In Praise of Bookmobiles from a Kid that Talks Funny

People never how to react when I tell them about “the accident” – as in, is it really okay to laugh when someone tells you about their brother running over their head with a tractor? Many think I’m joking, then I go on about being in a coma for days and the doctor spending the night because they were afraid they’d have to rush me into the operating room at any minute to crack my skull open. However, this accident would lead me down a long winding path that would one day make me a writer and poet.

The brain’s a wonderful thing but it doesn’t like being thrown around and run over by a tractor. Recovering from brain trauma can be tricky, there’s a thousand little connections and networks running around in that mess and it’s hard to tell just how any individual person will react to any individual trauma. There were a couple of totally quirky little things to get over though. I couldn’t remember phone numbers, strings of randomness like that were beyond me, and I had to remember numbers like dance steps on the key pad. Some people with numbers where digits repeated were like little cha-chas, the more random ones waltzed all over the place.

The big problem though was being able to talk. I can still remember the frustration of “talking” in my head and nothing coming out. Somehow that connection had been fried. Not completely, I could mumble incoherently, but that great thing we know as speech where you think something in your head and it comes out of your mouth, and you communicate a thought – that had escaped me. Thus began the long years of speech therapy – eight long years, long years of having to relearn English as now my second language. How to shape my lips, where to put my tongue, all those gymnastics the mouth does that everyone else took for granted. Every Tuesday and Thursday I’d have to go down to this little room in the basement of our elementary school. There I would mostly recite tongue-twisters and read from flash cards and look at diagrams of how your mouth and tongue were suppose to work.

Now the timing on this accident couldn’t have been worse, I was six, and it happened the summer before first grade. So I began my school career with all three of the holy triumvirate of reasons kids get picked on – I was a little sissy, a redhead, and now – I talked funny. Those eight years at Glendale-Chapel Elementary would be torture.

If there was one thing though that saved me though, it was the Johnston County bookmobile. For those of you that didn’t grow up out in the country, a bookmobile is a large panel truck fitted out like a traveling library. It makes it rounds around to host homes all over the county. My mom who had always loved books and had had this rather mysterious past job in Raleigh as a magazine editor made sure that we were on the route. So once a month, it would pull up in our driveway while the neighbors all turned in their old books and shopped around for a fresh read. I’d spend the entire Saturday afternoon sitting on the steps reading whatever I could get my hands on. I still remember the smell of the thing. It wasn’t air-conditioned so it would show up and be all stuffy and dusty at first. Then they’d crank open the little ventilation window in the roof and open the door and it would be tolerable, but the smell, oh that smell. If you love the smell of a library, a bookmobile has that times ten. It is to the smell of books, what that little room in the back of a tobacco shop is to the smell of cigars – pure and concentrated.

The bookmobile saved me. Soon the librarians were bringing me boxes and boxes of paperbacks. Apparently at the time, the library didn’t shelve paperbacks, so they’d sell them off or give them away. The librarians knew I had developed a love for science fiction. The summer between fifth and sixth grade they presented me with a whole box of science fiction paperbacks from some estate donation. This was a good box: Asimov, Le Guin, Niven, all the classics. I went through the entire box that summer, averaging sometimes a book a day. This would be on top of long days in the tobacco fields and curing barns. It would also be after that summer that the “incident” would happen with Mrs. Lucas, my Sixth Grade teacher. During the first week we wrote that typical “What I did Last Summer” deal – and I wrote about reading books all summer. I remembered how much I loved just writing that piece, how it came so easily and freely. Mrs. Lucas patrolled the aisles supervising the whole time, an intimidating presence. When I turned it in, I was fairly pleased with it, and anxious to see what sort of grade I’d get. A couple of days later I’d find out – a big fat “F”. I was in shock, tears were rolling down my cheeks – how do you get an “F” on a perfectly clean paper with no red marks paper? This was my first experience with an editor’s rejection slip. I went up after class and asked Mrs. Lucas myself, in a shaky voice, “what was the “F” for?”

The answer would haunt me for years. “You couldn’t have written that.” I pressed on, asking for an explanation, “that paper is on a college level.” In other words, there was no way she was buying that a redheaded little sissy boy that talked funny could have written it. I was devastated; she wouldn’t even yield to logic. Just how was I supposed to have a ghost writer when it was an unannounced pop essay written in class under her constant supervision? She countered with semicolon use. Pointing to a sentence she asked, “what is the rule for using semicolons?” I had to admit – I really didn’t know about any rules for semicolons. “Then why did you use one there?” My answer just infuriated her more “It just seemed to be the right thing to do.” The concept of learning grammar and complex sentence structure by reading and osmosis escaped her. Had she not read the piece? the whole point was about who much I’d come to love reading.

Despite Mrs. Lucas, my love of reading continued, mostly escapist fare – I was after all growing up on a tobacco farm in rural NC. I was still a bit shy though. High School would turn out better for me – lots better. I’d be playing sports, get my letter jacket. Date a nice girl, have friends, go on beach trips. I’d have burgers and fries with the gang at the local diner. It was in ways idealic, but in many ways torture. Especially being a gay teen, confused by sexuality, trying to pass for straight, and trying to work things out.

On top of all that though, I’d bitten the apple, my eyes had been opened. I knew there were other worlds out there, other people, other ways of thinking. Deep down I knew I didn’t belong in this place, and never would. But I had also been blessed/cursed with reading about other possibilities. Just the fact that there was other cities, countries, other worlds, other ways of living out there was intoxicating. Believe me, at the time big city life and alternative lifestyles were as alien to me as anything Asimov could have ever written.

Years later, I’d become a writer and a poet. Get published have people read my stuff. I’d get the nerve and overcome my shyness to get on stage and read in front of crowds. Then have to face the revelation that it’s not enough to be able to write, be able to get out in front of people and make yourself heard, that’s just the first bit – you also have to have something worth saying.

When it all comes down to it though, I have two things to thank for that: that inappropriately funny story about my brother running over my head with a tractor, and the Johnston County bookmobile.