An even bigger challenge was standing right next to her: my big brother, Marcus, all six foot one of him, his rocker hair now past his shoulders. We were oil and water these days, and when I gave him a quick hug at the door that Christmas, I could smell the cigarette smoke on his Sears Auto Center work jacket, the smoke my mom refused to acknowledge. And I wondered if he, or anyone in this family, would ever be able to love or accept me for me.
I quickly put my plan into action. I utilized a chorus of “I’m exhausted”s to race through frosting cookies later that afternoon. After dinner, I hugged my mom and said, “I don’t feel very good, and I still need to wrap presents” to win her dispensation to retire to my room early. She kissed me good night, and I was soon upstairs, isolated from the family I held dear, alone with my tape, wrapping paper, the few gifts I could afford, and my very big secret.
I used the same sleepy excuse Christmas morning to explain my quiet demeanor, but when I look back at photos from that day, I can’t help but notice that I’m wearing a hat pulled down low like a poker player’s. It must have been so obvious to my mom that I was doing everything I could to hide from them all.
Thankfully, Marcus had decided to deep-fry the turkey in the backyard that year, and having read about all the disasters such a method might summon, everyone gave their full attention to his bubbling peanut oil in hopes of a Christmas morning explosion.
His distraction left me alone to chop up the fruit for our traditional Christmas fruit salad. Then I raced through Christmas dinner, sharing only one story about a film editing class I was dreading, claimed exhaustion from jet lag, and was off to my room again, pleased that I had dodged any questions. If avoiding discussing anything personal or intimate with my once close family was the goal, well, I suppose you can say I was succeeding. But it felt terrible.
Up in my room, as I filled my suitcase with the many gifts my mother most certainly couldn’t afford, I couldn’t help but feel that in my attempt to save Christmas, I was losing the one thing that had always mattered most to me: my family.
And then I heard it, the sound I’d heard a thousand times before, the sound that had brought me comfort some days and struck terror in my heart others: click-clack, click-clack, click-clack. Coming closer, up the hallway, louder and louder, moving toward my room.
* * *
—
Even before I left for college, my mom and I used to camp out in my bedroom and talk endlessly about her work, my studies, the future, her past, and what kind of box our universe lived in. After I left home, on visits like this, we often maximized our time together by skipping sleep. I had hoped my repeated claims of exhaustion had been convincing enough to keep her away this time, but the click-clack of her crutches outside my door made it clear she had other plans.
There was a knock. Then three knocks. I said nothing, but the light in my room was still on and she could surely see it sneaking out from under the door.
“Lancer?”
I remained silent.
Softer: “Lancer?”
Another moment passed.
Even softer: “Are you awake, my baby?”
I couldn’t bear it any longer. “I’m just packing.”
She took that as an invitation and opened the door. A warm smile on her face, she stepped in and sat down on a corner of my bed, leaning her crutches behind her. She seemed so happy that I hadn’t yet fallen asleep. Such an entrance wasn’t unusual. In fact, it was the most normal thing that had happened this Christmas. This was what had always preceded us piling back into Jeff’s truck come morning and returning to the airport, exhausted but full of new stories.
This time, though, I had no idea what to talk about, so I continued packing. My mom happily took the lead and started up a conversation about the headlines of the day. As luck would have it, the implementation of a brand-new policy that threatened to affect her military and its brave men and women was all over the front pages. It was called “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” and President Clinton was ready to sign it into law.
My heart found its all-too-familiar home in my stomach. At first, I feared that my mother’s choice of topic meant she was on to me, but from her building fury over this new policy, I knew she had no idea I had a personal connection to it. To be clear, my mom wasn’t angry that “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” barred openly LGBTQ people from serving in her military. Her anger was aimed at the fact that this policy let LGBTQ people serve in her military at all—even if they did manage to keep their “ailing lifestyle” completely hidden.
“How dare this president allow those kinds of people to join? Even if they do keep it quiet, it’s still wrong. There is still such a thing as right and wrong in this world, Lancer.”
There wasn’t anything left for me to pack into my suitcase, and worried that my folding and refolding to bide time was becoming noticeably bizarre, I sat down, my back against the wall. Her feet were dangling off the bed beside me, her passionate sermon filling the room as if one of her Sunday school audiences were hanging on her every word.
“We’ve worked too long and too hard and made too many sacrifices to desecrate the service of so many brave men and women in our armed forces. Who does this Clinton think he is to destroy the good name of our military by filling it with sickos?!”
And on she went, growing more fervent about the possible secret inclusion of these “degenerates” we’d learned our entire lives were mentally ill, criminals, sinners, all bound for some orgiastic, eternal bonfire. But she wasn’t talking about some nameless, faceless damned anymore. Now I had names for these people—faces, hearts, and stories. These were my friends.
I had never been slow to debate my mom if I disagreed with her. She had always encouraged that. Now, feeling the very first sparks of indignation, I wanted more than anything to stand up for my new friends, for Ryan, and for myself. But this time, I didn’t dare to. So she took my silence as accord, and emboldened by it, she grew more passionate, more sure that these “unnatural people” shouldn’t be allowed in “the greatest military in the world. Secret or not, it is a disgrace to our country’s great history. How can we ask our children to dream and aspire if we set the bar this low?”
She was speaking from the heart now. Being a part of any family is what mattered most to my mom; being a part of the U.S. military family was a huge point of pride for her. She took pride in meeting the high bar the organization set despite her limitations. An attack on the sanctity of her military family was an attack on everything she valued, and these gays were not good enough, not perfect enough for the family of her highest ideals.
Even when I had chosen to stay behind in California, to go into the arts instead of becoming a mechanic or a scientist, I’d still felt close to many of my mom’s conservative ideals. The idea that somehow I was inherently no longer welcome in this wider, particularly Southern, military family of Americans was heart-wrenching, particularly coming from my own mother’s lips. So I tried hard to focus on the wall behind her, on a large cartoon mural I’d painted the summer before. I tried not to take my mom’s words personally, but I did. My mom and I share a gift of the kind of passion that’s tough to ignore. After all, we’d both been trained by the best storytellers on earth: old Southerners with Jack Daniel’s on their breath, preachers leading congregations in Mormon and Baptist churches, and prophets beamed in from Salt Lake City to every LDS church on the globe. So her anger cut deep. And for the first time, I knew for certain that this thing I couldn’t change about myself put me squarely outside of my mother’s love.
I didn’t want to come out to her that night. I wasn’t ready. So I prayed. Not to any Mormon, Baptist, or Catholic God, just to God, whoever that might be. I prayed for my sensitive ears to stop hearing, for my breath to return to normal, for the burning around my eyelids to cool, for my tears to stay inside, safely hidden until this terror was over.
Those pra
yers weren’t answered.
The edges of my eyelids began to burn hotter. That set my stomach trembling. My hands followed. And then I felt it. The tear hit my cheek before I knew it had even formed in my eye. One single tear had betrayed me. And once I felt it, there was another. Soon, decades’ worth of long-held tears came tumbling out.
Then I did something quite brave: I looked up into my mom’s eyes so she could see them.
The room went silent. Not a sound.
A good Southern mom can read tears like tea leaves. Right then and there, my secret was out. Her precious middle boy with his wide-open, flying saucer, blue eyes, the boy who she’d always said was put on this earth to teach her so many new things…he was now one of “them.” He was one of those broken people.
Somehow, despite all the clues over two decades, this news came as a shock to her. And only after a long, agonizing silence—not the kind she purposefully deployed to convey disappointment, but the kind that meant she couldn’t find any words—she parted her lips, her voice trembling, her eyes searching the room. “Why, my baby?”
With complete sincerity, I asked, “Why what?”
“Why would you…choose this?”
I sat with that question for some time and thought hard on my answer, on the most honest truth I could find. And when I tilted my chin back up, I looked to her crutches leaned against the bed behind her, and for the second time in my life, I really saw them. I looked at the braces on her thin, withered legs. I saw them clearly too, and differently now. Then I looked into her eyes, mine still shedding tears, hers now threatening to, and I acknowledged the thing we’d silently agreed never to acknowledge: “Why did you choose those?”
It took the air right out of her. Her tears fell fast and hard as she gazed down at her shrunken legs, as if she too were seeing them for what they were for the first time in decades.
It was the only time we ever openly acknowledged that she was “disabled,” that she needed those crutches to survive. It was the first and last time we ever acknowledged how different she looked. How different she was. In that moment, all the pretending had vanished. For both of us. It was indescribably painful. She had no answer. She knew full well that those crutches weren’t a choice. Her only choice had been to survive them. And when she looked at me again, I didn’t have to tell her this wasn’t a choice for me either.
Without words, I knew what she was thinking now. She was blaming herself: How could I have done this to my precious boy? What did I do wrong? And, How can I ever fix this terrible problem?
I don’t remember her leaving my room that night. I think maybe the sun came up and we were still sitting there in silence. Sometimes feelings can be so raw and painful that our brains mercifully stop recording—that sweet mercy called forgetting.
What I do know is that we didn’t fix anything on that trip.
The next morning, I returned to the airport in Jeff’s truck, my mom sitting silently behind us. And there was a different brand of goodbye tears. It wasn’t just the sadness of separation. Our most precious relationship in the world was teetering on the brink. Our tears held our mutual fear that we were losing each other to our increasingly different and divided corners of America.
And as I walked into the terminal alone, I remember the dawning realization that for the first time ever, us boys hadn’t gathered around our little mom on her bed on Christmas night. That Christmas, for the first time ever, no one had said the words: “This was the best Christmas ever.”
CHAPTER 16
Hungry Jackals
I
I’ve often felt alone in my life. Sometimes it’s been a real relief from my social anxiety and shyness. But the loneliness of 1996 was different. Since college began, I’d lived to hear my mom smiling over the phone when I had any news that bordered on “good.” And despite the growing chasm between us, I worked hard to impress my big brother, Marcus, and even harder to inspire my little brother, Todd. Hearing Todd’s new dream of heading to college after high school put real pride in my heart. But after that Christmas, my little family of survivors, so used to being pressed together into life rafts, suddenly felt a million miles away.
By my second morning back, Ryan could tell that my bleak postholiday mood wasn’t just jet lag. “Who pissed in your Cheerios?”
“Sugar Smacks,” I corrected. “I’m thinking.” I wanted him to leave me be.
“About?”
“I have a lot more to think about nowadays.”
“Oh. Fancy UCLA thoughts. I hope I didn’t just murder some earth-shattering idea.” He was openly mocking me now.
“Go fuck yourself.”
“Unlike you, I prefer to have others do that for me.” Silence. He knew I was still a gay virgin. Still waiting for love to open that door. So that stung. He didn’t relent. “Well, would you please give me a heads-up if there’s gonna be another pallet of grass in our living room tonight?”
Again, he was mocking me. Just before Christmas, I’d filled our living room with rolls of grass to film an experimental short featuring a white lily being battered to death by wind and rain, with a man’s deep breathing in the background. Color me artsy. Or call it what it was: I was listening to and reading far too much Morrissey and Dorothy Parker and had convinced myself that this floral horror film was an act of revolution. A month ago it had felt that way. Now I was in no mood to defend it, so I gave Ryan a quiet “There won’t be.”
He abandoned our usual banter. “I don’t like seeing you like this.”
With that warmth, I considered confessing, but I thought better of it and offered only a lie of omission. “I just miss my family…back home.”
Ryan said nothing. He understood that missing one’s mom was enough to push a mama’s boy like me into the blues. Then and there, he likely began plotting how to remedy the situation, with no clue that my mom was now busy blaming herself for a long list of things that had turned me gay, including letting me climb onto Ryan’s motorcycle a half decade earlier.
In the meantime, little struggles that I’d never minded began taking on water. Like parking my three-cylinder Geo Metro at UCLA. Others may have called it orange thanks to its severely oxidized paint, but I will maintain it was red to protect its honor. Problem was, the car’s starter rarely worked. But it was a stick shift, and in one of our increasingly rare conversations, Marcus had taught me that if I had a friend to help push, I could get the car up to a healthy clip, pop the clutch into first gear, and the engine would roar to life. The challenge at UCLA was that I had no one to help. Suddenly sensitive to such solitude, this took on undue emotional weight as I hunted for hilly spots in Bel Air near UCLA’s film school, a neighborhood with slopes just steep enough to do the job. There I would park, give the car a loving pat on the roof, wipe off the orange oxidation it kissed back with, and pray not to get a ticket in the two-hour-only zone.
Walking into the film school’s halls after Christmas break, I didn’t want any of my artsy classmates to know that my mom hadn’t leaped from judgment to acceptance overnight when she’d learned I was gay—that she hadn’t hugged me tight and professed her unconditional motherly love for her queer son. I didn’t want anyone here to know that I suddenly felt like the black sheep in a family that had always been my strength.
My new film school friends didn’t have a clue. We called ourselves the 4-Ds: Dustin, David, Deena, and Danny. David was Latino, gay, and certain that Annette Funicello was a goddess. Deena was a tough gal who favored overalls, and Danny was a straight guy from California with nerd glasses and a serious interest in special effects. We were misfits among misfits. We signed up for all of our classes as a pack. And on that first day back from Christmas break, my dear Geo parked, my face red from the uphill walk to campus, I put on a fake enough smile that the 4-Ds didn’t wonder if anything was the matter, and together we unwittingly walked into the crap-storm that would tempor
arily distract me from my familial woes and help define all of my future productions to date.
II
A young professor had recently been hired to teach one of two undergrad film editing classes. It was already clear that digital editing was the way the wind was blowing, and the school owned a handful of machines that could do it. But the rumors proved true that this new professor preferred using old-fashioned razors and tape to splice together actual celluloid. We walked in knowing we were about to spend an entire quarter (and a good bit of money most of us didn’t have) taking a class focused on a skill that had no value in the film world anymore. Like teaching actual typesetting to modern graphic designers, it was nostalgic and a bit hipster before that was a thing, but the reality was that we needed jobs out of school, and this wasn’t going to help. So I must admit, the 4-Ds may not have gone into this class with the most positive attitudes.
Soon it became clear that this new professor wasn’t terrifically concerned about our attitudes, or much of anything beyond her own struggling films. She didn’t lecture or instruct; she simply shot a short film from a script of her making and gave us all the exact same footage to edit our own versions. She was rarely around to review what we cut on the old Steenbeck editing machines, so we sliced up film (and sometimes our own fingers) and physically taped our little stories together. It may not have been terrifically practical, but it was crafty and creative, and we didn’t end up hating it half as much as we’d thought we would.
I didn’t especially care what grades I got at UCLA, because I knew I wasn’t heading to grad school, and I was rather certain that Hollywood studio execs wouldn’t be checking our GPAs before green-lighting our films one day. However, others in our class—many of whom had never seen a B in their lives—cared deeply, and for good reason: most needed top grades to win scholarships to pay for their master’s degree dreams. So weeks later, when our films were turned in and grades were posted, panic swept the film department. This brand-new professor, who had paid us so little attention, had handed down Bs, Cs, and if memory serves, even worse.
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