Lit: A Memoir. Mary Karr

I’m gonna do?

      A lot of obscene and illegal stuff, I’d wager.

      He said, I’m gonna fix this Lincoln up and drive it back to Leechfield. My senior year ride. No more Mama’s Torino.

      Like you will, I said.

      Like I won’t.

      My brain was starting to melt and soften again around an old image of Daddy from childhood. How he’d come home at dawn in his denim shirt, and I’d be the only one up, peering out the back drapes till he walked across the patio. Lots of times, he’d come in and lie on his stomach on the bare boards of our yet-to-be-carpeted floor, and I’d walk barefoot along his spine. I’d have to hold on to the bookcase to keep from sliding off the sloping muscles of his back, but I’d work my toes under his scapular bones, and he’d ask, You feel my wings growing under there, Pokey? And I’d allege that I did. He claimed it always helped him get to sleep in the daylight. It was maybe the only time I felt like a contributor to the household, somehow useful in our small economy.

      In the Lincoln, the image faded inside me, and I heard myself say, What use am I now?

      Doonie said, Something wrong?

      What the hell was wrong? Here I was, where I’d planned to be, but it felt like … like nothing. Some black and rotting cavity of wrongness still stank somewhere inside me. I could smell it but not name it.

      I lay in the dark a long time and had just about forgotten Doonie was there at all when he tossed the azalea blossom over the backseat and it fell in the middle of me, as if dropped from a cloud.

      Within a week or so, the party the Ken doll had invited me to rolled around. It was my only day off from the T-shirt factory where I sewed on size labels with a bunch of Mexican ladies in their sixties. Before that, we’d starved, living on what we could fetch out of grocery store dumpsters plus some raids on local orange and avocado orchards.

      Walking the canyon roads that day, I couldn’t find the posh Laguna address, so I spent hours flip-flopping up and down, getting the occasional whiff of coconut oil and chlorine, overhearing the soft Spanish spoken by some pool cleaners.

      But I rounded each corner believing rescue would show up. Passing a road called Laurel Canyon, I remembered a folksinger with a record named that and near-expected her to show up with a basket of sunflowers. Or Neil Young would amble toward me in a fringed leather jacket. Or J. D. Salinger himself, who’d become my mentor and order up poems from me like so many diner pancakes. …

      (What hurts so bad about youth isn’t the actual butt whippings the world delivers. It’s the stupid hopes playacting like certainties.)

      At one point a town car glided up, and my heart bounded like a doe as the window silently slid down. But it was a wrinkled lady in tennis whites, asking in bad Spanish if I was Luz from the agency.

      Parched, covered in dust, with blisters the size of half dollars on both feet, I finally stood on the coastal highway, having adopted the most desultory hitchhiking manner in history. Holding up a cardboard sign that read SAN CLEMENTE—where my pals had been surfing all day—I tried to look bored, like a girl who didn’t actually need a ride. I was a hitchhiker to aspire to.

      Toward dusk, a black Volkswagen pulled up, its driver a tattered-looking doper with sleek raven hair and pork-chop sideburns. He jumped out and ran around to open my door, announcing that Tennessee men were bred to manners. Sam-u-el, his name was—short version Sam—a guy old enough to be sporting an incipient widow’s peak flanked by bald spots.

      The car smelled like something left in an ice chest too long, and the back seat had been torn out, trash piled in. He claimed his old lady was gonna fry his ass if he didn’t get that mess cleaned up, but he’d driven down from Oregon and was wore out.

      I said my fiancée was the same way, thus believing we’d entered into some chaste understanding. We pulled from the road’s shoulder, peace-sign roach clip swinging from the rearview.

      He was a slow driver, puttering along at a tractor’s pace, and in that landscape, I had no reason for fear. Along the populated beach were tanned, bemuscled men; women whose hands bore diamonds the size of gumballs. I tried to roll the window down more, but it stuck about halfway. He drove on, head-banging to the backbeat of Ozzy Osborne’s Paranoid. On a steep hill, he downshifted and said, Mary, do you believe you live by what you earn?

      I said sure, stunned less by the question than by the breath he’d exhaled—real snake-shit breath.

      He shouted, Some live by what their own hands take. Others feed like buzzards on the carcass’s leftovers.

      That’s right, I said, wondering what he was getting at. Maybe he wanted me to sell Tupperware or cosmetics door-to-door. Some of the want ads I’d answered offered that.

      He said, Samson after his haircut could not break his chains, and the stones of the temple rained down.

      I nodded at the King James Bible cadence he’d slid into, his accent no longer evoking Grandpappy on the porch with a slab of pie, but a preacher whose fire and brimstone maybe came from a guilty conscience about underage choristers. I tried to adopt the big-eyed face of a church girl with a well-armed brother. A crumb of fear.

      He drew a snuff can out from under his seat and tucked a pinch in his jaw, saying around it, You dip?

      No, sir, I said.

      He said, Not a pretty habit on a young woman. After an awkward silence, he added, Here’s the real truth, if you can dig it. He reached into the backseat and handed over a bedraggled paperback whose inside-back ads involved books on UFOs and Nostradamus.

      Looks real interesting, I said.

      You believe in presences? he said.

      I lied that I knew ESP and ghosts existed, though I believed in nothing, naught, nada. (When I got to college and found the word nihilist, I’d glom onto it the way a debutante does an alligator handbag.)

      He shook his head. Those are just circus tricks for the weak mind.

      That’s when I noticed that no aspect of this hillbilly matched up with the surfboard lashed on top. Sam’s sunken chest meant his only swimming included water wings. Or—the ghost of reason said to me—when he was weighing down corpses in some black sunken lagoon.

      He said, My granny back in Tennessee was born with the web of a caul over her head like a wedding veil, and I come into this world wearing that same veil. I see what others don’t. I am wed to the truth and a missionary of it.

      He studied me in black-eyed silence for a while. You’re not a Jew, are you? I didn’t peg you for a Jew.

      Me? No, sir. Actually, do you know a good church around here for me and my fiancée? As if, I thought, I’d ever enter a church other than carried by handles.

      He spat in a coffee can and pointed out my window, saying, Look at this cathedral we been give here.

      Sun was spattering the indigo water with silver sequins. Girls who seem to have stepped from chewing gum commercials jogged in bikinis along the shoreline. It was a lobster-salad-eating crowd.

      I said, They say it never rains here hardly at all.

      With two fingers, he stroked the edges of his thick mustache like some diminutive Chinese emperor about to sign a death order. He said, We’re not made to wallow in pleasure. Pleasure is joy’s assassin. He paused to spit in the coffee can. He said, I can see past this day to the time when these same waves will be made of blood. You believe that?

      Sounds like you know the Bible, I said.

      That I do. I’ve studied on it pretty good. You don’t mind, he said, brightening up—you don’t mind, I gotta make a quick stop by a friend’s house right this side of San Clemente.

      With that statement, his manner altered. He smiled, showing the pointy incisors of a gerbil. Which change hit my adrenal system like jumper cable voltage. He was suddenly trying to be charming.