The Aqua Mustang 53 - MONGOLIA

Although Walter did most of the talking, he did seem fascinated by my experience of the world, which was so different from his –the foreign adventure part, and even more the part of my life when I was very young, a child, up in the restricted part of New Hampshire and also in Fairfield County Connecticut. And as my past came into focus, I was proud that from the very start I had rejected the family’s nasty bigotry, even though I had usually kept silent and seethed rather than go openly on the attack.

Such silence was becoming untenable in this time when everything was changing – this time when I was about to head up to northern New England to go on the hunt, feeling ready to kill as I gathered evidence against the villains and information about what had really happened, on the hunt for what had happened to all these cousins who were coming to such bad, often violent, ends now in the present, and not least what had really happened to myself.

Maybe on some level I had wanted to play the game. Why else Princeton? Even though I hated that shoddy Republican place, I did stay for all four years. And as for continuing to play the game: Why else give that “Twins in the American Century” shit a chance. Now I had to fight my way out of some maze I was in. Whether I had created it or been placed in it were irrelevant matters. But the fact that I might have a hand in it – me so opposed to so much of their awful nonsense from the time I was first aware of what they were doing, which started when I was about seven years old – that I might have had a hand in it somehow made logical sense – and made me even more want to kill.

Because I could not sit in silence anywhere now, I was spending almost all my time with people I knew only in this new time – people who were getting really organized now – people who were also on the hunt for family horrors in the present and especially in the past.

One reason I could not keep going to these hospitable Sunday gatherings, which had actually been a big part of life for me, was that nothing about me was explained there. I realized, as I began what I felt could be a fight to the death, that I could no longer listen to anyone’s nonsense.

One thing I had learned in those years of Sunday afternoons at Walter’s was that to people I consciously cared about, which more and more meant non-family people, the world I came from was as strange and forbidding and exotic too as would be the world of someone from Mongolia. And I realized that they would understand Mongolia better than they understood Waspdom.

For I knew William Buckley, who everyone thought so smooth, was a fraud. I just knew it. I was delighted when someone wrote that Buckley proved that old saying that if you give an Irishman a horse he will vote Tory. Buckley with his fake English accent – so like the fake English accents of my supposedly nearest and dearest, who also would know Buckley was a fraud even as they tried themselves to make accurate British sounds. No one in my family was nearly so cool as the Anglophile Irishman Buckley. My family’s model was non-existent.

I did not at this point, want to spend another Sunday afternoon with people who thought that what I came from was classy.