Living Blue in the Red States

7. Here Was Johnny

7. Here Was Johnny Steve Heller In May of 2003 my wife Sheyene and I moved from Manhattan, Kansas , “The Little Apple,” to Venice Beach, California. The move was a remarkable uprooting for both of us. Sheyene is considerably younger than I am, but she had lived her entire life in Kansas, growing up in the farm community of Clay Center, which I affectionately refer to as Middle Dirt. Clay Center is the county seat of Clay County, one of the most conservative counties in one of the most conservative states in the nation. Once a hotbed of grass roots populism, in recent decades Kansas has become increasingly known for its flat earth politics, a place where intelligent design is promoted as science, a woman’s right to have an abortion is regarded as both blasphemy and legalized murder, and farmers on the verge of economic ruin routinely vote for politicians whose policies speed up the process. Why and how this all happened is answered brilliantly in Thomas Frank’s recent book What’s the Matter with Kansas? What I’m concerned with here is how it feels, as a secular humanist respectful of the views of others, to live in such a state—and how it feels to have left. Sheyene and everyone on her mother Karla’s side of the family, the Henderson/Stunkels, were yellow dog Democrats, contrarians who would rather vote for a yellow dog than a Republican. This made them part of a small but vocal Middle Dirt minority. With the exception of her grandma Mabel, a good Christian who outlived three husbands , the left side of Sheyene’s family smoked, drank, joked, cursed, and generally carried on in ways that would make a pastor blush. The 103 104 | Steve Heller right side of Sheyene’s family, the Hoyles, her stepdad John’s side, was composed of conservative business people. Respectable people, the moral center of Clay County, even if most of them actually lived elsewhere . They all went to church—perhaps not everyone every Sunday —and did far fewer of the other things the left side did. Especially Grandma Hoyle, a widow by the time I met her, and one of the most polite, elegant people I’ve ever known. When I came into the picture, an older man with four children, going through a divorce after a quarter century of solid-seeming marriage , I expected trouble from both sides of the family. Especially the right. I didn’t get it. What I got from both sides, to my astonishment, was acceptance. We’re so happy Sheyene wound up with a professor, the right side said. Sheyene’s always been such a smart one. Half of us thought Sheyene would run away with a truck driver, the left side said. The other half thought she was a lesbian. Have another beer, Steve. The two sides were seldom seen together. Holidays, birthdays, and other occasions were celebrated on separate sides of town. Whenever there were concurrent gatherings, Sheyene and I shuttled between sides, sometimes accompanied by Sheyene’s adopted little brother Jackson Reeve, before returning to Manhattan, where all four of my children and their mother still lived. Until Sheyene’s mother and stepdad divorced, they shuttled between sides as well. The left and right sides of the family communicated through emissaries : Stepdad John, the black sheep of the right (a plumber at Kansas State who likes motorcycles and beer), and, less frequently, Grandma Mabel (whose lips have never tasted cigarettes, alcohol, or profanity), the white sheep of the left. And, of course, Sheyene, the darling of both sides, the one who was smart and honest and funny (though never gross, not with the right side, anyway) and loved equally by everyone even though she’d fallen in love with an old married atheist with four children instead of a good Christian, a truck driver, or a lesbian. I’m sure each side of the family had many heated debates about Sheyene and me. But the heat never spilled from one side to the other. Here Was Johnny | 105 The shuttle diplomacy of Sheyene and Mabel and John allowed both sides to maintain a kind of civility that in the end seemed bizarrely normal. Of course civility has its price: its effect on the development of one’s character. I’d learned about this effect long before I’d ever set foot in...