Travels with Penny: True Tales of a Gay Guy and His Mother (5 page)

MICHAEL JACKSON
died in June of 2009 while I was in Iowa City at the Writer’s Workshop, just days after our tornado scare. Normally, the death of celebrity is something I have no interest in thinking about, discussing or using brain cells to remember. The reason Michael Jackson’s death struck a chord was because a) I had expected one natural disaster, not a natural disaster
and
the death of a celebrity, and b) I had just hung up with Mom (we were arguing about which state was more humid: Tennessee or Iowa. I let her win with Tennessee. I still think it was Iowa.). Our family always used MJ as a touchstone for telling people where we lived.

“Cary,” one of us would tell a stranger when asked where we lived.

“Gary? Indiana?” was the response heard 90% of the time. “Like Michael Jackson?”

We would roll our eyes. “No! They’re from
Gary
. We’re from
Cary
. With a ‘C’.” It was as if the King of Pop existed solely so we could refer to him when giving directions to our hometown.

On the day MJ died, I had settled into a booth in one of the local watering holes called The Mill. I had just told a fellow writing student, Chris, who I met in class two years before, and Bart Yates, our teacher, about the philosophical discussion with my mom. They agreed with me on both counts: Iowa is much more humid than Tennessee, and a son should always let his mother win arguments. Just as we put that conversation to bed, the waitress came around asking for drinks when Chris blurted out “Michael Jackson’s dead.”

“Which one?” secretly hoping it was the right wing talk show host. I know, I’m evil. So kill me.

“You know … the singer,” our waitress said with a high pitched laugh and a roll of the eyes at Chris.

“Bullshit.” It’s my standard answer to anything that surprises me. There must be a social commentary about people’s inability to trust in their fellow man hidden within my standard answer, but I’ll leave that for the therapists to figure out. Therapists and poets, because in truth, poets do a better job of understanding human nature. Therapists have too much education to be smart.

I turned to the waitress, “Well?”

“Yeah!” She seemed too happy about this news. “That’s why we’ve been playing all his old videos.” She pointed to the TV over the bar. Sure enough,
Billie Jean
was flashing across the screen, with the lighted sidewalks and MJ dressed in a trench coat. The enticing part of Michael Jackson’s videos is the stories they tell. I love a good story and when one is put to music well—what more do you want?

“He is the third,” she continued. “MJ, Farrah Fawcett and that other guy who used to do the talk show.”

“Ed McMahon,” Bart said, turning to me. “It was Ed McMahon.”

“Yeah,” she said, “him.” She giggled, took our orders and left.

I turned to Bart. “The other guy who used to do the talk show?”

He shrugged. “We’re old, my friend.”

I knew that. There is nothing like taking a class with a gaggle of twentysomethings to remind you just how old you are. I watched the TV in the corner. By now, Michael flashed his shiny new glove, grabbed his crotch—again—and the herd of effeminate gang members echoed “beat it.” He used to be cool. How did society move from “cool” to “over” so quickly?

Maybe Dad was onto something when he said, “Never trust a guy who wears one glove and sings Beat It.”

After seeing the “ancient” Michael Jackson videos of the “really old fifty-year-old,” I needed some perspective. Did my apathetic attitude towards music come from a childhood trauma that I had suppressed? Perhaps tainted by a bad experience with concerts during my years as a toddler? It could have been either, since my first concert memory featured both Barry Manilow and Mom.

The concert happened sometime in the 1970s when everything was cool for the first time: wild colors, wild parties, platform shoes and Barry. Years later in a Greenwich Village store that features clothes for drag queens, Mom and I were to stumble across the same fashions. Only this time, the thing that made the artifacts cool was not in newness, but their retro-pseudo quirkiness. It seems the fashion cycle is grossly out of fashion, forgotten, favored by drag-queens, taken up by urban youth, cool again. I’ve noticed most pop culture owes its popularity to drag queens.

The power of Barry was damned near tangible in those pre-MTV/drive-by-shooting/crotch-grabbing days. He was on the radio, TV, movies and—most importantly for my friend Jill—on Mom’s favorite artists list.

“Your mom listens to Barry Manilow?” Her eyes grew wide and her voice accelerated to a pitch that only dogs could hear. I nodded. Then, with one huge change in octave, she clapped her hands together. “He’s coming to Chicago!” Then, with all the quiet earnestness at her sixteen-year-old disposal, whispered, “Can you get your mom to take us?”

I knew I should have been equally as eager to go to a concert, but the idea of sitting in a huge arena surrounded by strangers listening to music that I could hear for free on the radio didn’t excite me. Besides, I had never been to a concert before and didn’t know how excited I should get while still maintaining my image of being cool. I told you, I’ve always bordered the pathetic side.

Peer pressure being the heart-and-soul of high school, it became imperative that I persuade my mom to take us, as Jill’s mom was not remotely qualified for this special honor. Jill’s mom was rich, dressed in clothes from Saks Fifth Avenue and drove a European import. My mom had a job, dressed in clothes from JCPenney and drove a station wagon. More importantly, my mom had a fan club. “Your mom is cool!” my friends would say and then flock to my house where they promptly ignored me and spent their time chatting up Mom. I’m not sure if I had friends because I deserved them, or because my friends thought my parents were a vacation from their home life. This fascination would fade with time, however, as not only are high school kids fickle, maturation has a way of making the “coolness” factor die a miserable death when the “do-your-parents-have-liquor-we-can-steal?” factor becomes increasingly more important.

Convincing Mom was much easier than I thought. One morning as I readied myself for school, I nonchalantly said, “Oh, yeah, we were talking about Barry Manilow coming to Chicago.”

“Ohhh! I like him!” Mom said. I think she was pouring coffee into a thermos.

“Yeah, there’s this friend at school who wants to go see him.”

“That sounds like fun! I’ll go with you.” Like that, we had a ride. Things with Mom have a habit of just … happening.

The next thing I knew, we had four tickets and I was in the car driving to the amphitheatre with Mom, her friend and Jill. The entire night was spent standing up to applaud, sitting down, jumping back up, straining over the heads of the tall people in front of us and then doing it all over again. It was vaguely reminiscent of a Catholic high mass. Overall, the experience struck me as strange and did little to ignite the adolescent passion for live music. The music could be heard over the radio much more clearly than in a stadium full of screaming people. The Cokes were a heck of a lot more expensive than if we had bought them at the store. The T-shirts cost a small fortune, too. It all seemed so … wasteful. I decided I wasn’t the concert type. Maybe it’s genetic or something; my parents never went to concerts, either.

The memory that lingers, though, despite this lackluster experience, would act as both a precursor to the relationship with my mother and set the stage for my future expectations from people in general. During the show, Mom sat two seats over from me. As Barry came out to sing the final encore, I happened to glance over. Mom stood with her hands raised in the air, swayed to the music and sang along. This shocked me. Parents did this kind of thing? Don’t most moms bitch about the laundry, throw shoes outside if their kids forgot to pick them up and lecture endlessly about responsibility? Moms do not act like crazed teenagers rocking out to Barry Manilow. But here my mother was, more excited than I. She was having a great time. She was happy. Several days later, I commented on her crazed unmom-like behavior.

She said, “I’ve always wanted to go to concerts. Your dad doesn’t like the crowds, so we never went.”

That was the first time I realized that just because people have a couple of kids doesn’t mean they’re grown up; my parents were human. I began to understand that maybe—just maybe—they had things they dreamed of doing, the same as I did. In retrospect, it seems like an odd thing to realize, but for a sixteen-year-old, any moment spent thinking about others instead of one’s self is a feat. This realization would stick with me until years later, when the opportunity to travel with my mom took on a new, adult form.

The other realization that had long-lasting effects happened after the show. Our cohort followed the crowd outside and stood waiting for the limo carrying Barry to pull away from the stadium. Despite the assurances that “Barry has left the building,” the throng milled about the driveway, many with autograph books in hand. Mom wasted no time pushing to the front of the crowd and stood staring at the huge garage door, waiting to see if it would open and reveal Barry behind the windows. Eventually the door did open and the limo did pull out from the darkened garage. Then it sped past all of us, the only evidence of Barry being a partially opened rear window from which an arm appeared, waving. As quickly as it appeared, it disappeared around the corner and out of sight.

As we walked back to the parking lot, Mom turned to her friend and I heard her say, “I like him. I don’t care if he is gay, he’s good.”

The words hit me like a wall of ice water. Gay? Barry? Good? What the hell?

This statement and the questions it raised haunted me for the next couple of years as I matriculated through high school, matured into young adulthood and started to explore my own sexuality.

But I always stayed in love with Barry; to this day I can’t turn off the radio in the middle of one of his songs. Told you I was pathetic.

* * *

Do people understand that memories are powerful things? Powerful not only because of the rich history woven into them, but because as we grow older, their power changes exponentially. Time doesn’t shed new light upon old family baggage. Time gives them the seed to ferment, allowing them to mature into memories far more potent than the truth ever was. Sometimes the years add strength to what we remember and the past becomes more potent than when the event actually occurred. Those pickled memories carry a kernel of truth, but it is our own dark imaginations that drinks in these fermented memories and becomes intoxicated with warped facts, so “Uncle Jerk-off beat his kids” becomes, “Oh, Uncle Jerk-Off wasn’t so bad … he only beat people with wooden spoons” or “ Oh, Aunt Hysteria was a crazy ass, bi-polar, maniac who murdered one-eyed goats on the full moon.” Just like everything else, memory is susceptible to manipulation. When the memories are something dark from the past, they carry a legacy with them. Every family’s tales lay dusty and faded on shelves of the past. Finding them is easy. Reading them is not.

Most of my early memories involve traveling with the family. (Don’t you wish that memories from your childhood were printed on the same paper as the old OneStep cameras? Then you could be certain that, eventually, they would become brittle with age and just disintegrate into ash. The human brain may be wondrous in its composition, but it sure sucks when you’re trying to forget something.) I would be reading behind my dad, crammed in the backseat of a blue Chevy station wagon hauling the Jayco trailer, my sister seated behind my mom. My sister irritated me because she existed. Dad irritated me because he listened to that twangy, nasal country western music of Conway Twitty, Hank Williams and some banjo-picking guys who sang with an exaggerated Southern drawl. Mom, riding shotgun, would be talking non-stop over all this drama.

“What a beautiful landscape! Look at that barn! What do you want for dinner? Do we have any pop? What kind? I made sandwiches—they’re in the cooler! What are you reading? What books did you bring with you? Oh, look! Ice cream!”

Mom didn’t expect responses to any of her questions, which was good as most of the time nobody could follow the tangents closely enough to answer. Sometimes the constant commentary annoyed me, interfering as it did with the further adventures of the Hardy Boys or Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators, but most of the time, I enjoyed it. Mom could always be counted on to be clutching a guidebook and spouting off facts about history, the path of this highway, the legends surrounding such-and-such a landmark or God forbid we come within a hundred miles of a scenic turn-off. Back in those days, scenic turn-offs were snatched up with more fervor than a new iPhone application. Travel and Mom were synonymous to me, and her eagerness to learn everything about the place we were going to visit stayed with me for life.

Many years later, Dad traded the station wagon in on a newer model. He kept Mom.

IT’S 9:02
IN THE MORNING
on a hot, Midwestern Tuesday in July in 2009, and I’m sitting in a coffee shop in Iowa City looking at a picture of my birth family. I’ve been staring at this picture, trying to write about the significance it has for me and failing miserably. It’s a simple picture, really, so it shouldn’t be this difficult to write about, although this is the first time I’ve ever looked at this picture so closely. It’s a wallet-sized shot of four people: me, my sister, Nan, Mom and Dad. I remember this photo being taken several years ago at the Walmart in Tennessee during one of my visits to my parents. Mom and Dad sit next to each other, with Mom on Dad’s right. She is wearing a green sweater, dangling earrings and a tasteful necklace. Dad wears a short-sleeved pink shirt that Mom always said was salmon but—let’s face it—is pink. What the hell is this with “salmon” anyway? A gray sweater vest covers Dad’s salmon-colored shirt. My sister stands behind Mom, and I loom behind my father with my hand on his shoulder. I am shocked and embarrassed to see that my face and balding head practically reflect the light like aluminum foil. I’m surprised the photographer didn’t need shades. I want to blame this on poor lighting, lack of gel or perhaps a bad filter on the camera. But I know that it is more than likely my own fault—I hate the sun and avoid it at all costs, the effect of which makes me look like a human-sized Pillsbury Doughboy. My sister’s the only one with tan skin, but she also buys a lot of Avon, so it’s probably a tan from a tube.

I try to write about the history of the photo, but I remember how annoying that day was—Nan’s three kids came along so she could get family photos of her family as well as a shot of Mom, Dad, her and me. I thought it was a totally asinine idea, as my brother-in-law was out of town doing God-knows what for the rich oil company that weekend and why the hell should we go to Walmart for family photos when we could just as easily take them with Mom’s digital camera? I mean, her husband wasn’t there, so how could it be a family photo when the father is absent? I told my sister that it would either make people think we were one of those trashy Jerry Springer-type absentee father families or just plain mean to her husband who isn’t such a bad guy despite the fact he’s a Bush-loving Republican. She told me to stop being such a politically correct fag, and take the damned picture or else I couldn’t borrow her convertible anymore and would have to take the gas-guzzling SUV, which sucks up tons of gas that she and my brother-in-law could only afford because he gets a discount. She knew it would piss me off to fork over that much money to big business, so I shut up.

I’m surprised to see both Mom and Dad were wearing their glasses. I remember asking Dad on the way to Walmart if he wanted me to drive, and he answered that if I drive, I’d give him a heart attack because I drive like a mad man and if I wanted to drive myself into a cliff, go ahead, but don’t take anyone else with me. His eyes twinkled when he said this, which is how I knew he was teasing. His sarcasm was often derailed by that twinkle. Many people who didn’t know him often mistook good-natured ribbing for meanness. Hell, I did, too, for the first thirty-five years of my life. It was only after I realized my own smart-assed quips were sired by his sarcasm that I learned how to deal with it. So I didn’t take the driving comment too seriously as Dad was … well … Dad: He had to be in control of anything with a motor.

I’m wearing that blue shirt Mom got for me from the second-hand store. (At first glance, I mistook it for the one I had bought at the dollar store, but thankfully it isn’t. It would depress me to know that in the last photo taken with my father, I was in a shirt from the Dollar Store on Highway 70 in Sparta, Tennessee. In true redneck fashion, it’s not even sophisticated enough to be a Dollar Store; it’s a Dollar Mart or some such place. On that visit, I got a shirt for $2.99. I remember the price because I didn’t want to pay $2.99 in a Dollar Store. It should be a Dollar Store because things cost a dollar. If they were going to charge $2.99, then it should be called the $2.99 Store.)

I woke up on the morning this picture was taken to Dad announcing that the family was going to Wally World, home of the sweat-shop-human-rights-abusers, and we needed to get dressed for pictures. I pitched a fit.

“Thanks, Dad,” I remember snapping. “All I’ve got are frickin’ T-shirts. Why didn’t you tell me before I left Seattle?”

“Because then you’d have nothing to bitch about. Now get your ass in gear.”

“You hate getting your picture taken,” I reminded him.

His answer mystified me. “We haven’t had a family picture in years, and I want a family picture.” I remember asking Mom if he had taken his blood pressure medication because he was acting funny and Mom rolled her eyes.

“I have no idea, but if he doesn’t get this Goddamned picture, he’s going to drive me up a frickin’ wall. Just go put on one of those shirts I got for you at the second-hand store and take the picture so we can get it over with.”

I flung open the closet of the guest bedroom with trepidation. My mom is buying clothes for people all the time; it’s a curse, I think, as the poor woman is often times found wandering the aisles of a store, spinning in circles trying to find a pair of pants, shirt or other article of clothing that a family member would like. It’s her talisman against bad shopping karma: as long as she leaves a place with
something
for
someone
, she is sure to find a great bargain for herself. God forbid there’s a sale. The basement is crammed full of Christmas wrapping paper, bows, boxes and trinkets that she’s hauled home on December 26th with the battle cry, “It was on sale!”

To my surprise, the shirts were classy numbers that looked good on me.

“They should look good on you,” she told me. “I got these from a second-hand store that got them from a very wealthy lawyer in Florida. Lawyers always have great clothes.”

“Why did he give them up?” I asked.

“I don’t know. He didn’t want them, he retired, he died. Who knows?”

So I found myself headed to take a family portrait wearing a shirt that probably belonged to a dead lawyer. Shakespeare would be proud.

Between Dad’s insistence on taking a picture, my sister defending Walmart, the sweatshop-human-rights-abusers, and my annoyance with the whole thing, I’m surprised we made it through the day.

The picture didn’t turn out half bad, though, despite the tacky fabric background that was supposed to reflect tasteful splotches of color but instead looked like an Iowa thunderstorm before the tornado wipes out the fields.

There were several pictures of the family taken that day, and this is only one of the poses. Several more were taken of my sister and her three kids, who behaved like total spoiled brats until I threatened to smack the shit out of them. When my sister said, “Fine, go ahead,” they finally started to behave.

Sitting here now looking at the two photos, I realize this is the only one where Dad is
almost
smiling. He has never smiled in pictures as far back as I can remember. I’m not sure why.

I find myself obsessing about this picture, and I just figured out why: Dad was so insistent about the family doing this photo shoot and, as fate would dictate, it’s the last portrait he took before his heart attack. Why would a man who hated having his picture taken be so determined to get a family photo? If he was so intent on getting a family picture, why didn’t we all gather in the back yard near the lake and snap a couple of shots? Instead, he got an appointment, trucked on down to Wally World and forced us to sit against a phony sunset backdrop while children and old ladies screamed in the background. Mom and I often wondered if Dad knew that he would be dead within the year.