by Tara Clancy
Even though we would be missing Mark for a long time to come, that his business would never really recover, that his depression sounded the death knell for the moon-and-stars talks, nothing could take away from the fact that those earlier talks had forever changed the way my friends and I all thought of ourselves. Those conversations, alone, had made us realize that there was more to us than we knew. And for some, not all, but definitely for me, they also made you think: Well, shit, if, a) I like talking about all these big things, and, b) The universe is infinite, then, c) There’s gotta be more job options than being a cop.
I’m sure that, without the moon-and-stars talks, I wouldn’t have read that copy of King Lear. I wouldn’t have taken AP English. I wouldn’t have told my dad that the police academy wasn’t right for me, and I wouldn’t have applied for college, instead, to study Shakespeare.
Getting from my house on 253rd Street in Queens to my college in Manhattan took a forty-three-block bus ride, followed by a seventeen-stop subway ride. Getting there and not coming back—i.e., moving to “the City,” for a Queens kid—took the herculean, cyclonic efforts of my mom, dad, grandparents, aunts, and uncles, plus anyone who ever knew them. All together, fueled purely by love and armed only with landlines, they jerry-rigged the most Rube Goldbergian web of favors and hookups, Riccobono-rendezvous-style.
Mom started the phone chain—she rang up her brother, Uncle Sal, who called a guy who used to work with my grandpa at MetLife, who called a girl who worked for the MetLife–owned Stuyvesant Town apartments (which was then a middle-income housing complex, dubbed by some “the White Projects”), who couldn’t get me a place straightaway but nudged my name to the top of the waiting list. Her best guess was that it would take six months to a year, so my uncle then reached out to his ex-girlfriend’s sister, who let me illegally sublet her apartment in the meantime.
For his part, Dad called his friend Anthony “Bootsy” Zito, who ran his family’s Italian bakery on the West Side and was going to open a pizza joint on the East Side. Dad got him to agree to hire me once he did, but that wouldn’t happen until September or October, so again, Mom called Uncle Sal, who called his current girlfriend, Patty, who called her high school friend, Ang, who could get me occasional catering gigs at the company she’d worked for starting in July. But I needed a bit of service-industry experience before I could land either job, since prior to this I had only had summer jobs as a receptionist at a podiatrist’s office and with Dad at a frozen-bread distributor. So Dad called his buddy who ran Connolly Station, an Irish pub and restaurant, who hired me to bus tables starting the day after high school ended in June.
My Aunt Lucille, whom Grandma now lived with in Westport, Connecticut, and who knew something of the efforts it took to climb the ladder (one summer in high school she got a receptionist job on Wall Street and, without ever having gone to college, worked her way up to being a top trader) bought me a proper leather shoulder bag from a shop on Bleecker Street.
And of course Grandma herself was there to ease me into my new life in the city. Her contribution was to give me an exorbitant amount of money, every month, to clip her toenails.
“Take a fifty! That’s what they charge at the place anyhow!”
“No they don’t! It’s fifteen, at the most—”
“What do you know from these fancy-ass salons they got around here? Take fifty, I said! Now she’s a college girl she wants to talk back, minchia!”
—
Financial aid paid for 75 percent of my tuition at The New School, and my parents each chipped in to cover what remained. And, come the start of college at the end of August, with my catering job and my cheap Stuy Town apartment, I was able to cover my rent and living expenses, so long as I got a roommate—Kristy. She was going to Hunter College, plus working twice the hours that I was because she had to foot all her bills on her own. (Because her dad hadn’t paid taxes in ten years, she, who deserved it most, couldn’t get a dime of financial aid.)
—
Though I wasn’t more than fifteen miles away from where I’d grown up, college felt otherworldly. Esther also wound up at The New School, and along with a handful of other kids from Planet Outer-Borough, we spent the first few weeks huddled up in the cafeteria in shock.
“Yo, it’s like these kids have read every book ever written!”
“For real, I didn’t think my high school was that bad, but, damn, I feel like I don’t know shit!”
My first hard lesson came in our required freshman-level creative writing class: the teacher put an apple on her desk and said, “Okay, I know this will seem silly to some, but bear with me, I’m going somewhere with this—I want us to go around the room, and I want everyone to give an adjective to describe the apple.” I started to sweat, and when it got close to being my turn, I bolted for the bathroom. I had heard the word adjective before, and, based on everyone’s replies—crimson, crisp, globular—I thought I knew what it meant, but I wasn’t 100 percent sure, and I was mortified.
The next week, after class, the teacher pulled me aside to give back my first paper. She had a plastic grocery bag in her hand, and she handed that to me, too. “Tara, you have a lot of potential, but your grammar is…well…not where it needs to be. This will help.”
Inside the bag was an elementary-school grammar workbook. I about cried the first time I sat down to do those exercises, an eighteen-year-old, in my own apartment, paying my own bills, No. 2 pencil in hand, as if I were back in the third grade. The next semester I changed my major from Literature to Education—a worthy pursuit, no doubt, but, for me, a consolation inspired by my crushed self-esteem.
—
As it turned out, my bruised ego was quickly put in check by much graver matters—a week after I was given that grammar book, I got a call from Alli’s little sister, hysterical because Alli had dropped off the baby at her parents’ house for what was supposed to be three hours of babysitting and hadn’t come back for three days.
When I had moved into the city for college, Alli had moved in with a new boyfriend in Brooklyn. When she first called me, the situation seemed great.
“Tara, I finally got myself a good man! He took me and the baby to Chuck E. Cheese, bought us both sneakers, then he got me earrings and that North Face I wanted; he’s a straight-up angel! He even pays for a babysitter, so we can go clubbing at night!”
But by the time I went for a visit, a few weeks after that call, the picture was far from rosy: the only furniture in the apartment were ripped-out bucket car seats and plastic milk crates, and, judging by the smell, it wasn’t chicken soup they were cooking on the stove. The baby wasn’t there—Alli had been leaving her with her parents for longer and longer stretches of time, until that one day when she just disappeared.
I was the only person who had been to Alli and her boyfriend’s apartment, so her sister asked me to go try to find her. As soon as I hung up, I jetted straight out to Brooklyn. When I got there, Alli’s apartment door was wide open, and the place was cleared out. She called me two days later. “Tell my parents I’m okay, but I can’t be a mom right now. I just can’t. I love her so much, but I’m fucked up.” Click.
For the next six months she’d call her parents or me every few weeks so that we knew she was alive, but it would be another year before she and her boyfriend cleaned up their act and she got her daughter back.
—
Even if my bad grammar and badass friends set me apart from the other kids, I still had some of the more typical college experiences that year. I overheard a song in an East Village café and wound up singing it for the salesman in Tower Records to see if he could tell me what it was—after a full minute of my doing a New York–accented impression of Tom Waits, he was cracking up, but he got it. “Step Right Up.” That weekend, in the time it took me to ride the A train from the city to Broad Channel for my cousin Deanna’s bridal shower at the VFW, I had listened to the whole Small Change album.
By my sophomore year I was using the words hegemony and p
atriarchal in sentences (luckily, that shit was short-lived). And then, right before Christmas 1999, I did the thing all girls like me, no matter where they’re from, do in college: a girl.
Suzanne was a fine-arts student at Parsons School of Design. She had grown up ten minutes away from me, just across the city border, in the kind of Long Island suburban neighborhood that all my friends’ parents had been shooting for when they left Brooklyn—the fact that they ended up in Queens was a sort of baby step in the right direction (a kind of White Flight with a layover). Likewise, Suzanne was my baby step into the world of East Village lesbianism—her parents had grown up in Queens, and we were both Italian/Irish mutts with pretty much the same accent, but she already owned a couple of Ani DiFranco albums.
She showed up to our first date on roller skates, wearing very Long Island girl–style gold lamé pants, but with a very East Village–style white vest made of feathers—she looked like a hooker and a chicken collided. I fell for her right away. And I nicknamed her “Birdie.”
On our second date she introduced me to Fellini, and on our third, she decided my first Woody Allen film should be Hannah and Her Sisters. After that we spent every night together, and every morning before school we’d dance to Al Green’s “Tired of Being Alone.” I had slept with boys in high school and had loved one of them, but my love for Suzanne was unlike anything I had felt before. When she agreed to move in with me for our junior year, I knew it was time to come out to my parents.
Seeing as how Mom had been trying to tell me I was gay for almost a decade, coming out to her at nineteen was a lot more like admitting defeat than anything else. Her response was, “You see, dolly?!” Done. (If optimists had an extreme fundamentalist wing, my mother would be its leader. There she’d be in their propaganda videos, walking on clouds with a handful of daisies humming “Good Day Sunshine.” Incredible.)
—
Telling Dad, it turned out, would be a lot harder than I expected.
At the same time that I had moved to Manhattan, my dad had gotten a new accounting job that required him moving to Atlanta, Georgia. When I turned nineteen and started dating Birdie, he was forty-nine and officially a white-collar guy living in the suburbs—albeit one who still carried two guns at all times and kept a picture of the Pope hung around the rearview mirror of his truck.
Despite his being a former cop, wannabe priest, staunch Catholic, Republican, when I called to tell him I was gay, I expected it to be fine, because, after all these years, he was still very good friends with several of the gay regulars from Gregory’s. I guessed wrong. The second that sentence came out of my mouth—“Dad, I have a girlfriend”—he flipped out and insisted I fly to Atlanta to talk in person, “Now!” Click.
—
Three days later we got into his truck and drove, his only words being, “We’re going to a hotel.” Two hours passed in total silence, he and I practically motionless, the Pope swinging left and right.
Another hour, and we were on a one-lane road in the middle of the Blue Ridge Mountains. “Hotel, my ass!” I started to think. But just as I was imagining how he’d shoot me—or, worse, throw me into some “pray-the-gay-away” Jesus camp—a billboard appeared.
A woman not unlike the St. Pauli girl, with blond braids and huge, ahem, beer steins, smiled down at us. Next to her, in giant German Gothic lettering, it said: WELCOME TO HELEN, GEORGIA! A RE-CREATED ALPINE VILLAGE.
Somehow we had passed through an invisible transdimensional portal. Having been the lone car on a deeply wooded, curvy road, we were suddenly in a long line of minivans rolling through this Disneyland-bad, fake Bavarian town. Whole families wearing matching green hats adorned with feathers crammed the sidewalks. Three elderly guys wearing lederhosen played glockenspiels outside a place called Charlemagne’s Kingdom. And there were windmills. Lots and lots of windmills.
This was it! As in, this was the place my dad chose to have the conversation of a lifetime with me.
We pulled into our parking space at the Heidi Motel—no shit—and headed right to the bar. For the first ten minutes we sat, stone-faced, drinking Johnnie Walker out of our complimentary beer steins like idiots. Then, in one fell swoop, he set out to discover if, how, and why I was gay, in a room that had not one but two cuckoo clocks.
First he blamed me. “You’re confused, and you need therapy,” he said.
“I need therapy?” I reply. “I need therapy?? There is an oompah band outside, Dad!”
He didn’t laugh. And we spent the next six hours drinking Scotch and rehashing every argument, disagreement, and previously unexamined minuscule moment of contention we’d had in my nineteen years of life. From the time Tommy O’Reilly knocked me blind to when I stuck pencil erasers into my ears and he took me to the doctor thinking I was going deaf, from the time he told me not to play in the grass in my Easter dress, so I climbed the tree instead, from how he used to hide all my presents at the O’Reillys’, since we didn’t have any closets in the boat shed, and when I woke up on Christmas morning, there would be 360 degrees of toys all around me on our pullout sofa bed, to the countless, mind-numbing hours he spent watching me try on sneakers, from my notorious asphalt head dive, all the way to how furious he was at me for getting into so much trouble in high school and for drifting away from him.
Then, if for only a few seconds, he went from blaming me to blaming himself. “I shouldn’t have bought you those G.I. Joes when you were a kid! Or the Hot Wheels.”
And then he got quiet and said to himself as much as to me, “What did I know about bringing up a girl? I just did what I could,” and, a second time, even softer, “I just did what I could.”
And then he hugged me—for as long as a pick-up-the-guns/three S’s/red-light-running/mustache-and-aviator-glasses kind of guy does. And I hugged him back—for as long as a G.I. Joe–collecting/high-tops-wearing/head-down-on-asphalt-diving/Tom Waits–listening kind of lesbian does. And with that, we broke for dinner, across the street at Heidelberg’s Schnitzelhaus.
We made small talk. It was still a bit tense, but Heidelberg’s Schnitzelhaus is a hard place to stay angry (in addition to the lederhosen-clad waiters and the oompah band soundtrack, the place was strung from end to end with garlands of triangular German flags uniquely interspersed with hanging plastic Bavarian pretzels). Dad confessed that he had asked his new coworkers where to spend the weekend with his visiting teenage daughter. Of course, he’d neglected to mention the nature of the visit and was as shocked as I was when we had arrived in Helen.
Then, somewhere in between the sauerbraten and the strudel, my dad surrendered. He looked up, raised his glass, and said, “Ah, screw it. At least now we have two things in common—whiskey and women!”
You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.
—MAE WEST
Grandma told me she was going to croak every month for two years before she actually did—I’d come to cut her toenails, and within minutes she’d scream, “I’m gonna croak, you know! Probably soon. So you’d better get ready!” Then we’d crack up.
She died on February 9, 2000, three months before my twentieth birthday. I was home alone at my apartment in Stuy Town, and Mom was home in Queens. She got the news first, of course, but she was such a wreck, both with her own grief and at the thought of having to tell me, that my cousin Danny ended up being the first to call that day, presuming I already knew.
“Yo, T, you okay?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Oh, shit…”
“What!?”
“I thought you—”
“What?!!”
“Shit!”
“Don’t—”
“I’m coming over. Shit, just wait—”
“No. No! Oh, no…oh, please. Oh—”
And then my knees gave out. And the phone went flying. And I cried longer and harder than I have ever cried before or since.
—
The last words I spoke to my grandmother were “I love you.” The
last words she spoke to me, in reply, were, “Come closer. Closer, che cazzo! I have to tell you something, a secret. In an eyeglass case, in my purse, in the back of the closet, not here, at Lucille’s, is a hundred-dollar bill I hid. Take it!” Then I kissed her cheek and walked out of the nursing home, and a week later she was gone.
Her funeral Mass was held back in Brooklyn, at Our Lady of Peace, the same church where she had had her baptism, First Communion, Confirmation, and wedding. And she was buried at Green-Wood Cemetery, alongside her parents, brothers, my grandfather, and my Great-aunt Grapefruits, her beloved sister Mary.
I took two weeks off from school, and when I returned, I was a disaster, but I muscled through the end of that semester and decided to take the following one off, but not before changing my major back to Literature and signing up for a paid internship that summer at the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey.
It wasn’t until a month after her death that I remembered what she had told me on that last visit. She had been pretty sick, and her memory had been all screwy for months, but I went to my aunt’s house to look anyway. And in that purse, way back in the closest, in an otherwise empty eyeglass case, was that fucking hundred-dollar bill—best laugh I had had for a long time.
—
Birdie and I road-tripped to New Orleans at the end of that summer after my internship. We made a stop in Virginia, where Great-uncle Jelly had since moved, to a condo crammed with birdcages, vases, and what looked like half the furniture from his old antiques shop in upstate New York. He brought out some old pictures and showed us one of a teenage Grandma, in a bikini, draped over the hood of a Model-T Ford. Then he told us a story of how, just before she got married, Grandma talked about singing in nightclubs, like her hero Mae West, and he wondered if she regretted never giving it a whirl. It was the first I’d ever heard of it.
On the drive from Virginia to Georgia to visit Dad, Birdie convinced me to try another writing class.
I balked for my first semester in junior year, but by the second I worked up the guts to sign up for Playwriting 101. The first scene I wrote was a word-for-word account of one of my last conversations with Grandma:
