Mama's Boy

by Dustin Lance Black

  So just after my seventh birthday, my mom started her first job, working in a closet-sized room in the Brooke Army Medical Center’s shipping and supply department. And with some help from the church and her first paychecks slowly trickling in, we moved into a small rental home in a San Antonio suburb called Live Oak. At the same time, I did what most devout Mormon boys did back then: I began my journey to becoming an Eagle Scout by signing up for the Cub Scouts. There I quickly confirmed my worst fear: my crushes on members of the same sex would not be isolated to that one lawless, green-eyed neighbor. They were no passing phase. There would be more crushes, and they would only grow more difficult to hide and deny.

  To those who’ve said we ought to ban gay kids from Scouting for fear that the “queer” ones might treat the “normal” kids like a wanton boy buffet, I say they’ve forgotten what childhood crushes are like. For most kids, being anywhere near a crush is debilitating. You go splotchy-red, start to sweat, misplace half your vocabulary, and the harder you try to regain your composure, the more sweaty-bizarre-ignorant you become. Now imagine being surrounded by a handful of crushes all at once, or worse, being shipped off on a camping excursion where you can’t get away from them for a week. Add in a dash of eternal damnation and a dime for every “faggot” slur overheard, and you start to get why this supposed “buffet” felt a heck of a lot more like an obstacle course through hell. Gay kids shouldn’t be kicked out of Scouts; they should receive a special merit badge for resiliency.

  Until the LDS Church recently dissolved its century-old relationship with the Boy Scouts of America, for any Mormon boy, Scouting was a tacit requirement. Each church had its own troop made up of LDS kids. Together, Scouting and Mormonism reinforced a strict code of conduct. Add in my mom’s new job with the U.S. Army, and our world grew increasingly black-and-white. There was good or bad, right or wrong, and moral or immoral.

  Truth be told, I took comfort in our strictly defined boundaries. So did my mom. We knew the Lord’s path and the devil’s. Wiggle room would only have made life more complicated. We had enough on our plate already. Unlike my big brother, I had always been good at keeping to the “straight and narrow.” But the newfound homosexual path carving through my heart felt inextricable, and the more I tried to step off it, the wider it seemed to grow. No amount of prayer would make it quit. Soon, my mind and heart were at war, and with that war came new dread and anxiety, fomenting my shyness and fueling panic attacks.

  In response, I stopped talking completely.

  For the next half a decade, I hardly said a word in public. I couldn’t stand the sound of my own voice. I didn’t want to be seen. I didn’t want to excel or stick out. And I most certainly didn’t want to stand up in front of our entire congregation dressed as Lieutenant Starbuck from the original Battlestar Galactica and perform with a musical instrument I had no clue how to play. But that’s what my mom was insisting I do.

  Come late summer in our church, all of the primary-age kids were encouraged to pull on a costume, pick out a musical instrument, and play along with a pianist in what our congregation called the Jingle Bell Band (despite Christmas being months away).

  It should be noted that when I say the Mormon Church “encouraged” something, this means participation was expected.

  I had tinkered around on a piano and fiddled with my mother’s clarinet, but my efforts had only proven that I had zero innate musical ability. My mom had witnessed this debility and knew my shyness challenges just as well, so she spent her last dime on the simplest instrument there is to play: two beautifully varnished percussion sticks. All I had to do was get up on that stage and knock those sticks together in as close to rhythm as possible. Easy-breezy, she thought.

  My mom spent days sketching patterns of Lieutenant Starbuck’s uniform before attempting to sew an exact replica for my costume. It’s clear now that little of this effort was for me. She was trying to prove to her church friends that although she was a single mother, she could keep up with the best of them. And yes, the golden-haired lieutenant was my favorite character in my favorite TV show, but only for reasons I prayed my mom wouldn’t figure out. Let’s just say my admiration had nothing to do with his acting ability. Now my mom was going to “out” my keen interest in front of the entire church by dressing me up like him. For me, at seven years old, a shirt with a single stripe felt too bold. To dress me up in a gold-trimmed cape with a giant ’70s leather belt cinching my tiny waist? To have my frail frame compared to that of such a fully formed hunk of a man? To brazenly hint at my darkest secret in front of five hundred of our nearest and dearest congregants? And to force me to attempt to keep rhythm in front of them as they were most certainly figuring out my sinful secret? It felt so brutal and blind of her. I begged her not to make me do this. I shed tears—some real, some counterfeit—but none proved effective. So I refocused my efforts on a full frontal, emotional blackmail assault.

  I hid myself away in my mom’s closet with her craft box’s innards spread out and got to work on an epic construction paper, tape, and glue daisy. The head of the flower was as big as my own, petals three layers deep, with a large disk in the center that professed my undying love for my mom. Then I built a long stem that was as tall as she was and attached construction paper leaves to it. It was outstanding, by far my finest work to date. When I presented it to her, she seemed genuinely moved and impressed. I was certain it was my “get out of jail free” card.

  I was wrong.

  The fight that followed was epic. She told me that not only would I participate in the Jingle Bell Band, but I was to make her proud while doing it.

  “You will get up on that stage, and you will stand up straight and tall like the man you are. Straight, and tall, and proud. Do you hear me, Lance?” She hadn’t sat behind her sewing machine for hours on end after long days on the army base for nothing.

  I absolutely lost it—or as Marcus so eloquently put it later that night: “You went balls-to-the-wall-shit-ball nuclear, man.” He was right. And at some point during my nuclear meltdown, I shredded that construction-paper-daisy masterpiece into confetti right in front of my mom’s face.

  She shook, her eyes welled up, and my rage dissolved. My shameful secret had just provoked its first shameful act: I’d just purposefully and knowingly injured my own mother. I was supposed to be her protector. So stacking shame on top of shame, I died inside.

  My mom ordered me to my room. I gathered the remnants of her slain daisy, hung my head low, and did as I was told.

  When it came time for my song on that terrible Tuesday night, five hundred sets of curious eyes were indeed watching. I stepped up onto the stage with a dozen other kids, my percussion sticks hidden inside the gold-trimmed cape of my perfectly re-created Lieutenant Starbuck uniform. I hit my mark just fine, but that’s all I managed to do right.

  I couldn’t look into the crowd to find my mom’s face. I couldn’t meet her eyes. I was sure that my trembling body would soon release my bladder and I would die from all the combined humiliations. And when the music began, I didn’t stand up straight and tall at all. Slowly and steadily I slumped down deeper and deeper into myself, praying to become a snail, wishing I could vanish. My percussion sticks never touched each other. Not once. I was no man. I was no strong Mormon. I was no proud Southerner. I was a failure. A freak. The great shame of my family line.

  My mom never said a word about it.

  II

  Marcus was eleven when I melted down in front of our congregation. Mercifully, at the time, he was away on a Boy Scout camping trip. There, he would test his once-fragile preemie lungs with his first few puffs of weed. Thanks to his absence, my mom asked me to take on a new responsibility that had always been Marcus’s—to go shopping with her at the local mall.

  Second grade was looming for me, Marcus was headed into sixth, and Todd was growing fast. We all needed new clothes. What I didn’t think to co
nsider was that I’d never been out in public with my mom before, not outside of the safety and familiarity of family or church. So with no awareness of the minefield ahead, I buckled up, and my mom bulleted us toward the J. C. Penney in the Windsor Park Mall.

  Whenever I rode up front with my mom, I clicked myself into the middle of the big bench seat. I wanted to be close to her. And now I took the opportunity to rest my head on her shoulder. She was so little that my head reached her neck and fit perfectly into the groove between it and her collarbone. I remember noting what an exact shape it was for my head, as if it had been made especially for me.

  I wondered if she was still upset about the destroyed daisy, still disheartened by my pathetic performance in the Jingle Bell Band. I worried what my world might become if she ever gave up on me, lost faith in me. She was my most important thing in the world.

  The mall’s lot was nearly full. My mom pulled her massive Malibu into a regular parking spot way at the back. A year earlier, when the charitable woman at the DMV had offered my mom a handicap license, my mom had shot back, “And what exactly is it you think I’m incapable of?” This left the startled DMV woman in a terrible state of silence. My mom let her words linger, then put the woman out of her misery with: “I will have a regular driver’s license…thank you very much.”

  After a few failed attempts, my mom squeezed our tank of a car into the tiny spot. I jumped out, grabbed her crutches from the backseat, ran them around to the driver’s side, and opened her door like a good Southern gentleman ought to. She tucked her crutches under her arms, grabbed their handles, and we were on our way. Clockwork.

  There were only days left before school would start, so the mall was teeming with parents and children. I put on my best vanishing act: I looked down, made myself as small as possible, and slowed my breathing, as if that might somehow make me invisible.

  Click-clack, click-clack, click-clack. It was the sound my mom always made as she walked, and now she was moving through the mall with grace, speed, and determination. I did my best to keep up.

  Once we were well inside J. C. Penney’s boys’ department, digging through a pile of clearance denim, I got up the nerve to lift my head to make sure no one was looking at me. Unfortunately, I discovered the opposite. More than a few shoppers’ eyes were on us, and not just gazing our way, they were staring. It was a worst-case scenario. Had I been identified as an introvert? An antisocial child? A weirdo? The giveaways seemed too clear: the crinkled ears, the bowed head, the too-small size. Perhaps some were even deducing my other hidden difference: that I was a Mormon queer.

  But when I met their eyes, it quickly became clear they weren’t looking at me at all. They were staring at my mom. But why? I was the misfit. Why were they staring at my mom like they’d just seen a car wreck? Within our family or church, no one had ever treated my mom as if she were different. Now, with every new stranger’s worried gaze, I grew more baffled and bothered.

  Done with the clearance table, my mom walked to the stacks of poorly folded Levi’s 501 jeans that she knew Marcus and I wanted but that she couldn’t afford. That’s when I watched the gawkers dissect her swinging body. I watched my mom ignore their looks, her head held high and proud, just the way she had tried to teach me to hold mine. And for the first time, I really saw how she planted her crutches in front of her and swung her body forward again and again. I saw her spine through strangers’ eyes, with all of its twists and turns. I looked at all the other mothers with their straight spines and nimble legs, and for the first time, I understood that my mother was different, perhaps too different, and that no one saw her difference as a good thing. They stared like she was a carnival freak, and the few who bothered to notice I was alive offered only pity.

  My blood boiled. I wanted to wad up their pity and shove it down their holier-than-thou windpipes. My breath got hot, my palms began to sweat, and the edges of my eyelids burned. What I didn’t realize until much later was that I was no longer looking at the ground. I was no longer hiding behind my mom. I was staring every single gawker right in the eye, daring them to keep judging.

  I knew my own sins. I was sure I deserved these gawkers’ scrutiny. But what had my mother done to deserve any? This was unjust.

  So when a boy, maybe one year my senior, refused to stop staring, I waited for him to get just close enough, then grabbed hold of the fleshy back side of his arm with my thumb and index finger. And just how Marcus had taught me, I pinched and twisted the living heck out of his skin. He reacted, but when he met my eyes, he knew full well that he would be the one in trouble if he squealed, so he wisely didn’t alert his mother. I stared him down until he was well out of sight, making sure he would never look at my mom that way again.

  That afternoon, I realized I wasn’t the only freak living under our roof. I already knew ours wasn’t a land that celebrated differences. I knew it was best to keep mine hidden, so I didn’t need words to know that my mom wouldn’t want hers openly acknowledged either. It would take many years before we’d both learn that our differences demanded to be seen, understood, and perhaps even celebrated.

  When we got home, I excused myself to my room. My ears were ringing. It’s a sound that springs from pain-filled silence. I still hear it whenever I feel anything deeply. On this day, I finally, truly understood my familial duty. I wasn’t just there to make perfect vacuum lines in the family room; I was there to stand guard for my mom against an unjust world.

  But I also knew that weeks earlier, I had done the opposite. I had broken her heart with a construction-paper-confetti fit that she didn’t deserve. I understood now that I needed to make amends for that. So I got on my knees and asked God for His best advice. This time I thought I felt an answer.

  I snuck into my mom’s room and raided her craft box, looking for Scotch tape. An hour or two later, I found my mom in the kitchen, and I presented the paper daisy to her for the second time. It wasn’t a new daisy. That would have been a copout. This was the same daisy I had ripped to bits and pieces, meticulously reconstructed with tape and glue. It had demanded saving.

  My mom took the flower and let out a little breath. I can so clearly remember her looking down into my eyes with a rather somber expression and asking, “You think you could put the whole world back together again with tape and glue, don’t you, Lancer?”

  This wasn’t the reaction I had hoped for, so I thought hard on her question. I remember imagining the world splitting in two, all the lava threatening to flow out, people being knocked from their huts and homes, oceans pouring into space. Then I thought about what I might do if that really did happen, and after some sober seven-year-old calculations, I confidently answered: “Yes…if I had enough tape.”

  There it was. Despite all of our tall challenges, I seemed to believe that none were insurmountable, at least with enough tape. My mom laughed loud and hard for the first time in a good long while. She hugged me, shed a couple of joyful tears, and then stuck that flower to the fridge with a magnet.

  It turns out I was very much my mother’s son, and I was growing into a foolish little optimist, just like her. Perhaps she saw a glimmer of her indomitable old childhood self in my earnest eyes that day, and it gave her some hope back. What I know for sure is that we both felt a bit less alone in the world from then on, and her dimmed light began to flicker back to life. And boy, how we both needed that company and light like we needed oxygen.

  The paper daisy came down from the fridge when we finally moved out of that musty rental, but years later I would discover she’d given it a home with her hospital autograph book and her golden book of boys. It was the very first thing I ever made that earned its place as a sacred object.

  CHAPTER 8

  Bull by the Horns

  I

  By 1982, Anne’s stellar performance reviews at Fort Sam Houston came with modest pay raises that made putting enough food on th
e table increasingly possible. Occasionally she even splurged, surprising us with a box of Fruity Pebbles or Cap’n Crunch cereal that vanished into our faces in minutes. Her three boys were healthy and showed up for Sunday services in well-ironed navy blue or brown suits with matching clip-on ties. Enchanted by the easy access to weapons and heaps of praise for killing animals, twelve-year-old Marcus was thriving in the Boy Scouts. I had placed into a set of high-IQ-nerd-fest classes that sealed the deal on my friendlessness but left my mom proud. Todd was walking upright, and we’d begun having in-depth, markedly normal kid conversations about things like Star Wars versus G.I. Joe action-figure joint designs. He had no memory of Raul or his vanishing act.

  But my eighth birthday loomed. Eight is the age when good Mormon boys become men, become responsible for their own sins moving forward, and need to be baptized to rinse away any previous no-nos. Worried that my fantasies might count as celestial demerits, I was understandably eager for this righteous rinse. But usually it’s a boy’s father who has the honor of performing this full submersion in front of a gaggle of LDS nearest and dearest, in a font hidden behind an accordion divider in the center of the church. Raul was still around when Marcus required dunking, but we hadn’t heard a peep from old Pops for years now.

  So as my birthday drew closer, Anne realized that she needed a man, and quick. One who was blessed with the holy priesthood, could baptize her middle boy, and get us all into the highest level of heaven together. One who was into paralyzed, divorced women with three raucous boys. Any man like that would do. She didn’t have time to be too picky.

  A candidate soon presented himself. Merrill was a divorced staff sergeant now stationed at Randolph Air Force Base in San Antonio. His two young daughters occasionally came to visit and could be spotted next to him in the pews on Sundays. The trio stuck out in the same way our little family did. They were well-behaved, but it was rare not to see two parents per family. Divorce was allowed but frowned upon, a last resort. Everyone knew my mom had been abandoned by Raul in favor of a fundamentalist-style marriage to his first cousin, so no one judged her too harshly. But no one seemed to know why Merrill’s temple-blessed marriage hadn’t worked out. Perhaps because he wasn’t very handsome, I thought. At least not according to my standards, which increasingly seemed to match my mom’s—we often turned our heads in unison, gazing at this fella or that, and snapped them back in perfect time before being caught by the other. Merrill hadn’t drawn a head turn from either of us. He smelled a little like moldy bread, and he wore government-issue glasses ripped from Revenge of the Nerds. But he was nice enough and tall enough, and he seemed strong. He certainly wouldn’t have a problem holding my little body underwater until my first eight years’ worth of sins were washed away.