TIPPI LECTOR – PAINLESS SUFFERING
FREAKISH CHAPTER - HIGGINS
I somehow held onto a half-flask of last night’s pint so I have a bit more nip tonight than usual. Good. I sure need to wet my whistle for this tale.
It started this morning, when I saw an old woman at the Piggly Wiggly dressed like a cowgirl. A clear memory rolled in like a tidal wave while I was comparing packages of chopped meat.
The gal was decked out like Dale Evans in one of those Roy Rogers singing cowpoke flicks; all spangles and fringe, sequined Stetson tipped up on the back of her noggin, sporting a fancy embroidered riding dress with a little silver lame’ lariat coiled up on her belt.
I stared at her for a beat, thinking
Eh? Kook? Nah, probably a square dancer. Probably.
Then, I checked into my recall.
Old people say their memories fade like old photos, dimmed and cracked on brittle paper. But some reflections stay strong enough to grab hold of you and snatch you out of your day and square into the tattered snapshots. For me, those pictures riffled into a scratchy movie clip switching from one saved moment to another, from one unforgettable conversation to another, from one touch, kiss, laugh, heartache, to all of them.
Enthralled, I stood still and took it all in.
I thought about Gerry Nunnley, my sweetheart sideshow talker, the cowgirl friend who never felt any pain… except mine. For that, I still regret my mistakes… and her suffering.
There’s no sense in comparing one love to another, no way to change the past even if I could. We play our cards and win or lose the hand. In all honesty, pain and suffering are not the same. Get that wrong and it’s just nonstop pain, now, later, and spread over the whole shebang.
Gerry went by the name Tippi Lector when she was a bally caller with the Southern Amusement outfit in the 70s. We booked in to handle midway joint management between the front box and El Circo del Tigre, a cat-heavy, two tent outfit with clowns and acrobats. That’s what a midway is, the cash funnel between the box and the ring.
The tag, Tippi Lector, was an in-joke for show folk. The front of a midway crowd is called “forming a tip” and the soapbox podium where a talker barks is a lectern, so she took on the name “crowd lecturer.”
Gerry wore a get-up that made her look like the Queen of the Rodeo: embroidered wrangler blouse, a skimpy buckskin skirt, lowcut cowgirl boots, a pair of jeweled gauntlets, a red neckerchief, and a star-splashed, shoulder sash that made her out to be a sultry vaquero ginned-up for a dreamy, ride-and-rope frolic. Catnip to the boys.
That stole my heart and rattled everything below my waterline.
She kept her blonde hair dyed a chestnut brown to ditch her Hollywood sexpot looks for a rough and ready, Western flash. She had grit galore and everybody wanted some of it.
Germaine joined the company as a nail-board hoodoo’s assistant. The guy called himself Jabbar Waleed – The Human Pincushion! He swallowed swords, stuck nails into his chest, pushed big needles through his arms, walked on broken glass, you know, your standard Indian fakir routine. Of course, he was a faker all right, but Germaine was hired on as a prop girl wearing a skimpy-costume to assist him – hand him knives and things, act shocked at the right time, and wiggle about if crowd lost interest.
In time, she figured out the dupe and became a jackpot attraction.
Gerry was born with a medical condition called congenital pain insensitivity and had never felt pain since birth. Her parents each had half the ancestry it takes to give it to their kid, but neither had the faintest idea what was in store.
She could tell the difference between sharp and dull, or hot and cold, but too-hot coffee didn’t give her the sting she needed to spit it out. Her whole world had to be felt though her other senses. That’s probably why she took up with Waleed, who was actually Barry Lynch, a Black Irish double-dealer and hardcore felon with a hacking cough. He played dirty and tamed his bark with Terpin Hydrate cut with codeine so, a couple shots of hootch and he was off to the races. A hitter.
Along comes Gerry, who was naturally what he pretended to be, and, for Lynch, it was a stroke of luck made in heaven… his heaven.
The backlot folk called Jabbar “Jabberwocky” because he’d spit up all kinds of bally language mixed with highbrow jibber-jabber. He claimed to be an Ivy-league grad and an actor with the National Theatre, but he also claimed to be able to read minds. Brags and bull, his stock in trade. To the rubes, he was a legend. To everyone else, he was a hard-apple skirt-chaser who usually needed a bath and a slap in the chops.
His brag was respectable doubletalk and his show banner said it all:
“Prince Waleed! Medium! Adept! Potentate! Medical miracle! Never before witnessed by human eyes, now here in your beautiful area! An ascended master of the Hindu arts! Trading excruciating pain and untold suffering for an open door to the higher realm of consciousness! All shall be revealed in this once-in-a-lifetime exposition of power -the power of the human mind! Watch closely and you will see miracles that defy explanation! Prince Waleed! Here now!
Gerry picked up on everything Barry knew about drawing a crowd and separating them from cash. On the other hand, she had nothing to teach him. What she was made her the star of the ten-in-one Fakir racket. No pain, no fear. Barry took the podium.
First time I saw her, she was dragging the lot, drawing a crowd, walking along wearing outsized fishhook earrings. Real goddamned fishhooks. I figured they were gaffed; rigged with a magnet or some other gimmick, but she tugged at one and it was clear that the damned thing went clean through her earlobe as a drop of blood ran down the steel. The mumbling crowd swelled around her, shuffling along as she traipsed on; they stared at her, pointed at her, as she made her way to the sideshow stage.
Now, I’d done a bit of fishing over the years, even worked tuna boats out of San Diego with the hook-scarred Vatos who worked the poles, slapping the water to snag a frenzied Bluefin from the school, but Gerry’s hooks were bigger, some kind of one-offs; say five, six inches long, bright shiny steel, and tipped with a nasty barb. For a second, I thought she might be a townie girl just looking to make a splash, but she smiled and nodded and sashayed by the looky-loos, leading them toward her stage’s tent flap, and, just like that, she ducked inside.
Out hops Waleed, wearing a Dhoti and piled-high turban, holding a bell-topped walking stick. He shook the bell and went into his spiel.
“Have you all come to meet my tutee? My loyal student? Shakti Uma! The woman who strides the Path of Raja? That holy road of meditation and enlightenment? Will you spend ten of your precious minutes witnessing ALL her powers and abilities? Will you abandon your fickle disbelief once in the presence of her confounding miracles of mind and flesh? Wearing only the most modest garments of a priestess, she submits to the mortification of her sacred body while ascending the Karmic ladder of wisdom! All for your education and elucidation! Twenty-five little pennies in exchange for five thousand years of radiance! A pittance for an abundance of supernatural elation! Step up to the booth while there is still room within the tent! Hurry now, as she is preparing for her unveiling! ”
Jabberwocky, right? But in that hodge-podge of fifty-cent mumbo-jumbo, he hit the nail on the head, for
me. There is something magical that happens after suffering, be it a boon or doom.
Germaine ran with this gambit for a couple seasons, alternating piercings and healings to wow crowd after crowd. More than the bed of nails, stepping on broken glass, and sustaining darts and arrows hitting her legs, she smiled through birch switch hits and bullwhip welts.
Her body didn’t experience pain the way we do but she got tired of being Waleed’s meal-ticket and staving off infections. Having learned enough bally lingo to move on to the front of the stage, she went straight talker, fronted a bunch of other attractions, and pulled out the “Lynch pin.”
At the time, I didn’t connect that she went on to represent oddities - deformed or mutilated folks, hard-luck cases, and unfortunates.
She couldn’t feel her pain, but she sure as Hell could feel others’, so she skipped the device freaks and cons. He interest was only those who suffered their mutation or injuries, her heart was open to that, so the sideshow became her family.
I fell in love with her. Try as I might, I couldn’t clinch exactly what it was: the way her smile was pulled down a little at the corners, the way she raised an eyebrow when she spoke to me, maybe how her voice was so unlike her bally hoopla. Maybe all these and more.
When Gerry spoke to me, she seemed to whisper her sweet words, like a hushed aria gently sung from her heart. There was no way her voice could have expressed more affection and what she said was as clear as a shout.
Maybe I was like a boy listening to an angel, only wanting her to see me as worthy of her continued interest. And, for a while she did.
Let me explain why I came the long way around my story to how Gerry holds a place in my world.
In `85, a string of tornadoes danced across southern Wisconsin and an F5 – a whopper – landed in Barneveld and tore the county up.
We were about a half-hour away, camped outside Madison, looking at a month of bookings along Route 18 toward Iowa. The forecast was sketchy, and most of the 30 or so tornadoes that eventually swept through leveled everything in their path. So we hunkered down and waited for a break in the crazy.
Gerry holed up at my wagon, saying, “Let’s stick this out together. A second set of mitts might come in handy if a tornado makes scrap out of our caravan and we have to dig our way out of the remains.”
I might have bought that line, but she had brought along a basket of hard rolls, ham, wine, and a candle.
“Are we having a picnic?” I asked.
She smiled and I felt something shake inside me.
“Could be,” she purred, “unless the wind has its way with us and it winds up being our last meal.”
I let out a single “Huh!” giving a nod to the gag but holding back what was running through my mind.
Looking back, there’s not a thing I would change about that moment. Her voice, that sly grin, her rock-solid style; everything I found irresistible in a gal. The storm night lay ahead and, in honesty, if a tornado came and it was my time to check out, I’d have felt complete. Yet, I had no design on this glorious person other than to share the moment, drink in her friendship, accept the love that shined from her eyes. Anything more on my part would only shout my schoolboy preoccupation.
Gerry lit the candle and got to work on the wine bottle cork.
She piped up, “I wonder if a tornado is a guy or a girl.”
I just shrugged and waited for the pay-off. When she asked an oddball question, it was usually a set-up for something she wanted to spring on you. It’s what a good teacher does, isn’t it?
I wanted the lesson.
“Go on,” I said.
“I got to thinking about all the hurricanes named Audrey and Isadore, Betsy and Jeanne.” She said, “I know they started giving them male names a few years back, but that’s not my point. Why did it start with gal name hurricanes in the 50s?”
“Something to do with Mother Nature?”
“Better,” Gerry added. “It has more to do with blind rage. A hurricane doesn’t target a specific area in particular, it just sweeps through making rubble out of homes, and lives, and dreams. Then, the very center of the mayhem brings calm and promises relief from the fury for a while. Until the other side of the storm delivers a second blow to the two- or three-hundred-mile storm front. Unlike a tornado that moves from spot to spot, yanking individual targets, one-by-one, up and into the whirlwind. Almost methodical in its destruction. A very male tactic.”
I bit.
“I went through Hurricane Celia down at the Gulf in `70. She beat downtown Corpus Christi to a pulp and took out a couple dozen people before blowing through. That’s a girl?”
Gerry pick up the drift.
“Celia destroyed everything precious, smashed the dishes, flung belongings out onto the lawn, wrecked the car, sound familiar?”
I saw her point, “A woman scorned?”
“Just a thought. Destruction over hundreds of square miles versus a tornado’s devastation line – a mile wide and maybe forty, fifty miles long.”
She poured the wine into paper cups.
“We have nothing to worry about tonight.” She said with a grin.
Her roundabout made me wonder where she was leading, but, just as casually, she handed me a cup and raised hers for a toast.
“Here’s to living through storms and not having to live in the rubble.”
We drank up and she reached to refill my cup, but held onto my hand and waited for my unbroken attention.
“I spoke with Roland the other day.”
I let her words hang in the air. I speak with Roland every day. Where is this going?
“After close, we had a few belts and were getting tipsy. We spilled the beans… all the beans. I told him about my mother and the safety pin and he told me about your father and the World’s Fair.”
Gerry looked into my eyes and waited until I had a moment to shuffle all the feelings her words dredged up.
“You and I have had hurricanes and tornados, right, Boz?”
“Old-growth wood there, Gerr. Felled, chopped, and stacked by the hearth for kindling. I left my father’s and his sins in the past.”
“A tornado,” she whispered, “I understand. But there wasn’t a better man than Roland for you to look up to. He’s a natural. Heaven sent.”
“Yeah. I owe him everything. But I’d never ask anyone about their childhood. People wear their life on their face and, for most, it’s not a happy tale. I don’t want to see their scars.”
“What do you see in my scars?” Gerry asked.
She unbuttoned the top of her blouse and pushed out her left shoulder. Her skin was a rosy tan with a scattered web of scars, some small, some longer and jagged. The sight of the shiny ridges made me draw in a breath so quickly, I feared it would seem rude; an affront to her vulnerability. But she smiled and bared her other shoulder with a carefree flick of her hand.
“What do you see?”
It took a moment for me to find words that wouldn’t dampen her affections or deny my regard for her.
“A life. A burden pressed into a choice. A chosen path that has a sane destination and the learned wisdom to follow it.”
“Boz, If I didn’t know you as a handsome, good-hearted soul, I’d love you for being a whip-smart operator.
An odd choice of words for a woman who took a whipping for a paycheck. Isn’t it?”
There must be a word for what her bared shoulders and seductive gaze did to me, but I’d never known such a feeling of excitement-tinged fear and expectation. Was she letting me know her desire? Was I misreading her?
“I don’t know what to say.”
“Then…” she leaned forward and brushed her lips against mine, “Say nothing.”
Such an innocent kiss and yet a shock ran through my chest.
“Gerry?”
“Boz?”
That moment, all was revealed. We laid back on my bunk and she told me of the hurricane that tore her life apart. Her parents didn’t know about her condition until her mother, drunk and careless, safety-pinned a diaper through her hip. There was no cry of pain, but when her father saw blood on the cloth, he lost his temper and beat his wife. From then on, she never stopped drinking and the marriage fell to pieces. In the aftermath, Gerry’s mother destroyed everything that reminded her of her husband; the belongings, the photographs, the gifts they had given each other, treasured as physical proof of their bond, and held close when loneliness and despair crept in. To her and her daughter, there was no father.
Then Gerry summed up my tornado as told to her by Roland.
“Alcohol and two adults who couldn’t grow together. Looking for someone or something to fill the void when neither could be a parent and their young lover days had passed. I understand. I share a similar sadness, poor boy. But, all things being equal, I care even more about the man who was once that abandoned, disheartened boy. We survived, Boz. Those storms are only memories. They left damage, rubble that we have cleared.”
We looked into each other’s eyes, seeing both the child and the adult in each of us. Siblings, confidants, sharing a love borne of shared emptiness, grief, and self-doubt.
Gerry sat up, refilled our cups and offered me a deal.
“I don’t know how we will eventually feel about being friends in love like this. “Wait and see” seems like the best outlook for now. But, strangely, being lovers seems less personal, less selfless a commitment than where we are at now.”
We slept together that night, just holding each other and feeling completeness. And that was the day I accepted my past and felt the hole in my heart begin to heal.
(silence on tape, then)
Gerry stayed on for most of the next season, before leaving to, as she said, “Get a good look at the land.”
And, with that, I lost her to the world.
____
MJH (c) 07072024
all rights reserved
.
It started this morning, when I saw an old woman at the Piggly Wiggly dressed like a cowgirl. A clear memory rolled in like a tidal wave while I was comparing packages of chopped meat.
The gal was decked out like Dale Evans in one of those Roy Rogers singing cowpoke flicks; all spangles and fringe, sequined Stetson tipped up on the back of her noggin, sporting a fancy embroidered riding dress with a little silver lame’ lariat coiled up on her belt.
I stared at her for a beat, thinking
Eh? Kook? Nah, probably a square dancer. Probably.
Then, I checked into my recall.
Old people say their memories fade like old photos, dimmed and cracked on brittle paper. But some reflections stay strong enough to grab hold of you and snatch you out of your day and square into the tattered snapshots. For me, those pictures riffled into a scratchy movie clip switching from one saved moment to another, from one unforgettable conversation to another, from one touch, kiss, laugh, heartache, to all of them.
Enthralled, I stood still and took it all in.
I thought about Gerry Nunnley, my sweetheart sideshow talker, the cowgirl friend who never felt any pain… except mine. For that, I still regret my mistakes… and her suffering.
There’s no sense in comparing one love to another, no way to change the past even if I could. We play our cards and win or lose the hand. In all honesty, pain and suffering are not the same. Get that wrong and it’s just nonstop pain, now, later, and spread over the whole shebang.
Gerry went by the name Tippi Lector when she was a bally caller with the Southern Amusement outfit in the 70s. We booked in to handle midway joint management between the front box and El Circo del Tigre, a cat-heavy, two tent outfit with clowns and acrobats. That’s what a midway is, the cash funnel between the box and the ring.
The tag, Tippi Lector, was an in-joke for show folk. The front of a midway crowd is called “forming a tip” and the soapbox podium where a talker barks is a lectern, so she took on the name “crowd lecturer.”
Gerry wore a get-up that made her look like the Queen of the Rodeo: embroidered wrangler blouse, a skimpy buckskin skirt, lowcut cowgirl boots, a pair of jeweled gauntlets, a red neckerchief, and a star-splashed, shoulder sash that made her out to be a sultry vaquero ginned-up for a dreamy, ride-and-rope frolic. Catnip to the boys.
That stole my heart and rattled everything below my waterline.
She kept her blonde hair dyed a chestnut brown to ditch her Hollywood sexpot looks for a rough and ready, Western flash. She had grit galore and everybody wanted some of it.
Germaine joined the company as a nail-board hoodoo’s assistant. The guy called himself Jabbar Waleed – The Human Pincushion! He swallowed swords, stuck nails into his chest, pushed big needles through his arms, walked on broken glass, you know, your standard Indian fakir routine. Of course, he was a faker all right, but Germaine was hired on as a prop girl wearing a skimpy-costume to assist him – hand him knives and things, act shocked at the right time, and wiggle about if crowd lost interest.
In time, she figured out the dupe and became a jackpot attraction.
Gerry was born with a medical condition called congenital pain insensitivity and had never felt pain since birth. Her parents each had half the ancestry it takes to give it to their kid, but neither had the faintest idea what was in store.
She could tell the difference between sharp and dull, or hot and cold, but too-hot coffee didn’t give her the sting she needed to spit it out. Her whole world had to be felt though her other senses. That’s probably why she took up with Waleed, who was actually Barry Lynch, a Black Irish double-dealer and hardcore felon with a hacking cough. He played dirty and tamed his bark with Terpin Hydrate cut with codeine so, a couple shots of hootch and he was off to the races. A hitter.
Along comes Gerry, who was naturally what he pretended to be, and, for Lynch, it was a stroke of luck made in heaven… his heaven.
The backlot folk called Jabbar “Jabberwocky” because he’d spit up all kinds of bally language mixed with highbrow jibber-jabber. He claimed to be an Ivy-league grad and an actor with the National Theatre, but he also claimed to be able to read minds. Brags and bull, his stock in trade. To the rubes, he was a legend. To everyone else, he was a hard-apple skirt-chaser who usually needed a bath and a slap in the chops.
His brag was respectable doubletalk and his show banner said it all:
“Prince Waleed! Medium! Adept! Potentate! Medical miracle! Never before witnessed by human eyes, now here in your beautiful area! An ascended master of the Hindu arts! Trading excruciating pain and untold suffering for an open door to the higher realm of consciousness! All shall be revealed in this once-in-a-lifetime exposition of power -the power of the human mind! Watch closely and you will see miracles that defy explanation! Prince Waleed! Here now!
Gerry picked up on everything Barry knew about drawing a crowd and separating them from cash. On the other hand, she had nothing to teach him. What she was made her the star of the ten-in-one Fakir racket. No pain, no fear. Barry took the podium.
First time I saw her, she was dragging the lot, drawing a crowd, walking along wearing outsized fishhook earrings. Real goddamned fishhooks. I figured they were gaffed; rigged with a magnet or some other gimmick, but she tugged at one and it was clear that the damned thing went clean through her earlobe as a drop of blood ran down the steel. The mumbling crowd swelled around her, shuffling along as she traipsed on; they stared at her, pointed at her, as she made her way to the sideshow stage.
Now, I’d done a bit of fishing over the years, even worked tuna boats out of San Diego with the hook-scarred Vatos who worked the poles, slapping the water to snag a frenzied Bluefin from the school, but Gerry’s hooks were bigger, some kind of one-offs; say five, six inches long, bright shiny steel, and tipped with a nasty barb. For a second, I thought she might be a townie girl just looking to make a splash, but she smiled and nodded and sashayed by the looky-loos, leading them toward her stage’s tent flap, and, just like that, she ducked inside.
Out hops Waleed, wearing a Dhoti and piled-high turban, holding a bell-topped walking stick. He shook the bell and went into his spiel.
“Have you all come to meet my tutee? My loyal student? Shakti Uma! The woman who strides the Path of Raja? That holy road of meditation and enlightenment? Will you spend ten of your precious minutes witnessing ALL her powers and abilities? Will you abandon your fickle disbelief once in the presence of her confounding miracles of mind and flesh? Wearing only the most modest garments of a priestess, she submits to the mortification of her sacred body while ascending the Karmic ladder of wisdom! All for your education and elucidation! Twenty-five little pennies in exchange for five thousand years of radiance! A pittance for an abundance of supernatural elation! Step up to the booth while there is still room within the tent! Hurry now, as she is preparing for her unveiling! ”
Jabberwocky, right? But in that hodge-podge of fifty-cent mumbo-jumbo, he hit the nail on the head, for
me. There is something magical that happens after suffering, be it a boon or doom.
Germaine ran with this gambit for a couple seasons, alternating piercings and healings to wow crowd after crowd. More than the bed of nails, stepping on broken glass, and sustaining darts and arrows hitting her legs, she smiled through birch switch hits and bullwhip welts.
Her body didn’t experience pain the way we do but she got tired of being Waleed’s meal-ticket and staving off infections. Having learned enough bally lingo to move on to the front of the stage, she went straight talker, fronted a bunch of other attractions, and pulled out the “Lynch pin.”
At the time, I didn’t connect that she went on to represent oddities - deformed or mutilated folks, hard-luck cases, and unfortunates.
She couldn’t feel her pain, but she sure as Hell could feel others’, so she skipped the device freaks and cons. He interest was only those who suffered their mutation or injuries, her heart was open to that, so the sideshow became her family.
I fell in love with her. Try as I might, I couldn’t clinch exactly what it was: the way her smile was pulled down a little at the corners, the way she raised an eyebrow when she spoke to me, maybe how her voice was so unlike her bally hoopla. Maybe all these and more.
When Gerry spoke to me, she seemed to whisper her sweet words, like a hushed aria gently sung from her heart. There was no way her voice could have expressed more affection and what she said was as clear as a shout.
Maybe I was like a boy listening to an angel, only wanting her to see me as worthy of her continued interest. And, for a while she did.
Let me explain why I came the long way around my story to how Gerry holds a place in my world.
In `85, a string of tornadoes danced across southern Wisconsin and an F5 – a whopper – landed in Barneveld and tore the county up.
We were about a half-hour away, camped outside Madison, looking at a month of bookings along Route 18 toward Iowa. The forecast was sketchy, and most of the 30 or so tornadoes that eventually swept through leveled everything in their path. So we hunkered down and waited for a break in the crazy.
Gerry holed up at my wagon, saying, “Let’s stick this out together. A second set of mitts might come in handy if a tornado makes scrap out of our caravan and we have to dig our way out of the remains.”
I might have bought that line, but she had brought along a basket of hard rolls, ham, wine, and a candle.
“Are we having a picnic?” I asked.
She smiled and I felt something shake inside me.
“Could be,” she purred, “unless the wind has its way with us and it winds up being our last meal.”
I let out a single “Huh!” giving a nod to the gag but holding back what was running through my mind.
Looking back, there’s not a thing I would change about that moment. Her voice, that sly grin, her rock-solid style; everything I found irresistible in a gal. The storm night lay ahead and, in honesty, if a tornado came and it was my time to check out, I’d have felt complete. Yet, I had no design on this glorious person other than to share the moment, drink in her friendship, accept the love that shined from her eyes. Anything more on my part would only shout my schoolboy preoccupation.
Gerry lit the candle and got to work on the wine bottle cork.
She piped up, “I wonder if a tornado is a guy or a girl.”
I just shrugged and waited for the pay-off. When she asked an oddball question, it was usually a set-up for something she wanted to spring on you. It’s what a good teacher does, isn’t it?
I wanted the lesson.
“Go on,” I said.
“I got to thinking about all the hurricanes named Audrey and Isadore, Betsy and Jeanne.” She said, “I know they started giving them male names a few years back, but that’s not my point. Why did it start with gal name hurricanes in the 50s?”
“Something to do with Mother Nature?”
“Better,” Gerry added. “It has more to do with blind rage. A hurricane doesn’t target a specific area in particular, it just sweeps through making rubble out of homes, and lives, and dreams. Then, the very center of the mayhem brings calm and promises relief from the fury for a while. Until the other side of the storm delivers a second blow to the two- or three-hundred-mile storm front. Unlike a tornado that moves from spot to spot, yanking individual targets, one-by-one, up and into the whirlwind. Almost methodical in its destruction. A very male tactic.”
I bit.
“I went through Hurricane Celia down at the Gulf in `70. She beat downtown Corpus Christi to a pulp and took out a couple dozen people before blowing through. That’s a girl?”
Gerry pick up the drift.
“Celia destroyed everything precious, smashed the dishes, flung belongings out onto the lawn, wrecked the car, sound familiar?”
I saw her point, “A woman scorned?”
“Just a thought. Destruction over hundreds of square miles versus a tornado’s devastation line – a mile wide and maybe forty, fifty miles long.”
She poured the wine into paper cups.
“We have nothing to worry about tonight.” She said with a grin.
Her roundabout made me wonder where she was leading, but, just as casually, she handed me a cup and raised hers for a toast.
“Here’s to living through storms and not having to live in the rubble.”
We drank up and she reached to refill my cup, but held onto my hand and waited for my unbroken attention.
“I spoke with Roland the other day.”
I let her words hang in the air. I speak with Roland every day. Where is this going?
“After close, we had a few belts and were getting tipsy. We spilled the beans… all the beans. I told him about my mother and the safety pin and he told me about your father and the World’s Fair.”
Gerry looked into my eyes and waited until I had a moment to shuffle all the feelings her words dredged up.
“You and I have had hurricanes and tornados, right, Boz?”
“Old-growth wood there, Gerr. Felled, chopped, and stacked by the hearth for kindling. I left my father’s and his sins in the past.”
“A tornado,” she whispered, “I understand. But there wasn’t a better man than Roland for you to look up to. He’s a natural. Heaven sent.”
“Yeah. I owe him everything. But I’d never ask anyone about their childhood. People wear their life on their face and, for most, it’s not a happy tale. I don’t want to see their scars.”
“What do you see in my scars?” Gerry asked.
She unbuttoned the top of her blouse and pushed out her left shoulder. Her skin was a rosy tan with a scattered web of scars, some small, some longer and jagged. The sight of the shiny ridges made me draw in a breath so quickly, I feared it would seem rude; an affront to her vulnerability. But she smiled and bared her other shoulder with a carefree flick of her hand.
“What do you see?”
It took a moment for me to find words that wouldn’t dampen her affections or deny my regard for her.
“A life. A burden pressed into a choice. A chosen path that has a sane destination and the learned wisdom to follow it.”
“Boz, If I didn’t know you as a handsome, good-hearted soul, I’d love you for being a whip-smart operator.
An odd choice of words for a woman who took a whipping for a paycheck. Isn’t it?”
There must be a word for what her bared shoulders and seductive gaze did to me, but I’d never known such a feeling of excitement-tinged fear and expectation. Was she letting me know her desire? Was I misreading her?
“I don’t know what to say.”
“Then…” she leaned forward and brushed her lips against mine, “Say nothing.”
Such an innocent kiss and yet a shock ran through my chest.
“Gerry?”
“Boz?”
That moment, all was revealed. We laid back on my bunk and she told me of the hurricane that tore her life apart. Her parents didn’t know about her condition until her mother, drunk and careless, safety-pinned a diaper through her hip. There was no cry of pain, but when her father saw blood on the cloth, he lost his temper and beat his wife. From then on, she never stopped drinking and the marriage fell to pieces. In the aftermath, Gerry’s mother destroyed everything that reminded her of her husband; the belongings, the photographs, the gifts they had given each other, treasured as physical proof of their bond, and held close when loneliness and despair crept in. To her and her daughter, there was no father.
Then Gerry summed up my tornado as told to her by Roland.
“Alcohol and two adults who couldn’t grow together. Looking for someone or something to fill the void when neither could be a parent and their young lover days had passed. I understand. I share a similar sadness, poor boy. But, all things being equal, I care even more about the man who was once that abandoned, disheartened boy. We survived, Boz. Those storms are only memories. They left damage, rubble that we have cleared.”
We looked into each other’s eyes, seeing both the child and the adult in each of us. Siblings, confidants, sharing a love borne of shared emptiness, grief, and self-doubt.
Gerry sat up, refilled our cups and offered me a deal.
“I don’t know how we will eventually feel about being friends in love like this. “Wait and see” seems like the best outlook for now. But, strangely, being lovers seems less personal, less selfless a commitment than where we are at now.”
We slept together that night, just holding each other and feeling completeness. And that was the day I accepted my past and felt the hole in my heart begin to heal.
(silence on tape, then)
Gerry stayed on for most of the next season, before leaving to, as she said, “Get a good look at the land.”
And, with that, I lost her to the world.
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