It's All Relative (19 page)

The journey back home was never an easy trip for me: too many painful memories meshing with too many good ones.

Out of the blue on the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, just as we had finished eating dollar-size pancakes with strawberry syrup, I gathered my courage and asked my mother if she wanted to decorate graves.

Her tears told me she did.

She reappeared moments later wearing a dress and a pair of respectful, sensible heels.

“We'll need to pick up a few things on the way,” she said as we headed to my car.

I shook my head, popping the trunk, which I had already filled with miniature flags, a box of Kleenex, and, most important, peonies that had been born in my grandma's garden, passed to my mother, and then forwarded to Gary like precious, fragile cargo.

Though wilted, their beauty remained.

We stopped at my brother's grave first—just the second time I had visited it since he died—and then my grandmother's, where we told stories, and we wept, and we hugged.

I then knelt on my grandmother's grave that Memorial Day, my knees on the cool earth, and planted a flag and then said a prayer: a prayer that after I am long gone someone takes the time to share my story, to visit me on occasion, to pass along my legacy.

And then I scraped my hands into the wet earth, digging through new grass and mud and red clay, and planted some peonies.

“When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.”

–MARK TWAIN

T
here once lived a family in my little town that I firmly believed had been in the circus. The husband was freakishly tall and thin, six eight, 160 at the most, while the wife was short and stout, almost like a footstool with hair. They had two children, a boy who, sadly, looked like Mom, and a girl, who, sadly, looked like Dad.

While my family ate TV dinners and watched
M*A*S*H
, I would often picture the circus family at dinnertime, the father and daughter consuming a single bean while plucking birds from the sky, the mother and son eating whole cows and hundreds of pies before going out back to roll around with their pigs.

Despite their differences and oddities, however, I always knew they were a family even though others seemed confounded. I guess I could just sense it, that familiarity that families have, the same way I could smell rain coming.

Ironically, though, I had trouble discerning that odor in my own family.

While strangers certainly never had any difficulty telling that I was my father's son—we're both little fireplugs of men, with sandy hair, occasionally clenched fists, and stomping walks—I always felt as if I were the illegitimate son of a circus performer.

Whereas my father is complete left-brain logic, I'm all right-brain creativity.

I'm a writer. He is an engineer.

My father couldn't care less about culture, fashion, trends. He thinks Warren Buffett should be knighted, while I believe Mary Hart should be granted sainthood.

Despite this, we have a wonderful relationship, forged through years of valiantly trying to build a bridge to span that personality gap.

Every Father's Day, for instance, my father used to emerge from the Ozarks and join me in the city, where I would immediately, upon his arrival, cart him around to different stores in the area—Trader Joe's, boutique delis, local farmers' markets—in order to prove that there were places to shop in this world other than Walmart or the Liquor Barn.

One Father's Day I took my dad to Whole Foods and had left him only briefly—in order to nab a box of Kashi Go-Lean Crunch cereal—when I heard my father screaming, “Where's the zooks, darlin'?”

I turned the corner just in time to see a produce clerk who looked like an earthy Cameron Diaz drop a pretty honeydew she was stacking.

She had obviously never seen a true man of the Ozarks.

There stood my father wearing his summer staples: jean shorts that were about to fall down, a horizontal-red-striped golf shirt that made him look like a pregnant barber pole, and a hat that said,
GOLFERS HAVE BETTER BALLS
.

“The zooks, hon'! Ain't you got no zooks?” my father asked again.

The clerk looked at me and I simply shrugged my shoulders.

I didn't know this man.

And though I hated myself for remaining silent, I didn't want her
to connect us via our voices: Besides our stature, our low, rumbling voice was another physical attribute my father and I had in common.

But not our accents.

I had spent years trying to lose my Ozark twang and vocabulary, while my father still spoke Ozarks-ese.

Ozarks-ese, as I call it, is certainly not an officially recognized language like Spanish, French, or German, or even an important dead language like Latin. Instead, Ozarks-ese is like country rap, Nelly meets Paula Deen, a lexicon used in a seam of the American flag where Midwest becomes South.

In Ozarks-ese, words are shortened and slurred so the mouth doesn't really have to work too hard to enunciate them. If Ozark grammar were a food, it would be mashed potatoes. Ozarks-ese is like white man's rap, but instead of “boo,” “ 'hood,” “peeps,” “posse,” and “shake that Laffy Taffy,” we have my father's vocabulary.

When my father asks for “zooks,” he's looking for zucchini.

When my father asks for “cukes,” he's looking for cucumbers.

When my father asks for “maters” (long a), he's looking for tomatoes.

When my father asks for “taters” (long a), he's looking for potatoes.

Basically, if my father tried to buy ingredients for a salad outside of the Ozarks, he might as well be shopping for a vacuum in Guatemala.

When my father eats at a restaurant and orders “good meat,” he wants steak. And he wants his steak “beatin',” which means bloody, heart-beating rare.

When he orders “fuckin' pluckin',” my father wants chicken.

Now, “telly” has many meanings. If an actor—any actor—is bald, my father calls him Telly, not caring less whether it's Ben Kingsley, Stanley Tucci, Bruce Willis, or Natalie Portman in
V for Vendetta
.

“Telly” is also my father's term for both the telephone and television: “What's on the telly?” or “Who's on the telly?”

I usually tell him that “Telly is on the telly,” and that seems to satisfy him.

Despite my efforts, however, I never felt that I lived up to my father's expectations. Every gay son shoulders that burden, I believe.

So I made the mistake of taking Gary's advice one year and led my parents on a Father's Day trip to Ireland. Now, Gary firmly believed Ireland would be my father's promised land, a place where there was no language barrier, where golf was king, and where beer was as plentiful as oxygen.

“How can you go wrong?” Gary asked. “You will earn bonus points for life!”

But before we had even boarded the plane, my father pulled a three-day-old hoagie from his travel bag and began gnawing on its moldy remains.

I knew before we had even taken flight that my dreams were grounded.

“Ted, you old witch, I threw that hoagie out in Rolla,” my mother yelled at him.

“I dug it back out of the trash at the Subway, hon'!
Mmmm
, damn horseradish is good.
Mmmm.
”

“That will rot out that fat iron gut you call a stomach, sir.”

“I ain't the one who's already been to TCBY and Cinnabon, hon'!”

“Shut up, you old goat. After mad cow, airports forbid passengers from carryin' American lunchmeat products transatlantic, isn't that correct, James Wade?”

“What the Sam hell do you know about airport security, Geraldine? You're gonna set off the alarms with all the metal plates you got in that thick skull of yours!”

“You are fat and—
What
!—rude, sir! All my fellow passengers
agree, don't you, ma'ams and sirs? Yes, yes, they are not fond of fat, bald witches.”

By this time, Gary had moved to a neighboring concourse.

“Have you been on an Alaskan cruise, ma'am?” my mother continued, asking a woman who was fake-reading a book and wearing a sweatshirt that said
ALASKAN CRUISE
. My mother is a magician at busting people she knows are eavesdropping but pretending not to be. “I would love to go to Alaska, but Ted says it's too cold. Fat witches don't like the cold, do they, Ted?”

“Geraldine, it's too damn cold in Nome. I'd as soon cut my nuts off and serve 'em to the squirrels than freeze my ass off in the cold, yelling ‘Fuck me, Charlie Brown!' into the arctic wind.”

I smiled at the woman in the Alaskan sweatshirt, who looked from me to my parents and then back again, puzzled, wondering, I'm quite certain from her expression, if these were indeed the two who had given birth to me, or if I had happened to burst magically from my father's head like some sort of Greek god.

I passed out on the flight to Ireland and woke in the middle of the night, searching for my moisturizer and Purel, to find my father doing shots of Jägermeister with a group of college kids who asked for his phone number when we got off the plane.

I spent my entire Irish excursion watching my dad chug Guinness with the locals and make friends around the Ring of Kerry while I rolled my eyes.

By the end, I was mentally and physically soaked, sick of traveling around the beautiful countryside under a never-ending and constantly moving showerhead, but mostly sick with the uneasy realization that I really wasn't like my father—make that either of my parents—in any way: No, they were way more fun than me.

I was telling this Ireland story to one of my best friends from college, waiting for some sort of understanding response or equally horrifying story, but he said, simply, “Your parents
are
way more fun
than you, Wade. I mean, no insult or anything. Remember college? They were who they were, and, well, you just wanted to change.”

He was right.

Within the first thirty seconds of introducing myself as Wade to my new freshman college roommate, who was from the city, he asked, “Just how many syllables are in your first name?” At the time I was wearing my high school letter jacket—I “lettered” in the trombone—and I had an accent thicker than an eighties belt.

So I practiced my speech whenever I got a quiet moment, trying desperately to quicken the pace of my voice while losing my inbred Ozarks-ese.

“
Waaa-aa-aa-de
,” I would whisper in the toilet.

“
Waaa-aa-de
,” I would practice in my room when I was alone.

“
Waaa-de
,” I would say out loud as I walked to class.

And, ever so slowly,
Waaa-aa-aa-de
simply became Wade.

I was so good at mimicking others, fitting in, that I quickly mastered friends' accents and manners of speaking, focusing mostly on sounding “St. Louis,” which I thought was truly metropolitan, working diligently on making my o's sound like harsh a's. If Abraham Lincoln had been a St. Louisan, he would have said, “Far scar and seven yars ago.”

And then I worked on my walk, trying to unclench my fists and walk lightly and proudly, as if I were an Alvin Ailey dancer.

I wanted to change, to be somebody new, to not be the spitting image of my father.

But the more my parents visited me in college, the more I felt they defined me—my dad in his baggy jean shorts and hats with Reagan's face on them, going beer for beer with my fraternity brothers; my mother captivating a group who laughed like hell at a story that ended, “Well, sir, while he was asleep, all of us nurses tied his rather large and thick penis into the shape of a pretzel!”

The older I got, the more I began to intentionally hide my
parents, especially my father, from my friends, embarrassed by what they might do or say.

Every Father's Day after our Ireland trip, my father would tell me what a great time he'd had with me and Gary and hint strongly about how he'd like to travel somewhere with us again.

But I declined.

And then one Father's Day my parents came to St. Louis for a night, staying at our house before they were scheduled to leave the next morning for a vacation to Nova Scotia. It was a trip he'd desperately wanted us to be a part of.

When my father arrived, he did not look well: He was pasty, drawn, short of breath. He went to bed uncharacteristically early, without a beer and with very little fanfare. I thought he just wanted to rest before the early flight.

My mother woke me up at two in the morning in a panic, telling me that she thought my father was having a heart attack. I walked in to find my dad slowly pacing around the living room, gray-faced, gasping for air, clutching furniture for assistance. My mother, for once losing all of her nursing composure, not able to help him professionally, horrified but not wanting to show her husband or son how truly scared she was, reacted—holding back her tears—in the only way she knew how. “I told the old goat he can't just go on eatin' whole sticks of butter on his toast.”