This is the first long part of a long story that I've been working on. Oh, did I mention it's long? Don't say I didn't warn you.
Enjoy your schadenfreude installment for the day!
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I haven’t flown in six years. Of all my irrational fears -- spiders, heights, nose hair -- flying is the most intense. Just hearing the words “frequent flyer” or “Mile High Club” is enough to give me the shakes. Although joining the latter is a slight incentive to getting over my fear. Sex in a Greyhound bus bathroom isn't nearly as classy.
Given that my parents had convinced me that Ebola was lurking behind every Toys R' Us display, my fear of flying might not be surprising. But despite my pre-determined pessimism, it's not crashing that really scares me. I just can't bring myself to worry about dying in a plane when I'm so much more likely to die in a New York City cab. Of course, this means that I also have an intense fear of New York City cabs, but that's intertwined with my intense fear of New York City in general. Nothing good can come from 14 million people in a two mile radius.
No, my fear of flying predates even my earliest childhood memories. I’ve been claustrophobic since I was a baby. There wasn’t a crib built big enough to hold me. By my first birthday, my parents had added several levels of bars on the top of my crib to keep me from climbing out. Most babies don’t spend the first years of their lives in a crib that could have held Jimmy Hoffa. Actually, according to my mother, I was claustrophobic before I was even born. Apparently I was so unhappy being trapped in the womb, I almost killed her in my hurry to get out. I was only two weeks premature, but the way my mother tells it you’d think I was born brandishing a meat cleaver. Amazingly, my mother doesn't consider this a reproach on her hospitability. I hate when guests depart early from one of my parties, especially when their departure also results in an epidural and a blood transfusion.
I’ve spent thousands of dollars trying to get myself back on an airplane. Support groups, cognitive behavioral therapy, strapping myself to the nose of a 747 – nothing’s worked. One therapist had the brilliant idea of inducing panic attacks to help me desensitize to the feeling of anxiety.
“Breathe with me,” she instructed. “We’ll breathe slow at first, and then speed up, and after a minute or two you will hyperventilate and the attack will start.”
It seemed to me we were drawing close to the boundaries of legitimate therapy here. We spent the entire session trying to hyperventilate. It didn’t work. I didn’t have a panic attack, and the only consolation was that I got to watch the therapist turn blue. I refused to pay her for wasting my time with that nonsense. She referred me to a collection agency, which, ironically, gave me a panic attack.
But the biggest waste of time and money was the virtual reality therapy. The therapist fits you with a pair of goggles that are supposed to simulate flight and straps you to an airplane chair. The goal is to make you feel comfortable in an airplane-type setting. Tying a claustrophobic to a chair is a great way of making him comfortable.
“Do I get a bag of peanuts with this?” I asked the therapist. He wasn’t amused. I have a tendency to annoy therapists. I use humor as a defense mechanism, and most therapists have a horrible sense of humor. Especially when they’d ask about my traumatic childhood.
“So your mother would chase you around the house with scissors. How did that make you feel?”
“Knock knock.”
My sister says this is an unhealthy defense mechanism.
“It’s a form of detachment, Jonah. You refuse to deal with your legitimate emotions. It’s really self-destructive. Ok, we’ll have to talk about this later, I’m out of wine and the liquor store closes at midnight.”
After the therapist strapped me in the chair, he would switch on the virtual reality machine, the chair would start rattling, and I’d hear the garbled sounds of an airplane engine. I was supposed to feel like I was on an airplane, but the images looked more like a beta version of Super Mario Brothers. After a few minutes I got bored. The therapist would come back in the room periodically to check on me.
“So tell me, what’s your anxiety level at now?”
“Zero.”
“Zero? But you’re on an airplane!”
“No, I’m not. I’m sitting in your office. The graphics on this thing are horrible. I can hear your secretary talking about American Idol. This chair smells. And where are my peanuts?”
Fortunately insurance paid for these sessions. Otherwise I’d have another collection agency after me.
*******************
“You haven’t flown in six years? Why not?” Ethan and I were sitting in a corner at Starbucks. Ethan liked sitting in corners. He liked looking at people, but he didn’t like being looked at. Which was too bad, since he was very pretty. Pretty people have an obligation to the world to be as visible and scantily clad as possible at all times.
“I’m scared.” He took a sip of his coffee and checked out the couple across from us. I watched his eyes gaze from the man, to the woman, back to the man.
“What are you scared of? Dying?”
“No. I know that I’m not going to die on a plane. I’m not stupid.”
“No, you’re right. You’re not stupid. Just crazy.” There was truth in that. I looked over at the couple behind us.
“Which one is hotter?” I asked him. When we first met, Ethan told me he was bisexual. Of course, I didn’t believe him. I was bisexual once too – for about three minutes, until I realized that being bisexual meant more than just not instinctively vomiting at the sight of a vagina. So I took it upon myself to scrutinize his every glance; after four months of following his eyes while we were watching television, out at dinner, in a bar, at the gym, flipping through the Sears catalogue, I decided that he actually was attracted to both women and men. That’s ok, though; I was gay enough for both of us.
“The chick has nice breasts, but the dude is really cut. It’s a draw.” Ethan still used words like “chick,” “dude,” and “bro.” He was only a year out of college, where he was president of his fraternity, a member of the Crew team, and an Abercrombie & Fitch “brand rep model.” He was the kind of guy who would have beaten me up in high school. God was making up for my delayed pubescence.
I met Ethan on ManSlut, or HornDude, or one of those websites where no one has to pretend they’re looking for anything other than a quickie. For the first three months he was just a pleasant distraction. My hairline was just beginning to recede, so sleeping with a 22 year old frat boy was very appealing. He’d sneak in, we’d go to my room, and he’d sneak out anywhere from a few minutes or several hours later. My roommate, Jason, never saw him; it was less complicated that way. I didn’t really care if Jason knew that I had a fuck buddy. Jason was straight only in the sense that he enjoyed sex with women; in every other way, Jason was perhaps the gayest man I’ve ever known, so I doubt this would have disturbed him. Plus a few months earlier Jason had caught me shaving my pubic hair, and once someone sees you shaving your pubes, there’s really no where else to go but up.
As time went on, Ethan and I stopped just having sex and started to talk. At first I didn’t like the talking. He was as close as I had ever gotten to a boytoy, and I didn’t want to add unnecessary depth to the relationship. But I also knew that there was an expiration date to fuck buddies, and we were quickly approaching that time. So it was either get to know him as a person or end it, and I wasn't ready for that yet. Plus my subscription to ManSlut had expired, and I was too cheap to renew. The promise of sex was worth less than $19.95 a month.
Eventually Ethan began to spend the night, which added a whole new layer of complication. I have a very specific nighttime routine, and the presence of a third party interferes with this carefully orchestrated process. Shower twice. Comb hair four times. Make sure all labels in refrigerator face forward. Organize shoes by date of purchase. NASA has less detailed procedures for launching spacecrafts.
But the real challenge for overnight guests is my actual sleeping habits. First, I turn on a fan that sits under my bed for white noise. Then I tie a t-shirt around my head to block out all light. I know there are products specifically made for that purpose, but those are too gay, even for me. Plus they remind me of Joan Crawford, and it’s just a stone’s throw from wearing an eye mask to attacking your dry cleaner with a wire hanger, which I don't want to do. I like my dry cleaner. He's a wizard at ketchup stains.
After the shirt is properly tied, I layer one pillow under my head and one pillow over my head, lie down on my stomach, and stick one leg – just one – under the blanket. One hand rests on the television remote control, in case I have a nightmare and need to quickly turn on the television in the middle of the night, and the other hand rests on the teddy bear I’ve had since I was 2 (a priceless possession I also plan to be buried with). If any body party is the slightest bit out of position, I can’t sleep at all, and then I’m cranky the next day. Crankier than usual. Cranky enough to attack my dry cleaner with a wire hanger.
I also drool in my sleep. I’m not talking a little wet spot here or there – by the morning my pillow is more soaked than a priest’s pants at Chuck E’ Cheese. And I don’t only drool on my pillow – I bite it. Hard. You don’t want to get your fingers too close to my mouth while I sleep. Or other body parts. And to top it all off, I talk in my sleep, usually completely incoherent babble, though my freshman roommate told me that he once found me singing the Star-Spangled Banner while standing on my bed and saluting the television set, naked. I may think like a Democrat, but I dream like a Republican.
I quickly realized that I didn’t mind Ethan’s presence, though. He had this way of being around without intruding, or making me feel self-conscious about my lunacy. Being a self-aware lunatic is much more difficult than just being a plain old lunatic. Sometimes I’m jealous of people with little or no hold on reality. I wonder what it says about your emotional health when schizophrenia is appealing.
“Do you think it’s weird that I have to flush the toilet eight times before I go to bed?”
“Weird? I never thought it was weird. It’s just… one of your things.”
It was easy for Ethan to believe this, as his biggest visible quirk was a preference for crunchy peanut butter over smooth. It’s a little harder to avoid feeling judged when everyone on the subway watches you counting the number of fluorescent light bulbs in the ceiling.
Over time, my lunacy even seemed to become endearing.
“So what color t-shirt are you going to tie around your head tonight?”
“Well, it has to be a dark color," I said, moving the Kenneth Coles behind the Nikes and the Birkenstocks to the back of the line, where they belonged, both because I had bought them in the mid-90s and because they were an ill-advised impulse purchase at Lilith Fair, of which all I remember is being the only attendant with a penis. "Brighter colors let in too much light. But if it’s too dark, and I wake up in the middle of the night, I get scared that I might be going blind. So it needs to be the perfect shade of red, or dark blue. As long as it’s not ribbed. I don’t like the feeling of ribbed fabric against my ears.”
"You know, before I met you, I didn’t think people like you existed,” he said, flipping through the Sears catalogue and pausing at the woman's underwear ads. "You're very interesting."
“Interesting as in, there’s a guy I want to get to know better, or interesting as in, what a fabulous subject for psychiatric study?” I have a tendency to ask questions that I don’t really want the answer to, unless it’s the one I want to hear. Like, am I losing my hair?, or, is it the biggest one you’ve ever seen? My boyfriends learn this trick quickly. They only give the wrong answer once.
“Both.” It was an acceptable answer. He didn’t sleep on the couch that night, though I did rip the woman's underwear ads out of the catalogue. It was hard enough to compete with other men, but there was no way I could compete with a woman. I have a small frame, and my waist is small enough to cause some envy among my female friends, but with a five-o-clock shadow at 6 in the morning, my face is indistinguishably masculine. I wouldn't make a good woman. I wouldn't even make a good drag queen.
Back at our corner table, the couple across from us was holding hands and making smoochy faces at each other. The man was much more attractive than the woman, although of course I was biased.
“Do you ever miss sex with women?” I asked him, observing their pre-coital heteronormative rituals. I don't particularly like homophobics, but I also don't think that homosexuals should throw stones; if gays ever ruled the world, our first proclamation would likely be outlawing heterosexual sex, or at least, restricting it to certain hours of the day when the rest of us are getting manicures or attending Cher concerts.
“Sometimes. But sex with you is close enough,” he said with a grin. Ethan liked to think of himself as the big, strapping man, and me as the little helpless woman. I let him think that when it suited me, just as countless generations of women have before me. And just like those women, if he stepped over the line, I’d serve him his balls on a platter. Behind every great man there’s a gay man.
“It’s too bad about your flying fear. I was thinking we could go to the White Party next month.” The White Party was an annual event in Miami that was supposed to celebrate the culture and history of the gay people. In reality, it was just a glorified, city-wide orgy that would have made Caligula blush. I don’t think Rome ever actually fell. I think it just relocated to South Florida.
I had always been scared of massive gay events like the White Party. Actually, I was scared of any massive event. I was afraid I’d get lost in a sea of people and never find my way out. I’d just dissolve into the atmosphere. I suppose at the White Party I’d become part of a rainbow. I don’t want to dissolve, not even into a rainbow.
But having Ethan there would be an entirely different experience. He wouldn’t lose me to anyone, much less some faggy-assed rainbow.
“I want to go. Let’s go.” It was a big promise. Perhaps a promise I wasn’t capable of keeping. But I really wanted to go. And I didn’t want him going by himself. You don’t set a zebra loose in a herd of lions.
“Good, you’ll be ok," he said, watching the couple leave the store, probably headed for their bedroom to perform ungodly acts that would be outlawed in a gay-controlled society. "I’ll make sure you’re ok.”
This was one of those times his macho attitude suited me. Though I wished he was drinking something a bit more masculine than a Mochafrappacino when he said it.
***************************************
“It’s just not normal,” my mother said, as she cleaned the bathroom for the sixth time that day.
“Pass me the Windex.”
I had only recently come out to my mother. I didn’t think of myself as closeted when she didn’t know. I thought of myself as a totally out homosexual with a totally crazy mother. But when my grandmother told me that my mother had been calling radio psychiatrists to ask if they thought I might be gay (“My son likes show tunes and hasn’t had a girlfriend since the sixth grade – do you think he’s a fag?”), I figured it was time to come clean, before members of the ex-gay movement showed up at my door with a wooden cross and cleansing fire.
“It’s just not natural," she said, eliminating any trace of nature from her toilet. "It’s not what God intended.”
“There’s gay penguins,” I replied, handing her the Windex. Actually, it was store-brand Windex. The Haslaps are morally opposed to brand name products.
“You’re not a penguin.”
At the ripe old age of 56, my mother had already undergone knee and hip replacement surgery, but that didn’t stop her from cleaning every nook and cranny in the house. I once found her trying to move the leather couch when she noticed a dustbunny by the wall. If I hadn’t been there, that would have spelled doom for hip #2. There was no risk not worth taking for the sake of cleanliness. She had long since scrubbed away the rough spots on the bottom of the tub that keep you from slipping. A smart idea for a woman with more bionic parts than Robocop.
“It’s your fucking father’s fault, you know.” The word “fucking” had preceded my father’s name ever since their divorce. “He never played sports with you. A boy needs to play sports.”
“I played video games.”
“Video games aren’t sports. Sports have balls. You never played with balls.” I let that obvious opening slide, as she was already agitated enough. “And how about AIDS? How do you know you won’t get AIDS? Do you ask your partners to see their paperwork before you have sex?”
"Yes, mother," I replied. I called her mother whenever I was annoyed with her, which is to say, quite often. After seeing Psycho, though, I tried to cut back. Given my neatness and thin frame, the comparison was just too close for comfort. "Right before I ask for a copy of their tax returns."
My mother was an elementary school health teacher for 22 years. She was also a raging hypochondriac. Someone really had their finger on the button when they hired her for that job. There must be a whole generation of kids in New York City who disinfect doorknobs every time they enter a room.
“Why don’t you ask Lily these questions?” My sister was 33 and single, but I was pretty sure she wasn’t a virgin. I guess there must be 33 year old virgins -- like nuns, or Daughters of the Confederacy -- but Lily was too attractive to be one of them.
“Don’t bring your sister into this. It’s different for straight people. And for all I know she could be a lesbian.”
“Her life would probably be much easier if she was.”
“God forbid," she said, being unintentionally offensive as usual. After I came out, my grandmother pleaded with me not to take my mother's comments personally, because they "come from a good place." I'm not sure where that place was, but it seemed halfway between homophobia and ignorance, which wasn't such a good place to me.
“You know, there are other things you can do that won't put you at risk" she said, scrubbing the backside of the toilet bowl. I wondered what exactly she was doing at night that could get the backside of the toilet dirty. "Have you considered mutual masturbation?” she asked, nonchalantly, like a Jehovah's Witness might ask whether you've considered the Kingdom of Heaven. I had a flashback to when I was 14 and my mother caught me masturbating to one of my dad’s porn videos, which he had presumably left as a sort of makeshift mentoring program for my adolescence. I promised myself there and then never to masturbate again. That lasted about three hours, until I saw the Slevack brothers playing basketball outside shirtless.
“I really don’t feel comfortable talking about this with you.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t know anything about this stuff. You have to enlighten me. People didn’t do these things in my day.”
“Sure they did, they just went home to their wives after they did them.”
To my mother’s credit, her attitude had significantly improved over time. She even started attending PFLAG meetings, where she met some parents who had sent their son to an “ex-gay re-education school.” Apparently, somewhere between the Coping With Cunnilingus Seminar and Finding Your Way Around A Vagina 101, their son tried to commit suicide with a Lady Bic razor. Eventually they realized that maybe his problem wasn’t being gay; maybe his problem was having intolerant bastards for parents. But I don’t think my mother got the right message out of it.
“This school sounded like such a nice place,” she told me after her first PFLAG meeting. “They had lots of fun activities and interesting programs. If I had known about you years ago, I could have done something about it. But now,” she sighed, “I guess it’s a lost cause.”
It had been a lost cause since my best friend and I had decided to experiment with some athletic socks and a tube of Vaseline.
“Oh well,” she said with her arm elbow-deep in the toilet bowl yet again. Our bathroom was so antiseptic it could double for an operating room. “At least you’re not a transvestite.” It was true – I never once questioned my gender, and I considered my manhood to be one of my better physical attributes. I should wear my pants on my head instead. Always put your best foot forward.
My mother finished cleaning the toilet. She threw out the rubber gloves and put on a new, high-tech pair. The new gloves were necessary for Stage 2 of the cleaning process, which involved a mysterious combination of bleach, vinegar, and rubbing alcohol. It was a toxic mix that could be banned by the EPA if they ever got wind of it.
“So what else is going on?” Ah. Good. Moving on. Though my therapist probably would have rather we stuck to the mutual masturbation discussion. Not for the benefit of my mental health, but for the benefit of her college-aged daughter, whose first semester at Swarthmore had been fully funded by my traumatic childhood.
“Nothing, I’m just getting over a cold,” I said, immediately regretting any mention of my physical health. Within twenty minutes my mother would convince me that what I thought was a lingering cold was actually the first signs of some rare and deadly form of cancer that only 28-year-old homosexual Jews get.
“You don’t dress well. You should be wearing a sweatshirt.” No matter what I wore, it wasn’t enough. My mother wouldn’t be satisfied if I wore a parka in the Sahara.
“It’s 92 degrees outside.”
“It’s a dry heat.”
The fumes from the cleaning supplies were starting to get to me. I had flashbacks of high school, when I would spend hours laying face down on the kitchen floor. That is, until Michael Sloane introduced me to the wonders of marijuana in his parents’ basement.
“Are you going in and out of the air conditioning at work? That’s not good for you.”
“So what am I supposed to do? Call in sick until September?” It wasn't such a bad idea, except I wasn't sure who would fund my intense chocolate chip cookie addiction if I did.
“At least keep a jacket at the office. It can get cold in those big buildings.”
“I do.”
“Don’t lie to your mother.” She was right. I was lying. And she was also right about it being cold in the office. But bringing a jacket to the office would mean admitting that she was right, and then my whole world would start unraveling.
I followed her into the living room, which competed with Hitler's bunker for most uninviting space in the universe. One whole wall consisted of a large mirror, which seemed more suited for a porn studio than an apartment. Against the opposite wall there were two black leather couches facing a large black metal breakfront, inside of which sat various pictures of me and my sister from different stages of our childhood. We looked just as trapped in the breakfront as we felt in the pictures.
“How’s Ethan?” It was the first time she said his name without whispering it. Ever since I came out to her, our conversations were held in whispers, and the word “gay” was always italicized. “Are you sure you’re…gay?” “Have you tried not being…gay?” “When did you first realize you were…gay?” But she seemed to be getting past that. She was speaking in normal, 12-point font now. I felt like giving her a gold star. She needed some type of positive reinforcement. Maybe I’d buy her a new pair of rubber gloves, or maybe I'd spring for her next artificial limb.
“He’s good. He says hi.” He didn’t actually say hi, but that felt like the right thing to say. At least it was non-controversial. When my mother first met Ethan I was prepared for the worst. I had the number for the local police, fire department, and poison control saved into my cell phone for the occasion, just in case. As it turned out, though, my mom actually liked Ethan. He was tall, athletic, masculine, and his eyebrows weren’t waxed. Everything a “man” should be, according to my mother and Newt Gingrich.
“I hope you’re not driving him crazy,” she said, as she began to dust a picture of me and my sister at the beach. My father used to be in the picture, but after the divorce, he mysteriously disappeared from all of the family photos. Apparently I became the product of a sexual union between my mother and a human-shaped photographic cut-out. “No one wants to be around a nervous person. If you’re too nervous all the time, he'll run away.”
She finished dusting the pictures and began the final stage in her cleaning regiment: nooks and crannies. She climbed a stepstool to reach the top of a windowpane, where no dirt could possibly get and no one would ever know if it did. The stepstool itself was precarious. It appeared to be the same stepstool she had owned when I was a kid, but since it hadn't yet disintegrated into a pile of woodchips, she saw no reason to replace it.
“Shit, I’m out of bleach." This represented a cleaning emergency, surpassed only by the dreaded crumb on the living room carpet, or eating on the leather couches without first covering them with sticky plastic. “Let’s go get some more.”
I immediately agreed, looking forward to getting outside and regrowing the brain cells I had lost while breathing in the cleaner. On our way to the car, we ran into the mother of a girl my mother had wanted to set me up with shortly before I came out to her.
"There's this girl upstairs I want you to meet." It was more of a demand than a request. "She's not so pretty, but you don't care about things like that." I'm not sure which offended me more, that my mother wanted to set me up with a girl or that she wanted to set me up with an ugly girl. Fortunately, I came out to her before I could determine just how unattractive a woman my mother thought I deserved.
“So is this Jonah?” the woman asked with eager eyes.
“This is him,” my mother said, licking her fingers and removing some shmutz from my cheek. Things that you think mothers only do in movies my mother actually does in real life.
“Well, what a nice-looking young man." Her eyes danced with imagined possibilities. I could see the chupa being constructed as we spoke. "And your mother tells me you’re an attorney!”
“That’s right,” I said, wanting to add, “Did she tell you I like to suck cock too?” The way she was looking at me though, she probably still would have given me her daughter even knowing I was gay. Hell, I could have told her I enjoyed chopping up small animals and worshipping Satan, and she still would have given me her daughter. Being a Jewish lawyer makes up for a lot of shortcomings.
But before she could suggest three sheep and a goat for her daughter’s dowry, my mother, probably sensing my growing displeasure and fearing that I’d open my big mouth any second, started hobbling towards the elevator. “Gloria, we have to run to the store. I’ll see you later, ok?”
We left Gloria to plan the engagement dinner and entered the elevator, which, like the hallways of my mother's building, smelled like cabbage and Preparation H. Except for Gloria's unattractive daughter, most of the building's residents qualified for Social Security benefits. Not that I have anything against senior citizens; quite the contrary, I find cantankerousness endearing. At least, when it's not directed at me specifically.
Perhaps to prepare the residents for the not-too-distant future, the elevator was about the size of a coffin. It was only three floors to the garage, but it might as well have been three hundred. My palms began sweating, signaling the upcoming panic attack. I thought about the therapist who had tried to make me panic by breathing fast. A sharper therapist would have just stuffed me in an elevator.
“I know you can’t change who you are,” my mother said, leaning against the elevator wall and coming perilously close to the "Alarm" button. I didn't pay much attention to what she said. I was too busy counting down in my head and practicing my yoga breath.
“It’s just, being gay makes life so hard…”
30-29-28…in, out, in, out.
“Life is hard enough as it is…”
22-21-20…
“And then it’s so lonely…”
13-12-11…
“You’ll spend your life alone…”
5-4-3…
The door opened onto the dark garage. I breathed a sign of relief, and made an empty promise to a higher power to do a good deed for someone as thanks for getting me out of that death trap. Fortunately, I defined good deed rather broadly. For example, not stealing someone's wallet out of an open backpack is a good deed in my book. If actually stealing it is a bad deed, shouldn't the converse be true? Sometimes it takes more self-control to do the right thing than it takes maliciousness to do the wrong thing.
An elderly woman was waiting for the elevator as we got off. She was pushing a cart of groceries. I spotted some petroleum jelly among her bags, which reminded me that I also needed to go shopping in the near future.
“Hello, Ruth,” my mother said.
“Oh, hi Sharon,” she said. “Is this your son?”
“This is him,” my mother replied. Ruth was at least 90, but still looked healthier than my mother. She also smelled like cabbage and Preparation H. Maybe it was a new, fashionable old lady perfume.
Ruth looked me up and down, like a sexual predator but without the sexual connotation. “You know, I have a granddaughter…”
Apparently you couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting a yenta trying to marry off some family member in this building. I walked ahead while Ruth described her granddaughter to my mother in great and loving detail. I didn’t care to hear any more about the latest ugly Jewess who was to be the next Mrs. Haslap.
I arrived at her car, tucked away in the back of the garage. I wasn’t feeling much better than I had felt in the elevator. The elevator was small, but the garage was underground which made it just as bad as the elevator, or worse. In fact, I suspect my claustrophobia actually began with a fear of being underground. My childhood home had a crawlspace underneath the basement, which was the lowest point in the house, at least 10 feet below ground level. When I was little, I would hide in the crawlspace during my parents’ many arguments. They didn’t relegate themselves to one room to fight. They traveled from room to room, chasing each other out of one and into another, round and round until they tired themselves out, or one of them left the house, or someone called the police, usually our peace-loving next-door neighbors who surprisingly never petitioned to get us kicked out of the neighborhood. But if I crammed myself into the furthest corner of the crawlspace and stuck my fingers in my ears, I could only barely hear them. I would leave the basement light on so I could see, and I put a stuffed animal in there to keep me company, a giraffe my grandmother had bought me during our last trip to DisneyWorld. I also put some chocolate chip cookies in the crawlspace for sustenance. Sometimes the fights were pretty long, and I got hungry.
During one particularly nasty fight – I think it was about the vacuum cleaner, something about which required my father to go to hell and my mother to save him a seat on the way – I fell asleep in the crawlspace. When I woke up, it was pitch black. Someone must have turned the basement light off while I was asleep, likely my mother, who regularly went around the house turning off lights to conserve electricity, even if you had only walked out of the room seconds before. In the dark, I couldn’t tell which way I was facing. I couldn’t see the opening to the crawlspace. I started to cry, but I didn’t call for help, because that would start another fight, which would necessitate my returning to the crawlspace. I muffled my crying with the stuffed giraffe so no one could hear.
And suddenly, it occurred to me that I might not ever leave that crawlspace. I could die in the crawlspace. No one would think to look for me in there. I didn’t think an adult could have even fit in there. Everyone would think I ran away, or was kidnapped. I’d be on the side of a milk carton within a month. There’d be a manhunt for my captor. People would see me at the supermarket, or in a clothing store, or riding Space Mountain. Each new sighting would give my parents hope. But in a year or two, maybe less, depending on whether the tabloids picked up the story, everyone would just give up. I’m sorry, ma’am, the chances of us finding your son now are slim to nil. Just another missing child in America. My mom would grieve for a while, maybe forever. She’d rip out her hair and tear her clothes and blame my dad and my sister and God and everyone else she set her eyes on. My dad would grieve too. He’d buy himself lots of CD players and television sets and other gadgets to ease the pain. Everyone copes in their own way. But the world would continue to spin without me. It had to. I wasn’t that important.
And in a hundred years, when they bulldozed the house, they would find my corpse, still clutching the stuffed giraffe. By then my whole family would be gone, and no one would ever know who I was or why I had laid under a house for a hundred years holding a stuffed giraffe.
That was the last time I ever hid in the crawlspace. I didn’t go back in until six years later, when I figured out where my dad was hiding his porn collection. Before my mom sold the house, I ventured in one last time to retrieve the stuffed giraffe. It was still there. It still smelled like tears and chocolate chip cookies.
Back in the garage, I sat on the car, practicing my yoga breath. I had begun practicing yoga a few months before, around the time I came out to my mother. Mostly I did it to meet cute crunchy boys who didn't wear deodorant, but whose wholesome and earnest personalities made up for it. Unfortunately, I found that "lack of body odor" was actually on my list of necessarily qualities in a life partner. Amazingly, though, I also found the exercise to be mentally and physically beneficial. I had figured that the pallative benefits of yoga were an urban legend, like Big Foot and gay Republicans.
Twenty minutes later my mother caught up to me, presumably, after Ruth had decided that we should have a band instead of a DJ at the wedding.
“She’s such a yenta,” she said, out of breath from the long 75 foot walk to the car. “I met her granddaughter once. She’s very pretty.” Well, at least it was a step up. “If only I hadn’t married your fucking father.”
She stumbled on a crack in the floor. I grabbed her arm to steady her, concerned that the emergency room would be overflowing on a Sunday. She couldn’t have weighed more than 100 pounds. There was nothing to hold onto.
“If you hadn’t married my father, I wouldn’t be here at all,” I said, again confused about this "good place" that my grandmother spoke of.
“No, that’s not what I meant,” she replied, trying to steady herself on the edge of the car.
I helped her into the passenger side seat. I always drove when we went anywhere, even though I hated driving. The car still had stickers from all my alma maters stuck to the back window, expressing pride that my mother couldn't express in words. It also had the “WARNING—AIR BAG” stickers on the dashboard and paper over the floor mats, even though it was at least eight years old. The seat cushions were covered with old linen sheets, which smelled vaguely like coffee and dried urine from occasions when she couldn't make it out of the car in time.
My mother looked in the vanity mirror, checking her makeup. There was lipstick on her teeth, and one of her eyes looked significantly larger than the other, though that was partially the result of some inadequate plastic surgery she had undergone the previous year. She tried to reapply, but her hands were shaking, as they had for the better part of a decade.
“I should have been better prepared for kids." She tried to buckle her seatbelt, but it kept falling out of her hands. I buckled it for her and tried to tighten it. Even at its tightest it barely touched her waist. “No one teaches you how to be a mother."
Or a son.
We approached the garage door. The door opened, flooding the car with sunlight and warm air and life. I desperately wanted to change the subject.
“I’m trying to get back on a plane,” I said, as we pulled out of the garage. “Ethan said he’d fly with me.”
“The flying thing again? I just don’t understand why you’re so anxious,” she said, pressing the imaginary brake under her foot as I edged into traffic. “It must be your fucking father’s fault.”
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Stay tuned for Part II...
