A Letter from Knoxville, On Mother's Day

Found among the letters of the novelist and historian Hamish Hepburn, after his death by asphyxiation in the year 2026:

May 11, 2008

Dear Mother,

I’m nursing a dreadful hangover after an evening spent in the company of a few delightful misogynists from a university’s creative writing faculty. I hope you won’t find too much cheek in my imparting that detail to you on this Mother’s Day. I also hope you will notice the postmark and recognize that I, your faithful son, remembered you on this saccharine holy day.

I must say my hangover is less savage than the one I suffered after that row with my former agent, D. (Though I’m sure you will remember I got his goat royally.) And as you’ve no doubt gleaned — albeit disapprovingly — from my fi ction, I am somewhat a student of depravity. As you also know and regret, I celebrate each new experience with grotesque levels of intoxication. Dear Mother, I have dived to the dark, slimy subterranean pit of human dissolution and wallowed in its most aberrant sludge.

My twin senses of horror and indecency have never been awakened as they were yesterday, however. As we discussed on the telephone last week, I had to make a stop in that precious little city called Knoxville, Tenn., where I lodged at the Saint Oliver Hotel. One does not come to Knoxville expecting to find rapture. (I don’t mean that in the biblical sense, of course, but rather in the Dionysian sense.)

I don’t remember if we’ve ever discussed Tennessee, or specifi cally Knoxville — well, I chuckle. Why would we? I don’t think you’ve ever been here. And that’s unfortunate, really, because it is peerless among all my travels for celebrating the macabre in the most vulgar, common, debasing way imaginable.

I refer to Knoxville’s Abortion Fest. Or Feast of All Abortions. Or maybe it’s the Abortion Day Parade. I don’t know; I haven’t yet found out exactly what they call it. But you know it is spring, and cities always host festivals in the spring. Celebrations of life and new growth and all that silly, optimistic crap. But in this unlikely place, one fi nds in the very middle of spring a perverse Mother’s Day celebration in which we revere the aborted fetuses of the past year.

I cannot begin to convey my excitement when, strolling along the paradoxically named Gay Street, I noticed a sizeable crowd of bystanders, as do the spectators at a parade. They were unremarkable in appearance, but many of them were carrying signs with gory photographs of shredded embryos and fetuses. My initial reaction was, naturally, a weary sigh. Although I did rather enjoy the civic sense of irony in staging an abortion protest on the Eve of All Mothers, I was uninterested in observing more and began to make my way down the long avenue in search of a place called the Old City, where someone had told me I could fi nd saloons.

Needless to say, the Hair O’ the Dog had to wait. For the moment I set foot against the crowd in the direction of my promised libations, a procession began. Dear Mother, you know I cannot lie to you (although I know you wish to God I would sometimes). There were hearses. Black, gleaming funeral hearses flanked on each side by pudgy Knights of Columbus with raised rapiers (love it!) and skinny high school tuba players intoning an off-key dirge. I believe there were about 30 hearses. It was rather like the somber public funerals we witnessed during our winters in Santiago, only with T-shirts and street preachers. Well, OK, it was nothing like Santiago. But it was an impressive automotive function.

Of course, I had to investigate. A woman to my right had cast a few unmistakable glances at me. I suppose I was rather the odd egg in my worn-out tweed jacket and Birkenstocks, and the truth is I hadn’t shaved in days. I didn’t fi t in at all. I caught one of her glances, smiled and introduced myself. I asked her what was going on.

What she told me made me bite my lip to stop myself laughing. There’s a group called Tennessee Right to Life, lobbyists whose agenda has something to do with stopping abortion. (I suppose they also have an agenda to stop fucking, as a fi rst step.) The organization — of which she was a proud and, I must say, strident member — paired up another lobbying group to host the event. The other lobbying group was an association of funeral homes, which provided the hearses.

Now, before you reject this entire missive as a juvenile hoax, Mother, I swear to you it’s all true. A pro-life team got together with a pro-death team and threw a party for aborted babies on Gay Street, Tennessee, on the eve of Mother’s Day. And everybody, it seems, showed up to join the fun. There were the prayers and solemnities one would expect, but the general attitude struck me as most peculiar. The list of intercessions included the women who have had abortions. The thinking seemed to be they were all dreadfully sorry about what they had done and were living disgraced lives of inconsolable grief. During the intercession on their behalf, a cleric announced God loved them just as much as He loved the children they had murdered.

I couldn’t really know if that assuaged whatever misgivings the poor lasses had about their error in judgment, so I asked my guide if she’d ever had an abortion. She offered a curt, rather acid, in fact, “No,” and turned right on her heel. I know it was tactless of me, but I only meant to fi nd out if she’d had one and felt better now she knew God still loved her. Since she was wearing a sweatshirt with the image of a mangled postpartum glob on it, I thought her sense of decorum would be more liberal than to get all huffy about a personal question. But one should never make assumptions about manners in a strange culture, you always said.

And it is on reflection of your wisdom, my dear, sweet Mother, that I close this letter by thanking you — as do, I’m sure, the boys in South Beach — for not aborting me. The world, including Knoxville, is a more interesting place with me in it.

Love,
Hamish