Of course, he didn’t get fired. He just had to send an embarrassing retraction and make a couple of crow-eating phone calls to reign in the hoax before anyone took it seriously. It turned out that no one other than Drew believed the story anyway. As I suspected, it was too ridiculous.
We went to the taping that night as planned. I got to meet Paula Abdul. She was extremely nice. She called me “Jimmy.” It was a great time.
Did I learn my lesson? Yes. April Fool’s Day is fun!
The following year, I cast my net wider. My target: everyone.
I spent months planning my ruse. It had to be elaborate. It had to be believable. It had to be perfect.
Then, first thing on the morning of April 1, the following email hit the in-boxes of just about everybody I know.
From: Jerry Mahoney
To: [recipients]
Subject: Big News!
Date: Thu, 1 Apr 2004 05:59:12 -0800
Dear friends and family:
Drew and I have a very big announcement to make, and I hope you’ll forgive us for doing this via email, but it really was the best way to reach all of you at once. A few months ago, we began the process of adopting. We have lots of love to give, and if we can piss off a few right-wingers in the process, so much the better!
After exploring several options, we decided on an agency that specializes in Chinese adoptions. It seems fitting for us to take in an Asian kid. I mean, Drew and I both love Chinese food and Jackie Chan movies. (Ha, ha. Geez, if that’s my level of cultural sensitivity, I feel sorry for this kid already.) Maxine, our agent in America, knew of a particularly distressed orphanage in the Siyue Hunong region. We submitted our application, had it professionally translated, wrote about a thousand checks, and submitted to a very long, awkward, static-filled phone interview. Then, finally, just last night, we signed the papers. In three weeks, we’ll be flying to Shanghai (and then taking a nine-hour train ride) to pick up our daughter!
Out of respect for her heritage, we’ve decided to keep her given name, Fu-Ling. We deliberated whose last name to give her, weighing all the implications of each, how our families would feel, and, of course, whose name sounded better with Fu-Ling. And in the end we flipped a coin. Welcome Fu-Ling Tappon. (Dammit. Should’ve picked heads... Well, at least the next one will have my name.)
And since I’m sure everyone wants to see the newest member of our family, her picture is attached below.
Love,
Jerry and Drew
>——-Original Message——-
> From: Maxine Rablish
> To: Jerry
> Sent: Tue Mar 30 13:29:21 2004
> Subject: Fwd: Re: [no subject]
> hey, guys!!! well, i had to say five chinese prayers to buddha and sacrifice a goat
> (sorry, sick joke!!!!!!!!), but we finally got a picture out of that crazy woman!! i
> have to say, in all my years of doing this, you prob. scored the cuuuuuuuuutest
> baby ive ever seen!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! congrats again and again, kids!!!!! can’t wait
> til you bring her home and i can take you and little fu-ling out to lunch!!!!! xoxox
> >—- happy baby adoption china siyue wrote:
> > Date: Mon, 29 Mar 2004 18:43:57 +0100
> > Subject: Re: [no subject]
> > From: xin-xian xiang
> > To: [email protected]
> >
> >Attachment is pictur of you baby for arrange to pick up china 23 apirl. Too
> >welcome Fu-Ling too happy familiy!
Below all of this was a picture of China’s absolute most adorable baby. Thank you, Google Image search.
Then came what, in the Internet age, marks the official start of any good prank, hitting “Send.” It was out of my hands now. My baby was off on its own, out in the big world, sowing mischief far and wide, and I left Drew behind to deal with the fallout.
I was on my way to meet up with Greg in New Orleans.
The trip was his idea. In the time since our fateful phone call, so much had changed for both of us. Drew and I moved in together, and Greg embarked on the world’s fastest-ever coming-out spree. Friends, parents, baristas. Most of the Tri-State Area heard the news. What it took me ten years to do Greg accomplished in about two weeks.
Along the way, he learned not one but two of his two best friends from college were also gay. Back in school, the three of them shared a house together, but apparently, little else. We all felt the same—shocked, confused, and full of regrets from years spent in the closet. Greg thought the answer was to pack everything we missed into one wild three-day jaunt to the Sleazeville of the South. A good, old-fashioned Repressed Gay Summit.
The timing was purely coincidental, but it did keep me from giving my April Fool’s joke the follow-up attention it deserved. This was back during that brief period of several weeks in the early 2000s when cell phones could ring with a polyphonic rendition of “Baby Got Back” but not yet book your round-trip tickets to Orlando or turn your sprinklers on. Or, for that matter, email.
The only indication I had of how people were reacting was a voice mail I heard from my friend Adam during a layover.
“OHMYGOD! I’MSOHAPPYFORYOU!! OHMYGOD! SHE’SBEAUTIFUL!! I’MEXPLODINGWITHJOYANDLOVEANDHAPPINESSFORYOU! I’MSOSOOOOOOOTHRILLED!!! ICANNOTIMAGINEBETTERPARENTS! OHMYGOD! IT’SSOFUCKINGGREAT!!!!!!!”
So far, so good. I turned my phone back off for the connecting flight.
Soon, I was sitting with Greg and his two college friends in a restaurant that served gator fricassee. If you’re in a group of four gay men, it’s inevitable that you’ll compare yourselves to the ultimate group of four gay men, the gals of Sex & the City.
One of Greg’s friends repeatedly demanded, “I want to be the Miranda! Let me be Miranda! Come on, please can I be Miranda?” We said yes because, really, only a Miranda would want to be Miranda. (Although if he’d brought it up one more time, we were going to make him Stanford.)
Miranda branded Greg’s other friend the Charlotte. Charlotte had never seen the show, so Miranda had to explain his reasoning. “She’s a prude.”
“Oh. Okay.”
One thing nobody debated was that Greg was Samantha. Since his metamorphosis, he’d been slutting it up all across Manhattan. With this trip, he was expanding his conquests to below the Mason-Dixon Line. He arrived the night before the rest of us, bravely ventured into a gay bar, and hooked up with a guy he met there. It was that easy—and so was Greg. I’d spent my delayed adolescence as the shy wallflower. Greg had actually become Sweet Talk.
I was labeled the Carrie, the protagonist, the moral center. Lest I be too flattered, Miranda reminded me it was only because all the other roles were taken. Bitch.
While we were breaking the ice and eating okra, I sent a couple of phone calls through to voice mail, but when Drew called for the fifth time, I decided I should probably pick up.
He was practically hyperventilating. “Have you checked your email?” he asked.
“I’ll have to do it back at the hotel. Are people falling for the Chinese baby joke?”
“Hard,” he said. It was just as I’d hoped. My prank was weaving its delicious black magic. I let rip the delicious cackle of April Fool’s triumph.
“It’s not funny!” Drew shouted. “I’ve had people come into my office in tears! They’re so happy for us! I feel sick!”
“Wait,” I said. “I didn’t send it to anyone you work with.”
“I forwarded it to them. Now I wish I hadn’t. They want to throw us a baby shower!”
The more he told me, the more I exulted. My caring, trusting friends had taken little Fu-Ling into their hearts. It was an April Fool’s Day miracle!
Too bad my boyfriend was on the edge of a nervous breakdown. I tried to calm him. “Look, I knew I
was going to be out of town, so I composed an email to let everyone know they’d been had. If you want, you can send it on my behalf.”
“Where is it?”
I gave Drew instructions how to find the message on my desktop computer, back at our apartment.
“All I ask is that you hit ‘Send’ precisely at the stroke of midnight tonight!”
“Fuck that!” Drew replied. “I’m going home and sending it now. This has gone too far!” He slammed down the phone.
I was dying to check my email back at the hotel, but first, I had a date with the undead. Our Miranda had signed us up for a “haunted” tour, which seems to be the only kind of tour they offer in New Orleans. He wanted to save a few bucks, so he booked us with some no-frills outfit he found in a tiny ad in the back of a tourist magazine. Such a Miranda move!
Our guide ended up being a bitter grad student named Mitch. He asked us to meet him at a bar, and he arrived forty minutes late, with a backpack, three days of facial scruff, and no apparent interest in the history of his adopted hometown. He checked the four of us out, sighed, and rolled his eyes. “Do you really want to do this?” he asked.
We followed Mitch lazily around town. At times it felt like we were leading the tour because it was impossible to walk any slower than he did; thus, he was always trailing behind us. He didn’t say much, and when he did, it was something like, “This is one of the most haunted houses in the city. There was a guy who used to live here . . . I’m blanking on his name.” Most of the ghosts he told us about were vengeful former slaves, which was kind of a buzzkill. Who wants to go on a ghost tour where you root for the ghosts?
We kept having to step aside to let the more popular tour groups pass us by. Dozens of tourists would crowd around a guide decked head to toe in vampire gear, with pasty white makeup and the raspy voice of the undead. They clung to each other as he intoned chilling tales of spirits rising from the bayous. “I know that ‘vampire,’” Mitch said under his breath. “He’s from Cincinnati.”
The walking tour ended abruptly when we realized Mitch was no longer with us. We weren’t sure how long it had been since he’d disappeared, and we couldn’t tell whether he snuck away or had just fallen behind and gotten lost. But we didn’t look too hard.
We had more important plans, plans far more frightening than anything on Mitch’s tour: it was time to go to a gay bar. Greg had arranged to rendezvous with the guy he’d hooked up with the night before, and he wanted to introduce us all. “He can’t wait to meet you,” he assured us.
The way Greg talked about him, this guy sounded purely magical. He was older, confident, and dashingly handsome. He was passionate but tender, strong yet sensitive. They talked about their lives. They wondered about the future. They ordered room service. Greg had already invited the dude to visit him in New York. Was our Samantha in love?
We knew when we lost sight of Greg amid the sweaty, strobe-lit room that he’d found his man. And if there was any doubt, it was erased when we saw Greg’s tongue eagerly probing some strange guy’s esophagus. We casually strolled over and waited a long time to get their attention.
Greg’s new man was not what I’d expected. I’m not one who describes people as lithe, but it seems like the most appropriate word in this case. “Petite” would be another fitting description, as would “revolting.” He was small and twig-like, about half the weight of a third grader, with jeans so tight, he seemed like a plastic doll. He was ten years older than we were but dressed ten years younger. As we moved in for introductions, he threw his arm around Greg’s neck and plopped sideways across his lap.
He smiled and told us his name, but what I heard was, “Hi, I’m Sex.”
Sex sat with Greg all night, like a dutiful puppy—a puppy perennially searching for food inside its master’s mouth. He was the kind of guy who seemed to exist solely to shepherd guys like Greg through that potentially unpleasant “first fling” phase. I couldn’t imagine Sex outside the context of a pickup scene. Sex at the Laundromat, waiting for his clothes to dry. Sex at the dentist with cotton balls tucked into his gums. Sex at work, standing on the corner of a downtown intersection, twirling a Quizno’s sign.
Charlotte, Miranda, and I knew from the instant we met him that Sex was going to break our friend’s heart. He wasn’t interested in falling in love. He got everything he needed out of the relationship the night before. Sex would never be coming to New York.
When Sex stood up to get another Corona, Greg turned to the rest of us and smiled. “Well . . . ?” he asked.
I was as speechless as I’d been when the torso told me I was cute. I searched my brain for something nice I could say convincingly. Looks—no. Personality—no. Think, Jerry, think.
“You seem very happy with him,” I said, finally. Whew, not bad.
“I don’t like him!” Miranda snapped.
“What? Why not?”
Greg was devastated, but rather than retreat, Miranda doubled down. “He’s gross!”
Greg looked at me. “Do you think he’s gross?”
In truth, I thought “gross” was far too mild, but I couldn’t say that. “He’s . . . not someone I would be interested in myself.”
“Great, so you all think he’s disgusting. Thanks for your support!” Greg stormed off. It was the last we saw of him that night.
A little while later, I returned to the hotel, disheartened and exhausted. As I passed by the business lounge, I realized there was something inside that might cheer me up: my emails. Though I could barely keep my eyes open, I logged into my Yahoo account.
I’d never seen so many messages in my life, without half of them being for cheap V_1AGRA. The “HOLY SHIT!”s were off the charts. I even earned a few “OH MY FUCKING GOD”s, which is like a prankster’s Pulitzer. My friends’ euphoria burst from the screen with every word.
“This is the best news of the year! I have a smile a mile wide.”
“Wowee, I can’t be more excited for you guys!”
One buddy offered his sister as a translator. (She’d minored in Chinese at college.) Another said that Fu-Ling kind of looked like Drew.
It was just what I’d been hoping for—until I saw the responses that came in after Drew revealed it was a joke.
“Hope you had a fun time with this. Know you made me feel like an idiot!”
“Please tell Jerry that I fully CRIED!!! You guys are dicks.”
“I don’t think this is funny.”
“You a**hole.”
It was hard to gauge people’s tone from responses like these. I wanted to believe they reacted out of bemused appreciation, but I couldn’t be sure, especially when I saw this note from Drew: “You need to call Pam and apologize. She says she’s never talking to you again.”
I decided to call my friend Adam, the one who had gushed so delightfully on voice mail. He was a great friend and a good sport. His reaction would be fair.
I remember two quotes distinctly from that phone call. One was “I will never be happy for you again.” The other was “Everyone is going to hate you for the rest of time.”
If one thing was clear, it was that people loved the idea of Drew and me having a family. People weren’t upset because they’d been fooled. They were upset because they wanted so badly for my news to be true.
I realized I’d broken one of the golden rules of pranksters: never prank the things you dream about, because when you’re done, all you’re left with is the realization that they were just a joke. We weren’t going to China, we weren’t visiting an orphanage, and we weren’t going to have a sweet little girl falling asleep in our laps on the plane ride home. Man, that would have been incredible.
By the next morning, at least one person had forgiven me. Greg was disappointed that we didn’t give Sex a more positive review, but he rejoined our group for our airboat tour of the bayou. Soon, we were joking like we always d
id. I think we both knew the Sex thing was fleeting. What we had with each other went much deeper.
As time passed, most of my friends grew to have at least a grudging appreciation for my prank. I even got a few delayed compliments on pulling it off. Everyone else just stopped bringing it up.
Then, months later, a shocking story hit the entertainment world. A former American Idol contestant, Corey Clark, was claiming that he and Paula Abdul had been having an affair, and that was the real reason he had been kicked off the show two years ago. Drew called me instantly when he saw it, speechless.
That’s the other thing about my April Fool’s jokes. They have an uncanny tendency of coming true.
4
Can We Borrow Your Lady Parts for Nine Months?
When it comes to the requisite baby-making equipment, vaginas are further down the list than you might imagine. As long as Drew and I had clean criminal records and a checkbook, we could start the process of becoming parents. What baffled and terrified us was the process itself. I had no idea what would happen between now and the day an Elmo-loving munchkin started clomping around our house in Crocs. My mind tended to wander toward the darkest possibilities.
I’d read plenty of books and feature articles about gay parenthood, but for the most part, they were propaganda, designed to convince Middle America that gay families were Just Like Everyone Else. “Doug and Waldo remember the day little Leticia Rose came back with them to their Park Slope brownstone. With a pink bow on her nearly hairless head and the tiniest pair of shoes Prada makes, she was doughy, she was perfect, she was theirs.” Yes, but was Leticia Rose born addicted to PCP? How many arms did she have, more or less? Was some sixteen-year-old girl from Idaho bawling her eyes out back at the maternity ward of New York Methodist while Doug and Waldo were parading Leticia Rose (nee Beyoncé Miracle) around Brooklyn in a Moses basket?
The stories tended to focus on the happy endings, but I had a feeling that what came before was hardly fairy-tale material. War, poverty, drugs. Adopted babies had some badass backstories. Drew and I assumed foreign adoption would be the quickest and easiest way for us to go, if not the most cheerful. We’d jet off to another continent to score some sad sack kid who’d been orphaned because Ethnicity A was determined to rid the world of Ethnicity B or because a misreading of some well-meaning religious book made a band of heavily armed basket cases think women who bared their elbows were put on Earth for sport hunting. As much as I wanted to be a dad, there was something disconcerting about the prospect of finding ourselves in the “win” column of a genocide. Would we start rooting for international strife? Bloodshed in the Congo? Time to call our travel agent!
Mommy Man Page 5
