Leg, p.14
Leg, page 14
Dad told me about how he’d been walking to his car after work at the paper one afternoon, too depressed to watch where he was going, when he’d bumped into a young, tan reporter with long brown hair and a Basque last name. “I took her out in my gold Firebird and . . .”
“Dot, dot, dot,” I interrupted. We were on the freeway now, cruising along.
This was the part of the story I’d heard before, the part Mom was always bragging about. I remember wondering, even as the words came out, why I always had to be so sarcastic. Dad’s gold Firebird was the best car he’d ever owned. The engine had melted twenty years ago but he still brought it up any chance he got.
“And dot, dot, dot,” Dad said, playing along, “a month later we were engaged.”
“You and Mom jumped each other’s bones in your gold Firebird,” I said. “On your first date. Thanks for the info.”
Did I turn bright red after saying this? I did.
Did dad? I think so.
He tapped the steering wheel with his thumbs, tilted his head to check his mirrors. “My point is that I never gave Gina Jones another thought.”
“Except for right now,” I said, trying not to laugh.
I didn’t glance over but I could tell Dad was smiling, too.
Gretchen and I kicked off our presidential campaign in style that spring. In the era before social media, we gleefully turned our life into a photo shoot. We snapped silly pictures of ourselves as we raised virgin margaritas to firefighters at an arts festival, drink umbrellas in our platinum hair, and booty-danced near trash cans swarming with flies in case we wanted pictures to go with the slogan NO BUTTS ABOUT IT. Our strategy was simple, and that was to make fun of ourselves. It proved to be as sure a course as any. The G’s vanquished the bible study kids and the theater kids, the star baseball player being recruited by Annapolis and his outrageous girlfriend who wore jeans over pink tutus and peed on the kitchen floor at John’s house parties. The election came down to a runoff between Gretchen and me on one ticket and a pair of adorable Mormons on the other. One was a corn-fed male cheerleader and the other was the yearbook editor. These were the upstanding young people Gretchen and I would have been if nothing had ever been wrong with us, if we didn’t have to salt our happy childhoods with irony.
I knew we’d beat them.
The homestretch of the campaign was a blur. I hardly remember delivering our closing speech or bubbling in our Scantron ballots. What I remember is sitting together at a schoolwide assembly, our shaking hands locked together, and hearing our names called. Gretchen and I walked down the center aisle of the auditorium and onto the stage as blue and gold confetti rained down on us and Kool and the Gang’s “Celebration” came over the speakers. We’d won.
Our families rushed the stage. Tiffany tried to act like she hadn’t been crying. Moe danced around. Mitch played on her phone. My dad gave me a high five that turned into one of those shoulder-level victory handshakes that politicians do, fingers intertwined, palms flat against each other. “All right, my man. Leader of the free world.”
Mom wrestled me into a hug, her diamond earring digging into my cheek like usual, her sun hat almost flying off. Sometimes she piled on extra lipstick just to leave her mark. “You weren’t even supposed to walk, you little shit,” she said. “You were just this little tiny guy, this peanut, and you had these giant testicles. It was like, ‘Oh my God, those are the biggest things I’ve ever seen.’”
What can I say? Mom had her talking points and she stuck to them.
Despite the party going on around us, I could tell something was wrong. We normally only hugged gingerly as not to disturb Mom’s port. Hugging me hard, it was like she was past caring. Sure enough, the next thing I knew she was pulling down her camisole to show me what looked like an unripe pomegranate growing on her chest. Her port was infected and needed to be taken out. Immediately. “I’m supposed to be in surgery now. I’ve ignored about a bazillion calls from Saundra. I’m septic.”
“Is that serious?” I tried to sound worried but I was already looking past her for my friends.
“Most people die from it,” Mom bragged. “Don’t worry. I probably won’t.”
“Mr. President’s got hands to shake, Deb,” Dad said. “Let’s put away your third breast and get you to the hospital.”
“Hold your horses, Bobby Boy,” Mom said, trying for merriment as she roped me into another disconcertingly firm hug. Into my ear, she whispered something but started to cry and had to begin again. “I just had to be here in case you lost.”
Being the president of my high school was a complicated experience. The office gave me the permanent hall pass and padded résumé I wouldn’t have had otherwise but also made me susceptible to bullying on a far larger scale than I could have anticipated. It was like real politics in that way, all my insecurities under the spotlight. At club sign-ups before the first day of school, a band of self-described Mormon hippies (no shoes, no showers) politely asked for my car keys and threw them in the dumpster.
In spite of being religious rejects, Gretchen and I did the little good we could in office. We funneled some of our Christmas fundraising money into Head Start, where Gretchen’s mom worked, and knocked on doors for a Jewish woman, and proud Democrat, running to represent Skyline’s neighborhood in the state senate. I even spoke out against the Iraq War on the senate floor of the state capitol.
But the best part of being president and VP was getting to hang out with Gretchen. We starred in assemblies, got free pictures at dances, skipped class whenever we wanted, and prowled the sidelines at football games wearing our Student Body Officer sweaters. “Have a good time,” the Bobs warned us, “because it’s going to be over before you know it.” And we did. And it was.
Our final summer before college, John and I both got jobs as camp counselors at the Cottonwood Club. I had already decided to go to the University of Southern California when, after a day of filling bottles with colored sand and letting kids launch off my shoulders in the pool, I got talking to John in the parking lot about my other option, Northwestern.
John had gotten into an Ivy after all. He was headed to UPenn and was rooting for me to end up in Chicago because it was closer to the East Coast, just one time zone away. Mom had gone to a journalism grad program at Northwestern back in the seventies and hated it, passing on to me a dread of the freezing midwestern weather and depressed student body, though I told John, piously, I wasn’t going there because I wouldn’t be able to hack it academically.
“Fuck, you got in,” John said. “If you don’t want to be in Chicago then don’t go, b-but you’re plenty smart. You taught me how to say e-e-erudite.”
Something else had happened to turn me off Northwestern that I didn’t mention to John. Back in the fall of senior year, I’d done an alumni interview with a guy in an electric wheelchair. His wife had taken my coat when they had answered the door and I’d walked stiffly to the couch in their cozy living room, unsure whether I should mention my tight tendons, hoping this guy, an engineer in town, didn’t think I was making fun of him with my shambling gait. I hadn’t mentioned anything about my leg in my application.
Our conversation covered the usual ground, stories I’d written for Horizon and what I’d learned so far from being student body president. As we talked, one of the engineer’s house slippers fell off. I kept wanting to bend down and help him put it back on, but I just sat there on the couch, hands on my thighs, biting my bottom lip and thinking about how I was blowing it. How many times had a slipper fallen off my partially paralyzed foot? My brother said watching me try to put on a pair of shoes made him feel like he was having a stroke.
That slipper brought back the sense of revulsion I’d felt for Carlotta. When I saw other disabled people—openly disabled people—I wanted to limp away as fast as I could.
Maybe this was part of my attraction to John, my polar opposite, a Greek god who could spell things right on his first try, ace the ACT, and make the tennis team. And there he was in the parking lot of the Cottonwood Club, feeling up his chest muscles and begging me to follow him eastward. I had Dad call USC and back out that night. My destiny was in Chicago with John.
The crazy part of my ploy to be closer to John is that it worked. Both homesick freshmen, John and I spent hours every week messaging each other on AIM. John would send me music files and I would put on my janky headphones to block out the sound of my roommate slathering peanut butter on mousetraps or streaming basketball games on his laptop to compose enthusiastic mini-essays on Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan. Who are these guys? They’re amazing!
My all-male wing of the dorm was nicknamed the Mole Hole as it sat opposite the all-female Virgin Vault. I detested every second there. Not for the first time in my life, my queerness and my leg formed a perfect storm of insecurity. It’s hard to make friends when you’re scared to walk in front of people, when you’re secretive and ashamed about something as obvious as your own body. Thucydides says the strong do what they will and the weak do what they must, I chatted. I feel like I’m must-ing right now.
A few seconds later, LovingCup5954 popped up. Good reference!
I trudged to the showers in the blue terrycloth robe I’d stolen from my brother, so shy I shaved and brushed my teeth in the shower stall rather than at the sinks. In a matter of months, I’d gone from being the student body president of my high school to being the gross, weird kid in the Mole Hole. How anyone could stand living with me I’ll never know. I ran myself to the bone at the campus gym—trying to keep my legs stretched while punishing them for screwing up my life—and then hung sopping workout clothes from every corner of the room. I ate boxes of 365 Brand Cheerios in front of my laptop until the roof of my mouth was cut up, and then I washed it all down with gallons of pulpy orange juice. The mice were my fault.
Heading home for Thanksgiving break, John texted from the runway in Philadelphia, then again from the tarmac in Salt Lake after he’d touched down. All those hours over AIM would be worth it when we reunited in person for the scintillating talks we were sure to have about our new cities, our new lives, Thucydides. And who knows? Maybe the right moment would finally come along and I’d have the courage to put down my ping-pong paddle and tell him how I felt. Maybe we’d end up making wobbly love atop the table. I did some thigh stretches just in case.
I waited for him to text but John was always out with Byron and his drinking buddies. I had to swallow back a dribble of stomach acid when I thought of him pounding beers, no longer worried about brain cells and calories, no longer saving himself for his future with me. Did Chip realize how lucky he was?
I hadn’t gotten drunk once since the start of college, but I made up for lost time over the break with Gretchen, barely making it to the toilet to be sick on more than one occasion. Rinsing at the sink one morning, I made my way back to bed, Mom trailing after me. “I just don’t get why you’re so upset. I mean, who’s John? He’s just some kid you knew in high school.”
If he’d meant less to me, it would have been easier to express my disappointment. To call him a high school crush would have negated the hours we’d spent together, suggesting I’d only gawped at him from across the hall. At the same time, John wasn’t my first love; he was my only love. The possibility that he could just be some guy I knew in high school felt like more of an indictment of me than him. If that were the case, what had I been doing with my life?
Being stood up for a week solid should have been enough to break John’s hold on me, but once we were back at college, it was like we’d never left our dorm chairs, like Thanksgiving had never happened. John went back to being the smelly rock geek, repulsive to everyone but me, the guy who sent me love songs over AIM. Perhaps feeling guilty about Thanksgiving, or wanting to hang out with me away from his high school drinking buddies, John invited me to visit him for a campus-wide party at the end of the year. It was called Spring Fling.
Seriously, John wrote. It’s not for a while but book your ticket.
I booked my ticket to Philadelphia and then woke up in a cold sweat every night for months. Three weeks out from the trip, I took a shot of my roommate’s soju and sent John an email telling him I was gay because I couldn’t quite bring myself to tell him the truth: that I loved him. I remember addressing the email like a letter. It began “Dear John” and was signed “Sincerely.” If John didn’t want me sleeping on the floor of his dorm, I understood completely. “Sorry if this puts you in an awkward position,” I wrote. “I shouldn’t have accepted your invitation to visit without telling you first.”
I hadn’t even come out to my parents yet and I was hoping one coy confession would lead to another. John’s considerate, supportive, totally platonic reply dinged in my inbox a few minutes later. John told me how much our friendship meant to him and that he was still looking forward to my visit. And then came the dire final line: “This changes nothing between us.”
I played it off like I was relieved but I couldn’t help but be devastated. John didn’t want to do me. Duh. We were just friends. Coming out didn’t change that.
I took a long, weepy walk around the Lakefill that night.
Given the emotions roiling in me, the serves I uncorked on the hardcourts of a Palm Desert Marriott over spring break with my family were eminently more returnable than the veritable branches of lightning I could imagine emanating from my racket. Nineteen and still a virgin, I had things other than tennis on my mind. It was time to make like the macaw in the lobby and announce to my family I was GAY. Now that John knew I had nothing to lose.
In terms of set pieces, I could have gone for the dramatic, the clay courts, say, or the flamingo pond. When it came down to it, I chose the quiet of our villa, starting with my mom.
She had a range of reactions over the course of the day, from saying she liked gay men way more than straight men to telling me, as we treaded water at the main pool, that it felt like she had been hit in the stomach with a shovel. “I just don’t want your life to be harder than it already is,” she said. “I don’t want to see you get hurt.”
My dad’s response that evening, when I told Tiff and him I was a “pickle smoker,” was characteristically low-key. Eating Triscuits and sipping wine on the back patio, he said, “I see this as a non-issue, Greggo.”
“Wait, what’s a pickle smoker?” Tiff asked.
“Now hug,” Mom instructed, and Dad pulled me in, like we’d just finished a tennis match. The next day we picked up a set right where we’d left off. “It makes sense if you think about it,” Dad said, piecing things together. “Most of your friends are girls.”
It’s easy to deride the coming-out experience as trite. Part of the over it feeling I’ve settled into now that I’m older stems from a sense of annoyance. Once you start coming out, you never really stop. As a gay man and a person with a disability, I come out every day. “Are you limping? Did you twist your ankle?” Let me tell you: it gets old. It helps to remember the sun-drenched joy of that day in Southern California. And for what it’s worth, while the rest of my family dined at P.F. Chang’s that night, I was on the phone with John, screening calls from my mom, who had it in her head I’d left the table to grab a quick STD or off myself, not talk with a friend. Part of me knew she was right to be skeptical. Clearly, it should have been Gretchen on the other end of the line.
I still went to Spring Fling, but my heart wasn’t in it. I slept on a blow-up mattress on the floor of John’s dorm. His coke-snorting roommate was usually out, so we talked late into the night, me worried the entire time that I’d fart or go into cardiac arrest. Nothing happened. We walked around campus not holding hands and ate Chinese food not feeding each other bites. Wyclef Jean had been hired to play a concert at the football stadium. That night, John and I didn’t breathe in the scent of each other’s neck sweat or bump hips no matter how extreme my hip-thrusting contrapposto. A kiss was out of the question. There may as well have been a ping-pong table between us.
Every morning, he came back from the shower in nothing but a towel, drops of water coursing down his happy trail. All I could do was crawl at his feet, deflating the air mattress as he modestly pulled on boxers under his towel, like he was getting dressed at the beach. A girl from his hall kept coming around. John said her name in Sanskrit translated to “poetry in motion.”
Whatever you call the opposite of poetry in motion, that was me as I limped to my cab at the end of my stay, a hand on my aching liver, my roller bag repurposed as a cane. The proximity of John’s garlicky beauty could still scorch me even if proximity was all I told myself I deserved.
On the plane back to Chicago, I draped myself in one of those thin airline blankets, scrolled to Joni Mitchell on my MP3 player, and emoted like a ghost, hoping my seatmates would assume I’d just gone through a breakup or been food poisoned. I didn’t know if I’d get over John. And yet, I also knew I was ready to find a guy who wanted more than conversation and ping-pong. I had to put myself out there, even if all that meant for now was standing in the back of a Rainbow Alliance party at the student union, nervously crinkling a bottle of water as a Cher impersonator shook her fishnetted booty.
I didn’t go on AIM for fifteen days.
MELK
My first summer out of the closet turned out to be a low point in the battle for gay marriage. It was 2004 and President Bush was running for reelection. Compared to the blunders of George W. Bush’s first administration—fake weapons of mass destruction, the Iraq War—it’d be easy to see the homophobia of his reelection campaign as a historical footnote. To gay kids like me, it wasn’t. Same-sex marriage bans were on the ballot in eleven states, including Utah, and in them we couldn’t help but imagine the divergent paths our lives might take. Orchestrated by Karl Rove, Bush’s chief strategist, these measures were designed to drive evangelicals and, yes, Latter-Day Saints, to the polls, to get them to vote for Bush and against gay people. Against me.
