INSTITUTIONAL DIFFERENCE

I popped the hood and circled my car with a quart of oil in my hand. The sun was just above the mountains, unbearably hot, casting diffuse shadows over the broken pavement. I was looking forward to being free of it, not that there’s much escape, even inside my trailer.

Seven kids played a spontaneous game of basketball, the first time I’d seen the court in usage since I arrived down there. Every time I looked over there were more players. Five, six, eight. They were vicious despite the macadam court pocked with holes and divots. Contrary to the large frames of most of the young men, they handled the ball nimbly. The community is very proud of the athleticism of the youth.

I heard someone hollering to me, telling me to slow down. I looked up and made out L’s dark earthy skin in the distance, sitting with B in front of his trailer. There are always a few sitting out there, laughing, drinking. L’s skin stood out from the dusty golden landscape as I crossed the ground, covered in cut dry grass and marked with gopher and snake holes. A friendly pit bull greeted me despite L’s urging for it to sick.

L turned a chair and offered me a beer.

I waved my hand and said: “appreciate the sentiment.”

“Bullshit,” he laughed, “bullshit.”

Some months ago I realized that in order to be truly enmeshed with much of this community I would have to drink with them. It didn’t take much critical thought to see this as a categoric conflict of interest.

At an Elders meeting two nights before someone brought up the discouragement individual’s would face if they tried to quit drinking. They’d be told they were turning white, said it’s bullshit. Thought L meant it in good nature, I couldn’t help but feel that his treatment of my refusal was one of these socially institutionalized gestures.
I sat all the same.

There was a beehive there and dozens of leaf cutters surrounded me, nipped at my shirt and crawled on my hands. I mimicked L and B’s lack of concern. The bees crawled over everything, the bare roots of the tree shading us, the dog’s bed, the old sunbleached tires.

A car was rooted beside us, its tires surrounded by dried needles and leaves, its underbelly an ellipsed weave of cobwebs.

B cackled. His toothless mouth gaping, but such warmth in his eyes. His skin was tan and worn, as if by the elements, and every wrinkle looked a canyon, divots, depressions. His fine white hair was pulled back.

B has been at almost every Elders meeting. At first I wasn’t sure he’d want to come around, but first for the free dinner, then for the company. He makes the occasional comment but it seems above all else he comes to laugh.

L told a story about a dream he had of winning lotto ticket numbers, wherein he portioned the winnings as a trust for the community, one million for clothes for the kids, two million for college, etc. When the real life jack pot reached the one in his dream he didn’t get a ticket, only to find the numbers he dreamt of were the ones that won.

“Haven’t won nothin’ since,” he laughed.

I followed his story with one from my birthday, where a heaving intuition was calling me to the casino. Being in a constant state of finance collapse, I felt strongly that this was my way out. I walked solemnly through the slots until I reached the quarter slots, felt comfortable there, and lost all my money.

“Lost all your money!” B guffawed.

I felt uncomfortable, but couldn’t pin down why. We seem to thrive collectively on experiences of difference, yet difference draws me farther from the center of thigns.

It wasn’t the bees or the beer, the itching dog rolling over a piece of black plastic on the ground. Discomfort is always driving me away from sitting or stewing in situations different from my own. Maybe it’s why I never tromped down to the reservation when I first got in, when L would invite me to watch a fight. I exaggerate my own difference, even when that difference seems to disappear, become illusory.

There are some who never let me forget it, that I’m the only white guy down there. Despite the cordial greetings I receive from most, I’m told they snicker when I turn around and rumors are spread naming me as the culprit in the community’s most recent teenage pregnancy. L (the other one) is friendly with me, but still gives me the cockeyed look. Others seem to forget what makes me different entirely, like B, who simply laughs when she asks what radio station I listen to and I turn it to Bulgarian folk music.

This is where it all feels like an illusion. That the difference in background is contained within me. That the experiences that shaped me: a middle class liberal background, film school, and a thriving social life within art and music scenes, is something no one else is aware of but me. I realize more and more the isolation that this life builds. The regularity of experience mutes the rest of the world. At first this revelation took form in my disdain for contemporary art, the fact that it reaches only 5% of the population. I argued for an art form more grounded in a universal aesthetic (one), less abuse for the post-modern topical references that require that the viewer come from the same background in order to analyze the artistic work, and finally a greater amount of outreach by artists to under-served communities. Now I realize that it’s not just art, but it’s my way of life that doesn’t reach down here. Not just the relative affluence I was raised with, but the cultural refrains, the common knowledge.

When started my freshman year of college I encountered a difference. Having come from the suburbs, the cities, or wealthy liberal high schools, the majority of my peers were schooled in a knowledge I didn’t have. I had to learn it and it took a long time. Similarly, I couldn’t/can’t speak the language of a relationship, being illiterate with the common gestures of affection, the way that a man and woman communicate with. My childhood wasn’t spent there, surrounded by the arts. I was thinking recently that every ex-girlfriend I have came from a family steeped in high culture, and how that affected the way they are.

While I would not call my own parents uncultured, it wasn’t the opera or abstract theater that kept them stimulated. Maybe my mother read a few pieces of post-modern literature but I doubt they resonated with her. Really it was the common people for my father and the Earth for my mother. Beyond that there wasn’t much in Vermont, but those two things. My father holds a quiet disdain for hoity-toity liberals and among his closest friends, the majority are either republican or have their roots in the values-driven self-determination of the South.

I think that’s what bothered my father so much about what we call in Randolph: “the Bethany Mafia.” It wasn’t so much the support these individuals gave for each other and the children that came to their church, but the high culture veiling hypocrisy. I think of the story of one wife tearing into another at Lake Champagne (no more than a pond really), because she knew that her husband fathered the other’s daughter. It draws me to the suburban literature and film, of these same hypocrisies, but in a town of less than three thousand.

I had to gulp down a similar disdain when women I’d date would go on and on about their love of the French language and culture, something I have always felt inclines to elitism (even in Mexico French was the language spoken by the elite), and the number of plays a child went to, or the movies they saw, the bands they knew about years and years before me.

I was raised in the middle, not common, not elite, then sitting there beside the discolored trailer, stained by dust and the sun, the smell of bodies that spent the day digging holes to plant trees, the dull knocking of a basketball on a nearby court.

“You always were aware of your uniqueness,” my mother once told me, something she didn’t feel counted for everyone. I think now: and I’m the only one who knows this.

I looked at L and B, kicking back, a cold beer in L’s hand. The bees touching my knuckles, the flies, the smell, it feels more real, but still uncomfortable.

“I need to go make dinner,” I say, half wondering if this was an excuse to leave.

“All right,” L said sharply, clicking his tongue.

I shook his hand, then B’s, who smiled and looked at me with those warm moist eyes. I crossed the dry cut grass, minding the gofer holes, got in my car, and drove home.