whoever wrote that beer in the sun was like a hammer to the head was right. and whoever did write that did they not? it is possible that no one has written exactly that yet but still I recall accounts of sunstricken drunkenness that like in the stranger made of the sun something like pounding or slicing and I know that was meant as an extended preshadowing metaphor for the knife that would appear so fatefully later on but I myself was taken with the account of sunlight itself glinting off the phantom knife’s edge and into your eyes scorching a little your cornea slicing through vitreous humour and that the primary injury. because when I was young the sun was my enemy and now that I am no longer quite so young I still sometimes remember it that way especially upon making my way home in the street dry as dust and those who stagger in front of me because there are many and if I were to count myself among them I would be alive nonetheless those who stagger in front of me I can only assume are being harassed by the sun to even a more extreme degree than am I. helpless bloat. prayer for ice.
we had spent all day in the boat. this was a time when I was not able to stand to pee which is to say a time almost exactly like this time except no one just looking at me would have expected that I would stand to pee but for whatever reason I was too shy to ask for a restroom and at the end of the day part of me was filled with the metabolites of beer but the rest of me was wrung out in the vast desert of an alcoholic and unforgiving sun made all the more unforgiving by our having spent the day in a boat in the middle of a tepid lake in Georgia in July so I remember holding it in over every bump until I got home and then relief for the one discomfort and glass after glass of cold water which did not refresh the other until I had had about fifty of them which took a couple of hours of refilling the glass then emptying it and refilling it again over and over and over. at that point I think two gallons went in and none came back out.
why do we do it. there is nothing inviting even in the thought but we would have followed each other to the ends of the earth for a chance to make that break. you know the one that finally delivers you from yourself and into the arms of no thing and no one as beside yourself there is only that space teeming with nearly anonymous figures. they had given me a maroon members only jacket to keep me warm in the cool of the morning for I was too slight to keep warm all by myself even though it was not in any sense cold outside.
the odd thing is I remember this episode even though I was in love with none of them. I am not sure why I went or even why the whole trip was planned but once there we sat dutifully in the boat with our rods and reels and budweiser. I cannot recall if we caught anything or even wanted to. none of us were girls in the strict sense but I am not certain if we knew how to be anything else or if we knew how to be anything at all other than fugitive moments floating on the water waiting for something to happen while knowing that it would not. whose idea was this. you want another beer?
because the lake was really a vast conglomeration of flooded valleys the number of coves was nearly infinite and I was always astounded when someone else could find their way back to the one they had started in after motoring around nearly the whole perimeter. or maybe that was only the effect of going around in one big and highly irregular circle and as long as you kept going you were bound to rediscover your launch point before too long.
one year I made the mistake of camping out overnight in a beach chair on the dirt near the lakeshore because the tent was thick with heat humidity and sweating bodies so I was unable to sleep but the chair was bathed by a cool breeze into which I could radiate so I did that and slept peacefully for many hours. by morning my body had become host to more than 100 of those tiny red bugs which burrow under your skin and make you itch until they die or you absorb them or something. chiggers. if you know what they are you know what they are. I discovered their number in counting the welts a couple of days later when the itching was at its highest point and with the sunburn I had also picked up—because in those days you went to the lake and came back with a sunburn just like everyone else did as science had not even uncovered the problem with cigarettes yet—it was impossible to do anything but lie gingerly in bed without moving anything with skin on it.
such was the magical horror of summertime in the deep south three quarters of the way through the twentieth century.
some years prior to this wearing a bathing suit had begun to require a certain amount of dissociation because I had nearly reached my adult proportions and this was enormously disturbing. to me, that is. I do not know if it disturbed anyone else. I could not have told you exactly what was wrong because several things were and a small number of them escaped conscious notice possibly as a result of the necessity of dissociation for such occasions but the unknown wrong things were responsible for this necessity so as you can see the circle was vicious there for awhile. I could not know even when I made an effort to find out. I was not letting myself in on the secret just yet.
still I wore a bathing suit because that was what you did in the summer much of the time either you were lying out in the breathlessly hot besotted air trying to get a start on that year’s sunburn or you were at the lake late at night with your friends and a pickup truck full of beer watching the boats come by with their lights and we on the red clay shoreline sitting on the knees of the scrub pines black against their own shadows and the uncertain darkness that is a starry sky not close to city lights but not distant either. me I was always scared nearly to death that somehow we would be found out and my family would see me drunk. it did not occur to me that they already had and they knew they already had but given that nothing more was ever said beyond the bare minimum to keep the household from ceasing to function completely I had no clue beyond my own suppositions which were far from accurate most of the time. but so in my paranoia I felt that we needed to hide from these boats in case they were police boats.
my friends gently tried to persuade me that we were safe. I did not believe them then but they were right at least insofar as we were not about to be dragged out of the woods in handcuffs.
when drinking beer in the dark the next most worrisome worry was how far to the nearest restroom. I hung out with friends who could stand to pee behind any given tree but I could not stand and so could not necessarily use just any tree. on more than one occasion they pulled the truck over next to some tall bushes and I would dash out and crouch down behind the branches and leaves disappearing from any other traffic there might have been.
at the time I found this necessary and completely mundane bodily function mortifying but when you have to go you cannot keep it to yourself unless you are very close to a restroomed destination and so at some point I would mumble as loudly as I dared um um um I have to um um pee um guys and they not feeling at all abashed would ask how badly and I would answer how about those bushes right there.
it was not my idea to be a body after all and it was less my idea to be a body that everyone around me described as a girl’s body and it was even less my idea to be a violable and violated body but I was so far from being able to articulate my embarrassment at having turned up this way that the best I could do was point out the bush that seemed big enough to hide what would otherwise have been my abject humiliation in attending to this body’s functions. it was not sufficient at the time to know that all bodies made demands of themselves that they themselves felt ashamed even of having to acknowledge much less meet or maybe it was that I did not yet know that other bodies suffered in this way. in those days the body that I was lived its life at a complete remove from all the others.
one night as a gesture toward my then-obvious distress at living as the body I was my friends told me they loved me and this shocked me so thoroughly that I can still remember my silent panic you what? love? you two? love me? we drink together and we smoke weed and we share our drugs and love? I stepped into the requested hug while feeling as though I had been pushed out of the driveway whose contours I had long ago learned by heart and into some uncertain and unstable hunch—as though there were behind the rending of the veil nothing but an uneasy question hanging in the air without response but also unmolested.
this was not the they shall know we are christians by our love by our love love that I had been taught at church because by then none of us were particularly christian. this was an unbounded and unfamiliar love to me and not one that depended on an external authority as both its true object and its constrained definition. this love was directed at me and nobody else and I could not comprehend this at all anything rising over my emotional horizons back then would be sterilized into a form that could neither make claims on me nor move me nor put demands to me. not that my friends were demanding anything but that precisely was what tore into my sense of reality so forcefully that it took years for me to restitch and the mending job itself had to be fashioned around what seemed to be a frightful absence of demand but was in its effect the bestowal of a gift.
eventually. at that moment I did not know what to do or say so after the hug was complete I stammered off into my house. I may have said thanks or goodbye or see you or later or I’ll call you tomorrow but I do not remember anything else.
the Blue Socks Chapter continues
in two weeks or maybe only one!
