Travels with Penny: True Tales of a Gay Guy and His Mother (14 page)

“What the hell happened to you?” Mom asked, pointing to my leg as she approached the exit ramp.

“I was attacked by those stupid rocks while trying to help a woman back into her frickin’ bloody donut.”

“Well, that wasn’t too smart.”

“Well, it’s not like I planned it,” I spewed venomously. “It’s not like I didn’t have anything else to do. Besides, where were you?”

“On the river.”

“You were gone forever. I thought you’d drowned or fell off the tube or something.”

Mom shook her head and gestured to my niece, giving her the sign for “crazy” and pointed at me. “You worry too much, dear.”

I grabbed both Mom’s tube and mine and staggered up the cement steps that extended from the river’s edge to the narrow, unpaved road on the ledge above. I wanted to believe that I worried too much, but I didn’t. Instead, I launched into a tirade of justification of my overprotective nature by telling her about my floating experience; the repeated entrapment between tree roots and embankment, the struggle to maintain a shred of dignity while doing the turtle paddle towards the current and the constant battle against the hot sun. I showed her the gash on my leg, the bruised shin and the sunburn that was making my shoulder sting. I told her that she should be more thankful to me because tubing could be hazardous to her health and I was trying to look after her.

Just as I finished, I hear Dad’s voice in my head, “If anything happens to her, I’m going to blame you.” Jeesh. Aren’t voices from the great beyond supposed to whisper words of support and encouragement? Even while sitting in his recliner in the sky, with the opportunity to watch any ball game he wants without paying the pay-per-view price, he chose to watch us float on a donut.

“It was a rough ride!” I said finally.

“Just like your life—you always do things the hard way,” she snapped. “I’m easy. I’m not cheap, but I’m easy!” My niece laughed at this, and I glowered at her. I expected Mom to say something like, “My, David, what a terrible bruise that is!” or “Holy cow! That’s a nasty gash on your shin!” Instead, she follows that up with “Jesus Christ, David. It’s a freaking
river
! Where was I going to go? Timbuktu?”

I shrugged. What else could I do? She was right. I worry too much. I blame Dad, since being dead, he can’t defend himself and I finally get the last word.

“I just like to sit back and go where the river takes me,” Mom said as we wait for the shuttle to return us to the inner tube shop. “The river only flows one way, why fight it?”

Next time, I’ll just mope and brood, as it makes me feel better.

“YOU KEEP
EVERYTHING?”
I asked Mom, looking at the box of photos she had placed on the dining room table. She nodded, although I knew the answer and she knew I knew the answer. It was more of a rhetorical question. Mom and Dad both saved everything. Mom had always been the less cluttered of the two, but even she was about two steps away from a guest appearance on Hoarders. She had crammed the lake house’s basement full of everything, ranging from last year’s birthday gift boxes (“You never know when you may need a box!”) to scraps of ribbons and bows from the Christmas party Mary and Joseph had hosted (“It was half off!”). Mom has an oblong, plastic storage box dedicated to Christmas wrapping paper, purchased on December 26th of last year, during the “After Christmas Clearance Sale.” I told you: She can smell a sale like wolves smell fear. Growing up, we were the only kids I knew who opened Christmas gifts with a knife next to us, so if we got a gift in a box, we could cut the tape instead of tearing into the box. Back then, it was embarrassing. It was called “cheap.” Now it’s popular. It’s called “going green.” My family has always been ahead of its time.

“Now I don’t have to buy wrapping paper next year,” Mom would explain every year as we hauled the lightly flattened roles of wrapping paper into the garage. “Nobody’s going to care if it’s out of style. Cute Santa bears this year look just like cute Santa bears last year.” Dad shared Mom’s lust for collecting stuff, only he was better at holding on to useless items. While at least Mom could explain why she still had two-year-old bubble wrap, Dad had no idea what the gadget in the box in the corner was, he only knew it looked cool and he’d used it once in 1962 and it had proved useful.

I had just entered the garage, where Dad had built himself a workbench that ran the entire length of the structure. He’d always said it was for him to keep his tools organized. True, he did have an envious assortment of Craftsman tools dangling from wires and S-hooks on the pegboard. It was also true that he had dozens of baby food jars filled with washers, nuts, bolts, assorted nails and pieces of metal alongside bits of wire scavenged from the lawn department of K-Mart, a ball of twine the size of Pittsburgh that he had “acquired” from the loading dock at his work and an endless pile of plastic twist ties for plastic garbage bags that never seemed to hold the top of garbage bags closed, but did an impressive job of providing enough ballast to hold the bench onto the floor of the garage.

As I kid, I often sat on the floor of the living room in front of our brand-new
color
(!!) television, praying my parents would be chosen as contestants for
Let’s Make a Deal
. They’re the only people I know who when asked if they had a 1955 nickel, could come up with one. Our family was just one game show away from a lifetime supply of Rice-A-Roni. The downside to their obsessive collecting was that I could never find anything, either in the house or the garage. The upside to this is that I feel safe knowing when Western civilization as we know it goes spiraling downward out of control and people find themselves living a
Mad Max
film, my parents are on my team. They may not know the antidote to radiation poisoning, but we’d always have plenty of gift wrapping paper and twist ties.

Ironically, just before I left Dad’s workbench to join Mom inside the house and caught her at the table going through old photos, I had just been staring at Dad’s treasured tools. I had just been wondering how we were going to dispose of all of his stuff. Mom had told me that morning she’d decided to give most of the tools to my brother-in-law.

“All I ever use is a hammer and screwdriver,” she explained. “The stuff should go to someone who will use it. What’s the use of a tool if it just hangs there? Tools need to be used.” This flashback sat heavy on my heart. I realized I was probably like most people in the world—I didn’t see my parents for who they were
per se
, but for the things they said, stuff they collected and behaviors they demonstrated. Our parents aren’t so much people as character traits.

“You always laugh at me for keeping stuff, but aren’t you glad I kept these?” Mom jolted me out of my mental wheel-spinning as she reached into the box of pictures, grabbed a handful and handed them to me. “God, I didn’t know we had so many pictures.”

Neither did I. My family wasn’t much for photos while I was growing up. Only years later, when my sister and I had left home did Mom and Dad embrace the fine art of haphazard photography. The addiction started when Dad bought a video camera one year and began to document everything they did with the meticulousness of a National Geographic mini-series. One time I asked Dad why he felt the need to film everything.

“So we can watch the videos and remember the trip.”

“So you and Mom are going to sit down one day, pop in a VHS and watch forty-seven hours of your cruise through the Panama Canal with the senior citizen brigade?”

“You never know,” Dad told me. “And don’t be a sarcastic shit. I like remembering the trips your mom and I take together.”

“But you have the memories. Why do you need the VHS tapes?”

He sighed and shook his head. “The cable may go out for a really long time.”

Apparently the cable had never gone out long enough, for soon after that conversation, Dad bought Mom a digital camera for her birthday and she was off and running with this new toy, snapping still frames of real life with the zest of a person who’d forgotten they
had
real life to live. The VHS camera went the way of the Gameboy I’d given to Dad one Christmas and found years later still in its box.

“These are all the trips your Dad and I took,” she said, flipping through the photographs. “I want to do something with them.”

I took a stack of photos from Mom and looked at them. Most of the pictures were stock footage as seen by tourists; brittle black-and-white Polaroids, fuzzy shots of unknown landmarks printed on thick photo paper with a thin band of white bordering the outer edges. Others were faded color photos of my sister and me gazing at the camera with strained smiles. The newer ones—the pictures taken on Mom’s digital camera—were printed in the center of 8x10 white copy paper, the telltale sign of Mom wanting to save a hard copy of the digital image without paying for them to be burned onto a CD. There were friendly, vaguely familiar faces, faces of people I barely remembered, mingled together with shots of my parents’ past that I never knew existed. Scraps of their life thrown together in an unlabeled box. I flipped through my stack of memories, stopping when I spotted one photo that lay hidden at the bottom of the stack like a hidden snake ready to strike.

It was a 4x5 color picture of a bridge taken from the inside of a moving car. Beneath the bridge was an endless span of water, a bridge over nothing, going no place. I knew this shot.

“Where was this again?” I asked Mom. She looked at it over my shoulder.

“Oh, some trip your dad and I took a long time ago, probably, but I can’t remember. I don’t even remember when that was taken.”

I stood silently nodding. I remembered. She was right—it was a long time ago. The colors of the photograph were faded now, the edges torn and frayed. The white edges of the snapshot were gray with thumbprints and dust. The last time I’d seen this photo was when Mom showed it to me one afternoon when I returned to my childhood home to visit. The year was 1982, and it was summertime. I had moved out the previous year, appearing to all the world like I was, a typical idealistic young man who thought he could take the world by storm. In truth, moving out wasn’t an act of rebellion as much as an act of avoidance. I hadn’t yet told my parents I was gay, and I was hoping that by leaving home, I could avoid telling them. Telling people you’re gay was trickier back then, especially when it came to telling your parents. The most hypocritical part of our society is that despite people’s claims of “family first,” the most important parts of our lives are the parts most people only share with friends.

On this particular visit, I had returned unannounced, assuming I could cop a free dinner. The great thing about being young is that you can always go home for a visit and wind up getting clean laundry, a free meal and—if you’re lucky—a free movie. It’s like going on a date without the awkwardness of meeting anybody new. When I’d walked into the house, I caught Mom sitting at the kitchen table smoking a cigarette. She wore an odd grimace and her eyes seemed to gloss over when she saw me, as if something weighed heavily on her mind. She greeted me in a quiet, almost pensive voice and pushed some pictures at me. She sat at the table, narrating through a stack of photos she and Dad had taken on their recent spontaneous road trip. Her voice deteriorated as she spoke, becoming weaker and more breathy, and her speech started to become more like a stutter. She didn’t look at me much; instead, she focused on the stack of snapshots spread out on the table. Something was wrong; I could feel it. I thought the clues could be found by looking at the snapshots, but they showed me nothing at all except the usual tourist scenes.

Then I saw a shot of a long vehicle bridge crossing a large expanse of water. I remember thinking how it could be any bridge spanning any body of water—like a Beatles song, “Nowhere Bridge sitting in its Nowhere Land.” From the angle of the picture, I figured it had been taken from the passenger side of the car.

“Where is this?” I asked. Mom shook her head.

“I don’t remember.” Her voice sounded a million miles away. “I think Florida.”

“It looks like the Keys,” I urged. “Did you and Dad go to Florida?”

“Oh, I don’t remember, exactly. We went all over.”

This, I knew, was a lie. Not that they didn’t go all over; it was common for them to get into the car and drive into the unknown having no idea where they were going. When they did it, Mom and Dad called it “adventurous.” When I did it, it was called “irresponsible.” Rather, the lie was that Mom didn’t remember where the picture was taken. How could she not? Since Dad did all the driving, she must have taken the shot. Besides, how can you not remember going to Florida? We lived outside of Chicago. One doesn’t get on the Kennedy Expressway, get lost and suddenly realize you’ve driven halfway across the country.

Something was definitely wrong.

After a few minutes of silence, she got up and said she was going to get Dad. Several minutes later, she returned to the kitchen alone and sat down at the table again, picking up the pictures and returning them to their box. I was left holding the shot of the bridge. My curiosity piqued, I put the picture back onto the kitchen table and walked down the hallway to their bedroom where I met Dad standing in the doorway. His eyes were narrow slits, and his jaw was set so firmly you could see the muscles standing out in his neck. He didn’t say hello.

I babbled on about my new job with the ad agency in Chicago, how Mom had shown me pictures of their trip, the weather and just about anything I could think of as I watched him wander to his dresser and paw through the contents of the top drawer. Fearing I had interrupted some fight between the two of them, I invented an excuse to leave and practically ran out of the house. Later I called my sister and told her what had happened.

“They know, Dave,” she said simply.

I didn’t have to ask anything more. I knew exactly what she meant.

The next day on the phone with Dad, he became very angry, challenging me about “something he heard” about “gay.” When my back-pedaling and stammering gave an obvious answer and the conversation deteriorated into long silent pauses, he burst out with, “I don’t have a gay son.”

“Yes, you do,” I replied angrily.

“Then I don’t have a son.”

I hung up and sat on the hotel bed, stunned and shaken by what had just happened. Shortly thereafter, Mom called to talk with me about the argument with Dad. The conversation ended with her telling me to “give him time and don’t call for a while.” I did give them time. I didn’t call. Neither did they. A little time became almost three years, until the year 1985, the first time Dad almost died.

So there we were, once again sitting at a kitchen table looking at the same photograph that we’d looked at twenty years earlier right before I had lost contact with my parents. On the surface, it was a harmless snapshot of a long bridge over sparkling blue water. But to me, that picture represented memories I thought I had forgotten: of feeling that the house I’d grown up in was no longer my home; of feeling afraid of my own parents; of fearing their disappointed rage was my fault and my responsibility.

I sat frozen to my chair with the picture in my hand. Part of me wanted to tell Mom the story of the first time I saw the picture, but I knew I couldn’t. In her face was a far-off longing for the time when she and my father would hop in the car and roam the highways of the rural Midwest. When she saw this picture, she didn’t remember that time when I visited them in 1982, she remembered being on the road with her husband, discovering the Nowhere Bridge for the first time. To her this picture represented a slew of painful memories that stemmed from nostalgia of a dead husband, not fear. I decided not to say anything, choosing instead to return the picture to the stack on the table. Ironic that in 1982, the three of us didn’t even want to talk to each other. Now when we did want to, we couldn’t because Dad was dead.

* * *

“Mom, she’s flushing me down a toilet.”

“It’s cute.”

“It is not cute,” I said for the hundredth time. “She’s trying to flush me down a toilet.”

“She was five, for God’s sake. Get over it.”

“We didn’t need Dr. Spock. We needed Dr. Phil.”

While she was sorting out the stacks of family photos, Mom discovered a stack of old family films she and Dad had transferred to VHS years ago. She thought it would be fun to look at them again and before I could protest, she had jammed a tape into the machine. I cringed, knowing I’d have to suffer through hours of old black and white images of people I barely remembered.

Surprisingly, what came up on the TV were images of myself and my sister when we were children. Tow-haired toddlers running through the living room carrying stuffed animals and assorted toys, laughing with delight. Then my father was there, about twenty-five, looking young and handsome, picking each of us up in turn and facing the camera, so the lens got a clear shot of our faces.