I’ve Written a Letter to Daddy…..

Baby Jane Hudson, 1964

I have heard for years about writing a letter from my younger self as a means of catheterizing the slowly oozing wounds of childhood that seep forward to infect adult life.  All well and good except that when I try and think about what to actually say from the undeveloped, infantile, hurting, little boy that I was, I come back to the same conclusion; I need to decipher who I am as an adult first.  The adult that was formed and fed by the damaged boy I grew from.

And so, I will flip this suggested narrative and speak to that young boy through the ages and lenses that time has imbued me with and, in the process, maybe I’ll uncover some truths about the me of now as well.  We shall see.

Hey, you!  Kid. Listen up.

As I look back, it sometimes feels as if I am in the Hitchcock movie “Vertigo” with the innovative (at the time) telescoping film technique (Dolly Zoom) that was meant to visually describe Stewart’s extreme vertigo. From this vantage point of a great many years passed, it feels daunting to drop into the vortex and hope that I can identify the pinpricks of truth and insight that would have greatly benefitted you, then, and might, just might, assist me in untangling the webs of time that have clogged my heart and soul for too long now.

So, let’s begin.

I wanted to talk to you about fear.  The fear you felt as a very young boy, fear of your parents, individually and as a collective force.  Not physical fear so much as an emotional smackdown that all too often took you by surprise.  It did feel physical to you though, as well.  That gnawing pit of fear in your stomach that consumed you from the inside as you waited for that verbal hammer to fall, again and again, was physical. It always left you depleted when it was over and lessened in a way that you realized even then would come back, sooner than later, and jerk your insides into turmoil all over. The Groundhog Day, a movie you have yet to see but that you will revile forever forward. Resistance was futile.

You were five years old.

I really believe that had you known it, this was about where your emotional life turned on a dime and you would never be the same.  This was when you started school, kindergarten.  The omens were so overt as to be a text in a witch’s handbook of spells.  As you were waiting, excited, on the front porch for the bus to rumble down the country lane for your very first day of school, your father was waving goodbye from his car in the drive.  Your mother was holding your hand.  Then as you both watched him put the car in gear and back out of the drive, you also watched him run over your beloved dog, Maggie, in front of your eyes.

Her cries were horrific.  A suffering animal was your worst nightmare.  They scooped her up and rushed her away to the vet, both of them.  She was injured but went on to live a long, much-loved life. You were left to board the bus to school, alone, and go through your entire first day of school sobbing for your dog you thought had been killed.

Sorry you, the neglect and insensitivity started early.

Adding another element to the tragicomedy of your young life was the narrative, forever unanswered, as to where your sister is in all this? Honestly this is a major problem.  She was, and is, ten years older than you, forever.  You were both in the same school, granted she, at 15, was a sophomore? In a separate building but yet, based on your childhood hysteria of this your first day of school, wouldn’t the school have gone and gotten her, at least, to come comfort you? There was no recall any interaction with her then, or after.  

What did happen was your teacher, Miss Graham, took you to the old library building, a former Quaker Meeting House in the woods next to the elementary school. Looking back, the memories I have as an adult involve you in this ancient library, the smell of the dusty books, the creak of the old hand-hewn wooden floors.  It was a comfort all of your childhood and maybe it sprung from that day, in 1957, when you spent the morning sobbing in the children’s section waiting for something, someone, anyone. 

This, young man, set the tone for the rest of your fractured educational journey.

In your life you will attend five schools before you are a senior.  Most will be great institutions but ones that you will only alight in for a short time. Your bad behavior will play a role, but your mother will hold a larger-than-life presence here. She actually will start and expand a school that you will remain in until ninth grade.  You will have eight children in your class.  Your mother is the principal.  You will have to ride home with her every day of your childhood, many times after being sent to the principal’s office and waiting on “the chair” in the hallway for all the other kids to see.

This life will cower you, almost permanently

I will tell you right now that kindergarten seems to have been the Rubicon that you will have to hurdle in order to take your first steps into personhood.  That same year your mother, an educator, politician, and self-made women of the prewar era, took another step that would inform literally the rest of your life. She went to that same kindergarten teacher, Miss Graham, and asked her if she thought you were gay.

Now gay wasn’t a common term then, I’m sure homosexual was bantered about and to this day and I wonder what that conversation was like.  I also admire, in a polluted, corrupted, way, the courage it will take for her, your mother, in 1957, having lived in D.C. through the Army/McCarthy hearings, to air this washtub full of dirty laundry.  We lived in a small town, in the country.  She told me about this decades later but only the bare bones.

Those bones included the fact that your father is also gay.

This fact will not be revealed to you until your fortieth birthday. The timing, mid lifespan exactly, will leave the adult you, struggling with career, HIV, a new relationship, and life in the 90’s, to absorb and contemplate what might have been.  When it comes, it will be yet another staggering blow of betrayal, one you will regurgitate for the rest of your life. The bifurcation of your life, orchestrated by both of your parents, will resonate throughout the years and I can tell you from where you are now that where you will go with this newfound information will be truly the journey of your life.

Your parents gave you life. Your parents fucked it up as well.

But before you get to turn Forty, you must navigate a world that will explode everything you know and alter you forever forward.  After your mother spends the next dozen years, from five to eighteen, desperately trying to remake the you she created into someone who will not be gay, you will find out anyway. You will cement the installed attractions to guys, men, and use them like pavement on the highway to your freedom.  You will actually never deny your sexuality.  When asked by friends if you are gay, you will simply say “Are you interested or are you taking a survey?” Case stated, quietly with humor, and flipped back to the questioner.

But that quick-witted answer comes after.

After holding the “Secret” so close to your core for all those tumultuous teenage angst-riddled years, you seriously consider, often, what it would be like if you were not here any longer.  You’re now sixteen/seventeen, what we now know to be prime suicide territory for teens and young adults.  But when you get to this point, in1968, the world is exploding, there are no suicide hotlines, no PSA commercial on TV sending you to get help.  You will navigate this abyss alone. 

You will look around your small rural locale and find your best girlfriend down the lane, and she is living the life you want.  Popular, engaged, thriving.  And so, you will model yourself after her.  You will remake your own personality before your eyes. As you transform you know it is only a mask but like Mardi Gras, masks will give you the permission to become anyone you would like to be.  You will leave the dirt of your birthplace and flee to San Franciso. 

It’s 1976.  It is a party.

First it was Heaven.  Then it was Hell.

Just as you will be fine tuning the nascent, adult, gay guy you’d never even conjured in your wildest dreams, the world will shift.  They killed the mayor and Harvey Milk.  The spontaneous tear-streaked vigil will begin at your doorstep, 717 Castro St.  It will be the inaugural year for CNN and your front stoop will be live streamed into every house in America.  Much like earthquakes here in California this event will shake, rattle, and roll your psyche like almost nothing has since the death of JFK.  The tremors will continue through the capture and trial of the murderer, the slap-on-the-hand verdict, the riots.  It will all seem SO personal and devastating.

And then it all changed, again

HIV will creep in on cat’s paws but, paws with claws.  Claws drawn and ready inflict decades of fear, pain, loss, and almost every emotion you can conjure that a human might encounter.  And then some. Your friends and acquaintances will begin to disappear from daily life.  You will not see them strolling the Castro much anymore, if at all, and those you do see will be suddenly gaunt shadows of themselves, on walkers, with friends solicitously helping them navigate.

And then they will only be obits on Star Pharmacy’s wall of shame.

As almost the last of your friends vanishes, your visits to the AIDS ward at SF General will subside.  Frankly you are almost glad, the stress will grow too large for you to handle. You will not be tested, yet.  There are no tests. You already know.  You are next.  You will do what you have done rest in your life, flee.  Run from danger.  But what will you turn towards?  In a little over a decade, you will find yourself back at that crossroads of life and death.  You will run, alone, to the desert.  To die.  It will feel inevitable.  You will not want witnesses.  You will do this alone. You will be terrified that the confidence of the mask you have built will crack and you will want no one to see the agony that you will have seen.  You are tested. Finally.  You knew the results; you will have felt them internally and seen them in all of the friend’s eyes you searched as they lay dying.  There will be no counseling.  No referrals. No treatment that does not kill you as it will have killed every one of your friends. 

Alone Again, Naturally

            Gilbert O’Sullivan 1971

You will be barely thirty when you wake up and realize you must begin again.  Living in God’s Waiting Room out there in the desert will stifle you and you will realize that you will have to live, until you die.  But always with a backup plan for a quick exit should the need arise.  You will think about it, plan it, and obsess at times over having this Suicide Safety Net always ready.  And yet you will move forward, surprisingly.

You will roam around the country, seemingly on whims (really, exactly on whims) until you land in the fetid low country of the south.  You will not know why you end up there; it was not anywhere you intended to be. But in a year or two you meet a guy!  You will be forty years old; he will be five years older.  You will have that infamous conversation with your mother on your fortieth birthday where she outs your father to you.  Still shaking your head from the absurdity of the forty years you will have lived so far you will move, six weeks later, with this guy you just met, even further into some sort of Sordid Lives prequel.

And Your Adventure Begins, Anew

You, the very young you I am speaking to, will find it hard, impossible in fact; to imagine but you will spend the next thirty-five years with this man.  He will support you in every way no one has ever supported you before.  He will carry the load you will often find too much for you alone to manage.  You will craft a series of lives that you both make up from whole cloth, lumber and screws if you will, but lives that others envy, laud, and cite as a model of everything gay.  This will be, must be, your ultimate reward.  The fuck you to everyone along the way who ever doubted.  Especially to the you who will tend to doubt and judge yourself more than the world could ever care to.

Shake my hand, young man

It’s good to know you. You are meeting yourself now but seventy years in the future.  I have the advantage here, I know.  I lived your life and am living it still.  I wish I had had a me back when I was you.  You will do the best you can.  I will do my best to remember and celebrate the you I never really knew but that I inhabited all these decades.  And so, it falls once more to lyrics; songs, touchable moments in your and my history that carry more weight as the years pile on.

I don’t remember losing track of you
You were always dancing in and out of view
I must have thought you’d always be around
Always keeping things real by playing the clown
Now you’re nowhere to be found

I don’t know what happens when people die
I can’t seem to grasp it as hard as I try
It’s like a song I can hear playing right in my ear that I can’t sing
I can’t help listening

And I can’t help feeling stupid standing around
Crying just ain’t gonna ease you down
‘Cause I know that you’d rather we were dancing
Dancing our sorrow away
Right on dancing
There’s nothing you can do about it anyway
Just do the steps that you’ve been shown
By everyone you’ve ever known
Until the dance becomes your very own
No matter how close to yours another’s steps have grown
In the end there is one dance you’ll do alone

Keep a fire for the human race
Let your prayers go drifting into space
You never know what will be coming down
Perhaps a better world is drawing near
Just as easily it could all disappear
Along with whatever meaning you might have found
Don’t let the uncertainty turn you around
Go on and make a joyful sound

Into a dancer you have grown
From a seed somebody else has thrown
Go on ahead and grow some seeds of your own
And somewhere between the time you arrive
And the time you go
May lie a reason you were alive
That you’ll never known

Jackson Browne

  1974