It's All Relative (24 page)

Except we adopted ours from the humane shelter. She came from a litter of twelve, and we picked our puppy because she looked like a baby Scooby-Doo and because she had enough moxie to pee right on the newspaper.

Her given name was Maria.

But she didn't look remotely Latina, so we changed it to Marge, a sturdy, hardworking American woman's name.

Like Marge Simpson.

And nearly instantaneously, Marge did something every baby does: She changed our lives.

She snuggled with me when I was cold. She licked my face when I would get angry or cry. She lay on my feet, never leaving my side, no matter how many hours I wrote.

Marge would stare at me with such intensity and need and love that my heart melted about fifty times a day.

More than anything, she was happy to see me when I got home. She loved me unconditionally. She didn't care if I was gay or straight.

And when it was time to share our joy with the world, Gary made good on his promise and began planning our puppy shower.

Fittingly, we didn't do this as payback: We did it out of joy. In addition, Gary and I had just approached another anniversary together. It seemed a wonderful moment to celebrate and share all that was good in our lives.

So for once I let Gary, the quintessential party planner, go wild, giving him full access to our bank accounts, something I normally wouldn't even do for Suze Orman.

Gary not only has an eye for detail, but he can spend money like a crack-addicted socialite. He could make David Tutera pee his pants in envy.

Gary spent nearly a month planning our puppy shower, obsessing over every detail. He was going to create pup-cakes, cupcakes with Marge's face on them, and serve pup-corn out of little dog bowls; our drink options would include Salty Dogs and Red Dog beer; Gary made mix tapes with “You Ain't Nothin' but a Hound Dog,” “Puppy Love,” “Atomic Dog,” “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?” and songs by Three Dog Night. As party gifts, Gary planned to give out dog tags engraved with the date of our party.

Our invitations
were going to bark!

We proudly registered at PetSmart and PETCO, and—just for fun—at Banana Republic and Pottery Barn. We didn't ask for gifts
per se, but we did hint that it was a puppy shower and anniversary party. We meant for it to be fun, a celebration.

But something strange happened.

We began to get a lot of phone calls but very few RSVPs.

The tones of some people's voices bordered not just on irritation but outright outrage.

“Is this supposed to be some kind of a joke?” one person said. “If so, I'm not getting it. Okay, guys, what am I missing?”

“Why would I bring a gift for a
dog
 … or for
you
?” another remarked. “You're not married.”

“Is this really a wedding disguised as a dog party?” an acquaintance remarked. “Anyway, I think we'll be out of town.”

We
never
had cancellations to our parties. In fact, we always
overestimated
when planning a party, because our guests always asked if they could bring their friends because they knew what was in store: innovative theme, fabulous food, lots of liquor, great guests, one-of-a-kind party favors, scintillating dance CDs.

Now, I don't want this to sound overly stereotypical—too
Queer Eye
—because we have gay friends with no taste, just like we have straight friends with better taste than we have. But we can throw one hell of a party.

“I don't understand,” I said to Gary as our guest list bordered on a number best suited for women's dresses.

“We're window dressing,” Gary said robotically, just as he had stated before. “The giving … we're not doing it for once. We're asking to receive something.”

“A dog toy, for God's sake,” I said. “And maybe a nice belt.”

“You still don't get it, do you?” he said. “We're not just having a party, we're seeking acknowledgment. We're asking for affirmation. We're asking that people join us in celebrating the fact that our lives and relationship are just as important as theirs.”

I couldn't accept this was true.

But it was.

I ended up downsizing our party. It returned to being a simple puppy shower on a quiet Sunday afternoon, a concept people now seemed to grasp.

The fallout from our puppy shower kicked off a long, deep funk in my own life, culminating a few years later when our home state of Missouri ended up confirming what Gary had been telling me all along: People did not want to acknowledge gays as their equals. Which is why voters passed a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage by a whopping 70–30 margin.

The campaign was vicious. The end result expected but wholly unnerving.

I retreated into myself and became window dressing once again.

But over this time something magical occurred. Love blossomed between one of my best friends from college—in fact, we had been in the same fraternity and graduated together—and one of Gary's best friends, a woman with whom he had previously worked.

“I think they're in love,” Gary told me one day. “You've just been in too much of a dark hole to notice.”

When I asked one day when this all began, Gary told me their puppy love began to wag its tail at our puppy shower, where the two first met. It seems they bonded over their love of animals before bonding with one another.

And then this couple did something—just like our puppy shower/anniversary party had tried to do—that was not considered “normal”: They broke all the staid, conventional rules of a wedding. My friend asked me to serve as best man, and Gary's best friend asked him to serve as gentleman of honor. When we walked down the aisle together, people whispered, “What's he doing with … him? Is this a … mistake? Are they …?”

And then we danced together, right after the bride and groom, spotlighted, with my parents present.

In the end, people said it was the best wedding they had ever attended.

Our baby, Marge, is now thirteen; she is an old woman. She has leapfrogged past us in dog years. She still lies on my feet every day as I write—sighing, grunting, kissing, loving—grounding me.

She is looking at me right now, contented, her chin on my thigh, her brown eyes filled with as much love as I've ever known in my life.

Yes, like every child born changes every parent's life, Marge has changed mine, and I believe her birth helped change this world in a small way, too.

She not only brought two friends together in a wedding that redefined marriage to me, but she also reminds me every day that there is still incredible love and possibility in this world if we only choose to embrace it.

Which is why on our tenth anniversary—in the midst of all the state votes and Supreme Court rulings over gay marriage, in the middle of all the protests and anger and bile—Gary and I simply grabbed hands on a beautiful summer afternoon and walked into the open field that backs the woods behind our Michigan cottage.

We had moved to Michigan, uprooted our lives, so I would no longer have to serve as window dressing.

On our tenth anniversary we invited no guests, and I expected no gifts in celebration of our decade of marriage.

Rather, I picked some bright orange Indian paintbrush, a warm lake breeze blowing the field around us, and tied the flower around Gary's finger, thanking him—in front of God, in front of nature—for being my partner, my life, my love.

“Who gives this man to this man today?” Gary said, laughing.

We heard a bark and turned to look at Marge, our baby, our sole witness, wagging her approval.

I
used to march in small-town holiday parades, playing the backbeat of some Christmas or patriotic tune on my trombone while attempting to march my chubby body in a straight line while wearing a twenty-pound polyester band uniform with epaulets and a two-foot-tall fuzzy hat.

When I would finish, I would stand on the fringe with my friends, soaked with sweat, holding my fuzzy white hat and fighting the crowd for the hard candy that was tossed onto the street and flattened by the Shriners. Rural holiday parades were pure American kitsch, and they seemingly always culminated with the crowning of a festival queen, a coronation that involved a plastic crown and a farm girl with a nasty overbite whose father owned the local tractor supply.

I would watch all this wondering where, exactly, if at all, this big boy fit into small-town America. Everything just seemed so much easier for everyone else: the football team, filled with confident boys who had broad backs and chiseled faces and who owned the town; the pack of blonde cheerleaders with braces and boobies who seemed to be living the American dream.

There was a touch of nostalgic bittersweetness that glazed every
Labor Day parade, however, because townsfolk stayed home, readying themselves for the start of school the following Tuesday.

The parade signaled that summer was over, sighing its final breath.

Oftentimes, my family would load up after the Labor Day parade and meander along the hilly, winding side roads in the Ozarks, searching for yard sales.

The best yard sales always seemed to take place on Labor Day weekend, since most families held their best stuff back so kids could earn a little extra cash for back-to-school clothes and parents could rid themselves of a lot of crap before even more came rolling in.

As a child, I never understood why we hit yard sales, because we
never
bought anything; but as I grew older I began to understand this routine was more a venture in economics and psychology than shopping.

“Look at all this shit!” my dad would announce to us as we pulled in front of a decaying bilevel whose open garage belched the embarrassing remnants of some family's lives. “Who lives like this?”

We didn't.

Not by a long shot.

Rather, the Rouses hid our dirty laundry in an outbuilding on the edge of our woods, or in a crawlspace under the house. We didn't part with it—no, not ever—because a depression or nuclear war always seemed to be just on the horizon.

My father would spill out of our white Rambler on Labor Day and immediately begin pawing through some family's old bathroom cabinets, fishing lures, lamps, or shoes, saying a bit too loudly as he went from item to item, “A buck fifty? … A quarter? … I guess they need the money.”

Or he would comment, standing next to the sellers, “It's a damn shame. A little TLC and elbow grease would've kept this trash compactor working for years.”

Yes, yard sales served as sort of a psychological
Family Feud
for the Rouses, my father's inner Richard Dawson telling him:

My family is better than this one. And smarter. And richer. Oh, and we horde way better stuff than we'll ever find here … I mean, who would sell worn bowling shoes or charred oven mitts for a mere pittance?

And then I met Gary's family.

And discovered they were the family that my family had pitied all those years.

“Oh, my God! We live for our yard sales!” Gary told me excitedly before we were to make the two-hour drive to his family's house on Labor Day. “It's tradition. Who doesn't like a good yard sale? It's easy money.”

I smiled, my stomach clenching.

I felt like a Kennedy who realized he just married a Clampett.

I arrived in remote corn country to discover a two-car garage attached to a ranch house that was bursting at its bricks and overflowing into the driveway with folding tables sighing under the weight of used potpourri, Yankee candles, and magazines from 1974 featuring Brett Somers. There were retractable clotheslines lined with harvest-gold pantsuits and ties wider than a four-lane highway.

“Isn't this awesome?” Gary asked.

Gary's family believed a yard sale was a saner and safer way of earning money, say, than investing in stocks or a 401(k). They believed a garage sale to be the equivalent of purchasing a lottery ticket, firmly believing in their hearts that this Labor Day garage sale would finally be the motherlode of all garage sales—the one in which they unloaded the Zenith from 1968 with no picture tube, the white pumps that smelled like death and baby powder, the Lady Bird Johnson power suit with the grease stain on the lapel—and that they'd cumulatively collect enough dimes, quarters, and dollars to not only pay off their credit cards and mortgage but also have just a touch left for a dream vacation.

Gary's mother, in fact, had—like her lipstick procedure—honed economics down to a simple two-step process: Spend the money quickly, no questions asked, and then hold a garage sale to recoup the cash.

On the flip side, my family's solution to handling money was to invest it immediately and simply never spend it—on anything.

As the child of a Depression-era mother who collected tinfoil like it was gold and stole the condiments from every restaurant west of the Mississippi, my father bought used cars and mowers, used dishwashers and fireplace inserts. He simply refused to buy clothes. He wore the same things he wore in high school and college, no matter how much his body defied the fabric. “You look like Fat Boone,” my mother would say to him when he'd come out for a wedding dressed in an argyle sweater and penny loafers.

The few times we did spend money, my dad went through a very specific series of stages, much like the stages someone experiences when a loved one dies.

His first reaction was to fight the need to spend money.

The second was to deny he might have to spend money.

The third was to mourn money's loss.

The fourth was to bargain as hard as possible to spend as little money as possible.

The fifth was not to use the newly purchased item, in order to keep it special and unused.

And the sixth and final step was to vow never to spend money again.