Outlaw Country

By C.J. Janovy
Photographs and illustrations by Li Anne Liew

Li Anne Liew is a filmmaker, motion designer, and photographer born and raised in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

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She’s long gone, so she can’t tell her side of the story. Even if she could, she wouldn’t deny my version. Because it’s true. We destroyed most of the evidence but not all. I still have a couple of pictures. And there were witnesses, even if they didn’t want to believe what they were seeing in the high school hallways of a respectable Midwestern capital city.

And if it makes any difference, she was never actually my teacher. My teachers were the hard ones: the snowy-headed harridan who taught Greek and Roman mythology and stood scowling at her classroom door, hands on wide hips during the minutes between bells, frightening any mediocre students who might have considered taking her class; the portly chemistry teacher who looked like an affable uncle but giggled sadistically while taking away points if we were moments late; the AP English teacher who, after I tried to fake my way through an answer about the Hemingway I hadn’t read, asked whether I could “possibly be more obtuse” (I’ve refused to learn the meaning of that word ever since). She was not one of those teachers.

Our school was big, a ’60s-era brick warren of hallways whose only windows were enormous glass panes at the end of each wing overlooking grassy no man’s lands between the parking lots and the surrounding neighborhoods of ranch homes and winding streets. But the school wasn’t so big we couldn’t keep track of all the adults in the building and which parts of our lives they controlled. So it was a surprise, one day halfway through my junior year, when I saw her face beaming out from the river of bodies flowing through the hallway. She didn’t look much older than the seniors and she was as short as the sophomores, so it was lucky I caught the sparkle in her eyes when she said hello to a passing student. She said the kid’s name with a sly smile that seemed conspiratorial, even though this wasn’t the type of kid most teachers greeted at all—he was one of the parka-wearing freaks who smoked cigarettes on a patch of dirt at a far corner of the building everyone called “the wall” years before Pink Floyd’s album came out. I’d never seen any adult at my school smile at any of the parka-wearing wall freaks. I wanted her to smile at me that way. 

This turned out to be easy.

Student newspaper reporters have a reason to talk to anyone, and I’d been tipped off to a controversy. The hard teachers were furious about the principal’s idea to slightly shorten all the day’s classes to make time for a 20-minute morning interlude when kids could learn something described as “life skills.” This was intellectual mush and a waste of time, said the hard teachers, a view endorsed by the student council. A few other teachers, the ones who taught easy classes like shop and driver’s ed, supported the principal’s idea. 

One morning when I arrived at my locker, the woman whose eyes had sparkled in the hallway stood nearby talking to another student council member, a senior named Rebecca. 

“What’s this all about?” I smiled at Rebecca, who rolled her eyes as I switched from my role as Rebecca’s fellow student council member to my role as hard-hitting student journalist. (Now I know it’s a conflict of interest for newspaper reporters to serve on the governing bodies they cover, but apparently that was okay in 1970s high school journalism.)

“We’re debating ‘life skills,’” Rebecca said.

“You support that,” I asked the woman. 

“I do,” she said. Her smile was not the same one she’d directed at the parka-wearing freak. Instead, she tilted her head with an unspoken question about my interrogation.

I introduced myself and shook her hand. It was solid and warm. Her cotton button-down shirt looked soft underneath her blazer, a professional counterweight to her ever-so-slightly spunky short haircut. I caught a little of her perfume, which was not heavy like at a department store makeup counter but mellow like the sun and vanilla (I would soon learn it was Halston). Later, I would be disappointed at her confession that my name had sounded only vaguely familiar. She’d not been a close reader of the student newspaper. 

What I learned was her generically titled World Studies classes had a high proportion of parka-wearing freaks who, it seemed obvious, would benefit from life skills. It was annoying to me, the fact that this glimmering woman I now saw everywhere was among the teachers sucking up to the administration.  

“She makes a good case,” Rebecca allowed. All around us, kids were slamming their lockers, oblivious to the importance of this conversation. 

“You don’t think it takes time away from real education?” I asked.

“What’s your definition of ‘real education’?” Finally, her lips curled with the wryness I’d seen when she’d smiled at the parka freak. Her eyes sparkled.

The bell rang. 

When I saw her in the hallways after that, she smiled at me and said my name.

A couple of weeks later, I spotted her in the bleachers at a Friday night basketball game. Our team, the defending state champions, was cocky and full of itself and the gym was packed. Her red wool pea coat made her easy to find afterward as everyone poured through the building’s heavy glass doors and into the black night turning our breath to frost. As boots crunched on the salt-and-ice-covered sidewalk, I maneuvered to a place where I could pretend to be surprised to see her. She seemed happy to see me (she seemed happy to see everyone). As we walked together I learned the tall man a few steps ahead of us was her husband—they’d come to the game with friends—and the not-particularly-small kids running through the snow were hers. The size of those kids threw me, but I stayed focused on my next goal. I’d already been memorable; now I needed to be intriguing. We’d reached the parking lot at the bottom of the hill and, as her family gathered around a big Thunderbird, I yelled a walking-away goodbye with a chaser: “I have something to tell you sometime.”

“Okay!” she yelled back. “I want to hear it!”

What I wrote in my first letter to her was that I was an unusual kid, frequently misunderstood by people my own age, and I could use an older, wiser friend. A few months later, she admitted she’d found these pages weird enough to show to a school psychologist, wondering, among other things, whether I was gay and the letter was a come-on. The school psychologist’s opinion was that I was odd but harmless and could in fact probably use some support. So she wrote back. 

I remember her first reply as a measured promise, in language that might have been crafted with the help of the psychologist, to keep listening. It’s lost among the boxes of letters both of us would later burn.

• • • •

Every night, alone in my room listening to Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings, I poured words onto a yellow legal pad like beer must have been flowing from taps into pitchers at bars all over town. “Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys” had just come out, providing me with the lyrics to explain myself: I wasn’t easy to understand, people who didn’t know me didn’t like me, and people who did know me sometimes didn’t know how to take me; I wasn’t wrong, I was just different, but I was too proud to do things to make anyone think I was right. This was the basic philosophy, which I then traced back a couple of years to Wanted! The Outlaws, with its “Good Hearted Woman”—where the hero gets the girl even though she doesn’t understand him—and “My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys”—where “cowboys are special with their own brand of misery.” All of which required me to explain how a girl—me—could be a cowboy. 

Absent any deep body of music or literature paying attention to how cowgirls might feel about themselves and the world—how they, too, might feel lonely and rebellious or misunderstood or longing for something they couldn’t have—I spent little time bothering with them. No, being a girl cowboy wasn’t about gender (a word most of us didn’t even use a whole lot back then) but about philosophy. But, as if to subconsciously affirm that I wasn’t gay, I also detailed my album-cover crush on Willie’s harmonica player Mickey Raphael, all skinny and swarthy with his Latin Afro and beard and a yellow Hawaiian shirt unbuttoned halfway down his chest, on the back of Willie and Family Live. It was unusual for the harmonica to be just as important to the overall sound of the band as the guitars, but Mickey Raphael’s harmonica was the sweet melodic balance to Willie’s strange scratchy voice. Then there were the existential questions. The last two tracks on Side 3 were “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” followed by a slow bluesy “Amazing Grace,” with its concluding verse about how, even after being there for ten thousand years, residents of heaven still have infinite days to sing God’s praise. 

Handing her a folded-up package of these pages at school every morning, I played the cowboy’s game of finding out if she understood me. I didn’t expect her to reply with letters of her own, but at first, she did. She confessed that she didn’t know how to answer my questions about God, but she suggested the minister at youth group might provide insights. She was struggling to know what to say, but the fact that she tried was enough proof that she did, in fact, understand me. She was impressed by my writing. She told me I was seventeen going on thirty.

• • • •

Her husband was a traveling salesman. She chuckled when she said this, her lips curling into that wry smile like it was a joke just for me. (I’d later observe that she always made the traveling salesman joke before anyone else could.) Lanky and second-string good-looking, he made decent money managing accounts around the Midwest for a snack food distributor, sometimes driving a company truck with enormous icy Dr. Pepper bottles painted on the sides. 

She’d grown up in a small town a couple of hours west, had come to the university and pledged a sorority, going to frat parties, and flirting and getting pregnant and dropping out of school and eloping to get married. Now that their two kids were getting older, she’d gone back to finish her degree. She’d started teaching at my school as a substitute, with a strategy of making herself well-liked and indispensable, volunteering to sponsor the Pep Club and chaperone dances and serve on the most tedious committees. It worked. The principal loved her. And the assistant principal, an aging but still-fit former jock with a ruddy baby face and a head of military-trimmed white hair who stalked the halls as the principal’s storm trooper, had nicknamed her “Little Girl.” 

“If I can’t have an affair with him, I’d want him as a second father,” she said of the man even the best students knew as a goon. 

This was several months after the two of us began talking. By then I knew how, whenever her smile suggested she was joking, I should watch instead for a flash of light in her eyes. That light sparked as she joked about having an affair with the assistant principal, infuriating me in a way I didn’t yet understand; at that moment, the fact that she had somehow ingratiated herself to this man, as well as to the parka-wearing freaks he routinely disappeared, became another aspect of her life, like the husband and the age of her kids, that I subconsciously could not accept. I had little empathy for the complexities of her life at home, which included evening classes for her master’s degree and studying far past midnight. She confided that her husband wasn’t happy about laundry piling up and dishes rising in the sink when there wasn’t even any dinner on the table. But the two of them were enjoying the extra income now that she was full-time at my high school. Evidence of that was out in the teacher’s parking lot: her sleek and spotless sky-blue 280Z. 

It became our getaway car.

• • • •

I began stopping by her classroom during the last hour of the day, when I’d normally have gone up to the art room and messed around on the pottery wheel, and when she’d normally have graded multiple choice tests for her easy classes. Soon, though, all of 7th hour wasn’t enough time for everything we needed to talk about, and we stayed long past the final bell. Unfortunately, though, other visitors began showing up. It started with two other social studies teachers. The first one, who I’ll call Trotsky, wore a beard and a wrinkled suit and explained Marxism to his advanced social studies class; the other, who reminded me of Mickey Rooney, was a beloved elder who’d suffered a stroke a few years earlier and now leaned gleefully on the arms of cheerleaders who escorted him on his slow shuffles through the hallways and, because his classroom was at the far end of the building just inside the doors that led to The Wall, he’d also befriended the freaks who hung out there. Like any kid who approached him, I’d been the beneficiary of his hugs, all old-man sweat and coffee breath, itchy wool sweater and sandpaper cheek. He’d wallpapered one room in his tiny house with senior pictures students had given him down through the years, which everyone knew because we’d all brought beer to his house—the understanding was he’d never serve us alcohol but if we showed up with our own, what was so wrong about providing a safe place and good conversation? Trotsky and Rooney were an inseparable duo, the rumpled scowler and the loopy friend to all. 

They’d interrupted 7th hour one day after wandering down the hallway and glancing in to see her, looking from outside as if she were sitting alone at her desk near the chalkboard. Trotsky barreled in and saw me there, lounging in a desk that would have made me a front-row student if class had been in session. I could see him absorbing the fact of my presence, a look of surprise that lasted as long as it took him to remember that he, too, had spent time talking with me about politics and journalism and life. Then came the slower Rooney, who spread his arms wide and smiled crookedly, his raspy voice exalting two of his favorite people. 

“We were just going to happy hour,” Trotsky said to her. “Come join us.” 

She glanced at me. “I can’t today,” she said, so Trotsky and Rooney looked at each other and sat down in desks, too, and we all had a lively salon, though I quickly grew impatient with the intruders. After that, Trotsky and Rooney began popping in at random, flirting with her and putting on what started to feel like a comedy act while they tried to figure out why she and I were always sitting there in her empty classroom. My annoyance with this routine hardened into anger and I sat there petulantly willing them to leave, which they didn’t do until the whole building had grown quiet and finally she said she had to get home and make dinner. 

My first ride in her car was unplanned, at the end of one empty-feeling afternoon when she had meetings at the school district headquarters downtown and there had been no 7th-hour gabfest. I hung around for a while in the art room. By the time I decided to call it a day, the building felt deserted as I headed toward my usual exit, a side hall close to the teachers’ parking lot. Then, at the end of the long dark corridor, a heavy door opened in a flash of daylight and I saw the silhouette of someone who could only be her walking toward me. She was wearing some sort of serape, her sunglasses pushed up in windblown hair. She grinned, a different look from the wry smile I now knew she gave everyone.  

“I thought you were out this afternoon.” I could barely comprehend my good luck. 

“I came back,” she said. “I hoped you might still be here.” 

No one had ever said anything like this to me. I told her I was just leaving. 

“You want to go get some ice cream?” It seemed as if she was thinking fast.

Of course I wanted ice cream.

The 280Z still smelled a little new, but mostly it smelled like Halston. She turned right on the busy thoroughfare that led toward the more rundown territory of our high school rivals to the north, and pulled into a crumbly strip mall where she parked in front of a Baskin-Robbins. Always dieting, she ordered iced tea. I ordered daiquiri ice in a sugar cone. 

“Is that making you drunk?” she joked when we were back in the car.

I was buzzed, but not from the ice cream. 

“I want to get drunk with you,” I said.

And so we began leaving school every afternoon not for ice cream or to get drunk but to fantasize about getting drunk, along with everything else we could now talk about free of Trotsky and Rooney, out past the edge of town on the dirt roads separating cornfields. In the tape deck were Waylon and Willie cassettes I’d made her. 

“He’s got the sexiest voice I’ve ever heard,” she said about Waylon one day.

This was new. 

In my overnight writing to her, I’d been quoting Waylon the philosopher. But in his music she, more experienced in these matters, had heard something all her own. When Waylon sang from the shadows to a woman who’d married well but wasn’t satisfied, saying he knew her husband couldn’t give her the one thing she needed most of all and promising he’d be waiting if she ever came to call, maybe she felt his warm baritone somehow pulling her away from her own life, toward some unknown place where the excitement justified the risk. 

We were heady over the closeness in her tiny car and this time together, which was technically innocent but illicit in a way we understood without acknowledging it. We felt like outlaws but it turned out we were not especially creative ones, because we saw familiar faces behind the dark windshields of cars on these dusty roads: parka-wearing freaks in a beat-up Gremlin; slightly more popular long-hairs in a Duster; a couple of kids we knew nothing about in a rusty white van. One day one of these kids told her he’d seen her car out in the country and she pretended she didn’t know what he was talking about, as if a pristine sky-blue 280Z wouldn’t have been the most noticeable vehicle for miles.     

In our other lives, I partied with my friends and she went out for happy hour with teachers. Eventually we made plans to drink together. It would be on the night of the last school dance in May, which she was on duty to chaperone for an hour between 8 and 9. I would tell my parents I was meeting my friends at 6 and park my car in the lot at a pizza place, where she’d pick me up and we’d drive around and have a couple of beers before she dropped me back off and drove to the fern bar where teachers were having pre-dance cocktails; then we’d make our obligatory appearances at the dance and leave separately after her shift ended and have a couple more beers and I’d be home for my midnight curfew. 

The parking lot at the pizza place was busy at 6 o’clock on a Friday night, but I found a spot and waited, amped on adrenaline. It seemed to take forever for sky blue to flash in my rearview mirror. There she was, window rolled down, eyes droopy behind her sunglasses, lips looking slurry as she mouthed: “Get your ass in here.”

She’d had happy hour on an empty stomach and probably shouldn’t have been driving. But we cracked Miller Lites as she kept going until the road intersected with a two-lane highway headed out of town. Soon we’d downed enough beer to have ballooning bladders, so just before the Interstate she pulled into the empty white-rock parking lot outside a wood-shingled place called Stan’s Lounge. Stan’s was dark and deserted inside except for a band that was about to start playing in the corner. The guys behind the microphones looked happy to see us walk in, their faces falling as we bee-lined for the bathroom. By the time we stumbled out again, they were just cranking up “Free Bird.”

Back outside in the sunshine, I was overcome with mopeyness.

“If I left here tomorrow, would you remember me?” 

“Yeah,” she said, “I would.” 

Inside the 280Z, we grew maudlin. Maybe it was occurring to us that in a couple of weeks it would be summer, which meant three months apart, or maybe it was the painful realization of something farther away, like graduation and my plans to go to college in another state. I’d always planned to leave but now leaving was inconceivable. More incomprehensible was that I would go to college right here in my hometown. That we would discover a gay bar where she’d be distracted by disco, and that another lesbian would put an end to my first lesbian love affair just like the glossy Urban Cowboy soundtrack, which wasn’t country at all, would steal the country music airwaves from the outlaws. Or that someday she’d find her way back to the respectability of a straight man’s marriage.

We finished our six-pack in silence except for whatever Waylon was moaning about on the tape deck as she sped back to the pizza place. Half an hour later, in the crepe-papered school lunchroom, I sulked around the edges as a bad college band played Doobie Brothers covers, watching her across the crowd as she laughed with other teachers. I endured this until 15 minutes before her shift was over, then went to my car and downed a now-warm beer I’d stashed in my trunk and drove to a nearby side street where she picked me up again.

Out in the country, it was a gorgeous spring night, so she parked on a dirt road. She’d sobered up a little, but I’d spent the last hour stewing in furious beer-soaked teenage hormones. I have no idea what she said that sent me lurching out of the car and down the road, but I heard her yell: “Don’t go!” 

My next move might have been consciously dramatic, or I might have just been too drunk to walk, but now I was on my knees in the dust, crying. I could hear her car door slam, hear her running over to me. Now her arms were around me, enclosing me in soft warmth, breathing in Halston.

“What can I do?” she said.

I’d been spending a lot of time listening to Willie sing (Rodney Crowell’s) “Till I Gain Control Again.” Of all the songs on all my records, it was the one that put words closest to how I’d been feeling. The singer’s met someone he’s never lied to; he’s shown his true self to her; there’s nothing he could ever hide from her; she sees him better than he sees himself. Out on the road ahead of him, he sings, are turns where he’ll spin. “I only hope that you will hold me now,” went the refrain, “’till I gain control again.”

All I could do was quote him. “Hold me,” I said.

“I can do that,” she said.

“I know I’m not gay,” I said.

“I know you’re not,” she whispered.

Both of us lying to ourselves and each other. We stood up and walked back to her car, and I sat on the hood and cried some more and she put her arms back around me. 

I guess the only thing she could think of to say was cribbed from Willie’s new cover of a Sinatra song. “I could so easily take all of you,” she said. 

“That’s what I want you to do.” 

We weren’t talking about anything physical. Except that we were. We lied to ourselves because we didn’t have any words of our own to describe our feelings. The only language we had for this was outlaw country music, and we’d been soaking in it and believed its promise. We didn’t have to worry about breaking the rules because none of them applied to us.

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