By Kevin D. Williamson
Friday, May 29, 2026
Some stories do not need to include the disclaimer,
“There was alcohol involved.” But this is High Journalism, friends and
neighbors, and so, in case there is any doubt: There was alcohol involved.
And there was a fire.
My memory of most of these things, which happened when I
was in elementary school, is fairly vivid and detailed, to such an extent that
I sometimes suspect that I am filling in this or that element in a literary or
cinematic way, but the dates are fuzzy: This would have been the very late
1970s or very early 1980s, no earlier than 1978 and no later than 1982.
I am not sure exactly how the fire on the sofa got
started, other than that the proximate cause was, of course, a lit cigarette.
Ours was a very smoky house, to such an extent that after
we moved out the film of tar clinging to every surface made the interior
difficult to paint—the paint apparently just slid down the walls of the living
room and kitchen. You will not be surprised to learn that both the kitchen
appliances and the deep shag wall-to-wall carpet of the living room were
“harvest gold,” which, along with avocado green, was the hallmark
domestic shade of the 1970s. That carpet must have smelled like cancer.
Roy, my mother’s second husband, drank a great deal and
tended to talk about ’Nam when he did, and very possibly had passed out with a
lit Marlboro (full-strength reds) on the sofa (coarse polyester weave, floral
pattern) in front of the television (fake wood old-style console, dial
controls, convex CRT screen) drinking silver bullets, which he stacked in a
neat pyramid and sometimes logged the quantity consumed. On the ugly nights, he
would switch to mouthwash or Mexican vanilla or any other household goods
containing alcohol—there were no packaged alcohol sales in Lubbock back then,
and he may have worn out his welcome (or exhausted his credit) at the Stumble
Inn or the Branch Office or He’s Not Here or one of the other creatively named
local dive bars where my mother would sometimes go looking for him when he went
missing. She once found him at a place called the Joy Motel, the precise character of which I am sure I do
not need to explain to you gentle readers, mostly naked in a room with another
man, also mostly naked, but it somehow still did not quite occur to her that
her second husband just wasn’t second husband material. He was the kind of guy
who got drunk and talked about ’Nam and who would, at his wife’s request, lay
down in the back seat when she was bringing him home from jail to spare her the
embarrassment of having the neighbors know that she had already taken him back,
and who might pass out and accidentally set the sofa on fire with a
Marlboro—and, who in Hell knows, who might very well have set the thing on fire
with malice aforethought.
My brother and I ran out of the house. We may have been
laughing. Little boys like fire. (God help me: I have four little boys.)
We ran to our next-door neighbor’s house. Her garage door was open (it usually
was, for some reason), and we were friends with her two little boys, which
meant that we presumed free run of the place.
Fire! Exciting.
My mother came running out of the house, screaming, and
Roy came running after her, bellowing and in a rage. My mother was not the most
agile woman: She was overweight, for one thing, but also had recently (I do not
remember exactly how recently, but maybe a year or so) undergone a gruesome
series of surgeries after her poodle (RIP Pépé) scratched her and gave her a
terrible infection that necessitated skin grafts (an “abdominal pedicled flap,”
meaning her arm had been sewn to her abdomen for some time) and nearly cost her
her right arm, which instead of being amputated was merely left partly
paralyzed. She was in her early 40s but seemed older. Roy would have been right
around 30 years old, plus or minus a year. He had been out of the Army for a
while and the booze must have been hard on him, but he was active when sober
and reasonably fit. It was not going to be a fair fight, but Roy was not the
sort of man who was interested in a fair fight: He’d once hit me hard enough
that I was disoriented for some number of days afterward.
My mother was running as fast as she could toward us when
she must have had an all-too-rare moment of clarity: She was leading him to us.
She had a history of—and a talent for—leading trouble into our lives in the
persons of the men she lived with and married. She never got over that. I once
spoke with her on the telephone from what we then still called Bombay and
discovered that she had recently got married—her fourth husband—to someone I
had never heard of, who hadn’t been a big enough presence in her life to have
come up in any of our earlier telephone conversations. He turned out to be trouble, too, though not the kind of
trouble you are in when you are living with a violent alcoholic and you’re 8,
which is the kind of trouble Roy personified. I do not pretend to know what she
was thinking. I never understood what she was thinking and have come to doubt
that she ever really understood, either. But, in that moment, in the weird
little interstice between the front yards of Eisenhower-era brick ranch houses
built close enough together that you’d get a weird echo if you raised your
voice while standing between them, something seems to have occurred to her. And
she stopped, and turned, and fought, and, to her own surprise, even more than
anybody else’s, beat the crap out of her second husband, there in the front
yard as the neighbors popped their heads up out of their holes, prairie
dog–style, to see what it was that family was up to now. Roy was on the
ground by the end. I was pleased by the outcome, though I cannot say I was
exactly proud of the scene.
Of course we had fights in the front yard—some of them
incidents of domestic violence, some of them merely recreational. In almost
exactly the same spot, our neighbor’s older son, who was younger than me and
who had finally had enough of being bullied by my older brother, Darrell, gave
him a richly deserved beating, taking a fence picket full of rusty nails to his
ribs, which necessitated a tetanus shot and earned me a stern lecture for
having advised the little boy on how best to deal with a remorseless bully. (It
was excellent advice: Darrell never bothered him again. But I have spent
a fair bit of my career getting in trouble for offering good advice.) In sixth
grade, I fought another kid in the front yard of a different house on the same
street (we had moved two doors down) for no other reason than that we were the
two biggest kids in the class and somebody (I don’t know who) thought it
was a good idea, maybe even necessary, that we should have a fight. (There was
a little bit of half-assed boxing before each combatant declared himself the
winner, and then we were friends.) Dodging bill collectors, staging
weird personal psychodrama scenes in public, getting stupid drunk, facing eviction lawsuits, brawling while the neighbors look on and cringe—that’s what
white trash does.
(And never mind that that other sixth grader in that
desultory tussle was black—it was my yard.)
It does not matter whether you live in a trailer park or
a brick ranch house or something more grand and getting grander, it is all the same: Tornado
bait is tornado bait. When the Trump administration announced that
it was staging a UFC fight on the South Lawn of the White House, I
knew what I was seeing. It is as familiar to me as the taste of canned Ranch
Style Beans on cornbread or the smell of cigarette smoke soaking into
Dacron-upholstered office furniture and slick tallowy well-yellowed linoleum in
the grim waiting rooms outside those weepy Al-Anon meetings my mother dragged
me to for a while because she couldn’t afford a babysitter. I know my people.
My people know what they like. And they will have what they like even if it
harelips the pope—especially
if it harelips the pope.
It took 250 years, but you got here. All the way down
here. From Greatest Generation to White Trash Nation in the space of one
lifetime.
Welcome to my world, America.
