Travels with Penny: True Tales of a Gay Guy and His Mother (12 page)

IT WAS
AN UNUSUALLY HOT
spring afternoon the day I realized I should thank Oprah for reconnecting me with my parents. I’m not sure why I was thinking of Oprah on an unusually hot spring afternoon, as I doubt Oprah did much yard work, much less on hot spring afternoons. Nevertheless, there I was in Mom’s yard, working on all those projects Mom had asked me to finish during my week’s stay. I had been more interested in food, as Mom promised me a big lunch in exchange for the manual labor. Food has always played a disproportionately large role in my family. I envy those families with the celebratory Thanksgiving/Birthday/Christmas kind of relationship with food. My family tended more towards the destructive, “Oh, I’m bored and have nothing to do, so I’ll eat a box of Oreos” kind of relationship. Since my parents both worked full time while I was growing up, they were too tired for hiking, biking and skiing, and the Xbox hadn’t been invented yet, so they exchanged family game time for Mars bars and a TV with a remote. This guilt-induced eating may not have won them the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval as parents, but since Dad’s death, I’d periodically come to Mom’s to do work around the house, which was always good for lunch and a movie.

(One of the coolest things in life is when your parents retire. They get the rest they deserve, the ability to pursue all those hobbies they’ve been dreaming about and a discount at Denny’s. A convenient byproduct for their children is that they have plenty of time to do things for you. Where you used to buy cookies to bring to a potluck, now all you have to do is ask and WHAM! Tasty homemade treats. Try asking for some brownies next time you visit your mom.)

The day in question, I wandered around to the back porch and peeked through the sliding glass door to spy on Mom and see what she’d made for lunch. But the table was bare. Mom was nowhere in sight.

I found her sitting in the recliner watching
Oprah
.

“Your father never liked Oprah very much,” Mom said. “But I love her. Do you watch Oprah?”

I nodded and sat down. That’s the interesting thing about Oprah—whether you want to watch her show or not, the strength of her personality pulls you into her world like a tractor beam on the distressed Enterprise. Most of the world loves her for her generosity, her ability to get to the truth of an issue or any one of many reasons that put her in the running in a popularity contest with Jesus Christ. Me? Our relationship is a bit more complex. My love/hate relationship with Oprah began in 1985 when I was sitting with my sister and my mother on hard, plastic chairs in an Intensive Care Unit waiting room in a suburban Chicago hospital waiting to find out if my father was going to die. We sat several chairs apart from each other, as if the cheap plastic symbolized the emotional distance we had all put between each other. I stared at the TV as a heavy-set black woman with a booming voice and a wicked smile grinned into the camera. I had no idea who she was, but her energy was infectious and her laughter rang with sincerity.

“Who the hell is this woman?” I asked.

“Oprah.”

“Okra?”

“Oprah,” Mom corrected. “Like Harpo spelled backwards.”

“Oh, Jeez,” I whined. “What a moronic name.”

“She has this show.”

No kidding, I thought. The sound on the TV in the waiting room was turned down, so the only thing I heard was a muffled jumble of indistinguishable words. But the visuals explained everything: Some fat black woman had a talk show where they chatted about fashion. Great. Just what we need. Another bimbo on TV.

“She’s kind of a local celebrity. She does all kinds of shows about things going on in Chicago.” Mom’s voice came out uncharacteristically monotone. Her eyes were glued to the screen.

I sat back and watched as models paraded in front of the camera, flipped open fur coats, flashed rings and smiled for the studio audience. At almost the same time I considered turning up the volume, we were summoned into ICU and shuffled from the waiting room to Dad’s side.

Don’t ever have a heart attack. If your heart stopping doesn’t kill you, you’ll kill yourself mere weeks after you leave the hospital once you realize how terrible you looked while you were unconscious in the ICU. Dad was one of the lucky ones—he had no hair, so bed head wasn’t an issue. But he still looked pasty and the tubes running out of his mouth, nose and hands didn’t do anything to enhance his odds of making it onto the “50 Most Handsome Men” list. Nurses came in, gliding silently on rubber-soled shoes while pulling plugs, loosening tubes and lowering bed rails.

“What’s going on?” I asked. I knew he was alive by the annoying high-pitched beeping of the heart machine, so they couldn’t be prepping him for a trip to the morgue.

“He’s being transferred,” a young woman whispered in a crisp, soft voice as if the conversation would wake my father.

“What for?” Mom asked.

The nurse avoided eye contact and continued fussing around my father’s side. “You’ll have to talk to the doctor.”

* * *

That infamous summer Oprah entered our lives, I lived in a remodeled garage in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley. I hated the sun, heat and dryness of the Valley, but I had been in Southern California for a couple of years and built myself what passed for a life— albeit a pathetic one. The phone rang one morning about 7 a.m. It was my mother. I hadn’t spoken with her very often since that day at the kitchen table when we’d looked at photographs, when she’d asked me to “give her and Dad time” and I agreed. I had given them lots of time. A couple of years’ worth of time, in fact. During that time, I had heard nothing. So that morning when I heard her voice, thick with tears, choking, I knew it wasn’t a call to reconnect and end our estrangement. I knew it was something serious.

“David,” she said, “it’s … ” She never finished that sentence. Instead, there was a shuffle and her voice was replaced by my sister who did the same thing, shuffling the phone to someone else.

“It’s your dad,” a male voice said to me. He was the neighbor who’d lived behind us during my childhood; a cheery fellow with a wicked sense of humor and mischievous twinkle in his eyes. “They don’t know if he’ll live through the day. He could go at any time.”

I felt nothing when I heard this. It resonated at about the same strength as hearing about the death of someone you don’t know—a random face in a random newspaper article.

“Then call me when he dies,” I said and hung up. I figured why waste the money flying out to Chicago now? Much better to save the money for when he actually goes. Then I wouldn’t have to waste two flights.

I told a friend about my decision and her response was “It doesn’t matter how angry you are at a parent. If you don’t see them before they die, you’ll regret it forever.” I have no idea why I took this advice, but I did. I was on the next plane to Chicago, my estranged parents and Oprah.

* * *

Dad was transferred because he needed a surgical procedure that could only be done at the hospital in Elgin. The next day, when I arrived at the ICU, Mom sat watching Oprah again. This time Oprah was interviewing some people who I didn’t recognize.

“Oh, they’re some Chicago politicians,” Mom explained.

“I thought she did fluff pieces with fur and stuff.”

“That was yesterday,” Mom nodded. “She does all kinds of stuff.”

I nodded and sat back to wait for the doctors to arrive and let Oprah teach me about Chicago politics.

Thus began our relationship with Oprah. For the next several days, we would filter into the waiting room, watch
Oprah
and wait for the next development with my dad. Oprah became an odd touchstone in our lives, a way for us to be together without really communicating that allowed us to keep up the illusion that we weren’t worrying about what the future held, nor why we had gone so long without speaking. We slid into a silent understanding that we needed to be in the ICU waiting room well in advance of the
Oprah Show
so we could grab the hard, plastic chairs that had a clear view of the TV and not the hard, plastic chairs that forced you to crane your neck to see the screen. We brought our coffee or hot chocolate, our snacks and our thinning patience. We would sit glued to
Oprah
, only talking during commercial breaks. Oprah got us through those harried first days of anxious waiting, armed only with her smile, raucous personality and hair.

* * *

The night before Dad’s angioplasty, I sat with Mom at the kitchen table and made small talk while she chain smoked. When we had exhausted the weather, the quality of food in the hospital and other issues of avoidance, she turned to me and said, “Thanks for coming.”

That one comment grated on my nerves like nails on a chalkboard. After all this time, energy and frustration, a “thanks” is all I get? I turned to her and said, “I didn’t want to.”

She began to cry, “What do you mean?”

“I haven’t heard from you for all this time and suddenly I’m supposed to care?”

“We’re your family.”

I remember stammering, “All those years I heard ‘You’re our son’ and ‘You’re part of this family’—then when you find out I’m gay, you dump me? What’s that about?”

“You need to understand—” she began. I never let her finish that statement, a moment that has seared itself into my brain. For years, I’ve wondered what followed that statement. But that’s one train that will never return to the station—kind of like missing the ending of a TV movie that never gets released on DVD so you never find out.

Words began to spew from me uncontrollably, so fast I can’t remember if I made English sentences or if I ran them together like a tape on fast forward.

“People throw words around like ‘family’ and ‘love’ and what the hell do they mean, anyway? Don’t people who love each other accept them for who they are? What about those mothers who go on TV to talk about how much they love their son who has just murdered an entire family?”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Mom really didn’t understand.

“About the hypocrisy of it all. Like ‘You’re our family as long as you do what we like.’ Actions speak louder than words. Or silence. Jesus, Ma, family doesn’t ditch someone like an unwanted friend at the mall.”

Throughout my venomous monologue, Mom watched me and nodded.

“I’ve been alone, Ma. I really needed advice. I needed help.”

“You’re doing fine.”

“How the hell would you know?” I felt warm, like standing beside a furnace. “I’m terrified! I hate my job, I hate my life and I have no idea what the hell I’m doing. I could use some help here and there’s nobody I can trust.”

“That’s not true.”

“How do you know?” I asked again. “You don’t know anything about me.”

Mom stopped crying and turned on me. Her eyes were suddenly dry and her face stern. “Who’s fault is that? You never told us anything. You want help and advice? Ask for it. You want us to support you? Then share. I can’t help you if I don’t know there’s a problem.”

“Like you would have been there, right?” I didn’t know if I sounded sarcastic, but I wanted to. Where’s the reality show TV crew when you need them?

“You’ll never know, will you?”

What do you say to that? All was quiet for a moment, until at last she said, “We need to start again. Just … start over.”

“Fine,” I shot back. “Then you need to accept you have a gay son. If you invite me to see you, I may bring a guy. I have a life—

okay, not a good one—but it’s mine and you have no control over what I’m doing with it. It’s got to be on different terms, Ma.”

She sucked on her cigarette, and I watched the smoke flow out of her mouth, sending a puffy cloud into the air. We sat in silence until she finally said, “Everything is going to be different now.”

“We’ll see,” I said.

After another long pause she added, “Maybe we’ll come see you in Los Angeles. I’ve never been to Southern California. I’d like to go.”

“Then come,” I said.

Then we returned to sitting in silence, her cigarette burning silently in the ashtray.

* * *

Mom brought me out of my reverie when she said, “Oprah has really changed over the years, you know?”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “I know.”

“I like her,” Mom said, turning up the volume.

“Me, too.”

“THIS WAS
YOUR FATHER’S
favorite part of the house, really,” Mom said as I followed her down the slope of the backyard to the small dock Dad had built on the shore of the modest-sized lake. “He sat down on this dock for hours. He always wanted me to join him down here, but my God! How boring is it to sit and look at water all day? That is just not my deal.”

Dad sat on this dock to contemplate his navel, watch the Canada geese, or God-knows what else early-rising people do during the pre-dawn hours of the day. Often I would wake and stand at the sliding glass door in the kitchen with a mug of coffee and watch him sitting on the ancient metal lawn chair in the morning stillness. I never did understand what he was looking at. I’d never bothered to watch the water for more than a couple of minutes. Yes, watching the water calms the nerves, and I’ve heard it inspires poets. But, seriously, water’s water. What’s it going to do? Stand up and roll over? Leap up and do somersaults? It’s water, for crying out loud, not a spaniel. Bodies of water are fickle. They lay there, acting peaceful and serene as long as you stand on the shore admiring them from afar. But the minute you dive under the surface for a swim, her temperamental bitch personality kicks in and she drags you under the waves and tries to drown you. My grandfather taught me well.

Dad loved watching bodies of water, though, regardless of size. He felt a special connection with the water behind the house. He’d get into his beloved miniature boat and circle the lake, sometimes cutting the engine in the middle and drifting aimlessly, lost in thought. Maybe I’d be able to understand his fascination with the small lake if he and Mom were in the habit of leaping off the dock into the water with adolescent glee, or challenged each other to friendly skinny-dipping races or took romantic canoe rides around its perimeter beneath a moonlit sky on a summer’s night. I could excuse his obsession with the lake if he’d been a flower child in the ’60s and needed to relive his acid trips, but as far as I know, the only thing he knew about drugs was that they came in smart packaging and made guest appearances on
Law and Order
. That, and Mom visited a hash bar while vacationing in Europe. Besides, Mom didn’t even like being in the boat. So I chalked this water-watching up to him being weird. Or retired.

I turned to Mom, who stood next to me in the backyard looking at the dock. It was simple and functional, and jutted out twelve feet into the water. The L-shaped wooden pier was home to Dad’s small boat as well as a variety of mismatched lawn chairs. It was the centerpiece of his life after he and Mom retired and the last remnant of his to be cleaned up after his funeral. And cleaning up was putting it lightly. Judging by the masses of wires and switches attached to the wooden structure, Dad had been tinkering out here as much as he did in the basement. “Jerry rigging,” he called it. “Messing with stuff until it broke” was my term. Dad’s favorite saying was “jerry rigging”—a turn of phrase I couldn’t find in the dictionary and wondered where the hell it came from. When I was very small, I asked Mom one day what it meant.

“It’s not jerry-rigging!” Mom would snap back. “It’s good ol’ Yankee ingenuity!”

There you go. (For the record—later research revealed the origin of the phrase is “jerry-built.” I guess neither the word built nor the hyphen were considered good enough to stay in the English language.)

The dock wasn’t immune to the forces of Dad’s wild improvisation. On the left side of the L stood one of those cheap, white plastic garden cabinets you see in the glossy ads jammed into the Sunday newspaper—the ones that spill out of the center of the paper and pile up on the floor as you reach across the kitchen table for more coffee. The cabinet looked innocently Midwestern as it basked in the sunshine on that warm spring day—it stood about five feet tall, three feet wide and its inside sported three shelves. Its outer cabinet doors, when closed, provided a small ring through which one could secure a padlock. It was the kind of cabinet unit you find on sale at Lowe’s for less than the cost of the gas to haul the thing home. It was held together with interlocking pieces (No tools necessary! Just snap the easy-to-assemble pieces together and instantly store your garden supplies!). I opened the unlocked doors and out tumbled some fishing nets, a tangled mess of fishing line, bobbers, a life vest and a slew of miscellaneous stuff that Dad kept as treasures, and the rest of us relinquish to trash dumps.

“It’s old and full of spider webs,” Mom declared, pointing at the plastic shed. “Just take it down. I’d do it myself, but my I don’t have the strength to haul it away.”

“You’re sure you don’t want to keep it?”

“For what? More crap? Don’t I have enough crap around here?”

No comment.

“All right. Consider the thing gone,” I assured her. How hard could this be? Advertisers like to use words like “durable” and “sturdy” but we all know that’s adspeak for “It’s manufactured by low-paid Chinese workers with sub-standard materials, so you’re buying a piece of cheap crap that’s a step above cardboard.” I bought a similar piece of crap when I lived in Maine. Every time I touched it, the thing would fall apart into a heap on the basement floor. I took Dad’s lead and tried jerry-rigging it with duct tape, wrapping wire around the joints, leaning it against the basement wall, praying to pagan gods and whatever else I could think of, to no avail. Last time I saw it, it sagged against the dumpster behind my townhouse and a stray cat had taken up residence on the bottom shelf.

All things considered, there was plenty of time to yank Dad’s cheap, plastic shelf unit into a pile and haul it to the dump before noon. Then we could take off for an early lunch, then maybe to the movies. If I used my Son Look, I could probably get Mom to spring for the popcorn.

I grabbed the large white thing by the sides and pulled, thinking I would haul the unit as one piece to the truck, saving myself the bother of disassembling it and making several trips. But it didn’t budge under the force. It felt as if I had pulled on a rock, solid and unyielding.

“When did Dad get this?” I asked Mom, suspecting that Dad must have bolted it to the dock. Damn. This would mean finding the right socket wrench, undoing the bolts and making the several trips I was trying to avoid. There would be no “early” to the lunch.

“Oh, a couple of years ago,” she said. “It took him about five minutes to put it together. It’s a cheap piece of shit. Besides, you know how he loved to tinker with shit.”

I grabbed the door of the cabinet, knowing it was only attached to the roof section and the floor section at either end by a finger of plastic that fits neatly inside the hole of the upper shelf unit. Like the story goes, “Insert slot A into hole B.” Nothing wrong here folks, just a minor set-back. I pulled. It fought back. I yanked. It didn’t care. No matter how much I tugged, the door’s plastic fingers remained firmly rooted in the base at both the top and bottom. Screw it, I thought, there were two doors, so I tried the second door. It too refused to budge.

I grabbed a hammer and shoved the claw end into the narrow gap between the door and the main unit. The door buckled but didn’t snap.

“Ma, come here and hold the door, okay?” She did and I applied more pressure to the hinge side of the door. No good. I moved back to the first door. Same results. Soon we had a cheap molded plastic storage shed that looked like it had grown breasts.

“Reach under the doors and pull.” Mom said.

I did. With a loud CRACK, the upper finger of the left door popped out of the hole.

“Damn! This thing is a pistol!” Mom said.

“Did he super glue this thing together?” I asked, looking at the deformed door and deciding that if I was ever a offered a superpower, screw things like flight and telepathy—I would ask for the ability to blow up stuff. First on my list: that frickin’ plastic storage shed. “Now, we just pull the bottom of the door from slot B and we’ve got it.” I grabbed the door and pulled upwards. Then I screamed as the plastic remnants sliced through my finger and blood gushed out into the water. The damned thing bit me! The door remained fully entrenched in slot B.

“Don’t kill yourself, for God’s sake!” Mom chastised me.

“God-damn!” I kicked at the cheap plastic door in exasperation. It swung away from me and hung limply over the water, beaten but still kicking. “What do we have to do to this thing? Set the frickin’ pier on fire and melt it?”

“Well, it gets a lot of weather out here: rain, ice, snow … ”

“So do postal carriers, but they’re not indestructible!”

“Your dad wanted it to stay put, I guess.”

“Staying put is one thing, fusing it to the dock is something else! So he took this cheap piece of crap plastic and what? Morphed it into concrete?”

The door clung to the plastic storage shed with all the gusto of Mel Gibson’s character in
Braveheart
when he lay strung out on a table getting his penis chopped off by the British. It knew it was doomed, but it still planned to make me work for my victory. I grabbed the plastic with a renewed vigor and sense of determination. It’s a finger of plastic shoved into a hole, for God’s sake! I was a human being with a Master’s degree! I had a brain. I had opposable thumbs. This shed was an inanimate object that didn’t even have hands. There was no way it was going to defeat me. After five minutes of tugging, pulling, swearing and throwing myself at it like a five-year-old throwing a tantrum, the door finally gave up and broke free with a loud CRACK. I chucked it onto the dock with a grunt of frustration and threw my arms up in the air in triumph.

“We win!” I screamed, wiping the sweat off my face.

“Congratulations,” Mom said. “You beat the shit out of a hunk of plastic.” Mom picked up the remnants of the door and inspected it carefully.

“There’s no glue on this!” Mom said.

“Yeah, Mom, I noticed that.”

“That should have been easy to take apart. It’s just a bit of plastic in a hole.”

“You’re right, Ma. I’ve been playing around because I have nothing better to do than hammer a piece of plastic.”

“Don’t be a sarcastic shit,” Mom snapped, analyzing the end of the door. “Wow. That’s strange. What’s holding it in place?”

“No idea, Ma.”

One door down. One door, three sides and a roof made of crappy plastic to go. I looked at the time and realized it’s been almost twenty minutes and we’d only managed to remove one door. At that rate, we were looking at wrapping up just before sunset. We were definitely
not
going out to lunch. Maybe there’d still be time for the movie, though.

This time, it’s war. I stared down the second door and strategized my plan of attack. I grabbed the claw hammer and spun it in my palm, analyzing the shed for its Achilles heel. Then I see it: a small gap between the wooden dock and the underside of the remaining door. I estimate there’s just enough space to accommodate the claw of the hammer, allowing for enough leverage to pry the bottom loose from the wood. I took a deep breath and throw myself onto the dock. I hurled myself into the handle of the hammer, shoving the claw between the opening and the wood. I whirled around, bracing my feet on the inside of the back wall and tightened my grip on the tool. I simultaneously pulled on the hammer and thrust with both my legs, sending all my force into the cheap, plastic wall. The shed groaned with agony as the nails holding the floor to the dock were wrenched from the wood. Then, with a heavy THUD, it keeled backward onto the deck and lay still. It was dead. I had beaten the plastic shed.

“Now the roof,” Mom declared. “Then the walls should be easy. They’ll fall like a house of cards.”

“No sweat,” I said. This time, I’m ready for the sucker. I declare a full assault on the plastic shed by hammering upwards against the roof from the inside.

“Well, I’ll be,” Mom said. “That’s really stuck in there, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” I groaned. Sweat dripping into my eyes, I dropped the hammer onto the dock and picked up my secret weapon.

“What are you going to do with a hack saw?” Mom asked.

“Go Jeffrey Dahmer on it!” Note to self: Worry when you begin to identify with serial killers. I placed the blade about halfway up the side and began sawing. This time, we’d just cut the damned thing down the middle, yank the top half off and screw trying to disassemble bit by bit. I’m totally going to draw and quarter this sucker. Ten minutes later, I had hacked into the sides about an inch. Goddammit! About forty minutes had gone by, and we’d only gotten two doors off.

“You did better when you were kicking the hell out of it,” Mom said. She was right. I began kicking it again. It didn’t help.

“I cannot believe this!” I threw myself at it in frustration. “How in the hell did he put this together?” I went Hulk against the cheap plastic, yanking, pulling, kicking and screaming.

“Jesus Christ, where did you learn language like that?”

“You and Dad.”

“Maybe from your dad, but not from me,” Mom snorted. “Here, I’ll help.”

She pulled on the unit. I shoved the crowbar underneath the bottom shelf while throwing myself against it. A loud CRACK echoed over the lake and the shed flopped onto Mom, who caught it like a pro linebacker. All that was left now were four huge, rusty bolts drilled through the wood of the dock with jagged pieces of white plastic sticking out from under the rusty washers.

“Damn!” I said, pointing. “Here’s the reason! Dad bolted the sucker to the dock with four bolts.”

“Look at the size of them!” Mom shrugged. “I guess he wanted to make sure it didn’t go anywhere.”

“These bolts are the size of Detroit. What the hell was he expecting? A hurricane?”

I adjusted the wrench and started unscrewing the bolts, which were tight from the rust that had accumulated around the threads. I tugged on the wrench. They stayed. I smacked them with the flat side of the tool. They remained motionless.

“I’m going to need vice grips,” I snapped at Mom. She fingered the tools lined up on the dock.

“These?” She said, holding out the vice grips. I snatched them from her. “Yes.”