Guy Lancaster

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Grace, Nudity, and Chocolate Syrup

All it took to get me to pose nude for April’s photography project was the offer of dinner at the China Restaurant—Jonesboro’s best Chinese buffet, in my humble opinion. Not that people in the know weren’t surprised by this, for I was renowned for refusing to wear even shorts in the summer, liking to have my legs completely covered (and consequently kept that slightly bluish shade of skin we might dub “computer geek pale”). In fact, it took my friend Tim, who had mentioned April’s project to me, a long time to believe that I was serious enough.

“Really?” he said again for what seemed the tenth time.

“Yes, I’m completely serious,” I said, trying to keep patient with him.

“I mean, it’ll be me and you,” he said. “I’ll be wearing a gas mask and something else, but you’ll have to be not wearing any clothes. And you’re okay with that?”

“Yes,” I said, beginning to wish I had kept my mouth shut.

“Really?” he said again for what seemed the eleventh time.

I had just come back from a year’s study in Tokyo, where our dormitory had only public showers, so the thought of stripping bare before other folks was no longer the terror it used to be. It’s funny how quickly you can adapt to that sort of life, eventually reaching the point where one guy can say to another, “Hey, I was thinking of going down to one of the public baths and soak a bit. You wanna come?”, without it sounding like a line from a gay porn movie—cue jazz music.

And anyway, I was feeling a bit stir crazy, coming back to Jonesboro after having lived in one of the most populous cities on the face of the planet, that endless metropolis of techno-exotica that is Tokyo—even if what I had experienced of most of it was the local pubs and their toilets. It would take me a while to realize just how strange and wonderful this Arkansas can be, but in those early months after my return, I could only lament the sameness with which Jonesboro was infected. I wanted nothing more than to venture abroad and be an unaccountable stranger in foreign lands.

Instead, I was a nude model. For a photography project.

The three of us went up to one of the studio rooms in ASU’s fine arts annex building one Saturday evening. I’d never been inside the place, which was little more than a two-story brick square painted on the inside a sickly gray. The brightest thing was the vending machine right inside the door. As we walked down these halls painted a bloated corpse gray and lit with fluorescent lights, I felt rather sorry for the art students who had to use this place, who were left trying to create masterpieces on canvas in a building that no doubt constantly tempted them to slit their wrists.

The studio was little better. It was a wide, expansive room spattered in different colors of paint, but the only light came from a bare bulb that hung from its electrical cord in the ceiling. Rummaging around in one of the supply closets, we came across some smaller spotlights that we could use. Shadows lingered across the walls.

April was all business, directing us to move this square platform just beneath that bulb, to point the lights there at that wall. She is a short woman with thick glasses, and even back then I didn’t know what her real hair color was, for I had seen it brown and blonde and black and red and blue. She dressed like a goth in loose, black clothing but smiled too much to pull it off.

I was talking with her about the various poses and whatnot when Tim stepped beside me wearing a flower print dress. “What’s with that?” I asked, running my eyes up and down him.

“You like it?” he said as he put on his gas mask. It was an American-style gas mask, without the bulbous external canister sticking out in front. He strapped it tightly and then pulled out of his bag a cat o’ nine tails and started trouncing across the floor, swinging it stiffly like a character from an early martial arts video game, laughing all the while.

“Okay,” said April, “here’s what I want you to do.” And so I took off my shirt, and Tim and I mounted the platform beneath that bare bulb. I swung out my arms as if being crucified, while Tim knelt at my side in the pose of Mary Magdalene, his hands clasped together in solemn prayer. April moved around below our makeshift Golgotha and snapped picture after picture of this bluejeaned messiah and his rather strange disciple.

I didn’t ask why the flower-print dress.

Soon enough, we moved on to the next set. Tim pulled out of his bag some rope, duct tape, and a squeeze bottle of chocolate syrup. He said, “What we’re going to do is duct tape the rope to the wall up high, so you don’t see it in the shot, and have you on your knees against the wall, with the rope tied around your wrists, like a dungeon scene.”

“And the chocolate syrup?” I asked.

“Oh, this is great stuff,” said April, taking the bottle in hand. For black-and-white photography, it looks just like blood. Lots of people use it that way.”

Was this true? I wondered. When filming Psycho, did Alfred Hitchcock have a special syrup technician standing by to spray Janet Leigh during that infamous shower scene? In Schindler’s List, did the skulls of Jews burst open in sticky sweet Hershey’s after a hail of Nazi bullets?

They tied me to the wall, still wearing my jeans, and Tim stood beside me, not a worshipful disciple now but a tortuous Roman soldier (albeit one wearing a dress and gas mask) making mock swings of his cat o’ nine tails upon my back while April clicked away.

Then came time for me to take off my pants for much the same pose, though with my pale ass like a blazing sun beneath those spotlights. After a few more shots, April came and tried to create whip marks across my back with the chocolate syrup. Every time we had a pause in the shooting, Tim handed me a towel to cover myself with, though I knew it was less for my sense of modesty and more so that he didn’t accidentally catch a view of a friend’s penis.

Next, we moved back to the platform, where it was my turn to kneel and Tim’s to stand over me, pulling upon a leash around my neck. The bulb still hung above us like a light of inspiration, just out of reach.

I knew better than to ask what all of this meant, what Tim wearing a dress and gas mask and torturing/worshipping me represented—whether some Christological commentary was intended, or just a bit of sacrilege. Most likely, though, it was just the assemblage of a few props the two of them already owned, followed by the statement, “You know what would be really cool….” It was just art. That’s all. As long as it titillated a handful of insiders and shocked a few people down at the fine arts photo lab, it served its purpose.

When April went though her last roll of film, I put my pants back on, and they helped me scrub my back clear of syrup. Tim got rid of the dress and gas mask, and we marched out of this depressing building and drove to China Restaurant, where I got my pay and where the crab rangoons are just fried shells stuffed full of oniony cream cheese, as I like them.

As it turns out, though, I got more than five plates of Chinese buffet that night. I also got my freedom, though I didn’t realize it until two years later, on the heels of a presidential election.

It was the year 2000, and I had fallen rather hard for Ralph Nader’s campaign. So began rather a strange transformation for me. Previously, I’d not really given a damn what went on in Washington, but now I began to learn all the flaws with Bush’s Social Security privatization scheme and memorized Gore’s hypocritical record on the environment and studied intently all the problems created in the third world with the onset of globalization. I was in a fever of newness, as if I really had just woken up to the world, and I pinned up campaign flyers on my office door and loved it when Democrats heaped their scorn upon me for helping this renegade steal votes that supposedly belonged to another man.

It was an exciting time, like my own personal Sixties, when transforming the world entire seemed just a matter of determination, of refusing to let certain dreams waste away beneath the constraints of a brutish reality. Giving a damn for once felt good.

And in the end, when the campaign was over and all the fevered activists I had met went on to other worthwhile projects, there was I, wondering what to do with myself, wondering how I should make a difference in this life. One of the things Nader stressed was the importance of the young getting involved in politics, and there was I, listening and thinking. After all, I could do this. “The world is a fine place, and worth fighting for,” wrote Hemingway, and I had learned that it was true and that the fight could actually be pretty damn fun.

But I had my own dreams, dreams of me spinning out words that could move people’s souls or, at the very least, just give them a night’s distraction from their waking problems. I had just published my first few short stories, just had the taste of that world which, now, I was considering giving up for a supposedly greater duty to my fellow man. I didn’t want to, but how could writing little short stories compare at all to the pain and protest of the worthy life?

And so I hung there in the balance, like a kid I remembered from a Sunday school class long ago who said he would follow God’s will, even if it meant being a missionary in Africa, though he really really wanted to be an NBA star and kept promising God he would be a good witness to the power of Jesus on the court if He let that happen.

I hung there in the balance, leaning toward duty and away from destiny, dreading the dream deferred….

And then I remembered—I had posed nude on camera two years back. There was no way I could run for anything, not even alderman!

I was so excited at remembering this that I just ran around the room, happy to be back in my own skin again, as if I had divine permission to do my utmost desire. Grace had come in the form of chocolate syrup and my white ass on film. Thank you, Lord—thank you.

Which isn’t to say that we should abandon the world and its people to those who would destroy them. But rather this—the world is in the mess it is because we refuse to succumb to our deep, driving desires. Instead, we stay in jobs we hate because they pay enough money to buy the garbage we then need to make up for the misery, all part of an entire global economy based upon despising your every waking moment. Even if it’s for a good cause, you can do violence to your soul.

But I was free, I realized. I was blessedly free. Somewhere, there were prints of my naked self covered in chocolate syrup with a man in a dress pretending to whip me, there to keep me from turning my back on my own promised land, my own dreams and hopes.

*          *          *

Don’t Tell Grandma the River Ain’t There

Every weekend for the entire summer of 1999, I stood in the exact spot where my uncle was murdered.

This was at Lan’s Liqour, on the county line between Cross and Crittenden counties—your typical country liquor store. Uncle Paul had run that store ever since I could remember, up until the day when three guys stormed in and shot him to death for whatever cash was in the register. It was a Tuesday night, so they didn’t kill him for much.

My Uncle Paul was the easy-going one of the family, never too uptight about money or morality or all the other things people sweat over. I remember what was probably the last Christmas day he ever saw. He was living with my grandmother in Parkin then, having succumbed to debt after a fairly nasty divorce. Someone called him up on the phone that afternoon, and all we really heard of the conversation was him saying, “Okay, I’ll be right over.” When he hung up, my Grandma asked him where he was going.

“Gotta open the store up real quick,” he said. “Miss Annie’s got herself a case of the shakes.”

“Paul!” she said. “You don’t need to go wait hand and foot on that alcoholic! That just ain’t right.” Perhaps it was even illegal to sell booze on Christmas.

“Miss Bit,” he said (that was what everyone called her), “you just be thankful you ain’t an alcoholic suffering alone on Christmas.” He leaned down to kiss her on the forehead and walked out of the door.

After he was killed, the liquor store went to my grandmother on account of all the money he still owed her. Grandma was a devoted Baptist who never touched a drop of liquor, and she went up to her pastor the Sunday after the will was read to tell him that she was sorry but that she had to keep this whiskey store open until she could sell it. He just put a hand on her shoulder and told her not to worry about it at all.

That’s how I came to work there at Lan’s Liquor. A guy named Big Dave was still going to be working there, for my grandmother now, but since Uncle Paul was gone, he needed extra help for the weekends when things got busy. Big Dave was old and hurting most of the time, so Grandma asked if I could come up on the weekends.

“I can’t pay you a whole lot,” she told me.

“It’s not a problem, Grandma,” I told her.

Every Friday, I got out of work early and took the hour-long trip down to Parkin, where I stayed with my grandmother at night while I worked at the store. She would often cook dinner for Big Dave and me, though I had to go to her house to pick it up. I don’t know that she ever stepped foot back into the store ever again.

But I did, each weekend. It was a rather strange feeling, being there behind that same cash register, standing upon the spot where they had to mop up all that blood and sometimes wondering if ever someone else might decide that we were too tempting a target, our lives too cheap. Oh, the police had caught the men they said killed Uncle Paul, but there are always others out there.

I rather liked my time at the liquor store. In the early afternoon when it was fairly slow, Big Dave would take to the couch in the back room for a nap, leaving me there to read my book and eat all the beef jerky I could. When I knocked off on Saturday, he’d usually give me one of those big bottles of Old English or something else to take home. Sometimes, when we got shipments that were partially damaged, we got credit for the case or the six-pack and got to keep whatever wasn’t broken. Not too bad.

What I remember most are the people. This was Cross County, smack between Parkin and Earle, and our clientele was predominately black, most of them probably not more than a generation’s remove from a past of sharecropping out in the cotton fields. A lot of them were alcoholics, to be sure. I remember a number of men and women who came in each day for their fifth of Night Train or pint of Heaven Hill, always having exact change at the ready.

That first week, Big Dave introduced me whenever someone new would come in. “There here is Paul’s nephew,” he’d say, words that never failed to result in wide eyes and someone reaching out to shake my hand. I can’t count the number of times I heard, “You’re Paul’s nephew? Your uncle was a good man. Yessir, he was one of the finest.” I heard this from both men and women, from the old more than the young. One old woman, who called herself Paul’s other mother, said she got in the habit of calling him when she was heading that way and seeing if he needed her to bring him some lunch. I wondered how often my uncle had eaten two lunches just to make both his mothers happy.

Lots of people stopped to tell me stories about Uncle Paul: the time he helped out an old man whose house had burned down and who was having trouble with the insurance company—he closed the store to go chew out the insurance agent that time; all the people he helped out with money over the years without batting an eye; all the times he shared a mess of fish he’d just caught with someone who probably needed something solid in his stomach that night. These folks were the forgotten people of the Delta, but they knew they’d always be remembered by their friend Paul.

This isn’t to say that he was a secret saint, that his life is worthy of hagiography. There were drugs and women enough to keep him from wearing too shiny a halo. But he knew how to be kind, and sometimes, that’s all you can do.

Some of us wondered just how Grandma would deal with Uncle Paul’s funeral. After all, she had never been too keen on black folk, and the fact that the Cross County sheriff had arrested three black men for the murder didn’t help. But I think she understood that these were all Paul’s friends, and in the absence of her son, they helped fill that void with all their stories about him. I remember, the day before the funeral, hearing my grandmother on the phone saying to someone: “I don’t know just who told you that, but ain’t nobody gonna be unwelcome at this funeral! I certainly didn’t say that!” I was secretly proud of her.

Probably more black people than ever before saw the inside of the First Baptist Church of Parkin that day—it seemed that most of his customers showed up for the service. Paul’s other mother asked my grandmother for one of his fishing poles to remember him by. Grandma gave it to her.

We buried my uncle in the Parkin Cemetery. He had requested in his will that he be cremated, but as my grandmother would tell anyone and everyone, “I know that’s what he wanted, but I just don’t think I can do that. I read up on them, and sometimes they burn a lot of people at the same time. The ashes they give you, you don’t know if that’s your kin’s ashes or not.” She had looked around at a few cemeteries, including the one out near Marion where my grandfather is buried, but she decided that one looked a little too nice. Paul wasn’t the neatest man in the world, and the old Parkin Cemetery was small enough and grown over enough and was filled with tombstones that didn’t match each other. It was the perfect compliment to his life.

“Besides,” she said, pointing to a thick line of trees at the graveyard’s edge, “he’ll like being here, close to the river there.” She told me that the Tyronza River lay just behind those trees—the same river that ran behind his store down the highway.

A few weeks later, my Aunt Mary Lane was up from Baton Rouge, and the two of us decided to go out to Paul’s grave. We were out there for not too long, picking up some of the flowers and just in general neatening things, when she said, “Hey, let’s go look at the river.” So we walked down to the line of trees and looked past them to find—

—only an empty field. There was no river there. After looking a bit, we could see another thick line of trees about a mile away, certainly where the Tyronza actually ran. Here, where we stood, was just where people threw the flowers that had gotten too old or other assorted decorations that got left on graves and eventually transformed into trash.

Aunt Mary Lane looked at me with a dead serious stare. “Don’t you ever tell Grandma that the river ain’t here,” she said.

It seemed a rather strange request. I mean, we had probably all, children and grandchildren, spent years trying to protect my sweet Baptist grandmother from the world at large—or rather, tried to protect ourselves from her ever finding out just what we were up to. But surely, after Uncle Paul’s murder, there wasn’t just a whole lot we could keep from her. The world out there, the scary, violent place that could always be tuned out by turning off the television, had made its way to Parkin in the worst way.

But maybe all we had left to lie about was this little mistake about geography. Maybe that’s what’s left to you when the worst occurs—the belief that there runs a river by your son’s grave.

My Aunt Mary Lane looked me dead in the eyes, and I knew that she didn’t even have that anymore. This wasn’t a river but just where the groundskeeper threw his trash.

I nodded, and we left in silence.

So we never told her. Grandma moved to Jonesboro soon after that, but she still makes it back to Parkin occasionally, usually to see an old friend, and each time she’s there, she goes and visit’s my Uncle Paul’s grave. She has a collection now of things people have left on it—pictures and watches and even a full bottle of beer, as if someone meant to return a long-owed favor.

And I know that when she is there, as she walks up to the grave of her son, her middle child, there flows from her aged lips a song, her favorite hymn in all the world—

Shall we gather at the river,
Where bright angel feet have trod,
With its crystal tide forever
Flowing by the throne of God?

Yes, we’ll gather at the river,
The beautiful, the beautiful river;
Gather with the saints at the river
That flows by the throne of God.

Guy Lancaster is the editor of the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture and a Ph.D. candidate in the Heritage Studies program at Arkansas State University. He has published one novel, as well as a variety of short stories, academic articles, personal essays, book reviews, and interviews.