America, You Sexy Bitch (45 page)

I really want Michael’s wife, Martha, to like me. One of the most intriguing things about Michael is what an extremely devoted family man he is. He got married in his mid-twenties, had kids by the time he was thirty, and has been happily married ever since. We have had numerous conversations about love, marriage, and relationships, because really, what else are you going to talk about in an RV for hours on end, and intimate conversations always have a way of circling back to love. It is clear Michael is proud of his wife and the life they have built together. It was the first thing that made me warm up to him: the incredibly endearing way he speaks about his family. In fact, I told him early on he reminded me of a snarky Dick Van Dyke.

For all of Michael’s liberal beliefs and politics, when it comes right down to it, Michael is a pretty conservative family man. He is
living the happy 1950s nuclear family ideal that so seldom exists in 2012—one he did not have growing up.

I am in a constant struggle with what love, marriage, relationships, and children mean to me. I have never been the best at maintaining long-term relationships with men. I value my freedom above most other things in my life. I do love children and find them adorable. That being said, I worry about reconciling my world and my crazy life with someday having a family. I had such an incredible childhood and wonderful experiences growing up that I feel more certain as I get older that I do one day want to have a family. I just can’t really figure out what that would look like or how it would all fit together in my world. As much as I feel like I have found a clear path in my work and the world of politics, and that I am certain of my convictions and the future I want when it comes to love, marriage, and children, my sentiments are alternately murky and complex.

Right now in America, marriage is not something that every citizen has an equal right to. How meaningful can marriage be if only straight people can do it? I do find the idea of marriage romantic, but in the same way that I find great poetry romantic but not necessarily realistic. I cry at weddings and always want the marriages to last forever. In reality, however, more than 50 percent of marriages end in divorce, people still get married strictly for business or social purposes, and, like I said, gay people are denied this right.

I’m conflicted about what marriage means for me and the rest of my generation. We do not have the same pressures generations before us had “to settle down.” Sometimes family and marriage are something I can see happening and really want; at other times I think it could never work with my personality and lifestyle, and I fantasize about spending the rest of my life on the road
Easy Rider
style, riding motorcycles, drinking beer, and wreaking havoc within the Republican Party. I do think about the kind of love and support I derive from my family and the insurmountable role my family plays in my life. My parents and my brothers and sister are a huge, bright light in my life. They all bring so much joy and
comfort to me that I also feel like it would be a shame not to someday have a family myself. Who knows, maybe I can do both and have an
Easy Rider
family or something. I know my feelings are ever evolving, but I also know that Michael had clearer ideas about marriage and family at my age than I do. I mean, Michael met Martha, he knew she was the one, and soon after got married and had two lovely children. Love and relationships just have never been as simple for me as they were for Michael. For me marriage, love, and having a family continue to raise unanswered questions about the kind of future I see myself having.

We continue on the windy roads to Michael’s house; apparently, according to Cousin John, we have in fact found Connecticut. The evening has turned into night. Night has turned into very late night. I am getting really carsick from just absolutely everything. Michael might get to experience me puking all over him during the eleventh hour of our trip. I’m nauseous, hot, and worried that we have entered the Bermuda Triangle and we will all just be stuck in this RV for the rest of eternity. For the record, if I die and end up in purgatory, I am completely certain that the waiting area between heaven and hell is getting lost in this RV with Michael, Stephie, and Cousin John. Yes, I am convinced of that.

“Gumdrop, get me to Redding, please!” I yell towards Cousin John as I lie on my back trying to ebb off nausea.

“Workin’ on it, Gumdrop!” Cousin John knows how to talk to a woman.

 

Michael:
“You’re lost, aren’t you?” Meghan asks. She’s being kind of bitchy because we’ve been in the RV for six hours and she’s hot and probably needs to throw up.

“No!” I lie.

“If you’re lost, just say you’re lost!”

“I’m not lost!” I tell Cousin John to make a right. I have no idea where I am.

Stephie has grown silent, the way Stephie does when she is trying to contain her anger. The only other time I’ve seen her this angry
is when we went to a Pittsburgh Pirates baseball game. After five or six innings, Meghan and I were both bored, but neither of us was willing to call it. Stephie wanted to get back on the road to beat the crowds and kept imploring us to stop being babies and leave. When neither of us was willing to surrender to the other, Stephie finally stormed out of the stadium, leaving us alone.

“Should we call it?” Meghan asked after Stephie’s heated exit.

“You can call it if you want,” I said.

“Fuck you, Black. I’m not calling it.”

We sat there through a drizzle and all nine innings, only leaving when security made us go. Stephie was waiting for us, fuming. We were both kind of ashamed of our behavior, but that’s the price of victory. Freedom doesn’t come free, baby.

Back in the RV, everybody knows I have no idea where I am. “Do you want me to take out the GPS?” Cousin John asks. The GPS has been banished to the glove box for the duration of the trip because Cousin John does not trust it. To have him ask if we should take it out is like George Washington asking if he should surrender to the British. Hell no, we don’t need to take out the goddamned GPS! Damn the torpedoes and full steam ahead!

“Take a left,” I bark.

He turns left, and in a few minutes I recognize a landmark. I don’t know how I did it but I somehow steered us true. I know where we are! We’re at the corner of the Road with That House and Some Other Road with That Other House. I act nonchalant, of course, as if there was never any doubt in my mind. We’re maybe ten minutes away from home. A mile or so later, a police car blocks the road. We slow. The policeman tells us a tree is down.

“Road’s out,” he informs us.

He gives us complicated directions for a detour. Cousin John looks at me.

“You got that?”

“Yep,” I answer.

Three minutes later, we’re lost again. I steer us in circles for miles until we come to another familiar landmark. We are now farther
away than we were at the roadblock, but at least I know where we are.

“Just go straight,” I tell Cousin John.

He does. As we approach the turn-off for my road, there is another police car. Another tree is down. This is insane.

“Road’s out,” the second cop tells us. Again, he gives us directions for the detour. I think Meghan might start screaming. Stephie has grown even more silent, which shouldn’t be possible because earlier she was totally silent. She might actually be
absorbing
sound at this point.

This is going to sound like a lie, but I swear to you: as we get close, we reach a
third
downed tree and a
third
closed road. It’s actually getting kind of funny. I mean, come on, three trees down? That’s funny! Except nobody’s laughing. Even I’m not laughing. It’s not funny.

I could call my wife and ask her for directions from our current location, but that is not going to happen. She already mocks me for never knowing where I am. I would rather perish out here in the wilds of Connecticut with my friends than ask her for help. Not going to happen.

Finally, hours after I said we’d be there, we pull into my driveway. I’m carsick, sweaty, and filthy, but I’m home. We unfold ourselves from the RV and head inside.

“Daddy!” my daughter, Ruthie, yells, running at me from the kitchen. I hug her. She smells like bathwater and shampoo. My son, Elijah, is ten, too cool for long hugs, but he lets me put my arms around him anyway. “Hey, Dad,” he says.

I kiss Martha and usher the rest of our vagabonds into the house. There is much kerfuffle as suitcases are brought upstairs and downstairs, drinks are poured, chitchat made. The kids show me the tarantula and scorpion I sent them from Arizona. Ruthie tells me she was terrified and had to run out of the room when she opened the package. Elijah says the tarantula was no big deal, but I suspect it freaked him out too, which pleases me to no end.

They lead us down into the basement, where they’ve made a giant hand-colored banner that reads WELCOME HOME DADDY, MEGHAN, AND STEPHIE!!! ” Cousin John is not included on the banner. Martha says they spent all day working on it and did not want to add another name when they learned Cousin John was spending the night; he says it’s okay.

Meghan seems a little shell-shocked. I think maybe it’s the whole “I just spent a month living with your husband” thing. Which is understandable, I guess, except that Martha doesn’t give a shit. We’ve been married thirteen years. She trusts me. She knows I would never, ever cheat on her with a hot blonde with big boobs. Never. And, despite my “methinks the lady doth protest too much” act, she’s right.

Once we get the kids to bed, the four of us sit in the living room and trade stories from the road: the strippers in Vegas, Branson, Graceland, the heat, dinner with Meghan’s dad.

“How was it overall?” Martha asks.

Good question. Now that it’s just about done, it’s hard to process what we’ve just been through other than in the broadest generalities.

“It was amazing,” I say.

It’s an easy answer, but incomplete. Yes, the trip was amazing, but what I actually discovered about America was more of a mixed bag. I am, by nature, a cynic. My cynical view on our nation is simple : we’re fucked. Before leaving for the trip. I thought our current fuckedness was a temporary aberration, a cyclical pothole along America’s long and continued prosperous march towards life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But after diving deeper into our problems, I started to realize that America has some serious, perhaps fundamental, troubles.

If you start to talk about healthcare, for example, you have to talk about the poor. If you talk about the poor, you have to talk about jobs. If you talk about jobs, you have to talk about globalization. If you talk about globalization, you have to talk about China
and India and Brazil and overpopulation and income inequity and currency valuation and energy and pretty soon you’re not talking about anything because you’re talking about everything. Each issue is so hopelessly entwined with every other one that they’re like a ball of yarn the cat’s gotten into.

Republicans criticize Obama for his “lack of leadership.” As much as I prefer Obama to them, I think they have a point. America is lacking a coherent mission statement. Who are we right now? What are our aspirations? What are trying to achieve as a nation? Politicians keep talking about a romantic notion of “the American dream.” But what is that dream? Can the American dream be applied, not just to its people, but to America?

We’re at our best when we have common purpose. Usually it takes a tragedy or a war for us to find this common purpose, but it doesn’t need to be that way. Our president, and
all
presidents, should lay out some national purpose that people can rally behind. Public service. Infrastructure. Lowering the deficit. Something, anything.

So many of us voted for President Obama because he promised to unite the country, to move us past a nation of petty bickering. All presidential candidates make similar promises, but millions of people like me thought maybe this guy really could move us beyond the acidic rancor of the W. and Clinton years. He didn’t do that, and in retrospect, it was naïve to hope he could. I don’t fault Obama for not succeeding, but I do fault him for failing to give us a reason to try. Platitudes aren’t enough. We need more than that. And we’re not getting it. From anybody.

As goofy as the idea was, when Newt Gingrich proposed building a moon colony, I found myself thinking,
You know something? That’s a pretty awesome idea.
Not because we need a moon colony but because we need something–anything–to make us feel as if we’re utilizing the best of who and what we are to achieve something great. And also because, let’s face it, we need a moon colony.

When we agreed to write this book, Meghan and I had a simple premise: that Americans have more in common than they don’t, and
that even two near strangers with almost nothing in common could spend a month together talking about politics and still have a great time. We did that, which leads me to my optimism.

One of the great, unresolved philosophical debates in this country is the notion of “American Exceptionalism,” the grandiose idea that the United States holds a special place, not only in the present world, but in all of world history. Generally, Republicans take the concept of American Exceptionalism as a truth, as indelible as the Declaration of Independence. Democrats are a little more wary because they are wary, not of greatness, but of hubris. It’s easy to conflate “exceptional” with “correct,” and I refuse to accept that America is always correct. The “my country right or wrong” crowd always leaves me leery.

But I do believe that America has exceptional qualities, primarily an endless capacity for self-invention and rejuvenation. We are the Lady Gaga of nations. There is something rooted in the American character that lends itself to relentless striving towards betterment, as in “to create a more perfect union.” We are a nation of problem solvers, and it is our capacity for applying creative thinking to seemingly intractable problems that preserves my optimism about my country.