Bible Verses

 

The other day a really nice guy I know told me he had just read my book of stories Next to Nothing, and he seemed taken aback and perplexed.  He said that the characters in the stories were really the bottom of the barrel.  Really, he emphasized.  He said that back in the day characters like the ones I write about didn't seem so nasty.  All the drugs and sex and alcohol, he said.  I mean, they're just sad.  No way out.

 

So why do I write about those kinds of people?

 

Really. 

 

Why?

 

I don't know why I write these stories except that the bottom of the barrel has been a focus since I started taking writing seriously.  That's because for most of my life I have had proximity to the Nothing people, direct access through working with them, being related to them, and being one of them.  I write what I know:  gay, working-class, Appalachian/white-trash, etc.  And while I'm not a dope addict or anything, I still am often coded as that because of the gay, working-class, Appalachian/white-trash-ness.  So the bottom of the barrel I write about is not titillating or stylized or embossed with disgust or conveyed with a distant splendor or even love.  I convey the lower level of human existence (for those who think in levels, and I guess that's all of us) without any sense of judgment or disdain or weepy sense of social justice.  The debauchery is just there, like anything else about people.  Therefore the debauchery gets blanched into banality.  Maybe that's what is so horrifying and depressing to a lot of people (the few that actually read what I write)?  That sense of scrambled morality, that in that universe I write about and from, "sin" is just another element of character, not a code of destruction or a broken commandment.  It's just life.

 

When I was a kid I always went to vacation bible school in a backwoods Baptist church, and one summer I memorized the most Bible verses than any other kid.  I was awarded with a construction-paper crown and a giant candy-bar.  The verses still come into my head sometimes, Jesus non-sequiturs that actually provide possible clues into what and why and how I write those bottom-of-the-barrel short stories.

 

Here's one that is often on repeat inside my skull.  Suddenly I'll just be driving around and ka-boom:

 

"Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you."  Matthew 7:1.

 

Could that be the reason the stories I produce come out the way they do?  They are born outside of judgment.  When I was a kid, just about the only intellectual stimulation I got outside of school was going to church, and I took that church stuff seriously, construction-paper-crown and all.  I wanted to find meaning in those verses.  I'm still trying.  When you try to be moral or whatever, morality sinks you.  But when you try to figure out how morality works without using morality as a map, when you're all on your own out there, imagining a world bereft of meaning so that feeling usurps reason, then suddenly you can look at sin and sadness and drunkenness and perversion (maybe all those should be in quotes?) without cringing and without wanting.  And then maybe the Bible verses become flashlights? 

 

You just see the human in that beam, and once you see that the horror shrinks into comedy and then a sort of love might inconspicuously sneak in.

 

So I write about freaks and low-lifes and perverts and so on, and while they never transcend those earthly statuses they do become truly human I hope, not disconnected from those bottomless-pit identities, but also not condemned by them.  Just living that way.  God help them.  And God helps us all. 

 

I'm not judging.  I'm just seeing.  And the only judge at the end of the day is God, and I have no fucking idea who or what God is.  I just know that I'm not God in any way shape or form.  I do know, however, that these people I'm writing about are somehow God's own.

 

Another verse that keeps coming back:

 

"For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God."  Romans 3:23.

 

One of the stories in Next to Nothing I like the most is called "How to Get from This to This."  It's about a raging alcoholic's last day of life on earth.  He basically has degenerated into what he has feared most about himself.  And he's drinking himself into the oblivion that he craves.  Even though I never intended it, the last few lines of the story read like a series of Bible verses to me now:

 

"This is the secret nobody ever tells you:  there is so much happiness when you finally give in, a kind of happiness you can't imagine until you hit the very bottom.  It's a magical pond you slip into headfirst, drowning quickly, though you take your time.  There's quiet, and then there's not even quiet.  It's just like that.  And you're grateful."

 

I followed that poor guy to the end, and I kind of found out, at least in my imagination, his end wasn't about torture or damnation or the gnashing of teeth.  It was about a freedom he was grateful for.  What we're all trying to chase outside of ourselves, anyway we can.  



Under the Stars

One of my collages.  It's directly linked to a couple of the stories in Next to Nothing.

This week a really nice reporter from Cincinnati Magazine called me up to do a short interview about my book that's about to come out in March (from Lethe Press, thank you LA Fields and Steve Berman), Next to Nothing.  It was a pleasure to talk to someone so kind and sensible about the stuff I write.  A lot of people, at least in the past, have not taken too kindly to my stories and what they mean and do.  That's not patting myself on the back or anything, just the way it is.  I mean many people get it of course and I'm grateful, but when they don't get it boy it's hurtful, as in your day job being threatened, etc.  The main reason many people have turned up their noses at my oeuvre is because the people I focus on are poor working class trash who also often happen to be gay, and they are living in situations and places that are not conducive for the "coming out" story or even hopeful tolerant little ditties about "fitting in."  I mean they "fit in," but often times they fit in with people who are "morally objectionable" as well.  And by putting air-quotes around "morally objectionable," I'm stressing the fact that every person I concentrate on in the fiction I write helps me at least question what that term means.  And then I usually go back to that epigram I'm always tossing about, the Flannery O'Connor one that actually starts off Next to Nothing:   "It is when the freak can be sensed as a figure for our essential displacement that he attains some depth in literature.” 

 

I centralize freaks in a way that doesn't allow codes of morality to interrupt their transmissions.  And for me at least that's one of the most moral actions to take.  Sounds self-aggrandizing, but that's it. 

 

Next to Nothing is a drastic, off-kilter parade of homosexuals, alcoholics, pedophiles, philanderers, adulterers, robbers, wife-beaters, transvestites, foul-mouthed kids, and so on.  It is also a Wednesday night after work where everyone is too tired to breath, some going home and feeding the kids, others having a drink, others going to their part-time jobs as caregivers at the group-home.  Some are getting ready for Wednesday night services at church and others are bracing themselves to ask other relatives for some cash till pay-day and still others are hoping their cars are going to start tomorrow morning and a few more are doing laundry, watching HBO, taking the garbage out.  It's that mix of "morally objectionable" parade and the mundane everyday where I find meaning, and even grandeur, in lives that often don't mean shit to others, and when I write those stories I don't feel anything but a connection, a direct link, to both myself and to others. 

 

We are all sinners, and we all sometimes bounce checks because we wanted to buy really good Christmas presents.  We all are evil, and we also help the old lady get her groceries into her car. 

 

By foregrounding lives that are not heroic or even upstanding, but just there, I can mitigate the need to judge and forgive, and find a place to examine my own shortcomings, my own stupidities and my own goodness.

 

I just finished reading The Great Gatsby again, which is a much more elegant and brilliant book than I will ever be able to write of course, but still it has always informed what I want to do.  Gatsby is the freak here.  He is all desire and lies and crimes, and yet he is the central figure of Nick's displacement, and ours.  "Morally objectionable," Gatsby owns a different metaphysical space, an ethereal world of wishing and hope that's completely tainted and diffused by the means he has gone to attain what he wants.  And yet he is better than most people we will ever know.

 

One of my favorite moments in the book happens toward the end, when Gatsby is summarily banished from the Buchanan household, but he still waits to see when or if Daisy will come to the window to let him know she loves him.  He is an outcast on the edge of his own paradise, and Nick is leaving after hanging out with him out of pity.  It's nighttime in West Egg, that blue-gold glow Fitzgerald loves to conjure, and Nick shouts across the lawn on his way to his train:  "They're a rotten crowd.  You're worth  the whole damn bunch put together."

 

That shout always makes me cry. 

 

Look:  God knows I'm no Fitzgerald or O'Connor, but I do have a reason to write, and it's probably linked to those two great American writers' needs to not only stylize life into a form they can create from, but also their needs to find morality outside of the "hive mind," outside of the "crowd."  Both of these canonized geniuses found ways to canonize freaks, to displace us from ourselves for a little while so we can know our own shortcomings, and understand our place under the stars.

 

  

Manifesto

I wrote "The Wedding of Tom to Tom" about 13 or 14 years ago, inspired by my years working in group-homes, especially by the people I worked with and supported.  There were all kinds of memories and images in my head, and when I came up with a story to go along with them I was kind of overjoyed.  This story still sticks with me.  It is sort of my manifesto.  The plot's very simple:  two direct-care staff in a group-home assist two gay men with developmental disabilities to get married, against both the rules of the group-home and the rules of the state.  The two "Toms" have been friends and lovers since they met each other in an institution years ago, and their love truly is how they separate themselves from a fucked-up world.  The main character is a woman who has an ex who just got out of jail, and she turns the secret wedding planning into a version of saving her own soul. 

Link to the story:  "The Wedding of Tom to Tom."
Link to a discussion of the story by students in a Disabilities Studies class:  "Dis/Lit Discussion."
Link to the original images I used for the "Tom to Tom" collages:  "Tom to Tom" images.

One of the major images of the story that continues to haunt me:  "This big hanger building," Dad says, from the podium. Tom and Tom are right there in front of him. "Pink light, like exploding roses. The red-light district. Ha ha. No. A stampede. You gotta hear it. A thousand-plus feet. I am on the other side and I look up and all these shaved-headed people are running right at me in the red light. It's like they just got freed, you know? Like the concentration camp just opened its doors and they got out and they're running. They don't know where they're going or nothing. They're coming right at me. And I want that to happen. I want them to run me over."

What I wanted to do with these collages is reinvent the way I visualized the story by thinking about the totems I used.  I wanted to back away from the story and see it in my head as a sort of silent movie, black and white and solemn and strange.  I did 22 collages in all, on index cards.  I took images from the internet and Xeroxed them, so that there's no color, only a sort of paper-cut contrast. 

Here goes:

Lovesick Dishwashers

I have a stockpile of collages I've made over the years.  Thousands of them, dating back to 1997.  Jesus.  Most of them are in black three-ring binders.  The process I went through to make them in every phase is pretty easy to explain.  For the ones featured on this post:  February 2009, I took lots of photos with a disposable camera of absolute nothingness as I drove around doing my job.  Got the photos developed at a Wal-Greens in Hamilton, Ohio.  Took the photos home and had a big box of Xeroxes and old books and other pieces of litter and would piece each collage together from whatever was there.  I wanted the photos to be the magnet, and all the detritus the steel fragments.  I glue-sticked and Scotch-taped each collage together, usually atop the glossy disposable-camera photo, so they are all uniform, 5" X 8".  For this suite, I didn't use a black three-ring binder.  I bought see-through envelopes and each one is stored in one of those. 

No titles.  Just images.  I was writing a novel as I did these, so I think I was trying to escape the monogamy and monotony of novel-writing with these little short bursts of nothingness and beauty.  I was trying to find an aesthetic I can live with.  Still am.  I'm 48 almost, and every time I try to find beauty in the world I crack up laughing:  strangeness and meanness are always what I'm after really because I think beauty and joy are always accompanied by those nasty little henchmen, and if you want beauty and joy without meanness and strangeness I think you're probably not really looking for anything but the arrogance of thinking you know something.  In these dumb little collages I find vast amounts of gorgeousness and also a sense of stupidity so deep and wide I can crawl inside it and pretend I'm on a cruise.

In the end I keep making these things because words don't mean enough, and aren't mean enough.  Images that just link together because you want them to become symbols of anarchy and insouciance and desperation, all words I love, all meanings I love.  I'm returning to these things I made (and still make) because I need to right now.  I'm writing more, trying to figure out how to write more.  These images allow me to creep out of my hole long enough to be absolute and absolutely dumb.  And dumbfounded.  I find all the people I want to write about in these images/interregnums.  They are all usually lovesick and lonely, exhausted and trying too hard, washing dishes, pumping gas, buying beer...  In the end I'm just trying to find who I am too. 

You Will Be Missed



Dont't worry about what happens next.  Simply walk through the door, and you'll find all that you once feared has turned itself inside out.  I used to be like you.  I used to fall into that same trap, but birds don't need restrictions.  They need sky.  They need air.  They need destinations.  This isn't makebelieve either.  I wore myself out getting here, blistered and cut, scorched and frozen, a little bit pissed off.  I've flown over wars, carnivals, traffic jams.  My eyes are smaller because of it.  You came out of that room and you were terrified, but then it all went away.  I came at you like you knew it was about to happen, the fury and finesse pulling itself out of the moment and into our convergence.  Birds don't belong indoors, but I wasn't a bird anyway, just a flicker.  Then you knew.  It wasn't really over particularly, just a rought start.  You continued walking but you were already laid out on the floor.
 

Saved Every Sunday

Let's not forget that one day when we went across the fence into the field and we found that American flag bundled up into a hobo's suitcase, nestled in some old brown weeds near the off-ramp to the interstate.  Cars and semis flashed by.  It was cold and then it was warm because of the wind.  We stood above our find, dumbfounded.  Then you got that grin on your face and bent down on your knees and untied the flag and there it all was:  four dirty magazines, a half-emptied carton of cigarettes, and a big shiny Zippo lighter.  You picked up one of the dirty magazines and opened it and three ladies were spread-eagle on a large heart-shaped bed.  It felt like we were seeing something we'd always wanted to see but we only could get at it alone in dreams.

You just nodded your head. 

"That's filthy," you said.

I laughed.

You had wanted to blow somebody's head off before we took off earlier in the day, and I was like I always was, calming you down.  But now you were feeling great.  You had just uncovered treasure.  We took that stash back to your house.  We saw your brother fixing his truck, his head under the front of it so all we could make out was his headless body on oil-stained concrete.  His legs were twitching a little.  The truck's hood was up.  Your mom was upstairs sitting in her chair.  Big and fat, she had bronchitis and could barely breath but she was in a deep sleep.  When she was awake, she had a loud-mouthed psycho old-lady way about her, her laugh always loud and forced, like she was trying not to be depressed as hell but she was.  Right now she was Nyquiled into another world.  She didn't even see us take the stash upstairs.

Your house smelled like bacon and gasoline and septic-tank and lilac spray.

Your room was a miniature landfill.  You never seemed to wash your clothes, and you had unopened action-figure packages and eight-track tapes you had shoplifted all over the place.  When you shoplifted, I was your lookout.  Once I saw that no one was looking I'd give you the okay and you would grab this or that and then back your way up into a wrack of big coats, disappearing and then coming back to the world with whatever you wanted stashed inside your pants or jacket.   Every time walking out the hissing electronic doors of K-Mart or whatever store we targeted I would feel like I was about to lose it.   You just kept walking.  

Nobody understood why I hung out with you, but if they could have seen inside my head, and make out the way I saw you they probably would have been horrified.  You were the only person worth being around is all.  Everybody else was always so worried about getting through the day.  Worried about hallways lined with kids looking at them.  Worried about what their parents thought about them.  Worried about grades and sports and girlfriends and here the two of us were, 14 and stupid and wandering around fields, pretending to be little boys because we did not want to have to do anything else.  Or maybe you just couldn't grow up.  That was probably it.  It wasn't about will.  It was about what you had to work with.  In school you were always downstairs near the boiler-room in Special Ed.  Shaved-headed, skinny as a pole, old flannel shirts and dirty corduroy pants and untied hiking boots.  I was always hiding from everyone but you.  Me some fat pale white-trash kid who could get through classes without saying one word and still make Bs and Cs, one of those kids nobody really wanted to know, but he was still there taking up space. 

You let people know who you were.  You could not hide it. 

You threw the American-flag-wrapped stash onto your unmade bed.  You untied the top and opened it up, and then you said, "This is filthy.  It makes me sick."

Your face was lit up.  When your mom was not sick she was always taking you and me to church, that little Baptist one that had a trailer next to it, where the preacher and his wife lived.  The church itself was an old house they were trying to turn into a church.  Me and you and your mom would sit in folding chairs with the sixteen or seventeen other worshippers and you always made a big deal out of being saved.  You'd get saved every Sunday.  You'd go up and get saved and because everybody knew you were retarded they just assumed you had forgotten you'd been saved the Sunday before so they just let it go.  But I knew you just wanted to be saved over and over again so you could come back to being lost the next day.

You picked up the lighter.  You kept working it, turning the little wheel with your thumb.  You smacked the bottom of the silver lighter with your palm, and kept trying and trying, and then the thing lit up, a flame bigger than I thought it was going to be.  And you picked up one of those dirty magazines and you lit it.  The thing was a little damp so it was hard at first.  But it caught.  And you did that with the other three magazines and the carton of cigarettes that had been wrapped in the flag.

You stood back.  The flames from the stuff caught your mattress on fire.  I did not really care about the fire except that it was there and you had caused it.  I remember thinking that this was it.  I would never see you again.  You were laughing, looking around for something else to add to the flames.
       

Beautiful Souls




"Holding Hands for Safety" is in my collection of stories The Smallest People Alive, available on Amazon...

 
L. A. Fields, a sweet and kind MFA student from Chicago,  messaged me about answering a few questions she had about what I do fiction-wise for a class she's in.  Here goes...

I looked up the anthology where I first found “Holding Hands For Safety” (in Men on Men 7) and found a review calling your story “fierce and funny,” which is not at all the impression I got (it seems very quiet and serious to me). How would you characterize this story? Or at least what is the impression you hoped to give with it?

It’s both funny and sad to me, and I don’t think you can have either in a story like that without both humor and tragedy working at the same time together to get you through. That said, I also think the class aspect of everything I write can sometimes be misinterpreted as insouciance and “black comedy,” when really it’s just the way people live, point-blank. Poor people, like rich people, have beautiful idiosyncrasies – it’s just that rich people often have more elaborate and intricate ways of hiding those idiosyncrasies, or to transform them into sweet little eccentricities. When Flannery O’Connor talked about why many of her stories featured “white-trash” people, she said something about how many of her characters are stripped of manners and decorum, and that allows the reader to look into their souls. I’m paraphrasing, but that’s the gist. And I think in “Holding Hands for Safety,” all the characters are stripped down to their essences to the point you have access to their souls, and while those souls might be a little ugly and a little worn out, they are beautiful souls none-the-less, especially the souls of the three main characters: the teenaged gay narrator, his punk step-cousin, and the six-year-old girl the step-cousin kills.

You said in an interview with Donald Ray Pollock that you’ve written another novel since The Life I Lead—would you mind telling me what it’s about, and if it’s any closer to finding a home?

Actually it’s Holding Hands for Safety turned into a novel, funny enough. I opened up the story to include many other points of view (including Courtney and Troy), and what happens after the murder. It’s going around now to different places. No good news, yet. Or maybe ever. But I keep trying. That’s the essence of all this stuff: you can’t get deterred. I have a draft of another novel I’m working on now called Johnson City Divas. It’s a homage to James M. Cain and other noir writers. It’s kind of like Mildred Pierce spliced with Jean Genet. A middle-aged drag-queen who lives in Johnson City, Tennessee is one of the central characters. I liked the idea of going with a plot-driven gig for a change. In The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity, Cain’s plots have both an artificial dexterity and a weird existential necessity. It’s the nexus between reality and phoniness where murderers live. A lovely place for a story.

Having written both novels and short stories, which do you enjoy writing best? Are there differences in how you approach long and short pieces of fiction?

I like writing short stories, but then I get sick of them because I want the terrain of a planet instead of the intimacy of a condo. But they go well together, and most of the novels I write come from the short stories. They intermingle. And some of my favorite novels, actually, read like collections of interrelated short stories. The best I’ve read recently: A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan.

Tom + Tom = Bliss



About ten years ago I wrote a short story that was published on the website Nerve.com.  It was about two guys with developmental disabilities who happen to be in love with one another, and the dedication of one support person working in their group-home who helps them to get married.  The title was:  "The Wedding of Tom to Tom."  It's also in my book of short stories, The Smallest People Alive. 

Ten years.  Damn.  I'm not famous.  And God knows I'm not a genius.  But what's amazing to me is that this story seems to have a life beyond most of the other things I've written.  I guess it has something to do with the fact that when I wrote it I was trying to merge all aspects of my life together:  people with developmental disabilties, gayness, social work, fiction, and a philosophy honed on reading Flannery O'Connor's Mystery and Manners, in which Flannery writes, “It is when the freak can be sensed as a figure for our essential displacement that he attains some depth in literature.”  I've always taken these words to heart in everything I've written, but in this story I think it may have yielded some of the greatest moments I could come up with.

Anyway, a student named Amanda Grace Gorman in the ENGL 375A2 DISABILITY AND LITERATURE class at the University of Mary Washington in Virginia wrote a paper about my story.  (I copied it and pasted it below.)  I read it yesterday and burst into tears.  I've been writing now for 25 years or so, and have had reviews in the New York Times, Village Voice, Boston Globe, Publisher's Weekly, and blurbs from famous writers and editors who say my stuff is great, etc., but this was the first time I cried reading something somebody wrote about my fiction.  I think it has something to do with the no-nonsense connections Amanda has made with what I write and the way people with developmental disabilities are perceived and relegated.  It also has something to do with her sympathetic yet strategic way of reading my story.  There's a moral code Amanda is targeting and she finds it in my work:  what an incredible gift to me as a writer.

A true example of 2 + 2 = 5:  me the writer writing something wholeheartedly dedicated to reinventing the way people view characters with developmental disabilities in literature, and ten years later a writer takes what I did and gives it back to me fully reinvigorated.  Wow.  Another example on the same blog is four students in the class creating monologues based on some of the characters in my story that I did not give a lot of voice and agency to.  Reading those monologues made me cry too.

Maybe I'm just some overemotional freak (well wait a minute:  yes I am that), but also I think that this is probably a pretty normal thing that happens to writers all the time.  This is just my first time.  It was Amanda and the other students' thoroughness that got me.

Thanks to ENGL 375A2 at the University of Mary Washington in Virginia...

Link to the story I wrote:  "The Wedding of Tom to Tom"
Link to the ENGL 375A2 blog:  Dislit blog

Here's Amanda's wonderful paper:

Disability and Representation in Keith Banner’s “The Wedding of Tom to Tom”

by Amanda Grace Gorman

Disabled characters, perhaps because of their inherent mystery to nondisabled writers and readers alike, have always been well utilized in literature. These characters often become walking talking embodiments of their disabilities, and help to further the plotlines of the main nondisabled characters. The paradigmatic example of a disabled character in literature is Tiny Tim, the helpless, pitiable disabled boy who acts as a moral compass for Scrooge’s change of heart in A Christmas Carol. We seem to be comfortable encountering disabled characters in literature insofar as they act the part: innocent, desexualized, childlike, bent on overcoming their limitations. In “The Wedding of Tom to Tom”, Keith Banner seems to be challenging this literary stereotype to the utmost degree. He opens the story by confronting the reader with two intellectually disabled characters engaging in gay sex, an act that many people are barely comfortable reading about nondisabled characters engaging in. Banner continues his incredibly progressive representation of disabled characters in “The Wedding of Tom to Tom” by granting legitimacy to their sexualities, asking the reader to reject an infantilized view of them, and by re-imagining the kind of impact that they might have on nondisabled persons.

The fact that Banner’s representation of the intersection of sexuality and disability is a positive one is first evidenced in the text by the fact that he clearly depicts the sexual acts between Tom and Tom as intentional. Anita, after walking in on the couple mid-blowjob and forgetting to turn the lights off as she left says that she “ was getting ready to open the door and turn them off when [she] saw that one of the Toms had already got it. Almost as soon as it was dark in there again, they were making that same crazy silly sex music” (51). This shows that Tom and Tom had not only a physical understanding of what they were doing but also a social understanding, as it is common practice that lights are dimmed during intimate sexual interaction. Anita as the main narrator also makes reference to Tom and Tom’s sexual practices within terms of normal discourse: “Tom A. and Tom B. were trying to sneak off for a quickie right then, and I saw” (59). This shows that not only do the disabled characters view what they are doing as legitimate, but one of the nondisabled characters does too. Though this perhaps should not need to be the case, the fact that a nondisabled character shares this viewpoint does seem to help encourage the reading of Tom and Tom’s behavior as worthy of being understood as mature, intentional sexual behavior.

But it is also made clear in the text that Tom and Tom are not merely mimicking nondisabled sexual behavior. As Tom B. sneaks back to his room, Anita describes him as

“half-demonic, half-angelic, but dramatic, like he had gone off and now he was returning from his journey filled with beautiful new things to tell” (52). This description portrays Tom B. as seeming to understand and to have personalized the complexities of sexual life, rather than merely engaging in acts prearranged by a framework of nondisabled sexual meanings. Though their pleasure itself is described as genuine, for example Anita imagines a fantasy in which a lot of people are coming towards her all “smiling the way Tom A. does during a blow-job session”, Banner does not portray their shared sexuality as functioning merely for physical gratification (73). The love between Tom A. and Tom B. is conveyed to the reader in poignant subtle detail. For example, after the two men are split apart during group time, Anita describes Tom B., smiling, “but his eyes were afraid at the same time. He blew out a sigh and let go of Tom A’s hand…” (58). The fact that the men are constantly split up ends up being read not as a necessary precaution, but rather a tragic element of their love story. The “stack of old-timey bridal magazines, worn out from looking at them”, that Tom A. has stacked in his room, clearly is meant to evoke a kind of sympathy from the reader that differs from the kind of pity one might have for two adults with mental retardation engaging in sexual acts devoid of an understanding of their meaning (65). When Tom B. talks about his relationship with Tom A. Anita describes his face as “sincere and stupid and scary and beautiful”, the kind of face she cannot say no to (66). By the time in the text wherein Anita plans a wedding for the two men, the reader understands why she would want to do something nice for these two men who are unquestionably in love.

It is because of the tender details of their love that Banner includes in the story that the reader ends up having such an adverse reaction to Anita’s boss Kate’s viewpoint on the relationship of Tom A. and Tom B. which is that it is a problematic one, characterized by a strange obsession with each other’s presences. Her view of the two men only makes sense within an infantilizing, paternalistic view of disability that denies disabled persons their own agencies to make informed decisions for themselves. In a meeting for workers at the home, Kate expresses her concerns about the two Toms: “I mean, what I’m afraid of is that they are gonna end up hurting each other. Physically. There’s all kinds of issues here. I mean when I walked in on them the other morning, Tom A., excuse me, but Tom A. was anally penetrating Tom B.” (63). It is clear that this is not a rational concern, proof being that it is indicated that the men have been together for many years without much incident, but rather Kate’s “concern” seems to be a matter of attempting to rationalize her paternalistic motives. Kate’s assumption that the two men cannot make their own decisions despite their apparent competence may be related to a belief that their choosing to be in a homosexual relationship is indicative of an impaired ability to choose appropriate partners due to their mental

disabilities*.

However, Kate is emphatically not a sympathetic character, which reveals that Banner wants the reader to reject Kate’s infantilizing view of the intellectually disabled characters. The reader is not supposed to like Kate, who is first described as “smiling like a whack-o” (51). But furthermore, her way of demeaning others and undervaluing their capabilities is shown not to be caused by real necessity insofar as she works with needy disabled individuals, but rather a manifestation of an undesirable personality trait. After the meeting Kate has with the (nondisabled) workers at the home Anita relates that it “…got quiet, like we were all suddenly little kids and Kate Anderson-Malloy was the teacher” (64). The fact that Anita constantly refers to Kate with all three of her names, Kate Anderson-Malloy, helps locate more specifically what Kate’s undesirable personality trait is: pretension. In fact, throughout the story Anita expresses her frustration with Kate’s assumed superiority. For example, she says at one point, “I mean, she’s a bitch…but also there’s this weird, loud, lovingness in her face as she pronounces her proclamations, like against her compassionate instincts she’s always having to tell us these things” (63). As Anita has trouble pinpointing just what is so terrible about Kate’s opinion that the two men need to be separated, all the while she does not doubt that the two men should have “permission” to be together. Banner seems to be saying that of course love between two adults should be allowed, this should be an unquestionable fact, one that should not need arguing for.

As progressive as the narrative is in representing the intersection of disability and sexuality and rejecting the appropriateness of infantilizing mindsets, it runs its biggest risk of falling back into the conventions of the archetypal disability narrative in making the disabled characters somewhat auxiliary to the dynamic narrative of the main character. Not only this, but it does seem to be the implication that the protagonist Anita, a nondisabled character, is looking to learn something from the disabled persons at the group home. In fact, she describes her job there as her “antidote” to what she had been through with her ex-boyfriend. She explains that she feels like she is “paying penance too but just for being a total fucking fool” (57). But Banner now departs from the typical nondisabled character learning from disabled characters structure. The familiar storyline might include disabled characters overcoming their limitations in some way or learning to cope with their disabling conditions and a main nondisabled character that finds that inspiring. In “The Wedding of Tom to Tom” there is no talk whatsoever of overcoming disability, and what the nondisabled Anita finds inspiring about Tom and Tom is their love story and the endurance of their love through hard times.

Banner makes it very obvious at certain points in the text that Anita draws analogy between her relationship with Archie and Tom and Tom’s relationship. For example, she admits that when picking up the Toms before their impromptu wedding that she is “thinking: well it’s me and Archie in my head, if you want to know the truth” (69). Later on, Anita imagines within her prophetic fantasy of Tom A. and Tom B.’s happy life together, “Love-light. Lava-lamp light” (73). She then immediately connects this to a memory of Archie: “Archie has a lava lamp in his bedroom, or used to. He would turn it on in the dark while we made love. “Real cheesy,” he would say (73). There are also more subtle comparisons in the text that truly bring to light the resonance for Anita of Tom and Tom’s love. In the car with the Toms in the back seat, Anita remembers a moment with Archie: “…and this was love, without crack and without any lies and without his petty-assed, trashy ways. Maybe, maybe not. I see them back there in the rearview. Tom A. and Tom B. Looking straight ahead” (70). Here Anita is looking back to the past to recall a pleasant memory of Archie before they began to have problems and questioning whether or not she loves him. This stands in stark contrast to the reflection in her mirror of the two Toms sitting in her backseat, looking straight ahead, unflinchingly, resolutely, in love and looking towards the future. In addition, Banner even seems to evoke the blowjob motif first encountered in the opening lines of the story when Anita decrees to the reader in a moment of unbridled passion for Archie, “if he had a crack-pipe I would let him stick it into my mouth” (75).

Ultimately, though, it ends up being not just the inspiration of Tom and Tom’s relationship that leads to Anita’s epiphany of her love for Archie at the end of the story. It seems rather to be the fact that he on some level grasps the fact that Tom and Tom are in love, and would never think to question it. This almost seems to conjure the archetypal image of the disabled character acting as a moral compass, but I argue, differs in a fundamental way. Archie can in no way be seen as a moral hero for the way he treats disabled characters, for in fact he does not even interact with the disabled characters. He merely hears the crazy sex music of the Toms through the wall separating their hotel room from his and Anita’s and “isn’t disgusted” or “even perturbed” (76). It is this, instead –his attitude towards love, that it cannot and should not be denied no matter how difficult or unusual the circumstances, which is evidenced by his seemingly natural acceptance of Tom and Tom, that makes Anita realize that she loves him.

By representing the disabled characters as sexual, adult individuals capable of making decisions for themselves, and capable of inspiring people in ways other than attempting to overcome their impairments, Banner breaks from traditional uses of disabled characters in literature. Instead he comes closer to representing people with disabilities as they actually might appear in the world, as nuanced, complicated individuals with their own ideas, goals, and values. Banner’s story might be read as an argument for the transcendent quality of love, for its ability to reach beyond the socially sanctioned places it is supposed to be confined to and manifest itself in anyone. By including disabled characters in this argument, Banner in a small way begins to right the wrongs of his predecessors. He gives disabled characters back their humanity.

* I am indebted to my peer, Helen Alston, for this insight. Her complete explication of this passage through the joint lens of sexuality and disability is available at our Disability in Literature course blog at http://dislit.umwblogs.org/2010/11/03/he…