The Greatest Story Never Told, Part 1

A brief excerpt from my never-to-be-finished (?) memoir

Hello there cowboy—long time no type. I am currently in rural PA, riding out month #Onemillion of a severe depression, sampling the local delicacies (whoopee pies, Baldwin’s Book Barn) and keeping silent. While nothing I’ve tried has improved my mood, I am at least attempting not to spread my misery digitally.

Unlike most comedy volk, I only write when I’m happy. Joke’s on me.

This years-long internal symposium, “But really: Why Live?” lifted for about two weeks in July. It felt glorious, though I was wary that it would prove only temporary—which turned out to be exactly the case. In this brief window of sanity (?) I wrote about 15,000 words of a long-threatened memoir…which promptly threw me back into the soup.

I suspect I would require EMDR on-the-hour, every hour, to complete this thing, but I thought I’d share at least a little piece, by way of saying “hello” and “thank you for subscribing to my blog.” I hope you enjoy it. Someone somewhere should enjoy something, for God’s sake.—MG, completely ignoring a delicious milkshake

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Welcome to my memoir. I urge you in the strongest possible terms: do not believe a word of it.

What follows is a jumble of unverifiable assertions, vaporous impressions, and half-remembered—or entirely mis-remembered—family lore, all arranged in the most self-serving way possible.

There is not much objective truth to be found here, but it is how I explain myself to myself. At 55, a certain amount of looking back upon the wreckage seems appropriate. I also hope it is entertaining—but only a fool would take any of it seriously.

•.   •.   •

I imagine my mother, too young, feet in the stirrups; pretty in a Glenda Jackson sort of way. She is wearing a peasant blouse because, in the 1969 of my mind, that’s what all 19-year-old women wear. The men all have patchy beards, and wear overalls, and look like they play keyboards for The Band, but in my mind my father is not there, because—well, you’ll learn why in a bit.

The family story goes like this. “Mike came very quickly. So fast that he was out before anybody was ready. A man in a suit walked into the delivery room, scooped him up, snipped the cord, and they both were gone.”

For the first time and only time in my life, I’d arrived early. What happened next broke me of the habit: “We’ll show you who’s boss! Chuck ‘em into the incubator!” And so for a month I sat there, small and wrinkled, darkly pondering. Nurses came, nurses went; I resolved never to be on time again, and trust no one in authority.

Mom sprung me just in time for the Moon Landing. “I remember watching the blurry TV of the astronauts,” she said wistfully, “while I folded your tiny tiny little clothes.” Neil Armstrong was someone’s baby once, and look at him now. Up there, bouncing around, happy to be out of his incubator.

Just a rocket-powered incubator, if you think on it

I was born to a young, unmarried couple living in Columbia, South Carolina. As some of you might know, Columbia is called “the cradle of the Confederacy.” This location surprises friends of mine, especially those who have sat next to me during Ken Burns’ Civil War. That damn show. I can’t go five minutes without swearing at it. “Oh no, Shelby Foote! Don’t you dare sugarcoat Antietam! Don’t you dare play up Stonewall fucking Jackson! He was a fucking lunatic! Robert E. Lee—”

Nothing makes me madder than the Lost Cause. I am Southern by birth, custom and even temperament, but Northern by choice. By necessity. See, in the South in the 1970s you still had to pick a side, North or South, Blue or Gray, Union or Confederacy. This nonsense is still going on today.

Do you choose the truth? Or “it’s our heritage.” That’s the sickness.

The symptom is…well, all the Southerners I know are obsessed with history, with dynasty, with bloodlines, and I am too; that’s why I’m writing this book. But the only Lost Cause here is me.

All of us, we’re proud of the wrong things, and Southern history has way too much napenthe in it. In this book, it will be mentioned that ol’ Stonewall thought one side of his body was heavier than the other, and so he had to keep his blood balanced by holding up one of his arms. I mention this partly because it’s funny—the fucker got his arm shot off—and partly because it’s important to remember what lunatics people are, especially those in charge.

I’m going to be as honest as I can be, precisely because white Southern culture says I shouldn’t. I should be charming, and I hope I am, but Southern culture says there are things I mustn’t say, secrets I mustn’t tell, because someone higher up on the totem pole might not like it. Maybe it’s the local gentry (they’re the ones who own the car dealerships, or bottle the Dr. Pepper). Or maybe it’s the preacher. Maybe it’s grandma, maybe it’s God. Doesn’t matter who—everybody, for various reasons, wants you to keep all the interesting stuff to yourself. “Why do you have to talk about that? Why can’t you just be nice?”

I can’t live like that; I never could. It gets people killed. Sometimes they kill themselves, sometimes other people do it. The truth hurts, I know; but on balance it hurts less.

Please understand, I am a rabblerouser by nature, but not by choice. I would prefer a life of bourbon and barbeque. Fishing. Long periods of unemployment, filled with whittling, the aforementioned Dr. Pepper, college football and bullshit. Of Life’s pleasures, I most prefer belonging, but over and over in my life, I’ve found myself in the rebel’s role, trying to get something done that the people in authority should’ve done years ago, if they weren’t such irresponsible assholes.

So.

There won’t be a lot of politics in this book, but I gotta say something about it here at the beginning. The sad story of my life, as far as my native country is concerned, has been the slow creep of these Southern values, this Southern know-nothing say-nothing learn-nothing nonsense, up like kudzu over the Mason-Dixon line, first into every rural area of the United States, and from there, into power. The Southern way is a seductive way to live, but it isn’t a good one unless you own that Ford dealership; polite lies and simple thinking hasn’t helped the South, and it’s not going to help the rest of us. Take from a Southern boy…who became a Northern man.

•.   •.    •

It seems biologically impossible that my father was even younger than my mother, but he was, by about four months. He was studying History—naturally—at the University of South Carolina. Trish was his high school sweetheart. Both had decamped from St. Louis, where they’d met, so Mike could pursue higher education.

I use this phrase very lightly, because it seems Mike himself did. But let’s not judge; it was the Sixties, which made their own history, or seemed to, and college was where the party was at. Also, it being the Sixties, marriage wasn’t deemed necessary. Couples just found each other and got to it because…what would a mere piece of paper matter, come the revolution? I mean, the NLF would just make you get married all over again. “I and Uncle Ho, now pronounce you man and wife.”

Not so surprisingly, neither side, Mom’s Larkins nor Mike’s Germuths, approved of the match. My paternal grandfather, a doctor and academic whom we will refer to as “Dr. Fred” or “The Old Man,” was appalled enough to formally disown Mike for siring me.

Mike, to his credit, told The Old Man to go fuck himself.

Now, from my perch here nearly sixty years later, it occurs that the smart thing for Mike

to do would not have been to use the f-word, but to name me after his father. Nobody as vain as Dr. Fred could’ve resisted that, and it would’ve pleased my Uncle Fred, too—one Fred is a good idea, but two Freds is a power base. As Archimedes might’ve said, “Give me two Freds and a place to stand, and I shall move the world!”

My mother, always more romantic than dynastic, wanted to name me Thomas Holden Germuth, after Tom Sawyer and Holden Caulfield. “And that,” she has said tartly, “is how you know you’re too young to be having children.”

None of it mattered; at the last minute, my father swelled himself into a 19-year-old paterfamilias, not naming me “Tom” or “Fred” or even “Doctor Fred” (which would’ve been just superb for so many reasons), but after himself. So I came into this world “Michael Allen Germuth II.”

(Or, for a brief time in the 1980s, “Michael Allen Germuth II: Electric Boogaloo.”)

The catastrophic blunder of not selling naming rights to the fetus was compounded by the fact that Dr. Fred represented the only folding money on either side of the family tree for at least a generation, and his vocal, in fact belligerent lack of support meant that Mike and Trish were broke.

No marriage, no clan, no money; that revolution had better come quickly.

While we were all hunkered down in student housing waiting for Ho Chi Minh (or someone like him), the three of us relied on my mother’s preternatural ability to make do. This was, and remains, one of Nature’s greatest marvels. In 1993, stuck in a small apartment in New Haven, Connecticut during a road-paralyzing January blizzard, I saw Mom make an entire dinner for three out of one freezer-burned Cornish hen and a single bag of frozen peas.

Not quite the loaves and fishes, but Mom’s meal did have more protein. And, as she always says, “something green.”

Mom has a knack. Or perhaps…

Here’s where I say that before I was born, people always thought Mom looked just like Mia Farrow from Rosemary’s Baby. If you think that’s a coincidence, well, you didn’t eat that Cornish hen.

Even in the South though, family connections can only get you so far. When I was an infant, Mom snagged a job on the graveyard shift at the local printer. “I used to help lay out the student newspaper,” she told me later. “That’s where you got the ink in your blood.” I’ve always really appreciated knowing this; as one’s life progresses, it’s important to know who and what to blame. So every Monday through Friday of the 1969-70 academic year, The Daily Gamecock made its deadline, but not once did they ever print “HAIL SATAN OUR DARK LORD!!!!”, not even in mice type. (And people wonder why he’s grouchy.)

Anyway, I like to imagine Mike and Trish as they were then, back in those grainy Polaroid days, a young couple full of dreams and government cheese. One dream—which I tease Mom about regularly—was their strongly considering taking me to Woodstock in August of 1969.

“Oh Michael,” she says. “Nobody knew it was going to turn into what happened!”

My mother is an honorable woman, which is to say she doesn’t blame my dad for stuff like this, him not being here to present his case. Which, let’s be honest, likely would’ve been something along the lines of, “Oye como va, y’all.”
At the last minute sanity prevailed, which likely saved my life, but robbed the world of the immortal phrase, “People, please—do not give the two-month-old brown acid!” ◊

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Ex-child MICHAEL GERBER is the Editor and Publisher of The American Bystander, an all-star print humor quarterly. He is deep into designing issue #29.