A Normal Person Doing Normal Things

By Jay Colburn

How do you find yourself when you've been given the wrong directions?

 

Jason is a backwoods boy with problems. Being gay in Alabama is hard enough, but God hates him and one of his classmates wants him dead. He dreams of escaping to California, but life sends him on an unexpected detour to Alaska first.

 

This witty, unflinchingly candid memoir steps into his uncomfortable shoes as he grows up and tries to find himself in the sinful world of sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll, and love. He travels from Alabama to Alaska to California and back, before realizing he might've been looking for the wrong person.

 

A Normal Person Doing Normal Things is ultimately an exploration of identity, freedom, and what it means to be a human.

 

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bawler Media
• Release date: Oct 18, 2022
• ISBN: 9798985955026

Book preview

A Normal Person Doing Normal Things

an uncomfortable memoir

Jay Colburn

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Bawler Media

Copyright © 2022 by Jay Colburn

All rights reserved.

No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.

Published by Bawler Media

1401 Doug Baker Blvd

Suite 107 588

Birmingham, AL 35242

Library of Congress Control Number:

2022917704

Paperback ISBN: 9798985955002

Hardback ISBN: 9798985955019

Ebook ISBN: 9798985955026

Printed in the United States of America

This is a work of creative nonfiction. The events are portrayed to the best of the author’s memory. While the events of the book are true, those involving alcohol may be less reliable. Some events have been compressed and some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of people involved. Dialogue has been recreated with the intention of maintaining the essence and emotional impact of the original conversation.

Contents

1.Spit Me Out to Georgia

2.The Devil’s Music

3.Mr. Gay Marbury

4.Loser Virgins, aka Not for Sensitive Readers

ALASKA

5.Moose Suck More Than Mosquitoes

6.Drama!

7.Oh Brother Typewriter

8.Boys vs Buddha

9.The Call of the Mild

10.A Nosferatu Triptych:

10. The Lost Boys, Near Dark, Bad Blood

CALIFORNIA

11.On the Rocks

12.FELIPE FOREVER!

13.Sweeping Jesus

14.Discomfort

15.Hammered

ALABAMA

16.Not so Greatness

17.Lost Satellites

18.Rookie Season

19.... For You To Show Me Only Hills

20.A Safe Place for Christmas

21.Stranger Cotton

22.House Trap

23.Shirts and Skins

24.Riding to Nirvana

25.Prose and Koans

MIAMI

26.Threads

Acknowledgments

About the Author

1

Spit Me Out to Georgia

I’m almost 100% certain that I wasn’t really born in the backwoods of the Deep South, but rather spat out by them. It’s like Alabama ate something that disagreed with it and purged it after nine months of negotiations.

After my older sister arrived, quickly following our older twin brothers, my parents took measures to eliminate the possibility of more children. I showed up (from somewhere) anyway, proving the futility of their efforts or the overriding determination of my destiny. Either way, I became a slowly awakening disappointment. God had given my parents a surprise seed, and instead of a weeping willow, an oak, or a masculine rose bush, a reluctant dandelion peeked through the soil of their lovemaking. Soon, it became obvious that Alabama was no place for a dandelion; it had probably been trying to spit me out to Georgia the entire time.

For the first ten years of my life, we were poor and Pentecostal. The one benefit of this combination was that it was against our religion to do anything fun, but it didn’t bother us because we couldn’t afford it anyway. It also meant that God didn’t allow my mom to work. This contributed significantly to our perpetual commitment to staying miles below the poverty line. Occasionally, she would sneak off to work at her sister’s gas station to make extra money while my dad toiled away at the tractor implements factory. Afterwards, she would rush home, wash out all the cigarette odor, and complete her housewife duties. If my dad smelled a hint of cigarette smoke, he would ask questions and that would eventually lead to an argument. He was also not a huge fan of my aunt Evie, probably because she chain-smoked and actively practiced non-Pentecostalism. She also cursed, wore jeans and makeup, drank wine coolers, and owned multiple televisions. I thought she was awesome.

The bad thing about being poor and Pentecostal, besides everything, was there was really nothing else to do but survive, pray, and go to church. Imagine the Amish, but with electricity, cars, and less money. Three times a week, the women, wearing long skirts and barefaced with their uncut hair in a bun, and the men in simple outfits of light-colored, button-up shirts and belted trousers, would show up to praise Jesus and sing songs to the Lord.

Depending on how the preacher gauged the spiritual state of the world that week, the church service would range from subdued to very dramatic. Subdued services didn’t make much of an impression, so I think I only remember one. The preacher probably had the flu or had eaten some bad barbecue that week. Or, maybe he was experiencing another weakness of flesh; I once witnessed him rubbing the leg of another man’s wife, so maybe his fear of being struck by lightning for being a hypocrite in God’s house would restrain his tongue. Some days, he would calmly talk about fishes and loaves rather than getting worked up about single mothers being more likely to give birth to the Antichrist. But, that was rare.

Since the world remained in an increasingly hopeless state of fucked-up, the service most weeks leaned towards the dramatic. It usually started with a few hymns and then crescendoed into a cadenced fire and brimstone sermon that pulsed and pulled you into its primal rhythm. This rhythm plucked disjointedly at people throughout the church as if they were instruments, and each pull of their spiritual string elicited an amen or a hallelujah. Soon, congregants would speak in tongues and stand at their pews with arms raised.

For reasons lost to the years, one service was particularly emotional. Everyone in church was walking around with tears in their eyes, hugging each other. Except me. As the preacher’s wife moved towards me, wet-bloused and open-armed, I panicked and froze in place. She pulled me into her ample bosom and I wondered if not crying would get me sent to hell.

Years later, I realized that it wasn’t my dry eyes that were going to get me assigned to the down escalator at death.

I learned everyone is going to hell, especially the Baptists, because they were fake Christians, and the homosexuals (whoever they were), because they were abominations. Catholics were also going to hell, but there weren’t many in our neck of the woods so they were rarely mentioned. Only good Pentecostal people would be saved from spending an eternity being tortured by the worst roommate ever, Satan.

I also learned that the world was going to end at any minute, and that the Communists or Russians (used interchangeably) were going to shoot me in the head in front of my family unless I took the mark of the beast on my arm. So, I could either have 666 tattooed onto my arm or get a bullet in the head. There were no good options. If I chose the tattoo, it meant an eternity in hell and probably having to watch the rest of my family get their heads blown off. Since they were much better Christians than me, they would have taken bullets for sure. I would be an orphaned 666 boy, wandering the planet alone until Satan eventually picked me up off the side of the road. I imagined myself sitting quietly in the passenger seat as he drove me to hell, singing AC/DC in his woefully seductive voice. My bloodstained pajamas (stained with the blood of my family and evidence of their true faith) would turn black with heat before gradually catching flame and engulfing me into my eternal burning.

I never learned when or how the Russians would get to us, but I knew the Four Horsemen were already close. So, I thought, maybe the Four Horsemen were the Russians… and if four of them could conquer us on horseback, then they must be pretty powerful. We were screwed.

Since the world was always going to end soon, my dad remained completely disinterested in improving himself or the lives of his family. He didn’t worry that we never had enough food. It didn’t seem to bother him that the walls of the bedroom I shared with my sister and two brothers glistened with frost on cold winter nights. He would sit in the living room, a tobacco-less pipe dangling from his lips (Pentacostals aren’t allowed to smoke, but my dad still liked his pipe), reading and waiting for it all to be over. I don’t think he was a bad person. He probably would’ve just been much happier living in the 1800s or possibly in a cave.

My father stood around six feet tall. Not skinny or overweight, just average. His light blue eyes and slightly larger nose distinguished him from others, and his head of white hair made him easy to pick out at church.

He and I were not close. I always assumed that he was the quiet type until I realized that I was the only one he wasn’t talking to. Considering that they named me after him, you would think it would have connected us. That was far from the case. In fact, we both kind of gave up on the name Thomas after a while. Everyone called me by my middle name or some derivative of it, like Jay, Bluejay, or Jaybird. He had that head of white hair all of his life, so everyone called him Cotton.

I think he might have tried to hang out with me once or twice, but it didn’t take him long to realize that I wasn’t good at it. Plus, he preferred activities that usually involved killing something, while my favorite activities were coloring, behaving, and picking flowers for Mama. My dad had my twin brothers, David and Daniel, to kill stuff with, so I just gradually faded into his background. Thankfully, my sister was already there (in the background), so she and I started hanging out more. Rachel never asked me to kill anything and she had better toys.

While my father was relatively plain, my mother was beautiful (a description potentially biased by distributed affection levels). Hers wasn’t an aggressive beauty; it lingered softly around her. Her long, thick black hair extended to slightly beyond her lower back. Since God wouldn’t let her cut it or go to the beauty salon, she usually pulled it back and held it in place with bobby pins and Aqua Net. Other than the fact that she was only slightly shorter than my father, my mom stood in complete contrast to him—with her olive-tinged skin and dark brown eyes.

She would always ask me If I left your daddy, would you go with me? My answer was always yes. I wasn’t sure if that would make me an accomplice to her mortal sin, but I knew I would follow her anywhere, even to hell. Though, there was the part of me that didn’t believe this scenario would actually ever play out, because in our world divorce was an almost unimaginable sin.

My mom brought it up to my father a few times over the years. He would respond by clutching his chest, falling to the floor, and faking a heart attack. An ambulance would pull into the driveway, sirens blaring and lights flashing and take him away. A bit later, my mom would load her four kids into the car and drive us to the hospital to retrieve him. He would return home feeling much better, and my mom would let it go.

Our home was the color of key lime pie that had been sitting in the display case too long. While there was no heating or air conditioning, there was a fireplace, but it was only ever strong enough to heat one room. During the cold months, my mother would get up every morning, start a fire, and make our breakfast. I would stay in bed with my brothers, covering my head for warmth until the fire had been lit and was beginning to heat the living room. Then we would all scamper across the cold floors of the house and sit under a blanket on the couch waiting for Mom to finish breakfast.

Fortunately, when my mom left my dad it was summertime. Otherwise I might have just kept my head under the covers forever.

Because of the ever-deepening trench of poverty surrounding us, my dad eventually allowed my mom to get a job. I can only assume that he based his new position less on newly adopted feminism and more on the steady flow of hospital bills arriving in our mailbox. He insisted he would find the job for her, and it would be the only acceptable job for a Pentecostal woman: cleaning houses.

So, three times a week, while we were at school, my mom would leave our house and go to another man’s house to clean. These small doses of freedom began to infiltrate our existence. and quickly developed into an addiction for my mom. She soon brought home a controversial gift: a black-and-white TV. Normally, my dad didn’t take to sinful gestures such as this. My aunt Evie once set up a Christmas tree in our living room while we were at church. Underneath it, she had placed a box of food. As we pulled into the driveway, the multicolored lights blinking in the window hinted at something magical. We walked in and, for the briefest of moments, enjoyed our first Christmas tree. My father promptly unplugged the pagan symbol and dumped it on the porch as my mother took the box of food into the kitchen.

My father did not unplug the TV. He was maybe trying to be nice, or he had just given up, believing that the ever-reaching tentacles of sin had finally grabbed the ankles of his family. We were slowly being dragged into an unrighteous world while a fuzzy, gray Annie sang Tomorrow in the background.

Then my mom showed up wearing jeans and makeup. This alone may have shocked him into surrender. I can never be sure.

Finally, one day, my mom returned home from work and told my father once and for all that she was leaving him. This time, he did not clutch his chest.

In that moment, everything in the room vanished except my mother, sitting in a single chair, and my father standing over her. My father yelled at us Get out! and suddenly me and my brothers and sister were all outside, running in different directions.

I ran straight into the woods, alone, and lost sight of my brothers and sister. My feet were bare. As I fled, I had forgotten the woods were a place to go slow, a place of rattlesnakes, poisonous vines, and blackberry canes that reach and whip at you with a bitter sweetness. I cataloged the dangers beneath my feet and against my skin with their afflictions, mysteries for me to unravel later. My sweat dripped into my eyes and stung like his words: Get out!

Yet, scarier than the terrors in the woods, was my father’s face staring at my mother. It’s the one memory I have of him where he looked strong, and now it seems more like a possession, as if Satan himself had seized upon the briefest doorway and entered through the crack in my father’s heart.

I ran faster and faster into the woods as a horrifying shadow of fear grew larger and larger behind me. Tears were mixing with the sweat now. I had always promised I would go with her. Instead, I ran scared and left her behind to face the Devil. Worried and guilty, I bit into my lips, but I kept running; the taste of blood, the penance for my betrayal.

Eventually, I came out of the woods and continued running down the road to my uncle’s house. My siblings weren’t faster runners than me, but I always had a notoriously terrible sense of direction. They had already arrived and told the story multiple times before I even made it into the driveway.

I felt like shit, but no one made a fuss over me. I assumed they were immune to feeling sympathy for a child with a hundred snakebites, multiple skin lacerations, and a bloodied lip. Or, maybe it was possible I had survived my woody ordeal in better shape than I imagined.

Our uncle loaded us into his pickup truck and returned us to the home where our mother no longer lived.

The following day, my mother returned and asked if any of us wanted to go with her. My siblings stayed behind. I, on the other hand, had been waiting for her to come for me; I had a promise to keep. Within minutes, I was packed and exited the house. My dad stood frozen, as if shocked and paralyzed by my betrayal, while my siblings waved goodbye. My mom and I turned out of the driveway and onto the dirt road in her little red car, never to call the green house home again. We were also no longer Pentecostal.

2

The Devil’s Music

After my mom left my dad, she and I moved from the woods of Maplesville into the town of Maplesville. There was a constantly blinking red light, a post office, a sheriff’s department, a barber shop, a few random small shops, and a Dollar Bills. It wasn’t very exciting, but everything was changing so fast that I didn’t notice. My mom had cut her hair and now wore makeup and jeans all the time. She had even recently gotten her ears pierced and had become the most scandalous person in the town. Even though there were only 700 people, it remained quite a distinction.

Before, we could only listen to old Christian music. Now, we would drive around town in her new, gray Ford, listening to Bruce Springsteen and Elton John. I had only heard about Bruce Springsteen from a religious tract that I had found at the old green house. On the front of the pious pamphlet was a black and white drawing of a possessed man. The inside informed me that I’m on Fire was a song about a pedophile that could no longer control his urges and that Bruce Springsteen must be stopped before he raped every young girl that was home alone and unsupervised. The Devil lived in music. We must remain constantly vigilant to not let the hooky horns of rock & roll earworm us toward a life of pedophilia and tortured darkness.

My mom either didn’t read the tract, or maybe she did and just considered it an invitation. Either way, being in her car and listening to Born in the USA and Sad Songs (Say So Much) made me feel like the arms of the world had just opened up and were giving us a great big hug.

We rented a small white house with a fenced-in yard. It smelled completely different from our old house, like chemicals instead of old wood. It wasn’t an unpleasant odor, just foreign. Even after cleaning the entire house, the smell still lingered. My mom has always been the cleanest person I know, so I’m sure we would’ve cleaned it even if it smelled like gardenias.

For the first time in my ten years on earth, I had my own bed and my own room. My excitement faded to terror as I realized that I had never slept by myself before. My two older brothers had always shared my bed with me, with my sister a few feet away. They would torment me sometimes by making me sleep next to the window and telling me if a monster or madman broke in, he would get me. My death wouldn’t be in vain because my screaming would wake them. They would wake my parents and escape to safety as my mangled corpse became sweet candy for a demon, or worse, just chopped into pieces and not savored by a Michael Myers type.

Now, without my siblings around, my muffled screams wouldn’t save anybody. I would just be dead meat without a purpose. I ended up staying up as late as possible, hoping that as soon as my head hit the pillow, I would be out. Otherwise, I would lie in bed staring at the darkness, wondering what would come for me and from which direction.

Once, I even endured sitting through two hours of Geraldo Rivera as he explored The Mystery of Al Capone’s Vaults. If you missed it because you had a life or hadn’t been born yet, you missed absolutely nothing. Turns out that the mystery was that there was no mystery, and Geraldo Rivera solved it all by himself. Fortunately for me, watching nothing happen for two hours is a great way to fall asleep. Also, fortunately for me, my mom’s boss had been coming over a lot, and he would carry me to bed when I fell asleep