Valamity!

“The country I come from
Is called the Midwest”
-Bob Dylan, “God On Our Side”

Oxford is a town in the southern, central part of Nebraska. It’s twenty miles south of Holdrege, which is thirty miles south of Kearney, and that’s along Mighty I-80, so everyone ought to have heard of it. Oxford has seven bars, seven churches, and not much else. Evangelical Free, First Baptist, United Methodist, St. Paul’s Catholic, St. John’s Lutheran, Spirit of the Rock, New Beginnings Fellowship. We went to the First Baptist when I was a kid, but my mom was a Methodist, and kind of believed in evolution, but don’t tell anyone. Thelma Lou’s, The Wagon Wheel, The Longbranch, The Sail Away Lounge, Cornhusker Bar & Grill (perpetually with new owners), Union Bar, and Tufty’s. My parents didn’t drink when I was a kid, but now my mom and stepdad go to the Cornhusker to drink their frosted-glass tumblers of spiced rum and diet coke. The tallest building in town is the grain elevator, and every year the silos rust over a little bit more. Oxford is a town that has been rusting and peeling for the last sixty years, like a homely scab that eventually dries and flakes down to nothing but a funny little mark on your knee.
Oxford used to be a rail town, when people still rode trains. The Oxford Indians—the local baseball team—used to play the University of Nebraska baseball team every year. It used to be a big deal. There used to be a buffalo farm, until the man who owned it got tragically gored, a bowling alley, until it became Thelma Lou’s, a Dairy Queen, until it became a feed store, a man named Homer Twilegar that sold kettle corn in that abandoned lot between the real estate office and the Longbranch, which used to be the Muleskinner. I liked it better when it was the Muleskinner—the cheerily grinning donkey on the front facade made it seem more appealing than it really ever was.
Now, based on the signs, Oxford is the ‘Gateway to the Outdoors’ or the ‘Home of the 1992 Girls State Basketball Champions’ or the ‘Last Gas Station for 23 Miles.’ It’s an Ampride, and my best friend from high school still works there for $7.25 an hour. I don’t ask him if he has any plans for the future anymore. Futures only happen in places that aren’t Oxford. You might be breathing, but you sure as hell ain’t living.
Oxford used to be a lot of things, and it claims to be many more, but for me, it will always be the town I grew up in. It will also, always, be a part of myself that I don’t know how to understand. It’s my home, sure, but it’s a home that I still feel self-conscious in—like I don’t really belong there, like I’m just a guest and not a particularly wanted one. When I was much younger, my parents used to take me to high school football games, and all the other boys my age would come with their parents too. We’d all gather behind the concession stand, and the kid who brought the football (there was always a kid who brought a football) would present it to the rest of us and proclaim, loudly, that we were going to play a game called Smear the Queer. Smear the Queer is a game where one kid holds the football, and he’s the Queer. Everyone else, they chase the Queer around and around behind the concession stand, and they try to Smear him—this involves tackling him and then hurting him until he coughs up the football, which someone will then grab, and there will be a new Queer, and the process repeats.
I never understood this game, and looking back, it was the first glaring sign that I simply did not have a place in that town, with those people. That town where I was a dandified pussy, pussy, said with the jeering hateful tone that only children can manage, for not particularly wanting to end up as the inevitable kid who walked out from behind the concession stand with blood streaming from a broken nose or chipped tooth. Well, pussy it is, then, and I’ll wear it with a bloodless grin.
The game’s greatest reward was the chance to run like hell from a world of hurt. This realization did not change me, but the capacity and clarity required to make it, that marked me as different from them. So, too, did the fear, the desire for self-preservation above the animal fervor of the hunt. I used to tell myself, sometimes, that I was a lover, not a fighter. That was before I ever convinced anyone to love me, but it might very well be true. I have lived much of my life to phrases like these—clichés that provide some excuse for whoever I am. Regardless, I began from that moment to identify with the Queer. I knew intimately the sense of not belonging to the pack, and I developed the desire to run like hell from Oxford, to escape from a place I never chose to be from.

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