There was no catering. Friends, family, and neighbors had cooked up their specialties and brought them by. I served myself up a tall plate and leaned against a wall with my aunt Martha, who was dazed with grief. My cousin Sandy soon approached, leaned on the wall next to me, and whispered for me to go look at what was pinned up right next to the toilet.
Doing as I was told, I walked down the hallway to the bathroom and stepped inside. There, next to the toilet, was that year’s calendar. Written in by hand were every one of Josie’s siblings’, children’s, grandchildren’s, nieces’, and nephews’ birthdays. I felt compelled that I had long since lost my place in this family. And so I turned the calendar pages to June. But there I was, right there on the tenth was my name—and not Dustin, or Dustin Lance Black, but my familiar name: Lance. As far away as I may have traveled, Josie had never let me go. And I began to understand that all I had ever needed to do was to face my fears with courage and step back in, and I would have been home again.
Now I needed to visit our trusty cousin Jack.
The big Texarkana sky grew dark. Those of us left—my aunt Nan, Debbie and Sandy, Todd, and my big tough cousin Lynn—drank and spun yarn about Josie, her stories already growing into tall tales. Well soaked, Lynn laughed when he told me to go look under a toilet seat nailed to the side of James’s old work shed. I did. Under the lid was a picture of President Obama. Yup, I was back in the South. I wasn’t going to see eye to eye with everyone here, certainly not politically. So just as he’d unabashedly shown me who he was, I didn’t hesitate to say I’d recently met someone who lived a long way away. An Olympian. A diver. A Brit. And yes, “A dude…named Tom.”
The “dude” bit didn’t come as much of a shock to anyone there, but the Olympic diver thing piqued the ladies’ interest. I shared a few pictures and watched their eyes go wide. Tom didn’t wear much to work, and he was very easy on the eyes. I wasn’t too worried about Sandy or Nan’s reactions; my eye was on Lynn, who remained unreadable. Still, when questions were cautiously asked, I dared answer. Yes, I was quite taken with this Brit; yes, it was a helluva long distance; yes, he was younger than me; and yes, he had me doing some crazy things: flying across the Atlantic, taking time off from work. “I’ve never taken a vacation in my life, and I’m on number three this year. Plus I’m living in the damn gym trying to find my abs again. He’s gonna kill me. Literally. Or put me in the poorhouse. Or both!”
A loud laugh burst out of Lynn. “The good ones do!” he said. Then he pulled up pictures of the woman he’d been dating, and their last trip overseas. “She’s gonna break my damn bank!” I knew it had taken a bit of courage for him to compare his love to mine. Without saying so, just by sharing those pictures of his girl, he was blessing my love as legit, perhaps even akin to his. Lynn wasn’t about to lead any gay rights parades, but I started to think he might actually acknowledge me as family in public. The ice had cracked.
Late that night, after a few liquor runs, our tall tales growing taller and Josie nearing sainthood, I shared the story of how their mom had helped me peek out of my shell for just a moment back at a time when her care felt like life’s blood, and how knowing someone like her existed in our family had given me hope. “People think tall, loud, and tough is strong, but she showed me another way, with her patience and silence and a bowl of ice cream: that kindness is what takes real strength. I try to pay that forward, some days better than others. I owe your mom for that.” Lynn looked me over for a good long time, then he said, “Come ’ere, boy,” and led me back out to his dad’s work shed, where Obama was hiding under the toilet seat.
Inside that shed was a living, breathing shop. Long retired, James was now making picture frames out of old wood as a hobby. “Look. Dad’s marbles,” Lynn said, and he pulled a giant jar filled with marbles down off a shelf. I examined them through the glass. These weren’t just any marbles; these were treasures, the prizes from every victorious competition dating back to my mom’s childhood at least. And just as I was getting lost in the memory of my mom’s old marble stories, there was a crash! Glass hit the floor hard, followed by the thunder of a thousand bouncing marbles looking for cracks and crevices to call home.
“What the hell?!” I demanded to know, suddenly feeling six years old again, terrified that we were in a mountain of trouble with Uncle James.
“Couldn’t git ’er lid open, so I did it the old-fashioned way.” Lynn had smashed the jar on purpose! Now he was picking up all the best marbles and handing them to me one by one. “Put ’em in yer pocket.”
“I can’t take your dad’s marbles.”
“Hell you can’t. Some are probably yer mom’s he stole. Take ’em!”
“Honestly, do you have another jar?” I wanted to conceal his crime.
“Just shut the fuck up and take ’em, asshole.”
That was Texarkana code for “I like you, so don’t say no.” So I pocketed the marbles. I’d missed out on most of these sorts of country-boy shenanigans, the kind Marcus had lived for, the kind I might have taken part in if my crushes on boys hadn’t chased me inward, or if my family hadn’t run for our lives to California. Lynn was making up for my lost time—and fast.
“Come ’ere,” Lynn said again, and he led me back outside, deep into his mom’s backyard. It was very dark back there, but soon I saw the tin roof of a temporary-looking structure that had stood for a generation. When we got closer, I could see it stood on four chalk-white wooden stilts; beneath it was the rotting corpse of a 1965 GMC pickup truck. Lynn looked at it as if it were still brand-new. It reminded me of how Marcus had looked lovingly at any 1967 Camaro, no matter what sort of a rust bucket it was.
“My mom drove her. My sister too. And me. They took her away from me when I got busted with this and that. Used to drive her across the border to pick up, well, this and that, and git it back here. Now look; here she is dyin’, meltin’ into the earth.”
“What color is she? White?”
“Yellow. Errr, yellow-orange. That’s the primer you see.”
But she was all primer now, all chalky white like she’d been whitewashed for spring along with the legs of her shed and a handful of the town’s poorest homes. There was no orange or yellow left to be seen. No proof of glory days left. But Lynn could still see them in his mind. I gave him this: “She must have looked great back in the day.”
“Fast too. To git away from the cops.”
We sat there in silence for some time admiring her memory, Lynn reflecting on his war stories with her, his close calls with the cops, the car’s secret compartment to hide “this and that” as he’d cross the border.
Then, committing Southern sacrilege, I broke this sacred moment with: “Well, I need to pee.” And I really did.
“Well, hold it a fuckin’ minute.”
“What? Okay.” I tried to pretend I wasn’t bursting.
“Listen. If you promise to take good care of her, she’s yours.”
“What?” I had heard him, I just couldn’t make sense of it.
So he made himself crystal clear: “I’m gonna put her on a truck, and yer gonna take her home, as long as you promise to take care of her.”
I’d like to say I fought Lynn on his offer, told him he was too drunk to make such a mammoth decision, but holy mother of God, this was better than I could have ever imagined. This wasn’t some first act of fixing a broken thing, this was no meager bridge over a ravine, this was a billion gallons of concrete to fill the whole damn divide in for good. He was giving me the Mosley family truck. It was the greatest reconnection a country boy could have ever dreamed of.
“I promise,” I said. “And a promise is a sacred thing.”
It’s not like I had a choice in the matter. Where I’m from, if a man offers you his truck, you don’t pansy around. You treasure it; you treat it like your child. You might even consider
towing it to the best restoration shop you can find so they can get it running like a champ, paint it candy-apple red, chrome plate its rims, and give it a lacquered wood bed. And you should probably name it “Mosley” after the family you’re so thankful to know again, that you were afraid lived in too different an America but that—politics and news shows aside—was right there with you the whole damn time. And with a pocket full of marbles, that’s exactly what I did.
The thing about today’s boxes, the ones created for the world’s tribes to fit in by twenty-four-hour news channels hoping to sell us shaving cream or sleeping pills—well, those boxes must be built of rather angry blades, because instead of keeping us safe, they cut our families, our homes, and our world to pieces. And what’s silliest about such boxes is that they aren’t even real. My red-state, Southern cousin reminded me of that when he walked us back to his father’s shed, and stepped us out of all the relentless political drumming we’ve come to call “trusted,” “fair,” or “balanced” news. And guess what quickly filled the void? Curiosity. The wonder we once had as children hunting for tadpoles or bugs together, praying for first kisses from cute boys or girls, staring up at stars, wondering what eternity and God look like, or stepping into woodsheds to raid Papa’s marble jar—it’s the curiosity that came naturally before too many of us were taught to fear and loathe folks living in boxes of different kinds or colors. With curiosity’s return, it was plain to see that a far higher plane than politics lives right under our feet, or just across a road, down a river, or beyond a border. And curiosity has little interest in traveling down one-way roads—red to blue, or north to south—and even less interest in any boxed-in dead ends, because true curiosity would soon grow wearied with any one kind of America, or even two or three. Curiosity hungers for the kind of varied Americas that used to call us all to adventure.
It took years to blast away all the rust, to find the replacement parts Mosley needed, and treat her the way Marcus would have insisted upon and Lynn would approve of. It was late afternoon when I got a call from the auto shop that her last section of custom carpet had finally come in. Mosley would be finished that weekend, and I couldn’t wait to show her the road again. But the call came just days before my fortieth birthday, and I’d already booked a flight home to see my mom, who had started calling herself a dinosaur. I had a flight to London after that to see Tom, the Olympian, who’d been happy to start naming our future children on date number two (that soft-spoken Mormon must have said a helluva prayer for me). So I wouldn’t be picking up Mosley that fateful June weekend. She would have to wait a bit longer for her maiden journey.
Little did I know the world-shattering nature of the very first trip she would accompany me on, and how much sooner than expected it would occur.
CHAPTER 23
Mama’s Boy
I
I arrived in Virginia just before my fortieth birthday, and to my surprise, my mom seemed in good spirits and relatively healthy. She didn’t want to get out of bed, but that was nothing new: she had long since created a perch of pillows and surrounded herself with remote controls—for the TV, the ceiling fan, and now the electric blinds I’d bought her the Christmas before so she could let light in as she saw fit.
To many a gay man, turning forty feels like the end of something. A day to wear black, not celebrate. But since losing Marcus, I had grown more grateful for every candle on my cake. I was now one year under the highest number my big brother ever touched.
Jeff ordered us takeout from a restaurant around the corner. He and my mom got steak; I got my favorite chicken Parmesan. Caloric suicide. My mom sat up in bed and ate her dinner, Jeff sat in a big loveseat with his, and I was on the floor just below my mom, opening the gifts she had ordered online. Her big gift was a tube filled with memorabilia from the year 1974, the year I was born: a mood ring, ’70s candies, and photos from the hit shows of the day. It was a time capsule that took us all the way back to that hospital she nearly died in trying to have me. For dessert, we had two cakes because my mom had forgotten which was my favorite: Black Forest or red velvet. I honestly don’t have a favorite: I just love cake, so this was ideal. Then we topped it all off with some strawberry-cream-filled Oreos. It was the perfect way to spend my big birthday, in absolute gratitude for the woman who had risked her life to bring me into this world, and who despite every challenge had helped turn our lives into a dazzling ride thus far. Jeff told me she was a different woman when I was home. She was joyful. So was I.
But for the next two nights, she had to go to the bathroom constantly, and she couldn’t sleep. Instead of fighting it, she and I took advantage. Jeff had work, so he went down to the couch in the living room and caught some z’s. I stayed with my mom, watching TV, finishing the Oreos, helping her to the bathroom, and talking until the sun came up. In the middle of the day we would each manage an hour or two of sleep, but that was it. This trip was a window into her new life, ruled by a spinning mind that refused to let her body rest.
Now she had some sort of bladder infection that needed a doctor’s attention, but she was hesitant to see doctors lately. That was new. She had felt something pop loose in her back a few weeks earlier, something the doctors couldn’t explain, and I think she was afraid one might finally figure it out and let her know what she feared most: that the technology that had long held her together was outdated, and what was left of the metal in her bones had begun to give way. Modern doctors weren’t studying polio anymore. Why would they? Who in America still got it? And most victims besides my tough mom had met their maker long ago. There were no good specialists anymore, no new surgeries or ideas to put a polio survivor back together. “I’m a dinosaur now, Lancer.” That’s how she put it. She wouldn’t say it directly, but we both knew what had happened to the dinosaurs. I pushed that thought out of my mind.
But after three sleepless nights, and countless stories and Oreos, I convinced her to let me call Jeff back from work early to take her to a doctor as soon as I left the house. “You won’t miss a moment with me. When I go to London to see Tom, you’ll go to the doctor.” She agreed to that arrangement. She was pleased that I was going to see Tom. Months earlier, I’d called her from a Heathrow Airport people mover on my way back to Los Angeles, tearful that I had to leave him behind. I’d never felt so strongly about anyone, and now I had no idea what to do about this unrelenting, long-distance heartache. It felt like madness. She sounded positively giddy about it. “Oh baby, I’m so, so happy for you.”
“About what?!” I’d asked through a snotty nose. “I have so much work to do right now, Mom.”
“Enjoy this, Lancer.”
“You told me to always finish my work first so that I can enjoy everything else more.” And then she laughed! Up to this point, I’d built a lifetime of workaholism around this ideal she’d instilled in me. I’d never once taken a vacation. How dare she laugh it off so casually now?
“I was probably just trying to get you to clean your room, Lancer.” Thirty-six years later, I was shaken by this revelation, but she had deeper places to go: “I’ve been afraid to say it, but I was beginning to wonder if you’d ever find this. It makes me so happy to hear that you have. You’re in love, Lancer, and boy, do you deserve it.”
She’d met Tom at Christmas, when he’d made a special trip to D.C. to frost Christmas cookies with us. Any young man who would cross an ocean to take part in her treasured Christmas traditions was marriage material as far as she was concerned. And soon after, I caught her Google Image searching pictures of Tom in swim trunks. Like mother, like son.
So as I packed my bags back up for London, I called Jeff and asked him to come home early. He arrived about thirty minutes before I needed to catch the cab to Dulles. He seemed relieved that I had convinced my mom to finally see a doctor. His relief was mine. My mom started ordering me around like the general she was, pointing fingers and telling me to get her slacks, her socks, her
blouse, her brush. She may have been ill, but she was still a woman, and she insisted on making herself beautiful.
I presented her with black socks, and she approved. I left them draped across her legs like I always had, but this time, through her weak voice, she said, “Help me with them.”
It took a moment for me to really hear that request, but then I carefully slid the socks onto her tiny feet as she watched, wiggling her toes for show; that was the only movement she ever did regain.
Then, just as I was about to step away, she grabbed hold of my forearm. Her grip was startlingly strong. When she looked straight into my eyes with her striking blues, I could tell that she was still fully present, still absolutely sharp. Then, with the intent and passion of a lifetime of struggle, she gave me a singular order: “Fight for my life.”
Chills ran through my body. It had been decades since she’d given me such a command. I held her gaze and said, “I will.”
“Promise me. Say it.”
This felt so strange, so out of character, but I said it, I made the promise. “I will. I will fight for your life, Mom. I promise.”
She seemed to relax, to become herself again. I was deeply rattled. I told Jeff, and he said they were leaving for the hospital right away. I told him I had hours before my flight and to call me with any updates: “I can always turn around.”
I hugged and kissed my mom and told her how much I loved her. I could feel that something new and somber had begun to settle in, like she wasn’t fully there with us. I hated it, so from the doorway I shouted an over-the-top, campy-as-all-hell “It’s been a delight, Mother! We must do it all again real soon!”
Usually she would have caught my drift, laughed, and come back with an equally over-the-top, flying-in-the-face-of-tragedy send-off. Instead, she looked up and gazed at me for what felt like ages, then offered only a soft smile. And that was it. I had to go. The cab was waiting.
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