12. Somebody Else

Every heavy tale has a useful fool. Yorick. Luna Lovegood. Mario Incandenza. The White Knight. On the BBC series Downton Abbey, George V is king, and the Earl and Countess of Grantham live in an enormous house with their three daughters and untold numbers of servants. One of them, a small kitchen maid, is named Daisy. Her skin's wan and her voice is all pip and squeak. Once, Daisy watches the cook push a planchette over a spirit board and believes a ghost was talking to her. Once, she lies about seeing a valet steal some winebottles. She falls in love with a footman, who, it's clear to everybody but her, is gay—"Not a ladies man," in the words of the cook—and, later, she marries a dying soldier because everybody tells her to. Then this man dies. "I feel nothing," Daisy tells Ms. Patmore. She wakes at 4:30 every morning and creeps round the family’s bedrooms, lighting fires. Seventeen hours later she's washed crockery for the fourth time that day and is sent to bed, like a child, while the grownups gossip in the servants' hall. Among every domestic who abides her lot at Downton, Daisy is the lowest. Rankless. Impulsive. She's a dunce and a ditz. Everybody loves her.

11. An Interlude

Then, one day, it occurred to me that I'd never bought a daisy at a flower shop, at least not intentionally, and I wondered what I might learn about Bellis perennis and its position among its peers by finding a florist in town to sell me, say, a couple dozen. I was, as of this writing, new to a college town, so I emailed my colleagues for suggestions and got two responses: the literature professor said that even when she lived in North Carolina would she order all her flowers from Stephanie's, and the poet said a place with the name Jester's was always good to drop by for browsing and idle chat with the experts.

Months passed before I had any occasion to which bringing a bouquet of flowers would be appropriate. Yes, they do say that any occasion is a good occasion for flowers, but everyone knows this nonsense comes from the clever wheedling of florists hoping to get you to drop thirty-forty bucks on their merchandise. I waited and was patient. As the semester ended, our friend Heather's due date became less of a far-off abstraction, and we decided it was time to throw her the kind of baby shower where men and women alike could wish the couple well, and where no one would be forced to play fatuous parlor games. And here, at last, was an occasion for not just flowers, but lo! a baby! for those little innocent daisies I'd been, these past months, wasting so much breath over.

I decided to call ahead to those florists my colleagues had recommended. When Stephanie's answered I went: "Um, yeah. Do y'all have ... uh, daisies?" Stephanie's did have daisies. Stephanie's's daisies were 85 cents apiece. "How many do you have?" I asked. "Or: how many do you think you'll have by Saturday?" I wanted three dozen. I'd pictured many small bouquets of daisies in tall drinking glasses just sort of thrown all over the house of our friend Amy, who was hosting. The woman on the line went to go check. It took but a silent minute.

"Sir," she said. "They're not Gerber daisies."

"That's fine," I said.

They had plenty, but I called Jester's to give them a fair shot at my business, and the man who answered told me he didn't believe they did have daisies in stock. "Lemme go check real quick," he said and set the phone down. In the background I heard Barry Manilow sing, "Caught up in a world of uphill climbing, the tears are in my eyes, and nothing is rhyming."

"Only thing we have is red and yella Gerber daisies," the man from Jester's said to me. "But they are sold."

Gerbera hybridae is a species under the genus named in 1737 for a German physician lost to history. They are heavy and often require little prophylactic straws to prevent bowing. I am not interested in Gerber daisies.

I made a plan to stop by Stephanie's Saturday afternoon on the way to Amy's, and to buy three dozen for $33.35 with tax. Neal and I were in charge of food, and one afternoon he trekked clear to Birmingham to grab cheese and beer at Costco. That he and I had thought hard about and planned for this trip, and that on the phone that Friday morning we were vocally excited about the selection of grocery items there, was just the latest in an ongoing string of reminders that we live, now, in our thirties, very adult lives. Costco, it turned out, also had daisies. For cheap.

"They're nine dollars," Neal said of the pre-wrapped bunch. "Here, I'll send you a picture. Call me back." I waited for the email and clicked the attachment. Were those daisies? Why were the capitula so green? Why did the florets curve and curl upward rather than shoot flat out like blades of ivory grass?

"I think they're white chrysanthemums," I told him when I called back. I felt somewhat of an expert. I'd been burned before and I wouldn't let it happen again.

"White chrysanthemums?" he said.

"I don't know. They don't look right."

"They're nine dollars," he said. "And I'm not gonna count them but there are way more than a dozen in here."

He was right. We were on a budget. "Okay, yeah, what the hell?" I said, and Neal snatched up the bunch.

At home they got a lot of scrutiny. "Daisies don't smell very nice," I said, not knowing anything of it. "No, they don't," Neal said. All the same we took them to the shower. Neal cut the stems and set them in a silver water-service pitcher by the stereo. I set out food while Amy's daughter Daisy watched me like a hawk and snacked on our grapes.

"Are you a boy or a girl?" she asked, grinning.

"What do you think?" I asked.

"A boy!" she said. It was some kind of riddle. Then, shortly after: "You have a funny name."

Oh, I have the funny name, I thought, spraying Olive Oil Pam on a sliced up baguette. I do. And at the end of the night I took the daisies home, mistaking who they'd been meant for all along.

10. Boy Parts, Girl Parts

Flowers are feminine things, but there's no clear way of understanding why. Is it that we leave adornment for women, that we are not the birds? One way flowers' innate femininity is false is linguistic.  Flower, the noun, is male in Latin (flos), Hebrew (perach), Russian, (цветок), Polish (kwiat), Italian (fiore), Irish (bláth), and Norwegian (blomst/blome). Doubtless others. The other way it's not true is morphological. Most flowers—the Asteraceae at least—contain both a stamen and a pistil, and owing to their names' unlikelihoods I'm going to let you guess re the sex of these organs which is which. Botanists confusingly refer to this trait in flowers as bisexuality, but if they were little humans we'd call them intersex, the lately added I to this new world's ever-growing GLBTQIAA acronym.

All this, however, runs counter to what we just know: flowers are feminine. And if the flower is a feminine object then the daisy is perhaps our girliest. It would be unthinkable to name a boy Daisy to everyone other than those couples who see having a baby as an opportunity to break down traditional gender boundaries.

Is why that girl group SHeDAISY feels so poorly named. Wacky caps aside: how dully redundant! Like naming a band HePENIS.

9. Of Human Bondage

Another summer game for little girls: knot the stembottom of one daisy noosely under the head of another. Continue until a loop is formed, large enough to drape around your own little neck. Abracadabra. You are a princess from some far-off place.

It's been given in these modern times more figurative uses, but defining what makes a chain a daisy chain is difficult. There seems a requisite asymmetry of the links. A causal string of consequence—one element of Link₁ appearing in and exerting influence on Link₂. Or? The OED won't help, lazily allowing that the literal daisy-garland definition has been transf. into more fig. uses. What quot'd examples that don't come from the military come from commodities trading: a group that buys and sells only among itself so as to inflate prices before selling on the open market. It's in this way that chains get daisied. A you-scratch-my-back-and-I'll-scratch-yours system of blooming self-interest.

Which leads us back to the tawdry: the daisy chain as sex act. Like a 69 to the nth power, where n = your total swinging volunteers. Through careful planning (n ≡ 0 [mod 2], to start) can a daisy chain be kept safely heterosexual, but when I see those words I see something smuttier. A sagged loop of Craigslisted strangers. Every daisy dicksucker his own Lucky Pierre.

8. Peace, Little Girl

There was a time not too long ago when the daisy had a certain vigor. This vigor was either rooted in the daisy's symbolic innocence, or it stemmed from same, and that these puns are unavoidable tells us something about flowers as a means of cognition. We've got the poor things tangled up in our idioms.

I'm talking, I'm afraid, about the 1960s. That time when the center stopped holding. Or, if you want, when the wave finally broke and rolled back. It was in 1964 that LBJ wanted to continue the administration he got handed aboard Air Force One the previous fall—his freshly dead president just miles away, Jackie stricken at his side, and Jack Valenti within his raised right arm's reach, rheumy over a bouquet of you guessed it. Johnson in August got Congress to pass the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and by the end of the month polled 27 points over Goldwater. And yet, to acquire a presidency from an assassin and not an electorate is like going stag to a prom whose decorations committee you once volunteered for. No one wants a wallflower legacy. So in September, the Democratic National Committee aired what everyone seems to agree was the first televised attack ad, starring a girl in a field. In her little fist she holds a daisy.

"One, two, thray, four," a voiceover counts amid bird-twitters. The girl's pretty much ripping the florets from the flower's capitulum.

"Five, seven, six.... Six...."

There's an adorableness here. More birds.

"Eight, nine.... Ni—"

She doesn't get to repeat nine because another, colder voiceover cuts her off, reversing and thus undoing her careful counting.

Then the shot of the girl freezes. The camera zooms in on her eye. As the countdown hits one we're in tight on her pupil, and inside that pupil an A-bomb explodes into a mushroom cloud. It goes off right in her eyeball. Cue LBJ:

These are the stakes: to make a world in which all of God's children can live, or go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die.

Three years later, Johnson had ordered more bombs dropped on North Vietnam than were dropped on Japan in the entire Second World War. More bombs than were dropped on Korea. In October of 1967 a 17-year-old named Jan Rose Kasmir found herself in Washington D.C. at the wrong end of a line of bayonets. It was the March on the Pentagon, held at a time when majority opinion had turned against the country's involvement in Vietnam. Abbie Hoffman was there, dressed as Uncle Sam. So were Norman Mailer, Dr. Benjamin Spock, and photographer Marc Riboud, who snapped at a crucial moment a photo of Kasmir holding a daisy like a talisman in front of a wall of MPs. This was the flower's power.

Riboud's is a black-and-white photograph. Kasmir's eyes are wide open. A line glows along the edge of her rippled silhouette, backlit from the setting sun. She's got the daisy turned away from the camera, as though letting it seek out that last light. As though the thing were too powerful for the military to behold head-on.

Forty-five years later I find Jan Rose Kasmir to ask her about that day. "I hope this is not too big a comedown," she writes. "But it was a chrysanthemum. Not a daisy."

What it means to me that it's not a daisy held for eternity before a dozen loaded rifles and sharpened bayonets is that the world cannot always fit into the hopes I might have for it. That plans are often funny things to make. Kasmir's email wasn't so much a comedown as a total devastation. Even her middle name is wrong. I should have seen this coming.

Though it only aired once, after 9pm EST, during NBC's Monday Night at the Movies, the Daisy Ad was viewed by an estimated 50 million people. In a poll that week, 53 percent of women and 45 percent of men agreed that Barry M. Goldwater, if elected, would push the United States to war. Johnson won 61 percent of the popular vote in November. Goldwater went on to write, in 1993, that "[y]ou don't need to be 'straight' to fight and die for your country. You just need to shoot straight."

Kasmir's hands, in her iconic photo, are just inches from some young boy's blade. Both hands hold the mum, as though it were fragile. A few miles away, protest-rock band the Fugs played a free outdoor concert. To Washington they'd brought with them dozens and dozens of daisies. The plan: drop them from an airplane over the Pentagon. It was a time of wild garbage notions. Abbie Hoffman reportedly tried to get enough kids chanting that they'd collectively raise the Pentagon into the air. And then turn it orange.

Kasmir offered to get me in touch with the British reporter who once told her this bit about the Fugs, but what would be the use? Where could this lead even lead me? It's the white chrysanthemum that means "truth" in the language of flowers. Not the daisy.

7. Mr. President

In the eighth grade I tried out for the musical because I felt cool. In truth I was a squawky, just-pubesced teen who played the clarinet and wore argyle socks pulled up to his knees over pairs of long underwear that stuck out from the frayed holes of his jean shorts, but all the same I stood one late winter afternoon in the middle of our school's empty stage to sing just two lines of R.E.M.’s “Hairshirt”—a capella—before the music and drama teachers thanked me and eventually tossed me into the lineless role of Background Maltshopper. It was an undoing of sorts. I'd been aiming for the role of Duffy, sidekick to the handsome male lead, because his getting all the good lines connected in my head with an understanding about myself I had at the time: I was a funny person. And plus our names were so similar!

The musical, Rock 'N' Roll, was a Grease retread with a far flatter plot. Any idiot can jitterbug. We in the chorus were shown dancesteps simple enough that stagetime was left wide open for the emoting and blocking of the leads' scenes. Backstage, we had any number of ways to pass our downtime. We'd corner the sevvies and threaten them inexplicably. We'd see who dared to say "penis" the loudest, and then we'd laugh over it. That was the year of Nirvana's Nevermind, and often someone cast as one of the jocks would pop the CD into the theatre classroom's boombox and we'd mosh impromptu among the desks. The girls in the cast weren't into this. They'd lure the boys outside on nicer days to practice jitterbugging acrobatics, which landed me and a girl named Caton a solo dance during the show's title number. What we did was this: Caton, arms around my neck, would jump up and I, arms around her waist, would swing her along my right hip, and then back out and in along my left hip, and then back out and in right at my waist, around which Caton would wrap her legs for me to swing us both around in a circle. Was it racy? Memory doesn't serve here on whether she let go of my neck at this point to lean backward; despite the pride I felt in doing this to/with a girl, I remember her doing most of the work.

One slow afternoon I found a curly blond wig and put it on my head. Ratty, knotted, it fell just past the shoulders. I stood there and smoothed the hair down and became, for a time, someone else. My castmates there in the classroom stood around me and watched me do this to see what would happen next. And here I saw an opportunity.

"Hello," I said in a voice that made a husky rustle in my throat. I knew, somehow, to let my body mince as it walked toward one of the jocks, who in his real life was more skater-punk but looked large enough to play a member of the high school football team. "What's your name, big boy?" I said.

"C.J.," he said, laughing. Playing along. "What's yours?"

I felt slutty, dumb, and funny. Of course I named her Daisy.

*

Herndon Intermediate School was a building old enough to have been the town's high school back when my grandfather would have gone. The auditorium's seats were lacquered plywood, murder on older backs. The pale-blue walls and ceiling made a hard sharp box of the room. Everything always echoed, and the high thin windows that ran along the hall's north wall cast a weak pall in the room that made us all look sickly. Better to be on stage. Better still to be backstage, where the teachers couldn't see a group of us corner 7th-grader Tang with vague wide-eyed threats about the safety of his person. Where they didn't catch that background chorus member don an old wig and make everyone in his vicinity immediately uncomfortable. Daisy was more of a lark than a laugh, more caricature than character. One bit I had with her was to pose as though I had ladies' hips I could run my hands up and down. I'd bend toward someone close. "Happy Birth-day!" I'd sing, channeling Marilyn. "Misssthter Presssthident."

Was this funny? Here's the thing about Daisy: nobody laughed with her. Her antics—the breathy vocals, the Monroe bit, the little fluffing of her hair she'd flirtily throw the way of the jocks—were more shameful than charming. What laffs I got were the laffs of teenage boys made uncomfortable and perhaps just sad by the spectacle before them. Here were boys who already were the boys they were going to grow up to be. They weren't seeds of future selves, they were those selves fully formed. I didn't know it at the time, but in this key sense I was not a part of them. I was some other kind of boy. I was this thing to humor. And here's the other thing about Daisy: this was enough. Being laughed at was getting me laughs. Disregard is still one form of regard.

The play ran for three nights. After Saturday we struck the set and this is where my memories of Daisy end. I never again put on wigs and pretended at being a woman, except for later that year, when I went as a kind of benign parody of my sister for Halloween, stuffing her bra with my own balled sweatsocks. This was 1992, all of it. My drag year.

*

Here, word for word, is how I in the final days of eighth grade signed the yearbook of Chris, who played yet another of the guys on the football team:

Christopher,

Luckily, between B.J. and "Rock + Roll" we united.

Yay,
Dave

P.S. I'm in love w/ your sexy brother. Hello, Jeff [commalessness sic] my sex-slave forever! I want you to lick me all over + let me wear your sexy glasses! Joy.

P.S.S. [sic] Purple W's rule the solar system.

P.S.S.S. [sic] Hopefully over the summer you become less morbid + learn to love life for the blissful escapade that it is.

P.P.P.P.S. DAISY LOVES YOU! [underlined thrice]

B.J.'s a mutual friend. And it seems important here to note I was in no way attracted to 12-year-old Jeff. If I had attractions to other boys at age 14 it was for the thuggish, athletic ones I got a chance to see undress in gym class (hello, Jarrett! hello, Tommy and Colin!), or for our gym teacher himself (I salute your shorts, Mr. Stames!). What was going on here was not a safe place to flirt just-kiddingly with the sorts of people I wanted desperately to gain the attentions of. By way of evidence for this claim, behold a line from our friend Kevin's entry in the same yearbook:

I want your hard cock throbbing in my hot mouth.

In certain contexts there is nothing funny about this. It is not a funny thing for a 44-year-old, for instance, to say to a 14-year-old. It's also not a funny thing for a 44-year-old to say to another 44-year-old. But it is a very, very funny thing for one 14-year-old to say to another, and where this comedy lies is in the line's performativity. Hard cocks and hot mouths, even the notion of throbbing, these were nothing but ideas to us at 14. They were abstract concepts we didn't know anything about except that when uttered or written they became funny.

I think what I'm trying to say is that there was a lot of acting going on in Herndon, Virginia, over that long spring term of 1992. That I was an eventual queer acting every day the part of a nascent straight boy—a performance for which I, too, was for years a willingly fooled audience member—is the role that concerns me the least here. It's the mawkish A-plot in every stock coming-out story. What's more interesting to me is the acting that happened on stage. It was, naturally, terrible. To watch an old VHS recording of Rock 'N' Roll is to see kids sport about a tempera'd set in makeup stagemoms must have sprayed on with a hose. Kids endlessly failing to project, their reed-thin voices rarely reaching back to the back of the hall. What everyone seemed ready to project, though, was a future. We were middle-school kids given a stage to act the parts of high-school kids. Danceful high-school kids in love. Movies and television had been explaining all along what it was like, but now here was a script that felt written just for us. We were made with the play to receive a kind of education.

As far as educations go, it was a lousy one. Within a year after Rock 'N' Roll, I’d walk down the halls of my high school with my new girlfriend and have an actual jock, from our actual football team, laugh with his buddies and say, “Is that your boyfriend or your girlfriend?” I'd begun growing my hair out in the style of the alt-rockers I favored at the time, and Beth had bobbed hair that fell like a silent water feature, one strand hanging lower than the rest that was dyed with dye she bought at a basement-level store in Georgetown. Beth and I just kept walking out to her car. In not knowing which of us that boy was addressing I got the best education around on how I'd need to act for the next four years to keep my dumb self under the radar.

Daisy herself wasn't so much an act as she was an act of an act. Of several acts. Everything I did with her was meant as wry reference, derivative of any number of sources beloved in 1992 to a 14-year-old. The Mister President bit was taken straight from the first Wayne's World movie which had premiered that winter. The wig's rattiness and the voice it inspired, the sense of terror I tried in others to instill, was all Jerry Sizzler from the second season of The Kids in the Hall. Daisy was the same kind of mechanism for cheaply earned laffs as the guy who's good at quoting Simpsons episodes at appropriate moments of the conversation.

Except I think I was the only one in on the joke. It was clear to me that boys my age made inappropriate references to sex and sex parts in order to make each other laugh. I was smart enough at 14 to pick up on this and enact such inappropriateness. But it's also clear I went too far. I wore a wig for god's sake. If there were a dress handy I'd probably have slipped that on as well. And then for the next five years I got called faggot by classmates who all seemed to know something about me that it would take a whole decade to find out for myself. To come out (not just to your parents, but even to yourself) in the middle of your twenties is like finally allowing yourself to look in a mirror and see the reflection staring back. And it's hard not to look into those eyes of that new person without seeing the lost years behind you both. What happened? It's hard not to ask yourself what happened.

Daisy is the way a terrifying side of me began to unfurl. I've hated her for years.

*

Regarding Daisy, my Daisy, there are two things that are true. One: I donned that wig happily and readily at age 14. Two: As an adult, I'd rather slice a vein than put a wig on and become someone else.