Mississippi Sissy Read Free Page A

old gymnasium (perhaps
prance
is a better word) that summer day, right before school started, when he took his buckets of red, blue, white, and yellow paint in there to get rid of the devil at the center of the court and replace it with his colorful rendering of an Indian chief in a full-feathered headdress. As his work progressed and I tired of my prancing, I curled up next to him and watched his handiwork. He hummed, then sang, some country-and-western tunes sung by vocalists on the albums he loved to listen to: Frankie Laine, Johnny Cash, Ray Charles, JimReeves. He let me, only once, dip the brush into the paint and tip a feather with red atop the chief’s dignified head while he sang Reeves’s “Scarlet Ribbons,” the song he put on the stereo when he wanted to slow-dance with my mother. I fell asleep by his side, my head swimming with his slow-dance voice. The fumes from the paint. The salty, sweaty musk of his bare chest and underarms after he had taken off his shirt and rolled it up for me as a makeshift pillow.
    The smell of such gym-housed sweat regularly filled my nostrils. It became an inaugural desire. My father would allow me to come to basketball practice—even let me run down out-of-bound balls—if I kept quiet and out of his way. He would also allow me to sit on the bench with him if the games were not close, in an attempt to keep me from sitting with the cheerleaders and mimicking their routines to the delight of the crowd. But he would never let me into the gym’s inner sanctum: the Chiefs’ downstairs locker room. No matter how much I begged him, tearfully at times, he would not allow it. The more I was denied, of course, the more I longed to know what was behind that door. Once, while he held me tightly in his arms for some sort of rough comfort—before passing me off to a cute, pudgy little pimply-faced team manager named Jack “Tip” Myers—I saw the locker room door open as my father, furious at his team’s loss, strode colossally inside. His entrance halted any thought of horseplay and silenced the room except for the incessant hiss of a row of hot showers. A bit of sweat-infused steam from the heat of those showers—a bare shoulder scurried by—escaped from within and warmed my face before the door was slammed shut by my father’s hand. It was the first time I felt my heart break. Four years old, I was inundated with adult emotion. I lunged forward. Pimply-faced Myers pried my fingers from the knob. My father’s hidden voice rose. The berating had begun.
    The following season, after winning a local tournament, my father surprised me by scooping me up from the cheerleaders. He took mestraight into the locker room after the game. The delight I felt was as pure as it was profound. The steam from the hissing showers that had once only teased my curious face was now encompassing me as my father put me down on the concrete floor and the players, stripping off their uniforms—giddy and lithe—were teasing each other with that high school athlete’s palaver of “asshole” and “dickhead” and “faggot.” Buttocks were bared. Bodies, rank with victory, dodged the repeated snaps of tightly wound terrycloth. A gravelly screech, followed by echoes of shared laughter, bounced about all the concrete when the terry hit its target. My father smiled—a handsome crooked grin of a smile—at all the roughhousing, the random merriment. I tried to smile just like him. I can’t remember ever being as happy as I was at that very moment. All attempts at happiness over the years have been failed conjuring acts to replicate those first few moments in that locker room, the one and only time I felt my father truly loved me. “Watch Kevinator for a minute,” he told Pimply-faced who was handing out the towels. “I’m thirsty after screaming at those refs all through the overtime. Doncha love overtime