The Trees Grow Crooked Here and Other Stories

By J. L. Long

Tea-obsessed pseudophilosophers. Lesbian teen Audrey Hepburn fanatics. X-rated Santa Clauses. The literal Devil.

All these characters and more you'll meet in The Trees Grow Crooked Here and Other Stories, a collection of thirteen short stories written over the span of nearly two decades. Character-rich stories written in a range of genres create a book that represents classic yet modern American story-telling.

• Language: English
• Publisher: J. L. Long
• Release date: Mar 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9781530482979

Book preview

The Trees Grow Crooked Here

and other stories

by J. L. Long

COPYRIGHT © 2016, 2021 BY J. L. LONG

Publisher's Note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

All rights are reserved by the author and copyright owner. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or distributed in any form, by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of the author and copyright owner.

ISBN: 978-1-5304-8297-9

The Trees Grow Crooked Here and Other Stories

by J. L. Long

Table of Contents

Introduction

The Thing About Tea

Pyromania

Fat Elvis

Bring the Mountain to Muhammad

The Ice Cream Man Cometh

Porno and Mistletoe

Ten Mississippi

Ugly

This Exam Will Be Graded Anonymously

Morning in America

The Trees Grow Crooked Here

The Last McDonald's in Paris

Mary Hollingsbrooke Goes Straight to the Devil

Introduction

When I was thirteen years old, I tried to kill myself.

Hang on—don't go. This isn't going to be one of those kinds of essays. Or, well, perhaps I shouldn't say that. Does anyone who writes one of those kinds of essays ever think that they're writing one of those kinds of essays? I can promise, at least, that I'll try not to.

But as I said, when I was thirteen, I tried to kill myself. I was severely depressed and just beginning to grapple with my sexuality and gender, in addition to all the various garden variety horrors inherent to being thirteen. At the time I was deeply closeted, about being queer and about being transgender, and keeping those things secret bled into nearly every area of my life. I felt terribly, terribly alone.

This collection of stories was written primarily during my mid to late teen years through my early twenties. As I was selecting and revising stories for inclusion here, I chose stories that I thought would work well together. That would present some sense of cohesiveness if not an outright theme. I didn't know just what that might be, at first—at first, all I had was a vague sense of these stories belonging together—but as I got farther into the revisions, what should have been obvious from the outset slowly dawned on me.

These are stories about alienation.

These are stories about the many things that keep us apart from one another, including and especially ourselves. They are stories about unloved and unlovable people. They are stories about quiet desperation and enduring sorrow.

And, too, these are stories about fighting back against that alienation.

These stories are stories about the very human quest for connection—and the just as human way we often screw it all up. These are stories about unloved and unlovable people who somehow love and are loved in return. They are stories about quiet courage and enduring tenacity.

These stories are, in other words, stories straight from the heart of a lonely, depressed thirteen-year-old queer trans boy who tried to kill himself. And just as importantly, these are stories straight from a lonely young boy who tried to kill himself and failed, who went on to grow up to become a man who built for himself a life far less lonely than the one he knew before.

Thank you for reading, and I hope you might find yourself feeling just a little bit less lonely by the end than you did at the beginning.

— J. L. Long

The Thing About Tea

So I sat there, holding a lit clove cigarette between my middle and fore fingers, watching the smoke curl lazily up towards the ceiling, while wondering why all British stories involved tea in some way. It was inevitable. If you were some protagonist of the female species, and life was looking grim and drizzly, you had yourself a good cry then a good cup of tea. If you were nobility, or merely rich, you threw afternoon tea parties for your upper-class acquaintances. Englishmen in foreign, barbaric lands, such as France or Germany or New Jersey, took refuge in their teapots as their single remaining link to civilization and sanity.

And I wondered—why tea? Why not coffee, or hot chocolate, or warm apple cider? Mona told me I was obsessing. She said that tea is a British thing and, like most British practices, questioning it would be both futile and frustrating. I also never understood driving on the left side of the road, I replied, but that never shows up in British literature.

Americans drink tea too, Emily, Mona had told me. Remember the Boston Tea Party?

Of course I remembered. I had been one of the top history students in my high school. My credentials being what they were, I felt more than qualified to point out to Mona that, while American colonists had once been huge tea drinkers, that was no longer the case. Now we took to drinking double-tall café lattes.

Besides—tea does not appear with such frequency in American literature. 

So the question remained: why tea?

Why not? Mona had cried, sounding perhaps a bit exasperated.

Why not, indeed.

At that point, I switched the cigarette from my left to my right hand and took a long pull.

It occurred to me that I had always been blessed—or cursed, depending on how one sees it—with unusual powers of perception. If I wished, I could spend the rest of the afternoon and most of the night exploring the meaning of tea in the written word. But I did not wish. I had other matters to attend to: the coffee table cried out for dusting, Tom Dahill had just called this morning about some urgent disaster at the bookstore that needed my attention even though it was my day off, and Mona was again complaining about my personal appearance. Even worse, Mona wasn't entirely wrong. I had to admit that I really did need a haircut in the near future.

Yet—and there was always a yet—I could not disengage my mind from tea. It was such a peculiar phenomenon, was it not? I had scavenged through my mother's old collection of vinyl records and could not find the same incessant references to that particular beverage in music as in the literary world. Did Eric Clapton sing the praises of Earl Grey? Did the Beatles, in three-part harmony, extol the pleasures of oolong? Did the Who, the Stones, the Yardbirds? Did David Bowie, did Pink Floyd, did Queen, and all the rest?  No. No, they did not.

It doesn't matter anyway, Mona had declared, "because you don't drink tea."

I might, I'd replied.

But you don't.

Which had been true enough.  I have never been a huge tea aficionado.    

Well, there. Mona had crossed her arms over her chest, as was her wont when she felt that she had won. If you don't even drink the stuff, why does it matter?

Now it must be said, in Mona's defense, that she is a marvelous girl. She is kind, infinitely generous, and even quite attractive. I have known her essentially all my life and have been her best friend almost as long. We've always been perfect compliments to each other. She's the beauty, and I the brain. She always goes out with tons of men, while I never really did grasp the point of dating. And so on and so forth. But as much as I adore Mona, she sometimes has difficulty in grasping things, even obvious things.

It was with some disdain, then, that I had replied, "Why does it matter?  And, after a suitable pause for impact: Mona, it's there! The question is there, in front of you, laughing in your face! It's begging to be answered and all you can say is, why does it matter?"

She had looked at me, in what I'd imagined was the rage of defeat, for a few moments. Then she'd left, slamming the door behind her. I'd sat in my easy chair and lit a clove. Although my disagreements with Mona were distressing, I knew she would be back.  She always came back to me. Even the time she called me arrogant and an asshole, while simultaneously threatening to destroy my entire set of vintage Encyclopedia Britannica, she'd come back the very next day with apologies. She always came back, usually with apologies and occasionally with chocolates.

It was simply the nature of our relationship.

Still, I had enough common sense to call her up and leave an appropriately remorseful message on her voicemail, begging her to forgive me, my stubbornness, my callousness, my stupidity, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. That task dutifully accomplished, I returned to my pondering of tea.

To aid my pondering, I turned on the television set in the corner. Generally I was not given to watching television, but I figured I needed something to help me relax. Tension is not conducive to thinking.

I had been watching some game show, with absurdly easy questions concerning pop culture mundanities, for about ten minutes when Mona called me back. She said she didn't believe that I was sincere, based on what was in the voicemail. I sighed, explained that of course I was sincere, didn't she know me better than that, and asked if she wanted to hear my latest theory on tea.

Oh, go ahead. I know you'll do it, no matter what I say, she said, with a very disconcerting lack of enthusiasm.

I chose to ignore this, however. I began a detailed explanation of how and when tea was introduced into Great Britain; its effect upon the economy, traditions, and culture of that island; and concluded that because of tea's unique, exalted status in the land, that was enough reason for its prominence in the literature.

Mona was unimpressed. Genius, Holmes, she said dryly. Pure genius.

I hung up the phone and decided my theory needed some revision.

But first, I needed some tea. I padded out to the kitchen in my fuzzy slipper socks and put on the kettle. Rummaging through my cupboards, I found a mostly-filled box of Earl Grey tucked in the very corner. I took a sniff and, finding nothing obviously amiss, decided probably the tea leaves were still good. Or, at least, unlikely to cause me to drop dead.

Elbows on the counter, I gazed out the kitchen window while waiting for the kettle water to come to a boil. My neighbor across the street waved to me. I waved back. He was a nice old fellow. He wore wool caps and black socks, no matter the season or the weather, and he was always mowing his front lawn. In fact, that was exactly what he was doing at the moment.  Trimming the grass with his old-fashioned push mower.

Just then, the kettle began whistling, and I took it off the burner. I poured it into a teacup, sat down at the counter, and suddenly felt like calling Mona up again. Unfortunately, she had probably already left her house and put her phone on silent. She had a date tonight with her boyfriend—some cretin who worked at the downtown Wal-Mart and was named Boris, of all things—and I knew he was supposed to have picked her up already. Besides, it would be unseemly of me to call her again. I would not be reduced to groveling before her.

The tea wasn't very good. Perhaps it needed milk and sugar. But I did not get up to fetch any, for the simple reason that I had become depressed thinking about Mona's boyfriend. I did not particularly care for Boris. He never seemed to grasp Mona's specialness. Although she's admittedly no great intellect, her spirit and beauty are unrivaled. Boris, however, only saw her for her wallet and her credit cards.

And, of course, he disliked me as well. He delighted in saying I was an arrogant bitch and also made unflattering comments as to why I never dated, most involving my general  level of unattractiveness. To which Mona would always reply, quite nobly if rather unconvincingly, Emily is beautiful!

I gently set my teacup on the counter. Wasting brain cells on Boris had ruined the drink for me entirely. I looked out the window again, waved once more to my neighbor who still was mowing his immaculate lawn, and retired to my room. It was early still, but I had might as well take a nap. I drew my curtain and got under my bed covers. Mona always joked that I had a king-sized bed, as only a king-size could accommodate my tremendous ego, according to her. But in reality I had a simple twin. I hated anything larger. All the extra space would only serve to remind me that I was alone and unloved, involved with no one and with no hope of ever becoming involved.

I was not feeling any better than I had before.

Turning over, I hugged my pillow to my chest. The truth was, I did not date not only because of disinterest, though there was that, but also because I was terribly ugly. Incredibly perceptive, but terribly ugly. I kept no mirrors in the house except in the bathroom because I hated looking at myself—dirty hair, lumpy body, pock-marked skin. All unsightly and, the true crime, all preventable.

Mona did not know that I realized this fact, but I did. I'm not an idiot, after all. Quite the opposite. Besides, I have eyes like anyone else.

It wasn't until the phone rang that I'd realized I had managed to fall asleep. I flipped on the light beside the bed and stumbled out into the living room, where my cell phone was ringing for the third time. I snatched up the phone and groggily mumbled, Hello.

Did I wake you? asked Mona with unusual concern for my well-being.

No, I was just resting my eyes. I swallowed over the thick feeling in my throat. How are you?

To tell the truth, I'm not too great.

I noticed a tremor in her voice.  This was distressing.  Mona does not cry—ever.

Mona, what's wrong?

Oh, it's nothing. Nothing much. Which was a lie.  Quite plainly, she was sniffling on the other end of the line. It's just Boris.

Sudden rage flared within me. What did the bastard do to you?

"Nothing, Emily!  Don't you see?  It's what I did to him."

I did not see.  However, for Mona's sake, I kept this to myself.

Don't you see? she repeated. I hurt him. I screwed up. He's gone, and I don't think he's going to come back this time. She sighed, and it came out sounding almost like a moan. We were talking about getting married again. I thought it was too soon. That we weren't ready yet. I mean, it's been five months, you know? But Boris didn't see it that way. He said he wanted to know I was his and would never belong to any other man.

And what did you tell him?