Saunders--Memoir--Wk of 11-09

11-09

Cliff keeps at me about not remembering, or noticing, or mentioning anything good my father ever said to me. He indicates this is my dualistic, black/white way of seeing my father; says it’s a trap that I have to get out of. I would dearly love to remember my father having said kind, encouraging things, having shown a father's love in some tender, supportive way, but I can't find those memories. I don't know where they are or why I might have hidden them.

I do, indeed, have problems remembering my father ever having said anything positive about me. When I graduated from high school with honors, having been chosen to give a valedictory speech because I was honored as most outstanding senior, all my father did was complain about having to go to the ceremony, and complained about having to suffer the ride (it was a little over a mile) with my mother’s parents in the car with him. This was how my father reacted to my accomplishments, and I had a lot of them. Where did I get the motivation to do so well in school? Was it my parents? I don’t remember that it was. I don’t remember reading at home, or being encouraged to pick up a book. I remember my teachers encouraging me, remember them paying attention to the fact that I read much better than the other kids, and remember how much they enjoyed the fact that I was able to read seventh grade stuff in the fourth grade. They gave me my encouragement, my parents were too busy dealing with their depression and their general disappointment to be much help to either my sister or me. Did I ever get any help with my homework? Never. Did I ever get any encouragement to do a science project or read a book? No. All the encouragement I got as a child came from my teachers, not one bit of it came from my parents.

The fact was that school was more often than not a blessed escape from family life, so I dove into it. Life at home was never much fun, so reading was a natural, easy escape, and it came naturally to me, and I got lots of help finding good books, so that’s what I gravitated towards. I had awful science and math teachers, hateful, nasty bullies all of them, so I didn’t develop much of an interest in either science or math until high school. Unfortunately, I reached the ninth grade before I found good science teachers, and they were so good they helped me overcome years of indifferent instruction and actually want to learn about science. Mrs. Carpenter, my chemistry teacher, and Miss Blalock, my biology teacher, saved me from a life of hating science.

Dorothy Lockhart taught me to love words. She was my English and French teacher from fourth through seventh grade. She found me when I was in the fourth grade, newly arrived in Atlanta from Jacksonville, and she kept a watchful eye on me. She gave me books to read, and she delighted in the fact that I could read better than the other kids. When I got into trouble, she disciplined me by putting me in a pilot French class program, and both of us were happy at the results. I took to French very well, and responded to her encouragement by working harder to get better at writing and to read more books. So it was from Mrs. Lockhart that I got the words I needed, and from Mrs. Carpenter and Miss Blalock. No words came to me from my father saying, Good job, son or even, That’ll do, pig.

Did I know or not know my father loved me as I was growing up? He never said those words, never hugged me, never shook my hand. The only physical contact I ever had from my father was the beatings he handed out. He never congratulated me on my successes in school, and I had many of them. He never asked me about my school work or about my interests, and he never ever offered to get involved in any father/son activities. Did I want him to? No. I never regarded him as a friend. I saw him as an ogre who lived with us, who could and would, at any time, blow up and hurt somebody and the first choice for hurting someone was always, always me. I understood that he wasn’t always in a state of dangerous, hurtful rage, but I always knew, from experience, that he could erupt at any moment.

I took my cues in dealing with my father from the way my mother dealt with him. She vacillated between being friendly and happy with him, being scared of him, and fighting with him. It was very clear to me, even though I couldn’t have articulated this when I was a kid, that my father felt and acted very differently with my mother than he did with me or with my sister. My father would never have raised his hand against my mother, no matter how heated their fighting became or how harshly she berated him, and they could go at it fiercely. They often fought about money, about how badly my mother was managing the household finances or sometimes about how much of a bully my father was.

My sister used to call these fights suitcase drills. Mama and Daddy would fight, and Mama would decide we needed to go home to her parents because she couldn’t take it any more. She’d pack my sister and me up, and we’d go stay with my maternal grandparents. Daddy would beg her not to leave, and she’d read him for how he treated her and us, and they’d go back and forth, and sometimes we’d actually make it out the house and all the way to grandma’s house, and sometimes the packed suitcases would just get unpacked, my sister and I would be sent back to bed, and Mama and Daddy would go back in their room and close the door. As for kind or tender words from my father, I do remember him apologizing once during a suitcase drill that happened around the time I was twelve or so. Mama and he decided they were going to get a divorce, because he was a bully and Mama couldn’t take it any more. He pleaded, she said No. Then one of my mother’s sisters was summoned, usually Aunt Hilda, the de facto matron of my mother’s side of the family, and eventually a truce was declared, followed by a slow, sullen reconciliation.

Did my father ever say a single thing about me that was positive, that was fatherly, that was helpful in any way? All I can say is that I remember my address was 8089 Lourdes Drive North in Jacksonville Florida when I was six years old; I can remember having pneumonia when I was two and a half; I can remember all kinds of things from early life, from my youth, from the time up until his death, and I can’t, honestly, remember a single kind, appreciative, positive, helpful thing the man ever said about me.

So what did I think made my father attend to his duties as a father? He never said anything that would indicate he liked or wanted to be a father. I think he believed he met his obligation to me by going to work, by bringing home the bacon, by providing a roof, clothes. I think of him like the father of August Wilson’s “Fences,” the angry bully who eventually dies alone after having driven everyone away. But like that character, I think my Dad saw himself as doing much better than his own father had done. If my father was a bully, his own father was a far more terrible animal, and the fact that my father didn’t do to me what his father had done to him was, in fact, an extraordinary triumph.

11-12

More that I know about my family on my father's side: that my great grandfather Saunders came to America from England in the 1850s to present a gift of a team of horses from Queen Victoria to the Governor of South Carolina. That he stayed in America rather than going back to England, and that he was in his sixties when he arrived. That he served in the British military in India for much of his career, and then became attached to the Queen's Stables after that, hence the position that led to his being sent to America. That he worked on the railroad when he came to America, working on the building of the rail lines in the Southeastern U.S. That he wound up in Saint Augustine, Florida, where he met an married a woman of Spanish decent, by whom he had several children. That he left her some time afterwards, moved to Georgia, and there met my great grandmother, by whom he had a number of children, including my grandfather, Frederick Lee Saunders. My great grandfather was thus over seventy by the time he started his second American family. There used to be a portrait photograph of Great Grandfather Saunders in the house of my Aunt Lucy Belle Darden, Granddaddy Fred's sister, in Homerville, Georgia, a small hamlet on the edge of the Okeefenokee swamp. The portrait of Great Grandfather Saunders was very imposing. He looked much younger than his years (probably from all that sex) and looked, in fact, a lot like Friedrich Nietzsche with his big bushy moustaches and his sharp jaw.

That Grandfather Fred was born into a family of some means, and that he led a privileged childhood in Waycross and Homerville, Georgia. That Grandfather Fred grew up to become a very industrious entrepreneur in his youth, amassing a network of grocery stores throughout south Georgia and north Florida. That he met and courted my grandmother, Ruth Jernigan, and regarded it as more than a coup when he got her to agree to marry him. That they were almost immediately visited by discord, which followed them through to the end of their marriage. Grandmother Ruth had social pretensions, and Granddaddy Fred was a boisterous, wild man who was given to riding around in a brand new car and shooting up the countryside. He was known for showing up at his own house to find guests there, being entertained by my grandmother, which he took to be an invasion of burglars. To this he responded, on more than one occasion, having arrived drunk from a lengthy excursion of whoring, hunting, and boozing, by shooting up the whole house and frightening the quests nearly to death. As far as I know, Granddaddy Fred never killed anyone except in wartime, but he surely seems to have scared a lot of people.

I know very little else about my great grandfather. I believe he was Welsh. Don't know a thing about his family going further back. I've thought about calling or writing my uncle Bob, my father's only surviving sibling, and asking him what he can tell me about the family. Uncle Bob was always kind towards me, but I know in recent years he has become deeply committed to his evangelical faith, mostly as a way of reconciling himself to having committed murder during the Vietnam war, where he evidently tortured civilians. I may yet contact uncle Bob, if I can work up the nerve. I feel nervous and uncomfortable around him because he's very much like my father, resembles him greatly, and is one of the most volatile, crazy people I've ever known.

11-14

This past weekend I went to one of the few sex clubs in town. No-nonsense, no pretense about being a "spa" or anything silly like that, it's just for sex. I like the honesty of that, though I think the idea of places like my sex club is almost always far rosier than the realization. Having done a modest survey of sex clubs in the United States (in New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Jacksonville and Fort Lauderdale) and in Europe (in Paris, alas nowhere else) I find that Atlanta's contribution to this genre is about as dreary as one can imagine. I have many theories as to why this is true, just as I have many theories about most things. Call me the Andy Rooney of gay life. Only I trim my eyebrows and use skin cream.

I think cities have a definite character, a kind of collective personality. Not a very revolutionary idea, is it? New York has its energy, which is decidedly male, ambitious, highly focused on money. Atlanta is a more feminine place--after all, it identifies with a fictional virago, Scarlett O'Hara, and I think her mystique penetrates far deeper than some people might admit. Unspeakably vain, decidedly anti-social, focused on getting what she wants, Scarlett never shines quite so sweetly as in the scene that comes just after she's gotten the shit fucked out of her by someone even more conniving than she is. And so it is with Atlanta: a city of power bottoms, hungry for bling, driven by the most sanguinary urge to acquire, to amass, to own. This translates into a city of snobbish, paradoxically (perhaps) promiscuous, often quite charming vampires. Nobody dates much here, but there's lots of fucking going on, and a whole lot more character assassination during the non-fucking intervals.

And this set of facts, in turn, colors the sexual underground of such a place. In a city such as Atlanta, I don't even know that sex clubs like the one I go to properly belong to the sexual underground. They may, instead, be merely the convenience stores on the ground floor. Private sex parties, organized over the internet, through gyms, or through word of mouth at bars--that's the real sexual underground in this town, and I'm not a member. Too old, don't have a big enough dick or a big enough bank account. Oh, well.

So in a place like Atlanta, sex clubs are sort of dank and dreary and sad, all that goes with something approaching a democratic approach to sex. Didn't use to be that way in this town: before the Babbitts invaded the place, Atlanta was a pretty warm and fuzzy place, but that all dried up in the 80s. Were we visited by an invasion of pod people around that time? I know I'm not the only one who asks that question.
So the sex club I go to is democratic, which means a good many of the men aren't what some people would call "hot." Hotness is represented there, but it doesn't rule. I think it's really a shame that sex clubs tend to be such sad places. I think of the legends I hear about the Continental Baths when Bette Middler sang there, and I think our lives are not better, there are just twice as many of us as there were back then.
I go to sex clubs as much for the affection as for the fucking and sucking. Actually a sex club is a dangerous place. I' don't want to romanticize places like that, because people in them get carried away and fuck without condoms (I don't, dear reader--don't want to pass my viral load on to anyone else), so it's very hard work to have a good time without exposing yourself to some really gratuitous and awful risk. The thing is, you don't really have to; you always have a choice. I go places like that to be with other men, to have safe sex, and to get a little cuddle time in.
My problem with men (or at least one of them) is that I love not wisely but too well. When someone asks me what my type is, I always quote Mae West: "There's only two kinds of guy I go for: domestic and foreign." Since I stopped drinking, I don't do the voice when I repeat that line. Since I live in a town where men don't date, where I've lived beyond my best if used-by date without falling completely apart, and where it's easier to find affection and tenderness in a sex club than anywhere else I know of, I go, from time to time, I try to balance the act of making love against the threat of causing harm, and I grope my way through the dark with the rest of my brothers.

11-15

In all that I have said about my father, I haven’t said much about his childhood. It’s important for me to talk about what I know in this connection, because it has formed so much of my own experience. Throughout my own boyhood I often heard stories about my father’s early life—almost never from him, of course. He never was one to talk much about the past, least of all subjects. He didn’t much care to hear about the past, either, unless someone else told the story. As for his own story, I learned most of it from my mother and her sisters, especially my Aunts Frances and Hilda.
My Aunt Frances was a wonderful person. She was the oldest of the children in my mother’s family who survived to adulthood. She lived most her life in a modest life in Jacksonville, Florida, and died a mostly happy death after a long, difficult, painful life. She was a free spirit. If Armistead Maupin had known her, he would have made her a heroine in one of his novels. My favorite story about her is about how once, when she was around seventy or so, she was cruising the intracoastal waterway near Jacksonville with one of our robber baron cousins in his pleasure boat bought with ill-gotten gains. Someone spotted an alligator in the water, and Aunt Frances, having had a few drinks, asked for a harpoon. There was one on board, and she used it, nailed the gator, hauled it on board and cooked it on the grill that night. Everybody loved her; she was the best kind of doll.

Aunt Frances complicated the family tree a good bit by marrying my father’s mother’s brother. My uncle Woody Jernigan, brother to my Grandmother Ruth Jernigan Saunders, started out a blacksmith and ended up a drunk. Most of his life he sat in his lounge chair and waited to die. Aunt Frances stayed by him, nursed him through his many brushes with death, and after he died she married, in succession, two more drunks and a sober, rich old man. Luckily her fourth husband left her rolling in dough. She earned it.

Along the way, nursing drunks and their grudges, my Aunt Frances became the chronicler of my father’s family. She was the one who passed down what the rest of us knew about what happened to my father’s family and why things fell apart. It is primarily from my memories of what she told me that I have a recollection of how my father came to be the brute he was.

When my father was born, his mother and father were rich, powerful and prominent in their community. They lived part of the time in Brunswick, and part of the time on Jekyll Island. My grandfather led his wild life pretty much apart from my grandmother, who pursued her career as a teacher and a social activist to the dismay of her husband. Granddaddy Fred was interested in hunting, boozing and whoring. How he managed to amass the fortune he did is something I’ve never figured out—I suppose he must have charmed the money out of people’s pockets. He did have powerful and prominent friends, like R. J. Reynolds and Herman Talmadge, but how that translated into what appears to have been a great pile of wealth I’ve never exactly understood. Grandmother Ruth, in the meantime, went about her business, working in the temperance movement, advocating for birth control, and being a teacher. She also entertained pretty lavishly, at least by the local standards—local to Brunswick, Georgia, in the twenties, that is.

The Stock Market Crash of 1929 didn’t affect my grandfather immediately. In 1930, however, his whole world was dismantled when my Grandmother died. The story goes that, having endured enough of his drunken shenanigans, she told him she intended to have no more children by him. At this time they had three sons: Kenneth, the eldest, my father William, then aged five, and the youngest, Robert, then aged three. What precipitated this pronouncement from my Grandmother—about remaining married in name only—remains a mystery. At some point afterwards, however, she got pregnant, and when it became clear that she was, indeed, pregnant, she sought the services of an abortionist. Abortion was illegal at this time, of course. Her abortion was not a success, and she died.

Her death left my Grandfather in a rage rather than a more conventional state of mourning. He abandoned his three children, disappeared, and left them with his sister, Lucy Belle Darden. Aunt Lucy Belle, whom I remember from my youth, was delusional most of her life, and by all accounts, she wasn’t much better when she supposedly took up the task of raising my father as a step-child than she was at the time I saw her. Periodically my grandfather would blow back into town drunk at Aunt Lucy Belle’s house, his only purpose being to rant to my father that his mother had killed herself out of anger with him, with my father. So, my father was raised by a crazy aunt, a delusional cocaine addict, living in a sad, dark old house in a small town on the edge of the Okeefenokee Swamp, being told over and over again that he was responsible for his mother’s death. He was old enough when she died to be aware of being suddenly thrown from a life of considerable luxury to one of Dickensian gloom, and all he had, all that time, was his father’s curse.