Mr. Mercedes is a novel by Stephen King. It’s a straight up detective story, so there are no supernatural or science fiction elements. That might be unexpected, however like most King stories, it’s mostly entertaining escapism. King isn’t much interested in sharing insights into the human condition or challenging his readers. His goal seems to be to tell a good yarn for the shear joy of it, and with Mr. Mercedes, he succeeds yet again. My biggest complaint is that King is too fond of using slang and colloquialisms in an attempt to give his stories an added layer of color. Sometimes this works. Sometimes it works well. But King has a tendency to overdo it, and I often notice odd words and phrases coming out of his characters’ mouths that are so unlikely that I’ll have to suppress a groan. For instance, in this story, a retired detective seeks the advice his teenage yard boy concerning a computer issue, and because of the specific issue, the detective has to let the young man know about an old case he was working on before he quit the force. I’ll accept that a seventeen-year-old might refer to the case presented to him as a “Sherlock Holmes mystery,” but when the detective gives a few more details, the teen proclaims that the case is at least a “two pipe problem.” For me, that is just too cute by half. But that’s King. It’s part of his style. The thing I liked best about this particular novel is that King gave us not one, but two socially withdrawn characters who are crippled by depression and extreme anxiety. Some of the plot points might be a bit over the top, but King’s depictions of these two women are remarkably accurate in my view. One of the women turns out to be a hero. As someone who suffers from PTSD and social phobia, I greatly appreciated these characters.
I saw Ode to Billy Joe soon after its release. I was about eleven or twelve at the time. So Billy Joe McAllister played by Robby Benson might be the first gay movie character I encountered after I realized I was gay. I saw the film a couple of times after that. The last time was probably about thirty years ago. I just finished watching it again. I thought the first half laid on the broad and farcical comedy a bit thick, and some of the dialogue was a little stilted, but the film did a good job in establishing the innocence of Billy Joe and Bobbie Lee. They were both sweet kids bursting at the seams with romantic ideas, and at least Bobbie Lee was feeling the heat. However, we eventually learn that Billy Joe’s heart really wasn’t in it. He had desperately played the part of the old-fashioned suitor. He gave it everything he had. Maybe he thought that if he just went through the motions his feelings would catch up at some point. The song told us that Billy Joe threw himself off of the Tallahatchie Bridge, and the movie told us why. I remember crying for Billy Joe when I was young, and I guess I, more or less, accepted that Billy Joe’s self-destructive act was reasonable and understandable under the circumstances. I guess I believed what we were told to believe, that being gay was a tragedy, an awful, heartbreaking thing because you could never hope to be accepted or walk among “normal” people if they found out your secret. Now at forty-nine, I’m disturbed and angered by that idea. I think the film, although a bit sappy at times, was a good film. I think Billy Joe’s suicide was a realistic plot development. An LGBT youth living in 1950s Mississippi… Probably quite a few killed themselves in one way or another, and it’s still happening even today. Thankfully, the film depicted Billy Joe sympathetically. He was adorable. The film may have helped a number of people wonder what was so awful about Billy Joe. But I wish there had been other narratives. In the ’70s, the movies usually took us to a world were LGBTs didn’t exist, so it seemed like a gift from heaven when I came across a gay character, but did they always have to so tragic? In 2015, it seems so monumentally senseless that Billy Joe, a fresh out of school eighteen-year-old, would throw himself off of a bridge just because he got drunk one night and had sex with his boss. Why should that be so horrible? Even if the guy wasn’t right for him, even if going to work on Monday was going to be awkward, even if he wished he hadn’t done it the next morning, why should letting the old guy screw him be anything other than mildly embarrassing? And what if Billy Joe had liked it? What if he wanted to fuck everything in pants after that night? So what? Why should anyone give a shit?
Last night as I was drifting off, I had a little dream. …or was it a vision since I wasn’t actually asleep yet? I was hiking in northern California on the Pacific Crest Trail. It was the middle of the day, and I had come to a meadow. It was a lovely, quite place, so I decided to take a nap. I laid down on the ground and used my pack to prop myself up. I was there for just a moment when a red-haired boy appeared. He was in his late teens or early twenties. Like me, he was by himself, and without saying anything, he removed his clothes. He was magnificent in the bright sunlight. He was white and smooth all over. He was fairly slender, but his belly was soft. He got down on the ground beside me, laid his head on my chest and curled into a fetal position. I put my arm around him and held him. We rested together without speaking.
I saw this early 1980s TV version of You Can’t Take It With You when I was in high school…long before I saw the 1938 film. It made a huge impression on me. Those who are familiar with it know it’s about an eccentric family. They live together in a large house, and each member pursues their own highly improbable and impractical dreams. The grandfather is a bit of a philosopher, and he firmly believes a person should do what they want rather than what is expected of them. I needed to see this play when I was 17. Many snobbishly dismiss everything that’s on TV as trash, and a quite a lot of it is trash, but you can also find high quality entertainment on TV such as this play. TV provided me glimpses of a wider world, and it let me know that there were other ways of doing things and seeing things. I hate to think what would have become of me if the only thing I was exposed to while growing up was the culture of southern West Virginia. In the film The Boys in the Band, there’s a scene in which Donald is giving Michael attitude for being a movie lover because he thinks movies are garbage. Michael retorts, “It may come as a surprise to you, but there was no Shubert Theater in Hot Coffee, Mississippi.” Thanks to TV and especially PBS, there was a kind of Shubert Theater in my little hometown of Oak Hill. I saw this version of the play once and once only. For a very long time, I’ve wanted to see it again, but I couldn’t find it anywhere. There’s a crazy expensive used VHS tape for sale on Amazon, but I’ve not had a VCR in over ten years. Tears came to my eyes when I found this on YouTube last night. I hated going to bed without watching it first because I feared I’d wake up to discover it had been removed. One of my favorite lines: “Your mother believes in spiritualism because it’s fashionable. Your father raises orchids because he can afford it. My mother writes plays because eight years ago a typewriter was delivered here by mistake.”
He was an earnest kid. A little too earnest. With his serious demeanor and closely cropped dark hair, he looked like he had been making all “A’s” since grade school and would go on making them all through business school and law school. His lips were full and protruded in a way that might be sensual if he ever allowed himself to pucker them. His nose turned up a little, and his ears stuck out just a bit. If his features had been slightly more exaggerated, he might resemble Alfred E. Neuman, but as they were, he was cute, or at least he might be if he relaxed. He lowered his brow and studied me in a way that suggested he expected to catch me in a lie at any second. Maybe because he had been wronged before and hurt. I wondered what he would look like laughing…joyously and unselfconsciously.
