TWENTY TWENTY HINDSIGHT

Things have gotten pretty serious between my virtual girlfriend and I. We Gchat roughly forty hours a week and text on the weekends and she sent me an adorable drawing of the two of us with our three future children, Rocket and Panda, who she will gestate, and Sushi, who we will adopt from an undecided East Asian nation. I returned her romantical mailing with my own—a mixed CD and a love letter that went something along the lines of, I want to make out with you and buy you things with other peoples’ money. This is how serious it is: Virtual Girlfriend (VG) came out to her parents. Frank, Betty, she said, I’m gay on the Internet. Frank and Betty may have been a little confused because they are slightly older than average and may not be entirely sure what the Internet is, but I guess they got the point, which is that their daughter likes to put her head in other girls’ laps.

So, in honor of my dear sugar bitch VG, today’s episode is all about tearing down that closet door. I realized I’ve alluded to my own coming out in previous posts, but here’s the story, real talk style….

I had a friend growing up who was obviously a boy. I mean, she was a girl, but she looked like a boy. This didn’t really change as we got older. She always had really short hair and was built like a guy. Very handsome. I realized at some point that she was probably a dyke but we never talked about it. I also remember thinking that I was really glad that I wasn’t like her, that I wasn’t a dyke. Just like parents who think that their son’s life will be difficult because he likes to shop at Banana Republic and bend over for guys who shave their chests, I didn’t want my life to be difficult. My life was already difficult. I was sixteen. Life is difficult for everyone at sixteen, especially for androgynous boy/girls in a school where the mascot is a Confederate army general. I was glad the gay disease wasn’t something else I had to worry about catching. My butch friend didn’t come out until after high school, but no one was surprised. What was surprising was that a lot of my other friends also came out after high school. We never talked about girls. We may rarely have kissed boys, but we talked about them the same way all teenage girls do. Turns out we just had to leave the vast hell of a small town to be who we are.

I made out with boys for a while in college, but anytime I found myself looking at the curve of some woman’s hip, I held my boyfriend’s hand tighter and told myself that I just really appreciated beauty. There was no way I was gay. I mean look, I’m holding hands with a boy! But then I met A—, and, along with making me crazy, she made me gay.

My friends at school were unfazed when I came out to them. My brother and sister were equally flapless. I was the only girl in Little League. Of course I’m gay. I did not, however, want to tell my parents. This wasn’t because I thought they would be upset—my parents would be more upset if I married a Republican or became a youth pastor—but because telling your parents you’re gay means telling your parents that you aren’t just emotionally and mentally gay, you’re also gay with other gay girls. Like, naked gay. I didn’t even tell my parents when I got my period. I definitely didn’t want to tell them that I was a sexually active person. You know how weird and terrible it is to think about your parents having sex? Think about how much worse it is for them to think about you having sex. You’re their little girl. You sat on their laps and giggled when they tickled you and cried when they spanked you for starting a small and completely manageable fire in the neighbor’s yard. And now you’re telling them that you not only have sex, you have the kind of sex that won’t give them grandkids no matter how hard you try. Not a conversation I really wanted to have.

About a month after A— and I got together, we drove from Asheville to the Outer Banks for a romantical weekend. Before we could get there, however, we were rear-ended by a dump truck on I-40 and crashed into a construction barrier. The air bags popped. The windshield shattered. Traffic was stopped for hours. The car was totaled. We went to the hospital and got prescriptions for completely unnecessary painkillers and stayed at a nearby friend’s house that night and borrowed her car the next day so we could get to the beach and back home. While we were at the pharmacy collecting our completely unnecessary painkillers, my sister called. She happened to be visiting our parents that weekend and said that our mom knew I was homo and was really upset. Like tears upset. Like, what-if-you-had-died-before-we-talked-about-this upset. I got that sinking stomach thing right away and started screaming that I was an orphan as of right now, this very second, no longer a member of my very own nuclear family just because I’m a big gay, fated to a Christmas alone with afternoon movies and Chinese takeout.

It was a hard weekend. A— and I were still freaked out about the wreck. We weren’t farther than arms-length away from each other for three days. When she was in bathroom I waited outside the door just in case she got sucked into the toilet. But it wasn’t just the whole near-death thing that freaked us out. It was the conversation I would soon have to have with my mom, a conversation I would rather have with my cellmate than my mother, a conversation A— also hadn’t had with her mother yet, a conversation that would make everything real. Alas, I like my mother and was still on her insurance, so I at was also a conversation that had to happen. I avoided her pleading messages until we got back from the beach and popped a few of the completely unnecessary pain killers and drank a few completely necessary beers and sat on my porch with A—, holding her hand like we were trying not to get torn apart by a tornado. The conversation went exactly like this:

Me: Who told you, my brother or my sister?

Mazog: No one. You’re father has gaydar.

And while I do think that my father’s gaydar is probably better than average because he kind of walks on his tiptoes, I suspect the big giveaway was less my hair cut and more the way A— and I interacted with each other. I had taken A— to my parents’ house one afternoon to borrow their canoe. I hadn’t done this with any of my other friends. All my parents knew about most of my friends was that they littered cigarette butts on my front porch and wiped with coffee filters because we never had any toilet paper at my house. But it wasn’t just that. It was the way we were with each other. Not touchy and not fawning and not overtly together, but still together, like there was a string that connected us and only us. The string, of course, broke. But I’m still gay. That’s not going to break.

And so, welcome to the family, VG. Frank and Betty will get over it when they meet me.

I have to cross my legs every time I sneeze so I won’t pee on myself.  I’m not leaving the house today because I accidentally drank four cups of laxative tea last night because I lost my glasses and the box was right next to Sleepytime.  My mom once pasted the following phrase that I had just cut from an email: “My girlfriend and I bid on one of Ani’s used tampons on eBay.”  The point is, it takes a lot to embarrass me.  I am such a dumb fuck that if I were a sensitive dumb fuck, I’d be one of those lesbians who wear stretchy pants and eat icing directly out of the can and have a meaningful relationship with Oprah and don’t consider having more than three cats hoarding.  But there was one day this week that challenged my ability to laugh at myself.  We’ll call this one Tuesday.

The morning was bright, hot, and duo-style.  I slept through class and this made me feel kind of terrible but my power to rationalize quickly supplanted guilt and I drank some coffee and drove my new friend/future lover home.  After that, I stopped by work to pick up a paycheck and buy some product.  It was S. Windor’s (of the Pensecola Windsors) first day on the job after a year hiatus, so I helped out and chatted for a bit, even though I wasn’t wearing socks and had wet brain and fuck head and a huge hole in the crotch of my cut-offs.  I got my check and my product and was about to leave when one of my bosses asked me how I was going to pay for the product.  Um, take it out of my paycheck?  Like always?  Turns out I longer get a paycheck from the Unmentioned Former Place of Employment because I had, unknowingly, been laid off.  And that’s cool.  I mean, I liked the shop and all the employees and that one crushtomer almost to the point of looking forward to work, but I’d been putting in all of four hours a week, so even though it sucks, it’s also not a bad spray tan or anything.  But that is a really uncool way to let someone go.  I’m sure it was less a malicious fuck up and more a communication fuck up, but the ungraceful manner of my dismissal drove me to tears, which is pretty difficult to do considering I don’t have tear ducts and/or feelings.  But, like I said before, after the number of times I’ve been fired, I look at getting laid off as a back-handed compliment.  I’ll get over it.  Eventually.

I then headed to the Chateau to bitch to Lady Mantranny and drink Bud Light and banter via text with a stranger in Austin who I want to gay marry after receiving the following messausage: I’ma woo you, bitch. A few hours and Bud Lights later, I went to the bar.  I was only going to be there for a Lima Bean or two and head home to shower off the shea butter and forge recommendation letters, but then a dear friend I haven’t seen since fucking her over in a really unfunny way walked into the bar.  We didn’t talk at first, but I had nerves like a Jonas on her wedding night, so it was chilled Stoli for my gray matter.  Eventually, my dear friend and I hugged it out and my tear ducts started working again.  And, as if crying in a bar isn’t embarrassing enough, the following occurred: for the first time in my drinking life, I vommed in a bar.  I then had to be convinced not to drive my car and/or ride my bike home (both of which were and are still are parked outside the bar), and was escorted home by a former and favorite co-worker and my new friend/future lover.  I’m pretty sure I didn’t vom in the car, but I did discover vom on the lap of my jeans when I woke up the next morning, so you never know.  This was all while the Carrboro sun with still round and yellow and perched in the sky.  Embarrassing, yes, but what are your teens, 20s, and 30s for if not a little public humiliation?  I mean, fuck, I’d just been fired.

And, yes, I recognize that I’ve been waxing and whining about jobs for a while now.  Why not just get a job and stop living off the generosity of North Carolina tax-payers, right?  What’s so great about not having a reason to get up in the morning?  The truth is—nothing.  Unemployment is boring.  But following rules beyond such OCD-imposed ones like Do Not Sit On Antique Furniture and Never Eat In Public is unpalatable like anal bleeding is unpalatable.  And because I have an unfounded faith that I don’t have to worry about boob sag because gravity doesn’t effect me, and also that I don’t have to work hard because I am immune to such things and poverty and Alzheimer’s and the second coming, I am secretly and not-so-secretly convinced that this blog is my ticket out of a working life, that if only the right person sees this and recognizes my genius use of malapropisms, I will be swooped up to the land of silk and sunny.

But even if that did happen, even if I made a few hardbacks shitting words and rainbows, I’d have to get a gender-neutral moniker and a day job as a sandwich artist just to keep my real life and my writing life completely hidden from Mazog and Pazog.  Is it crazy not to want your 60-year-old mother to read about that time you hooked up in the Christmas tree farm across from the bar and went to brunch with your friend in her mom the next morning covered in saw dust?  Do you want your dad to realize that the first hit when Googling the term “dickthroat” is your blog?  No one wants that blush to cross the parental palette.

Here’s the thing: the shit that enters my head and falls from my mouth is because I am a 26-year-old shorter version of my father.  My dad is most politically incorrect liberal white male I know.  When my parents confronted me about my taco-bumping ways, my mom’s only concern was that I was somehow hurt by my dad’s frequent use of derogatory terms to describe homos and fags, like I’m some kind of a pansy.  My father is such an adept liar that I thought that my grandparents’ dachshund Willy the Elder was my uncle until I was nine and that my dad was a Rolling Stone until I was eleven.  Take the following reviews of my father as professor culled from Rate My Professor:

this class is pretty interesting. but i think he makes a lot of the material up himself.

I will never forget the pubic hair survey or the 1910 dildo he brought into class! Hilarious and smart!

he knows his stuff. if your easily offended by cursing and blunt sex phrases, stay away. He likes to throw the word G**D*** around too. thats not cool with me but…he’s a good teacher

He is a awesome professor. He knows his sex facts!

See the problem?  My muddy mind was written in my DNA, and yet, the parental revelation of my musings is one kind of public humiliation I just can’t get down with.

During my semi-annual car bathing today, I balanced my wet Hooter’s tee shirt and short shorts with a little NPR.  Terry Gross was interviewing a novelist named Ayelet Waldman, who just published a memoir called Bad Mother, a title that refers to some pretty unchristian criticism she received after publishing an essay in the New York Times with the following statement:

If a good mother is one who loves her child more than anyone else in the world, I am not a good mother. I am in fact a bad mother. I love my husband more than I love my children.

Whoa.  Lady Waldman may be the only mom since Mary-Mother-of-Jesus to admit that sort of Hallmark-kiling sacriledge, and she was married to God.  My mother, however, loves me more than anyone else in the world, which I know because she sends me texts like, i <3 u bestst 4 eva., so Lady Waldman’s discount mothering isn’t really something I can relate too, nor what I really want to talk about.

But Mz Waldman’s memoir isn’t just about hating her spawn.  It’s also about sex.  Specifically, the anticipation of her children reaching that parent-dreaded period of early sexuality.  At 14, her oldest daughter is precisely the same age the author was when she dropped her pimento.  Ignoring that slightly disturbing fact—disturbing, at least, to a late bloomer still waiting for those buds to bud—Mother Of The Year Waldman has a good 21st century attitude about sex and discussing it with her young’uns.  When relating the unfortunate tale of her unfortunate hymen-breakage to her daughter, her advice was to not go into a room with a 21-year-old Israeli soldier with a drinking problem and a boner, which seems like a good idea to me. (Apologies for the anti-semetic implications here.  I’m not anti-semetic but I do have a fear of the awkward hand gestures used to bridge language barriers.  And boners.)

After the interview ended and NPR returned to the usual communist/botanist/astronomist propaganda, I cleaned my cigarette lighter with a Q Tip and Windex and pondered that thorniest of horniest issues: sex and kiddie….

My parents told my sister and I about the whole bio-ween/vagine thing when we were relatively young.  And when I say “told,” I mean they gave us a book called Where Do I Come From? after B– said “stop sexing me” after our mom gave hugged her.  The book was cute.  Sperm were dapper in top hats and tuxes, eggs matronly and welcoming in aprons and bonnnets—the kind of cells you would want to catch lightning bugs with.  Where Do I Come From included such insight as, “If sex is so much fun, why don’t we do it all the time?  Well, because sex takes a lot of work.  Jumping rope is fun but you couldn’t do it all day, could you?”  This particular statement was proved problematic after I told my gym teacher that I didn’t want to jump rope because I was tired and you can’t have sex all day.

Sex wasn’t really something I discussed with anyone in my family, which is sort of surprising considering that my father taught Human Sexuality and regularly enlisted my siblings and I to help him grade quizzes on autoeroticism and self-flaggelation.  He is also the proud owner of a New Guinea penis sheath, a vibrator from the ’20s, and a penis pump once reportedly owned by Rodney Dangerfield.  Even though we are progressive folk, the kind of folk who are more likely to get a letter of recommendation from Sinead O’Connor than the Pope, sex in my younger years was only discussed when promient God-fearing d-bags got busted for some man-of-the-cloth/altar boy action in the confessional at the local diocese.

I haven’t gotten any more comfortable talking about sex with my folks, no matter my age.  I think it’s great that some mothers advise their daughters on keeping the maritial bed busy when the kids are asleep, but that will never be me.  At this very moment, for instance, I’m sitting in my parents’ living room while they’re watching Law & Order.  The victim of this particular drama is a high school sophomore who’s into sending photos of her naked self to her mans via cell phone.  And even though I’m 25 and I’m in graduate school and I live alone and I got my oil changed and my car inspected today, my mom just leaned over to ask if I’ve ever heard of “sexting,” and I am now fighting the urge to flee from the room as fast as a tween to a Jonas.  The mere acknowledgment that sex exists when I am in the same air space as my parents makes me feel like I’m ten years old and Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze are doing that thing with the clay and the wheel and I am so embarrassed that I would rather tell my third grade teacher Mrs. Sheapard that I love her (which I do) than sit here for another goddamn second.

Yes, I am perfectly happy to tell the Internet that I have only a vague idea of how many people I’ve slept with because my definition of sex changes to suit my needs at any given time, but the idea that my parents realize that I have been and may currently be a sexually active person induces the sort of panic other people feel when stuck between Rick Warren and a Twinkie.  Ignoring the things that make me uncomfortable (swine flu, for instance, and Ohio) is one of my more refined attributes, so it’s easy enough for me to maintain the illusion of my parents’ ignorance.  That is, until my mom discretely places a dozen Gardisil pamphlets in my bathroom.

But it’s not just talking about sex with ma and pa that makes me feel like a Mexican jumping bean.  It’s also the gay thing, and this is especially weird because the vast majority of my tongue kalestenics come via the discussion of gay people, gay music, gay jobs, and gay hair.  But every time my mom asks if I’ve been keeping up with the WNBA, I hate that little gay gene and it’s blonde tips inside of me as much as Larry Craig hates the foot-rubbing bottom inside him.  It’s not like my parents even give a fuck that I’m homo.  In fact, I bet they prayed to the Flying Spaghetti Monster that at least one of the twins would be either black or gay.  I mean, what’s better than having a gay daughter to a couple of left-wingers?  A gay son, of course, but a dyke will do as long as there are a couple of Asian babies in a Prius somewhere in my future.  Shit, I didn’t even come out to my parents—they came out to me.  When I asked who told them, my mother said, “No one.  Your father has gaydar.”  And yet, every time my mom suggests we watch Boys On the Side, my gay ass knows the hometown reprieve has come to an end.

Oh, fuck.  Lil Kim is on Dancing With The Stars. I gotta get out of here.

I did this Q & A thing with a DC blogger yesterday. It brought up up some unpleasant memories (No. 6) and forced me to contemplate my cultural identity (No. 3) as well as our crisis du jour (No. 1)….

Small Talk!

When Betsy and I were about seven, our dad walked into the kitchen while we were enjoying buckwheat pancakes one summer morning and yelled, “Guess what?  There’s no Santa!  And there’s no Jesus!”

The magic ended right there.