Bereavement Fare
There were elephants here, and ball lightning, and killer fungus, after the tornados. A quaint pastiche Armageddon, provincial-apocalyptic. Joplin, Missouri ran decent debate tournaments when I was in high school and now it is acres of collage of trash and dried blood my mother insists on driving through on the way to see my dead grandfather.
***
Ours is the generation for whom, when our grandparents die, the closets of the 20th century become pop-up vintage boutiques. Weather diverted my plane to one wrong airport and my baggage to another, and I am in this dead man’s walk-in looking for shoes that will not embarrass my family at visitation. I am grateful for the excuse and will take also boots, belts, a hat.
On a wall, in his bedroom: who is this man, here smiling sepia on a bridge in London, here smirking from under a laughable Scottish Rite hat, here more uncertain flanked by three grandchildren that would never know him well enough?
In our youth our hearts were touched with fire are words I remember from Holmes and in no picture did my grandfather seem more alive than in this one, handsome and young in his Air Force uniform, the heat of bombs dropped on Germans in his eyes which will have faded by the time his first and only grandson is born in 1987. I hope he didn’t live this way: a few years of terror and excitement, to die gasping after a half-century of self-domestication.
***
A funeral home like this: yellowed, with haphazard annexes and artificial flowers that still have wilted and curling paintings of birds and Jesuses. A coffin flanked by three grandchildren in the middle of a kind of stage. They will be unsettled, these grandchildren, when two hours are up, by how easy it was to pretend to care about the long train of strangers going out the lobby doors.
The strangers tell me that I was once small, and blonde, and that they assumed I was my sister’s boyfriend or husband until they asked. Perversely I am flattered to be taken so easily for straight by so many people.
They tell good stories. How sprawling, how overliterate, how Talmudic, how Jewish is my own storytelling, which is not and maybe never was the stolid Protestant prose of these clerks and bankers and and veterans and widows. The plain New Testament register in which, in this rite of narrative funerary cannibalism, pieces of lives I have not known are offered by neighbors, friends, and relatives to an only grandson who is the only left to be expected to care:
“… and it was on the Frisco line that your Grandma Daria as little girl was offered her first coffee by the first colored woman she ever saw and said to her ‘but if I drink that stuff I’ll look like you!’ “ and
“… and that weekend your granddad – he did like his parties and we always said it was the Air Force’s fault – had so many cocktails his own sister painted his toes cherry red. Imagine! And your grandma the whole way home said: ‘Christ Jet if we get in a wreck and they put you in the ground with painted toenails like some kind of pervert I hope I’m cold in the plot right next to you!” and
“… and so your granddaddy’s Fortress was late back to Molesworth and when they finally landed smoking the rest of the 303rd had already divvied up his stuff! Some friends, those! He made ‘em each buy him a drink, the Hell’s Angels. You know there’s only one of those guys left now.” and
***
He is survived by… his grandson, Andrew Fogle of Washington, DC…
and who is this, whose name deserves to be read to all these Calvinists who cannot imagine how much more solid this preposition sounds than anything I’ve done in five years has a right to?
Does anyone suspect me, dissembled emissary from the city of the living where young men dance neon agelessly and death comes only to the dark and poor? Where rot is a fecund rot, the hungry catabolism of feral rosebush brambling over dead rats and brick scree and trash, not the polite and unproductive chemical stink of an open coffin to be sunk in the leaded topsoil of this stunted mining town? Where we have lived past not just AIDS but past death, pagan and blithe? Where we flee satyric from the jaundice of stained glass like this, the gravity of eulogies like this, the embarrassment of corpses like this, from all that is not floral and brightening?
My father who was there when, in the years before my birth, my grandmother stiffened in the Cartesian prison of Lou Gehrig’s disease – will he guess that this blue stain on my black tie is body paint, obscenely lively contaminant of a torso pressed hot against me in a dark room half a continent distant the night Joplin blew away? This beloved and respected paragon of baby boomer civic virtue who at 47 stumbled behind a lawnmower I was supposed to be pushing, dumbed by a stroke that, through some stupid contingency my mother has to call a miracle, did not kill or impair him but should have – can he fathom the vernal libido of the gay metropolis, which is without shame? I think briefly and terribly that someday probably I will have to put him in the ground. My sisters will look in my direction for a man to comfort them and they will find a scared little boy who has spent his life in the company of scared little boys.
Abide with me, fast falls the eventide…
starts from a piano and the handsomely furrowed woman playing it is the model of Presbyterian physiognomy. What of this hymn can have any sense for me?
… darkness deepens… helpers fail and comforts flee…. change and decay in all around…
and I realize it’s easy to be a Nietzschean on a dance floor but not at a funeral.
“I don’t know why I keep lookin’ at him like I do when he’s not really there” says my little sister who is wrong. Because, for the first time in 91 years, Jethro Walter Fogle is all there, totally coincident with this cold flesh, not riven and smeared across time like he was the morning my mother called me at 10 AM Eastern and I answered the phone in a bedroom that wasn’t mine on the Lower East Side with the words: “Who died?”
***
After the funeral and for the first time I see my father’s family drink grievingly and my own habits make more sense. Inwardly I thank them for the quiet heritable masculine glamour of their alcoholism, enough maybe to forgive the crooked and too-big ears which have also been passed on to me.
An Uncle Jack asks me off the back porch and from his pocket produces a Colt of some description. He insists I handle the gun and I tell him that in DC it’s illegal even for me even to look at such things and he tells me in Tennessee you’ve got to have one on account of the blacks, who will break into your house either for your aspirin or for ass-raping – his drawl and the scotch make this point unclear. It is only later that I realize he might have offered me the piece so as to have another set of prints on it. At any rate the cherry pie a neighbor brought is good.
***
Never really felt at home, like these were my people, resonant.
But maybe now, in the wake of something so richly anthropological, The Death of the Patriarch? As if, by some uncanny botany, this aldehyded flesh will germinate and with unseen capillaries of genealogy bind, like the hickories on the edges of the creeks that have humbled these once-high Ozark Mountains, the thin and restive loam of this life?
“Dig that hole deep as you want, boy, and you’ren’t gonna find roots” no one says but a lot of them think, I imagine.
Because faggots don’t have roots and I can be proud of this. Because, since before Whitman, we’ve been too clever and too pained to take things like origin and tradition seriously. Because we are condemned to understand that these things and others like them are drag props, are finally play-acting accoutrement, are worthless and meaningless apart from whether or not we choose to take them up. Our undoing, maybe, this rust-glitter existentialism worked out in bars and cabarets instead of cafes and lecture halls, but at least an honest kind.
***
“I like those shoes” says a cheery and fat woman in an emergency exit row somewhere over Ohio at five hundred miles per hour. Dante’s sodomites were not allowed to stay still.
“Thanks. Secondhand. A steal.”
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