The Holdout Read online

  I live in the Cotton District. I am renting a small home at the end of South Nash Street, right where it intersects with Lummus Drive. I chose this home because it looks like it belongs on Rainbow Row in Charleston. The outside is a subdued pink, an almost salmon color. My front door is yellow. Three steps lead up to the front door. Inside, I have a small kitchen with a microwave and a stove, a living room with a pullout couch that doubles as a bed, and a TV. The house’s best feature is a bay window near the front door. It’s especially nice, on a balmy summer night, to sit on the front porch beneath the window and have a beer. When you’ve remembered to ice the beer stein beforehand, and you’re sipping the overflow beer head foam quickly so as to avoid waste on one of these balmy summer nights, right at sunset, it’s tempting to think that it might not ever get better than this. The house is small. It’s what realtors call quaint or cozy.

  No sooner do I turn the key than the deep and satisfying feeling is gone. It’s always like this after confession. Maybe it’s because God’s love is so piercing that one can only withstand it momentarily. I get a taste of it and I know it’s all I could ever want, that it’s all that could ever satisfy me, but that ultimately the full measure of this feeling, and really the consistency without the comedown, is not of this world.

  Or, on the other hand, maybe I’m like the scores of other lay Catholics who fancy themselves doctrinally and doxologically astute yet, in reality, are theological imbeciles. Who—no matter how wide their smiles, no matter how many slogans they can recite, no matter how many conferences and retreats they’ve attended, and no matter that they’ve just finished that ‘unbelievable’ MIND-BLOWING new Catholic author’s latest book—remain: theological imbeciles.

  Whatever it is, I’m now back in the torpor. The torpor is like an eddy, a gyre. It sucks you in, deep. Far into a feeling of depressed meaningless, a draining and numbing sensation that everything means nothing, never meant anything, never will mean anything. A feeling that life is fundamentally absurd and, much worse, bland; screaming profanities into the void unaware that the mute button has been on all along, held down by nothing and no one.

  Women can serve as an antidote to the torpor. For who can be in the torpor when on a first date with a pretty girl? All that nervous energy and excitement, she wearing that dress and you, having been given a mandate to look your best, do. There is a catch. Women, the supposed antidote, are at the same time asymptomatic carriers of the torpor disease. When the incubation period ends in a relationship the relationship ends as well. Scores of my relationships have been ended by torpor.

  Four months ago I was dating this girl named Kennedy Paxton. She is from Alabama, six years younger than me, with long brown hair and a soft accent. She is a Southern Baptist who acts like an old-school Presbyterian, so old school it’s nearly 200 proof Calvinism. Tsk, tsk, you bad boy, her non-verbal mannerisms would tell me whenever we were out and I’d order a beer. She’d give me this passive-aggressive look of Puritan disapproval, circa 1627, whenever I’d dare be so obviously Roman in her presence.

  Kennedy is sweet, sweet as honey and just as translucently golden; beautiful girl, properly gorgeous. Everything about her was interesting. She is studying biology with plans of entering medical school. I loved asking her questions about medicine. It is she, in fact, that is probably one primary muses for my own work. (Well, her and a few well- placed helmet to earhole hits, I should add; me being on the receiving end, I mean). She likes ice cream. Me too. We’d go get ice cream and sit and talk for hours about medicine, Mississippi State sports, and dogs. She is an animal person. So am I. She even liked talking about my dissertation. She wants to become an OB/GYN. She has heterochromaia iridum, interesting down to the finest details.

  Then the torpor set in, right in the middle of an ice cream date. Both of us felt it, the slow inevitability similar to one’s immediate apprehension that that first faint stomach pang is but the advance guard of food poisoning and sooner or later you’re going to be throwing up your guts and there’s nothing you can do about it and perhaps it’s just best to go find a toilet now and get the whole nasty business over with rather than unnecessarily dragging it out. You can delay it, but you can’t stop it, and to delay is to perhaps only make matters worse. Kennedy laughed, nervously, trying to keep the torpor at bay. I picked up on her cue and leaned in for a kiss. I had kissed her many times. This time I tasted torpor. It was all over. We made mutual promises to meet up again soon. Tomorrow? No, not then. Maybe next week? Yes, definitely. Or the week after that, no doubt.

  I plop down on my couch and stare at the wall. The torpor is really thick. All I can do in these moments is wait out the storm. I grab a rubber ball and begin to throw it off the wall to myself. Thwock…thwock… thwock… thwock… thwock.

  I guess taking sex off the table has scuttled a few relationships for me. Women tell me I’m handsome. They like that I’m six feet tall. The like my black hair and they really like that I have blue eyes. They like my build. One girl told me I was the best looking man she had ever seen and that I was a dead ringer for Clark Kent. She asked me if she could call me Superman. (And guys get a hard time for abysmally catchpenny pick-up lines!?). I’m pretty sure she was just trying to flatter me into sleeping with her because no sooner had she been making a great fuss to all her friends at the party about her “new boy” Clark, her Superman Clark, than she asked me to go upstairs.

  I told her no. She was shocked. As shocked as if I’d told her that I believed in aliens; which I do, just kidding. C’mon, she said, playfully. Let’s go upstairs. I told her no again. She then tried her last pleasant persuasion. She told me sex was “no big deal” and that it would be “fun,” our little encounter. You’re not against having fun, are you? This is Brent’s philosophy on sex. I wanted to give her his number but thought better of it.

  I told her no a final time. I told her I wasn’t going to hook up with someone I just met an hour ago. Especially not someone with an arsenal of such hand me a dull crowbar while I self lobotomize sans anesthetic pick-up material. She slapped me across the face and proceeded to tell me, amongst other choice words, that I wasn’t a real man, that I’d never amount to anything, that I was a coward, that I was a loser, and that, if anything else, I was definitely not a real Christian because if I was I’d understand what loving your neighbor meant. She finished by telling me that she was wrong in bestowing upon me the title of Superman because I obviously didn’t have what it takes.

  I burst out laughing and walked away.

  Thwock…thwock… thwock… thwock… thwock. I think back to Strange Brew volleyball girl. She wouldn’t act that way. She’s a real lady. Thwock… thwock...thwock. I should shower. The torpor is on the wane and I could get up. No, I’m too tired. Thwock… thwock...thwock. I flip off my shoes and get under the covers. I grab my computer. I want to watch an episode of something before I go to bed but I’m too tired. There are too many options. I fall asleep.

  CHAPTER TWO

  My aunt Shelby lives on Jackson Street. I’m going over there for dinner tonight. She lives on Jackson Street in Starkville, Mississippi and it’s not a bad place to live, actually it’s quite nice, but I often think why not a little further out in the country? Starkville is not really a city, not like New Orleans, anyways. What I’m saying is that it’s a country place stitched together by a university, its football team, and some really good ice cream, ice cream one imagines a farmer cryogenically froze mid-stream ex-udder—he pumping with one arm, freezing with the other, the “snine-tist-nick contrap-ca-lation” doing its work fine, even down near the soft mud held by a callused hand extending out from rolled up, red and black flannel—before centrifugal separation could remove all the good lipids just so another skinny-jeaned, two-button fuchsia shirted hipster could have his “healthy” latte; the one with spooned-whipped caramel, mendacious mocha (?), shit like that. What I mean is this: if you’re going to live in the country, why not go whole hog? Ten, fifteen minutes outside of Starkv
ille one can find it, the South: purple sunsets and atomic tangerine (a real color) sunrises, fog as thick as buttermilk, so white it’s almost gold, black dirt good enough to eat and midnight silence as still as a Cistercian monastery.

  People don’t often believe that Shelby is my aunt because she’s black. When someone meets us together for the first time, she black and me white, they often think “Aunt” is some kind of cute nickname. When they find out that she really is my aunt—and if they, the inquiring party, are white—they quickly become apologetic, overly apologetic in keeping with the current fashion. These things can get down right embarrassing rather quickly.

  One time, in the produce section at Kroger, such a mistake was made. The offending party had a cart full of food and goods labeled “organic” and “free range” and “no BPA” and “non-GMO” and even some kind of Icelandic yogurt product promoting a money back guarantee on intestinal “hyper-regularity” all the while sporting an orange sticker on her shirt that read “a !WOMAN! needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” She apologized, profusely, for what must have been at least two minutes. Shelby finally had enough. “Damn, girl. Get a hold o’yaself!”

  Shelby is married to my Uncle Uwe, my father’s brother. Once upon a time Uwe came down South on a baseball scholarship to play for Ole Miss. He is originally from Boise, Idaho. I was born in Boise and much of my family still lives there. Uwe is as white as a ghost. When he and Shelby got together there was some friction on both sides. From her family and from his, things being they way they were back then. Uwe and Shelby didn’t care. They were in love. They got married. They’ve been married for close to forty years now.

  Both Uwe and Shelby are retired. Uwe did something with oil. Shelby taught math. That’s how they ended up in Starkville. They originally lived near Biloxi where Shelby worked as an adjunct at a few local community colleges while Uwe was out on rigs in the Gulf. She received a tenure track offer from Mississippi State. Uwe was able to work something out with his job. I don’t know the details. Shelby accepted the offer and finished some years later as head of the MSU mathematics department. They haven’t left Starkville since.

  Uwe is not religious. He’s not anti-religious he just doesn’t care. Religion is not important to him. Shelby is a proud Catholic and a proud Democrat, reconciling the conflicting points of these two allegiances by simply ignoring those facets of the Democratic Party platform that don’t conform to her Catholic faith. Shelby defines herself as “staunchly pro-life,” which she has explained to me as being against abortion, contraception, euthanasia, cloning, in vitro fertilization, nuclear weapons, the death penalty, embryotic stem cell research, sterilization, war, poverty, torture, dehumanizing immigration laws, guns and something she calls “covert neo-eugenics.” Those issues on which the Democratic Party either doesn’t match Shelby’s Catholic values, or can be classified as anti-Catholic, she puts away in her “mental laundry hamper.”

  If I had to sit in a room and I wouldn’t be let out until I had written one paragraph saying something good about the Democratic Party I don’t think I could do it. I would have to stay in that room until I died. I don’t think I could manage the paragraph if ten million dollars was the reward. I just couldn’t do it, no matter the prize, not even if I wanted to. I don’t even think I could make up a lie if I was allowed to lie. Look, just write something, okay? Anything. Start scribbling, do hieroglyphics if that’ll get the juices flowing.

  Uncle Uwe is not a man of few words. This designation implies occasionally speaking. Uwe doesn’t speak. He grunts and snorts. Because of this Shelby calls him her “Idaho Bull.” I don’t know how often Shelby calls him her Idaho Bull but she always does it out loud at family gatherings. I think Uwe and I are on good terms. I’m not quite sure. We had this moment, after my freshman year of college, where I think he, in his own way, accepted me as a man or something like that. I had just finished my first season of college football. Uwe respects athletes. I think he was both surprised and impressed that I had enough talent to play in college.

  Uwe and I were in the basement. I was having a tea and he was on his fifth or eighth beer. We had been down there, just the two of us, for about ten minutes. Neither of us had spoken. We were just sitting there. He took a massive swig of his beer, and I mean this was like a 50 oz. mug, and he looked me in the eye. “Football,” he said. I, after a brief pause, was about to reply when he cut me off. He nodded his head three or four times. He picked up the mug once more and said, “Football.” That was it. That was the longest conversation I’ve ever had with him.

  Today is a special dinner. My cousins from Columbus, I think my second cousins to be exact, are coming over. Parker and Austin are twenty-one year old twins, seniors at LSU. Their final year of college doesn’t start for another week. While Parker and Austin look alike—red hair, freckles, each about five foot eight—they have vastly different personalities.

  Each time I see Parker he reminds me why I disdain the Republican Party. If I had to sit in a room and I wouldn’t be let out until I had written one paragraph saying something good about the Republican Party I don’t think I could do it. I would have to stay in that room until I died. I don’t think I could manage… do hieroglyphics…

  Trying to avoid being critical of Republicans is as easy as staying dry when you fall off a boat in the middle of a lake. That lake, by the way, is filled with gallons of yummy raw sewage. Every second word out of Parker’s mouth is about immigration, or the economy, or how what America really needs is for someone to invent a time machine so we can all go back to the Reagan years. I had a hunch Parker knew little about the man beyond soundbite talking points. I once asked him what was his favorite Reagan movie and if he thought there was any correlation between being an actor and a successful politician. Parker just stared at me. He stared at me with a deliciously obnoxious half-smirk. “Okay,” he laughed. “Yeah right, bro.”

  (So you’re thinking I’m ‘anti-establishment’? That I like ‘outsiders,’ right? You silly goose. How about the next time we need someone to fly the plane we ask the baker; get the college dropout to teach Classics at Yale; get the noodle-armed actuary to close out the 9th for your favorite team in Game 7?)

  Austin is a Buddhist. So he says. I’m pretty sure he’s not a Buddhist. I’m pretty sure he’s just a run of the mill, half-taught New Age seeker, the kind that is common to college campuses and used bookstores. The more I talked with him about his beliefs the more I came away with the impression that he was like some lady who left her posh middle-class American life in search of “Eastern enlightenment.” That was the way her book was marketed. A girl I was dating, Naomi, suggested it to me and gave me a five-minute pitch on how it had changed her life. I didn’t read it. The title was something like A workaholic New York Girl is Reborn under Bhutanese Sunspots. Enough said. I could tell that it sucked so I didn’t bother.

  This woman, let’s call her Jane, goes on some pseudo-Buddhist trek, the only thing Buddhist about it being headlong immersion into “following your own lamp,” claiming that she is searching for a deeper meaning to life only to, instead, indulge every hedonistic and childish impulse imaginable on her “journey of self-discovery.” Americans wonder why the world hates Americans.

  I’m pretty sure that Austin is this type of “Buddhist.” Austin is not a Buddhist as much as he is the all-together different “American Buddhist.” How to describe American Buddhism? One part actual Buddhism, one part Hinduism (Austin is a big fan of the Mahabharata although two questions in it’s obvious he has no idea what the Mahabharata is), one part marijuana, two parts New-Age belief in NV Peale “positive thinking,” “vibes,” and neo-gnostic “secrets,” one part cannabis (the only time I ever saw Austin properly mad was when he was explaining the difference between marijuana and cannabis to Parker who was just staring and smirking at him), one part being nice no matter what, and one part nostalgic longing. Those are the eight components of American Buddhism. I am fairly certain that for Austi
n, Buddhism is just code for smoking lots and lots of weed.

  Then there’s Shannon. She’s twenty-six. She graduated from MUW a few years ago and works in a bridal shop in Columbus. She does something else, too. I think she’s some kind of designer.

  Shannon is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen in my life. She is thin but not too thin, strong and well built all the same. She is like a Mississippi version of some antiquarian statue of unreachable female beauty come to life. A Southern Venus de Milo, this one. She is tall. Five foot ten and three quarter inches. I know because I’ve asked her before. (She even stood against a doorpost and let me measure her once!) She has slightly blonde hair. It’s curly but not too much. She has green eyes. Her lips, which are neither too fat nor too thin, are the proper accentuating feature for a perfect face; “perfect” is the exact descriptive word, anything more or less is incorrect. She does this thing with her lips when she smiles. One side of her mouth comes up slowly and she gently bites her upper left lip. The last time I saw her do this my knees got so shaky I had to grab Shelby’s arm to stop from falling down.

  “Y’all right, child?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  You see my problem. I know who the world’s most beautiful woman is. I have found her. But because she’s my cousin, or my second cousin, or something like that, I can’t even ask her out for a cup of coffee. I don’t want to be that guy, the guy who has a crush on his cousin. The guy with the cousin-girlfriend.

  “Rhett,” Shelby says, standing in the doorway. She’s smiling. Her hands are outstretched as she shoos me to her. “Darlin’. Come in, come in. My boy.”

  I give Shelby a hug and walk inside. Uncle Uwe is sitting at the kitchen nook. He sees me, nods his head once and goes back to his paper. Parker and Austin are standing by the kitchen sink, talking. Parker is wearing a suit. It’s a great choice for an August evening in Mississippi. Austin is dressed casually. He is wearing a loose fitting tank top, board shorts and flip-flops. When they see me they stop talking and smile, almost simultaneously.