James Tadd Adcox
Once, when I was young, I went with my uncle on a trip to Maryland. We stayed in a hotel room. During the day, we went to the conference center where my uncle was attending a conference. At night, we would play minigolf. There was a minigolf course near the conference center.
In my memory of these events, the minigolf course was tremendously large. There were jungle holes and desert holes and holes that wended their way through a system of artificial caves. I had the impression, each time we began playing, that we would never get to the end of it. But of course we did.
My uncle was attending a hotelier conference. The conference hall was packed with men wearing suits in various shades of brown, sitting in small cubicles that displayed innovations in hotel management: quieter vacuums, more advanced lighting systems, clothes hangers that could not be removed from the bar on which they hung. While my uncle walked from cubicle to cubicle, introducing himself or saying things like "My God, Marty! It's been a hell of a year, hasn't it?" I looked for places to hide: in the space between two cubicles, or between a cubicle wall and the actual wall, or in the nook under the emergency exit stairs. That was most of what I did in those days, find places to hide, with enough light that I could still read or practice my singing. I practiced my singing by forming the words without sound, so as to remain hidden.
My uncle wore a brown suit, too.
My uncle owned a hotel, or a motel I guess, near the highway that passed through the small town he and my aunt lived in in North Carolina. The hotel used to be successful. Before the interstate was built, the highway that ran through town was the primary route to the beach, and every weekend carloads of teenagers would pass through town, and some percentage of those carloads would choose to spend the night in my uncle's motel.
This trip with my uncle was an anomaly in my life. Up to that point my uncle had taken very little interest in my upbringing. My uncle rarely spoke to me, though I understood that among men his own age he could be gregarious. Perhaps he simply didn't know how to talk to children. I don't blame him. I don't know how to talk to children myself, even though I was once a child and can remember how it felt, being around adults who didn't know how to talk to me.
He and his wife, my aunt, did not have children. My aunt very much wanted children, I think. Whenever I asked her about it, she would begin humming loudly rather than giving me an answer. Of course I wasn't trying to hurt her; I was too young to know any better.
I thought it was a game, or maybe a joke we had come up with together: I would ask her why I didn't have a cousin, and my aunt would begin humming furiously. I thought this was supposed to be funny, though I didn't know why. Because I wanted to fit in, I would laugh.
The song my aunt hummed most often was "Baby It's Cold Outside." My aunt was famous in our family for "Baby It's Cold Outside." Any time she would begin humming it, my mother would tell her what a wonderful voice she had. "She really does," my mother would say to me. "It's a shame you don't sing anymore, Jenny," she would say. Then she would begin singing herself, out of tune—my mother, who loved to sing, was always a terrible singer—while my aunt would hum louder.
According to the National Association of Hoteliers and Owners of Motels, the difference between a hotel and a motel is as follows: A hotel provides comfortable accommodation for travelers, often with some sense of luxury, and typically features amenities such as a swimming pool, lobby, restaurant, and interior hallways. Hotels are rated on a system of one to five stars to indicate relative quality and amenities. A motel, originally short for "motorists' hotel," is intended as a form of "quick stop lodging" for motorists on the go, and so features fewer amenities, as well as a lack of interior hallways. Motels are often perceived as "less luxurious" than hotels (see Waldorf et al, 2008); however many motel owners have criticized this perception as unfair.
When I asked my uncle what the difference was between a hotel and a motel, and which applied to the business he owed, he told me that first it was one, and then, over time, it became the other.
My uncle was a fiend for golf. Whenever I would visit my aunt and uncle, there would be golf magazines, posters of golf courses or famous golfers, books and videos intended to help one improve their stroke or master the "mental game" behind the sport. The only thing missing was actual golf clubs. My uncle had once owned a magnificent set that he sold before he married my aunt, so that he could pay the down payment on his motel.
Of course he could have bought another set, equally magnificent, during the period when his motel was successful, before the interstate came. Why he didn't remains one of the enduring mysteries in my family.
At night, when we went to the minigolf course, my uncle would make a big show out of selecting the perfect putter from among the putters offered in the big bucket at the beginning of the course. He would take a putter and hold it straight out in front of him, sighting down its shaft as though preparing to fire at something far off in the distance; then he would balance the putter like a seesaw, with his finger as the fulcrum. If a putter passed these two tests he would try a practice swing, then flip the putter around and study its head, assessing its phrenology via criteria that remained hidden and which elude me still. Very few putters managed to pass each of these tests, and he would often make his way through most of the bucket before finding one he deemed satisfactory.
One day during our trip we had lunch with one of my uncle's colleagues in the hotel business. I was furiously shy. The man was charismatic and I fell instantly in love with him. I wanted, with all of my being, to impress him, which meant, of course, that it was nearly impossible for me to speak. I stared down at my sweet and sour chicken (we were at a Chinese buffet; it was dark inside the restaurant, with thick blackout curtains covering the windows and weak red paper lanterns providing what illumination there was, though it was warm and bright outside), while my uncle's colleague discoursed about his life in the hotel business, telling stories of the many celebrities and other important people who had stayed in his hotel: the strange requests they made, obscure references that only years later I understood probably referred to bizarre sexual practices (I recognized none of the names). My uncle and his colleague laughed at these stories with an ease that I admired. I wanted to laugh too, but was afraid, and so what came out, from time to time, was a sort of choking snigger.
When we were nearly done with lunch, when my sweet and sour chicken was gelatinizing on my plate and my uncle and his colleague were beginning to make noises about who should pick up the bill, I finally screwed up my courage to tell a joke. It was a joke I'd read in a book (I was a very bookish child). Even though I didn't understand it, I thought it was hilarious. It had to do, if I remember correctly, with the similarity between the words "vagina" and "Paulina." It seemed like a joke that one would tell among swaggering men. My uncle's colleague waited patiently while I told my joke. I gave it my all, trying to make my high pitched voice adult and wised-up. When I finished, my uncle's colleague continued looking at me with that same patient look for several moments, as though it weren't clear that I'd finished. I repeated the punch-line, louder, more emphatic. Still his patient expression remained.
"I'm asking you this purely out of curiosity," he said, a strange smile twisted onto his face. "Do you actually know what any of that means?"
In other versions of this memory, instead of telling a joke, I demonstrate my wordless singing. The result remains the same.
The rest of that day I was inconsolable, though naturally I couldn't reveal this to my uncle.
I don't remember my uncle's funeral, which is strange, because of course I went to it. We were a very small family, only myself, my mother, my aunt, my grandmother, and my uncle. (My father had left not long after I was born; I had no memory of him being together with my mother.)
(Or rather, I should say, I had no credible memory of him being with my mother: because I did have one memory. This was in a room that I otherwise did not remember, in a house that existed before I knew houses. I was sitting on the couch, propped up; my father was on the couch next to me; my mother was entering through an unseen doorway. She carried in her hands a hard plastic case, which she placed, almost ritualistically, on the table in front of the couch. On her knees in front of the table, facing us, she opened the case and removed and assembled the pieces to a flute, which she then proceeded to play: a tune that I have never otherwise heard, though I can hum it even now. When I told my mother about this memory, she frowned: "I haven't had that flute for years.")
(I say that I had this memory, not that I have it. I remember having this memory, but now what I have in its place is no longer the sense of this as a memory, but rather a story that I have told, of a memory I once had.)
(It seems important to note that in this memory, the scene described does not play out from my own perspective, i.e. that of the small body propped up on the couch, but rather from somewhere near the ceiling looking down, the way certain near-death experiences are described, the near-dead person observing the scene of their near-death from above, seeing their own near-corpse laid out on the table, the tops of the heads of the surgeons working tirelessly to bring them back to life, etc.)
I suspect that my uncle kept in touch with my father, though he couldn't tell my mother about this, of course. She would have been furious. Purely for the form of the thing, she'd never be able to speak with my uncle again, which would have made things difficult with her sister, my aunt. Still, I think she too had her suspicions.
Many years later, I married and then divorced a woman who was a member of a religious minority. We were married for three years, but they were sweet years. They were years that I now look back on with an overwhelming longing.
Her religious minority believed that God existed in dance. Not that He was expressed by dance, and certainly not that He was created when members of this religious minority danced (a belief they would consider heresy). Rather that He existed only in those moments when one or more of the members of her religion were dancing. This, even though He was omnipotent and immortal and so forth, my wife assured me. It had to do with the relationship of the divine to time, and those moments in which He touched it. It's a little hard to explain.
Still, I loved watching my wife dance. Each of her movements had something of a dance about it, as though at any moment she might begin dancing in earnest. It was what first attracted me to her, I think. In photos you might think she's nothing special to look at.
During those three years I had a transcendent vision of the nature of God that seemed to call the more homely mainline faith of my family into question.
My uncle was religious, although I do not think he believed in God.
He was culturally religious, the way one has to be in certain small towns.
Later in life he gave up the motel and worked as a salesman for a local farming machinery supplier. He sold those machines you see on country roads sometimes, rising high above the surrounding countryside, with wheels taller than your car and, above that, complex towers of blades gleaming slowly through the sunlight.
Like large otherworldly insects that have lumbered, briefly, into the stream of traffic.
And here I recall to myself the traditional linkage between farming equipment, for example scythes, and the grim reaper.
My uncle died at a relatively young age of cancer, though he didn't do any of the usual things—drink, smoke, work in environmentally toxic environments—that would lead to cancer. It was a hereditary form of cancer, the doctor told us, although strangely none of my uncle's relatives developed it. My great uncle and great aunt, who gave birth to my uncle late in life, both lived well into their nineties.
The cancer started somewhere near my uncle's pancreas and made its way up to his chest. The immediate cause of death was a heart attack: the cancer got his heart into its hands and squeezed.
This, at any rate, is how it was explained to me. Although that explanation sounds more like a story, a fairy tale, than anything medically valid.
That night as we played minigolf my uncle told me in more detail a story he had alluded to earlier at lunch with his colleague. The story took place before the coming of the interstate, when his motel was still a hotel.
A group of Marines had come in once and rented a room for the night. They'd come up in a truck, two riding in front, two riding in the bed. Sitting in the space between the driver's seat and the passenger's seat was a girl my uncle was pretty sure wasn't of legal age, or just barely, who stayed out in the truck while the Marines were inside paying for the room and so forth. Every once in a while this girl slumped forward, like she'd passed out for a moment, and then came to.
My uncle didn't know what they were up to, but it was pretty clear it was no good.
When one of the Marines caught my uncle looking out at the girl slumped over, he smiled a mean smile and asked my uncle what it was he thought he saw out there.
Later that night my uncle got a call from the Marines' room. They needed some extra towels, they said, and a fresh pair of sheets. There was all kinds of hooting and hollering over the phone while the Marine relayed this message to my uncle. It was 2:30am; my uncle was the only person on duty at the hotel. He walked from the office through a moonless night. It was starless, too. It must have been very cloudy, my uncle surmised. When he arrived at the Marines' door with the towels and extra sheets, the Marine who answered was entirely naked. His three friends on the bed were naked as well, and the girl—also nude—appeared to be unconscious.
She was probably unconscious, my uncle said.
Of course there was no way for him to know for sure.
The Marine who answered the door gave my uncle a big mean smile and passed him twenty dollars.
My uncle told me this story as though it were a joke, though of course I didn't understand it, or not entirely. Still, I understood enough to know that I wasn't supposed to laugh.
Was the girl okay, I asked my uncle.
Looking back now, I wonder if this was the reason he brought me on this trip to begin with, so that he could admit this to someone. Perhaps he did not know, himself, that he needed to admit this. Perhaps he was unwilling to admit to himself that this was something that needed to be admitted.
Hell if I know, my uncle said. If I'd gone in to check on her, those four boys would've killed me.
His voice didn't sound like he was telling a joke any longer.
I think of him trying to tell my aunt this story, and her humming it away. Humming furiously, louder and louder, furiouser and furiouser, until he quit talking.
I don't think my uncle ever tried to tell my aunt this story.
I remember my uncle as a tremendously large man, large in a way that I was a little afraid of as a child; but in photographs I saw after his death, he didn't look any larger than anyone else. He might even have been a little on the short side, though there's no way to verify this at present, as I do not have access to any of these photographs, all of which were taken in the age before digital photography and so exist only as physical copies, lost—I suppose they are lost—in a box somewhere.
Perhaps this impression of largeness had to do with the moustache he wore for most of my childhood: a tremendously large, unruly moustache, with hairs that curled back up into his nostrils.