Filthy beasts, p.19
Filthy Beasts, page 19
I analyzed my friends’ relationships closely, looking for evidence that supported the supremacy of my singledom. Whenever there was a disagreement, or any indication that either of their personal freedoms was being curtailed by the other, I made an invisible checkmark in the “single” column. Asked by your partner to do something you didn’t want to do? Check. Partner says something counter to your personal view of the world? Check. Partner wants you to go shopping with them? Visit their parents? Invite a sad single friend to dinner? Check. Check. Check.
I was building the case against marriage, because I couldn’t see that it was in my future. I had come to believe that love was either like a lightning bolt that hadn’t struck me yet or a compromise that people made not to be alone. I had been surrounded by beautiful, intelligent, and funny women all of my life, and I had been told that some of those women found me attractive. But I couldn’t see it when it was happening, and I was only attracted to women who were unavailable or showed no interest in me.
The most striking example of my paralysis occurred a few weekends before Lee and Ruth’s wedding, when a law school friend of Lee’s came to visit. Danielle was strawberry-blond, brilliant, fit, and funny. We clicked soon after she arrived, connecting on multiple levels in a way that eventually led her to my apartment late that Saturday night with a bottle of wine, soft lighting (I turned off the fluorescent overheads), and the two of us sitting next to each other on the couch. Danielle turned her body toward mine, and as we bantered back and forth her hand found my knee and traveled farther up my leg. She flipped her hair, tilted her head, and touched my arm. I felt nothing but abject terror and confusion.
After it became obvious that I was not responding, Danielle left, confused and surly. The next day I told Lee and Ruth what had happened.
“I don’t think she’s ever been rejected before,” Lee said, laughing.
“I didn’t reject her.”
“I can’t think of a single man she’s wanted that she hasn’t gotten.” He scrunched up his face in deep thought.
“You saw through her bullshit,” Ruth said.
“Not responding the way she wanted isn’t rejection.”
“Yes, it is,” they said in unison.
“I can’t be held accountable for turning down something that I didn’t want in the first place.”
“I would have loved to have been there,” Lee said giddily.
“She wanted it. You didn’t give it to her. Rejection.” Ruth pounded the table for emphasis.
“I don’t like it,” I said.
“Did you ever want her?” Ruth asked Lee.
“Oh, fuck yeah,” he said.
* * *
MY MOTHER’S WHEREABOUTS were a perpetual mystery to me at this point. She and John split their time between Bermuda, Boca Raton, the new yacht Bermudiana, and their flat in London. Monty was just finishing up at the College of Boca Raton, where he was studying “hospitality,” a major I had never heard of. Robin thrived as a high-paid executive of a Bermuda reinsurance firm. He slicked his hair back and wore power glasses. He looked like a member of a secret preppy murder club where one smoked cigars and drank scotch while a young, beautiful blond nymph was trussed up in the background, mewling for her release. He played golf, hunted, joined private clubs, and settled into the life he had dreamed of, the one my father had let slip away.
My mother came to visit me my second year in Roanoke. To this day, I’m not sure how she got there, given that I can’t imagine her navigating the process of boarding one of the small commercial planes that flew into the valley. She only traveled first class, which wasn’t an option coming to Roanoke. She no doubt would have worn a fur and dark glasses and expected several members of the airline “staff” to help her to her seat and stow her carry-on luggage. What she would have discovered was a lone ticket agent hustling people into a cramped fuselage, chirping an inauthentic and weary “Good morning, y’all” to a country crowd, a good portion of whom were likely wearing overalls, NASCAR T-shirts, or polyester blends.
I’m sure John encouraged her to come, a suggestion she bristled against because it implied she was neglecting us or that he didn’t want her around or, more likely, both. Instead of feeling like she was happy to see me, I had the sense that she was formulating a response to John’s arrogant presumption of neglect, not realizing that her internal rejection of his presumption proved his point.
I was excited that she came, mostly because it gave me the opportunity to prove to my friends that my stories about her were not exaggerated. I had bonded with a small group of UVA grads my last year in Seattle. We stayed in touch as we each moved back east, the small group growing into a cadre of twenty, all of whom lived within a few hours of each other in DC, Roanoke, Richmond, and Charlottesville. Many of my new friends had navigated their own unconventional upbringings. Lee remembered his mother, as they were driving the narrow streets of Ireland, seeing a toddler on the side of the road precariously close to traffic with no supervision and eerily giggling “Bye-bye, baby” as she drove by, before the parent came running out to keep it from getting run over. Ruth described the note she received from her mother, pointing out that her “fuck knots” (the tangled hair knots that formed presumably after having sex with Lee) were unladylike, and warning that she was heading for an adrenaline crash. She had written the note in a spiral shape, so that Ruth had to keep turning the paper to read the warning, the final word, “DESTRUCTION,” highlighted at the bottom of the illustrated vortex.
Lee and Ruth invited my mother and me over for a drink before dinner. Several friends who lived nearby came as well, eager to see if the caricature I had drawn was even close to true. I think my mother knew she was being presented as a novelty act for everyone’s entertainment, but by this point, it was the only way for us to connect. She was uncomfortable in front of people she didn’t know, and responded to that discomfort by wearing expensive jewelry and elaborate outfits. As with any good actress, I think the costumes helped her access the character.
My friends were noticeably excited when we walked in the front door.
“This is my mother,” I said to a group of beaming faces. I pointed out each of my friends by name as my mother followed, stony-faced and uninterested.
“I would like to sit down, please,” she said.
Lee showed her to their largest upholstered chair, which she occupied like a throne.
“It’s so nice to meet you, Mrs. Hamill,” Lee said. “We’ve heard so much about you.”
“It’s Mrs. Outerbridge.”
“I’m so sorry. Mrs. Outerbridge.”
“Can I get you something to drink?” Ruth asked gently.
“A white wine would be lovely.”
“We’re huge fans of your son,” Lee said.
My friends Mimi and Roger stood in the back of the room, smiling. “We love Kirky!” Mimi said. It sounded like an unexpected hiccup.
“Did you have a good flight in?” Lee asked.
“I wouldn’t say that,” my mother replied, scanning the room with an eye toward finding something objectionable about it.
“It’s not the easiest place to get to, that’s for sure,” he said.
“You think?” my mother said, looking at Lee like he was an escaped mental patient peeing in a planter. “Did the other one go to France to get the wine?”
“Her name is Ruth. She is one of your hosts,” I said.
“Who’s this one?” my mother asked, waggling her finger at Mimi, whose face was paralyzed in a clown-like smile of terror.
“That’s Mimi. You can ask her yourself, you know. She’s with her fiancé, Roger.”
“They’re good-looking too,” she said suspiciously. “Why are all of your friends so good-looking?”
“They speak English. Everybody here speaks English, and they can hear you.”
“You weren’t a good-looking baby.”
“We’re all dying to know what Kirk was like when he was younger,” Mimi said.
“You turned out okay, but you were one ugly baby.”
“Here’s your wine,” Ruth said, returning from the kitchen. “I hope Chardonnay is okay?”
“Thank you, darling.” My mother looked at Ruth, acknowledging her for the first time. Ruth didn’t realize that she could have brought my mother paint thinner and she would have been just as grateful.
“I can’t tell you what a pleasure it is to meet you,” Roger said, moving forward. “It is truly an honor.”
“I raised three boys on my own,” my mother said to nobody in particular.
“I can’t even imagine,” Ruth said. “I don’t think I could do that. I really don’t”
“It wasn’t easy,” she said, her face hardening in a memory.
“Impossible,” Ruth said.
“But I did it.”
I wanted to add a caveat or two about her roaring parental success, but thought better of it.
“If Kirk is any indication of your ability to raise good people, you have a rare and precious talent,” Roger said. Roger was the friend of mine who always spoke as if his biographer were nearby jotting down his insights.
“We love Kirky!” Mimi repeated.
“Good thing this one is pretty,” my mother said, a slight smile appearing on her face for the first time.
“Mimi.”
“What?”
“ ‘This one’ is called Mimi,” I said.
“Oh please; I’m too old to care,” my mother said.
My friends laughed harder than they should have, including Mimi. Either my mother was the Don Rickles of the drunks or they were treating her as such because they loved me, or a little of both. She loosened up more and more with each round of laughter, to the point where she started telling the stories that they said they wanted to hear about my childhood: about how I only wanted to eat hot dogs and Frosted Flakes until I was eight years old, or about when I threw up on the airplane landing in a thunderstorm at JFK when I was six. They were all the same stories I had heard before, many times. I noticed for the first time that all of her stories of me took place when my parents were still together, as if the story of us ended when we moved to Bermuda. In the middle of her stories I caught glimpses of who she used to be—when her laughter was unguarded and her joy irrepressible—and held my breath to cling to the moment as long as I could before the shadows moved back in. I started to see my mother as somebody caught in darkness, doing whatever she could to steal glimpses of light, knowing they wouldn’t last for long. I saw how brave that was, and how sad.
* * *
A YEAR LATER, I WAS in Portland, Oregon, for work when Robin called to tell me that my mother had been in a car accident and was in the ICU. She had pulled out into traffic and driven drunk into one of Bermuda’s iconic pink buses. According to my brother, when the paramedics arrived, she was pinned in the car and was fighting the rescue workers trying to extricate her.
“They say she smelled like somebody had poured a bottle of scotch over her head,” Robin said.
“Do I need to come?” I asked.
“I think so.”
She had a massive concussion and broken ribs, and had shattered her leg. She didn’t open her eyes until two days after the accident.
“What are you doing here?” she slurred when she saw me.
“I enjoy the beach.”
“Where am I?” She started to move around, not realizing that every part of her body was connected to a tube, monitor, or traction device; the saddest marionette you’d ever seen.
“Don’t move.”
The nurse came into the room and checked her eyes and adjusted dials and tubes. “You’re a lucky woman, aren’t you, Wendy?” she said with a strong Scottish lilt. “You smelled like a bloody distillery when they brought you in here, didn’t you?”
“Fuck you,” my mother replied.
She closed her eyes and turned her head. The nurse looked at me with raised eyebrows.
“She says that to everybody,” I said sheepishly.
“At least she’s got her fighting spirit on,” the nurse said matter-of-factly. “She’ll need it.”
“She sounds like that all of the time, actually.”
“Stop talking about me.”
“Thank you,” I said to the nurse as she walked out the door.
“What happened?”
“You drove into a bus. You’re in the hospital.” I listed her injuries and the long recovery the doctors had outlined for Robin, John, and me.
“Am I going to be okay?”
“They think so.”
“Shit.”
Chapter 12
“Do you think you might be gay?”
I had just turned thirty and was hanging out with my friends Wendell and Jessica at their house in Georgetown in Washington, DC. I knew Jessica from Seattle, having met her and her two best friends from Miss Porter’s School. They all loved hard-core rap, gay porn, and skinny boys with stringy hair and budding drug addictions.
Wendell was the one asking me. He and Jessica had been married for a few years and had recently relocated to DC for his work. Throughout our heavy night of drinking, the questions had become more intimate, so I wasn’t immediately put off.
“I don’t know,” I said.
I honestly didn’t know. It was the first time anyone had asked me directly. I had been gently confronted several years earlier by the only gay person I knew—a friend of my father’s growing up, who offered himself up as a resource should I ever need “somebody to talk to.” He told me that my friend Kevin—the friend I lived with in Boston right after college who had “stolen” my non-girlfriend, Avery—had said something to him about the possibility I might be gay. I don’t know if it was the memory of the betrayal, or that I was suspicious of my father’s friend’s motives as he swayed drunkenly in front of me, but I vehemently denied that I was gay and let him know that I didn’t need his help.
“I’m going to think about it,” I said, after a short pause.
Once I had let the possibility that I might be gay into my brain, it set up shop, and memories of my past started to make more sense. The flashes started at four years old, watching my brother and his friend Andrew sword-fighting with sticks and climbing trees while I sat and built little cottages with moss and bark, wincing when one of them would scream too loudly. I remembered seeing my mother needlepointing in the corner chair in our study, and how I admired the intricacy of each stitch and the way, little by little, the tiny bumps transformed into a story, knowing, without being told, that I wasn’t allowed to do what she was doing, even though I so desperately wanted to. There’s a picture of my brothers and me taken when I was thirteen. Robin is sitting up straight to my left. Monty is slouching on my right. I am posed coquettishly in the middle with my legs together, as if I don’t want somebody to look up my skirt.
I hated war movies, and buddy cop shows. I never played with toy soldiers. I didn’t think the Marx Brothers, Benny Hill, or the Three Stooges were funny. I thought burping was gross, and farting unforgivable.
I loved the Carpenters, the movie Beaches, Wonder Woman, Judy Blume books, Stevie Nicks, Madonna, the smell of hand lotion, talking about my feelings, Air Supply, dance routines, and movies where men fell in love or cried.
I loved Ethan. I had been in love with Ethan.
“I think I might be,” I said to Wendell.
A few years earlier, I had noticed that the voice inside my head was feminine and didn’t belong to me. The voice wasn’t my mother or anyone I knew. It wasn’t necessarily even a personality. But it was distinctly feminine, and it felt like it didn’t belong, like some genetic wire had crossed in my brain and my life’s narration had been assigned to the wrong actor. She wasn’t accusatory or self-destructive, nor was what she said inconsistent with who I was, yet she wasn’t me. As soon as I admitted to myself that I was gay, she disappeared, replaced with a voice that was male and mine, and integrated in a way that the female voice had never been.
Within a week, I had told my closest friends. I had never kissed a man, and besides the awkward fumble in the Tulane library bathroom ten years earlier, I had never touched another penis. But I knew. Around this same time, Ethan called, having tracked me down in Roanoke. He told me about his career as an international businessman that took him to London and Europe, and how he had lived in Russia for a while. It didn’t take long for us to find the rhythm that we had shared so many years before. Just one exhale and we were right back to it. I told him I was gay, and reminded him of our conversation in my dorm room so many years before. He apologized and said that he wasn’t that same person anymore, and he hoped I was happy. “I miss you, Kirk,” he said before hanging up. In some ways this was the first time we had met.
* * *
ONCE I HAD TOLD THE people who I knew would be supportive of the news, it was time to tell my family. Harboring a secret felt like holding a hot potato in my hand. I knew the relationships I had with them were going to be strained in some indefinable way until they understood this part of me. I didn’t think they would be happy about it, but I never once had the fear that anyone would cut me out of his or her life because of it. My family members weren’t disciplined or concerned enough with the lives of others to exert the energy for such a campaign. As luck would have it, it was already late fall, and I was traveling to Florida for the holidays in a few weeks to stay with my father and Barb through Christmas Day, before spending Boxing Day with my mother and John.
