Chapter One Part X
From The Starter Home
I would not fare better in the city. Not that it was much of a city. An hour west of Atlanta, with a population of around 15,000, Carrollton, Georgia in the late ’80s had a large copper manufacturing plant, a hospital, and West Georgia College. I lived just outside its city limits in a small brick ranch house on Highway 27 with my parents and sister.
My grandfather’s farm was a twenty-minute drive away across the Alabama line, but my other grandfather, my dad’s dad, Jim, started a mobile home sales business just outside of town after retiring from the Air Force in 1972. My father worked as a salesman in the office with my grandfather. His older brother worked outside in the heat setting up mobile homes.
The early distinction between blue- and white-collar that I saw was not about value, but about culture. My uncle’s world smelled like dirt, sweat, axle grease, and hot asphalt, whereas my dad’s office smelled like cigarette carpet, Folger’s coffee, and ancient corduroy couches covered in generations of my grandparents’ Yorkie Terrier hair. My uncle came home physically tired, and my dad, mentally. If I was not going to be a farmer, then it seemed that I was going to have to be sorted somewhere between hammers and fax machines.
My dad studied guitar in college and moved to New York to try acting in the early ’80s. He ran a music studio out of a double-wide trailer behind our house, played in multiple bands, taught songwriting at the community center, and was the music minister at our tiny Methodist Church. He wanted to be writing country songs on Music Row in Nashville and not running credit reports. His aspirations were creative. He was, in my memory anyway, a capable but reluctant salesman, always with his guitar nearby.
My uncle, on the other hand, seemed to want to toughen me up. He first took me hunting at an early age (my dad doesn’t hunt), but he wasn’t watching closely enough when the butt of the shotgun kicked back and gave me a black eye. I worked with him outside setting trailers in the heat with his crew. I was slow at the early jobs given to me. I didn’t have enough pride in physical work.
When they moved me to the office, presumably because my uncle had grown tired of training a doomed protégé, I failed there too. The Xerox copies I was told to make never turned out right. When my job was locking up all the model mobile homes on the sales lot, I always missed a house. I was easily bored inside. If I was not a natural fit on the farm, I was not a natural fit in either lane at the family business. The adults had as hard a time sorting me as I was having being sorted.
Despite my uncle’s failed attempts to inspire me towards his ideals of masculinity, he and my aunt did give me something durable. When my aunt got a job in the elementary school technology department at the city school, I was able to attend the better-resourced school as a “non-resident.” This unlocked a new path. Unlike my neighbors in unincorporated Carroll County, who were mostly rural working class, my schoolmates were the children of small-town bankers, doctors, administrators, and lawyers. The city kids belonged to the country club and attended the respectable, well-funded churches in town.
If my dad’s dream was in creative expression, my uncle’s was in the flourishing of his two daughters. Because they were also non-residents, the new school provided opportunities for us all to become good cosmopolitans. My cousins played multiple sports and cheered. They would both go on to be class presidents. Voted most likely to succeed. Artistically gifted in ways that I was not. Beloved in the city school, whereas I argued with my teachers and coaches. I was convinced I knew better. I did not want to take pictures at family gatherings. I did not want to give hugs to the old folks. I was difficult.
I did not belong on the farm. I did not belong in the city either.
Stuck on the outside, in between both, my problem was not that I escaped group identity, but that I saw its shallowness early on. Each group sells a vision of belonging that excludes the other, and the tinier the distinction, the more the divide counts. Either you were a Georgia Bulldog or you were a Georgia Tech Yellow Jacket (despite hardly anyone having gone to these schools). Either you were a real American and drove a Ford pickup truck or you were likely a socialist in your Japanese sedan. Either your parents could afford Abercrombie & Fitch or they could not. These narcissisms of small differences were invisible from ten miles away, but from inside, they were the total contents of my known world.
What was worse than seeing these distinctions was the recognition that I was still being named by them anyway. Too lazy for the blue-collar path of sports and trades, too distracted for a white-collar path. Higher on the social ladder than the people who bought homes from my dad’s business. Lower on the social ladder than my peers at the city school. Neither academically gifted nor struggling. Not especially athletic. Not especially social. Not into Tolkien. Stuck on the outside, not wanting to come in. From the outside, I could see that belonging meant accepting someone else’s name for you. I was a non-resident with a lisp.