Does This Baby Make Me Look Straight?: Confessions of a Gay Dad (6 page)

Suddenly, the bathroom door opened and I jumped out of my skin as a short, redheaded girl named Loryn emerged.

“Nobody go in there if you don’t want to die.” Loryn thought this was hilarious.

I took it literally. “Oh, no thanks. I don’t have to go,” I said. But what I
thought
was
I don’t want to die! I don’t want to die!

Loryn and Samantha started laughing hysterically. “That was my third dump today!” Loryn bragged as she lit a cigarette, ripping hard on the filter. Samantha introduced her as her homeless friend who’d been staying with her for a while. I remembered hearing about Loryn a few phone calls back. She had come into Samantha’s life and basically offered herself as a personal assistant in exchange for a place to stay. Leave it to Samantha, that resourceful young schemer, to wind up with a pro bono handmaiden. Yes, I was bitter about the broken promises and forged medical documents. But I also knew she was making the best out of the limited resources she had. After all, she was taking care of a three-year-old. I just couldn’t figure out how she was doing it. Where on earth did Loryn sleep? The room was small. One double bed on one wall and a kitchenette on the other. How were both girls and three-year-old Tye all staying there together? I asked.

“I know, right? And Billy sometimes too.” Samantha laughed. Great. Her boyfriend and the alleged father of her baby stayed there as well! Super! My mind was racing. Shouldn’t I try and get a medical history from the boyfriend too? What was his blood type? Did he have chicken pox as a kid? Flat feet? Was there mental illness, disease, or obesity in his family? Wouldn’t hurt to know all that. If he was going to be around a lot, she could ask him! Wait a minute. Were they having sex here too? Of course I knew straight couples have sex throughout pregnancies. But the thought of her drugdealer
boyfriend taking her to Pound Town in front of our potential child was, let’s just say, out of my comfort zone.

“Where is Billy now?” I asked, trying not to sound nervous.

“At work,” Samantha answered a little too quickly. Work? I had a flash of her boyfriend in a busy office somewhere with a receptionist answering wildly flashing phones. “You’ve reached Tweak Time, please hold. Tweak Time, hold please. Tweak Time? . . . No, Billy’s doing another line at the moment, can I take a message?” I knew not to ask any more questions.

Don quickly moved into cleaning mode. “Do you have everything you need, sweetie? Maybe we should make a Target run.” There is nothing Don loves more than going to Target, filling a shopping cart with mops and towels and sprays and polishes, and taking on a huge cleaning project. And that’s exactly what we did. Eventually. But first things first:

“We should get to Quest before they close,” I said. There was no way we would miss this appointment. Even if it killed me. And it probably would. Or Billy would. Or Loryn. Or more likely I’d die of a heart attack from the stress.

We all piled into the rental car and drove along this strange, industrial part of Las Vegas I never knew existed. We finally pulled into a large brown cement building with an enormous QUEST sign on top. From the look of the sign, you’d think there were dancing girls and video poker inside the building. The parking lot was huge. Clearly, blood tests were in hot demand in this part of the world.

I walked with Samantha up to the first available window (there were eight) and helped her with the paperwork. Finally
she was called and I watched as she was taken into one of the lab rooms. Confident that she couldn’t weasel out of the test again, I joined Don and Loryn outside for about fifteen minutes, waiting for Samantha to emerge from the building.

Samantha came out and lit a cigarette. It was done. I breathed a huge sigh of relief. No matter what happened now, that blood was safely in a tube awaiting analysis. It felt like the entire future of my family was inside that tube.

Don and I knew we wouldn’t hear the results of the blood test for a few days, so there was nothing for us to do now but wait. It was awkward with Samantha. On the one hand, we wanted to go home right then and there. On the other hand, this young woman and her gal Friday/friend/accomplice had so little, we didn’t want to leave them without giving them a hot meal, some supplies, and a quick dry-mop. We both wanted to make our visit about more than testing Samantha’s blood. So there was only one logical thing to do: we went to Olive Garden.

We were being seated at a booth just a few yards from the pasta buffet. A basket of breadsticks and rolls immediately arrived on the table. Loryn emptied the basket into her purse. “Anyone mind?” We shook our heads. Don asked for another basket, and this time, Samantha pocketed the loot. She then slid out of the booth and headed outside for a cigarette. Don told Loryn to hang back and wait with him to order some appetizers as he signaled for me to go after Samantha and keep her company. Which I did.

I got outside and bummed one of Samantha’s cigarettes. It had been a while since I’d smoked. The Newport 100’s
Menthol burned my lungs—and possibly every other one of my internal organs. But I rallied. The smoking ritual really helped cut the tension, which was already thick.

“I’ve never been to Olive Garden before,” I said. Samantha looked at me. She was quiet. She took another drag off her cigarette and exhaled. “You know, secondhand meth smoke can sometimes show in the blood.”

“What?” I asked. But I’d heard her. Crystal clear, so to speak. This was her way of admitting she’d been using drugs. Whatever attachment I still had to Samantha, my belief that she was our ticket to becoming parents was now hopelessly broken.

“I tried to tell Billy not to be tweakin’ around me and Tye, but he doesn’t always listen.”

I nodded. What does one say to that? “Oh, men,” I said weakly. We went back inside. We ate. I tried to tell Don
It’s over
with my eyes. But it wasn’t until we were alone in the car, after we’d stopped at Target for supplies and gone back to the “suite” to help tidy up, that we finally said goodbye to Samantha.

Don and I had missed the last flight back to Los Angeles. I pulled into the Stratosphere, where I was able to get us a sixty-nine-dollar room for the night. It was depressing. We lay in bed, wide awake, the prospect of becoming fathers so much farther away than when we’d arrived. I wanted to cry. Sad from the loss, yes, but also sad that we felt such relief.

Two days later, we heard from the doctor that her blood tested positive for methamphetamine. Duh. Two days after that we called Samantha. We got her voicemail. Don left her a message:

“Samantha, it’s Don. Look, we heard about the blood test results. And we want you to know that we really care about you and want only good things for you and Tye. But with all of the deception and miscommunications and now the blood test—this isn’t the way Danny and I want to start our family. We hope you understand. We will always wish only the best for you and Tye.”

I sighed deeply. Now it really was over. I was overcome with emotion, wondering if we had just walked away from our last opportunity at fatherhood. While we felt enormous relief on the one hand, it was tinged with the fear that we just weren’t tough enough to handle how difficult it really is to start a family.

Two months later we got the call from Monica, the woman who would become the birth mother of our two kids. Four months after that, Don got an email from Samantha, who wanted him to know that she was doing well and that her baby boy wound up with a couple of nice guys from San Diego. We were so glad. Some of these girls are really committed to the gays. I guess good grooming habits and a taste for Broadway musicals aren’t the only advantage.

I’m not that spiritual a person. But I do believe the universe has a curiously powerful way of working in concert with fate or destiny or whatever to put people where they’re supposed to be. Or if it’s not predestined, then let’s just say life has a way of forcing us to push past our fear—and the burning of a menthol cigarette and the smell of some homeless handmaiden’s poop—to give us the strength and clarity to allow a
new
opportunity to become the
right
one. And you know, Nurse Vicki’s son’s sci-fi script? It wasn’t half-bad.

W
e’re in the waiting room of our ob-gyn in November of 2004. Don and I are so eager to find out the sex of our first child we can hardly sit. But we do, sandwiched with our birth mom, Monica, in a room filled with pregnant women and no other men. I’m nervous. So is she. She’s chewed up most of the French manicure we treated her to a few days ago. She stands up and looks at me. “Do we have time?” she asks me. Don stays to fill out paperwork while I take her outside. I notice how much she’s actually showing when we get to the curb for her quarter-hour cigarette break. Several people give her dirty looks as she lights up. She knows full well why she’s getting this rebel attention. She loves it. She’s on her third drag when Don calls me on my cell. She rolls her eyes and puts the cigarette out on the arm of her jacket, pocketing the “halfie” for later.

Don and I stand next to each other, staring at the ultrasound machine while our doctor rubs the sensor over her belly. We hear that echoey, futuristic, submarine-sounding heartbeat and my eyes well up. The sound is so reflective of how I’m feeling:
wow-wow-wow-wow-wow. Holy shit!
I think,
There really is a baby in there?
The doctor turns to Monica.
“You want to know the sex?” She looks up at us. “Ask them. They’re the ones you gotta ask.” We nod. It’s a girl.

We were so excited. A girl! It was going to be so much fun! Girls seemed, at least to us, the better option for first-time parents. We assumed they’d be easier and sweeter and less likely to want us to play something horrible with them like football or smear-the-queer. Girls would be—well, more girly. I was down with that. I was already a bit on the girly side, and Don? Forget it. A kid asks him to play ball and he’s likely to say, “Only if I get to be Cinderella!” With a girl, we’d get to shop for dresses and play with Barbies and twist her hair into different braids and buns and do’s. Girls were made of sugar and spice and everything nice. But as it turns out there was one thing girls have that we were less experienced with. That would be the, you know, “down there” area.

Let me be clear: I’ve never been one of those gays who have anything against vaginas per se. I was just never particularly interested in them. Seeing them. Touching them. I didn’t ever really get them. I mean, one or two, maybe. But it was just a phase because I just didn’t
get
them. So many intricate folds. Canals. Wrinkles. So many places to get lost or get things lost in. Even as a kid, a girl’s “down there” was just plain baffling.

When I was seven Natalie Rovner and I had a sleepover campout one summer in her backyard. She convinced me to show her my penis and I’d get to see her vagina. I would “get to,” her exact words. It was supposed to be the big incentive for exposing my junk. I say Natalie made out like a bandit in the deal. I remember thinking,
Geez. Couldn’t I see her vagina
and
also get a Snickers?
But I knew I was supposed
to care, so my pants were around my ankles before she could say, “Don’t ever tell a soul.” I flashed her. She flashed me. I zipped up my pants and my sleeping bag and went to sleep. I immediately felt guilty. At the time I thought I’d done something horribly wrong.

But in hindsight, I think my guilt had more to do with knowing I was supposed to relish the opportunity to see Natalie’s vajayjay and I so didn’t. Something was wrong with me. Clearly. I was ashamed at my inability to pray at the altar of Miss Mary’s snatch. Natalie could’ve offered to show me a frog and I’d have been more excited. And I was scared of frogs. As it turns out, I was much more scared of beavers.

As I hit puberty, my relationship to the female anatomy got even more complicated. I remember when I was twelve or thirteen my best friend Philip and I would get our parents to let us go from the suburbs into New York City alone on the train to have lunch or see a movie or whatever. Well. I don’t know what my parents thought “whatever” was, but I can tell you it was all about getting the newsstand guys to sell us porn.

We planned each trip with precision and detail—the way one might pull off a heist at, say, Van Cleef & Arpels, complete with fake IDs and disguises. Philip would wear a hat. I’d wear a jacket and tie. And smoke. Well, I’d try. I’d pull a few half butts out of the ashtray of my dad’s Buick Skylark and save them for such missions. According to our plan, we’d try and get the newsstand guys to think we were commuters:
Oh, here come a couple of Dapper Dans just off work at the firm and on their way to Grand Central to catch the 7:25 back home to their wives
. I looked thirteen well into my twenties; when
I was thirteen, I looked nine. I was short. Had rosy cheeks. Lots of freckles. Philip looked maybe a year older but he had braces, the perfect touch—if we wanted to look like we were on our way to our bar mitzvahs. We thought we looked at least twenty.

Suffice it to say, we
always
got the porn. I’m sure the vendors laughed, but hey, a sale is a sale, right? Not only that, but we’d often stop at the Grey Car Lounge at Grand Central Station for a cocktail before we boarded our train home to our “wives.” I’m sure we were completely inconspicuous: two pubescent nerds in hats and jackets ordering Amaretto Sours with extra cherries. Yeah, right.

It was on one of these secret missions to New York where I got my first close-up view of an actual lady vagina. And I’m not talking about some “tasteful” arty spread in
Playboy
with their modesty poses and dainty trimming. No. These publications, like one called
ClimaXXX
, were considered hard-core, so the women were always spread-eagle, with long painted fingernails helping to lead the way. And naked guys too . . . which was clearly the
real
motivation behind the pleading looks to vendors on these long, convoluted treks into the city.