I Came Out for This? (14 page)

Kimba and Bette are sitting here, making me write. They dragged this diary over to the hospital along with my toothbrush and pajamas and dumped it on my lap, telling me it will help keep me sane while I'm here. I'm in the hospital not from not eating, like my mom threatened, but because I crashed the car and I'm lying here all beat up. I can't believe I did it. I never get into accidents. I'm an excellent driver, just like Raymond in
Rain Man
. I think I have gone crazy. I'm afraid I'm going to die after I leave here. Kimba said, “Well, we're all going to die eventually,” and Bette reprimanded her and said, “Don't worry, honey, we won't let you die.” But Bette and Kimba can't be with me every second of the day. They do have to work, after all.

I can't believe it was only this morning that the phone woke me and Wanda, my supervisor, was on the other end, telling me there were two complaints called in about me. One was from the Jewish guy and the other from the army sergeant at the Wyoming. Instead of being contrite I said, “Tough shit.” Wanda told me we would discuss it later and hung up the phone. I was too agitated to keep
sleeping, so I got up and got dressed and walked over to Terri's. She was expressionless when she saw me and the whole time I was visiting she treated me like a magazine saleswoman. She spoke to me in a formal voice and called me “Joanna” instead of “Knadel.” She asked about my car, if I'd gotten the brakes fixed. I said I did, and it cost me $300. She asked me how my job was going and I lied and said it was going okay, and then we didn't have anything more to talk about, but I just kept sitting there. I was feeling so hurt and desperate that I blurted out, “Why don't we get married?” and it was supposed to be kind of a joke, but she got annoyed and said coldly, “That's not in the plans.” Pretty soon after that I got up in defeat, and she ushered me out of her apartment.

I walked home stiffly, feeling like a very old woman, and trudged up the steps and went into the house, and there was a package from my mom in the mail pile. She had told me she was sending me an anthology of Cleveland Orchestra performances conducted by the great George Szell. She was so excited about it. Seeing the box gave me a little lift, a feeling of being loved. I remembered that I needed some milk, so I ran across the street to the store, and when I returned ten minutes later, the package was gone. I started charging through the house, demanding to know if anyone knew where it was. I ran up the stairs and some thugs walked out of Jerome's room and I asked them if they had seen my package and they looked away from me and one of them said, “I don't even know what you're talking about,” and I figured that one of them had it hidden in his baggy pants, but there was nothing I could do and they trotted down the stairs.
Then I went on a rampage, screaming at everyone in the hall that I was sick of people stealing credit cards and stealing food from the refrigerator and now somebody ripped off my fucking CDs and I'm going to kick their fucking ass, and I kicked the walls a few times and then I grabbed a lamp that was sitting on a table in the hall and threw it across the hall and it broke. Then I decided that I would find those thugs who took my CDs and follow them to see where they tried to sell them and I stormed out of the house and sped down T Street, and a woman was crossing the street and I saw her too late and cut the wheel and crashed into a fireplug. My head hit the dashboard and my chest went into the steering wheel and now I'm lying in Howard University Hospital with broken ribs and my face looking like Times Square and my car is all crashed up, but I'm tanked up on Demerol, so I don't care. In fact, I'm surprisingly chipper for someone who just had a car accident. I wouldn't mind staying here for a few weeks, or even a few months. What's not to like? They even gave me my own room.

I can't believe what a loser I turned out to be. This wasn't supposed to happen to me. I was an
enfant terrible
reaching for the brass ring. And now look at me! Almost fifty years old, living in a rooming house with nuts and weirdos, practically broke, with nobody to love me. Lying in a hospital after going berserk and crashing the car. I'm like one of those scraggly women people take out to lunch and talk to them about how to get their lives on track, and give them a list of resources with names like Bertha's Room and Hands Across the Water.

I refuse to go to Hands Across the Water. I won't. I'd
rather live on the streets, which I will be soon if I can't work.

Good God. I just got it. Those people out there,
they
were like
me
not too long ago. Living in hovels, one step from the streets. And once they were
on
the streets,
they
refused to go to “Hands Across the Water” too. And that's why they're on the streets—because, like me, they still have their pride and refuse to accept help from pitying people who see what they have become. You have to lose all your pride if you want to rise from the bottom. And since I still have pride, my goose is cooked. I'll just keep regressing until I'm lying in a trash heap with shit on my pants.

I can't believe I'm writing this drivel. I should throw it away before someone sees it. Kimba is sitting on the chair eating a moon pie, but Bette is hovering around my bed, fluffing the pillows and she might try to peek. On the other hand, she probably thinks I'm in such a piteous state that anything I write would be completely incoherent.

I just met a fellow patient and I poured myself all over him. I hope he doesn't think I'm crazy. I am in such an awful state with my concussion and broken ribs and broken heart that everything I do or say feels crazy. I don't think I can function if I leave this hospital. That's what scares me. I've never literally felt as though I was falling apart, except when I was younger and used to have panic attacks, but they would go away. This isn't going to go away. Terri doesn't want me and she never will. I can't deal with it, so I have to stay in this hospital. I'll figure out some way to do it. I like it here. I've always loved institutional food, like Salisbury steak and chicken à-la-king and peach cobbler, even though I've been too upset to eat. I like being taken care of, and except for this one harridan, all the nurses here are darling. And I have a new friend, Nicky, except maybe he thinks I'm nuts and won't talk to me anymore. That's not true. Of course he will.

He popped into my room this morning when I was lying in bed, wanting to die, this handsome guy in jeans and slippers and a hospital robe. He said, “Hi! I'm Nicky Stewart!” Then he looked at my face and exclaimed,
“Lord Jesus! What happened to you?” I never saw him before in my life, but my whole ridiculous story started pouring out of my mouth. “I never had a car accident in my life,” I babbled, “but the woman I'm in love with is with someone else and I got all distraught about it and drove into a fire hydrant. But not on purpose!” I yelped, not wanting him to think I was suicidal. It was bad enough that I was obviously mentally unstable. But instead of recoiling, Nicky said, “Oh, you poor thing!” and he bopped right over to my bed and sat on it, crossing his legs, Yoga-style. For some reason, I didn't mind his familiarity. He said, “My boyfriend just left me for a Polish giant.” I really didn't want to hear his troubles at the moment, but I was feeling better already from being jolted out of my morbid thoughts. “What do you mean, a giant?” I said. “Literally a giant?”

“Literally a giant,” Nicky said. “Seven feet tall.”

“Does he play basketball?” I asked.

“No, he's a large-animal veterinarian,” Nicky said.

“Does he look up pigs' asses?” I said, and Nicky said, “Yes, both at work and at home,” and I laughed. I decided that if this guy could make me laugh in the state I was in, he could sit cross-legged on my bed till doomsday. He told me he was in the hospital because he was having ferocious headaches, probably from the stress of losing his boyfriend. “I'm one of the most successful attorneys in DC and I feel like a little putz,” he said. “My self-esteem is in the toilet, just from being gay. Being gay sucks. Don't you think so?”

Well, that may have been the wrong thing to ask me, because I launched into a depressive eruption that even
his most hysterical fag friends probably couldn't match. I told him I didn't know I was gay until a few years ago, and before that I tried not to be gay and that was even worse. I said I'd always imagined that I had a pretty cool life, because I was a writer and had all these friends and was nice-looking, at least when I was younger, and Nicky interjected, “You're nice-looking now, even underneath all of that phantasmagoria,” and I decided he was going to be my friend for life. I told him that I now realized I'd been fooling myself, and that my life had really been pretty shitty, and all the supposedly cool things about it weren't cool at all, like acting up at school and setting trash can fires and getting thrown in a loony bin when I was fourteen. “I loved it in there,” I said. “I didn't want to leave. I couldn't go out with girls, so I had to get my thrills from flooding the school bathrooms and setting trash fires and being locked up with a bunch of crazy people!”

“I was in a loony bin when I was fourteen!” Nicky exclaimed, and we high-fived each other. I asked him why he was in loony bin, and he said, “I licked this boy's ear when he passed me in the hall.”

“Well, so what if you licked a boy's ear?” I said furiously. “Why would they put you in a loony bin for that? That's no big deal!” Once I like someone, even if I've only known him for five minutes, I become as loyal as though I were part of his family.

“He went home and told his father and his father called the principal and the principal had a meeting with my parents,” Nicky said. “He told them that I sometimes engaged in odd behavior. I never forgot that. He made it
sound like I was some weirdo. I ended up in a bin for a week. They decided I was just this little faggot and sent me home.”

“Ha!” I said. “At least they had the good sense to know you were a faggot.” I told him I was in the bin for six months and nobody ever figured out I was gay. I am still astonished at the extent of the ignorance of those so-called experts. I walked with this little swagger, I wore nothing but jeans, and I flirted with all the nurses in the bin. I had crushes on half of them and followed them around like a puppy. I had no attraction to boys at all. Anyone today would have known. But back then in suburban Cleveland they were still living back in the fifties even though it was the sixties. “They thought homosexuality was an incurable disease,” I said to Nicky. “If they had found out I was this little lezzie, it would have been like discovering I had inoperable cancer. ‘We are so sorry to tell you, Mr. and Mrs. Kane, that your daughter is a—what did they call them?—a sexual invert!” Nicky laughed. “Of course, I was just as ignorant as the rest of them,” I said. “I pictured lesbians as these pathetic women hanging around bus stations with big hollow eyes. It took me thirty years to figure out that I was one of them.”

And then I went into my thing about trying to be with men my whole life and never falling in love and never even having a real relationship. “I just had sex,” I said. “It was positively sordid. I fucked one man after another, because I thought I should just keep trying until something worked. I always had to be drunk. Then I would wake up the next morning and think, ‘Where's my
goddam post-coital glow?”' Nicky listened patiently. That's the nice thing about gay people. They understand the depth of your rage. I told him that I'd been depressed my whole life and didn't even know it, that I was one of those intellectual Jewish girls who went around smoking marijuana and writing poems and discussing Herman Hesse and suppressing her libido while everyone else was falling in love and fucking their brains out. “I was like a giant head with no body attached to it,” I said. “I channeled all my energy into writing, but I could only write about stuff no one could relate to. I didn't know anything about love or passion or sex. And so I ended up with no literary success, no love, and no nothing! God, I hate myself!”

Nicky asked me when I finally came out, and I told him that I had been telling people I could go both ways, but I'd never actually been with a woman, and I'd stopped having sex with men, so I was celibate. “I thought I was frigid and I loathed myself because I valued passion above everything,” I told Nicky. “I started going to a massage therapist to get some relief, and I developed a crush on her. One day after a massage I went to visit my friend Ann and she said, ‘How is Frances?', referring to my massage therapist. And that's when I realized I was gay. Standing in Ann's kitchen while she stirred a pot of soup. The whole room got bright and I just stood there, quieting erupting with this knowledge. I said to myself, ‘Joanna, you are a lesbian. You've always been a lesbian.' I didn't say anything to Ann right then, but by the next day I was announcing it to the world. I was so happy. A lot of people didn't believe me, but eight months later I met Terri, and then they did.” I laughed.

“Coming out is phenomenal,” Nicky said. “When I came out I felt like Pinnochio, the wooden boy who finally stopped lying to everyone and turned into a real boy. Coming out is coming alive.”

“I know!” I said. “But I didn't come alive until I was forty-five years old! I was forty-five when I was born! And now I'm going to have this short life, because even if I live to be eighty, I'll really be only thirty-five when I die!” I burst into tears and Nicky scooted up the bed and lay next to me and put his arm around me. “Terri doesn't want me and I'll never fall in love again,” I sobbed. “I'll never have anyone to love me. I don't have any children and now it's too late to have them. I'm in menopause. I'm old and broken down and I'm going to end up in some musty old apartment, and I'll kick off one day and they won't find me until the neighbors complain about the smell!” I buried my face in Nicky's shoulder and wailed, and he held me and stroked my hair and said, “Ssh, ssh.”