by Dan Savage
I took some more codeine.
Things were even more complicated than simple drinking. Melissa had started having contractions earlier that week; she went to the hospital, where she almost gave birth prematurely. Tests all indicated that the baby was healthy. The ultrasound showed that he was a boy, and that his head and limbs were all normal. When Melissa was released a week later, her doctors ordered her to get bed rest. Melissa didn't have a bed to rest in, though, so the agency got her into emergency housing. But emergency housing didn't allow animals, and Melissa wouldn't be separated from her cat and dog. Melissa needed to get into an apartment, and if we went ahead with this adoption we would be expected to pay her rent as a “reasonable birth mother expense.”
A birth mother is expected to pay back these costs if she decides to keep her baby. To protect her from feeling obligated to give her baby up, and to avoid running afoul of anti-baby-selling statutes, the agency tries to keep the expenses as low as possible. If a birth mom wants to change her mind and keep the baby, she should be able to make that choice without having to worry about paying thousands of dollars back to the couple she jilted.
Laurie told Terry that if after meeting Melissa we decided to go ahead with the adoption, we would be expected to pay for an apartment. Melissa didn't want anything fancy, just a studio apartment somewhere downtown, close to where her gutter-punk friends hung out. The agency had already helped Melissa get Oregon's health care plan and her food stamps. Melissa told Laurie she'd die before she put on maternity clothes, so besides the apartment there would be no expenses.
Since Melissa was going to be on the streets until we made our decision, Laurie wanted us to come down to Portland as soon as possible and meet her. First we'd see Laurie, who would help facilitate that conversation. She'd been working with Melissa for about a month, and knew her pretty well, and when she read our home study she thought we'd be a good match for Melissa. Birth moms and adoptive couples will sometimes meet two or three times before the adoptive couple makes a decision about going ahead, but we had time for just one meeting. Melissa was seven months pregnant and living on the street. If we weren't going to adopt her baby and pay her rent, Laurie needed to find a couple who would.
We rented a car and drove to Portland the next day.
Driving down to our first “mediation,” a meeting that could potentially alter the course of both our lives forever, what did Terry and I do? Read up on fetal alcohol syndrome? Flip through Dr. Spock? Talk about the future? Of course not. We fought about music. We may have been on our way to meet the woman carrying the baby we might adopt and raise as our own, but that didn't mean we had to act like grown-ups. When Terry was packing the rental car, he grabbed fifteen of his CDs, none of which I would ever want to listen to unless I were listening to them being snapped in half. When we were too far from home to turn back and get any of mine, he popped in a CD and told me that it was my fault for not grabbing a few of my own.
By the time we got to Portland, we weren't speaking to each other.
Our first stop was the Mallory Hotel, our base camp in Portland. We checked in, dropped stuff off, and headed over to the agency. We'd never been to the agency's offices before; the seminars, meetings, and interviews we'd been to were all held elsewhere. We felt as if we'd been called to the principal's office. We would only be there for a few minutes, time enough to meet Laurie, go over what she'd told Terry on the phone, and then drive to Outside In, a drop-in center for street kids and gutter punks. And there we'd meet Melissa.
We got to the agency early, so we walked around the neighborhood. We found a Starbuck's and got some coffee for Terry and some tea for me, then spent half an hour picking over used Christian records in a church thrift shop. I once heard a recording of Anita Bryant singing “Over the Rainbow,” and I am determined to find that album one day. It is my quest. Terry and I both love resale shops and junk stores, we find them soothing. But this resale shop didn't have the usual calming effect. Not today, at least. We were so nervous we even started speaking to each other again.
Anita Bryant's “Over the Rainbow” was nowhere to be found, and it was time to head over to agency HQ. I'd spoken on the phone with people from the agency so many times that I'd developed a detailed mental picture of the place; a homey little office in a funky old building, with wainscoting, rag rugs, gingham curtains, and a room full of kids waiting to be picked up by adoptive couples.
The agency shared the second floor of a creepy, two-story glazed brown brick office building with a travel agency. On the wall opposite the single elevator in the lobby was an enormous oil painting of a fishing village at sunset, rendered in inch-thick blobs of orange and brown and dark red paint. The painting was easily three feet high and fourteen feet long. It was absolutely hideous, and if it had been for sale I would have bought it. A chrome light fixture hung in the lobby, with two dozen clearglass lightbulbs on chrome spikes radiating from a large center ball. The building was about as welcoming as the Nixon-vintage county courthouse.
We took a seat on one of two couches in the agency's cramped waiting area. There was a coffee table, some toys, and a wall of smiling children, kids alone or with their adoptive parents. They seemed to say, “We're in the kids biz. We can get you kids, lots and lots of kids.”
Laurie came out, said hello, and showed us into her office. Like everyone at the agency, she was extremely nice in that professional way, and she was dressed like a mom, in a loose denim skirt and white turtleneck. On her desk were pictures of her own kid, a little boy, and as we sat talking I wondered if it was her own bio-kid or her own adopted kid, but I didn't think it would be polite to ask. We sat down on a couch in her office, and she sat at her desk. She turned to us, made an empath face—lips pursed, eyebrows up, head tilted to one side, a polished look of engaged and upbeat concern—and asked us if we had any questions.
We did.
What was Melissa like? Where was she from? Who was the birth father? What should we expect at this first meeting? Was she being honest about how much drinking she'd done, and about having stopped?
Melissa was a nice-looking young woman, Laurie told us, but she was homeless. “She doesn't have access to a shower or a bath, so she smells a little. And you have to look through the dirt to see it, but she's a pretty young woman.” Melissa was from a small town outside Portland, and she was committed to placing her child for adoption. A friend of Melissa's had had her baby taken away by the state. The kid was in foster care, and Melissa's friend was probably going to be stripped of her parental rights. She wouldn't be able to see her kid after that happened, which was part of what was motivating Melissa to do an open adoption. Melissa knew she couldn't take care of her kid, but she wanted to be a part of his life.
The birth father was not in the picture: he was another homeless street punk, and he didn't know Melissa was pregnant. Since Melissa was living in Portland, this would be an Oregon adoption.
“Melissa says he usually turns up in Portland or Seattle in the summer,” Laurie said, “which would be well after the baby was born.”
As for the drinking, we had no way of knowing for sure how much Melissa drank, and there was no way of knowing for sure that she had stopped.
“But Melissa comes across as a very honest, straightforward person,” Laurie said, “and I really think she's telling the truth. She's been very reliable and responsible about coming to her counseling appointments, and I don't think she would be so reliable if she were drinking on the streets.”
Laurie also reassured us that, while we were Melissa's third choice, we would have been her first choice had we been in the pool sooner.
Why did she pick us?
“Melissa said you looked like real people, like people she might know,” said Laurie. “All the other couples looked phony to her. She really liked your home study, and really wanted to meet you guys.”
* * *
There were two issues Laurie felt we should think about while making our decision. First
, the drinking and the drugs; second, Melissa's lifestyle. Melissa planned on going back to the streets after she had the baby, and that would create special “challenges” for us in our relationship with our child's birth mom. Laurie was a little concerned that Melissa was different from the birth moms we'd met at the seminar, so she wanted us to brace ourselves. We didn't tell Laurie that, as far as we were concerned, the less Melissa was like those birth moms the better. Laurie kept calling Melissa homeless, but we knew what Melissa was: she was a gutter punk, one of those kids who travel around the country looking like punks and smelling like hell, sleeping on downtown streets and driving business owners crazy. Seattle's full of them in the summer.
Seattle's too cold and wet for anyone other than the truly homeless to live on the streets year-round; as soon as it gets cold, the gutter punks who come up here in the summer head south, to Arizona, southern California, and Mexico. A few damp gutter punks can be found in Seattle in the winter, but it's the summer when they return in force, tanned, rested, and ready to hit us up for change. Terry works at one end of Broadway, Seattle's hip/queer shopping district, and I work at the other end. Walking from Terry's bookstore to my office between May and October means wading through clumps of gutter punks. Two or three stand or sit at almost every corner, with huge backpacks, bedrolls, and punked-up hair. They wear sweatshirts, baggy army pants, boots, and white T-shirts. From sleeping on grass, in alleys, and under overpasses, gutter punks tend to take on a uniform greenishgray-grime color. Some travel with dogs. Most of the punks are pretty harmless, but a run-in with one suffering from some major psychological damage or on too much acid can ruin your whole day.
In addition to rejecting mainstream American values, like cars, homes, and jobs, gutter punks also reject mainstream personal hygiene, like toothbrushes, soap, and shampoo. When you're living on the streets and begging for change, you're not going to pour what money you do come by into hair-care products and dental floss, or pump quarters into washing machines at Laundromats. Consequently, two gutter punks standing together can create quite a stink.
The kids hit you up for change as you walk by. They need the change for food, forty-ouncers, and dope, and they'll tell you as much. Run-of-the-mill bums or drunks will give you a line of crap about needing a dollar to get on the bus, but gutter-punk culture has an almost Holden Caulfield–like reverence for honesty. Gutter punks don't give you a sob story about needing exactly forty cents to get on the bus; they tell you they need another dollar to score some dope, and could you help get them high?
But after you've been asked for change six or seven thousand times in one day, you can get pretty tired of gutter punks. Even the bleedingest heart eventually hardens. Some will sneer at you as you race to work, without acknowledging that they depend on your job, as well as your guilt and empathy, to move change out of your pocket and into theirs. On some level I envy gutter punks and think the circuit they've created is a kind of wandering Woodstock. One day, I suspect, kids who are in their teens and early twenties right now and who don't run off to be gutter punks for a few years will feel the way all the sixties kids who didn't go to Woodstock now feel. They're missing out on their generation's defining cultural experience. Twenty years from now, we'll all be reading the great novels of the Gutter Punk Generation, and people who weren't gutter punks will claim they were, just like people who didn't make it to Woodstock claim they did.
But while I look forward to the novels they're going to write, living in Seattle it's easy to get sick of the gutter punks and their shtick. They especially drive Terry crazy. He's always having to throw gutter punks out of the store. They come in, stink up the place, and shoplift books in order to resell them at a used-book store down the street. The summer before, while we were doing our paperwork, Terry'd had a confrontation with a clearly tripping gutter punk that almost turned violent. At a party a few days later, he joked that the gutter punks should all be herded together and gassed.
No one objected.
We were relieved Melissa was a Portland gutter punk and not a Seattle gutter punk. It would be a little awkward if she turned out to be one of the gutter punks I said no to when she hit me up for spare change, or one Terry had thrown out of the bookstore. Or wanted gassed.
We followed Laurie through downtown Portland to the dropincenter.
Meeting the woman carrying the baby you might adopt is an unusual situation, not just for gay men. We had no idea how we were supposed to behave when we met Melissa. We hadn't watched this scene play out in movies or on television, and we hadn't thought to ask Bob or Kate about what meeting their kids' birth moms was like. We had a better idea about meeting aliens than birth moms.
How were we supposed to behave? How did she feel about giving up her child? Odds were good she wasn't feeling too up-beat. We couldn't go in all smiles. But we didn't want to walk in looking as if we didn't want to be there either.
At the seminar, all the birth moms and the couples who'd adopted told us about their first meetings. They all said they hit it off right away, that there was an instant connection, and ten minutes after they met they were like old friends.
“It'll probably be that way for Melissa and us,” said Terry. “I mean, why not?”
Outside In is three old wood-frame houses facing the freeway that cuts through downtown Portland. When we walked up to the building, two gutter punks were sitting out front with a dog. They checked us out, looking us up and down, and seemed to know who we were. We smiled and nodded and walked by, grateful they didn't ask us for change.
Inside the door was a long hallway filled with backpacks, lockers, safe sex posters, and punks. On one side, a stairway went up; on the other, a doorway opened into a living room. Kids in their gray-green-black clothes were sleeping on couches, milling around, and eating instant soup and ramen noodles.
Standing next to Laurie was a short girl with long black hair, dark eyes, and a wary look on her face. She was obviously pregnant.
Melissa.
Melissa gave us a quick “Hey,” and turned away. She called to one of the Outside In's staff and asked if we could use one of the upstairs counseling rooms.
We were both staring at Melissa; we couldn't help it. She was wearing a grimy white T-shirt, fatigue pants covered with patches and cut off below the knee, and knee-high Doc Martens boots. A Swiss Army knife, some tools, and a cup hung from her belt. She wore a black zip-up sweatshirt that hung from her shoulders to her knees and made her look smaller than she was.
As we started to walk up the creaky staircase, Melissa smiled at a friend coming in the door. Dental work, I thought to myself, catching a glimpse of her teeth. Any son of Melissa's is going to need dental work.
In the first few moments we were together, I caught myself assessing her in the crassest possible way. It was hard not to look Melissa over as if she were a horse we were about to bet on. Was she good stock? How do those teeth look? Any hint of inbreeding in the slope of her forehead or the shape of her eyes? Would her offspring be strong? Did she have the right genetic stuff ? If we went with Melissa were we betting our $15,000 on the right horse? And there was the birth father to think about, too. What did he look like? We were not, in all likelihood, ever going to meet him. All we had to go on was Melissa, and except for the teeth (which were no more crooked than mine, actually), she looked good.
Down a short second-floor hallway, a small room had been carved out of a larger one. Woodwork and baseboards disappeared into the wall. A brown sheet was tacked over the only window. Melissa sat down in a low stuffed chair, Terry and I sat on a couch, and Laurie sat in a chair. No one said anything for what seemed like a very long time.
“Well, Melissa, this is Dan and Terry,” said Laurie, “and Dan and Terry, this is Melissa.”
It's hard to remember that first conversation, but we weren't chattering away like old friends in ten minutes. Melissa stared at the floor, and Terry and I stared at Laurie. Melissa gave one-word answers to Laurie's ice-breaking questions,
and when Laurie asked Melissa if there was anything Melissa wanted to know about Terry and me, she shrugged and said no.
It didn't feel as if things were going well, and I wondered if Melissa had taken one look at us and decided we weren't the parents she wanted for her baby.
When Laurie asked us if we had any questions for Melissa, Terry asked Melissa about the baby's birth father.
“Everyone calls him Bacchus,” Melissa said, “but his real name is Kevin. We were traveling together, and I got pregnant, I guess.” They hadn't seen in each other in months.
“It's not like he could take of a baby,” Melissa said, “so I wouldn't worry about him wanting to take the baby away or anything.”
Melissa didn't know much about Bacchus's family or his health history, since they'd only hung out for a month.
“It's not like we talked about that sort of stuff,” she said. “And, anyway, we were high or drunk a lot, so even if we did talk about it, I wouldn't probably remember. He was a normal guy; I don't think there was anything wrong with him.”
“Dan and Terry have some concerns about your drinking and drug use,” Laurie said.
“We've both used drugs, and we both drink,” I said, trying a little too hard to put Melissa at ease and coming across like a boomer talking to his teenage kid. “It's not like we have anything against drinking or drugs, but we're a little worried about it, with the baby and all.”
Melissa ran us through the drinking and drugs she did before she knew she was pregnant. She had three or four beers a day, four or five days a week, for the first four and half months.
“It was usually beer, but we got a space bag every once in a while.”
