Read Stories for Boys: A Memoir Online
Authors: Gregory Martin
Stories for Boys: A Memoir (18 page)
But what if the long-term, reflective adult self has spent most of his life in existential confusion? What if it is only the child who is impulsive, deceptive, but let’s also say courageous enough, to be gay? How does the adult put the child in time-out when the child wants to give or get anonymous head in the park for the 613th time, but not put the child in time-out when he wants to simply be himself, to be gay? What if the child has only ever been gay in secret, among strangers with whom he has no desire to have a playdate? The child doesn’t even want to know the other boys’ names. He is in a hurry to get back to being an adult. What if the long-term adult self has desperately, for more than thirty-nine years, been trying to either conceal or suppress this not-so-short-term child? Hasn’t the child grown up by now? What if the adult has been desperate in this way so long that this desperation has become a strangely calm anticipation? Or a kind of thrill?
3
What if the child slips up, irrevocably, and the adult tries to kill the child? A child? Really? A grandfather and father but also a child? Could it really be possible that the adult, in this one crucial, essential way, has been a child all these years?
3
What if the child slips up, irrevocably, and the adult tries to kill the child? A child? Really? A grandfather and father but also a child? Could it really be possible that the adult, in this one crucial, essential way, has been a child all these years?
My mother could not put my father in time-out. He was sixty-six years old. Sixty-six minutes was not long enough.
Subject: Happy Belated BirthdayDate: Tue, 11 Feb 2009Greg,I have been so caught up in my own worries of late that I completely forgot your birthday. I am really sorry. It seems that since MomMom died, I’ve been really out of sorts. I have also made a few really bad choices in so-called friends. I finally decided a few days ago that I am facing the possibility of having dropped into a level of depression I haven’t been in for some time. I believe that having that realization is a step in the right direction. I’ve made some positive changes in my behavior(s). Like quitting the bar scene and becoming more wary of people I meet. I’ve still got to figure out how to battle isolationism and take care of myself. But enough on me for the moment.Happy Birthday, again. Is there anything special I can get for you that you wouldn’t get for yourself? Please let me know. Also, I will go out today and at least get a real birthday card and get it in the mail.Got to go for now.Love you,Dad
Assisted Living
IN THE SPRING OF 2009, TWO YEARS AFTER HE ATTEMPTED suicide, my father moved to Arizona. I didn’t know he was considering a move. But he’d been in touch with a recruiting agent for a national rehab company located in Phoenix. They offered him a position in a 128-bed nursing home in Kingman, which is a seven hour drive down I-40 from Albuquerque. The day before he left, my father wrote me an email and broke the news. “They made me an offer worth coming out of semi-retirement for.”
I didn’t think it was just about the money, about the economy tanking and my father’s retirement account tanking with it – though that had happened. He didn’t need to move to small town Arizona, of all places, to go back to work full-time.
I called and asked him why he wasn’t just going back to work full-time in Spokane. Didn’t he like his job?
He said, “I don’t want to see your mother in the grocery store. I saw her recently. The look she gave me – ” my father’s voice trailed off.
But why Kingman, Arizona? That wasn’t exactly the most open and affirming place. He was a speech therapist. He could move anywhere. Why not Seattle? Or the Bay Area? I’d bet there wasn’t a single gay bar within a hundred miles of Kingman. Where would he go with his guitar on Karaoke night?
“I don’t really like that life,” my father said. “I can’t really get used it. The people that go there. They’re just not the kind of people I’m used to.”
What did he think, that coming out of the closet was going to be easy? Why not move some place where he at least had a fighting chance? What about the friends he’d been making lately?
My father said, “They weren’t really friends.” His voice had gone cold. He didn’t want me to be asking these kinds of questions, but I felt strangely desperate for him. I didn’t want him to give up trying.
I said, “What about that man you were sort-of seeing, the one who was divorced, who was older? The one who owns the horses and lives on a bunch of acres outside of town?”
“I don’t know how to say this, son. He doesn’t want any kind of commitment. He doesn’t really return my calls. He only calls – ” My father stopped talking.
“I’m sorry, Dad.”
“It’s time to move on,” my father said.
My mother and father had lived together in Virginia and Nebraska, in Maryland and New Mexico, in New Jersey and Washington, but never in Arizona. There was nothing to remember in Arizona.
FOR THE FIRST several weeks in Kingman, while he looked for a new place to live, my father stayed in his popup tent trailer, in what was, truly, a typical RV park. The owner of the nursing home learned of this, and he asked my father if he wanted to stay in one of the rooms at the assisted living facility across the parking lot from the nursing home. There were a few open rooms. My father could stay for free until he found a place. My father accepted. So for about a month, he slept in a bed on wheels with electronic controls. He had a bureau with a mirror, a bathroom outfitted with safety rails, a shower with a seat, and a red call button next to the toilet. My father did not tell the other residents that he wasn’t a resident. They didn’t think to ask. They just assumed he was one of them.
My father did not say, “I’m just here temporarily. I work across the street. I’m waiting for my offer on a house to go through.” Not once. He had breakfast and dinner with the other residents. Beef stroganoff. Chicken alfredo. Fruit medley in that syrup.
I don’t know how to account for this. I don’t know whether to think of it as one of the most humble things I have ever heard about anyone, or whether to see my father’s reticence as a refusal to let others see how far he had fallen – and a refusal to admit this to himself, out loud, in words. Humility? Shame? Denial? Or perhaps all three at once.
My father made offers on two different houses. There was trouble, each time, with the loans – my father is no economist – but, this time, he did not steal from my mother. Both loans were denied. Each morning, after breakfast, he walked across the parking lot to work.
DURING THIS TIME, I talked with my father about once a week. He didn’t tell me he was staying in an assisted living home. I didn’t learn this until much later, about two years later. What he told me at the time, in an email, was this: “I’ve had to live in a temporary place with most of my things still packed, waiting for a permanent home.”
Father’s Day
MY FATHERHOOD HAS BEEN CELEBRATED NINE TIMES now, and I can’t remember a single well-meant gift. No father remembers what they get for Father’s Day. Not really, and this is as it should be. Father’s Day gifts are supposed to be vague and generic. Something he needs but won’t get for himself. When I was growing up, I gave my father soap-on-a-rope. I gave him brown socks in a three-pack. I gave him shoe polish. I gave him ties so wide they could now be worn only by supremely self-confident hipsters. He always seemed pleased with these gifts. But even as accomplished an actor as he was, he could not pretend to be thrilled. Which was okay. I was pretending, too. I pretended to have thoughtfully picked them out myself, when the truth was that my mother bought these presents for him. After I grew up and went off to college and eventually became an adult, my mother stopped giving my father gifts for Father’s Day on my behalf. She didn’t even send him a card. Instead, a few days before, she’d call and remind me that Father’s Day was coming up, and a few days later, I would call him and we’d talk for a while on the phone.
But why did I not call my father on Father’s Day in the summer of 2009? It could no longer be my mother’s fault. Could I possibly have waited to email him until a few days after Father’s Day because he had not gotten in touch with me, at all, for the past two years on my birthday? I wouldn’t do something like that, would I?
Until now, it had never occurred to me to wonder how my father spent Father’s Day when he was a boy. I wonder if that day, and the days leading up to it, were spent in fear. Or in hope and longing for the father who would be sober, kind, unpreda-tory. Wouldn’t that have been what my father always felt for his father, on every day of his childhood – fear and longing at once?
I HAVE NEVER once feared my father. Not a single moment, not a single day. I wonder how many grown children can say such a thing.
Subject: RE: Father’s DayDate: Tue, 30 Jun 2009Greg,Really nice to hear from you. And I do understand exactly how it happens. But I have an over active imagination. I woke up yesterday morning at 5:30 sweating like a stuck pig, absolutely positive that you were trying to hide something from me. The only thing imaginable that you would hide from me was that your Mom might have cancer again. This would be something that I am incredibly vulnerable about. I still care very much and felt totally powerless. It was all I could do to get through the day... I was most grateful to hear I was wrong. You may not want to hear all about the inner me. We have discussed this in the past. I feel very deeply, but have always kept my inner self hidden, and it is obvious that I still do. It is a rare occasion for me to really open up. I was really and truly scared about the possibility that your Mom might be facing cancer again and I couldn’t be there in any form for support. I told you once before that my penance for my many sins would be never to be close to Dee again. It is a forever pain that has not diminished in the past two years.The transition from Spokane to Kingman has been interesting, but not without its problems. I’ve had to learn a completely new computer documentation system at work. I’ve made mistakes, partly because my boss never took the time to really ensure I knew what I was doing before cutting me loose. I don’t believe she wants me to fail, she just didn’t check up on what I was doing to make sure I was doing it right. Happy to say I haven’t made any serious mistakes, just annoying ones. I really like almost all the people I work with. They are mostly friendly and helpful. The facilities I work at are all clean and well managed and I’ve not met a nurse who didn’t know what he/she was doing. I was really depressed about the loan on the house falling through. And I’ve had to live in a temporary place with most of my things still packed, waiting for a permanent home. Yes, I’m lonely. But no, I’m not doing anything about it. I’m not going to try bowling yet because I go to bed around 9:30 and bowling leagues never finish that early. There is no bridge that plays at night. They only play during the day at the Senior Center. Can’t do that. I have resolved, however, that when I get settled, I am going to frequent the Community Center for lunch or dinner. I don’t like living like a hermit.Like I said earlier, I don’t open up often, but when I do, watch out. Right now, my fingers are tired and my shoulders ache. More later.Love you all very much.Dad
My Father’s Memoir
I CAN’T TELL YOU MY FATHER’S STORY. THE BEST I CAN do is let him speak for himself, from time to time, so that you can at least partially come to know him, so you can see how he is both emotionally open (
It is a forever pain that has not diminished in two years
) and frustratingly vague
(I’ve had to live in a temporary place
) in the same email.
It is a forever pain that has not diminished in two years
) and frustratingly vague
(I’ve had to live in a temporary place
) in the same email.
My father’s memoir will never be written.
I can’t tell you anything about what it’s like to live a secret life, to be a sexually active gay man while married and in a loving relationship with a woman. When I imagine that life, it’s as if I’m imagining the life of a man I’ve never met.
Imagine my father’s memoir. Imagine the stories he might tell. Imagine how his stories would confirm or contradict, clarify or confuse the stories I am telling here. Imagine all the stories my father has not told and will never tell. How can I know him if he won’t tell me his stories? How can I tell you what he won’t tell me?
Transgression
THE HOUSE WAS QUIET. DEE HAD BEEN ASLEEP FOR hours, since ten or so. The boys had been asleep longer. He’d checked on them at eleven, before he got into bed himself. They’d kicked off their covers and he’d pulled them back up. It was November and the house was cold at night even with the furnace running.
He’d been in bed long enough. He hadn’t slept, hadn’t tried to sleep, couldn’t have slept if he’d tried. He knew better. He pulled back the sheet, slid his feet to the cool wood floor, walked lightly to the closet, and took a t-shirt and jeans from two hooks at the back of the closet – he’d hung them there earlier that night – and went down the hall to the bathroom. The house was old, built in the twenties, and the worn, oak floorboards creaked with every step. No matter. He hardly noticed. His was a house of heavy sleepers. The walls creaked and the furnace knocked and whistled and the plumbing banged against the joists. He’d stopped noticing all these night sounds. He didn’t hear them any more than he heard his own breathing, which was calm. Anticipation – that low electric thrum – was deeper in his chest. In the dark of the bathroom, he took off his pajamas and pulled on and zipped up his jeans. He opened the linen closet and set his pajamas on a high empty shelf. He turned and, out of habit, checked his teeth in the medicine cabinet mirror. They were fine. He’d brushed them before he’d gone to bed. For a moment, he stood tall and took his own measure. He was forty-two years old. Only a few of the hairs on his chest had gone gray. He was lean and strong. He pulled on the t-shirt, left the bathroom and went down the back stairs. In the kitchen, he took his keys off their hook. He took his wallet from the drawer and put it in his back pocket. He opened a tall cabinet door, and beside the sugar and salt and Flintstones vitamins, he found Dee’s blue pill organizer. He took out her three pills for that morning, a Tuesday, and set them in a small glass bowl on the counter. He took out her penguin mug and set it beside the bowl.
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