I grew up in Alabama so it can take me five minutes to tell you my name and where I’m from.
I’ll be 59 on my birthday so like a lot of people my age who grew in the rural South, I was born to parents who were barely more than kids themselves. I like to say of my parents and me, “we grew up together.”
Even after I was old enough to start first grade, remnants of their high school days were still evident around the house. In the outdoor storage room which we called “The Sand Room” (because that’s where my sandbox was), the evidence of their recent “glory days” was there on the shelf next to the Amway products.
There was Dad’s purple football helmet with the white number 12 emblazoned on the side. He’d played for the Parrish High School Purple Tornadoes. Beside the helmet were his football cleats with bits of mud and grass still stuck to the bottom from that last glorious performance on the gridiron. My dad had been a really great football player and he was devilishly handsome. All the girls wanted to marry him.
Next to my father’s things were the relics of my mom’s high school achievements. She had twirled a baton from the time she could hold one and by the time she got to high school she was the Drum Majorette which was an amalgamation of being a baton twirler and the field conductor of the marching band. I just couldn’t imagine any higher achievement for someone who hadn’t even yet graduated from high school! In my young mind, leading the marching band was right up there with being President of the United States or an Apollo astronaut. There was a tall, white rabbit fur hat, you know, one of those big Q-tip-looking numbers that marching bands used to wear. You don’t see them so often these days outside of New Orleans or perhaps on the marching bands at HBCU’s. For years I mistakenly called it a “shako” but then found out that’s a different kind of hat altogether.
As worn by the guards at Buckingham Palace they’re referred to as “bearskin caps” which is odd because to me they are hardly “caps,” not very “cappy” at all (although in fairness they do sort of cap off the look) and yes, they are actually still made from bear skins (“harvested” in Canada) which sort of makes me sad– but you know the kind of hat I’m talking about when I tell you about mom’s and probably would have even if I hadn’t blathered on and on and instead just said it was “one of those Q-Tip hats.” As I said, hers wasn’t made from bearskin but (because I’d often looked on the inside can tell you it) was made from actual white rabbit fur. (Also, kind of sad. I hope someone ate the meat.) On the front of Mother’s Drum Majorette hat was a huge inverted triangle of luminescent blue sequins.
Mom had gone to the rival school Cordova, home of the Blue Devils. The hat had a patent leather chin strap and a shiny black visor. On the shelf by her hat were her white cowgirl boots, not the long kind but the short ones with about a six-inch shaft that showed off more of her legs. My mother had legs that would put Betty Grable’s to shame. She looked like a movie star and all the boys wanted to marry her. I would sit and stare at the picture of her in her Drum Majorette uniform, her ridiculously long legs shooting out of a short white circle skirt. I thought my mother was the most beautiful thing on Earth. On the front of the boots were these big blue-and-white yarn pom-poms that I imagined would swat at the air in a most dramatic fashion when she marched left-right-left-right down the field.
Now as it turns out, I did turn out to be pretty athletic as an adult. I went to Marine Corps boot camp when I was 34, started playing rugby in my 40s, and like most gay men in America I know my way around a weight room. But at the time I’m describing, when I was about 7 years old, as I stood there in that sand room looking at Daddy’s things and Mama’s things, it was hands-down no competition which captured my attention more.
I chose the dazzle over the dirty. Those blue sequins might as well have been sapphires! In fact, I was pretty much transfixed by everything my mother touched or wore in those days — her tabletop portable hair dryer, her hat boxes, her wigs on white Styrofoam heads (which she let me draw faces on with my magic markers), her bottle of Channel N°5, her Leggs pantyhose in those big white plastic eggs, right down to those little Avon lipstick samplers, I found everything Judy Key downright…you guessed it, dazzling.
My older boy cousins who lived next door, Randy and Tim, used to gather in the big field by our house with their teenage friends on Saturday afternoons to play tackle football, no pads! Like a lot of little kids do, I hung around wanting to be a part of the big kid fun and one day they actually asked if I wanted to play. I was scared to death but finally said yes. They said they’d let me play if I’d say out loud just one from of a short list of “cuss words.” That was to be the price of admission into their “big kid” world. After careful consideration I decided I just couldn’t do it. We were a good Church of Christ family and I just knew that Jesus would fry my little butt forever in the Lake of Fire if I was to drop the F bomb just to get to play in a game of backyard football. If memory serves they still let me take a snap or two but after getting the breath knocked out of me once, I was pretty much done. I said I was tired and went and sat on the sidelines with the girls.
Then I had an idea.
Now, you should know that many of the interesting stories and all of the catastrophic stories of my life include the sentence, “Then I had an idea.” You see, even though it seemed that at 7 years old I wasn’t quite cut out for tackle football with my teenage cousins, I still wanted to ingratiate myself to them in some way. Humans are pack animals and I wanted to be part of the pack. It’s anthropological!
I should add a little more backstory here. My family was at Parrish High football field every Friday night. The only reason we were at church more than we were the football field is that they didn’t have more games. I won’t say that football is as important as religion in Alabama, but it’s running a very close second. But to me, football games were just four quarters of boring violence that existed solely for that 15-minute dazzling extravaganza that happened at halftime!
When those rednecks got up to go get popcorn when the marching bands took the field, I was always aghast. I was thinking to myself, “Hey where the heck are y’all going?! This is the real show here! You’re gonna miss it!” The big bells of the Sousaphones rocking back-and-forth as the kids playing them marched along honking out the low parts. The piercing sound of the trumpets! The silky flags spinning around in unison! The majorettes wrapped tight in risqué costumes of sequins as they threw those batons so high in the air it seemed they’d pierce the starry black velvet of the nighttime Southern sky! And then there was the rifle line with their long rick-rack’d skirts twirling those wooden rifles with that serious stern look on their faces. The thrilling wall of sound that came from all those young musician’s instruments when they played “The Budweiser Song,” Henry Mancini’s “The Stripper,” or “Eleanor Rigby”! And of course, the drum majors with their elaborately choreographed salutes, calling forth all that beautiful music with just a wave of their arms. How wonderful that must feel to lead the band!
Okay, getting back to “my idea.” I thought wouldn’t it just be wonderful if I gave my cousins their own halftime show! That would give their football game an extra air of authenticity that it had theretofore lacked. And I was sure they wouldn’t be expecting it.
I went to the sand room and pulled on Mom’s white cowgirl boots with the big blue yarn pom-poms on them, stuffed an old t-shirt inside that white rabbit Q-Tip hat to keep it from falling down over my eyes and then peered around the corner of the garage to wait for my moment. When the teenage boys took their break to go over and sit on the sidelines by the teenage girls; when they popped the bottle tops on their Mountain Dews, Grapicos, and Yoo-Hoos and got fresh mouthfuls of Red Man chewing tobacco; when the really bad girls, the ones who liked fast cars and Maybelline, lit up their Virginia Slims, I knew my moment had arrived.
I started marching down the hill into that field with the great aplomb, twirling a broken stick with all my might, those blue and white yarn pom-poms on those boots dramatically swatting the air as I marched left, right, left, right, and I just KNEW that they were all going to find it all just as magnificent as I did! And did they? Did my older cousins and all their friends find my halftime performance as imaginative and ingenuitous as I did? Sadly, they did not.
One of the red-headed McCormick sisters pointed at me with a long, outstretched arm, a Virginia Slim cigarette pinched between two fingers which seemed to shoot a smoking laser in my direction as she simply said, “Whut the hell is that?”
There was one of those long pauses like after a “golden buzzer” audition on America’s Got Talent, one of those pauses that is then always followed by and explosion of adulation. Except what followed this pause wasn’t uproarious applause. They all just sat there slack-jawed as if they were looking at alien emerging from a flying saucer as all the pep vanished from my left, right, left and decrescendo’d into a halt. I think it was my cousin Tim who broke the silence when he said, “You look dumb.” Then came the wave of laughter, a sound that would become oh-so-familiar to me in the coming years. Dejected, disappointed, and embarrassed, I shuffled my way back up the hill and back to the sand room to place my props back on the shelf where they belonged. What was wrong with me, I wondered.
But here’s the thing. Behind the door in the sand room was this old full-length mirror that had been placed there when a new one replaced it in the family bathroom inside the house. Before taking off my mama’s Q-Tip hat with the sparkly, blue sequin upside-down triangle on it, before kicking off those white cowgirl boots with the big blue yarn pom-poms on them, I caught sight of myself in that full-length mirror. And you know what? Those older kids were wrong. I didn’t look dumb.
I looked dazzling.
Jeff Key is Walker County native who now travels the world as a writer, activist and veterans’ advocate. He credits his upbringing in Walker County for his Southern Gothic, Magical Realism, Dark Comedy take on life. “I am made of stories and Alabama clay. The water of the Black Warrior River flows through my veins and cicadas are the soundtrack to my life.”
