Fayettenam: An Excerpt from a Memoir †
* The first home we had together in Fayetteville, North Carolina, after my stepfather, Staff Sergeant James E. Lewis, married my mother was a little box of a house behind the main strip mall at that time, "Eutaw," which I thought some alternate-universe Western state. Geographical things to a six-year-old are only a bit larger than psychological things in their jurisdictions, or maybe smaller. The Big World, just how big was it? How densely braided are the streets of the world, and is a mayor bigger than a king? Utah, given a lavender tint by the mapmakers, might have been closer or nearer than Eutaw. Geographically they're discrete and adjusted to scale; psychologically, they're both on Mars. I've been to Utah a couple of times, driving through from elsewhere. I didn't feel quite white enough among the citizens there. But away from the Denny's or the Cracker Barrel, the wide-girthed natives staring at me for a stranger, out into the mountains, of course it didn't matter. A roadside restaurant is a psychological space, but you can leave mind for mineral whenever you want. Sometimes it's the best way to stay sane: get down into the salt of yourself. If you're a white man, the Aryan pelt gets skinned in no time. And the street we lived on was Acorn, of which there were many. Many more pine needles and rough orbits of pine cones on the land, those half-creature things. Pine cones lie in wait, daring you to pick them up: do it wrong and they hurt you, never mind who's head you were going to lob it at. What other use could such squat things have in the world? Throw them! That they suggested hand grenades was part of Nature. Life at age six teetered between the animated world and the real, and I knew which I preferred: the one apparently with more violence, but also acorns with their caps on straight, gigantic in the hand-like paws of smiling cartoon chipmunks. Any animal I might have met wandering the woods near our acorn-sized house was a potential friend or enemy, like the snapping turtle in a creek under a bridge. He clamped on the chuff of my right hand when I tried to take him home. Maybe he was trying to take me home. He was a big rock-shaped thing, but I shook him off somehow without thunder. Out of pure grade-school malice, my friends found him or some similar creature, and smashed him to bits in the road above the creek. I saw pieces of his shell like a broken toy and strands of his innards, and felt sick: not squeamish from gore, but from witness. I had a sliver of conscience already, and it seemed wrong to have done that; and I knew it wasn't out of love for me. Vigilantism loves itself. It was the brutal balance, old as the tribe. Then a momentary quiet, that unnerving quiet around something dead; a car goes by and the world goes on. From some vantage point—maybe not all that far out, really—the turtle's passing is no more or less significant than the death of a boy. As for my hand, after a few years, the scar was gone. The war story wasn't the same without it, and one move later the gang of boys was not there to confirm. That was the unfortunate thing about moving every year or so: your reputation started over. That was also the good thing. Friendships were a constant flux. In my mind now, individuals join compositely, are forever young, framed by definite spaces, faces with soundtracks drawn from the Top 40 of the moment. Having been a civilian for most of my life, I barely recall the specialness and even superiority we felt as military over non-military. One gave little thought to the other branches of the Armed Forces; Army was the real military, of which the others were variations. But we felt superior to what? In the civilian schools we were the smarter kids; we had multiple vision, because we'd been over the horizon, had seen other lands and witnessed the particular, potent American stride. America was an idea traveling with us wherever we went. We felt superior to civilians because we had flexible accents, or no accent, spoke like the voices on TV news, the voice of rationality and assurance. But most of all we felt superior to the civilians because our fathers were powerful men, some of whom had killed; defenders of everything good, though we had to concede that somehow that included civilians. Many years ago, and many years after our living there (a memory itself as in the middle of a sea), I went as an adult to find that house on Acorn Street; amazingly, it was still standing. It was just as black and white as the photographs I had of it. Naturally it had shrunk to a depressingly small size, as always happens; and had sunk as well deeper into the gulch. The gulch or depression I'd not remembered, recalling the space around the house as flat and without hems and haws in its address to the road. It was a shortcut of memory, perhaps. Now my memory of the pilgrimage itself is suspicious, as I must have been in a dark frame of mind, recently married, unsure of what I was; about to enter a long melancholy. It was wrong, in our family's history, to believe in mental illness: you were weak or you were strong, and that was all. When Lewis married our mother, he was already taking care of his own mother and sister, and had been doing so since he was twelve: that's when his sister, Pam, was born, and their father, Jimmie, took off. He managed it with a series of paper routes and other labors on top of school. After he took over our family there were seven besides himself to feed, all on a Master Sergeant's income: around $400 a month, jump pay included. He married into a bloodline with weakness in it. Sick Mammy, for one: I know of her from a few lines of descent scrawled on shirt cardboard. She was so called for getting a sour belly the day she heard of Ft. Sumter, feeling better four Aprils later when she got news of Appomattox. Political hypochondria, or just plain craziness; and it still lives in the family line. There's one who collapsed in Marine boot camp and retired on disability at age eighteen. Maybe it wasn't weakness so much as survival. My mother has her own variations on the theme, and she's still with us; the strongmen she married are dead and gone. My maternal uncle, of a quiet life, has a beautiful world: citrus trees, a doting wife of many decades, a visage marked by lines of grace, and a most delicate, lovingly-detailed, vast, consistently crafted Lionel train-world on a table; a world where it's mid-century always, Pax Americana, fruits and vegetables, billboards of blowsy women, and vaccinated cattle. Acorn Street: stand on the hill, at roadside, and look at the little house, gray and aged, with whatever family it holds under the trees that towered and perhaps remembered in a vague way, as trees do. That's what existence is, and so everything has it: a minimal power to at least remember yourself, a little more, a little more. Hold still like a tree: there's your proof, another snapshot of yourself. One might knock on the door of a former residence, hoping to be greeted by the present occupants as a kind of relative, having shared the same space; a kind of ancestor, whose knowledge of the house in its younger days will draw their wonder, enrich their lives. But "I used to live here" is merely an intrusion, a theft to those who live there now. The little house might remember you, but will not admit to it; the little house is even more abstract than the trees in its sense of history. It remembers the last coat of paint, the last flush, the last click of a door latch. These things must seem as living to it as its occupants. Mind and mineral, geology and geography and psychology and religion–measures of accident, but somehow, as far out as it goes, still human. I didn't knock on anyone's door that day. At first I wasn't sure I had the right house, then I was sure from something visceral, my Madeleine maybe, but stale and dry. It was the shutters, the way they put eyes on the old house, an expression of sadness. I recognized the house, and it did not recognize me. They never do; wood and mortar can be sentient, but they're rarely sentimental. It's worse going back to former homes on Army posts because I'm long since a civilian, realize now that I was always a civilian, and as such am not welcome, entirely, in the Zone. Post-9/11 they meet you at the gate holding their rifles down and away, and in some places you can't get in without the right ID. Who cares if you lived there, a dinosaur's age ago? The guy or girl with the gun wasn't even born then. I was always destined to be unwanted, almost a spy. I am a spy: here, now, as I write about it, is the betrayal. My ironies, my reflections wrapped in further reflections: very un-American, unmanly, unwelcome. * Standing at the curb near our house on Acorn Street, corduroy cuffs rolled up to show a deep-red flare of flannel lining, Sears cardigan bunched over the waistline, I would squint beneath the after-school sun at passing cars. Fins, languorous and wavy, with all their emblematic promise of speed and forthrightness: "Chevrolet": doesn't it sound so wonderfully gay? Cars were made for camp and parade. They'd slip by, true to their fishy ends, wide-eyed stares, big-hipped chassis. I don't know how many convertibles I ever saw outside of a magazine or TV ad, but I do know I saw bent elbows jut from open windows, relaxed, hairy, winking their faux-butt cracks at the sun. Or sometimes an extended arm, as if to drag fingers in a stream, but a cigarette smoking itself at the end as the other arm turned the corner. Short-sleeved shirt. Driving was sailing, flying, dreaming, going; I didn't much care for being a passenger, but I could do all kinds of driving from the street corner just watching the cars go by. Those triangles of vent-windows, tacked to the wind, little sails. The squinting was a kind of mask or a shield. The car would pass by, slowing to turn the corner, but the slow turn might have been the car's intention to stop and question me, enlist me, accost me. It was a way of playing chicken: squinting was what a tough guy did, a soldier watching the tanks lumber by; a cowboy in the dusty plains. Take these two images of me at the curb squinting near Acorn Street: one, I'm adult-like, tall and strong, perhaps a tough NCO with a cigarette glued to his lip. The other, I'm just a little boy, but one dimension over from who I really was: edgy, aware, as if I kept coming back from about five seconds into the future. But I'm a boy in any world: strange, since I had the hardest time seeing myself as a boy when I was a boy. The disjunction between my sense of self, my body image, my fit into a certain life and what I now reconstruct in memory, standing as if outside, looking over and down at the boy: it's a little sad, as if one of those cars did stop, and I was kidnapped and never returned. Disappeared, and they weren't doing the milk-carton thing yet. And the driver of the car was I–the adult, who still can't quite imagine who or what he is, who stares at the fellow in the mirror as at an invader, who can't always remember how old he is; it was I, I was driving the car. But where are we going? A reservoir of the perpetual flow of scenes that I felt a part of, an actor. Waiting out by the street: something will come, something is coming now. Let's say there was a father in that car. I had two fathers, a biological and an empirical one. The father in the car was some stereotype, Platonic Father of Fathers, a TV-Dad, a savior in my moments of dread. The car was returning, looking for me; it was gassed up for a voyage to the world beyond corners. There was a waterwheel somewhere in the woods near Acorn Street, in a stream on its way to a reservoir. I came on it by accident and sat watching for a long time as if its turning told a story. The moss-stained wood paddles, the muscular creak of the machinery, the angry-looking axle, and the suffering water rising and falling. Every walk in the woods was a search for the uroboros, center of the world or some substation thereof. What made everything move, measuring it out? What rounded off every instant before it dropped back into the stream? I wanted to find Ultima Thule, or whatever I would have called it then: somewhere where my father was, though he was a god, a face in a cloud. Even movie stars were more real than he. Ultimate North: go and return victorious to the gabled home, sit in a fleshy chair by the most faithful lamp, and read of my own adventures. I kept an animal graveyard in the lot across from our house: last rites for rats, possums, mice, birds, frogs, lizards, whatever littered the woods and sidewalks above the level of insect. Shoeboxes became coffins; popsicle sticks and Elmer's glue made crosses. My mistake was in thinking it sacred: a kid named Douglas from the top of the hill trashed it when I was elsewhere, dug up the graves, strewed the bones and broken crosses. There was no offense. That is, I felt none, sensing instead that my rituals were false. But I cried, mourning the loss of a previous self. Nostalgias had already taken me: at six I longed for the prelapsarian age of five. To cry: something more rudimentary than a sense of personal justice. It was easier then; what ailed you was a torrent of tears that burst betimes above ground, then returned to darkness. The afterlife is only one of our graces. Kids, like a different race: measuring out a step-world untraceable to adults. At the creek, some of the stations along its length struck the fancy as riverine and wild. Somewhere, it joined the sea. I knew I could trace it belowground if need be. I had seen an advertisement in a comic book or a Boy's Life for a miniature submarine—on the same page as the ads for X-Ray Specs and Sea Monkeys. The drawing of the little boy at the helm (facing right, toward Progress) was determined and happy. I was taken with the idea that this was the real thing, that I could order it, assemble it, and launch it into the secret ocean. I doubt that I ever broached the topic of ordering it. The cost was six dollars. The ad appeared frequently. Before turning seven I took it for a hoax, though a plane from lawn-mower parts and plywood seemed doable at least to age ten. As for sea monkeys, they're real: genus Artemia, species salina.
† “Fayettenam” is a conflation of “Fayetteville,” as in the host-city of Fort Bragg, North Carolina; and “Vietnam,” where thousands of soldiers were sent from Ft. Bragg a generation ago (now, of course, they’re off to Iran and Afghanistan). You can still buy tee shirts with the “Fayettenam” brand, if you like to mix your civic pride with a healthy dose of historical irony. “Fayettenam” was, mainly, a reference to the undesirable side effect of having thousands of very young soldiers milling about downtown before their departure for war: topless bars, pawn shops, used-car lots, violent crime, prostitution, etc. The cityscape today has been largely gutted and rebuilt, and Fayetteville, NC boasts a clean, though sparsely occupied, downtown mall.
Robert Lunday was born at Ft. Jackson, SC and raised mainly on Army posts in the U.S. and abroad. Then he went to Sarah Lawrence College, where he once boogied down on the cafeteria dance floor with soon-to-be White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel. Lunday's first book of poetry, Mad Flights, was published by Ashland Poetry Press in 2002. He was a Stegner Fellow once and a Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center fellow twice, returning a third time to serve as Writing Committee Coordinator. Lunday lives with his wife, Yukiko, and son, Dugan (named after the poet Alan Dugan, who was kind to the pregnant Yukiko during a Cape Cod winter) in Bastrop, Texas. Recently, Lunday finished a memoir, "Fayettenam," from which this excerpt is taken. "Fayettenam" is written around and through a selection of letters home from Vietnam by Lunday's stepfather, James E. Lewis, during his third Southeast Asian tour of duty; at its end, the memoir becomes a meditation on missing persons: Lewis drove away from his home on October 3, 1982, and never returned. © 2008 prickofthespindle.com |
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