Does This Baby Make Me Look Straight?: Confessions of a Gay Dad (13 page)

“It took eighteen months,” I say, “from the time we met with a lawyer to the time we took Eliza home. Best thing that ever happened to me—to us.” I hate how cliché and preachy I’m starting to sound. I go on, “But that’s just me. I’m not one of those people who think you don’t know what love is till you have a kid. Of course you do! I mean, I loved a lot of people before having kids—and things. Pad Thai, for example. Love it. Always have.” I remember that the last time the kids heard me speak of my love of pad Thai, Eliza asked me if I wanted to marry it. The answer, of course, is yes. But I think the gay plate is kind of full, so to speak, on the marriage equality fight already. Plus I think filing joint taxes with a bowl of rice noodles and fish sauce could get tricky.

He laughs a little, then stares at me blankly, not knowing how to take what I’m saying. I don’t blame him. I just likened my kids to an Asian entrée. I’m self-conscious. “I just mean, parenthood . . . it’s fantastic but not for everyone. Is there a dolly I could wheel this out with?”

Eliza tugs at my pants, whispering, “Daddy, I have to go poopie.”
What?
She did
not
just say what I think she said! We
were just in the bathroom and there was no mention of a poopie. I don’t have time for poopie. Poopie was not in the picture.

“Eliza, I’m paying and then we can go poopie at home, okay?”

“No! I have to go right now!” She starts to cry. CuteGaySalesGuy notices. I’m a better daddy than this. I hand him my credit card.

“Why don’t you run my card. I’ll be right back,” I say, forcing a smile though there’s clearly panic in my voice and fury in my eyes. He smiles empathetically. I fall in love with him just a little more. I have a quarter-second fantasy about my life with CuteGaySalesGuy—driving around in a Range Rover, our child who never has to go poopie in the car seat and a whole aisle of Pier 1 loot we scored with his employee discount in the trunk. Oh, and he’s not wearing a shirt. And I look like Ricky Martin. What? It’s my fantasy. Or was. Eliza’s still crying.

“I know,” he says, “you have meat in the car.” He smiles. Winks, maybe? Or I imagined that. I’m mortified. I run to the bathroom with Eliza.

“Don’t-touch-anything-don’t-touch-anything!” I chant, faster than usual. I gift wrap the toilet seat again and Eliza sits. But nothing happens. She shrugs.

“Don’t look at me, Daddy. I don’t want you to see my poopie face.” I didn’t realize my daughter
had
a “poopie face,” but I do as I’m told, facing the wall. I position myself so I can glance in the mirror at her adorable mozzarella face as she squeezes out a turd. She really is the cutest thing I’ve
ever seen. How did I get so lucky? So blessed. So—shit! The meat. I turn to face Eliza.

“Is that it, sweetie?” Nope. I turn again. She starts chatting now that she’s comfortable. And relaxed. Why shouldn’t she be? So adorable and infuriating. I try to appeal to her, calmly and rationally.

“Eliza? Remember all the food we bought together? All those yummy hamburgers and hot dogs we’re going to make? Yeah. Well, Daddy’s got to get that food home so we don’t have to throw it all in the trash. Okay? So will you do Daddy a big, super big favor and go potty right now so we can get home before it’s too late?” A part of me is hoping a little added stress may jolt the crap right out of her. Literally. But come on! She did
beg
to go to the bathroom only
three minutes
ago.

What’s the use? By now there’s probably a hungry, ketchup-carrying crowd lining up behind my car, and I’ve undermined the future of the gay movement by failing to deliver more than a few cursory words when I should have been inspirational. And here I am, facing a pee-stained wall at the Pier 1 Imports’ men’s room—all for a tacky striped umbrella I’ve decided to buy because I am
nothing
like Anna Wintour.

Finally she’s done and we flee to the checkout. CuteGaySalesGuy has given me thirty percent off! I’m speechless. “Floor model discount,” he says, smiling at me. Oh my God. Should I ask him out? Oh no, right. I have a kid. And another one at home. And I’m
married
! Hellooo? I sign the receipt, thank him profusely, and wish him luck.

“Definitely check out Vista Del Mar adoption services,” I say, dragging Eliza and my new umbrella toward the car.
I hope I’ve done my duty to future gay dads. Because I definitely have
not
done my duty as a dad, to be patient and loving and understanding of my five-year-old, who didn’t ask to be dragged around on errands with me, even if I did cave on the balloon thing. The only one who’s done her duty today—in both senses of the word—is Eliza. And good for her for taking care of herself. Because after all the stress and anxiety I put myself through, the meat was fine. And CuteGaySalesGuy? I can’t be responsible for him and his parenting choices. Right? What do I look like? Let him Google “gay adoption” if he needs more hand-holding. Not my problem. And he shouldn’t wear lime. Not that shade of lime, anyway. What is this, Miami?

Oooh. That feels good. Very out of character for me. And
very
Anna Wintour.

W
e’re all squeezed into a row toward the back on a flight back from DC. We have been visiting my sister and her family. I’ve already taken half a Xanax and the kids are busy coloring in activity books. As the plane revs its engines and speeds down the runway, I offer to take Eliza’s hand.

“I’m not nervous, Daddy,” she proclaims.

“I am,” I admit to my six-year-old. She looks at me to see if I’m serious.

“You’re supposed to be the grown-up,” she says. Busted. I’m relieved Don didn’t hear her, as he’d undoubtedly flash me a raised, kids-say-the-darndest-things eyebrow and a smug little smile.

The flight is fairly smooth, no turbulence to speak of either outside the plane or in. As usual, Eliza and Jonah are very well behaved on the trip. They love to fly. They color and play games and watch movies on our iPods. No tantrums. No running down the aisle. No kicking the seat in front of them, like the monster toddler currently kicking mine.

Don is sitting across the aisle from me, as he usually does, reading voraciously and listening to music. He and I will
switch seats midflight “if necessary.” But it never comes to that. When we land, the kids unfasten their seat belts and stand, patiently waiting for their turn to deplane. Several other passengers shower us with compliments about how well behaved they are and what great parents we are. “What a couple of angels,” someone says as they pass our row. Sure. Now they seem like angels. After six hours in a confined space with limited snacks, piped-in oxygen, and dizzying flatulence coming at them from every angle. But put them in a hotel? That’s a different story.

There is something about the place we book on our trips to visit my sister that always stirs up trouble. I don’t know what it is. Nor do I know why we always stay in the same hotel and in the exact same room. Three times now we’ve gone and all three times we’ve stayed in room 207 at a chain hotel that adds “Suites” to their name so that it sounds fancy. It just means there’s a microwave and a sink in the room.

Our first experience with room 207 was when Jonah was two and Eliza was four. We got stranded at the hotel for almost a week after a blizzard hit the area. And not just any blizzard. An epic, worst-storm-since-1937 kind of blizzard. Two feet of snow piled up and left us stranded while the city of Gaithersburg, Maryland, caught up with the task of plowing the roads. The kids were in heaven. They got their first experience with snowmen and snow angels and snowball fights. Keeping them entertained wasn’t ever an issue. But on the afternoon of the second day we were going a little stir-crazy and the hanging of wet, snow-drenched clothes along the radiator in our room was getting a little old. My mother,
visiting at the same time, had taken the room right above ours. The kids got used to bopping upstairs to visit Abuela and back down again.

At one point, I had gone outside to scrape ice and snow off our rental car with a broom and a dustpan like a true West Coaster and Don was tidying up the room. I sent the kids upstairs to visit with Abuela. I was outside for maybe ten minutes when I heard the noise. The fire alarm was sounding loudly and persistently from inside the hotel building. Oh my God. I dropped my broom and ran toward the building. Once inside, I noticed all the guests coming out into the hallways to see what was going on.
Clang, clang, clang, clang
. . . the alarm kept going, echoing loudly. Eliza had Jonah by the hand and was walking down the stairs when I entered the building. They met me in front of the door to our room. Eliza had a look of panic in her eyes and she was yelling, “Jonah pulled the button! Jonah pulled the button!”

Jonah had gotten out of Abuela’s room and run down the hall like any normal, curious, fearless, “terribly two” little boy and reached up to pull down that deliciously tempting and just-within-reach fire alarm handle that must have been calling to him since we’d arrived. For a split second I was even impressed with the restraint he’d shown up until then.

“Jonah!” I got down on my knees in front of him. “Show Daddy what you did!” He walked me to the end of the hallway and pointed to the small alarm box he had activated. I think the relentless ringing of the alarm paired with the look of panic in the guests scrambling in the hallways was enough to ensure he’d never do it again, but I hammered the lesson home.

“You may never, ever,
ever
touch a fire alarm. Do you understand?” I wanted to add to my fire alarm warning something extra that would really sink in, like,
If you touch it, your head will explode and worms and blood will fly out and make you die
. That felt extreme, not to mention highly inaccurate, but I was desperate to differentiate this particular scolding from the dozen or so I’d given him over the past few days. “Please don’t pull all the towels into the tub with you”; “Don’t climb on the curtains”; “Don’t stand on the table”; “Don’t play hide-and-seek unless someone has agreed to ‘seek’
before
you hide under the housekeeping cart, throwing Papi and Daddy into a full panic that they’ve lost you forever.” Right now Jonah was staring up at me as he always does during a reprimand. He wanted me to pick him up. He cried with pure heartfelt remorse. He wrapped his arms tightly around my neck. “It was a askident,” he kept repeating again and again. My heart, yet again, was broken.

I called the front desk to get someone to shut off the alarm. The seventeen-year-old “manager” informed me that only someone from the fire department could reset the alarm.

“Okay. So when can they get here?” I begged.

“Yeah. Don’t know. Roads pretty hairy. Haven’t been plowed. Still coming down. May not have chains on the trucks.” That was his response. Little morsels of bad news, delivered with apathy and distraction, packaged in odd little “Me Tarzan, you Jane”—grunty caveman sentences with nary an article or pronoun. I thought I would lose my mind.

“But the alarms are going off, loudly. Nobody can stay
in their rooms with all that noise. Isn’t there anyone who knows the building well enough to reset the alarms?”

“Yeah. No.” That was the end of that conversation.

What if there had been a real fire? Would the fire department have been unable to come and rescue us? What a terrible system! I guess nobody knew there would be a blizzard. And I guess we all knew, now, that there was no
real
emergency. No harm had been done besides our feeling of total humiliation. It was mortifying to have to look at dozens of guests standing in the hallways, some still in their pajamas. Don thought we should explain how we had lost control of our two-year-old son and as a result ruined all of their vacations. I wondered if we couldn’t just act like one of them—baffled by the alarms, annoyed even, as we’d say, “What the hell happened?”—as though we had no idea who or what had pulled the trigger. But it was too late. Don was already going person to person with an explanation and an apology. Don, who always seems like he’s running for mayor of every fucking hotel floor, airport security line, or fast-food dining area (“Anyone need straws? I’ve got enough for everyone!”), had blown our cover. It was during this episode that I went through my regular checklist of regrets. Why did we have to come to DC in the dead of winter? What’s so special about my sister’s family anyway? Why did I agree to meet Don at that stupid Celebrity party in ’92? Why couldn’t we have stayed at a nicer hotel? Why did we have to have kids?

We waited a full hour before the fire representatives walked through the corridors to determine that, in fact, there was no fire and it had been, as we’d said repeatedly, an
“askident” caused by Jonah. Right around this time, Frank, the father of the seventeen-year-old manager, arrived. He was the Director of Operations for the hotel. My mother decided this would be a good time to lodge a complaint.

“This cannot be!” she said indignantly, her accent stronger than it should be after fifty years in this country. “A hotel needs to be able to shut off an alarm if it goes off accidentally!”

Frank was apologetic but explained that the fire department mandated all alarm activations be investigated. My mother wasn’t having it.

“But we knew there was no fire. You can’t just have them blaring for an hour while people wait. Come on! That’s no way to treat hotel guests!”

I couldn’t quite believe her chutzpah to try and blame the hotel for my kid’s hijinks. But I was relieved to have the attention shifted off us. We quietly filed back into our rooms and prayed the memory of the last ninety minutes would fade quickly.

My mother got an elaborate fruit basket and her room comped. I think the guy also asked her out. I was impressed. Clearly at these “suites,” the customer
is
always right. Even when the customer’s grandson is most definitely wrong. Oh, and when we got back to Los Angeles, I got an effusive email from Frank, apologizing for our discomfort and offering us a free night the next time we were in town and wanted to stay. As if!