Sturtle: Richard’s Uncle and Other Stories
Sometimes you get lucky on the internet. After weeks of sifting and separating the meat from the crap, you find a story that’s so compelling, it shines through the gray water of the blogosphere like a lighthouse. You know this story belongs in a different sort of place, and you contact some of these places to let them know how great this story is, and how it would become an even better story if you turned it into, say, a documentary radio show (thanks for nothin, dick gordon). But the people who take stories like these and turn them into bigger stories don’t listen, or maybe they’re flooded with stories, or maybe they didn’t see the same beacons you saw. So the story continues to float through the ether, frozen in a moment, buried in the archives of another blog. And all the time and emotion that first made this story bring you to tears or laughter are still there. That’s a very weird idea to think about, if you think of stories as things that have life.
There are two stories, both written by the same person, that can still knock me around every time I read them. I think this is a measure of good writing that goes beyond the usual things people write on blogs. The problem is I don’t know which one to read first.
You might’ve read these stories before, but maybe you haven’t. Also, today is the first day of June, and I know for a fact that there’s nothing good on the internet right now. Definitely nothing as good as these stories.
So this writer, Richard, lives in New Orleans. His writing is so well organized, I think maybe he writes plays, and he definitely reads a lot. He reminds me a little of David Sedaris, more because he writes about his own strange life with sweetly sarcastic humor than because he’s a gay memoirist, or a memoirist blogger. He’s definitely gay, and that part of his life didn’t make much sense for a long time because he was adopted, and didn’t find out about his biological family until he was an adult. He grew up in Mississippi.
Have you ever been to Mississippi? It can be a delightful, charming place, but it suffers from Low Southern Self Esteem, just like much of the southern united states, and sometimes Mississippi is truly frightening. In addition to places in Alabama, New York City, Los Angeles, Cancun and the Midlands, parts of Mississippi have scared me so much I’ve gone into full-blown fight mode. I doubt it was a friendly place to grow up being gay.
Mississippi is right next to Louisiana. Some of the cities in Louisiana have a distinctly foreign feel to them. Baton Rouge feels more like a french redneck town than a small southern city. And New Orleans is, I think, the weirdest city in the entire country. It has an alien, parisian, mediterranean vibe to it, and it smells and looks and sounds like old european cities whose infrastructure and architecture have gone through centuries of styles and cultures and languages and food and dirt.
Richard and his family live in a section of New Orleans called the Faubourg Maringy, which is close to the gigantic Mississippi river and the french quarter. The neighborhood didn’t suffer as much water damage as most of downtown New Orleans after Katrina, but it still got fucked up. On the night of the storm, Richard and his partner left the city for several weeks. They were in a rush and a panick, and couldn’t find their cat Lola. I’ll never forget the day I read the story Richard wrote about going back to his home for the first time after the storm. It’s a great story to read.
And long before Katrina, Richard started documenting the story of his adoption. It includes how he found his mother, how he used to hang out with a crowd that included his biological sister before he even knew about her existence, and how, in one of those moments when the internet plays nice, he found his biological father. On facebook.