The Blazing World: A Novel Read online

  When I think back on that four-eyed, interracial, epileptic kid dancing the tango with his little sister, Letty, in the recreation room of a split-level, solidly middle-class house outside Richmond, Virginia, I don’t find it at all surprising that he took to God even before his mama was reborn. At school I was a pariah, who had never lived down the full-body seizure that took place beside the slide on the playground in the third grade, but at church I shone, a pious little angel with a sacred affliction. Hadn’t St. Paul, father of Christianity itself, fallen down on the road to Damascus in a fit just like the ones I sometimes had? Harry was fascinated by the delicate, skinny, freckle-faced John with his black mother and white father who read a lot of books, watched movies on TV, and made up his own world called Baaltamar, a name plucked from the Bible (Judges), but which, in its first incarnation, looked like a Hollywood stage lot. In Baaltamar, overdressed villains with supernatural powers tangled with one angelic hero, my alter ego, Levolor (named after the window blind company because Levolor has such a pleasing lilt). I spent a lot of time in that magical country, just as Harry had spent a lot of time in her own head with an imaginary companion and a busload of anxieties. She, however, grew up godless.

  It was painful to feel God looking in on me every minute, judging my secret thoughts and rambunctious longings as I lay in my bed dreaming I was Levolor, who had taken up singing and dancing and lived in a big pink movie mansion with ten servants. Fans came by the hundreds of thousands to watch me wail out songs and shake my tail feathers and do slides, stomps, and brushes. I used to close my eyes and listen to the crowd thunder its adoration, and then, because it was a selfish, unholy fantasy, I would shift its direction, turning Levolor into a Jesus character who walked around Tinsel Town laying hands on the sick, raising the dead, and magically multiplying crackers and soup for tragically poor people in tattered clothes and shoes with holes in their bottoms. This fantasy, too, had its problems because it wasn’t right to feel too good about being good, and I knew I felt awfully good about my goodness.

  Mama’s religion has cooled down considerably, and she’s way too soft a person ever to have been a self-righteous holy roller, but there was a time when she went at her worship with a lot of zeal. My parents separated when I was three and Letty was one. We had a daddy on weekends. My earliest memories are of sitting on his shoulders and looking way down at the grass, a rabbit named Buster who lived in a cage in Daddy’s backyard, the shiny silver watch he let me wear high up on my arm, and pancakes sitting on a blue plate that looked different from Mama’s. I remember that his house smelled funny, and I used to dread he’d pick up the football and suggest a little back-and-forth. When the ball came flying toward my head, I’d duck before I knew what I was doing. The hard, whirring ball frightened me. Later, I trained myself to remain upright and worked hard to catch that damned thing and run like mad. I used to pray to God to help me succeed in my efforts to please my father, to become the coordinated, hearty, real boy he wanted. No doubt I was a disappointment to him. I was not made in his image, but I also think I scared him a little or maybe the epilepsy scared him or the idea that something might happen to me when Mama wasn’t around. He never scolded or harangued me about my athletic shortcomings. I just felt he would have liked a different kind of boy. And yet, when Letty and I spent the night, he used to come into the room, sit beside me, and stare at me while I pretended to sleep. He must have known I was awake, but he never let on that he knew, and all he did was sit there and watch.

  Then one day in the spring after I turned eight, my father had a brain aneurysm. The balloon burst, and he died on his sofa alone. He was thirty-one years old. Even though Mama didn’t want him anymore for a husband, his death seemed to paralyze her for a while until the Pentecostal religion of her youth stepped in to take over the blank spot Daddy had created. We changed churches.

  They dunked Mama in the baptism pool, and after that she was filled with the Holy Spirit. “And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.” Acts, Chapter 2, Verse 4. I know that for outsiders such doings fall into the remote regions of crackpot religiosity, but I loved the hymns and the “Amens” and “You tell ’em, brothers and sisters” during the preaching, and the tongues and the interpretations and the testimonies. Letty and I liked to play church at home because we could bounce and skip and rush around like wild animals hollering out nonsense. All I can say is that the people who were suddenly hit by the Holy Ghost and fell to their knees or collapsed onto the floor and began to speak weren’t fakers, although I did wonder about Sister Eleanor at times, who often seemed overly uplifted, and the language that ran out of her sounded vaguely like pig Latin.

  I prayed harder and harder and wondered why God had done it, taken my father, and why my mother had sent him away before he died, and whether his sadness had something to do with the bubble in his brain, because he had seemed sad, especially when he sat by my bed—a heavy gloom moved from him to me and settled in my chest like guilt. Mama used the word incompatible. They hadn’t fit together somehow. After my father’s death, Baaltamar became more elaborate, more violent, and more secret. Slavery emerged as a theme. Levolor led armies against Prince Hadar to free the slaves, who were a combination of black Americans and the Israelites, and I began to draw up battle plans in an imaginary geography. When I close my eyes, I can still see Lake Ashtarot and the river Jeshmoth and a mountain range I named Mizlah. After a time, the populace of Baaltamar discovered sex and went at with biblical abandon. Hadar’s followers often stripped naked and danced to wild music to tantalize Levolor, who had a lot of fun looking on while he nobly resisted their advances. It was inevitable that my hero would give in to temptation, to the sweet jerks and hard rubs under the blanket with a washcloth and the God guilt and the wet wonder and the poetry of it all.

  I think it was my stories of Baaltamar that seduced Harry. The imaginary world disappeared about the same time as my seizures, as did the all-seeing God of the Hebrews, but I have kept a tender feeling for people who speak in tongues and for Mama, who never turned away from me, despite the fact that I wandered into a secular wilderness and never returned to the fold. When I arrived at the lodge, Harry was tending to her own characters, a group of stuffed figures—cold, coolish, warm, and hot. I became fond of her “metamorphs” (as Harry called them), even though a good number of them were injured or deformed. I take that back. I liked the hurt metamorphs most, the ones with missing legs and arms, with braces and slings, humps, or rashes painted on them. They did not look real, but they felt more human than a lot of humans I know, and Harry was gentle with her homemade critters. Sometimes she’d make them talk for little Aven, who was just four at the time and used to visit “Gran” on weekends and leave wet spots all over the art from her kisses.

  My route to the Red Hook lodge was circuitous. After college, I journeyed to New York City along with legions of fellow aspirants to become a thespian and ended up as a waiter. “Hi, I’m John Whittier. I’ll be your waitperson this evening.” That was the era of broken plates, rude customers, auditions, callbacks, rejections, more rejections, and a few measly parts for a freckle-faced, light-skinned black man who can do any and all accents on request. Auditions are one thing. Auditioning for parts in plays and movies that are so badly written, so poorly conceived, they give you indigestion is another. I decided to write my own material and became a performance artist, Phineas Q. Eldridge, an impoverished one, I’m afraid. I had been dumped by my beau Julius and had fallen from the semisplendor of a Chelsea apartment to my friend Dieter’s couch (a kind of a gutter, as it turned out, with gum wrappers, toothpicks, dust fuzz, and nickels between the cushions).

  It was Ethan Lord who came my rescue. My act at the Pink Lagoon had been featured in the Neo-Situationist Bugle, probably the most obscure publication in all of New York City, but Ethan and his friend Lenny cultivated performances like mine for reasons that only a few people in university grad
uate departments understand. They did not approve of capitalism. This was well before the 2008 smash-up, and shopping was still the national pastime. Of course, the two subversives didn’t appreciate the joys of a brand-new toaster or the feel of a cashmere scarf or what a dab of extremely expensive cologne can do for you psychologically. They were strict, strictly secondhand, thrift-store, vintage boys. It was a matter of principle but also of perversity, one that comes more easily to rich people than to the rest of us. Ethan had a trust fund. Lennie did not, but I gathered that his parents sent him monthly checks.

  Despite the fact that the boys were straight, they were advocates of “queer theory,” which was not only for or about homosexuals but could be applied to all manner of persons and things. The point was to “bend the categories.” I was all for that, of course, and they were an earnest, touching pair. Lenny reminded me of an anarchist from the thirties with his round wire-rims, and Ethan, with his large eyes and dark curly hair, seemed to be hiding a sense of humor somewhere, although I wasn’t sure where. When I first met him, he spoke to me about how my act “embodied disruptions of normativity.” They were disruptions lifted directly from my own life. I played versions of my parents, whom I called Hester and Lester, and I played Letty as Hetty, when she was a wild tot and as her grown-up, serious engineer self who doesn’t approve of the fact that I robbed our family story for the theater, and I played my old-soul, epileptic, little-boy self and Sister Eleanor in the grip of her tongues, but always with comic distance, and I did it in costume, cut in half, black and white, man and woman—but the boys were right: By the end of the show all the neat distinctions between one thing and another had gone queer.

  Ethan wanted me to meet his mother: waif saver of the universe. I came preapproved because I was technically homeless and because the Bugle had turned H/Lester into a “theoretical construct,” and this had impressed the rag’s nine readers, one of whom was Harry herself. A few days before I met Ms. Burden for the first time, there had been an uproar at the Red Hook lodge. One of Harry’s waifs, named Linda Lee, whose “art” involved cutting her body and taking photographs of the damage, overcut herself in the hallway of the resident artists’ wing and was rushed to Methodist Hospital, where she was patched up, shipped to a psychiatric ward for a week, and then sent home to her mother in Montclair. Apparently, Harry had not understood that the girl’s artistic impulses involved real blood. Ethan might have had his head in cumulus formations, but, as he put it, his mother’s “charitable impulses had to be curbed before disaster struck twice.” He also told me that “one insane person was enough in the place”—a reference to the Barometer, whom I came to know and tolerate.

  In short, that is how I assumed the role of master of ceremonies at the Red Hook lodge. Harry had not been paying attention. I told her that she couldn’t take in any piece of trash that came begging at the door. This wasn’t a crib for impoverished tourists, nutcases, slatterns, and junkies, was it? We needed bona fide artistic types who would stay awhile and do some chores. The Barometer was already dug in, and Harry was stuck on the man, whom she believed to be harmless, which he was, mostly, except that he did not wash. It was Maisie who convinced him that a weekly immersion in the tub with a bar of soap was the price he had to pay for his living quarters. Maisie was a sort of specialist in insane people, and she went on to make a film about him called Body Weather, which won a prize at a film festival. I also discovered that the Medeco key to the front door had been copied by a cabal of lost boys and girls who came and went in the night. I changed the lock.

  I took over the excommunicated Linda Lee’s spaces and, after posting a sign that read NO ROOMS AVAILABLE, I started the informal application process for artists in need. I decided there was space for three to live and work in the building besides Harry, and since the Barometer and I were already there, we had room for one more resident. We settled on Eve, a flamboyant character born and raised in Idaho, twenty-five years old and a seamstress of force. She moved in with her Singer and sewed up a circus of artworks that Harry and I both thought were adorable. Eve didn’t stay long. Ulysses, a sculptor in the minimalist tradition, followed, and then came Delia, who worked exclusively in old-shoe installations (my favorite). I created the minimal rules and regulations—no littering on-site; excessive noise after eleven p.m. strictly forbidden; love objects welcome but absolutely no sexual business transacted on site (not a problem anymore, but as a prohibition it gave us some chuckles); presence required once every two months to show and discuss finished work or work in progress. We hired a weekly cleaning team to roar through the two floors of the building, divvied up some domestic jobs, and the lodge was civilized.

  But you want to know how it happened, the story between Harry and me. Well, it didn’t happen fast. It crawled up on us. We rented movies on Sunday afternoons, mostly oldies Harry had never seen: Busby Berkeley extravaganzas for their kaleidoscope visuals—Footlight Parade, Gold Diggers, Forty-second Street; some Rogers and Astaire; and the old films for Negro audiences only: Cabin in the Sky and Look-Out Sister, and Harlem Is Heaven with the Jangler—Bojangles, “Everything’s Copacetic,” the “Dark Cloud of Joy,” born Luther-in-Richmond-Virginia-Robinson, who danced up on his toes, precise rhythms, perfect tones—and Stormy Weather with Robinson again, some faux version of his life with Fats Waller, Cab Calloway, Lena Horne, and the oh-my-god-I-can’t-believe-how-well-they-can-dance Nicholas Brothers. I started tap lessons at four and could impress Harry with some shuffle-ball changes and skating moves, but I never had the real stuff. Lester does a little soft shoe in my show, and it always goes over pretty well. Harry called the Sunday movie our “cozy time,” and she liked to put on what she called “soft clothes” or “nearly pajamas” for the occasion and make popcorn. Then we’d sprawl and laze in front of the TV. We were not always alone. Other members of the lodge joined us from time to time. Bruno, Eve, or the Barometer, who wandered in and out or brought his sketchpad to the sofa and drew.

  Exactly when our project was hatched I can’t remember, but one Saturday I visited Harry’s studio and noticed she had painted SUFFOCATION in huge letters on the wall. “I’m thinking about it,” she said, “as a theme.” Then she changed the subject, or so I thought at the time. I now believe it was the same subject, not a transition, because it was a story about her father. She told me about her first show in New York, when she was in her early thirties. Her parents came to the opening. Her mother was sweet and proud and full of congratulations. Her father was silent, but then right before he left, he said to her, “It doesn’t resemble much else that’s out there, does it?”

  I asked her what he had meant. She said she didn’t really know. I asked her how she answered back, and she said, “I didn’t say anything.”

  He shut her up.

  The man wasn’t some unsophisticated boob; he knew art. He had a hankering for Frank Stella, she told me. I said to Harry: “That’s pretty cold, don’t you think? I mean, it’s a cold thing to say to your own daughter.”

  “That’s what Doctor F. says.”

  I told her a medical degree wasn’t needed to see cold as cold.

  Harry looked as if she might cry.

  I pretended to be sorry, but I wasn’t.

  Harry told me lots of stories about the man, and my opinion on the matter is that her dad, when he was among the living, had a problem with both who Harry was and with what she did. Being and Doing—the big ones. Harry’s work was warm: I don’t mean electrically heated—I mean it was passionate and sexed-up and scary. Her father was a tight-ass who liked neat, closed systems: the world in a jar. What was he going to make of her stuff ? He wouldn’t have liked it whoever had done it. Still, I didn’t blame Harry for trying. Hadn’t I spent my whole goddamned life making up stories about my own heroic father, loving and hating him? And when Daryl came along courting Mama with his big smiles and his shiny shoes, hadn’t I wished he would just vanish or drop dead on the spot?

  We started our collaboration beca
use Harry wanted a phallic front. I told her she should think twice about taking on a swishy black man, but Harry was undeterred by my status as a member of not one but two minorities. She wanted scenes of suffocation, she said, metaphorical ones, not pillows over a face, but a theater of rooms the spectator had to enter, and she wanted me to help her build it. Hadn’t I lived my life mostly as a nancy boy? Hadn’t I changed my name in 1995 to celebrate my second self ? Hadn’t I known what it felt like to be smothered before that, Pentecostal tongues or no tongues? Didn’t we live in a country that is perverted by racism? Wasn’t I a black man, even though I wasn’t much darker than Harry? People still called me “black,” didn’t they? What did skin tone have to do with it? Her mother was Jewish, so she was Jewish. She knew something about anti-Semitism. The Protestant set of her grandparents had been sick with that particular strain of flu. And what about sexism? How many years had women had the vote? Not even a hundred years! Didn’t I play a man and a woman, a white man and a black woman in one body? (Harry swooned for Hester and Lester, especially Hester, the whinnying, haranguing spouse of the not-nearly-so-gabby Lester.) Didn’t we understand each other? Weren’t we alike in many ways? (Harry’s identification with me might sound outrageous to some people, but it was sincere.) She didn’t truck much with conventional ways of dividing up the world—black/white, male/female, gay/straight, abnormal/normal—none of these boundaries convinced her. These were impositions, defining categories that failed to recognize the muddle that is us, us human beings. “Reductionism!” She used to shout this every now and then. Her son took after her. Neither of them liked what they saw out there in the big world—received ideas were for peons and huckleberries—and yet, there was tension between them—bristling is the word. Maisie was the peacemaker, the sweetie pie waving a white flag.