Purple Golf Cart: The Misadventures of a Lesbian Grandma (25 page)

Halfway through the flight I began to regret what I was wearing. It was the first time I would see my mother in over half of my lifetime, and I had on a ratty (but stylish) pair of twill jeans and a long-sleeve t-shirt. Heather grey.

In the letters I wrote to her, I tried to explain where I lived and what my situation was. I later learned that she had been using her connections through the university system to check up on me once she heard I had started at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Her own Alma Mater. I’m sure what she saw were poor grades, low attendance, and academic probation, until I flunked out completely. After that there was no way for her to find me.

I remained in Gainesville, near the university, after I bombed out. I was pretty heavy into the drug culture there, and I enjoyed it. I had always been such a good kid in high school but all that changed when I left home. I didn’t care that I failed out of college. The only reason I even went to my classes most of the time was to deal. Now that I didn’t have school to worry about, I was free to focus on my more lucrative endeavors. I lived in an apartment with three friends, Queen Diamond, Monique, and The K Fairy, each of us active in the business. In the life, really. It was a time of altered states with large quantities of drugs flowing in and out of our apartment. We each had our favorites. Mine was ecstasy followed by a little GHB.

This lasted for about nine months, then things started to unravel. One night, Queen Diamond was arrested for selling acid at a club. When Monique, The K Fairy, and I found out about Queen Diamond, we immediately cleaned house. We were hearing things about people we knew, friends of ours, some who were busted, some under surveillance, some who did business at my house. Buyers quit buying. Sellers feared getting raided so they dosed their stock. People close to me were taken from their houses, some in handcuffs, some on stretchers. My roommates and I turned on each other. Queen Diamond made a deal with the cops. A sting. In my apartment. I literally threw my things into my truck and drove away in the middle of the night.

These are among the things my mother is about to find out about me. I didn’t plan to withhold any of it. Besides, I’m sure she suspects that I got a little wild, but I think the reality will surprise her. But hey, this trip is all about answers, as much for her as it is for me. For my whole life, I had been well versed about my father’s side of everything that happened in our family. What I didn’t know was my mother’s side. What I didn’t know about my mother could fill a book. Mom, why did you move so much? Why did you take us to rallies? Give me picket signs when I was six years old that said ERA YES? So many questions I had for her. I remember the visitations when I was young. Every other weekend. I didn’t know why she did some of the things I’d see her do. But the real questions that I had were more about myself rather than about her.

Leaving Gainesville, I went to the only place where I felt safe—Key West. I couldn’t go home. The shame of what I had just been through was too much for me to face my father and his new wife, stepson, and new baby daughter. I went to Key West. I took enough pharmaceuticals and barbiturates with me to end my life. Just in case. But soon after I got there, I knew I wasn’t going to commit suicide. I flung the drugs into the sea.

During the next few months I lived on the streets in Key West. I spent my days sitting along Duval Street, selling my hemp-weave jewelry to the tourists. Some days I made enough money to sleep a night or two in the youth hostel. When I didn’t, I slept underneath the bridge at Bahia Honda. What I found there was clarity, peace, and a community of transients who showed me how to live out of the mainstream. I realized that what I’d been through made me strong. I found the courage to go home. While I loved being there in Key West, I knew it was not my place.

It had been a few years since I spent any time at my father’s house—my house, the house in which I grew up. His wife had changed everything with which I was familiar. My father called it nesting, but I saw her for the insecure little girl she was. She systematically removed anything and everything in the house that could remotely be connected to when my mother lived there. I saw her fear about any idea that associated her husband with his ex-wife. There was only one thing left from my childhood, from my mother: the couch. And here I lay, sleeping on it, wondering what happened.

I was only somewhat prepared for the fallout. As far as my father was concerned, I had been missing for months though he hadn’t tried to find me. And now here I was, asleep on the couch when he and his wife came home from a concert. Things were calm initially. Conversation was no more than “where’ve you been” and “what are your plans.” The yelling came, but not from whom nor at whom I expected.

I heard my father’s new wife yell at him in their bedroom at night. “Is he paying us rent to stay here?” “He’s a loser. I don’t want him around my baby.” “You get him out of this house!” And he did. I had been there for two weeks when my father told me to leave. He spoke very mechanically. There was no disappointment in his voice when there should have been. I was confused. I distinctly remember countless times when he himself told me that this will always be my home, that I would always have a place here, no matter what. When one is told something repeatedly by someone he trusts, it’s easy to believe it. Granted, it hadn’t felt like my home since I got there, but now I knew it was not. In fact, this wasn’t even my father. This is not the man that I grew up admiring. Respecting. Not anymore. No, that person was not in charge here. Fear rules this house. Her fear that I’ll infect her family. His fear that he’ll die alone if he doesn’t placate her, even at the cost of his own son. My family was someone else’s now.

Less than a month after coming home, I found myself back on the street again, but it was okay. This was a much-needed confirmation for me. For the few years that I lived in Gainesville, away from my family, I suspected that I didn’t belong any longer. I also realized that every event in my childhood was orchestrated, almost choreographed. I chose nothing. Hearing hateful things about my mother constantly for all of my childhood had great impact on my perception. All along, I believed my father was the victim of the worst theft and that I was the target of a predator. All I knew about my mother was exactly what my father wanted me to know. Now here I am, another one of his outcasts. Just like my mother. For the first time in my life I truly felt lost. Being homeless again didn’t bother me. I just didn’t know who I was anymore. So, in an attempt to find myself, I wrote a letter to my mother. I was twenty-two years old.

It was the week of Thanksgiving, 1998. As the plane pulled up to the gate, I knew she would be right there. My heart pounded as I walked up the gateway. I recognized her, could see her face in the expanding crowd. The uncertainty of how I would react was holding me until the last possible instant. I walked to her, tears welling in my eyes, feeling her arms surround me. I was suddenly struck by an unexpected familiarity—the gentle whiff of her perfume. I was a nine year old boy again, and safe in my mother’s arms.     

31. Wearing My Genes

March, 2005. My son Erik, who lived in Orlando at the time, visited me in my hotel room when I was at a conference in Tampa. It was two weeks before my birthday. "Mom,” he started, clear and confident. “There’s something I need to tell you, kind of a birthday present to you..... I’m gay.” As he said this, he extended his arms to me and flicked both wrists. Classic!

“Oh my precious son, I know,” I said with genuine gentleness.

“You do? How long have you known, Mom?”

“Years, honey. Since you were a year old and refused to wear your little plaid shorts with a striped shirt. And for sure when you were two years old and cried your heart out when you had to take off that adorable little Pierre Cardin tuxedo you were modeling for the Burdines Easter Pageant. A baby fashion queen!”

We hugged each other. “I love you, Mom.”

“I love you, too, Erik, and I’m very proud of you.”

~~~~~~

A month later the phone in my office at UCLA rang. It was Erik, still in Orlando. “I want to tell Dad,” he said. His apartment was only a few miles from his father who still lived in our original house, the house in which Erik was raised and from which he’d been kicked out a couple of years earlier.

“Erik, please, listen to me. Be careful. Call your dad or write a letter to him, but please don’t tell him in person.” Erik is a small man, about 5’8” and 130 pounds. His father is over 6 feet tall and 200 pounds. From somewhere in the cobwebs of my brain, I heard his father’s words from years ago: if my son tells me he’s a faggot, I’ll get a gun and kill him. I was frightened for Erik.

Two days later Erik called me again, his voice small and shaking. “I told Dad, Mom. I called him on the phone and told him. He told me never to contact him again. Mom...”

Erik moved to Los Angeles two months later.

~~~~~~

Berit divorced her first husband Bill and married her college professor, Matt, a few years prior to Erik’s coming out. Strangely, her father Jake, had a giant emotional transference and fully identified in some sick way with Bill. As a result, Jake excluded Berit from his family. Berit told me, “Dad said I was just like you. He lost it when I said ‘Thank you!’”

Today both Berit and Erik have lives that are good and healthy and full. They’re successful in their very different ways, surrounded by family and friends who love them deeply. Too bad Jake and his family are missing out on these two truly wonderful people. Two children disowned. How stupid can one man be?

~~~~~~

When Erik turned thirty-three, he said he wanted to write a letter to his father. “Mom, I want him to know how good my life is here in Los Angeles, how happy and successful I am. I’m just afraid he won’t read it, that he’ll throw it away unopened.”

“He might, Erik, but you have no control over that. If you want to write to him, do it for yourself, then let the letter go with love. Write whatever you want to tell him. Write what your heart tells you to say. Write it for yourself, not for your dad. If it’s time for him to read it, he will. Don’t stop trying to communicate because of what you think your dad may or may not do.” Erik hugged me.

“How can you be so open-minded about this, Mom? He was so mean about you, yet you always encourage Berit and me to not burn bridges. How do you do that?” I thought about Erik’s question. How do I explain that it took years of therapy, commitment to a 12-step program, a deep and abiding belief in a loving God, and the ability to forgive myself and others? So I merely said, “I know what it feels like to be separated from you and your sister. The day may come when your dad wants to reconnect with you. Holding a grudge serves no purpose. That’s all. You have no control over how your father feels and acts, but there may come a time for reconciliation, and you and Berit need to be open for it.”

“You’re amazing, Mom.”

“Well, regardless, if you write the letter, be sure to include a photo of your new Mercedes.” If Jake insists on being an ass, let him eat his heart out!

~~~~~~

Here’s an ironic thought: I believe Jake’s mother Cynda is a lesbian and that’s why she hates me so much. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if Jake were also gay. I believe homosexuality is genetic and runs in Jake’s mother’s family.

Case in point: Two years after I had come out, I brought my girlfriend Karen with me from Tallahassee when I took the children home. It was the first time someone besides the children and I were in the car. Cynda walked out to the car to greet us in her syrupy-Southern phony way.

“Y’all brought the chil-run home rhat on time.” And then Cynda stopped. She looked at Karen for a long minute, and then did something very strange. She invited us into the house! She never invited me in and, really, I never wanted to go in, but now curiosity got the better of me. We had to go in. What on earth was going on?

We followed Cynda into the house as she focused totally and completely on Karen. She invited us into her office where she dug deep into a drawer and removed a neatly wrapped stack of letters. Cynda handed the letters to Karen.

“I had a girlfriend once,” she said with great calm. What??? You could have knocked me right over. Did I just hear her say she had a girlfriend????

“She looked just like you,” she said to Karen. Holy COW!!! Karen was trying to be polite. I was on the sidelines trying not to reveal my hissy-fit. This is the woman who has single-handedly made my life a living hell for years with no sign of a let-up. She had a girlfriend??? I was dumbfounded!

Cynda continued. “We were girlfriends before I married Big Jake. Her name was Maria. She moved to Daytona Beach right after high school. She wanted me to go live there with her. These are her letters from back then.”

Okay, I had to try to breathe now. Cynda the Homophobic Witch had a lesbian lover? Karen was very polite. I was in shock and missed much of the conversation. Damn! Cynda a lesbian??? Of COURSE, she was. It all made sense to me know. She hated me because she hated herself! I was the embodiment of that which she detested in herself!

It was all very difficult to comprehend, but polite Karen got the woman’s name. I did some research among my lesbian friends in Orlando and found Maria. She confirmed to me that she and Cynda were indeed lovers many years ago. When Cynda would not move to Daytona Beach to be with her, they broke up. For whatever reason, Cynda married Big Jake, the young town drunk, shortly thereafter. Wow!