As happy as I was for her, my reaction to this last bit of news was similar to Marcus’s. It was likely the reason he was out back poking our tree house full of holes. Divorce meant returning to poverty. And Merrill would surely exact revenge. I thought of the beatings we’d have to endure, and I was scared. But unlike Marcus, I understood that my mom was stuck between love and real life. It was where I’d been stuck since I’d realized at age six that I liked boys. And though my romantic desires dared not find a voice yet, hers just had.
So, understanding her dilemma far more than she knew, I said, “Well, we should probably meet him, then.”
That was that.
* * *
—
Anne invited Jeff over to the house for dinner a week or two later. This time my brothers and I weren’t hiding in a hotel or at a friend’s house; we were hiding in Marcus’s room, a bit terrified that our latest potential man of the house was on his way over. As an offering, I’d left the completed Helldiver model in the center of the kitchen table. I had never built a model so perfect. I still believe it looked better than the picture on the front of the box. And when Jeff walked in, he immediately began examining my detail work: the plane’s microscopic, impeccably painted rivets, its historically accurate sulfur-yellow nose and propeller tips.
One by one, my brothers and I emerged to face this new man in our lives. Marcus went first. Hardly ten minutes later, he came back to his room without a word, just a tough-guy look in his eye. Then it was my turn. I handed Todd my last surviving G.I. Joe from our mostly finished battle, stepped out of the bedroom, and walked down the hall.
I wasn’t at all prepared for what awaited me in the kitchen. There was Jeff, inspecting my Helldiver, an honest-to-God, beefcake U.S. Army soldier. Jeff was more handsome than Raul, and far better looking than Merrill, but it was that troublemaking mustache that was just too much for my adolescent heart. I blushed, choked, and sat down in petrified silence. Indeed, my mother and I shared the exact same taste in men.
It turns out that despite his military credentials, Jeff was also a bit shy, so we danced around the big subjects and talked about the airplane’s paint job instead…then about the big, thick, ugly new scar across my chin. He told me about his own scars: from his battles in South America, from his parachute accident, and from a thousand other things gone wrong. Then he told me that my scars would all eventually fade, adding, “Even if you don’t want them to.” I liked hearing that. I showed him where the dentist had just fixed my front tooth. There was only a little seam now between what was real and what the dentist had bonded in. It took some trust to share that, and Jeff knew it.
Dinner was ready. Everyone came to the table, and Jeff told us a few stories about growing up in Philadelphia, about how often (or seldom) Catholics like him went to church, and about what it was like to jump out of airplanes.
After dinner, my mom and Jeff had planned on watching a movie together. Jeff had already rented a VCR from the grocery store up the road and picked up a few movies with it. We were now free to go play. Todd and Marcus ran off, but perhaps because I was the first kid he’d really heard about thanks to my epic face-plant, or because he’d heard I’d proven tough enough to survive my injuries without too much complaint, he stayed with me for a moment alone at the dinner table and popped his actual Special Forces airborne beret on top of my head. I think he could tell I was the most tuned in of us three boys, at least back then, and probably the most nervous too, so he cut right to it: “Your mom told me about your dad. About Merrill.”
I quietly corrected him. “He’s not actually my dad.”
“Right. Right.” There was a bit of silence. “You know, in the army, they taught me how to break a man’s legs and arms with my own hands.” He took the requisite dramatic pause, and then added, “It’s not something I like doing, but it’s something I’ve had to do before.” Color me terrified and turned on. “And…your mom told me some of the things he did. How your dad acted with you guys.”
“He’s not my dad,” I reminded him.
Jeff nodded. “I know. I get it. I was also raised by a man who wasn’t my father.” I liked that he understood. Then he leaned in and looked me dead in the eyes. “I want you to know that if this Merrill asshole ever steps foot in this house again, if he ever tries to hurt you, any of you, I’ll break both of his legs and arms before he knows what hit him.” He was dead serious.
My heart leapt from my chest. Who was this knight in “shimmering” armor—as my mom always put it—this man who had just extinguished so many of my worst fears with one sentence? With his Special Forces beret sitting atop my head, Jeff was the first man to ever offer me his full protection. No God or law would get in his way. I had never known what it was like to feel protected. And for the first time in six years, that angry, spinning ball of anxiety that told me over and over again that everything I loved would soon get ripped away…suddenly…stopped…spinning. For the first time I could remember, I slept safe and sound that night.
* * *
—
With the blessings of her sons, and only weeks to go before Merrill returned, Anne gripped those proverbial Texas bullhorns more firmly than she ever had and told Merrill she wanted a divorce. She offered what I thought were generous terms. She wouldn’t share his physical abuse with the courts as long as he never showed his face around us again. Afraid of being excommunicated and court-martialed, he agreed. Once the divorce was under way, we quickly ran out of cash, so I gave my mom what little savings I had from my San Antonio Light newspaper delivery route so we could cover the mortgage. And although I wouldn’t have minded seeing Merrill’s legs snapped, my mom didn’t want to risk the encounter, so we stopped attending church altogether.
Instead, we started going on little adventures with our mom and Jeff. Butch stuff. Sweaty Texas stuff. I loved it. Jeff also began spending more nights over. Then weeknights. Soon he moved in full-time. And when I got into an argument with my mom, and Jeff stepped in to check my language, and I pulled out the old “You’re not my father” card, he didn’t punch me in the face. Instead, in a calm, stern voice, he said, “I know. But you’re not going to talk to the woman I love like that.” Any fight drained out of me. He was protecting the woman we both loved. After that, I wished more than anything that someone like him had been my father my whole life. But I was rather attached to my last name now, so instead of changing it again, I named my new kitten after Jeff. I called him Airborne. And in a show of approval, Jeff took the airborne patch off his treasured beret and let me sew it onto Airborne’s collar. Just like my grandma Cokie would have.
At the beginning of the summer, Jeff was given the details of his next tour of duty. He was being sent to a base in central California called Fort Ord. But the military doesn’t pay to move girlfriends and their children, and we could never have afforded the move on our own. So as he and our mom sat in his brand-new pickup truck, Jeff made a little ring out of a silver paper gum wrapper and asked her if she would be his wife. This was the third time a man had asked her that, and arguably the first time she knew for sure that it was for all the right reasons, but she said she needed to talk to her boys first.
A pang of doubt hit him.
“Why me?” he asked her.
“What do you mean?”
“You probably could have had any doctor who worked at the hospital, and all the prestige that comes with being a doctor’s wife, so why choose me?” He meant it.
Who is this knight in shimmering armor? she thought as her eyes welled up.
But she was conflicted. Saying yes meant leaving our church and her supportive family in the South for the unknown, and going against everything she’d taught us about family and eternity. But she was also more certain than ever that this was right—despite it being the most selfish thing she’d ever do to her boys, and she told me just that when she sat
me down to look at a flyer about this faraway place called Fort Ord, perched along the central coast in California.
It was tough being Mormon in a place like Texas, and it was tough keeping my “homo-tribe” secret there, but I loved the rowdy, warm people. I loved the long summer nights at the community pool, the slushies, the lightning bugs, the thunderstorms, the drainage ditches, and the tadpoles. I loved that for better or worse, family was primary there. I loved that we Texans were taught to take life by the horns when necessary. And although I couldn’t do it myself, I admired the tough men and women who stood up straight and tall and faced their rough circumstances with strength and pride. This was the America I had been raised in, the South that I loved, and the land I would always consider home.
Besides, I had heard terrible stories coming out of California lately. From San Francisco to Los Angeles, men were dropping dead from a new cancer brought on by a mysterious disease called GRID and then AIDS. Even rich, famous men like Rock Hudson were dying from it. Working in a hospital laboratory, my mom knew more than most about this new disease, and she assured me that it was mostly only gay men who’d gotten it so far. Little did she know that this only complicated things further for me. And here she was, proposing that we leave the safety of our beloved corner of America for this very different land of dying homosexuals—another kind of America, one our church had warned us was filled with sinners. So she added, “Do you know who Clint Eastwood is?”
Of course I did. Dirty Harry. What kind of idiot did she think I was?
“Well, he’s the mayor of a city called Carmel, right next to the army base out there. He would be like our mayor.”
That did sound appealing. And I liked the photos of ocean-side cliffs, and the beaches free from all the oil globs we found along our Texas coastline. Plus, it wasn’t as if I had any friends in San Antonio. Someone at school had called Jason a “fag,” and he’d stopped returning my phone calls and gotten himself a tough blond girlfriend with the same short haircut as mine.
“Okay,” I said. Somewhere deep in my heart I thought maybe I could start over in this new place, and boy, did I need a fresh start.
And so Anne and Jeff got married in August of 1987 in a courtroom. We three boys weren’t invited. She didn’t want to put us through too much of a roller-coaster ride in case this didn’t work out the way she’d hoped. Jeff left for California ahead of us to try to find a place for us to live. A couple of our aunts showed up in his wake to help us hold a garage sale and try to convince my mom how foolish this was: “He’s so young. Are you sure you’re sure?” My mom got angrier every time they brought up his age or hers, his pay grade or hers, or how far she would be from family when something inevitably went wrong. She shot back, “I love you, but I am perfectly capable of managing just fine on my own, thank you very much.” They knew to leave that alone.
We didn’t tell anyone at church, at school, or in our neighborhood that we were leaving. My mom didn’t want anyone else to try to convince us to stay. So we just jammed what little we had left in the world into the trunk of our car, shoved sedatives down Airborne’s throat, and pushed him into a crate in the backseat with me and Todd. Marcus spread out a map in the front. My mom started the car and backed it out of our Texas driveway for the last time.
And that was it. So long to Texas. So long to the South, to the Mormons, the Baptists, and the Catholics. So long to the tadpoles and cicadas, and to this corner of America I knew and most often loved. We were now strapped into the Chevy Malibu that Raul had left behind when he abandoned us, blasting toward New Mexico, across Arizona, through Los Angeles, and over that winding Grapevine to a town John Steinbeck had aptly called East of Eden. Because there was Eden, where Dirty Harry reigned, and then there was the small farming town just east of it, in a place not nearly as nice—our soon-to-be home in a very different kind of America.
PART II
CHAPTER 11
West of Home and East of Eden
I
I was fourteen years old and hadn’t grown an inch since leaving Texas, though there was now some peach fuzz emerging under my arms that I’d examine during my rare alone time in the early-morning hours locked in our tiny new apartment’s windowless bathroom. It was 1988, one year into our coastal American adventure in Salinas, California, where John Steinbeck had seen an “Eden” to the west: Big Sur, Carmel (where Clint Eastwood was no longer mayor), and Monterey (where my mom and Jeff worked at the Fort Ord army base). But we’d settled east of all that beauty. It felt impossibly far for a teen with no hope for a car come sixteen.
Jeff was still in the early days of his career, and my mom had been forced to take a demotion in order to transfer to Fort Ord, so we were dead broke again. We could just barely afford to live in this agricultural town of ninety thousand souls where most of our neighbors were surviving well below the poverty line. But my mom felt that love was worth such adjustments. Even in our new claustrophobic abode—no backyard, no lake to be found, and all the little adaptations living in a mostly Spanish-speaking area called for—I agreed that a loving home was well worth any new challenges. Besides, I found learning to speak Spanish empowering, loved the refried-bean burritos at Rosita’s café, and looked forward to looting the strawberry and artichoke fields that surrounded our apartment once the sun had set and the agricultural workers had gone home.
San Antonio had been diverse, but our neighborhood and my junior high were primarily white. In my new school in Salinas, I was now the minority amid first-generation Latin American kids who were so busy handling their own challenges that they didn’t seem to pay much attention to mine. I caught fewer stares aimed at my mom as she swung her way through the local mall or into a school meeting. I appreciated that. And hundreds of miles from our Southern traditions, fewer men rushed to hold doors open for women. Here, my mom would have to fend for herself a bit more, but she liked that people assumed she could. Feeling a touch more daring, I even asked my mom’s new hairdresser in the local mall to cut my hair however she saw fit. She promptly gave me a flattop, but as she approached my Texas mullet, I stopped her. I wasn’t quite ready to let everything from home go. Not just yet.
On special weekends, we drove a handful of miles west to Monterey to gaze at the piles of blubbery seals sunning themselves on warm rocks as Pacific waves lapped over them. We fed the silky-furred squirrels who’d eat right out of my mom’s outstretched hand, or ventured farther down to Carmel or Pacific Grove along the seventeen-mile drive where the photographer Ansel Adams captured his iconic images of lone cypress trees swept landward by the sea breeze. It really was a special kind of paradise. And back home at night, all tucked into bed, I occasionally dared to dream of a sunnier tomorrow, even if during my waking hours it still felt like a handful of miles out of my grasp.
But a year in, I would still slip up and say “y’all” in class, inviting choruses of laughter from my new classmates—this in a school where a teacher who stuck out too much for being “cool” had been shot by a student (the teacher survived). Add in my persistent shyness problem, and I had a grand total of zero friends at North Salinas High School.
Then one particularly warm day, I was walking toward the exit after the final bell had rung when I saw a gaggle of North High’s most handsome boys holding court by a bank of lockers. Tony Graffanino was the first to catch my eye. He always did. He was taller than the rest, and at only sixteen, he already had a triangular patch of wispy brown hair on his chest that turned into a fuzzy trail leading all the way down his belly. He wore his shirts unbuttoned to his rippled stomach to show it all off. The one thing we had in common was that we were both on the struggling swim team coached by my biology teacher. She was desperate for athletes, and expert at social pressure, so she’d convinced me to join. Tony was her one star, a natural jock. So during practices and meets, I had to be extra careful not to look in his direction or my body might betray me.
&n
bsp; But it was the off-season now, and Tony and I hadn’t said a word to each other since our last crushing defeat. As I approached him in the hall, I had a choice to make: say nothing and cement my weirdo status with the one teammate who’d bothered to cheer me on during my hundred-meter backstroke humiliations, or work up the guts to say hello like a normal human being. It took every bit of courage I had, but as I passed, I looked at the ground and let a “hey” escape my lips. To my surprise (and great discomfort), Tony extended a long, strong arm, pulled me in by the shoulders, and introduced me to his assembled brood of boys. My heart raced, my head went light—this was too difficult to navigate. It had to be a dream. Correction: a nightmare.
At the center of these impossibly handsome boys was an aberration: Ryan Elizalde, a husky Latin eighteen-year-old with a thick, black, ’70s Freddie Mercury pornstache that made him look thirty. I’m well aware that it’s not politically correct to lean on stereotypes, but Ryan had a certain flare, a flamboyance I recognized, a swish he didn’t seem to be trying hard enough to hide. Given my roots and this town’s Latin-machismo leanings, I thought this Ryan fella must be an absolute lunatic not to try to dim his “burning flame.”
But Ryan had one other thing few in his clique did: a job, and a job with some power. Ryan was the head of the personnel department at the local Toys “R” Us near the crumbling stucco shopping mall, and he used that mighty power to hire all of the best looking guys at our school. Every single one of them. North High lore was that on weekends, he’d buy gallons of beer and wine coolers and caravan North High’s hottest to a series of natural caverns just outside the city limits for epic bonfire parties where all sorts of drunken, sweaty shirtlessness took place. During my sleepless nights in the room I shared with Todd, his growing legs shaking all night, keeping me and my sensitive ears wide awake, I often fantasized about those mystical cavern boy parties.
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