Rerun Era

By Joanna Howard

Rerun Era is a captivating, propulsive memoir about growing up in the environmentally and economically devastated rural flatlands of Oklahoma, the entwinement of personal memory and the memory of popular culture, and a family thrown into trial by lost love and illness that found common ground in the television. Told from the magnetic perspective of Joanna Howard's past selves from the late '70s and early '80s, Rerun Era circles the fascinating psyches of her part-Cherokee teamster truck-driving father, her women's libber mother, and her skateboarder, rodeo bull-riding teenage brother.

Illuminating to our rural American present, and the way popular culture portrays the rural American past, Rerun Era perfectly captures the irony of growing up in rural America in the midst of nationalistic fantasies of small town local sheriffs and saloon girls, which manifested the urban cowboy, wild west theme-parks, and The Beverly Hillbillies. Written in stunning, lyric prose, Rerun Era gives humanity, perspective, humor, and depth to an often invisible part of this country, and firmly establishes Howard as an urgent and necessary voice in American letters.

• Language: English
• Publisher: McSweeney's Publishing
• Release date: Oct 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781944211936

Book preview

THERE ARE PICTURES OF

DENNIS WEAVER AT MY

FAVORITE ICE CREAM SHOP.

Joplin is forty minutes away, so it is an outing. Joplin is in another state. We go to another state for ice cream. We go to another state for everything. My dad works for a trucking company that is in another state, a third state, even. It’s in between our state and this ice cream state, which doesn’t even seem possible since everything is under an hour away. Under an hour.

And everything is flat and dry and a field or a long flat road. Everything is grass that is on its way out or on its way in. The seasons are the season of hot and muggy, the season of ice storms, the season of tornados. In the hot and muggy season we get ice cream most nights after my dad comes home from work.

I don’t even really like ice cream as a kid. It is always being offered as a bribe for something, but then they get me the ice cream and I have to get another bribe to eat the ice cream. Ice cream is too controlling. There is a lot of guilting, guilting around the flavors, like when my mom’s friend buys me German chocolate which is her favorite, a flavor that has coconut right in it. I scream. I scream bloody murder and drop down in the parking lot having a conniption. I hurl the ice cream at a parked car. I get half dragged away.

But in Joplin there is Anderson’s where they have old-fashioned everything. This is not the time when old-fashioned things are thought to be good: this is a time when old-fashioned things are thought to be novelty and overpriced and dingy and generally for the elderly. When we go to the ice cream shop, it is always us and the elderly.

My dad doesn’t mind the elderly. He gets along with everybody because of being from a place. When you are from a place forever, you know how to be with the people from the place even if you are younger. It doesn’t matter that the place is in another state because all the states touch, so my dad gets to be from four of the states at once. We all do, but less so than my dad.

At Anderson’s my dad gets black walnut every time. His honest favorite flavor of ice cream is black walnut, which to me tastes like mold and rot. We have a black walnut tree in our yard, where my little red swing is, and when the walnuts are ripe, I hop up and down in the swing and shake the limb, and the walnuts drop from the tree encased in their exterior balls of black ooze and they burst like bombs all over the lawn furnishings and walkways and stain everything a dark color. Black walnut, black walnut. My dad is obsessed. He panels the house in walnut, the hardwood floors are stained walnut. Walnut is a color of luxury.

But Anderson’s has an old-fashioned vanilla ice cream cone that has been pre-dipped in the most lurid cherry-flavored wax and then frozen very solid. A row of these sit at the back of the freezer case waiting for me. As regards sweets, I like always the red things, and the pink things. I do not care for the chocolate things, or the butterscotch things or the things with nuts. If I am given a chocolate thing or a thing with nuts I scream and hurl it. But I enjoy the red and pink things. I think I can taste red and pink, and that is a flavor. (It is! It is fruit, this is not made up!) The man behind the counter wears a paper hat, and is a bit slow or slow of wits, and he looks both very old and very young, older than my parents in some ways, and young somehow too in his softness in his slow approach to the dipping of the homemade ice creams. Sometimes his father is there too, and he too seems both young and old at once. Perhaps it is the paper hat. The buzz cuts make their heads look like gray fuzzy baby heads. They have both always worked at the ice cream shop, my mom says, even since she was young, and they are part of a family bound by ice cream and paper hats, and also cinnamon rolls which cost five dollars. It is the paper hat father who is shaking hands with Dennis Weaver in the photographs on the wall.

I am docile. I have my red frozen thing. My mother points to the photographs.

That’s Dennis Weaver, she says. I shrug. He’s from Joplin, she says.

I shrug, I’ve heard it before.

He’s so handsome, my mother says.

I guess, I guess he is, but I don’t say. He has a mustache. I like mustaches. I came out of the womb liking mustaches, I don’t know why.

He was Chester on Gunsmoke, my dad says, before Festus, he was Marshall Dillon’s sidekick.

I like Festus, I say. I know my dad likes Chester better. I rebel. I rebel by preferring Festus.

I AM EASILY RATTLED.

My brother is so much older than me he is just: not—he is not. Not there, not real, not known. Gone or alone or elsewhere. He has a skateboard. He threatens me with scissors if I knock on his door. When I am very little he chases me in a Gene Simmons mask, and scares me to death, and I run through the house screeching. My mom explains it’s not scary, it’s just a rock band that wears lots of white makeup and this person has an especially long tongue. Like a demon? And this is not scary? There is no logic to this.

I’m pretty easily rattled. I get scared if anyone breathes like Darth Vader, for instance. (My brother does it. He comes into my room and breathes like Darth Vader, and I scream and run through the house.) We go to the movies and my dad doesn’t like to go because he is always working or fishing or in the woods, and my brother doesn’t like to sit with my mom at the movies, so my mom takes me to the movies and has me sit with her for company and my brother goes elsewhere. We go to see Raiders. My brother has already seen it. Do not take her, my brother says, She’s going to flip out at the end. I do fine for the whole film and then we get to the end, and they open the ark, and the faces melt and I flip out. I’m scared of Nazis after that. My mom says, Well, that’s alright, Nazis are very scary. But also I’m scared of biblical artifacts?

My mom wants to see The Elephant Man and doesn’t want to go alone. My brother says, Do not do this, do not take her to see The Elephant Man. My mom takes me. I am five. I scream, I wail, but my mom really wants to see the end of the movie so I have to sit there. To this day, I think I will die in my sleep if I lay flat, that my deformities will literally crush my lungs. I sleep with so many pillows; I sleep propped up, like a pneumonia patient.

EVERYTHING IS A RERUN.

OR A VARIETY.

It is us with the TV. We are all together there with the TV, and the TV is not somehow the same as the movies. Someone else is in charge of what goes on the TV besides my mom, so I will not see faces melting on the TV by accident. The TV is safe for now.

In the daytime there are reruns,