Back in Boston: Edie Sedgwick

So yesterday, after a dinner of buccatini and pancetta, I needed a long stroll, so Andrew & my friend Lisa & I decided to cut through Boston Commons to see Faneuil Hall at sunset. I wanted to show Andrew the newest crop of baby ducklings, but when we got near the pond to see them, we found, instead, two men flicking water on the poor creatures. They turned to see us gawking, and, per my luck, one of them stumbled toward me.

"EDIE!" he said.

Here we go, I thought.

"EDIE SEDGWICK!"

"I do not look like Eve Sedgwick," I said. "Eve Sedgwick looks like a man." I was pretty impressed that someone as high as this guy could conjure up an image of a respectable feminist critic like Eve Sedgwick at the height of his hallucination, but was just as confused as to why he'd feel comfortable calling such a formidable woman "Evie." In case you don't know her, this is Eve Sedgwick:

He seemed confused by my response, so he wrinkled his brow and tripped over a tree root. He decided I couldn't speak English very well, so he started yelling at me.

"YOU LOOK JUST LIKE EDIE SEDGWICK!" he screamed. "FROM THE 60s!"

I thought the most logical way of dealing with him was to yell back.

"I DO NOT. LOOK LIKE. A MAN."

This was all entirely too confusing for him and, anyway, his companion was trying to sit in a perfect stranger's lap. She was flapping her arms trying to shoo him away, but it wasn't working. He swerved toward his friend and pulled him down the pathway away from the ducklings and, thankfully, away from us.

Of course, it was only after hours of giggling about it did I find out who Edie Sedgwick, 1960s pop icon, was (see below).

I have to admit, I was a little relieved.

Back in Boston

Boston looks different in the morning than it does in the day. By day, I can't help but associate Boston with the belly of a beast, mostly because, by day, I ride the subway, which smells like blown-out tires and hot exhaust and dirty feet and old newspapers. But this morning, I saw Boston at daybreak when I went for a jog at the Commons. And it was an entirely different scene.

There's a long hidden stretch of pavement that runs along Commonwealth that's shaded by old, long-fingered trees and tall apartment buildings. Bronze statues of women I've studied for years but thought no one knew about interrupt the sidewalk. Lucy Stone. Phillis Wheatley. People pour out of tiny apartments with big dogs on leashes. German shepherds, fat labradors, unnamable English-looking showdogs that probably cost more than my car. How do they all fit inside, I wonder? Then there are the impertinent little creatures -- Jack Russells, Rat Terriers with bellies larger than their little legs, Wirehairs with perfectly straight earpoints and leather collars, walked by women wearing 3-inch high heels at 6 o'clock in the morning.

There's no way I could ever fit in here, were I to momentarily go insane and move to New England. This has a little to do with the fact that I'm a hick and a little more to do with my complete lack of urban fashion sense. My Coldwater Creek sweater and so-five-years-ago wedges make me look dowdy around the women who shop on Newbury street, where they apparently develop some superhero ability to pair breezy pale colored skirts with floral vintage-but-not-bargain-basement collared button-downs. Their long bare legs seem impervious to the weather, which is a steamy 50 degrees in the middle of June. I wear a hooded jacket and scowl at them as I clunk down the street but it doesn't make me feel any less out of place.

Chronicles of a Life in Linden: Coming Out in Cass County

I recently went home and opened the newspaper to a story about a man who was living a closeted gay lifestyle with a crossdresser who called himself Sa'Derius. You have to understand that crossdressing is something you have to drive 4 hours to Dallas to do; it must've taken a lot of stealth and planning on Sa'Derius's part, and somewhere between Commerce and a club in Deep Ellum, Sa'Derius must've done some soul searching. He decided that he and his partner should come out to their families and stop living life as if they were ashamed of themselves. When Sa'Derius approached his lover to convince him to come out to Cass County (ok it was Bowie but the alliteration is appealing), his lover shot and killed him. He told the judge he was convinced Sa'Derius was clutching a gun in his hand, but when he pried open his cold, dead fingers, all he was holding was a bottle of blue nail polish. Honest-to-God true story.

It's hard to come out in Cass County. When I was teenager, I had a friend who didn't so much come out as she was outed by her lover, who was a wild girl with dark punk hair and Goth white skin and acne. When she sat down at the prep table and put an arm around my friend, she was making a statement. Before we could blink, Goth girl had taken out a rotten banana and taught us how she and my friend had learned to do all kinds of things with it. She took time to take in our faces, and then she left. My friend never recovered from the ridicule that followed her outing in the school cafeteria. She moved and didn't tell a soul where she'd gone. I haven't heard from her since.

When I was a bit older, I met one of the best preachers I'd ever had. She helped me through the worst year of my life -- 1996, the year I became a 16-year-old, had my first heartbreak, and lost my grandfather to cancer -- and helped me understand Faith and Doubt can, in fact, go hand-in-hand. When she moved to become a pastor in another city, she divorced her husband and took a female partner, a Lindenite who had also been married with children. Everyone buzzed. I'd heard some people xeroxed her partnership announcement in the paper and tacked it up on telephone poles, but it's impossible to say if that was true.

It's hard coming out as anything different in Cass County, and that applies to just about any label someone might try to adopt. It's hard to be a drug addict, divorced, depressed, alcoholic; it's tough to be too smart or too dumb, to have no job or two jobs, to have no kids or ten. Being part of a rural town is a lot like being part of a big family. Some types of deviation can bring you closer to everyone in it, while others can make you a permanent outcast. Which it'll be is anyone's guess.

Chronicles of a Life in Linden: Lacy's Bridge

Lacy was dead, to begin with. That's all I can really tell you because I don't remember the true story behind the ghost that allegedly haunted Lacy's Bridge. Variants of it have something to do with a young girl, a suicide, maybe an unborn kid, maybe a lover scorned -- who can tell?

Rumor had it that if you crossed Lacy's Bridge at night, all manner of things could happen to you. Your car would stall. Your lights would go out. Faces would press up against your window while you stared out into the dark night.

If you wanted to reach the witch's grave, you had to cross Lacy's Bridge, and that's just what we were doing one Halloween night when I was about 15 or 16 years old. The car was stuffed with teenagers dressed as slut-whore bellydancers, slut-whore cheerleaders, and slut-whore nurses. The guys smeared gooey fake blood on white t-shirts, halfheartedly playing along with the charade. We turned the car engine off at Lacy's Bridge to call her out. You don't know quiet until you reach the country in East Texas at night. Bullfrogs turn to vampires. Bellowing cows become the moaning dead. I surreptitiously put a handprint on the humid back window and tapped my friends to show them that Lacy was trying to push the car over the edge into the black water. Someone, undoubtedly Carrie, maybe Lauren, gave me a good smack for pulling my old antics.

Let me pause a second to tell you that smack was entirely justified. One night, at a sleepover, I forced my friends to watch the Exorcist when we were entirely too young to do so, then crept outside and, at the scariest part, raked my fingernails down the dark glass that looked into the livingroom. Thereafter, my friend Steph slept in the bathroom wedged between the toilet and the wall. This was a stunt topped only by the time Melinda & Carrie tried to pull one on me by planning (a little too loudly) a sneak attack on me after I'd fallen asleep. Since I'd overheard the plot, I unscrewed all of the light bulbs in the room and hid, so that when they pounced on my bed, they found it empty. When they went to turn on the lamp, all they heard was CLICK. And then, my favorite part: CLICK CLICK.

So I'm saying I deserved the smack. At any rate, I was about to try something else to elicit a scream when we heard a gunshot. Everyone slipped and stumbled and scraped, a flutter of gauze and sequins and fake wigs and high heeled shoes, trying to cram back into the car and speed away. Lacy must have been preoccupied because the car started -- did it do so weakly? -- and we skidded away on the dirt road back home.

We say, to this day, that somebody's daddy was firing at us for trespassing near his house. In Texas, you don't step on someone else's land uninvited in the middle of the night -- especially Halloween Night -- and expect a glass of sweet tea. Maybe it was Lacy, trying to teach me a little something about fear.

If Necessary, Use Words

Every day on my way home from work, I pass a used car lot, and that used car lot has a sign that hasn't changed in the year I've lived here. It says, "Go forth and spread the gospel. If necessary, use words."

I've always thought that was a ridiculous sign, mostly because evangelicals who might follow that advice are probably already too full of words and too short on action. But for some reason today, the sign struck me. It made me think of Lillian Smith's Killers of the Dream, which says the South is marked by signs with words and signs without words, and while she was talking about state-mandated and social segregation, it still has resonance with me today. Everywhere I turn, I see a message.

Take, for example, the other day. I was sitting at a red light next to a homicidal maniac who decided that, when the left-turn-only arrow turned green, he'd shoot out of the go-straight lane I was in and attempt to careen into the cars veering left on their protected signal. Seconds after the maniac made his attempted suicide, I sat at my own red light, wondering how in heaven's name he hadn't been smashed to pieces. Suddenly, the car behind me sat on his horn and gave me an ugly hand gesture. Beeeeeeep. He wanted me to run my red light, too. His message was, "I'm more important than your safety," "I have somewhere interesting to be," and "You don't matter very much."

I was recently engaged in a service opportunity with a woman I didn't know well. A man walked in after all of the food had been cleaned up and approached me. He'd missed breakfast and the access pass he needed to obtain clothing for the month. "Do you have any shoes?" he asked. It was 95 degrees on the pavement outside. Summer was approaching with fury. "The clothes closet surely does; let me get you the ticket you need to get them," I said, turning to the woman in charge, expecting her to give it to him. "You're LATE," she said sharply at the man with no shoes. To add emphasis, she looked at her watch and blew out a huff of air, rolling her eyes. "I'm sure they don't have anything. Because you're SO LATE. But I GUESS you can look." He was eyeing the 13 loaves of bread she was preparing to toss in the trash can, and she noticed it, and she took them away anyway. "I am important here," she was saying without saying it. Her sign read: "I matter here. I feel powerful when I deny you what you need. I am in charge and you are not."

I thought about my own signs without words. What have I printed there for everyone to see?

Chronicles of a Life in Linden: The Drugstore

I didn't know, at the time, that spending every day after school at a real, working drugstore would one day be an unusual thing, but it would be.

A drugstore in a small town is about more than just pharmaceuticals. Like the Country Store, it's where old guys go to drink coffee in a drab room in the back. And it doubled as a video store with neat rows of plastic VHS boxes. I always wanted to rent the ones that had titles like "I'm Gonna Git You Sucka" but I was a creature of habit. I would always pick Labyrinth even though I knew every word from the beginning to the end.

The drugstore also had rows of neat white Whitman's chocolates for men who forgot their wives on anniversaries and valentine's and didn't have time to make the hour drive to a big city to pick up a present. It was the best place to pick out cards with bad puns before stepping down the street to Capital Florist, which let you charge your flowers to your account because they'd know where to find you if you didn't pay your bill. I didn't want chocolates, however; I was most interested in the Wetslicks Fruit Spritzers Lipgloss which I was convinced would make boys want to kiss me. It didn't.

Chronicles of a Life in Linden: The Legion Hall

Sure it's "Music City" now but the Legion Hall used to be this big dusty auditorium with concrete floors, peeling paint, and musty-smelling velour curtains. I loved every inch of it.

It's where the Lions Follies, a show featuring local talent, took place, and my dad and Mr. Penny (male adults in small towns don't have first names) were the emcees. Mr. Penny always wore a red shirt and red pants and suspenders; he could wiggle his hips and feet in two different directions at the same time, which I found remarkable.

I used to perform at the Follies too. When I was little and it was OK to sing off-key, my mom dressed me up in a poodle skirt and put my red-headed boyfriend in front of me in a sailor suit and told me to sing "Soldier Boy" to him. The only thing I can remember is that his face turned as red as his hair and when he kissed me on the cheek at the end of it, the crowd started to whistle, which I didn't understand. When I got older, my mom sat me down and said, "Kacy, I have to tell you something. You're not very good at singing." Which was true. So she strapped a two-headed styrofoam dummy to my back and put boots on my hands and feet and I did a weird puppet show to a song I can't remember. That was the end of my career as a stage performer at the follies.

The best part about the Lions Follies was the underground "green room" which wasn't green at all but solid cement and cold. Follies participants would party there after the show; everyone brought food to stash in the kitchen for the celebration. My friend Lauren and I would tiptoe downstairs and steal one of Miss Billie's sandwiches, which she made with ham and crack, and my mom would always catch us and fuss at us for being the little piggies we truly were.

When I got older I watched the show from the audience, usually balancing on the yellow handicapped railing at the back of the building, practicing gymnastic flips over the bar and barely escaping smashing my head into the concrete floor. Later, when the fun of the follies was long over, the building was used as a gym, when a husky guy from out of town came to teach wouldbe cheerleaders backhandsprings. One night, he took everyone's payment for that month and skipped town without so much as a kiss-my-foot. I wonder whatever happened to that SOB.