As a teenager, Papa worked to distance himself from his father, who would often drop into his life at school or work and embarrass him somehow. Much later, when I was six, Glenn appeared at our house unannounced. I was asleep, so I missed it, but it seems Glenn made a move on my mother (!) when Papa left them alone for five minutes to go to the bathroom. Papa threw him out and told him that if he came around again, he would kill him. Dean Folds is pretty dry, matter-of-fact, and convincing without ever raising his voice. Not long after that incident, Glenn Folds hanged himself in a motel. Papa didn’t attend the funeral, taking us instead to play Putt-Putt across from the mall.
My grandmother on my mother’s side was Lois. My brother and I called her Grammy. Her first husband, Charles Kellam, my grandfather, was in the furniture business in High Point, North Carolina. A former North Carolina statewide high school wrestling champion standing five foot five, my grandfather is remembered for performing handstands on two Coke bottles—with his thumbs. I’m happy to remember him this way too, but I’m not sure I believe it. Sadly, Charles was a chronic alcoholic and died of liver complications at forty years old, just before my mother was born, leaving Lois to raise two girls alone.
With her reddish wavy hair and her dark skin tone, Lois claimed to be part Cherokee. Having grown up dirt poor in Missouri, before the Great Depression, Lois, ashamed of her beginnings, always struggled to rewrite her story, even awkwardly affecting the mannerisms of wealth. After Lois’s death, my aunt Sharon got heavily into researching our ancestry and confirmed that Lois’s father was actually of African descent, with no trace of Cherokee. Lois spent her life covering her redneck past and her mixed racial heritage. She chose to forget that her parents dropped her alone off at an orphanage while her brothers and sisters grew up at home. And she, in turn, did the same to my mother and her sister.
Mama was six years old. I always imagined that this dropping off was meant to be temporary, a way to get some space to restart Lois’s life after her husband’s death. Only, the months turned into years. Mama always called it a “boarding school,” the way her mother had chosen to characterize it, but Papa would always correct that. “It was an orphanage, Scotty.” It certainly was not a prep school in Connecticut full of rich kids. Photographs of Mama’s orphanage, with its shacks on a lawn of trampled brown grass, were stored in a box along with other photos from the same era, of Lois taking flying lessons with a gaggle of wealthy male suitors. Her children safely installed in “boarding school,” Lois eventually remarried, and Mama and Aunt Sharon returned to living at home at the end of high school.
Chuck and I were never dropped off at an orphanage. We were never beaten or threatened in bed with a knife, never left in the woods with guns. Those histories weren’t mine. They were my parents’ and their parents’ histories. They might have been mine too if Mama and Papa hadn’t each done such an impressive reset. They acknowledged their past, forgave it, perhaps learned from it, but they didn’t try and rewrite it. They created a safe space, a clean slate, to bring up two kids.
With this clean slate came a naïveté, a lack of form and formality, and a sort of all-around skepticism of convention that defined my upbringing. Rules, routines, and rituals were out the window. A family walk could mean hopping over fences with DO NOT ENTER signs. Mama would often allow me to be late to school if my favorite song was about to play on the radio. On the rare times we all ate together, there was no set dinnertime. I can imagine this sort of upbringing wouldn’t work for everyone. Some need borders and conventions more than others. And not everyone is a fan of improvisation.
As a result of my unusual upbringing, I was sent home from school many times for disregarding the rules, and the teachers seemed as frustrated with my parents as they were with me. But my parents did teach me to be a hard worker and to be polite, in a “do unto others” sort of way. My manners are pretty old school sometimes. To this day, I always rise to greet company, open doors for others in public, smile at and acknowledge everyone. “Please,” “thank you,” and a lot of “yes, ma’am” and “yes, sir” from a bygone Southern era, peppered with lots of “shits” and “fucks.” I’ve always been an odd combination of polite, irreverent, hardworking, and utterly undisciplined.
My parents’ era didn’t make a high art out of child-raising like we do today. And Mama and Papa were barely twenty when I came along, still children themselves, so they were just winging it.
What the hell is this thing? A boy? Okay, put him in a cardboard box and let’s do this!
Mama now seems mildly horrified by the photograph of the cardboard box that served as a cradle when I was an infant. I don’t care, though. Why not? Cardboard is light, cheap, and disposable, like a cradle should be. Because babies aren’t babies for long, and they don’t know the difference anyway. Put a pillow up in that shit and your baby will sleep like…well, a baby. Anyway, I’ve included that photograph in the book for fun.
For equal and fair treatment, I’ve thrown in a nice shot of my father taking me for a drive when I was four months old. I was placed in catapult position in the front seat of a doorless convertible Jeep, with no seatbelts. Papa, driving, and my uncle Jim in the back seat, as they were off to play tennis. Papa admits there was also a six-pack of Budweiser beer in the paper bag in the back seat. At least there was a nice hard-plastic baby car seat for me. Still, no straps or seatbelt attachments, no door.
Cardboard boxes were a big part of childhood. We moved so often that we never got around to unpacking all the boxes before moving to the next place. All of this moving was part of my parents’ livelihood. Besides their multiple day jobs, they built houses where we would live temporarily until some kind of tax period passed, at which time they could be sold for a profit. And the moves themselves were as informal as the rest of our life. I remember blankets being thrown over a desk, so we could move the desk and all its surface contents at once. Sometimes it’s just more efficient to leave everything on top of the furniture and go. When we got to the new house, we removed the blankets and straightened the pencils, stapler, and the coffee cups. If something broke, we threw it away.
My family was constantly in motion, writing our own rules, while the surrounding neighbors, both the new ones and the ones we left behind, seemed permanently fixed. Fixed to their houses, their schedules, their churches, for generations past and to come. At least that was my perception. Their lives were writ on rock tablets, like in the cheesy paintings of Moses on their living room walls. Our life was more like Mama’s dry-erase board.
Cardboard cradle
Uncle Jimmy, Ben, Papa, 1966
A WORKING-CLASS TOURIST IS
SOMETHING TO BE
WINSTON-SALEM, NORTH CAROLINA, WHERE I spent most of my childhood, boasted as wide a spectrum of social class as anyplace in America in the 1970s. From the lower class right up to the top with everything in between. For a variety of reasons, I experienced them all, living, studying, and working my way through the whole spectrum.