Does This Baby Make Me Look Straight?: Confessions of a Gay Dad (15 page)

“They were loud.”

Asked and answered. What on earth was Stressy Tessy thinking? Kids grow up fast enough, don’t they? Without having to formulate a “sexy look” by the age of five. I let her ruin the last party for me—and ultimately for my kids, after I dug through their party bags to discard all the candy. But you know what? I’d risk rotting my kid’s teeth every day of the week rather than rotting her soul with gobs of lip gloss and a child-sized bustier at a Playboy bunny–themed birthday party!

“Are you disappointed, sweetie?” I’m feeling guilty about the way we stormed out of there.

“I wanted to stay for the cake,” she says, simply.

“Honey, that cake was made of birdseed and mulch. You wouldn’t have liked it.”

We get to my car and I strap her into her seat. “You know what we’re going to do? We’re going to get ourselves the biggest, most delicious, gooiest candy-covered cupcake we’ve ever seen. One that’s got sugar cream on the inside and is dipped in chocolate and covered with candy and then dusted with sugar! And after that if we want, we’re going to get another one! How does that sound?” Eliza’s eyes light up.

Eat your heart out, Stressy Tessy with your “sexy look.” We’ll see you in the dentist chair.

G
o, Dazzlers!” I scream at the top of my lungs the second I hear the referee blow his whistle. I’m at my daughter’s Saturday AYSO game. I notice some moms sitting on a blanket behind the goalposts, talking about a new brand of fruit leather that is made from organic pear puree. I have a
lot
to say on the topic but feel a gravitational pull toward the dads standing on the sidelines discussing strategy and encouraging our five-year-old daughters in hot pink cleats to be aggressive, pass to their teammates, and drive the ball toward the goal. I notice Eliza is standing in the field picking a Cinderella tattoo off her arm as the ball rolls in her direction. I have somehow become a combo platter of soccer mom (minus the minivan and L.L. Bean jeans) and closet soccer dad. “Eliza, look!” I shout. “The ball’s all yours! Give it a kick, honey! Pretend it’s the head of Ursula from
Little Mermaid
!
Kick it!
”

She looks up, half-interested, hops up and down like she has to pee, and watches as one of her opponents intercepts the ball and takes it in the other direction. She looks at me, smiles, and shrugs as if to say,
The ball does what it wants . . . isn’t that weird!
It’s adorable. Kind of. I smile and give her a
thumbs-up, covering my frustration. I’m not going to be one of those dads who scream on the sidelines of their kids’ games. I’m not.

I walk back over to a cluster of dads who are midconversation.

“I think we need to schedule an extra practice during the week. Teach these girls some basic passing skills.” I hear this suggestion lobbed into the air. Who said that? Wait. Did that come out of me? All the dads are looking at me and nodding. I
did
say it. What the—? Who
am
I?

I’ll tell you who I am: I’m the guy who put Jonah in a cute little tennis clinic with an amazingly patient and sun-damaged pro named Ray. Five three-year-olds face the net. Ray tells them all how to hold the racket and they comply. He tosses each of them the ball and they swing and try to hit it. Most miss. Jonah lands it perfectly in Ray’s court, just before the baseline. And then he does it again. And again. Ray turns to me and smiles. “Say hello to your retirement plan.” My chest fills with pride. I want to cry. It’s like he said it about
me
. This is
not
a good sign. To get that invested in the performance of my three- and five-year-olds?

Oh shit
, it hits me,
a second ago I was Joe Dad, suggesting extra practices for the girls. And now I’m a vagina away from being one of those frantic “real-sized” moms running dance drills and spray-tanning their kids for the pageant circuit
. What the hell difference does it make, really, how well they play at this age? Or at
any
age? I mean, of course it’s nice to find something your kids are good at. But this feels different. More personal. Sadly, more like redemption.

I was never good at competitive sports. Never. And I
tried. And my dad really tried. To get me to be good. Or better. Or just not embarrassing. The chubby, five-foot-three Argentinean with a Napoleon complex was obsessed with proving to the world he had a lot of power despite his stature. Which explained the basketball hoop I received on my eighth birthday instead of those tap shoes I’d put so prominently at the top of my wish list. And the at-home pitchback net, which I used only once, as a pretend
I Dream of Jeannie
bottle where I served tea to my sister’s Barbie and Ken. The equipment was all part of my father’s campaign for more athletics.

We lived in New York City before moving to the suburbs. What did I know from kickball, baseball, and soccer? I was a city kid. I liked going to Phil’s Pizza after school to share a slice and a grape Italian icy with my best friend Amy. Then we’d go learn double Dutch from the neighborhood girls, whose dads were dealing crack in the playground behind our building.

Fast-forward to a year later and we’re living in the burbs with a yard and a mower and a neighbor who calls me “Jew bag” and a basketball hoop in our driveway. Suddenly I’m trying to “break in” my catcher’s mitt with some high school jock my dad hired to coach me. No surprise there, given my dad’s obsession with the whole idea of coaching. He loved that word.
Coach
. For a while there, he wanted me to call him Coach. It was creepy, ’cause he so wasn’t one, not to those gifted with sight and hearing. But he tried. He even became my team’s soccer coach one year as part of our town’s recreational sports program. He showed up to the first practice with handouts, flip charts, and some Argentinean fight song.
It just gave the assholes
another
reason to kick the shit out of me on the bus.

“Hey, Danny Fuck-a-ten-speed!” they’d shout at me.

I’d close my eyes and imagine my retort:
Oh. I get it
. Hah! Hah!
Because “Bucatinsky” and “Fuck-a-ten-speed” rhyme! Or wait, what? They don’t rhyme?
Oh no!
Your careers as greasy-haired preppy rappers are over, assholes. Not to mention the fact that a person can’t actually fuck a ten-speed. Do you understand that? Maybe not. You’ll probably be the guys who die trying
. But instead I said nothing. I pretended not to hear them. Yeah. I wasn’t so much into the bullying.

But these guys were relentless: “Tell your dad he’s a loser coach and we’re gonna lose. Okay, faggot? Is your dad a faggot too? Maybe the apple doesn’t fall far from the faggot.” Boy, did they double over laughing at that one.

Needless to say, soccer didn’t work out so well that year. But I didn’t let that stop me. Nope. Over the years, I played them all: soccer, basketball, baseball, and tennis, each worse than the one before. Though I was never forced to do any of them, I remember feeling like a disappointment if I didn’t. To myself. To my parents. My tireless effort to try different team sports was my way of mitigating that disappointment.

But I hated sports. Almost every single aspect. Except maybe the uniforms. I did love those. Hello! Why the hell did it take me until I was twenty-five to come out of the closet? If anyone had paid attention to the boy in his baseball uniform, dancing in the mirror on the door of that closet, they could have saved me a lot of trouble. I remember the baseball team in fourth grade. Our uniform, modeled after the Yankees’,
was almost worth the hassle of playing on the team. I wore it with pride until game time and then I felt nothing but dread. One fateful Saturday, however, I limply held up my mitt more to block the sun from my eyes than to catch a fly ball headed right toward my face. I remember feeling the blinding sun, pretending it was a spotlight, and wondering,
Is this what Doug Henning feels every night, center stage on Broadway in
The Magic Show? Suddenly the ball careened into my glove, managing to break my finger in two places before rolling onto the ground. I was benched—in uniform, thankfully—with my middle finger bandaged and splinted into a semipermanent “fuck you” for the rest of the season. It was heaven! But I don’t think my dad was too happy about it. After all, he’d invested all this money in a pitchback and balls and gloves and the coach who got seven bucks an hour to run drills with me. Luckily for me, my athletics career didn’t end with soccer and baseball.

The summer after sixth grade I joined a local swim team. I never thought of swimming as a competitive sport. But I’d promised my parents I’d sign up so I wouldn’t have to go to some sleepaway camp that featured a midsummer Olympics. Are there scarier words for a gay kid to hear than “midsummer Olympics”? Camp seemed, at the time, like a fate worse than death. Little did I know that swim team would be a fate worse than, well, sleepaway camp.

I was pretty nervous that crisp May morning of our first hometown swim meet. I dove into the water. Some combo of the cold and my own panic left me breathless. Literally. I gasped and sputtered. But I wasn’t drowning. I wasn’t. It must’ve looked like I was, though, because suddenly everyone
started screaming, the pool was cleared, and our swim coach, in a gesture of heroism, hit the surface of the pool in his polo shirt and chinos. Everyone was staring. When I reached the edge of the pool, my mom was there to help pull me up. I burst into tears. The sheer humiliation was more than I could handle. But everyone applauded with relief. “Thank goodness you were rescued!” Not a sentiment I shared at that particular moment. Now I had to live with the infamy of being “the loser who drowned in the shallow end” for the rest of junior high and high school. Ridiculed for it. Tortured by it. I should have gone to camp! I think I would have gone, had my parents found one that didn’t focus on sports. Couldn’t they have sent me to dance camp? Cooking camp? Or roller-skating-in-the-garage-pretending-to-be-on the-
Donny-&-Marie
-show camp? I would’ve rocked any of those.

I finally got my first whiff of victory in eighth grade in a dance competition at Nancy Finkelman’s bat mitzvah. I was hooked. Turned out I liked the smell of victory as much as the next guy. I just preferred the scent of the hustle or the hora over a line drive straight to third. But more than the feeling of the win, I’d discovered something far more valuable and important in my development. I had found something I was good at that I also loved to do. I’d found an activity that made me feel good. Shouldn’t that have been the point all along?

•   •   •

The Dazzlers are now tied with the Magic Mermaids. There are only five more minutes left of play. Don is reading some
Victorian novel on a giant blanket behind one of the goals. Jonah is chasing after a ball with another kid. It’s a beautiful day. I ask myself if I’m having a good time. And yes, I am. Again, isn’t that the point? I tell myself it doesn’t matter if the Dazzlers win. I tell myself it doesn’t matter if Eliza dribbles or runs fast or kicks the ball, passes it or ignores it altogether. We’re here as a family on this Sunday to connect with other families and one another—and to have fun. Eliza runs up to me on the sidelines.

“Daddy, can I have a sip of water?” I notice Eliza has managed to scrape off all but Cinderella’s head from her arm. I reach into my bag and hand her the pink “Eliza” thermos. She drinks.

“Are you having fun, Eliza?” I ask. She nods. But I want to be sure. I get on my knees. “Seriously, sweetie, you don’t have to play if you don’t want to.”

“I want to.” She smiles, handing me back the thermos of water.

“Good, Eliza. I’m glad,” I say. And then I can’t help myself: “Have fun. Do your best. And don’t be afraid to pass that ball. Or kick it and drive it toward the goal!”

“Okay, Daddy!” she says. And we both know she’s going to do exactly what she wants to do. “Did you know that after the last game we all get trophies?” Her eyes are like giant blue twinkling planets. She turns and skips happily back onto the field to join her teammates.

And then, as though she’s planned it, as though she’s colluding with God or the universe or Destiny or whatever, the ball rolls to Eliza and she dribbles it down the quarter field she has left before reaching her opponents’ goal. She kicks
it hard and it dances into the goal! I jump up and down and scream!

“Yay! Good job, Eliza! Woo-hoo!” Eliza high-fives her coach and the other Dazzlers. And the game is over. They’ve won. Eliza scored the winning goal. The other dads come running over to hug it out and high-five Eliza. She turns to me and Don with this heartbreakingly touching smile, both embarrassed by the attention and relishing it, trying not to reveal how proud or happy she really is. Oh my God, she’s trying to act “cool.” It’s the cutest thing I’ve ever seen. As usual, I start squirting tears—not over my own pride, though. I’m touched by the pride on my own daughter’s face. And I’m overjoyed by this feeling of affirmation and belonging that comes from just being a guy with his husband and kids at a soccer game. Sounds so simple, yet it feels like something I only dreamed about growing up. Maybe this is what my dad was after all along.

I hope we all come back next week and do it again. You know, if the kids
want
to. The more she plays, the better she’ll get. Nothing wrong with that. I wonder if they make a pitchback net for soccer.

I
thought parenthood would magically make me more empathetic and give me a more generous soul. And as far as putting my own needs behind those of my children, that has absolutely happened. But once in a while, I want—or dare I say, need—a little reinforcement from my kids. No, I’m not proud of it. I’d love to be a “high road” kind of person. But I’m not. I am at times pretty small. I know I am. And I often find myself looking admiringly at the beautifully paved “high” road from where I’m driving, down here on the bumpy, potholed, gravelly low road.