Travels with Penny: True Tales of a Gay Guy and His Mother (13 page)

After another five minutes of swearing, tugging and beating, the first bit of metal gave up its valiant struggle and spun free.

“Finally!” I said.

“Well,” Mom agreed, “that’s one.”

The second and third were the same. Finally, I pulled the third one from the wood of the dock. As I lifted it out of the hole, a tiny splash rang out.

“What was that?” Mom asked.

“I think it was a washer Dad placed on the underside of the bolt.” I guessed. “How in the crap did he get a washer
under
the dock? Did he go into the lake?”

“Maybe he had one of the grandkids helping him. They liked getting into the water.”

The final bolt spun wildly, giving me no resistance.

“Crap,” I said, throwing down the wrench and falling onto my back on the dock. “It’s stripped. Now the freaking thing will never come out.”

Mom leaned over, grabbed the bolt in her fingers and pulled. The bolt slipped out with ease. She stood over me with the rusty hunk of metal in her hand. “This one wasn’t even fastened down.”

“Which means there were three bolts holding that bloody thing onto the dock,” I sighed. “That’s impossible. It felt like the whole cabinet was cemented in place.”

Mom wasn’t listening. She was already putting her obsessive compulsive disorder to good use by cleaning up the fragments of plastic, the discarded bolts and various tools. When the dock was nothing but an L-shaped hunk of weathered wood jutting into the lake, she motioned for me to follow her up to the house.

“Let’s go have some lunch,” she said, leading the way. “It’s almost noon. I don’t think we’ll get to the matinee.”

“Dad should have gone into construction.”

“He loved this dock,” Mom said, barely a whisper. “If he’d had his way, he never would have come in off the lake.”

Even after death, he didn’t want to come in off the lake. Knowing Dad, he’d already be at work planning some divine revenge against us because we tore down the last vestige of his safe haven. A vengeful father haunting us from the great beyond. Great. As a kid, I dreamed of my life as a great Jules Verne adventure, but what I’m getting is a great Shakespearean tragedy.

“WANT TO
GO TUBING?”
Mom asked.

“Tubing?”

“You know, you get in a huge inner tube and float down a river.” I could hear the sarcasm dripping from her voice, even though the cell phone makes her sound distant and a bit … flimsy. But in all fairness, she’s got a PhD in sarcasm.

“I know what tubing is, Mom.”

What I didn’t know is into which river she planned to throw her sixty-five-year-old retired body. Recently, a friend of mine took her boyfriend to Wyoming and did some tubing in the Rockies, where mountains and water offer tubing
opportunities
. Mom lives in Tennessee, halfway between Knoxville and Nashville. The only river they had was that one the four guys traversed in
Deliverance
. Like I learned from Kentucky natives when I went to graduate school in Lexington, “The only thing worse than being from Kentucky is being from Tennessee.” There’s nothing much of interest in Tennessee, besides Nashville and—let’s face it—in the twenty-first century, even Nashville has lost its glamour. Most recordings come out of New York and Los Angeles. The Grand Ole Opry may have been genuine country in its day, but in 2009, it’s one step away from an entertainment theme park. One of the reasons Dad wanted to live in the house where Mom was now living alone was due the fact that you have to drive a half-hour to find a stoplight. Dad liked to be alone. He’s the one person I know who wanted to trade places with Robinson Crusoe.

“It’s fun,” she said, bringing me out of my daze.

“You’ve gone tubing?”

She said “I went with your sister when she took the kids. It’s a blast.”

“Yes,” I said, determined not to be outdone by my sister, “I want to go tubing. When?”

Sibling rivalry: The roller coaster that never stops. I always thought adolescent jealousy would fade when my sister and I grew up, got jobs, started lives of our own and got partners. But here I am, years later, still harboring that lingering suspicion that maybe she is doing better than I am. Maybe somehow she has become more mature, more financially viable or more emotionally stable. At least in my old age, I’ve discovered I’m not alone—who doesn’t feel that way? Be honest. Can’t you hear yourself saying, “Well, I got fired again, split with the meathead and I’m on probation, but my sister/brother forgot Mom’s birthday. Life is
so
gonna suck for them.” Break-ups and layoffs get sympathy. Forgetting to send flowers on a birthday gets the Mom Look.

There was no way I was going to let my sister get off looking more fun, hip and spontaneous than me. Damn her and her river-riding/inner tubing excursion. Any fun she can have, I can have funner.

This was war.

* * *

Apparently, the days of uneducated, cousin-marrying hillbillies who are genetically allergic to dentists are over. Even Tennessee has dragged itself into the modern age. They have joined the increasing ranks of “states where you can go inner tubing.”

Who knew?

Upon hearing of my sister’s inner tubing adventure on the river with her kids, Mom hit the web to see if the place my sister recommended had a website. She found several websites of several businesses. Then Mom found the links to the pictures that showed the river’s locations. From that, she veered into the Tennessee Parks and Recreation Department website, the state of the river ways of Tennessee and God-knows-what-else her retired self was able to uncover. Seemingly overnight, she transformed from Mom the “Oh, I only use it for email” confused senior citizen into Neo from
The Matrix
. I have visions of her holing up in the back bedroom of the house with a stack of Hot Pockets and a mini-fridge so she wouldn’t have to leave the computer room for her meals. Apparently, she had visions of the red pill.

Thus, several weeks later I found myself clinging to a yellow donut of a balloon drifting on a slow-moving Tennessee waterway. The fun never stops, does it?

The current brought me to the edge of the river, where deep black mud met the clear water. From this angle, I could see the exposed roots of the trees as they clung to the side of the embankment, peaking through the dark soil like children spying on the Christmas tree.

I spun myself around so I could kick away from the bank and felt myself inching towards the center of the waterway where I could see the leaves barreling along the surface of the water like tiny battle cruisers headed towards some fierce enemy. It was only when I pulled my gaze away from the leaves and took in the surface of the river did I notice
everything
was clicking along faster than I was—leaves, twigs and all other natural refuse. Great. Now I was officially slower than a floating twig.

I caught sight of my mother. She had somehow managed to reach the center of the current despite the fact that she left the launching area after I did. She folded herself into the middle of the giant yellow donut, with her butt hanging into the water while her arms and legs flowed over the sides of the tube. She flailed her hands, but only her fingertips reached the water, barely touching the surface. She kicked furiously, sending her yellow donut bobbing up and down, her toes narrowly missing the river. She looked like a spastic turtle turned on its back.

She was talking to my niece, who hovered a few feet away inside her own giant donut. Her face lit up, not only because she caked herself with sunblock and set about seeking the sun like a deranged camel, but with happiness. I couldn’t hear the exact words, but I did hear … “fun.”

About twenty minutes later, I had somehow gotten my bright yellow tube to inch over into the center of the water and I kicked and paddled myself close to Mom.

“Having fun yet?”

She nodded. “Too bad we didn’t know about this place a long time ago,” she said as the sound of what could be rapids neared. “Your dad would have loved it.”

* * *

It feels like an hour later, and I’m trapped between two rocks. Again. The sun is frying my semi-bald head. Again. There are those who flock to the sand and heat of Phoenix, Las Vegas and Albuquerque so they can throw themselves onto lounge chairs, coat themselves with oil and lie in the sun.

My line of thinking: meat + oil + heat = BBQ

The sun is meant to be used as a source of power and one day it will be, once we figure out how to make money off solar power. Other than that, sunlight needs to remain the domain of chlorophyll.

I am not a sun person; I am a night person.

“You like to live in caves,” my friend Holly would tell me. “Do you ever rent an apartment with a window?”

“God, I hope not,” I would respond. “Then those evil rays of the sun will melt me.” I’m the opposite of the Wicked Witch of the West.

It was a running joke. You had to be there.

I looked to my left and saw that a few feet away, in the widest part of the river, several youngsters frolicked in the water, basking under the glorious shade of the trees lining the shore. Floating nearby were their yellow inner tubes: waterlogged donuts set free to swim their way home. The children laughed, screamed and spoke in excited German, making them sound like a Heineken commercial on crack.

I should have felt happy for them, but the more I watched them, the more I really wanted a bratwurst and a beer.

I struggled against the confines of my yellow donut and tried to reach the sides of the river with my foot so I could propel myself into the middle of the water and drop off this floating whoopee cushion. I wanted to be in the water; I wanted to submerge myself in the coolness of the river to escape the scorching heat. Some people like the surface. I like to dive underneath.

Mom, who had been behind me for several minutes, floated carelessly on the current and was brought crashing into the throng of Germans where she joined in with their laughter, pointing and joking as if she could speak the language. What is it with her and Germans, by the way? The woman can walk down the street in the wilds of the Amazon jungle and stumble upon a German candy store.

I wanted to be over there with her, not here along the banks struggling to break free of rocks from hell. I wanted to be floating freely and not trapped.

But, that’s me: I always want to be somewhere else than where I am.

I was sure this revelation was going to be important in my life somehow, but right then, I just wanted out of the damned sun! I rolled off the yellow donut, barely missing part of a rock hidden beneath the surface, and swam out to join the throng of glee-filled Germans and my mother, who by now had become a victim of their splash wars. By the time I dragged myself and the yellow donut over to them, the joke was over and the crowd was dispersing. The sun had even shifted. I was now behind my mother standing in the sun. She waved. I waved back and hauled myself onto the tube. Maybe if I followed her, I would wind up in a herd of Germans laughing about something I couldn’t understand.

The water ahead began to pick up speed and downstream I saw the white movement of water over rocks. “Rapids” would be exaggerating—when I think of “rapids,” I think of Meryl Streep strapped into a boat fleeing Kevin Bacon in
The River Wild
. What sits ahead of me is the Tennessee version of rapids. I call them “Rapids Lite”—same great picture, half the thrills.

My tube snagged on a rock (again) and when the current pulled it loose, I went spinning counter-clockwise down the river a few feet only to hit a rock hidden just under the surface and repeated the process spinning in the opposite direction. As I flailed in the water to spin my inner tube around so I could face the final leg of the one-mile trip head-on, I spotted a cluster of rocks in the middle of the river a few yards away, forming another set of rapids-lite. There’s a woman standing amongst the white upsurge, her eyes squinted against the sun, flailing at the pathetic excuse for waves as if she’d never had a bath before. I notice two things about this situation immediately: 1) the woman stands in water that is waist high, meaning she is really,
really
tall, or the water is really,
really
shallow, and 2) she has no inner tube. An inner tubeless person on an inner tubing expedition instantly alerts one to the fact that all is not well in inner tubing land.

I paddled my way towards her with all the grace of an obese, paraplegic turtle.

“I fell off my tube,” she said with disgust. “I hurt my leg.” She awkwardly lifted her leg against the current of the river and showed me the blood pouring out of the cut on her calf.

“Looks nasty. Where’s your tube?” I asked steadying myself on one of the rocks that composed Rapids-lite. She pointed a few feet away. I see a yellow “O” beached on another rock not too far away, where it lay sunning itself. Great. Even the stupid inner tubes are sun lovers. Damn them. I slide off my tube and hand it to her.

“Get in this, I’ll go fetch yours.”

“I need help getting in it,” she whined. What do I look like? The freaking Coast Guard?

I grabbed her arm and we struggled against the suddenly strong current to lift her into the tube, but the flow pushed her backwards onto me. I was just about ready to verbally bitch-slap this woman for being unable to withstand water moving a half-mile an hour when, thankfully, a stray kayak floated along with a teenage boy in it. He lodged himself on the rocks and took her other arm and together, we got the bleeding, possibly weak-due-to-anemia woman into the yellow donut and give her a shove. She was off and floating.

I turned to the beached inner tube she has abandoned and waded towards it. Suddenly, my foot landed on an underwater rock, and I slipped on the slime. Under the water I went. A pain shot through my leg and I could feel my feet trapped under something large … something hard yet squishy. I couldn’t tell if it was a piece of river junk or a log. Either way, I didn’t really care, so I pulled myself free and inched towards the beached inner tube just as a swirl of water from Rapids-lite freed it, sending the yellow donut shooting downstream.

The fun never stops when you’re inner tubing.

Just then, I spotted an orphaned yellow donut creeping towards me on the surface of the water. Some other poor sod’s misfortune was just what I needed to get me on my way. What luck! Serendipity happens so rarely in my life, I take what I can get.

At the end of the one-mile route, the thoughtful workers of the yellow donut rental facility have hung a huge sign announcing the end of the fun-filled, action-packed ride and instructing all those thrill seekers renting yellow donuts to haul their sun-baked behinds out of the donut hole and walk up the path to the bus-loading zone. Although Mom and I hadn’t planned an exit strategy, I had leapt to the conclusion that I ought to wait for her here. To my delight, the ramp leading to the bus loading zone was in the shade, so I hunkered down on a large rock and waited, examining my bleeding leg.

About ten minutes later, I began to wonder where she was. Both she and my niece shot past me while I hauled Ms. Whiner into her tube. Even though they hadn’t passed by, there was no other exit off the river, and any reasonable person would deduce that in a few moments they’d be making their appearance. I began to worry. Did their donut spring a leak, pulling them down into the four-foot-deep water of the slow moving river? What if they’d been ambushed by a crowd of yellow inner tube maniacs, forced off the rubber floatation devices and left to their own devices amongst strangers? Perhaps they’d been caught by the donut police, eager to make off with a new mascot for their coffee breaks. How is it possible I’d taken her from New York to Europe with no mishaps, yet there in the backwater of Tennessee she could meet her demise? What would Dad think? He spent an enormous amount of time telling me I had to take care of her, and I had let him down. Done in by a trickle of water whose greatest claim to fame was hauling hillbillies from point A to point B. He’d been right. I had gotten her killed

Suddenly, I saw Mom and my niece coming around the bend, oblivious to the fact that they were headed straight for rotten Rapids-lite. Odd—from this distance, Rapids-lite looked like the river ride’s version of the Dumbo ride at Disneyland. How in the hell had I managed to lose my donut, slice my shin open and get run over by a chain smoker? Mom and my niece were holding hands, looking like conjoined twins with giant yellow donut butts. They were laughing. They sailed over the rotten Rapids-lite with barely a bob and emerged dry and not bleeding. For a moment I hated them and their naïve luck.