The Door to Heaven

I've been gone for awhile.
This last week I have been writing a piece for my Nonfiction workshop about Shelbyville. The assignment was to write about a small town I know well, so the choice was obvious. For those who don't know, Shelbyville is the town in Indiana I grew up in, until my family left after a series of personal disasters. For a long time, I didn't know if how I felt about my childhood there--idyllic, storybook, almost perfect--was the result of skewed perspective, sentimentality, selective memory. That may still be true, but after seeking the memories and recollections of childhood friends I realize that it was more complicated than that, a lovely place to grow up in but with an undercurrent of darkness that we rarely addressed openly.

Thank you to all those that helped me, that were willing to remember both the darkness and the light.

The Door to Heaven

In the thick of summer, the parks of Shelbyville, Indiana, shine and shimmer like emerald mirages amidst a desert of corn and soybeans. Moth-badgered Halogen lights illuminate well-tended fields of deep green and startling white, base lines as straight and predictable as the furrowed rows of the fields of surrounding farms. The community congregates to watch their sons participate in that most sacred and American rite of passage: Little League. Baseball fields are the non-denominational churches of summertime; the sounds of bats connecting with balls the hymns. The air lays like a hand across the back of their necks, a perfumed humidity that reeks of salted hot pretzels, drug-store cologne, chewing tobacco. There is a restlessness about them, the people of this town: this is only what they do while they wait for basketball season to start

Adults bring cheap Styrofoam coolers (won at Cagney’s Pizza for dining in ten times) filled with Miller Light and Schlitz in cans, sodas for the kids and the benefit of the umpires. As the parks technically prohibit drinking, each can is wrapped in some kind of koozie: pledging allegiance to the Shelbyville Bears, the Indy 500, John Deere--one nation under Bobby Knight. Tom Crean, two years in, is still the “new” coach of the Hoosier’s, still earning his stripes—and everyone likes to forget about the Mike Davis and Calvin Sampson years. The smaller children stand in front of the bleachers, grasping the slightly rusted metal of the chain-link fences that separate the spectators from the players. The metal diamonds leave slightly orange indentations on their palms as they make the metal ring with the tension of so many bodies leaning. The hands of their parents and neighbors grasp their slippered drinks as they sit on bleachers in duets or trios, singing the gospel of bases and boyhood, and they drink while they watch boys play ball.

Underneath the bleachers, scarred with the signatures and proclamations of love of five generations, are the kids who are not playing ball. So many girls, and boys also. Boys too old for baseball, or too cool or clumsy or too protective of their bodies as they condition for the “real” sport of the upcoming season. They sit in the shadows underneath their parents and watch the game occasionally, but more often watch one another. They sneak beers and wander to the dark spots of the parks, not wary of muggers or rapists, not wary of anything really, except more of the same. Sounds from the game occasionally echo around them, like apparitions of sound--phantom plays from ghost runners. They roll joints and pass them like collection plates. They flirt and sigh and posture as adults. They look at the imposing, inevitable Mid-Western skyline and wish they could get the hell out of this place.

Many of them do. Many leave, some stay, some leave and come back, some never look over their shoulders, afraid of turning to pillars of salt, of the terrible reach of aging parents, of the familiar, of the easy rhythms of being who you are in a place where everyone knows you and will only allow you to become so much.

At the heart of Shelbyville is a circle, with a fountain that runs until it gets too cold--usually October--a circle that used to comprise the hub of activity and business. Now industry in Shelbyville has moved to the edge of town, along the interstate, where Bruce Springsteen tells us there is darkness too.

Adults work for Knauf, the giant fiberglass-products manufacturer or for Major Hospital in the expanded oncology wing, or for Makuta, a medical device micromolder. Others work for Kroger, or the maligned school system. Some work for the Super Wal-Mart that drove all the useful stores downtown out of business. Now there are “boutiques” on the circle, filled with antiques and tchochkies, ceramic statues of the character Balzar holding two bear cubs, one in each upraised hand; Balzar from Charles Major’s signature work The Bears of Blue River, set in and about Shelbyille. Every year the last weekend of summer, the one before school begins, the town holds the Bears of Blue River festival to honor the author as its most famous native beside former tallest woman in the world, Sandy Allen. It used to last a week, now it is only three days. The smell of elephant ears and fried pork tenderloin sandwiches wrapped in see-through, grease-strained wax paper drift over the crowd that collects in front of the bandstand. The girls share pineapple whips, the kids eat tri-colored snow cones, the boys smoke cigarettes and watch the girls from under groaning metal bleachers. From this vantage point the country music sounds like it’s swirling in a tin can, piped over the thinnest of wires. The whole town tours the circle and the streets that shoot off like spokes on a wagon-wheel, walking the same paths through crushed wax Coca-Cola cups and smashed pop corn kernels over an over, for hours and hours, hoping to see something different, finding comfort when they don’t.

Except on the occasion of the festival, downtown feels hollow. If you throw a coin in the fountain, you can hear the echo bouncing off the windows of empty storefronts. A real statue of Balzar stands on the circle as well, looking over the still fountain, the empty circle, the town that ate itself, a ghost town, dead.

It wasn’t always like this.

When I was little my friends and I would walk the same pavement without thinking, barely watching for cars as we crossed roads and played tag in the streets. We stayed out until after midnight in the alley behind my house in the summers, our moms trying in vain to call us in. We walked downtown to the circle to sit on the fountain and cool off, get the humidity off our necks and watch the high school kids cruising, dreaming of the day when it would be us. We walked to school in the morning on the same streets our parents walked to the same schools. We walked and walked, getting nowhere, really, without knowing we would one day want walking to take us somewhere new.

When I tell anyone of a certain age that I am from Shelbyville, the town seems familiar to them, the name rings a bell. Their faces light up when they stumble upon it in the random highways and bypasses of tangled memory and recall nestled in their brains. Then they ask, always, inescapably, “Like from The Simpsons?”

No, not like that at all. It is not an imaginary place, my childhood home. I think.

Silvia’s mom worked for the Knauf’s. She cleaned their house, and lived in a small white cottage on the backside of their no kidding, real-deal, straight-up mansion, a model of the big house in miniature. They had two handsome sons they sent to boarding school in Switzerland or some such nearly unimaginable place. In this way (and many more) they were of the town, but not from it. For Silvia’s tenth birthday we were invited to a pool party at the Knauf mansion. Silvia broke her leg two weeks before. She rested on a chaise with her leg in white plaster, glowing like a lighthouse. She cried while she watched us, and we did nothing, continued to play, ignoring her on her birthday in pursuit of so much fun. Her mom, who reminded me of Sandy Duncan or some other cheery Disney heroine, died when we were young. It felt unreal, disconnected from the rest of our lives, death didn’t belong here, so I stopped thinking about it. For some reason, I have always felt worse about her party, her broken leg.

When something terrible or great happens to us, time becomes binary: before your divorce and after; before I loved you and after; before he lost his money and after. That is what time is like for me: there is my childhood in Shelbyville, and then there is after. More precisely, time has made Shelbyville binary: the town of my childhood and after. I do not want to go back there now, do not want to admit or despair what it has become. I do not want to turn into a pillar of salt. But I miss my town, and I miss who I was there. It was a place where I believed in God, where my home was a castle on a hill, where I was allowed to grow-up without fear. My happiness there is the barometer upon which all other happiness is measured, measured in the lengths of long summers of walking, in depths of admiring boys from and under bleachers, in widths between then and now.

One measure of a town is how it treats its eccentrics. Shelbyville has been home to a host of oddballs, iconoclasts, freaks and lucky losers. They say God looks over drunks and sleepwalkers, and if that is true, I am sure he also used to look after the most unusual residents of my home. It is no small thing to buck the tide of homogeneity in a small town. You may be branded an outcast, dangerous, treated as an outsider when inside access determines whether your business survives, whether your children are liked, whether you may sit in the bleachers with the rest of the town and take communion.

Pat drove a school bus and the town taxi, a service provided after the buses and trolleys stopped running. In the 1960’s she dressed as a man; her hair slicked back and smelling of lemons, the rough tan skin of her neck of Old Spice. She dressed in Dickies and mechanic shirts, and could be found at Bob’s Chug-A-Lug on the weekends with her girlfriend. When she got too far into her cups, she sang along with the songs of Hank Williams and Johnny Cash from the jukebox, off-key, and as lonesome as a hound dog in a chain-metal pen. She picked us up on Monday like the weekends never happened. The people of Indiana respect work ethic, and believe enough in it and minding your own business to repay deviance of one sort with the courtesy of pretending not to notice. It’s the children that notice, that make things awkward and unbearably honest in their asking, “Mom, is Pat a boy or a girl?” It’s complicated.

My father ran an appliance business on the circle, in the tradition of his father before him. I was raised, in part, in this store. We spent hours, days, weeks, climbing refrigerator and washer-dryer sets in cardboard boxes stacked upon one another in the back warehouse, our own personal Mount Everests; conquests marked not by flags but in the amount of dust in our hair, the dirt under our nails, the sting of deep paper cuts on the insides of our elbows. Here we were privy to a parade of characters: my father’s customers, his employees and friends. The strange became ordinary--different became our everyday. When we were hungry, Charlie Hershey, my father’s right-hand-man who happened to be a dwarf, would take us out to Taco Bell or The Chicken Inn and make us laugh so hard we would fart and beg for mercy. What we didn’t know until we were older were his midnight hours after work. While we slept sound in our castle--protected by night-lights, luck, our last name--Charlie could be found at the strip club, or at Bob’s Chug-A-Lug looking for easy company, for comfort in dark bottles that would not show his fun-house reflection. When I heard he died this year I remembered meeting him for the first time. I sat in the car on the way back home from dad’s store, quiet, wheels turning in my head until I said, “Mom, Charlie needs to have some more birthdays.”

One night Mr. Knauf showed up at my dad’s store when it was closed. He wanted to buy a television. My mother, having never met the man or having even seen him, recognized him for who he was despite the fact as he knocked on the front glass doors. When you are rich in a small town, and are of a certain disposition you expect favors. My mother, quick, found my father to tell him “Thies Knauf is at the door.” My father, more curious than obsequious, opened the doors for him. He was dressed impeccably, like Jay Gatsby, like Dapper Dan. He looked at a few models. He chose one and left. The store was quiet with the deflation of myth. Thies Knauf was no longer a mystery, he was an RCA man, just like my dad.

In Little League there are rich teams and poor ones, teams that are desirable and teams that reek of desperation and failure before the season starts. The good players go to the rich teams and the bad ones don’t. Knauf had a team, of course. My dad’s store sponsored a team for a few years. Little League is like any other democracy, in that it isn’t.

My parents were wealthy in a poor town. Our house was a Victorian mansion that took up half a block. It was only home to me, bigger than my friends’ houses but it gave me no pause, it was no Knauf monstrosity. The strange becomes ordinary. My parents were ambitious, and busy. They hired a babysitter, Renee, who took care of my brother and I at her house after school. She made us butter and sugar sandwiches for a snack. Her son and daughter, Tony and Jada, rode the roller coasters at King’s Island with us, teaching Chris and I that fear could be a wonderful thing as long as someone held your hand. Her husband, June, was the biggest man I had ever seen, he picked me up with one hand and held me aloft until my back scraped the sharp plaster pebbles of their ceilings. They used to take us to Noble Roman’s for pizza when my parents worked late. My grandfather saw us there one night while getting take-out. An unbearable bigot, he chastised my parents, telling them the picture was strange, these two towering, rotund black folks with these two little white kids squirming all over the burgundy fake leather booths laughing like no one else was there. The statistics for Shelbyville from the last census say that Blacks make up less than 2% of the population. One of the most important stories of Shelbyville could be told by what is missing, what refuses to change. She was a Jehovah’s Witness and her church shunned her for going in a bar. They refused to speak her name, literally turned their backs on her and made her sit in the last pew alone for service. She set herself on fire and left her husband and two children to piece together their own narrative from what remained, from what was missing. Ashes. The Holy Spirit. A melted gasoline container. My family was on vacation when it happened. She circled our block in her car, looking for my mother before driving to a parking lot on the edge of town and setting her heart on fire. She found darkness there, no doubt, but not God, nor any hand to hold to make the fear better.

Whenever I tell a woman of a certain age that I am from Shelbyville, Indiana, their faces go still until they remember, that’s right, I know that town and ask me, “Did you see that article in Time? That piece on Oprah?” They know my hometown as the example of a town that failed its children. Shelbyville is the town that spent millions on education, on top-of-the-line facilities, on counselors of every stripe, only to have the highest dropout rate in the state. I did see that piece on Oprah, one late night, in an empty bar in Raleigh, North Carolina, the station left on after a UNC game. Gut punched and sick I saw the streets of my hometown on parade as an example of How Did It All Go Wrong? I saw it, and I tell them no, that’s not the one.

The teenagers initially have few options for jobs; the unemployment rate is almost 12%. Those that do find jobs work in fast food, detassel corn in the summer, power-wash houses. One group of friends always takes over The Bear’s Den, a relic of 1950’s carhop culture, with root beer on draught and girls on skates. My childhood best friend worked there when we were in high school. She tells me, “I think you would have worked there too, had you still been in town.”
Kids drive “The Strip” after work, the short loop between the circle downtown and the Kroger out in the newly developed part of town. Sometimes they go out in the country, where someone fastened a plastic chicken and cow on a farm fence. It became a destination, something to do and somewhere to go, as in “let’s go to chicken and cow.” The kids, they meet out there, bathed in moonlight but protected by darkness, by obscurity and randomness, smoking pot because it’s easier to get than booze, or just talking, endlessly talking about how nothing is happening, about getting out. These are the things you do when you have nothing else to do.

Our elementary school, the one just a few blocks from my old home, it sits abandoned now. It is filled with the debris of crumbling hallways, papers graded but never returned, the dust and dirt of neglect, lost memory, childhood. I can not bear to see it now, humbled, unbelievably small, unrecognizable. The basketball hoops have no nets on them, that is how I know it is forgotten.

A few years ago, Shelbyville was on the news. Knauf was on fire, the building burning. It was so bright, it lit the whole town up; the alleys and back ends of parks, beneath bleachers, the pale underbelly of normal. They rebuilt the factory, made it bigger, tearing down houses on the darkest, most neglected streets. When I was little, I saw the smokestacks and I believed that was where the clouds were made, where the door to heaven could be found.