Shortest Way Home

by Pete Buttigieg

  Sometimes supplementing his wages with food stamps, Chasten worked his way through community college in Michigan and, later, the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire, where he earned a degree in theater education with a global studies minor. I joke with him about the number of jobs he’s had; once I asked him to recite them to me so I could write them down. Not counting helping around the family landscaping business, licking envelopes, and making copies for his mom from the age of twelve or so, his first job was at a veterinary hospital, where he scrubbed kennels, cleaned surgery and exam rooms, and walked and fed the dogs. By sixteen he added a second job busing tables in the aftermath of taco and burrito dinners at La Señorita, working until eleven some nights. Then he got a job at Cherry Republic, a touristy store in downtown Traverse City offering cherry preserves, cherry cookbooks, aprons with cherries printed on them, cherry salsa, cherry horseradish . . . you get the idea. He stained wood as the shop was being built, then worked customer service there. As he contemplated a career in health, he got a job as a home health care aide, taking care of a boy with cerebral palsy, getting him off his school bus, feeding him, helping him stretch while watching The Ellen Show, bathing him, feeding him dinner.

  At eighteen he enrolled in Northwestern Michigan College for nursing, and on top of his full-time course load he worked a complementary gig as a nursing assistant at Munson Medical Center in Traverse City. With a move to Milwaukee came another job, as a waiter at the short-lived CJ’s restaurant. There was Christmas-season work as a cashier at Toys “R” Us, and during the semester a slot as a site coordinator for a tutoring service. In the summer, he taught theater classes for Upward Bound. He served drinks at a bar, worked retail at Eddie Bauer, poured coffee at Starbucks, and taught theater to children with autism at First Stage, then back in Chicago found himself tending bar at a comedy club and recruiting for a performing arts academy.

  By the time I met him, he had realized that his future was in teaching, not nursing. He’d followed up his hard-earned bachelor’s degree by enrolling in the Master’s in Education Program at DePaul, fitting coursework in between work hours and maintaining perfect grades. In the absence of substitute work during the summertime, he made ends meet (and scratched the itch of his fondness for travel) with a job guiding exchange students through O’Hare Airport, driving a herd of German or Korean teenagers from one terminal to another, while checking the phone in his downtime for Airbnb customers and people to date.

  The resourcefulness and work ethic, if not the restlessness, clearly came from his parents, Terry and Sherri. For them, income was never the guaranteed fruit of a lifelong career with one employer, but rather the yield of ingenuity, relationships, and hard work. As they raised their three boys in their one-story house just off Route 37, Terry was also constantly improving and rebuilding it with his own hands. Sherri works part-time helping other small businesses with their books, while Terry plows snow in the wintertime. Their landscaping business gets work throughout the year but specializes in Christmas decorations; in a peak year, Terry and Sherri sell over a thousand wreaths and eighty thousand feet of garland after making it in the garage at their house or in their pole barn nearby.

  SPEAKING IN FRONT OF ANY-SIZED political crowd has never bothered me, but I was as nervous as a middle-schooler onstage when we pulled up in the Glezmans’ driveway for the first time after a four-hour drive north to Grand Traverse County, a few days before Christmas 2015. Earlier that day, I had been in full mayor mode, cohosting an event with Governor Pence to celebrate a major economic development grant. Now, sitting in my sweater and jeans in the passenger seat of the Jeep, with a sleigh’s worth of presents in the back for Chasten’s uncountable slew of extended family relatives, I had become a living cliché from a holiday-season romantic comedy: the boyfriend coming home to meet the parents for the first time.

  I don’t know who was more anxious, him or me, but at least Chasten had the advantage of being at home. The front yard was a Christmas wonderland, complete with lights and Santa figures. (When the boys were young, Terry was known to go out while they were sleeping and use deer hooves to create “reindeer prints” in the snow on the roof.) Chasten beeped the horn as we came to a stop in the driveway, and within seconds a yellow Lab came bounding out of the garage door, followed by an equally energetic Sherri and Terry.

  “Hey, Bubby!” Sherri enthused, looking younger than her pictures as she emerged from the garage to greet Chasten with a big hug. Next it was my turn, and the hug was just as big, followed by a generous handshake from Terry before he instinctively began helping carry in our things.

  It quickly became obvious that I had nothing to be nervous about. Almost immediately I was on a sofa in their carpeted living room, answering questions about home and hearing about what Chasten was like as a kid. Since we hadn’t been dating that long, it had been decided that I would sleep in the guest room, which had previously been Chasten’s own; he, meanwhile, was relegated to the couch in the basement.

  By the next day, to Chasten’s chagrin, we were reviewing embarrassing home videos of his boyhood. Sitting cross-legged on the carpet in sweatpants as the smell of homemade cinnamon buns wafted out of the kitchen, watching VHS footage of my goofy boyfriend-to-be at age fourteen in a school skit, while also playing one-handed tug-of-war with the dog, I felt more at home than I would have thought possible. The walls of the cozy living room ricocheted with the sound of Sherri’s high, contagious laugh as she threw back her head of long jet-black hair to relish one joke after the other. Terry was quieter, sitting in a recliner and smiling more with his eyes than his mustachioed mouth, occasionally patting beads of sweat off his shaved head with a bandanna and contributing details to the family stories being swapped.

  We’d been dating only a few months, from that August night at the ballpark to this Northern Michigan holiday, but I felt immediately welcomed into the family. I got just as far as discovering the shoe box with the potty-training videos before Chasten felt compelled to intervene in my bonding with his parents, and proposed we go to the kitchen table and play cards or something. Later, when we arrived at the pole barn for the extended-family Christmas dinner, too big to fit in a house, a giant stocking with my name on it took its place on the inside of the garage door alongside those for the two dozen aunts, uncles, and cousins, filled with peanut butter cups and Slim Jims.

  SO WARM IS THE BLANKET of love in that household, wrapped around Chasten and me both, that I struggle to visualize the darkness of a time in which he did not feel welcome there. Chasten, braver than I, came out at the age of seventeen. Hungering to understand the world, he had enrolled in a student exchange program against his parents’ wishes and gone to Germany. In that year abroad, he gained a command of spoken German, a little weight on his scrawny teenage frame, and a deeper awareness of who he was. Incapable of self-deception, he fully understood by the time he came back that he was gay, and needed for his family to know.

  They thought it was a choice. It made no sense to them, hardworking and churchgoing people who did everything they knew how to set a strong foundation in life for their three boys, that the youngest could select such a destructive and immoral path. How could he harm his family like this? Or was it somehow their own fault, something they had done wrong when he was little, or even before he had been born?

  In the weeks of turmoil that followed, it became Chasten’s turn to sleep in a car, as his father had. Working two jobs, enrolling at community college, and rotating between nights on friends’ couches and in a discreetly parked 2004 Saturn Ion, he was too busy and disoriented to contemplate the word “homeless” or apply it to his own case. He worked, he studied, he slept, while back home some kind of battle played out between things believed, things felt, things assumed, and things discovered. That battle took place out of view, but it ended when love and acceptance asserted their victory in the form of an unexpected phone call asking him to come back home.

  • • •

  THOSE PAINFUL
DAYS SEEMED impossibly distant by the time I met the family that warm Christmas, and only more so across the visits that followed and led naturally to a Thanksgiving morning that saw me rise before dawn at Chasten’s side in the guest room, and tiptoe out to head for the deer blind with Terry. A kind of adoption was in progress, communicated that morning in a different way than Sherri’s big hugs and loud laugh but just as clear, in the coffee and jerky proffered on the way out, the companionable silence as we shivered and scanned the woods for hours, and the wide-ranging chatter as we made our way back. I was made to feel the unique sense of welcome that comes from someone whose love for a son means love for whomever he loves, given on the sole condition that he be trustworthy.

  After dinner, Terry and some of the boys went out for a second round of hunting, but in the traditional post-turkey drowsiness I decided to stay talking in the living room with the others, as the conversation turned to Sherri’s battle with skin cancer. She described her new treatment with a topical chemotherapy that came in the form of a potent cream that she applied, wearing gloves, to burn off the cancerous areas—then she produced a package of the stuff from the bathroom so I could see how mundane this lifesaving medication looked. I blinked in disbelief as she held up what resembled a tube of toothpaste, and explained that each one cost over two thousand dollars. Or that’s what it would cost, if not for the insurance she had purchased through the health insurance exchanges that had been set up as part of Obamacare. I thought—and spoke—of that moment often, later, as I talked about why health policy was not a theoretical question for our family.

  And it was, each passing holiday, more and more our family, a different one than the one I’d grown up with, but surprisingly compatible, too. One summer weekend, my parents came up to Traverse and we went out on the Glezmans’ pontoon boat together, nibbling on Terry’s smoked fish and motoring among different favorite swimming and fishing spots.

  If the stereotypes of our divided society in 2016 were to be believed, there would be little hope of my liberal, intellectual parents relating to Chasten’s gun-collecting, working-class, small-business-owning rural Michigan mother and father. But five minutes on the boat made it clear they would get on famously. Their rapport got a boost from the universal language of fishing, both social and introspective, which is capable of uniting people of almost any style and background. But mostly it was because of the simple, transitive effect of love: my parents for me, his for him, and therefore all of theirs for each of us and for each other, all rooted in the strong desire for us to be happy.

  CHASTEN’S PARENTS ARE THE KIND of people who sometimes pay for the customer behind them at the drive-thru window at McDonald’s, just to put a little good out into the world, so it isn’t surprising that I am showered with gifts whenever I am at their home. Anything I have admitted to enjoying will make an appearance—from Reese’s peanut butter cups left under my pillow at night to offerings of dark-roast Keurig pods that Sherri will save in between my visits, knowing I’ll enjoy them more than anyone else in the household.

  But I really knew I was a member of the family when I became the object of their truest expression of fondness: teasing. As we filled up at a Shell station one Labor Day weekend amid an extended family camping trip in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, I volunteered to run inside and fetch breakfast supplies for the next morning at the campsite.

  “Could you pick up some blinker fluid while you’re in there?”

  “Sure,” I agreed, not processing the question too actively and somehow not detecting the conspiratorial telepathy among Chasten, Terry, and Sherri.

  “For this car you gotta make sure it’s the E-50,” Terry added. “The purple kind.” Chasten nodded in solemn agreement.

  I committed the specs to memory. “Uh-huh. E-50, purple.” Got it.

  Inside, I found bacon and eggs in the refrigerated section, then made my way to the car supplies. Not finding anything purple or marked “E-50,” I worked back along the aisle a second time, without success, and then started to look for the clerk. Just as I began asking for help, I heard the chime at the door as Sherri came inside. As the other two chuckled in the car, she couldn’t resist making sure she was on hand to witness the interaction. That way, later, around the campfire, she could describe the look on my face at precisely the moment it dawned on me, while repeating myself to a quizzical store clerk, that there is no such thing as blinker fluid.

  BACK HOME, AS CHASTEN AND I had become a couple, it was not readily clear to either of us how we were supposed to act in public. But we quickly formed the habit of conducting ourselves like any other couple, and found that we were generally treated that way. The harder part for him was the challenge that awaits any political plus-one: dealing with the volume of positive and negative attention coming to you and to someone you love, as a consequence of a life that he, not you, has chosen.

  One day, not long after we had begun to live together, Chasten was making an evening grocery run to Martin’s. In the refrigerated section, he pulled open a glass door to select a carton of yogurt. Eyeing his choices, he suddenly heard a tapping sound next to his ear. Startled, he turned to the right and found someone knocking on the glass.

  Abandoning his yogurt selection for a moment, Chasten closed the door between them and asked how he could be helpful.

  The constituent’s request was simple enough: “You tell your husband to stop fucking up the streets downtown!”

  Evidently the gentleman was not a fan of our Smart Streets initiative. It was beside the point that he may not have fully appreciated the economic benefits of a complete-streets policy, or that he was unaware Chasten and I were not yet married. In that moment, Chasten realized that he, too, had become a public figure, and would have to answer for me as well as himself.

  Even as he lives his own demanding professional life as a classroom teacher and head of junior high at the same Montessori school I attended as a child, Chasten has found that he constantly has to represent not just me but also a city administration in which he has no formal role. As we flop down in the living room after a long day of work, most of his stories are about the school day, but some are inevitably about how my work has invaded his. A day won’t go by without some kind of intrusion. It can occasionally be endearing, but just as often it will be frustrating, such as the staff meeting where an idea he mentioned was met with the response, “Is that your idea, or the mayor’s?” Or it’s just peculiar, as when a stranger lobbies him to get the city to stop putting fluoride in our drinking water.

  PERHAPS IT IS THE FEAR of any queer person preparing to come out that he or she will be marked as a kind of other, isolated from the straight world by virtue of being different. No doubt many have that kind of experience—indeed all do, at least a little bit. But the main consequence for me of coming out, and especially of finding Chasten, is that I have felt more common ground than ever before with the personal lives of other, mostly straight, people.

  Before, I could rarely relate to the stories I heard from others when it came to adult domestic life or romance. Today, being in a committed relationship with Chasten just might be the most normal thing about my life. I no longer have to extrapolate or use imagination to understand what colleagues are describing when it comes to their wives or husbands. Our world at home is full of the blessings of domestic life—and the frustrations, too, from my irritation that it’s hard to get him to fold the laundry as I do, to his bemusement at my stubborn indifference to expiration dates on items in the cupboard.

  For this reason most of all, it is mystifying that some persist in describing sexual orientation as a “lifestyle.” In those fragments of our days that aren’t dominated by work, our lifestyle revolves around meals, friends, exercise, housekeeping, sleep, extended family, and the care and feeding of our dog. Trying to visualize it from the outside, it strikes me that my partnered, gay “lifestyle” is a lot more normal, sustainable, and fulfilling than my prior lifestyle consisting almost entirely of work and trave
l. In that context, something as simple as taking care of a dog would have been inconceivable.

  TRUMAN, OUR RESCUE MUTT, was named Lamar when we went to visit him at the foster family that had been keeping him for weeks after a couple failed adoption attempts. A hound and beagle mix said to be about four years old, he had come from Kentucky by way of an animal rescue that specializes in getting dogs out of shelters in high-kill states. He had clearly been badly mistreated, and was at first extremely skittish. As his foster owner in Granger led him out on a leash to meet us in her yard, he avoided eye contact with either of us. As soon as Chasten went to pet him, he pancaked onto the ground in a passive slouch. Maybe the earlier adoptions hadn’t worked out because he just didn’t act very dog-like. But Chasten was convinced there wasn’t anything wrong with him that a few months of love couldn’t fix.

  Trying to think ahead, I was more reluctant. Once, weeks earlier, he had wondered aloud about whether we were in a position to responsibly take care of a dog, and I had pointed out that we didn’t even seem to be in a position to responsibly take care of cheese. After all, things constantly went bad in our fridge as we went days at a time without a meal at home. Taking good care of a pet would mean a change in, well, lifestyle.

  But the dog was irresistible, and Chasten reminded me that we had a good support network despite our work and travel schedules, especially since my parents lived around the corner. The next thing I knew, we were the loving owners of a four-ish-year-old hound whom we rechristened Truman, after the president who had quipped, “If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.”

  Early in my relationship with our new family member, I often thought of this saying with irony. For the first few weeks, he would get up and go to a different room if I so much as made eye contact. After that habit subsided, he still tended to run away and hide under a table anytime I tried to leash him. He wasn’t exactly man’s best friend. But over the months he bonded with Chasten and eventually with me, becoming the class pet in Chasten’s schoolroom and curling up in our bed with us at home. Now I return home to a serenade of barks and howls, a wagging tail, and all of the goofy excitement that you’d expect from a four-legged canine companion.