by Jake Shears
He must have been perplexed when I suddenly vanished on weekend afternoons, choosing to be inside the house reading rather than tinkering with him on projects. I wonder if my aversion to dirt and disinterest was disappointing, as it slowly dawned on him that his son wasn’t forming in his image?
When he dragged me to my first day of Little League, I blubbered and begged not to play. His face was stony as he pulled me out of the car, and kicking and crying onto the field. In the end, I knew it would hurt his pride too much if I didn’t even give it a try. Yet no one had even thought to teach me the basic rules of the game. What could anyone do but laugh at my ineptitude in the outfield? I stared at the sky and ran from the ball. It always plunked on the ground yards away from me, like a dead shooting star, its flame long extinguished.
I was obsessed with books and got the hang of reading from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s innocuous prairie tales, the Wizard of Oz books, and Raggedy Ann and Andy’s psychedelic journeys. To challenge me, my first-grade teacher gave me a copy of A Wrinkle in Time, and I attacked it with a puzzled vigor. I couldn’t figure out what the hell was going on, but I was determined to read it anyway. I wanted to read everything.
I’d lurk around the stacks in the public library for as long as my mom would let me. The peaty smell of books and their filmy, lacquered library covers incited a Pavlovian response, to browse and thumb, inspect and comb through bookshelves I’d already looked through many times. I parked myself at the desk of any librarian who was working, adamant that we would be friends.
While I was learning to read, I realized I could also tell myself more intricate stories with my toys. I was frequently on the floor of my room, flat on my stomach, surrounded by countless He-Man figures and castles. I amassed the little bulging chunks of plastic as if they were tender prophecies: steroid-fueled bodybuilders I could hold in my hands, just as I might one day hold the real thing in the flesh. The dramas that unfolded weren’t those of action cartoons but of relationships and tragedy, backstabbing and sacrifices. While I should have moved on to BB guns and remote control cars, I remained in my room talking to myself with misproportioned male dolls.
I simply loved a good story, and found I was able to write my own. My first one was written on a small spiral notepad, and it was about Garfield in a haunted house. We started getting our first creative writing assignments in school. Other kids would scrawl out a couple mangled sentences and I would keep adding on to mine, stretching the narrative into something much longer than I had even expected. I always ended up asking for extra paper.
By the time I was in second grade, I’d been placed in a separate advanced reading class taught by the school librarian. She wore long prairie skirts, had an air of sophistication, and seemed interested in what I had to say. I liked the way she didn’t talk to me like I was a little kid.
My second-grade teacher, Ms. Brown, was in her late twenties, attractive, with a bob haircut and black-framed glasses. When my parents went out of town on a business trip to Taiwan, they asked Ms. Brown to watch me for some extra cash. Our usual babysitter, Dorothy Reed, a shrill, prune-like woman with gray straw hair and polyester housecoats (my sisters hated her, and hated me for loving her), wasn’t available, and my parents thought there was nothing strange at all about asking my teacher to watch me at my own house. My sisters at that point could take care of themselves, so it was Ms. Brown’s duty to make sure I was fed, wearing my pajamas, and in bed by nine.
The household took on a more magical, conspiratorial atmosphere when Ms. Brown was there. I don’t recall telling anyone at school what was happening; it was like a strange, glamorous secret. The two whole weeks we lived together were like breaking a favorite toy to inspect its insides and see how it worked. Here was Ms. Brown making me oatmeal for breakfast. Here was Ms. Brown blow-drying her hair in a black nightshirt. It was like living with a celebrity.
At night we’d lie in our pajamas on my parents’ king-size bed in front of the TV, me on my back with a stack of pillows under my head. She’d be propped up on her elbows grading papers with a red marker while we watched Moonlighting. We had our own private life, an invisible rope that tied us together, and it filled me with a subtle superior coolness.
How strange it was to be in class, watching Ms. Brown teach us cursive, when just the night before I had snuck out of my room when I was supposed to be sleeping. Silent, I crouched on all fours and crept down the hall. Her boyfriend, Sheldon, had stopped by, with his thick dark hair, wearing a coat and tie, wielding a coconut cream pie from Marie Callender’s. “Oh, Sheldon,” she said, staring into his eyes, just before he kissed her lips. This was pretty juicy stuff.
My parents came back, scholastic life returned to normal, and I felt dejected: Ms. Brown acted like nothing had ever happened between us. I would angle for any kind of private aside when I could, desperate to see the friend with whom I had shared those nights in my house. She was liberal with her praise of my school performance, but I never again got to see that side of her. I was now on the lookout for adult women to connect with, mostly just friends’ moms in their kitchens, who were amused that I wanted to talk to them rather than play with their kid. It was a specific kind of attention that I wanted from them, an informed validation of my idiosyncratic self. It was the beginning of a pattern that would have a tremendous effect on my life.
We took a vacation the following summer. Instead of my dad piloting the family in his little Cessna airplane (which he did occasionally), we decided to drive our motor home to Canada for Expo ’86—but the behemoth broke down just north of Seattle and we never made it. Out of commission for a whole week, we unloaded the Nissan Maxima that my dad had had the foresight to stick on a trailer behind us, on the off chance we felt like cruising around in a smaller car. It was the kind of ingenuity that never escaped him. He was a man who believed in inconvenient convenience.
That was how we found San Juan Island, a tranquil, tucked-away rock in Washington State about five miles across the water from Vancouver. The island’s town, Friday Harbor, was idyllic, affordable, and charming to a family that had been living in a desert sprawl all their lives. We were smitten with the landscape of forests, beaches, and moss-covered rocks. Taking the two-hour ferry ride from the mainland, gliding over the calm ocean, was like being in a placid purgatory.
The island was isolated but active enough not to feel sleepy, especially in the summer, when the tourists on their bicycles poured out of the ferry like spilled club soda on a fancy rug: The vacationers were a temporary wet spot, but one that was cleaned up and had disappeared completely by fall. Friday Harbor had just one main street with two grocery stores, a courthouse, a diner, a movie theater, and some tacky souvenir shops. In the off season, only about three thousand people lived there. It seemed like everyone knew each other.
We found twenty acres on the water. The first time we saw the house, the beauty appeared staged: Deer leaped, pods of orcas puffed by, a lighthouse foghorn gently boomed in the distance. By the time we made it back to our repaired motor home, we had decided that we were leaving Arizona. Dad was in his late fifties and about to retire anyway.
As we packed up to move, I leafed through a pile of books in my parents’ bedroom and came across one called something like The Joy of a Gifted Child. I skimmed some of it and came to the conclusion that “gifted” meant “special.” But didn’t every parent think they had a special kid? Now I realize “gifted” meant “gay.” A code word invented to let parents down easy.
When I was seven, I had no idea I was gay, but I was effeminate, sensitive, and demanding of people’s focus. My mom knew very early, as most mothers do. She lived in a state of loving preoccupation about my sexuality, trying to figure out in secret if there was anything that could be done—and if there wasn’t, how to make things easier on me. She refrained from harping on my obsession with her Jane Fonda workout videos and my daily screenings of Nine to Five, both bastions of comfort for me. They were the opposite of my father’s stra
nge, oily world of machinery.
My mom’s personality always complemented my dad’s stoicism. She’s like a feel-good radio station that never turns off, always able to talk to anybody, anywhere, about anything. Her mastery of breezily filling complicated silences with folksy conversation has to be seen to be believed. When she laughs she often punches you on the shoulder. Her energy and devotion to my upbringing was unflagging. She packed my lunches, cleaned my room, and always made me feel loved. To this day I’ve never seen my parents get in a fight.
I was spoiled, a total mama’s boy. My rages when I didn’t get my way could be jaw-droppers to adults. A friend of the family even nicknamed me “The Little Dictator.” Since my sisters were so much older than I was, it sometimes felt as if I were an only child. And I was treated like one, getting what I wanted most of the time, whether it was toys, books, or attention. Perhaps my mom was scared I would break, so she tiptoed around me, trying to figure out how exactly to parent this “gifted” child.
She was just trying to protect me, using her instincts to cushion me from any potential pain. In line at the grocery store, I remember seeing Rock Hudson dying on the cover of the National Enquirer, a baroque photo of Liberace next to him with the words AIDS headlined in dead-end red letters. I asked my mom what AIDS meant, but she couldn’t seem to come up with a solid answer. I have a memory of Jane Pauley on the Today show introducing a segment about how some scientists thought it was possible that you could get AIDS from a toilet seat. The fear of this unknown threat was palpable, even to a child. I could read between the lines of an adult’s cursory glance or nervous pause when it was mentioned.
One day I asked my mom what gay meant. She looked at me in the rearview mirror and thankfully just said, “They’re very nice people.”
OURS WASN’T A MUSIC HOUSEHOLD exactly, at least of the recorded kind. The radio was never heard other than in the car or coming from my sisters’ bedrooms. I had my own turntable but my records were mostly kids’ stuff. Most of the music in the house emanated from live instruments. My sisters played the cello and the harp, and all three of us played the piano. Our teacher, Mr. Heck, ambled into our house on Tuesdays, wearing stale polyester in a smelly cloud of mothballs and Brylcreem. He smacked the sheet music with his retractable pointer, keeping time while we prepared for our biannual recitals. Windi and Sheryl practiced constantly, filling the house with music. I found practicing to be drudgery, having a hard time counting bars and remembering where the sharps and the flats were supposed to go, and I had to count by hand the lines in the staff. A chord just seemed like a tangle of notes, and deciphering them from each other was tedious. I didn’t want to rehash what someone else had already put on the page. I wanted to make up stuff myself.
I was a better singer than I was a piano player. I took elementary school choir from Mrs. Bell, who sported a fierce Toni Tennille hairdo. She was lovely and kind, but I was horrified when she clapped her hands in our faces in a rhythmic fashion and made us say, “Tah, tah, tee-tee tah.” We’d go sing at the convalescent home to cheer up the old folks, and to entertain myself, I’d caterwaul as if I were completely tone-deaf, or I’d attempt my third-rate Aaron Neville impersonation, which I thought was just hilarious.
It wasn’t until I discovered one particular singer that I truly started to fantasize about the possibilities of performing. I had watched a bootleg VHS of Labyrinth repeatedly and was captivated with its songs. I would fast-forward and rewind scenes so I could memorize the lyrics sung by this man in tights and a frosted Tina Turner wig. I had no idea who he was but I was beyond intrigued. My sisters informed me that his name was David Bowie, and he was apparently a big rock star.
On a subsequent trip off-island, my mother let me buy Let’s Dance on cassette. I picked it from a random selection of his albums. From then on, my Walkman headphones didn’t leave my ears. The first half of the record, full of the singles, was immediate, but it was the darker side B that I played even more. I showed off the cassette on my desk at school, never letting the artwork out of my sight, counting the hours until I could listen again.
I lay in my dark room after bedtime, the songs softly playing on a boom box. I imagined being in front of an enraptured crowd of classmates, envisioning a stage in my school gym, somehow an endless starry sky stretched above. I wore a tuxedo, crooning in front of a dapper band with a full horn section. It was the first time I thought with true conviction: I want to be onstage. Singing.
I followed Let’s Dance with Bowie’s Scary Monsters and Lodger. Most of the lyrics were opaque, some of them even frightening. But I memorized every second of those albums, listening at any opportunity, sometimes choosing the music over hanging out with my friends. I knew by instinct I could never play it for them. I had no interest in trying to convince anybody of what I already knew to be brilliant.
When I finally made it onstage my fourth-grade year, it in no way measured up to my bedroom fantasy. My mom had the wise idea that the two of us were going to take tap-dancing lessons. We signed up with Bill Ament, a local instructor who had a one-room studio across from the courthouse in town. Bill was a jolly modern-tap dancer with a very large wife named Rita who wore colorful muumuus, had frizzy hair and purple lipstick, and was always sweating profusely. She sat on the sidelines in a folding chair and ran the music, interrupting Bill every ten minutes to tell him he was doing something wrong. They made a fun team.
I was no tap-dancing prodigy, but I could certainly remember a sequence and was thankful that this wasn’t an outdoor sport. Tom was the only other boy in my class. Though we both wore glasses, he had a permanently runny nose and was unable to keep proper time. I couldn’t help but feel superior. But superiority was all relative. For me, as the new kid in town, it wasn’t a great look to be publicly learning dances to “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” and “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top.”
We worked through the spring for the show, which we were to perform at the community theater—which was actually a one-room movie house with the screen taken out and transformed into a small stage. The show was called Dance Happy! and it would star all the students from Bill Ament’s classes, including my mom. The number I was in was set to the theme song from the John Waters film Hairspray. At the end, Tom and I were to enter from the sides of the stage, clad in blue spandex tights, hopping on one foot and pretending to play a saxophone solo around a woman dressed up as a giant can of Aqua Net. My mother’s number was to be even more mortifying. It would consist of her and a troupe of middle-age ladies dressed as clowns, dancing around to circus music. They would enter through the audience, throwing confetti all over everyone, Rip Taylor style.
On the day of the show, my mother and I were getting ready and she reminded me to go feed Oreo, the rabbit my sister Windi had unloaded on me about six months before. Oreo’s large cage was at the end of a short trail through some trees, up the hill from our house. I made sure feeding the rabbit was the last thing I did before leaving for the show, so before going out to his cage, I spiked my hair with goopy gel and donned my tights, saving the tap shoes for the performance. (I didn’t want to scuff them up on the concrete.)
I knew something was wrong as soon as I skipped halfway up the hill and approached Oreo’s little pen. The air was too still. I slowed my pace and rounded the corner, not prepared for the full reveal of fresh violence. Clyde, our springer spaniel, had somehow gotten inside the cage and was sitting at attention, growling at me. Blood dripped off his wet jaws. Oreo’s two little hind legs were splayed perfectly in the air, as if they were in the middle of doing a festive high kick.
I screamed like a slowly deflating balloon, whirled around with my palms in the air, and ran down the hill, blind with panic, until I tripped on a rock that sent me flying. I landed hard, skinning my chin. My mother, in her pancake clown makeup, tried to console me as I picked the gravel from my palms and cried.
I couldn’t possibly perform, I thought. How could I grace the stage in such extreme mourning? �
��You’ll just have to wait until after the show to think about it,” my mother said as she wiped my face with a warm towel. “Let’s just get in the car, okay?” Doing my best to pull it together during the six-mile ride to town, I was unsure if I could face an audience. What if I cried onstage? I was going to have to occupy two places in my head at once, straddling a line between spandex hair fantasy and fresh rabbit guts.
I ended up doing the plastic-saxophone hop with red eyes, my face swollen from all the tears. But the number turned out all right. In any case, Tom and I were basically forgotten by the audience as soon as they got a load of the scary mom-clowns. When they stormed the crowd, showering them in confetti, my mom got a big chunk of it stuck between two molars. Backstage, all the other clown ladies surrounded her with a flashlight, her head tilted back and her jaws open as far as they could go in a frozen clown scream. They became one single greasepaint-encrusted beast as they clucked and prodded with tweezers, finally dislodging the glimmering piece in triumph.
When we returned home, I allowed myself the space to feel sadness for my eaten pet. But I also felt accomplishment for having gone out onstage anyway, powering through, making people think that I was “dancing happy.” The audience was there to be entertained. No one cared that I was having a bad day, and it was my job to not let them see it. All they saw was a really rotten number, and that was just fine.
It wasn’t just pet-on-pet violence responsible for introducing me to the natural world; I now had my own interactive ocean exhibit in the front yard. At sunset in the summer, I’d clamber onto the small peninsula of giant bleached driftwood that had gathered and watch the whales swim by. It was surreal when the orcas breached, shooting out of the water and slapping themselves on their sides, sometimes so close it would startle me. I poked around the tide pools alone, both fascinated and revolted by the lesion-like anemones and mussels, freaky creatures unearthed with the receding tide. I’d always had an irrational fear of animals without backbones. Unfortunately for me, the island was also home to large banana slugs that could grow to be almost a foot long.
