by Rob Spillman
“Batting from both sides . . . AC/DC,” Mark followed.
“What do you mean?” I asked, clueless.
Mark looked at me to see if I really meant it, then flatly stated, “Your dad’s gay.”
Imagine a long, awkward silence. Multiply “long” by a thousand. Multiply “awkward” by ten thousand. I was a cartoon cat hanging off the edge of a cliff, my legs pinwheeling. I wondered how long I could hang out there before I plunged into the abyss.
“Oh. Yeah, sure,” I eventually said, casually, like, Of course my dad is gay. It’s obvious that my dad is queer. How could anyone not know that my father is a homo, especially his own son?
I couldn’t look at Mark. I wanted to say something, but I had no words.
To myself, I said, My father is gay, testing the words out. I’d known this at some level, but before now the thought had never made it to the clear surface. Is that why my mother left? Has he always been gay? Was he gay when he married her? Does this mean that I’m gay? Am I going to want to make out with Mark?
“You okay with this?” Mark asked, and I nodded. Mark nodded. We went back to watching the sunset and were joined by the first wave of sunset partiers, though Mark kept glancing at me.
Surrounded by gay people all of my life, how could I not know? It wasn’t like my father was hiding Peter. They were sleeping in the same bedroom. And when I’d visited my father the previous Christmas, Peter was always around. The first morning, when I woke on the sofa to the sounds of my father’s making coffee, he motioned for me to be quiet, and I looked over into the bedroom and saw why—Peter was asleep on the futon. I dressed quietly and we slipped out to have breakfast at a diner before my father started work.
“Just, you know,” my father had said over his eggs, “keep this quiet.”
“Sure, Dad, but why?” I’d wondered what the big deal was.
“People might get the wrong impression,” my father said, not meeting my eyes. I nodded, but didn’t understand what this “wrong impression” might be. It never crossed my mind that he was going out with Peter, who was fifteen or twenty years younger than my father, closer to my age than his. Plus, faculty didn’t sleep with students, right?
But now that he was out of school, I guess it was okay. Was I okay? The shock was fading, and anger and self-loathing were taking over. I wanted to jump off the porch. How could I have been so blind? And why did this have to happen now? “Dad and sex” was the last thing I wanted to be thinking about. I had much bigger worries: my own sexuality—or, more accurately, my lack of sexuality. I was surrounded by beautiful young women, high school and college musicians from all over the world, none of whom acknowledged me the way I wanted to be acknowledged. Sexually, that is.
“Betty at four o’clock,” I said, nodding toward the townie on roller skates, her button-up shirt tied Dallas Cowboys–style, showing just the right amount of cleavage.
Mark gave me a thumbs-up.
32
“Words can be very powerful. I find them very difficult.”
—Bryan Ferry
Soundtrack: Bryan Ferry, “The ‘In’ Crowd,” 1974
ON OUR TENTH DAY in Berlin, Elissa and I got up early and washed as best we could in our cold-water flat, which meant splashing our faces in freezing water in the ancient sink down the hall. We never saw other people in the building, though we could hear muffled voices somewhere behind the walls. It had been another late night at the CV. Word had gotten out that we’d taken an apartment in the neighborhood and were staying indefinitely. Conversations were still earnest, but were now more measured and less fraught, there being an expectation that they would continue the next day. We no longer had to go through the strange ritual of people telling us about their trips to old concentration camps and their feelings of collective guilt, which almost all of the young East Germans felt compelled to lay on us. We also weren’t getting the suspicious looks from those who thought we might be speculators, scoping out future real estate. I, too, was more comfortable, trying less hard, letting the conversations come to me. Hank had also become emboldened. He went out on his own, walking off to sketch at the Wall at dawn. And on this morning he was already long gone.
Downstairs, we peered through the arches of our courtyard, making sure there were no lingering skinheads, then hopped in Dusty. Our tires crunched over broken glass for two blocks and then we were on the wide-open Prenzlauer Allee, which shot us out of our tightly packed neighborhood and across Alexanderplatz, as massive and soulless as I remembered it, and past the Wall, where tourists were chipping away for souvenirs, hucksters renting out chisels and hammers and selling prime chunks to those too lazy to chisel their own history. We were less than two miles from our apartment, but had yet to see a single one of these tourists in our neighborhood.
Across the Spree River, the avenue broadened, turned into Unter Den Linden, passed Checkpoint Charlie, and led to the Brandenburg Gate, isolated and surrounded by barbed wire during the Cold War, now awash with tourists gawking up at Victory driving her chariot. We skirted the massive city gate, passed the Reichstag and went into the Tiergarten, Dusty shabby next to all of the shiny new West German cars. We made our way from the city center to the edge of the Grunewald park, skirting past the Schlachtensee, where I remembered long walks by the water with my father. I found Schopenhauerstrasse and then 31 Kronprinzessenweg, Barry McDaniel’s big, blocky house hidden behind a wall of bushes and trees. Miraculously, I had been able to connect with my father’s old musical partner from a pay phone in the West and he had insisted that we come to his house for tea. “I must meet your new bride,” he said. Though only thirty minutes from our flat, we could’ve been in suburban Kansas, where Barry was originally from. He appeared as I remembered him from almost twenty years before—the same square seventies glasses, a blue turtleneck.
“Robby, I can’t believe it is you, yes?” Barry said, his Midwestern English heavily inflected from thirty years of living in Berlin. “And with your lovely wife,” he said, turning to Elissa and shaking her hand. “When he was a boy, he used to spend hours in my garden,” Barry said, and waved us through the elegant, plush living room and out into the backyard, where the tiers of flowers triggered a memory of playing with his long-haired collie.
“Amazing,” Elissa said, taking in the hundreds of different flowering plants.
“I collect varieties of fuchsia.”
“Remarkable,” Elissa said as Barry began guiding her to the far end of the garden, weaving along a path decorated by basket after basket of red and purple flowering plants whose vines spilled over the sides of the pots, their frilly, complicated blooms varying in size from plant to plant.
Over tea in the garden’s pagoda, Barry told us that Albert Speer had built the house in 1935 and had lived there until 1941 and afterward it sat idle and in legal limbo until Barry was able to buy it for “a song” in 1962. It seemed that no German wanted to live in the former house of the Nazi’s chief architect.
Barry had preceded my parents to Germany by four years, one of the first Fulbright scholars to come to the country, in 1958, also to Stuttgart, and then shortly after that to Berlin, where he had been singing in the Berlin Opera since 1961. “But it was with your father, singing lieder, that I truly made my name, truly became accepted by the Germans.”
Here was someone who had left a former life and reinvented himself, creating an existence fully integrated into his art. Sitting in the strangely familiar garden, I envied Barry, and at the same time felt shoddy, half-assed. What was I doing here? Besides being? But being what? I wanted to be Hunter S. Thompson, Ken Kesey, Jean-Luc Godard, Thurston Moore, Patti Smith, Nick Cave, James Baldwin, John Lydon, and anybody who wasn’t me. Barry had gone to Berlin to become himself, not anyone else.
My father had walked away from this, I thought. He could have had something like Barry’s expat life. I wondered if I had held him back. Barry
told us that he was winding down his opera career, retiring after doing “one more Magic Flute, my favorite.” But he would keep performing songs until he wasn’t satisfied with the quality of his voice. He asked after my father—how he liked teaching, whether he was able to perform as much as he would like. I said that I thought he was.
“And how is your mother?” Barry asked. My brain seized on hearing about one parent right after the other. I had forgotten that Barry had known my mother when my parents were still married. I wasn’t only confused, but angry to hear Barry ask about her, as he had been instrumental in her breakup with my father. I looked over to Elissa, who betrayed nothing as she sipped her tea.
My mother had revealed to Elissa, with the full knowledge that she would then tell me, that my father had never come out to her. Barry had summoned my mother to his house. At the time he was married with two children. In a veiled way, Barry told my mother that he was like my father, and that he was “making it work and so could she.” Even though Paragraph 175 of the Reich Criminal Code, instituted in 1871, criminalized homosexuality, and it was still the law of the land, my mother had no intention of “making it work.” My mother told Elissa that the entire doomed relationship suddenly made sense. They were each fulfilling family-driven expectations—to marry a suitable partner from a similar background and have children. This was their bulwark against the chaos and uncertainty of the nomadic, artistic life.
Somehow they had stayed together while my father was sublimating in the army and my mother was on the road, singing as a soloist with Fred Waring’s enormously popular big band, traveling four or five hundred miles a day by bus, singing in front of thousands of people a night. After Barry’s revelation, she could have gone back to Waring, or found opera gigs around Europe, but she now had a child. So she stayed in the marriage—that’s what good Midwestern wives did. My father also stayed. He was having brief affairs, but my mother, feeling alone and frustrated by her hamstrung career, entered into a more sustained affair. In the summer of 1969, when I was four and a half years old, my father went to Chautauqua while my mother remained behind to work in Berlin, and I stayed with her. When my father returned, I called him “John.” I don’t remember this at all. Now there was no pretending that the marriage was healthy, so my mother left. I don’t remember this, either.
Thirty years old, and the financial trapdoor opens. No steady income, a child, thousands of miles and an ocean and a culture between you and your family. But she was tough, and logical. She stuck it out in Berlin for nearly two years, scrambling to make a sustainable career for herself: singing any and all opera roles, running a large piano class, singing background vocals for German pop stars like the albino-white singer Heino and the terrifyingly Aryan duo Adam and Eve (I tracked down their records, and they are comically awful—oompah meets disco). Much later, in a rare tipsy moment, she revealed that she did some voice-over for German porn.
This patchwork life was no way to support a child. She resolved to go back to school and earn a master’s degree so that she could get a stable teaching position. This meant leaving the country—and me, temporarily. At the time I knew nothing of the sacrifice and risk her decision involved. I thought that she had simply disappeared. Of course, “simply” isn’t that simple. The shadow of her disappearance hung over me my entire childhood.
“My mother is doing quite well, thank you,” I said, and poured out more tea from the flowery Bavarian pot. I wasn’t going to give Barry anything about her. While I wanted to know more about my parents’ dissolution, I didn’t really know the person in front of me. Or if I had the guts to go there. Instead, I let sleeping dogs lie and asked him if he ever missed Kansas.
“He’s fabulous,” Elissa said as we got back into Dusty.
I nodded, and realized that she was expecting a verbal reply, but pushing even one word out felt like a great effort. “Absolutely,” I managed to say.
“You okay?”
“A little weirded out. I don’t recognize myself.”
“I can imagine. But you’re not eight, remember?”
“I’ll try to remember that.”
“You have a wife—hello.”
“Oh, I thought we were just friends.”
“Let’s go see some art, asshole,” Elissa said.
“Sorry. Good idea.”
I pointed us to the Gemäldegalerie, the home of the masters. As I drove, I tried to sort out the collision of past and present, Barry bridging both. It hit me that I was driving away from the place where my parents had ceased to be man and wife. The actual place where my mother had learned the truth about her husband. For years after Mark had finally made me see that my father was gay, I’d assumed that my mother had been so shocked when she found out that my father was a homosexual that she’d had a nervous breakdown and fled Berlin. Why else would she have left?
When I told my father that I was engaged, I asked him what he thought of marriage. We were in Boulder, where he had moved to teach after Eastman, and he was driving his solid, staid Buick Skylark, silly little AMC cars in his past. “I was a disaster as a husband,” my father said. But he didn’t pin the reason on his sexual orientation; rather, it was his single-minded dedication to his craft and career. He was determined to have a major concert or win a major competition by the time he was thirty, and to achieve this goal my parents had to move from Stuttgart to Berlin, even though my mother was under contract with the Stuttgart opera house.
And now, twenty-five, married less than two years, I looked over at my own wife, and was terrified. We could fail. Just like them. Our own bullshit getting in the way of us. As we walked toward the museum, I grabbed onto Elissa’s upper arm, both to steady myself and as a public show of affection. We were partners in crime, full partners, and this was not my parents’ city, but ours. Or at least we were going to claim it as ours. Surprised and off balance, Elissa leaned into me and steadied herself.
I wanted to fully be with Elissa, to see the paintings through her eyes. She could always unpack the hidden narratives. Titian, Dürer, Rubens, Rembrandt—I let them wash over me, but wasn’t able to settle before any of our old friends. I stepped back as Elissa lost herself in Vermeer’s Woman with a Pearl Necklace. We meandered through the rooms, not looking for anything in particular. And then we stumbled upon Caravaggio’s Amor Victorious. All of the other paintings were now static in comparison. “This is so damn alive,” I said, and Elissa moved closer to me. “I know him,” Elissa said, smiling at both me and Eros—timelessly impish, sexual, nude, mocking. At his feet, discarded, a violin, a lute, pen and paper, a square and compasses. He was mocking our material folly, mocking even art and music. They have nothing on love, Eros and Caravaggio were telling us.
Suddenly ravenous, we drove to nearby Kreuzberg, looking for a Turkish kebab stand, for a chicken pita and “roof rippers,” what we called their version of the Greek spanakopita. On Oranienstrasse we had our choice, and picked one by a small park.
“Crybaby,” Elissa said.
“Am not.”
“Yes you are, but look,” she said, pointing down a side street toward a little movie theater, its marquee displaying John Waters’s new film, Crybaby.
“Of course,” I said, laughing. We finished our perfect street food and followed the sign: 1950s-Baltimore fantasia with a rebel Johnny Depp, and all those crazy cameos—Iggy Pop, Patty Hearst, Traci Lords, Mink Stole. We filled up on expensive popcorn, but I didn’t care—I hadn’t seen Elissa laugh so deeply since we’d left New York. Stepping outside, my head was filled with images of Baltimore row houses, the native “Balmer” drawl echoing in my ears. Where the hell was I? How could I be in the here and now when my entire past was here as well? I thought of a character in another movie, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai, quoting Confucius, saying, “No matter where you go, there you are.”
In a daze, I drove us back into the East, the setting sun dissolving in the r
earview mirror. Back home, I threw on my running shoes, then ran to the Wall, scampered up and over newly toppled slabs that were like giant dominoes. The last of the sun illuminated the tips of standing barriers and reflected back off the guard tower windows. The Eastern side was still mostly graffiti-free, and there were stretches of the partition where everything looked as it had for nearly thirty years. My injured knee ached, so I slowed, then stopped in a desolate section of No-Man’s-Land. A year before I would have been shot for being there. Now I was going for a run, as if this were Baltimore or Aspen or New York. No: Be present, I demanded. But even in No-Man’s-Land, I couldn’t escape myself.
33
“I wanted to be a secret agent and an astronaut, preferably at the same time.”
—David Byrne
Soundtrack: Talking Heads, “Heaven,” 1979
“PRETTY PERFECT,” my father said, raising his cranberry juice toward Red Mountain, where the Aspens were sparkling in the direct, low sun.
“I’m going to miss it,” I said, and my father nodded. He was on break between rehearsals for the festival’s last few performances. Like the week before, and the week before that, I let the silence hang. I desperately wanted to talk to my father about sex, about him being gay, but was terrified. I thought that if he wanted to talk to me about it, he would have. Or maybe he thought that I obviously knew. I wondered if there was some kind of protocol for gay or bisexual fathers. Like, Hey, son, how do you feel about me dating other men?
In the days after Mark told me that my father was gay, I kept waiting for the world to change. But it didn’t, maybe because the concepts of “sex” and “father” didn’t have anything to do with each other, either straight or gay. The closest these came to touching was two years before when we were still living together and he was dating his old college friend Joyce, the last woman he would see before finally admitting to himself that he was gay. We would drive the four hours to Saratoga Springs, where we spent the weekend with Joyce and her daughter, passing as if we were a normal, happy nuclear family, which was pleasant for a couple of days, pretending to have an older sister who indulged me with boring board games, going to the farmers’ market, seeing an outdoor concert by Sonny and Cher (and Chastity, whom I had a crush on). But even with him spending the night in Joyce’s bedroom, the idea of Dad having sex was abstract—companionship, yes, but my imagination went no further.
