I started to go out alone. Early mornings on Sundays, I often found myself at the Sound Factory, dancing in a sweaty mob. Junior Vasquez was the DJ. The bass beat boomed. I sniffed this and that, took this and that, watched it all, sometimes joined in. Disco kites flew in the air above me. Flashes of strobe lights flashed on crazy eyes, slices of bare chest, tiny Japanese girls twirling in swirls of Gucci. Beside me one night, two large black women, dancing with gestures so perfect that I still remember them. There were street kids, ballet dancers. There were blacks and Puerto Ricans, whites, big-chested gay boys from Chelsea, fashion models, and people who looked distinctly dangerous. There were silhouettes of dancers on a screen bursting with colors. Everywhere was the current of sex, drag queens from the Houses of LaBeija or Extravaganza, doing runway turns on the sidelines. Work, all those crazy writers, my boss: They did not exist. I was alone, falling into situations I had never expected to encounter.
The disco ball spun fast; glitter fell from the ceiling and liquid smoke swirled on the dance floor. Flash forward, through faces, names I never bothered to learn, taxis with the music blaring, speeding through the late-night streets through the streams of light: It was 2 a.m., 3 a.m., 4 a.m., I was picking up a cell phone, dialing a drug dealer.
It could not last. I knew that, knew I would have to pay. And I did. I would pay and pay and pay. I am paying for it still, all those nights.
Around this time, I met a friend for coffee. He had made a sensible match, given up the party life. “I think I am out of control,” I told him. “You always were,” he said. “You just didn’t know it.”
I told none of this to Giorgianni. I told no one, admitted nothing. I kept my secrets battened down. Giorgianni and I talked about work, about how angry I got if one day passed and I was not, after all my hours, after all my work, after all my effort to get it right, singled out for special praise. If I was not told I am good, I was a wreck. If I was not perfect, I was nothing at all. If I am not successful, I am nothing at all. I tried to turn my pieces into masterpieces.
I was thirty-five years old, desperate, though I didn’t know it, empty, though I didn’t know it, raging in a way even I could not have managed to just ignore, though I did not know why. Often I could keep it in check, but when I needed most to be calm and confident, when I was exhausted, sleeping deeply, almost unconscious, I would spring a leak and all my anger would come out. I was a wreck. That is what happened when the phone rang on a Saturday afternoon while I was sleeping so deeply that I could barely manage to rouse myself to answer. When I picked up the receiver, I heard my aunt’s voice saying that we had lost my father.
19
Every Wednesday night, on the way to our favorite restaurant for the prime rib special, Betty and I pass the empty Presbyterian church in Perry, another town with one foot in this life and another in wherever little towns go when no one lives there anymore. Many churches in this area barely survive on the donations they collect. Congregations have dwindled and worshippers are mostly old, living in dire need of church communities, but existing on fixed incomes. People without jobs have little cash for collection plates. Those who might once have shown up on Sundays watch celebrity ministers broadcasting from megachurches. They post passages from the Reverend Joel Osteen on Facebook, promises of prosperity from a man who lives in a ten-million-dollar house in a neighborhood populated by oil millionaires.
On the highways there are new temples of faith, Pentecostal congregations, tabernacles of the Holy Spirit, often housed in the kind of sheet-metal outbuildings once used for machine sheds and equipment storage. It is the old churches that are on the verge of closing their doors. The merchants who sustained them are gone. Wal-Mart, the store that wiped out the merchants, shuttered everything, has never offered a lonely widow a turkey dinner, a day of fellowship among friends, or hope.
In Perry, at this church with stained glass windows that the sun still shines through, the end came, almost unnoticed by many. Last year, in a special final ceremony, the ancient Bible with the names of all the members of the congregation through all the years was carried out to be stored. The big old building stands waiting with rows of plants for sale along the sidewalk in front, though there is talk of a mini-mall with booths for antique dealers and purveyors of home craft items.
My mother fears the day that our church will be vacant. The notion of her town without her church, her life without her church, her world without its center is enough to make her turn her head away.
Like Betty, I am scared about the days to come and am reluctant to desert the place where people who know of my mother’s bad days come up to embrace me. They say they will do anything to help. A guy I went to high school with wants to know how I am doing and asks if I want to accompany him and his family to Branson to see Kenny Chesney. I thank him, but say I cannot forgive Kenny for what he did to Renée Zellweger.
“You always were real different,” my friend tells me, touching my arm and smiling a little before getting into his vehicle.
Gradually I have come to feel that I fit here, at least a little. I suddenly know people again and am Dear Abby for those who are real different. A week or so ago, a woman from my high school class stopped me to say she is stuck in a trailer with a son who thinks he has a black woman living inside him.