Does This Baby Make Me Look Straight?: Confessions of a Gay Dad (17 page)

“That won’t happen to us, right, Don?” I ask. Don’s been sober for thirty years and should have insight into an addict’s mentality and triggers that can be avoided by those who have the “disease” of addiction. Instead, Don spouts a particularly old-fashioned point of view:

“Oh no, our kids are being raised in a good family. They’re not from a broken home.” Is he kidding. He usually then turns on the parents, blaming them for their bad haircuts and trashy outfits. “That mom does not have the arms for sleeveless! No wonder her kid’s sniffing glue! Oh. And the dad’s a homo.” Don thinks everyone is gay.

“That dad is not gay,” I argue. “He’s got a mullet and a soul patch.”

“Otherwise known as a ‘flavor saver.’ Gay.” Don’s adamant. But why does it matter, anyway?

The show always cuts to a shot of a kind, reasonable father, tears streaming down his face, his eyes
begging
to be put out of his misery, having lost his only daughter to a lifestyle worse than your worst nightmare. Then they always say, “And she was such a happy baby!” Every single time. “Cue music!” we both say. The screen then dissolves into a montage of childhood snapshots like the ones in every photo album every parent in the world has of their kids. Every single porn star has a parent somewhere with a photo album of the kid in a onesie with a pacifier in his or her mouth—the same mouth that, eighteen years later, will be jammed by a ten-inch schlong! Probably pierced! Who can I pay to make sure they don’t get molested by some neighbor, cousin, or
babysitter’s boyfriend and then numb the pain by doing heroin, crack, or porn?

“Don. Don. Wake up. What if the kids grow up to do porn?”

Don grumbles, “Doesn’t strike me as a problem we can solve in the middle of the night . . .”

I don’t let up. “How can we make sure they don’t?”

“Well, let’s just hope they don’t.” And he turns back to sleep.

“That’s not good enough,” I say.

He finally sits up. “Well, will they be relaxed porn stars? Will they be the kind of porn stars that let their boyfriends sleep through the night? ’Cause that won’t be so bad.”

“‘Boyfriend’? I wish! If I were just your boyfriend, I’d be sleeping through the night. I’d be younger, thinner, and I wouldn’t be wondering if I’d already ruined our kids with my anxiety. If I’d somehow planted the seed for them to grow into meth whore junkies. Do you think I have, Don? Seriously. Do you think it’s too late?”

Don’s falling asleep again as he answers. “If it is, let’s hope they’re the best damn whore junkie porn stars they can be. Right? As long as they do their best . . . And they have health insurance.”

Turns out, he’s not so much fun to talk to at three a.m.

The next morning, Don is, as always, well rested and chipper and has no recollection of talking me off the ledge in the middle of the night. I’m stressed and exhausted but it’s my turn to take the kids to school, so I rally. We’re bopping along in the car, listening to some kids’ music, and I look back through my rearview mirror and see Eliza kissing Jonah
on the forehead. “My baby brother,” she says. I want to burst into tears. Nobody can say my kids aren’t affectionate and compassionate and polite. What more could a father want? We stop the car and both kids get out, literally skipping to the schoolyard. Anyone can see the other unmistakable truth about them: they’re good kids. And they’re
happy
!

Deep down I know my kids won’t be on a reality show. And if they are, let it be
Project Runway
or
Top Chef
and not some crazy gossipy, scratch-your-eyes-out exploitation show I can’t help but watch. I saw one the other night called
Gigolos
, with this poor guy confessing to the camera how he’s proud to be a paid “escort” but still hopes his parents aren’t watching. Meanwhile he’s
agreed
to let camera crews film him with a crazed, man-hating client who’s clearly lost her battle with dieting. She insists on locking a device on his penis called a “cock cage” while shoving a wooden spoon up his ass. What must his parents say when they see that?

“Oh, look, honey, Derek is on TV! Oh, shit . . . There’s that wooden spoon I’ve been looking for since Thanksgiving. Um. Hon? Do me a favor? Grab that pillow and hold it over my face until I stop breathing?”

I wonder if Derek knew about Mary and the apples she was bagging. She’s probably one of his clients. And he’s bagging
her
right now. Wait! Eliza loves apples. That doesn’t mean she’s going to become Mary, right?

I
, like most parents who don’t have a backyard, have been taking my kids to the park since they were very little. Often I would run into the L.A. Latin nannies, and over time, thanks to my still-workable Spanish, I became quite a hit with them. And if I showed up in the middle of the day, I was guaranteed to be the only man there. The nannies would hear me speak a little Spanish—for instance, “Hay una mesa de cambiar en el baño?” (
Does the bathroom have a changing table?
)—and there would be smiling and blushing as they’d usher me to another part of the park, where four or five other nannies would be sitting gossiping, pointing, and giggling.

“Qué papi guapo!” I’d hear. I was a
cute dad
in their eyes. And I liked it. I was like a celebrity. While my broken Argentinean Spanish left a lot to be desired, it beat the hell out of most everyone else’s desperate attempts to remember a page out of their seventh-grade Spanish books. (
Spanish One
,
p. 24
: “El aboo-elo ten-eeah largos bee-gohtes, y muchas canas!”) I remember seeing a particular mother yelling at her nanny once, pointing to a diaper bag and screaming, “Forgetta the wetta wipes! El niño tiene poopie. Tiene chili con carne en el diaper-o!” Did she really think her hysterical version of
Spanglish was better than just saying “the baby pooped”
slowly
and in English?

I started going to the park more often. I’m not an idiot. If these ladies wanted to treat me like I was Ricky Martin, then I felt it was my duty to deliver them Ricky Martin. Only, you know, Jewish. And older. And with a tight spandex undershirt to hide the love handles. Marisol would be waiting for me on some days with a picnic blanket and a full spread of snacks. Sofia would whip out a Ziploc of cookies she’d made the night before—“gluten-free,” she’d announce with a cute accent that reminded me of, well, every single one of my relatives. I’d thank her profusely for her thoughtfulness at remembering my recent diagnosis of Celiac Disease. Then Lupe would pull me in another direction, where she’d uncover a casserole dish “quince minutos a cuatro cincuenta!” (
fifteen minutes at 450 degrees
).

“Daddy!” Eliza would call out, plaintively. She got what was happening and didn’t like it. She was my girl and didn’t like competing. Jonah, all boy, would dive headfirst into the sand and not come up for air until we were leaving. He liked getting free toys and snacks and didn’t care where they came from.

After several months of this, I couldn’t help feeling guilty. Not just because of the food, the toys, and the handmade knitted sweater. I felt I was misleading them by flirting as much as I was. I wasn’t a
straight
Spanish-speaking dad. I was the other kind. So I promised myself I would tell them the truth, if they asked, that I climbed into bed every night with a muchacho, not a mujer. But for the time being, they weren’t asking and I didn’t want to disclose more than I
needed to, a strategy that until recently seemed to work fine for Ricky Martin. For years he managed to flirt and tease his fans with his charming “maybe I am, maybe I’m not” routine. Even without the twenty-nine-inch waist, I could deliver the same sense of mystery to my nanny fans.
Don’t ask, don’t tell
—bad for our armed forces, but in the playground? Maybe okay. I’m not proud of it but I was a little afraid of the backlash. I was afraid of what these likely Catholic, Latin American women would think of me. I was disappointed in my willingness to let my shame and fear and love of tamales push me back toward the closet. It was a long journey to become the evolved, proud, self-assured gay man and father that I like to think I am. Just clearly not evolved or proud
enough
.

On the other hand, this was no time to be political. Not when someone was eagerly making me taquitos with guacamole from scratch. And I wasn’t actually
lying
to them. I certainly didn’t hold back when we all agreed that the park groundskeeper was cute. I figured anyone who could put two and two together knew I was gay. But I was Ricky Martin to them and Ricky Martin’s a mo. So I concluded that the truth was known by my noontime novias and didn’t have to be said.

Clearly I wasn’t that comfortable with the situation, because I cut back on my visits to the park. But then I started to miss my girls. I needed my updates on their lives. They were like my
stories
, my telenovelas. I knew who was married and who was single; who was quitting her job because of a bossy mom whom she’d caught sleeping with someone else and felt uncomfortable with the information; and whose brother-in-law had just been diagnosed with prostatitis.

One day, I was alternating pushes between my two kids on the swings when Lupe came running over to me in tears. I think I actually saw Eliza rolling her eyes,
Here we go again
. Lupe’s second cousin, Ramon, was gunned down with his fiancée while coming out of a market in El Salvador somewhere. It was a horrible hit-and-run and police there were looking for the murderer. I couldn’t help wondering if maybe they were involved in some shady business Lupe didn’t know about. Maybe the culprits knew one or both of them and were getting revenge. I wanted to know more but my Spanish has its limits. I tried to communicate.

“A lo mejor están metidos en algo? O conocen alguien—” (
Maybe they were caught up in something or knew—
) Lupe cut me off, insisting they were innocent victims and not drug addicts. I shook my head. Had I said anything about drugs? I was clearly misunderstood. And I think Lupe felt the same way. She looked at me as though I’d somehow betrayed her by even speculating. I quickly conceded that it was the most horrible way for two people, two
so very innocent
people, to die. She nodded and turned back to her charges. But Lupe looked at me differently from that point on—like I had made an assumption about her and her family because of what had happened. Like I was judging them because they were Latin American. I was just like everyone else, she must’ve thought, “one of them.” I felt bad, because I would have thought the same thing had
anyone
been gunned down like that in broad daylight. I wanted to convince her, but since she never brought it up again, I never knew what she was thinking. I noticed she went missing from the park after that. The others explained to me that she had gone back to
El Salvador for a while. I felt bad about her family’s crisis. I wished I’d been able to get that across to her more. At least I still had Marisol and Sofia to talk about it.

•   •   •

A few weeks later out of the blue, one of the ladies smiled tauntingly and conspiratorially asked me, “Señor Dan, dónde está tu esposa?” (
Where is your wife?
) Ka-boom.

I’d been dreading this moment. I’d hoped they just assumed I was gay, as we all did with Ricky Martin. But as it turned out they didn’t know. So now what? If I said, “No tengo esposa. Tengo esposo. Soy gay. Me gustan los mucho macho muchachos!” I was certain of challenging or even offending a demographic that, until then, had been singing my praises and feeding me grapes.

Maybe I should lie
, I thought. I could easily tell them my “esposa” is at home. Or at work. Or dead? So what? Who cares? I don’t know these women. Whom does it hurt? Okay, I’d be betraying not only my own personal journey to a proud and honest life as a gay man but also I’d be in effect killing Don—or giving him an imaginary sex change. And why? Because the tamales were good? No. I couldn’t betray Don and every gay man or woman who risked and sometimes even lost their lives fighting for
my
freedom to even be a father. I turned to Esperanza, who was handing me an empanada made with creamed corn. Wow, she was a good cook. I knew I had to confess, but my mouth was full and suddenly Jonah called me from the top of the play structure to watch him go headfirst down the spiral slide. I ran to catch him: I know his little neck is flexible but wasn’t keen
to test it. Jonah landed in my arms and I carried him back toward the blankets of El Salvador and Guatemala. Esperanza, Marisol, and the others were focused on their charges. The moment had passed. “We’re going to go now! Hasta luego.” I had avoided the answer altogether.
They won’t even remember
.

Jonah and Eliza and I walked hand-in-hand to the car. Eliza then said, out of the blue, “Those ladies like you, Daddy.” Yes, they did. I knew that. And I liked them. Damn. I had to stop. We turned around and headed back.

“Where are we going?” The kids were pulling me and pointing toward the car. They’d already moved on. But I couldn’t.

We got back to the blankets and I told the ladies I was in the park by myself today because “mi
esposo
está trabajando,” and then I added, “
El
es un escritor” so there would be no mistakes about the gender. The ladies didn’t flinch. Then, as if from nowhere, Lupe, apparently just back in the country, piped in with “El es tan guapo como tu?” (
Is he as handsome as you?
) I laughed, blushing a little before responding, “Not even close.” They all laughed. I hugged Lupe and told her how much I’d missed her.

“I’ve been thinking about you,” I told her, “and your family. I hope you’re okay.” She took my hands in hers and thanked me. She told me how much she’d enjoyed getting to know me in the park.

And then she added: “Mi hermano tiene un novio. Ellos quieren tener hijos pero es muy difícil. Les voy a hablar de tu.”
(My brother has a boyfriend. They want to have kids but it’s very difficult. I will tell them about you.)
I was afraid to speak as the emotion was caught in my throat. Holding back tears, I
smiled and nodded and then just gave her a hug before the kids and I headed back to the car.