Ham (31 page)

The bell rang and it was time for school.

•  •  •

The next two hours were unaccounted for as I showed up in body only for my first classes. I entered McDowell's classroom for third period. He gave me a nod that acknowledged I hadn't imagined our talk.

After roll was called, McDowell told us to put away our books. He was leaving the planned curriculum and was going to talk about something else. He took to the floor like Clarence Darrow and lectured on prejudice and hate. He spoke of America's perception of blacks and how it has too slowly evolved through education and legislature. He talked about the treatment of American Indians and the unfair stereotypes we'd placed on them. He talked about Hitler and anti-Semitism. He talked about using religion as a platform for judgment.

I didn't raise my hand or participate. It was a demonstration that I knew was for my benefit, and perhaps the kindest thing anyone had ever done for me. Then, in the last fifteen minutes of class, McDowell strode to the blackboard and wrote in enormous block letters, clicking and clacking: BLACK, INDIAN, JEW, HOMOSEXUAL.

“Which one of these people would you
least
want to live next door to?”

There was one black student and a couple of “Indians” in class who were surely startled by the brazen question. McDowell pointed to the person sitting in the front far left row of desks.

“You start.”

“I don't know . . . a homosexual, I guess.”

“Why?”

“Because it's against God.”

McDowell pointed to the person at the next desk.

“A homosexual.”

And the next.

“A gay.”

“Homosexual.”

“A Jew.”

“Why?”

“Because you can't always identify them and they're sneaky.”

“A fag.”

“A queer.”

“A homosexual.”

“I don't care who lives next door to me.”

“Queer.”

“Queer.”

“Why?”

“Because they're not real men or real women.”

“Because they're evil.”

“They molest children.”

“Because God hates them.”

But for the single Nazi and abstainer, it was a landslide.

McDowell then asked, “Do you know any gay people, personally?”

“Well, no.”

“Not that I know of.”

“Oooh, gross.”

“Then how do you know what you're talking about?” he asked. “Did you know that ten percent of the population is gay? That means ten percent of your friends, your neighbors, your families. That means three people in
this
classroom.”

Everyone looked around suspiciously. I did the same, feigning bewilderment and secretly wondering who the other two might be.

“And none of you have been adversely affected or threatened by a gay person, am I right?” he continued.

The class fell silent for a moment and then McDowell resumed the exercise. The responses remained the same.

“A homosexual. Sorry. It's weird.”

“Queer . . . It ain't natural. I don't need to know one to know it ain't right.”

I wanted the black kid and the Indians to leave the room so at least I had a fair shake. My desk was situated fourth row in, halfway up the aisle. As McDowell continued to question, desk by desk, row by row, I grew more and more afraid. What did he want me to do? Choose another minority to live next door to? Be honest? Say I knew gay people? Say I was one? Was all of his empathy and goodness just a trick meant to set me up and destroy me, publicly, like some kind of witch hunt? Or was it part of his plan for me to disclose my true identity while he was present in order to protect me from the angry mob?

“A homosexual.”

“I'd keep a close eye and a cocked gun.”

As the questioning etched its way to my seat, I knew I didn't need to be polled—the sweat pouring down my pekid face was enough evidence to convict me. My eyes darted to the clock every few seconds. Class was almost over, but there were only two people ahead of me. I imagined a fuse spitting like a Fourth of July sparkler, making its way to a cluster of dynamite named Sam.

“If I have to choose . . . I guess a gay person.”

“Queer.”

I was next up. McDowell began talking. Something about ignorance. Something about responsibility. Something about unqualified hate. But I couldn't concentrate on what he was saying because I was trying to figure out what I was going to say myself. And then the bell rang. His timing was planned. A bit torturous, but planned. As the class poured out into the hallway, I held back for a private exchange to understand his purpose.

“I told you,” he said. “Ignorance. Fear. Also, some people are assholes.”

•  •  •

A few weeks later, I got the call from Opryland. In addition to the season at the park, they wanted to shoot a television special and take the company to Hawaii for a corporate performance. Rehearsal would begin in a couple of months. I asked if Scott had been asked. Yes.

My parents had known that I would more than likely go away again for the summer, but this offer would mean quitting high school and leaving Sand Springs and them forever. They knew there was little choice.

I moved back to Nashville and received my high school diploma through correspondence courses. Scott and I shared a one-bedroom apartment and a life together. We kept the Lucy and Ricky beds for show, but unless we had guests, they remained pushed together, joined, like we were.

We may not have held hands in public or even acknowledged our relationship openly among friends, but if this was as good as it would get, it was okay with me.

It wasn't that I'd come to terms with a childless existence. It was just that when I was growing up, fatherhood was simply never part of the possible picture.

Ten years into my relationship with Danny, the parental horizon had completely changed and I was sober. The United States and I had both evolved. All of my natural fatherhood desires that had been sequestered to an out-of-the-way corner of my heart were suddenly ignited and unleashed.

Every Saturday morning, Danny and I went to our neighborhood farmers' market where vendors from all over California set up tented stands on a narrow street, bookended by a latte café and a bicycle shop, to sell organic produce and artisanal goat cheese and herbs and honey and hummus and flowers. Behind the stands is a grassy square with family-packed picnic tables on one side and a Spanish tiled fountain on the other. A punked-out haberdasher is perched within splashing distance. “Old Eddie Dred” sits on a foldout stool behind a worn blanket, spread and strewn with miniature percussion instruments for the kids, and plays the conga while he sings homespun songs about “sunny days at the marketplace” in his scraggy, chapped voice. The smell of fresh pupusas and mango salsa is strong enough to taste. Neighbors shop and congregate, and kids' stained faces tattle of pilfered blueberries.

The place is Eden with a nose ring.

My recurring Saturday-morning fantasy was that Danny and I would take our brand-new baby to that market in a Bugaboo stroller and parade down the single aisle as a part of our family weekend ritual. I would be wearing checkered Bermuda shorts, leather sandals, and aviator sunglasses, and a porkpie hat would conceal my morning bed-head hair, adding to my funky-hipster-tattooed-dad look. We would attempt to shop, but it would be difficult because everyone we encountered would interrupt us to ogle our darling child and remark on the momentous occasion of our exceptional family. We would nod in gratitude, radiating pride, and manage, somehow, to settle on pluots and Casablanca lilies before onlookers began to tread too heavily on our privacy.

Like many couples, straight or gay, Danny and I didn't arrive at the idea of expanding our family at the same time. My desire for a child had grown into a tender ache, to the degree that being around our friends' children became punishing. Danny was concerned about what we would have to give up—our time, our travels, our privilege to spend money on what we wanted, when we wanted. Basically, our free, spontaneous, and fabulous life. Fancy dinner parties and junkets to St. Barts might be replaced by Chuck E. Cheese's and Disney cruises.

“We're happy now,” he argued. “It's all so perfect, why would we want to change it up?” But that was exactly the reason I wanted a child, not because a baby would fill a void or save our marriage or make our lives whole. If our life together was already so big, why not make it bigger? It was like God was knocking on my heart and saying, “You think you know love? You think you know happiness? I am going to give you love and happiness beyond your imagination. Beyond your wildest dreams. Beyond what you know as possible.”

So, what, am I gonna say to God, “Hmm, I'm not sure . . . let me think”?

Danny pointed out that we were in our forties and twenty years older than our parents had been when they started families. I asserted that, while they may have possessed the endless energy of youth, we would bring an economy of energy and sense of maturity and priority that younger parents just don't have.

Like my father before me, my twenties and thirties had been about me—my career, my identity, my drama, my impatience. So had Danny's. If not then, when? But at this point in our lives, I was ready to make it about someone else.

“There is no perfect time,” parents told us. “The perfect time is when you say yes.”

That would be one of the phrases Danny hated.

My simpatico friend, the actress Bridget Moynahan, asked me to be her birth partner after a tumultuous and highly publicized tabloid drama, which took the father, Tom Brady, out of the immediate picture. I said yes before she finished the request. We studied and planned and bonded and doulaed. We watched 1970s videos of au naturel water births with giant, hairy vaginas. We had to bow out of a very serious couples yoga class because we were cracking up silently as we formed heart-shaped tableau stretches, and then fully busted out when our Zen-monotone instructor urged us to “fe-e-el the love flo-o-o-owing between Mo-o-o-mmy and Da-a-a-dy and Ba-a-a-by.”

To maintain her anonymity, when we were in public, I was to call Bridget by her given name, Kathryn. A couple of months before her due date, we went shopping for a crib and a changing table at a particularly pissy baby store, and I mistakenly called her Bridget. For the sake of the saleslady, she asked, “Who's Bridget?” adding a hint of suspicion to her tone.

I took her cue and we both dove in to play out the scene.

“No one,” I said, with guilty innocence.

“So you just can't remember my name?”

“I'm sorry, Kathryn,” I said.

Suddenly emotional, she shouted, “I hope you can remember the baby's name!”

“Please don't get upset. I'm just tired.”

“
You're
tired?! I'm the one lugging this thing around. This is all your fault,” she cried, touching her belly. “I can't believe you did this to me!”

And then she turned on the tears and I comforted her as we headed out, making excuses to the saleslady, and we barely hit the door before exploding in laughter.

When the big day arrived, I experienced the entire momentous birthing process with Bridget from timing contractions through a difficult labor and delivery. It was the most primal, fulfilling, otherworldly happening of my life.

And it only magnified my desire to have my own.

But it takes two. At least it does when you're in a relationship. Danny was suffering for his reticence. Everybody knew he was born to be a father. He had long been known as “the child whisperer,” with kids drawn to him like a
Toy Story
sequel, and the pressure on him was pythonic. I prompted and planted the subject at every opportunity. Comedienne Rosie O'Donnell, who had been advocating that we have kids for about ten years (and who has sixteen or seventeen children of her own), cornered Danny with the question “Do you not see yourself as a dad? Afraid you don't have what it takes?”

Danny sputtered, “No, it's not that, I just—”

“Well, that's the only question,” she lasered in. “If you don't think you're parent material, you don't like kids, you don't think you've got what it takes, you're missing the dad gene, then that's the end of the conversation. But if you do, well, everything else just works out.”

That was another one of the phrases that Danny hated.

When he would voice his concerns, every parent we knew said, over and over, “You just have faith and it works out.
It just works out
 . . .
it just works out
 . . .”

This was followed quickly by “It changes your life—for the better.” Blah blah blah . . .

Or worse: “God doesn't give you what you can't handle,” which is the same phrase people use after a death or fire or cancer. It didn't help.

At one point, Danny was convinced that all parents were members of a secret society with required, join-the-club phrases meant to scam others into parenthood so they would not be alone in their wretched misery. Parents would stare at us with a vacant twinkle and say, “It just works out,” as if they'd been universally prepped at a murder trial. It didn't seem reality-based to Danny. He wanted someone to say, “Run for your life, schmuck!” But no one did. I supposed anyone who might have said that had already run.

Danny needed time, and not on my oddly ticking biological clock. Not technically, anyway. I didn't want to bully or threaten him, so we sought therapy to get the advice of an outside, nonpartisan, unbiased, completely and thoroughly objective couples expert who would tell Danny he was wrong.

I knew I was making headway when baby room possibilities began to sprinkle into our conversation. The obvious choice was to convert my home office, a large room with a lot of light and a walk-in closet. This meant Danny would have to share his office with me. As an alternative, he suggested we convert the small bathroom to a baby room.