The Grass Sweeper God
Doug Howery
Author Bio
About the Author
DOUG HOWERY has been writing both fiction and essays since 1990. His essays and familial stories have appeared in The Blue Ridge Lambda Press.
In many of his stories, as in “The Grass Sweeper God,” Mr. Howery’s true lode, his font of inspiration is in the passion and suffering he has experienced.
From the #1 Best Selling Amazon Author:
I see my audience as your audience because, The Grass Sweeper God is as much about how we raise our children as it is about accepting our children for who and what they are. People who’ve felt marginalized–so long denied any history have a special need and claim on writing that accurately represents their familial-based human condition. It shows the reader where we’ve come from and perhaps where we’re going as a diverse, tolerant and intolerant society.
Description
Sixteen-year-old Smiley Hanlon is a young woman trapped in a young man’s body. In the 1950’s Appalachia coal fields of Solitude, Virginia, Smiley is placed in the “Mentally Retarded Class” because he is effeminate and wears a blouse and saddle shoes to school.
Smiley is backed by his best friend, Lee Moore who protects Smiley from a father and many townspeople who hate him. Smiley has dreams of becoming an entertainer. Raised by his aunt in a juke joint, as a child Smiley sings and dances on the Formica bar top into the wee hours. Chosen as the female lead, Dorothy, in a new town production called Dorothy of Oz Coal Camp, his dream is being realized. The triumph of the play and his dream is sabotaged by his father and classmate bullies culminating in a tragic and horrific moment that changes both Smiley and Lee, forever.
Smiley and Lee flee to NYC. They learn that prejudice is prejudice whether in the coal fields of Virginia or on the streets of NYC. Smiley suffers at the hands of his real mother who is a religious zealot. She tries to change who Smiley is because he is a boil on the body of Christ. Lee suffers at the hands of psychologists who practice Aversion Therapy-electric shock treatment to cure his homosexuality.
What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Both Smiley and Lee become forces of change as do countless others. In 1969, Smiley Hanlon and his friend, Lee emerge as leaders of a gay revolution, The Stonewall Riots. The riots are vicious but the real battle will be won or lost on another continent: Solitude, Virginia.
The Grass Sweeper God is a force of nature that flows through all things…straightens out that which is bent…which is sick…
Book excerpt
Chapter One
1950s
This godforsaken place was the backwoods of Appalachia coal mining country. And being sixteen meant a cultured age of about ten or twelve, really. Especially if you were retarded and rode the short bus. This meant riding a school bus designated specifically as the retarded kids’ bus, but it also meant boarding normal kids alongside retards at each bus stop. The only real specificity: If you were trapped inside the wrong body—if you were a young man who wanted to be a young woman—you were the bull’s eye in the kids’ cross-hairs because you were the biggest, retarded mongoloid excrement of ‘em all, really. Excrement being too proper of a word: Specifically you got the ‘cultured’ and ‘godforsaken’ shit kicked outtaya every school day by retards and rednecks. Proper language left this place along with any civility once branded as a retarded freak, really. Indifference to proper language and civility ruled the day, and brutality beat the night.
It was the first day of Smiley’s tenth year in the “Mentally Retarded Sophomore Class.” Smiley had prepared for his first-day-of-school-beating by donning Aunt Lettie’s blouse and his shit-kicking saddle shoes. The school bus stopped and Smiley boarded. Under his breath, he summoned God’s wrath upon those who would do him harm, those who could and would kill him, that he knew, he had known that since the first grade.
He clutched his school books against his chest. Even the simple act of a boy holding his school books against his chest was considered sissy in this neck of the woods, really. Real boys/men held their books down at their side, not clinging to their chests like a girl.
The seats weren’t full, some had only one person seated, but just as last year his classmates scooted to the end of the bench seats so Smiley couldn’t sit. The school bus sputtered forward and jerked to stops. And with each stop and start, Smiley precariously balanced himself. Each time the school bus stopped, kids, sometimes one at a time and sometimes in groups, filed past Smiley. They pushed him aside in the narrow aisle and crushed his school books into his chest. The attacks from his classmates had become more brutal through the years than just the usual spitballs that he knew would pepper his head at any minute.
The clapboard cottages that dotted Cavit’s Creek appeared to pass by in slow motion. The school bus strained forward under the load of the children’s weight. Smoke from chimneys mingled with the fog rising from the water. Smiley imagined faces in a foggy television picture box. Then he dreamed that smoke and sparks would fly out of narrow asses who had not allowed him to sit. A smile creased his lips; a smile that only Aunt Lettie could put there. Minutes before boarding the school bus, Aunt Lettie had told him the story about his grandfather Hanlon’s death: His aunt would tell the story in her most southern and gracious dialect. “Your grandfather Hanlon said, ‘I hate this goddamn picture box. . .’ He reached to turn it off. Just as your grandfather reached to flip off the television, for the life of me, I cannot remember what was playing. But God spoke with a thunderous roar followed by lightnin’ that came in through the window over there,” she pointed to the window. “And then sparks flew out of your grandfa
ther’s ass. He dropped dead right over there on the throw-rug, right in front of that ol’ bar and television.” She paused like it was happening at that very moment. And she was watching the murderous lightning trail snake its way from the window to the smoky television screen before exiting Hanlon’s ass. “How would you like it if sparks were to fly out of your ass? Now you stop thinking about yourself. So what if you’re in the retarded class. Hell, we’re all bat-shit crazy. You’re just another long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. Just look around you and you can find someone else crazier than you. I betcha’ you’ll see some sparks fly outta’ their crazy asses before the year’s end.” She smacked his ass with a bar towel on his way out of the juke joint door of Hanlon’s Place.