Shaking the Sugar Tree

Chapter 5: Failure to Thrive

In my room, I put Patsy Cline on the record player and she told me about “Seven Lonely Nights.” I’m the kind of uncool guy who has a record player. Don’t feel sorry for me because I can pick up LPs at the used book store or thrift shop for a buck each. I listen to cassettes, too, and those are only ten cents a pop. Pretty cool when you make minimum wage. Makes you feel like you can actually buy something of value with it. Records are cheaper than candy bars, if you can believe that.

You preach it, girl, I thought, sitting on my bed and feeling lonely and miserable, wishing there was a man like Jackson Ledbetter in my bed, a man who would hold me and kiss me and make me feel alive again, if only one more time before the middle-aged spread took over my hips and sent me belly-flopping into dementia and adult diapers.

I was perilously close to thirty-three. Thirty-five sat like an apocalypse on the not-too-distant horizon. What kind of life could there possibly be after that?

I looked around my room, not completely immune to the shabbiness of my existence. The sheets on my bed and the curtains on my window must have been spun during the Civil War. I had clothes that I wore in high school, and still wore. My dresser was a cast-off from my brother Bill. The bottom drawers are covered with stickers that Noah put there when he was two and which I’ve kept meaning to peel off and never have. There is no denying the fact that I make minimum wage, that I work part-time because I can’t find anything else, that I have no frills or ruffles to speak of, that I am part of the reason why Mississippi is the poorest state in the Union.

The words “failure to thrive” floated through my mind. So did “dirt-poor” and “redneck, peckerwood white trash.”

No wonder Noah’s mother ran off.

Years ago, it had been suggested that I send Noah to live in Jackson at the Mississippi School for the Deaf. I couldn’t do it, and it wasn’t simply the expense. Despite the educational benefits, the constant contact with a large deaf community, all the ways it would improve his life, the lifelong friends he would make, I could not send him away. Mama and Bill had chided me endlessly about my selfishness, but I steadfastly ignored them. I was not about to punish Noah because he was deaf. It wasn’t a punishment, they countered. It was a chance at a decent life, a chance at a future. With luck he would learn to talk properly and read lips and find a place in the world of the hearing, be able to take care of himself, get a job, be a productive member of society, become independent, not lost in the world of the unhearing.

It was a chance, in other words, to teach him how not to be what he was, to not be deaf, or to find a way to pretend he wasn’t deaf and get along with “normal” people and live a “normal” life as though this fundamental fact about his existence was of no importance, as if he could somehow have a good life in spite of what he was if only he could find a way to hide his terrible infirmity.

I rejected that way of thinking. It had offended me deeply, not least because it was their exact same prescription for me as a gay man. Find a way to pretend to not be what you are. Find a way to live a heterosexual life so you can fit in and enjoy the benefits of society.

I stretched out, feeling lonely, horny, disconnected, anxious, tired but wide awake.

I needed a man. s*x would be nice too, but I needed someone to talk to, someone to bounce off, to make me laugh, to remind me that it’s good to be alive, someone who would make me feel young again, attractive, desirable, someone to walk through life with. I needed to put an end to this long loneliness of raising a silent boy who lived in a silent world, Deaf World, a world I could visit but never truly be part of.

I pictured Jackson Ledbetter smiling at me with those come-hither eyes. I’d put my hands on his hips. I’d feel his belly, his chest, his n*****s. I’d stare at his business, and he’d know I was hungry for it because I’ve been hungry for c**k my whole life and I can’t lie.

It was a long time before I fell asleep.