man, that we’d see those bumper stickers, stenciled in with names like Otway and
Chocawinity and Seven Springs. Nowadays stuff like that wouldn’t fly, but back then that
was fairly sophisticated publicity. I imagine if he tried to do that now, people opposing
him would insert all sorts of foul language in the blank space, but we never saw it once.
Okay, maybe once. A farmer from DuplinCounty once wrote the word shit in the blank
space, and when my mom saw it, she covered my eyes and said a prayer asking for
forgiveness for the poor ignorant bastard. She didn’t say exactly those words, but I got the
gist of it.
So my father, Mr. Congressman, was a bigwig, and everyone but everyone knew it,
including old man Hegbert. Now, the two of them didn’t get along, not at all, despite the
fact that my father went to Hegbert’s church whenever he was in town, which to be frank
wasn’t all that often. Hegbert, in addition to his belief that fornicators were destined to
clean the urinals in hell, also believed that communism was “a sickness that doomed
mankind to heathenhood.” Even though heathenhood wasn’t a word—I can’t find it in any
dictionary—the congregation knew what he meant. They also knew that he was directing
his words specifically to my father, who would sit with his eyes closed and pretend not to
listen. My father was on one of the House committees that oversaw the “Red influence”
supposedly infiltrating every aspect of the country, including national defense, higher
education, and even tobacco farming. You have to remember that this was during the cold
war; tensions were running high, and we North Carolinians needed something to bring it
down to a more personal level. My father had consistently looked for facts, which were
irrelevant to people like Hegbert.
Afterward, when my father would come home after the service, he’d say something like
“Reverend Sullivan was in rare form today. I hope you heard that part about the Scripture
where Jesus was talking about the poor… .”
Yeah, sure, Dad… .
My father tried to defuse situations whenever possible. I think that’s why he stayed in
Congress for so long. The guy could kiss the ugliest babies known to mankind and still
come up with something nice to say. “He’s such a gentle child,” he’d say when a baby had
a giant head, or, “I’ll bet she’s the sweetest girl in the world,” if she had a birthmark over
her entire face. One time a lady showed up with a kid in a wheelchair. My father took one
look at him and said, “I’ll bet you ten to one that you’re smartest kid in your class.” And
he was! Yeah, my father was great at stuff like that. He could fling it with the best of ’em,
that’s for sure. And he wasn’t such a bad guy, not really, especially if you consider the fact
that he didn’t beat me or anything.
But he wasn’t there for me growing up. I hate to say that because nowadays people
claim that sort of stuff even if their parent was around and use it to excuse their behavior.
My dad … he didn’t love me … that’s why I became a stripper and performed on The Jerry
Springer Show… . I’m not using it to excuse the person I’ve become, I’m simply saying it
as a fact. My father was gone nine months of the year, living out of town in a Washington,
D.C., apartment three hundred miles away. My mother didn’t go with him because both of
them wanted me to grow up “the same way they had.”