Unadmitted, Unrelished, Untold

Rais’n Up Catfish: Eight

The empty book and the apple box: “ ←- you understand” was code for ‘I don’t dare write it down, lest Satan know what’s tempting me.” I was actually writing notes in the margins to God to clue him in because I was afraid the devil was reading over my shoulder and didn’t dare say it out loud.

Seattle:  March, 1992.

I would never have guessed it could be so disheartening to read my journals from twenty years past, to peer into a speculum so old and false and see myself so young. Once I looked in I was trapped, unable to avert my eyes or deny the sad truth of youth’s reflections. So much self-induced torment. So much superstition and fear.

          Father,
          I want to be fully yours. Not withholding anything. Then only can one be truly happy.
          I feel, as is written in Psalms,“Thy law is not burdensome. It is indeed a joy.” 
          Help me, Lord to keep the Sabbath day holy. I know my Father that great and bountiful      
          blessings come from keeping the Sabbath holy. Teach me, Father, how. 
          Please be near to guide me. Help me in all that I do everyday to do it as unto You.
          I am truly a weak-willed person. But this will pass, as all imperfection. 
         You, Lord, are my rock. To you I must cling. Again I say, thy law is a joy...
         (Comfrey Mississippi, Summer 1972) 
                            

“I am truly a weak-willed person…”

I had nearly managed to forget all that over the years, to glibly rewrite my history, as the guilty are wont to do. But there they were, my journals from a lost summer on the Mississippi Delta, like an old, accusing mirror, words written at fifteen and forgotten, buried at the bottom of an antiquated box. Half-truths. Yellowed pages. Dissembling prayers. Dust.

It was raining that afternoon; March in Seattle. The world outside, veiled; eternal, weeping skies tilted sideways in chill wind. I lazed by the fireplace, restless, drinking my last quarter bottle of tired merlot and wallowing in the sad, worn voice of Billie Holiday.

“I sit in my chair
Filled with despair
There's no one could be so sad
With gloom everywhere
I sit and I stare…”

The dark combination fit my somber mood. Bitter. Lost. Pouting.

Fool!

I had been staring into the yellow-orange flames for hours, glancing occasionally out the window at the steady downpour and across the room at nothing. Every feeble attempt to make sense of my messy life seemed futile. Nearly broke, depressed, angry, having just walked out of another failed marriage and floundering about in an old rental house with stained carpets. I was at the beginning of something difficult but the ending of something much worse. Sorting through boxes was meant to keep me occupied. 

“Oh yes, good. Doing pretty good. Making real progress!” I chippered when a concerned friend who’d helped me move, hurriedly hauling boxes through a barrage of screamed threats and insults, past policemen summoned to stop me, to arrest me but who ultimately ended up providing protection, called to check in. Little white lies that mocked me. More empty words to give me cover. “Getting things organized.” I said cheerfully. Finding new homes for decades of sad old junk.

Sorrowful eyes pause again and again on an ancient apple crate across the room. Awakening from momentary trances, I’d find myself looking straight at it, then wander off again. Each time I resurfaced from another daydream my eyes were resting there once again. Just a rickety, old bin full of nonsense and memories, things I’d never gotten round to letting go of, never bidden their past due farewells.

Finally, curiosity dug in its talons. I moved closer, began pawing through its depths. Smiles of remembrance then, treasures stored for reasons so long forgotten, steps backward in time to happier, more innocent days. Tears began to well, eyes and heart overflowing, images and smells from a kinder past. My spirits began to lighten.

---

It lay buried there beneath a dog-eared Pee Chee folder full of Earth Science tests and term papers, one of those ‘Empty Books’ sold in bookstores for journaling and sketches. My friend, Gayle had given it to me at the end of our freshman year, along with a heartfelt note I’d tucked safely inside the back cover.

“Keep writing over the summer, David.” she admonished. “It will help. And remember, I’ll be praying for you. Please, keep close to God ...and pray for me too.”

I had packed her gift along when I flew back to Memphis for the summer and tried to do as she’d requested but things hadn’t quite worked out. Now, twenty years later it lay there at the bottom of that apple box, aborted, stillborn, one more hapless misfire; two dozen hand scrawled pages at the beginning of a volume meant for two hundred.

I flipped it open and began to read:

Journal Entry:  June 25, 1972

Father, fill me with a burning desire to study and pray constantly.
Help me to benefit in some way from this period of time when things are by no means 
going right, and keep me hanging silently on, waiting for your deliverance.
God, I'm so rotten, but I love you and the Christian life, and I want to be able to go home 
with you some day. Oh God, I hope it's soon.  And I live to be ready.

Just, wow!

Troubled words penned many years before, desperate sounding sentences that explained most about me by omission, daily entries scribed in the pious language of some two-bit tent preacher; stiff, like old joints; simplistic, one-dimensional slobber written not so much for me as some unseen audience I imagined reading over my shoulder. Words so stiff and earnest they were sappy. Tortured. Pained. Beseeching. Glib.

What a load of anguish and denial they brought racing back!

It was true I suppose, that some part of me had actually been like that, but only one part. Where was all of the rest of me?  Where was nature boy? And smartass? And the harlot’s son? Where was the class clown? Where was the record of that kid’s voice?

Scared, adrift, lost in a sea of discovery and guilt, I’d been no more able to make sense of the world I was living in at fifteen than the one I faced twenty years later in divorce. My second divorce. But rather than admit that, rather than writing it down and trying to tease out the tangled threads, I lied. I thought I had to. With Satan’s fallen angels reading over my shoulder each time I wrote, I didn’t dare pen some detailed roadmap to my doubts and fears, my greatest temptations. I’d been telling Mom’s lies for years. I did not yet know how to speak of the truth.

I was never able to write in that book again after that summer. I tried a few times, but always closed it up and tucked it back away. Eventually I stopped trying altogether.  Still, for some reason I never could just throw it away.

Life on that fish farm was a wild swinging pendulum passing back and forth between anguish and rapture. Much of what I saw daily was almost unbelievable to me, a curious collection of outlandish behaviors, the dark-steeped tea of colloquial sensuality, sweaty, Southern horniness.

There was a blinding compulsion among my work companions to ‘get laid,’ whatever the risks, then gloat the particulars to all who would listen. And in that world everyone listened. It was a kingdom of men who defined their lives by lovemaking, but lovemaking in terms of actions alone. Wonderful, enviable actions, mind you, but base and animal, nonetheless.

My companions were cavemen with pick-ups, snatch hunters reeking beer and Old Spice with deer rifles in their rear windows. I got no sense from their stories and jokes that sex had much to do with one's partner. It required neither great respect nor love, nor loyalty, just ‘legs of peanut butter...easy to spread.’

Pussy was queen, a delicious moniker used openly by many of the men I met. She was the ambrosian creature they lived for, the dripping, sweet fruit of whispered longings. Moist fertile playground. Tree of Knowledge. Beaver. Twat. Snatch. Nookie. Cunt.

By their grinning accounts she was the best meal I’d never had ...spoken of with reverence, like a goddess and leering, like a nasty treat, often in the same sentence.  She was a monster that could bite you. Eat your brains up. Rot your dick off. Make you weak.

Of all life’s grand mysteries, they said this was the best a woman had to offer. The salty-sweet flesh mango. Fruit of motherhood. Means of exchange.

Pussy was something she might, if you were lucky, let you play with, definitely use as bait, probably barter over. It could make you drunk, careless or, God forbid, prisoner for life.

To the men I lived and worked with, pussy may not have been everything, but it was damn close. For me, it was a terrifying thing to admit even thinking about, a name formidible to pronounce, the sweetest of dark-meat mysteries. Most fascinating topic at work.

Convinced that I was being tested continually by the God I needed desperately to save me, I tried my best to be a good Christian and let my little light shine. Funny how quickly those tests blurred and faded in the whirlwind of living and working among them. We sweated, labored, laughed and lusted together while I secretly, nervously feared for my eternal life. Despite it all, my journals never came close, not one word closer than admitting vague temptations and unspecified battles over prayer and Bible study. The bigger stories, those torturous, grander truths remained: unadmitted, unrelished, untold. And the smaller, sweeter ones, simply unclaimed.

I would never have guessed it could be so disheartening to read my journals from twenty years past, to peer into a speculum so old and false and see myself so young.  Once I looked in I was trapped, unable to avert my eyes or deny the sad truth of past reflections. So much self-induced torment. So much superstition and fear.

Frustrated and embarrassed, assailed by page after page of deliberate obfuscation and pretense I determined to skull backward along those moss overhung channels of memory, to remember, to explore and finally acknowledge just what it was about that backwater world that has kept it so very sweet in my mind.

I determined to look back without fear, without the crippling veil of shame, to own all of it, finally, every bit of the utter, raw magic that surrounded me that summer, that buoyed me up, that tied me in knots, that left me doubled over and gasping for breath there in that unlikeliest of fertile places.

© David E. Perry. All rights reserved.

---

When I was fifteen I lived in a boarding house in Mississippi during the summer and worked, seventy and more hours each week …on a catfish farm where I earned just a dollar an hour. The work was honest, if the circumstances surrounding it were not. My mother was dating the fish farm’s married owner. His wife wrote and signed my paychecks every week. He knew I knew. I knew he knew. I was both liability and oddity, a hard worker trying like hell to be worthy of my paycheck rather than the nuisance brat of some fancy piece of tail.

It was complicated.