Reading my mom’s letters with underground comics icon Howard Cruse

We talked for an hour before he managed to shock me. 

“You know, Glenny, I had sex with your mother once.”

I roared a happy laugh into the phone. “Oh, Howie, that’s great!” I said. “How was it?”

He met my happy laugh with a sly one and said just enough for me to imagine the scene: Atlanta apartment, twin bed, 1971. Newly single, 28-year-old Nancy Horn Nailen had left the kids with her parents in Birmingham, Alabama, driven to Atlanta for the weekend, and needed a place to crash. Her good friend Howard Cruse invited her to stay with him, and even offered to sleep on the couch so she could have the bed and be more comfortable. 

Don’t be silly, she said. We’ll share. 

There’s the short con. 

I can see and hear it.

If you’re a straight, single mother of three sons under the age of 10, your romantic prospects are dubious at best. But if you just want to get it on with a guy, who could be a better mark than your gay best friend, if he’s game?

Any onus for long-term love was absent — Howie preferred men and so did Nancy. Neither wanted a relationship or the barnacles of feeling that come with commitments. They had each lived with the consequences of unexpected pregnancy, so both insisted on preventative measures. After nestling and nuzzling through a long, sweaty night, they got it on just before dawn, he told me. 

“Nancy sent me to the store to get condoms,” Howie said. “Neither one of us wanted another child. We just wanted to enjoy each other.”

I could have been a stuck-rubber baby, I tell myself. I could have been the sequel. 

Of course, this is nonsense. But it’s the kind of nonsense I always engage in when I learn anything about my mother’s love life. I thought, Oh, Howard Cruse could have been my father. But that’s not the way it works. My father is my father and I wouldn’t want to trade him, even for Howie. But I love knowing about the liaison. And since my mother is made up anyway, I can imagine her with whomever I please. 

Here’s what I mean: 

I was 8 years old when my mother died in a car wreck; she was 41. Most of what I know about her has come to me secondhand — a mix of myth and nonfiction delivered by several survivors, including my father (her second ex-husband), my three older brothers (all sons of the first ex-), as well as family, friends and former lovers, one of whom was cartoonist Howard Cruse. Maybe you’ve heard of him: the founding editor of Gay Comix and a mentor to Alison Bechdel. From 1983 to 1989 his seminal comic strip “Wendel” ran in The Advocate, recording in real-time ordinary gay American life of the 1980s, including the ravages of the AIDS epidemic. His graphic novel, “Stuck Rubber Baby,” was published in 1995; playwright Tony Kushner wrote the introduction. But 13 years later when I picked up the phone to call Cruse — always Howie to me — the most important thing I knew was that he had known my mother. He was low-key famous in pop culture and a legend in my head. 

I bestowed legendary status on anyone who knew my mother because I was starved for information. And if you knew her before she was a mother, there was no higher rank. Howie had. Their friendship dated back to the mid-1960s, when both were students at Birmingham-Southern College. He knew her as a teenage co-ed and a young dropout wife, then a divorcée and a mother to boys. Their romp came before her second marriage (to my future father) and her first attempt at mothering a girl (me). 

In 2008, I was the editor of an alternative newsweekly in Birmingham, Howie’s hometown and my own. When a press release informed me Howie had scheduled a brief homecoming, I feigned a news hook: If I could interview him by phone, I would write a feature about “Stuck Rubber Baby.” (First Second published a 25th-anniversary edition in 2020.) I had never read it but knew it was set in a fictionalized Civil Rights-era Birmingham. I knew every review described it as “semi-autobiographical,” chronicling the radical, racial and sexual awakening of a closeted, queer Southern white boy, who played it straight just long enough to get his college girlfriend pregnant. I knew all this, but on the day of our interview, I didn’t even own a copy of the book. That turned out not to matter. I was about to get an earful on the book’s background and a postage-paid primer on my own writing life. 

The call was almost over when Howie said, “You know, I have all these letters that Nancy and I wrote each other in the 1970s. I have all the letters she sent me, of course, but I have mine too. I kept the second-sheet carbons.” 

I gasped. Somehow this shook me more than knowing they’d hooked up.

“Maybe you’d like to read them?” Howie asked.

“Of course,” I said. “Please.”

“I’ll send them and you keep the originals. But please promise that you’ll make copies and send the copies back to me.”

It was important, he explained, to keep the correspondence complete.

Because I was so young when my mother died, only a few memories of her are my own. But I can recall the ecstatic joy of going to the mailbox with my mother — or on her orders — because there was almost always a letter from someone. Howie’s were special because they often included drawings, but he was not her only correspondent. She wrote to her mother, her brother, her classmates, cousins and friends. She exchanged postcards with former sisters-in-law and her first husband’s second wife. (“My wife-in-law” was how she described that person.)

My mother was an adult convert to Catholicism and frequently wrote to priests. Those letters began “Dear Father,” whereas missives to her own father started with “Dear Daddy.” She wrote to three Popes that I know of — Paul VI and both John Pauls. No Pontiff ever wrote back, but the Archbishop of Galilee did — and often. Those envelopes were onion-skin thin and usually blue. “Par avion” was the first foreign phrase I ever learned. My mother told me the words were French for “a bird brought this.”

Many times she’d read aloud to us the letters she received. She’d read them at the breakfast table, in the living room in front of the fireplace, or instead of standard-issue bedtime stories.

She never wrote to me.

But she did write about me. In 1979. To Howie:

Letter shared between author’s mom and Howard Cruse. (Photo courtesy of author)

Glennie Lou is now three. It seems to me that she talks more and better than the boys did, but I don’t know if that’s true, or if I just read somewhere that girls develop verbal skills sooner than boys, so I’m looking for it. She really isn’t mechanical at all though. She has done things like stand on a book and try to pick it up. She has done that a lot. This shakes me up. She did it once while Don Gregg was visiting. I observed her and rather mournfully said, “She’ll never be a scientist.’”Don mulled this over for a second then cheerily countered, “Ah, but she will be a philosopher.”

In the next paragraph, she pleads with him to keep showing up in the mailbox. 

I love you, Howie. You ought to write me even if I’m tacky and I don’t write. At least let me know how disgusted you are at my behavior. Every two weeks. 

* * *

I asked myself what my mother’s correspondence represented to me. She was an English teacher and an aspiring novelist, but above all else a correspondent: She wrote hundreds of letters to dozens of people and, like Howie, kept copies of them all. (Turns out second-sheet carbon paper was the sent folder of the 1970s.) Thanks to my father, I had always had access to my mother’s papers, which included all of her letters. But neither my father, nor any of my three older brothers, nor I had ever read them — or at least had never read them all. The anguish of her absence was too great. Before I got that fat, flat package from Howie, I could only ever manage one or two at a time. And they weren’t even in order. While Howie’s correspondence was labeled and filed, what we had was hoarding as a grief strategy: letters stuffed in boxes and boxes stuffed in dresser drawers. For me to even open an envelope meant a trip to my stepmother’s house, where the precious cache was moldering in a mildewed basement.

Then here came Howie with an un-disordered archive. I didn’t have to go get it — it arrived in my mailbox. The thick packet contained an exchange of more than 20 letters, but for me it had a wonderful weightlessness. I imagined the mail carrier had been forced to hold onto it like a balloon, that “PRIORITY MAIL” in this case probably meant “so magical and important that before I delivered it, the Postmaster General had to personally devise a method to keep it from floating away.”

Envelope of correspondence from 1979-1982 between author’s mother and Howard Cruse. (Photo courtesy of author)

After I read a few Howie letters, I decided I was ready for the rest of her letters — to everybody. I thought of the phrase READY TO READ! and I couldn’t help laughing. When my mother taught me to read, this was surely not what she had in mind. But once I got started I couldn’t stop. I grew obsessed with completion. I felt I couldn’t figure out anything unless I read everything. The letters were all I had to go on. Those pages were my only bequest.

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So I retrieved reams and reams of paper from the basement and I ordered a fireproof, waterproof safe. I bought and donned white cotton gloves like the pros wore in the library archives department. I opened envelopes she had closed with wax seals. I turned piles into stacks and labeled new file folders and made a few spreadsheets. I put the letters in chronological order and arranged them by recipient. All the new information galvanized me. The more I read, the more confused I felt — and the more thrilled, too. I thought I would find answers with a capital-A, although I hadn’t even come up with questions.

Dated files of the author’s mother’s correspondence. (Photo courtesy of author)

* * *

I got drunk at a party and cornered a historian to ask for his guidance on research.

He said, “Well, you know that not everything in those letters is true.”

I said, “What?”

He said it again, and again I said, “What?”

We looked at each other for a long time. And I laughed and groaned and said, “Of course it’s all true.”

“Maybe,” he said. “Or maybe none of it is.” 

* * *

I spent the next several years writing to Howie about my mother and about writing. I called our correspondence “the doubling.” I was writing to Howie about her. And Howie was writing to me about her. And as we parsed how she wrote to him and about me, we were writing to each other about writing. 

June 17, 20141:46 PM

Glenny Brockto Howard

What always astonishes me about your letters is their length My God, their length! I try not to worry overly about What Kind of Writer I Am, but I do seem to have trouble with length. Is this concision or compression? I’m not sure. In any case, it troubles me, but only a little bit.

glb

June 17, 20141:48 PM

Howard Cruseto Glenny

Yeah. Well, past versions of me had the spare time necessary for writing long letters. Those days, sadly, seem to be gone. Sigh.

Howard

But included in my mother’s files I found an eight-page single-spaced letter that Howie had written to someone else — a document he had not included in the original packet he sent me. It was clearly a copy of a copy, meaning he must have sent my mother a copy of his copy. I wrote to ask him why, and he explained: “I made two carbon copies while writing it because I wanted to communicate the same things to Nancy without having to compose all the same notions a second time from scratch.”

This made absolute sense — it was the 1974 version of copy and paste. I’ve done the same a hundred times, cribbing from emails to compose essays, from text messages to finish poems.

* * *

“Pen pals” is such a corny term for a pair of people exchanging letters. These two were having intercourse, in the old-fashioned sense of the word — the give-and-get idea swap described by the medieval Latin intercursus: “communication to and fro.” The word implied exchange and intervention. Intercourse was a merchant’s word — used exclusively in trade until the 16th century. Then, for 200 years, it meant “mental or spiritual exchange.” Before the bawd overlay, the definition was “social communication between individuals; frequent and habitual contact in conversation and action.” Intercourse also meant “communion between man and that which is spiritual or unseen.”

Discourse was different: That word eventually meant conversation, but its Latin ancestor was discursus, “the action of running off in different directions.” Ultimately it meant “application of the mind to something,” which sounds like a solo act.

Their intercourse was discourse with a sly eye toward posterity. I was that posterity, on the page and off. 

* * *

At some point, Howie and I were discussing a novel written by a mutual acquaintance. Howie made an offhand remark in which he described the book as a failure. I didn’t bring it up again for four or five years, and then when I did, he didn’t even remember the conversation.

“If I said the novel ‘ultimately failed,’ I was probably being overly harsh,” Howie wrote in an email. “What I probably meant was that, while [the writer] was able to step back emotionally from the real life events to an admirable degree, he didn’t achieve quite enough distance to put himself in the reader’s place when he wrote it. This prevented him from recognizing when certain of the protagonist’s behaviors needed further exploration…

“But I don’t think that means the novel necessarily ‘failed.’ Just that, in my view, it could still be improved a bit with further exercises of craft and additional emotional distance.”

* * *

I had been thinking a lot about “emotional distance,” although I wasn’t calling it that yet. But Howie used the phrase and I read it like a map key. My mother was an absence rather than a presence; she was not a parent but rather a writer whose work I could study. Reading became a way to conjure her and draw her close —she was a character in her own story, but also in mine. Her future was history. Mine and hers too. Howie called the whole endeavor my “Getting-To-Know-Nancy Project.” And so it was. In those pages, I could read her like a book. 

What was the goal, though? Resurrection? Burial? 

When it came to letters she exchanged with anybody else, I didn’t know what I was missing. But I thought Howie’s cache could provide all the answers because I perceived it as complete. He was like a well that would never run dry. He was a slot machine set to win every time. Every time I hit refresh, the picture would get clearer, revealing some new detail. I started to think of Howie as a bizarro executor of her will. 

I had inherited his friendship. I had inherited his letters. And through him, I had inherited her letters, which actually felt like inheriting her. Her living voice — her wit and insecurities, her vanities and fibs, the whole of her mind as she herself came to know it. To read these letters was as good as reading her mind. 

The Howie correspondence unlocked something else that I had been previously unwilling to face — that getting to know her would mean having to grieve her, even if we only met on the page.  

* * *

Here’s an excerpt from a letter. I don’t know who the recipient was, or where the first two pages are. It’s only clear that it was written after Dec. 1976, because she is pondering how best to mother me.

My parents raised me to think a girl could do anything a boy could. When I learned the hard way that society as a whole did not share this opinion, it was a nasty awakening. Should I let Glennie dream her dreams? Or should I warn her early on as I was not warned? I keep thinking that if I had been prepared to meet prejudice, it wouldn’t have been such a big shock. On the other hand, if I warn her what it is like to be a woman in a man’s world, she might not dream at all. What to do?

What to do indeed? 

* * *

Obituaries almost always mention survivors, but they never mention the paper trail that the dead leave behind. My mother did not have a decent obituary — not one that did her justice — because her death was sudden. Instead, there was a death notice, just two column inches, with a list of our names behind the baffling phrase “survived by.” As if we survived her, but she didn’t survive us. The word choice is weird, right? It almost implies the dead can’t survive the living. But it’s not like we best the dead just by continuing to breathe.

Then again, the notion that any piece of writing, obituary or otherwise, can do someone justice is probably absurd. But I think about the phrase “body copy” — a printer’s term for the heart of the text, the main part of the text, everything that isn’t a headline or subhead or caption. When you learn to write letters, you’re told that the body is everything between the salutation and the closing. 

Her letters survive. I discovered her body in all those paragraphs on second-sheet carbon paper.

* * *

Howie died in 2019. In addition to his husband, brother, daughter, grandchildren and friends, he was survived by his letters, comics and drawings. In a letter to my mother written in 1974, this was his take on mortality: 

As to the Afterlife, I don’t particularly believe in the reincarnation of a soul/entities from human body to human body… or from human body to tomato or cockroach. I wouldn’t be that surprised (or disturbed), however, to find out that I’m wrong. 

* * *

Strange, but I’ve never considered writing a letter to my mother. Not once. To do so would seem like a silly put-on — like a weird grief pantomime. But I still write to Howie sometimes, even though he’s dead. This morning, for instance.

Dear Howie, 

I dreamt of you last night. We were sitting in some kind of storage facility and were supposed to be sorting packages, but instead were arguing about narrative clarity. 

I kept saying, “I’m thinking, I’m thinking!”

You said, “But you’re not. Not really.”

I said, “What? What do you mean?”

You said, “What about a willingness to discard directly autobiographical moments in favor of invented ones?”

I had a clever comeback, but it vanished as soon as I woke up. Can you remember it? 

Either way, if this letter reaches you, please let Nancy know that some of her messages got through.