by Jennifer McGaha
| I met Dwayne at a club in downtown Asheville the summer I turned eighteen. It was 1985, way before Asheville became known as the Paris of the South, before white kids with butt-length dreadlocks dotted the street corners, before the Friday night drum circle and hula-hooping hippies in Pritchard Park became a thing. Back then, the dance clubs on Tunnel Road were the only places for teenagers to hang out, and no one ever looked twice at your fake I.D. I was drinking a screwdriver when Dwayne approached my table. His eyes were the color of toasted almonds, and he was tall with bronzed muscular arms and thick thighs. When he asked me to dance, his voice slow and syrupy, I hesitated. I was not a good dancer, but he was beautiful in a Greek tragedy sort of way. His long golden brown hair shimmered under the strobe lights and fell onto his face. He tossed it back with a sweep of his head. Come on, he said, nudging my knee with his. I wore tight French jeans tucked into purple suede boots, a fashion choice that made movement difficult, but I took his outstretched hand and followed him onto the dance floor. Duran Duran came on and his body became a glistening, gyrating spiral. I rocked awkwardly from side to side. When Lionel Richie began to croon “You Are,” Dwayne gripped my waist and pulled me to him. I pressed my cheek against his damp chest. My first year in college had been less than successful. That summer I was working in the stockroom at the paper plant where my father worked in marketing. My father had gotten me the job, and the stint was meant to be a cautionary tale: Here’s what might happen if you don’t focus on your studies. Dwayne had grown up in nearby Candler. Right out of high school, he worked for a company that made decorative laminate. I had no idea what decorative laminate was, but I pretended I did. That summer, Dwayne and I went dancing. We drank beer and lay in the sun by the lake. We ate burgers and milkshakes from Cardinal Drive-In. Late one night, when I was doubled over with menstrual cramps on my bed, Dwayne sat beside me and pulled a white pill from his jeans pocket. He dusted it off, then handed me a lukewarm beer from the nightstand. As I downed the muscle relaxant with Bud Light, Dwayne took off his boots, climbed into bed beside me, and told me about the new bike he was thinking of buying. Closing my eyes, I murmured in response, but I wasn’t really listening to his words—just the cadence of his voice, that soft, cottony drawl that had surrounded me my entire childhood. My father had been the first person on either side of my family to graduate from college, and Dwayne’s voice was the voice of all my extended family: grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins who worked in paper mills and farmed the land. His voice was the tug of home, of the people and places I loved most, but somewhere not so far away was the gentle pull of some other life, not a better life necessarily, but a different one, an easier one, one that would be both more and less all at once and always. In that moment, I saw it all so clearly, why we had begun, why we would end. Still, I lay there with my eyes closed, my permed head resting on Dwayne’s chest as it rose and fell with my own. Finally, I drifted to sleep. A few weeks later, I changed out of the boots and jeans I had worn to work and put on a short skirt and sandals. I touched up my make-up—sparkly blue eyeshadow, blue mascara, glittery pink lipstick—then drove to the trailer where Dwayne lived with two roommates. Following his directions, I turned down a dusty road near a flea market. At the third trailer on the left, I pulled into the driveway, pushed the stub of my cigarette into a half-empty Diet Coke can, and skipped up the front steps. Dwayne opened the door before I could knock. As soon as I walked in, I smelled the acrid combination of cheap beer and sweat. Empty beer cans littered the kitchen table, the chair arms, the top of the TV. Posters of girls and motorcycles and girls on motorcycles covered the dark-paneled walls. A giant lighted Coors sign hung in the living room. His roommates sat on the sofa passing a bong back and forth. “Come here,” Dwayne said and pulled me into the hallway. “You look so hot,” he whispered as he pressed me against the wall. He ran his tongue inside my ear, then led me into his bedroom. We had sex beneath a poster of a blond in a bikini, her red stiletto propped on the seat of a Harley, one hand clutching her inner thigh. Afterward, he told me how much he loved a girl named Tiffany from Mountain Home. My gaze drifted to a framed photo on the dresser. The girl in the picture had curly brown hair and large breasts and thighs—a sturdy woman, a confident, capable woman, a woman who could drive a four-wheeler or bench press with the guys, no problem. I had idea who I was or who I wanted to be. I was not Tiffany, not even close, yet in that moment, I would have given anything to be. Toward the end of summer, I realized one day that Dwayne had simply stopped calling. A mutual friend said she had seen him at the club with Tiffany. Neither surprised nor particularly devastated, I did what I was expected to do: I finished my summer job, returned to college, and set my sights on raising my 1.7 GPA in hopes of getting into graduate school. My transformation had begun. Even now, though, all these years later, I sometimes hear Dwayne’s voice across the supermarket aisle or in line at the gas station—not his voice exactly, but the rhythm, the inflections, the same soft sounds—and I am filled with longing for another time, for the me I once was or might have been, for the night I danced under the strobe lights with a man I wanted to love. Listen to Cautionary Tale here |
Jennifer McGaha is the author of two memoirs, Flat Broke with Two Goats (Sourcebooks, 2018), and Bushwhacking (forthcoming from Trinity University Press in 2023). Her work has also appeared in The Bitter Southerner, Brevity, CHEAP POP, The Huffington Post, Lumina, PANK, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Passengers, HerStry, Baltimore Fishbowl, and many other publications. A native of Appalachia, Jennifer lives in a wooded North Carolina hollow with her husband, two cats, four unruly dogs, ten relatively tame dairy goats, and an ever-changing number of hens.