So this entry is not really a story; it’s a transitional explanation to get both of us back on track. I’m sure you’ve noticed that my memoirs are out of order, but if you ever write your own autobiography, you’ll understand why: You recall some memories more vividly than others, so you write those first and postpone the others. Then you have to circle back around and try to connect the stories as best you can.
That’s why I call my memoirs the Story Circle.
After my near disaster at the Quiet Man, I hitchhiked north out of Texas back into Oklahoma and on into Kansas. You may wonder what I did in those desolate states, and the answer is, “Not much.” I stayed with a distant cousin and his family in Wichita for almost a month until he kicked me out. When I showed up at his door, he looked at me like he couldn’t bring me into focus, which I expected since we’d only met once and hadn’t seen each other for years. His name was Frank, and he worked on airplanes, so he had a pretty nice house. There were two tiny oak trees in the front yard and a mound of fire ants in the back. His wife’s name was Marilyn, and she was pretty, prettier than Frank warranted. Frank and Marilyn had two kids, Frank, Jr., “Frankie” and Brighton James, “B.J.” How stupid do you have to be to nickname your son “B.J.”? Good Lord. Frankie and B.J. would play in the backyard until they got stung by the fire ants, whereupon they would run screaming into the house where Marilyn dabbed baking soda on their welts and bitched without ceasing at Frank to do something, goddammit, how many times have I told you to pour some gasoline on that mound or call an exterminator if you’re too goddamned lazy to do it yourself.
Once I was getting out of the shower, and I grabbed the towel rack, and though I hardly leaned on it, seriously, hardly at all, I busted it clean out of the wall leaving two jagged holes in the sheet rock. I felt very bad about that. I have a feeling it was Marilyn who made Frank kick me out, but I had it coming. A month is a long time to spend with anyone but especially with a relative you don’t know very well.
It wasn’t long after that when I got picked up by Randy and Ger, and they baptized me in the Wakarusa River, all of which you can read about in post No. 11: A Second Baptism? Part 1. Then read the following two posts, No. 12 and No. 13. The next post after this one, No. 39, will tell you what happened after No. 13.
And remember, 13x3=39 is orange, not pumpkin orange but the orange on a Candy Land card.
A transition is an “in between place,” a doorway through which one passes to another state, what academics since the 1980s have been calling a “liminal space.” “Liminal” comes from the Latin word limen meaning doorway or threshold. When you’re standing in a doorway, you’re neither inside the house nor outside the house. You’re on the sill. A step either way, and that’s where you are.
Or think about it this way: A liminal space is the or in “To be or not to be: That is the question.” The conjunction “or” is the “question.” You can’t stay in the question forever, so you have to decide whether you’re going to step backward into being or forward into non-being, or at least Hamlet had to decide that. I’ve always been on the side of being. Non-being scares me shitless not because of “what dreams may come” but because of the long, dark night. Or maybe both. (We need to talk about Hamlet sometime.)
I feel sorry for kids today who have been indoctrinated into asking, “Am I male or female: That is the question?” Apparently, some folks find themselves in that liminal dilemma when they’re older, but it’s not a question to be foisted off on a ten year old.
Back in my time, no one questioned whether or not they were male or female; we might question which sex we preferred as the object of our desire, but we never doubted our sex. And maybe some boys dressed up in their sister’s clothes when they got home from school, but even they knew they were boys, or they wouldn’t have gotten turned on by wearing their sister’s clothes.
I can’t image being young today (says every old person who ever lived), what with artificial intelligence—Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, ElevenLabs, Midjourney, and so on; social media—Meta, YouTube, X, TikTok, Chaturbate, Reddit, OnlyFans, WeChat, Discord, Ello, MeWe, Ravelry, and so on; sexual and gender labels—gooners, incels, bearded girls and breasted boys, sigmas, alphas, giga-chads, delulus, simps, pick-mes, baddies, queens; cyber groupies—carpeteers, snapewives, ziibos, gerbilsters; and religions—the most overwhelming list of all; so many proliferating categories that people forever remain in limbo (also from the word limen) trying to decide where they fit. The Catholic Church got rid of limbo at the very moment it became most relevant.
This is why “TRANSITIONING” is the “god-word” of our age (to channel Richard Weaver). We are all in transition, and so I wrote this poem:
SNAKE DOCTORS IN THE OZARKS
A green snake like a twining vine, like a sleek ribbon, glides through his fingers to tongue at nothing
Tiny black eyes: punctuation in a poem no one knows what the hell it means
Art for art’s sake curling back on itself like a green ribbon wrapped around a thin wrist
Warming its cold blood with his hot blood and looking with lidless eyes onto vacancy
Perhaps remembering the disturbance in the pondberry leaves and fingers made tacky by spilled Coke
And Look Daddy look!
The black eyes look but cannot see
Like virgins killed to entertain gods or a starved dog at the master’s gate
Or the dirty girl punished by Mrs. Black who loves everyone but her
Thanks to the good father
The green snake glides into the pondberry bush
But the dirty girl carries Mrs. Black in her heart forever