my doors and I fell asleep, thinking of Lewis.
                                                                #
        This life is not his life.
        I’ve heard that sometimes people feel as if they are being guided by some external presence; that they are outside themselves, looking down on the awful thing that is happening in their conscious life.
        When John B first contacted Brian Reed, how much of his story did he truly want to share? Was he crying out for help in figuring out who this man he had been watching his entire life, this John B McLemore, was?
        Even with seven chapter-hours of S-Town, there is so much we will never know about John B and what made him the man he was.
        The key could be such a small one, too, something he never told or something that happened when he was young and vulnerable. When he was unprotected.
        Something like this.
        I once knew a man, knew him when I was a boy and teenager. I worked for him one summer in his yard. I cut his grass, helped him lay gravel for his garden walkway and then pour cement into that same path. I weeded his flowers in the July Alabama sun, and for my trouble, he gave me three things:
        Fifty cents an hour.
        A slur at my father, a reaction to my dad saying you shouldn’t cut the grass too low or else the sun would dry it out and kill it: “What your father knows about cutting grass is less than the amount of shit a Chihuahua makes.”
        And this scene.
        I have finished cutting the grass, and he has arrived from his professional job. He wants me to help him lift some heavy rocks for the garden. He asks me to come inside while he changes. He must have asked me to follow him upstairs where he will change, because on my own I wouldn’t have gone there, wouldn’t have ascended his stairs. I am standing in the hallway leading to his bedroom. He does not shut his bedroom door, does not hide taking off his street clothes, does not cover or move out of sight as he reveals his gold underpants. Briefs, they were, much like the ones I was wearing underneath my jeans, only mine were plain white.
        He doesn’t look at me as he changes, but I turn quickly, so how can I be certain that he didn’t?
        He says nothing and soon has slipped into a gold work-suit, one-piece coveralls meant for cultivating.
        It’s like I was and wasn’t there.
        What if we had made eye contact? What else might he have done or said? As in dreams when we are caught by someone, or when someone is approaching us meaning to do us some harm, I see myself frozen in this moment.
        We went downstairs then and out to the garden and lifted those heavy stones.
        He lived alone with his mother. He was a man in his forties then, a man well-respected, though considered eccentric, even odd, by some. I was fifteen. In his spare time, he painted in pastels and water-colors. I have one of his pieces, a work given to me by my mother.
        He never touched me, but I believe he wanted to.
        Nothing like this ever happened again.
        Through years of therapy, I know how possible it is to have scars even when you haven’t been touched. It took much too long for me to realize this truth.
        I can’t help wondering, though: What if I hadn’t resisted his overture, his grooming? What if he had beckoned me into his room? Would I have obeyed? Would I have fled? Or would I have remained still, rooted to that spot?
        Paralyzed?
        What if I hadn’t been stronger, hadn’t sensed the danger?
        Hadn’t escaped my S-Town?
                                                                #
        I know that many of us both love and hate our homes, our past. Despite my difficult experiences growing up in Bessemer, I didn’t really want to leave.
        In fact, I feared entering any new space where I didn’t know if I’d make it, if I’d be good or smart enough to make it.
        So I chose a college only 25 miles from home. Even when I went to graduate school in Knoxville, TN, I came home every chance I got. At first.
        I don’t know what would have happened had I stayed in Bessemer. I’m not saying I would have ended up like the man I described above, or like Lewis Mincey, or John B. McLemore. They had their own private hells. And, I assume, I would have had mine.
        If I had another family, John B’s family, for example, I might have been allowed or even encouraged to wallow in my fear of leaving home. With a more limiting or needy family, I might have chosen to live in my parents’ spare room or have decided to get a low-rent apartment in nearby Jonesboro. I might have taken unsatisfying work in my hometown and never realized my potential, never gained the independence I needed, and never found the happiness I know.
        Without my own family’s support and encouragement of the dreams I had, I might not ever have left home at all.
                                                                #
        In the last chapter of S-Town, we discover that John B paid Tyler Goodson to tattoo him all over his torso, to pierce and re-pierce his nipples, and to whip him repeatedly and then cover the lash marks with more tattoos. John B desired the principle of pleasure/pain, but then, hadn’t his whole life been lived on that spectrum?
        We also learn, and here is a southerner’s true lament, of John B’s history with race, as Brian Reed narrates:
        “John had a complicated and contradictory relationship to race.
        Like with women and gay people, he’d express outrage when he
        heard examples of discrimination. He’d express empathy, and also
        an understanding for the systemic ways our society is built, to be
        unfair and harmful to these groups of people.
        But then sometimes John would say racist things in front of me.
        He’d acknowledge that he shouldn’t use the n-word and then use
        the n-word. People who’ve known him for a long time have told
        me that, especially years ago, John was quite racist, but that over
        the years he had changed for the better. Granted, these are white
        people telling me this.
        Woodstock is about 95% white, which, of course, is not an
        accident. It’s the result of many decades of laws and violence and
        day-to-day racism. Bibb County was the last county in Alabama to
        comply with a school desegregation order in 1967, long
        after Brown v. Board of Education. It’s a place that voted for
        George Wallace four to one. And then in the ’50s, had a sign
        appear on Main Street in one of the towns saying, “The Klan
        people of Bibb County welcome you.”
        So much of the stuff John said he hated about Shittown—Harleys,
        tattoos, misogyny and homophobia, racism, he said he despised it.
        But that stuff was part of him, too.”
 
        My town, Bessemer, had a Klan welcome sign, too, back in the 1950’s. Recently, I found a photo of it, planted there next to signs from the Kiwanis, Jaycees, and Lions. Unlike John B, I am not gay, but have been called “queer” or “fag” for simple things like growing my hair long, loving David Bowie, refusing to try out for football. No one ever ganged up on me or beat me, though. I’ve never used a racial slur publicly. Or at least not as an adult.
        But I will admit that long ago, after my first daughter was born, my father said to me as we were out walking one spring afternoon, “I’m afraid she’ll grow up and marry someone black.”
        In that moment I was scared, too. I could feel his fear, and though it didn’t totally become my own, it never left me.
        And yet I know that, compared to all the others I’ve written about here, I have been inflicted with only a few, mostly hidden, scars from this world.
        Hearing about John B, remembering Lewis and Michael, I realize I was strong. I am strong.
        I escaped my S-Town.
        And entered the rest of my life.