The Animators(42)

There’s a difference between seeing your town on the national news and seeing it on the local. Anyone who grew up with a television containing no flyover states—nothing that represents where and who you are—will know what I mean. You will come to assume that where you are is not part of the greater whole.

Because of TV, I was keenly aware that there were other places, bigger places, where words were said differently, where people moved more quickly. I imagined an outline of America with only a few bright points within, the rest a hazy, slightly sinister filler. The outline spoke very little to who I was, but God knows, volumes to who I wanted to be. Which was, in a word: elsewhere. I could expect a weird, secondhand familiarity on the local news. The accents of the weathermen, the muted on-set colors. Sometimes I saw things on the local that I had seen myself first, and not through the vainglorious eye of TV: Interstate 64, Rupp Arena. A particular Walmart in Grayson where we shopped for school supplies. It seemed more opaque than real TV; seemed, somehow, to have cost less money.

But seeing your place on national TV, there’s a sense that you’ve been incorporated into the world. And of course, context—how you and yours come into that world—means everything.

I was, as a kid, very much alone. From the adults monitoring me, criticizing me, giving me little more than a compulsion to shut out as much of the sanctimonious, supervisory world as possible—I would never, as an adult, really have a boss—to my peers, who made stiflingly sure to thin me out of their ranks as quickly as possible, my isolation was defining. It was not only how I thought of myself but how others thought of me as well. The other kids hated me. My own sister loved to tell me this, loved to be the carrier of sour information: what was said about me on the bus, who did a great impression of the way I walked, who wanted to kick my ass. When I asked her why—genuinely wanting her direction, a way to fit into life in our town—all she yelled was something she got off a high schooler’s T-shirt: “If you cain’t play with the big dogs, stay off the porch.”

My parents liked my siblings more, a suspicion confirmed by nicknames, tones of voice. They understood my sister and brother. I baffled them. They were awed, but not made proud, by the test scores I brought home. They found the pictures I drew strange.

My kid life was a more or less constant state of humiliation, the feeling that my skin didn’t quite fit me right and that everyone could see it.

—

“Seriously? You didn’t have any friends?”

Mel is sitting up straight, legs stretched long and crossed in front of her. She is staring out into the yard, unseeing, the way she does when she is listening.

“Not really.”

“That’s really sad. You didn’t have, like, rowdy little neighborhood dudes to break stuff with? Or little bitch friends who invited you to sleepovers to make fun of you?”

“No. Didn’t even qualify for that.”

“I did,” Mel says. “Her name was Nancy. She invited me to her tenth birthday party and then told the class I was a lesbian.” She gives me jazz hands. Sings, “She knew!”

“So what’d you do?”

“Peed in her closet.”

“I’ve told you about Faulkner,” I say. “What it was like there. Kids like me didn’t really have friends.” I shrug, uncomfortable, rubbing the back of my neck. “I don’t know. Maybe I just repel people.”

Mel rolls her eyes, shakes her head. “It wasn’t you,” she says. “So you didn’t have friends. So what. What’d you do to pass the time?”

—

I loved TV. I spent more time with TV than anyone. TV was my personal practice, my prayer, my companion—as much as I could get from after-school Hanna-Barbera reruns to The Late Show and all that followed. I was made crazy by the idea that I would miss something important: even the pauses, the snow-outed channels, the storm-time screen-skipping. I fell asleep in front of TV and gleaned from it the same intimacy I one day would from sleeping next to someone—the gurgles and clenches of their stomachs, their leg jerks and mutters. I was convinced that, despite all its noise, it would miss me.

But: I had one solitary friend during this time. His name was Teddy Caudill. Treasured, because he was my only one. And though I wouldn’t know it for years, he was my first love.

It was a love that did not occur to us physically. It had a body in the way children handle each other when they do not yet know intimacy—closeness without electrical current. In the summers, his arms and legs tanned, the hairs turning to red gold. He smelled like sand, and sweat. Once, when we were pretending to be cats, I licked his face. Only later did I remember to be embarrassed: Wait. That was not a thing to do.

It was, in this way, unspoiled.

Teddy and his dad were our next-door neighbors. Teddy was a little strange himself, which was probably why we were friends—our force fields complemented one another. We spent whole summers crossing each other’s yards, tracking kittens through the rotting woodpile, going to the creek to see how fast it took the water to turn our feet orange. Our family had just purchased a VCR, a Quasar, and I made Teddy watch tapes and tapes of all the TV I recorded: a cartoon showcase I adored called Liquid Television. Count Duckula. My favorite music video from MTV, an eerie stop-motion Claymation spot by a band called Tool that both frightened and excited me. “But wait,” I kept saying, rewinding, pressing play. “Let’s watch it again.”