The Clancys of Queens (17 page)

We were on Main Street by the time we got to the part about there being no TV at Mark's, and Rob damn near crashed the car. “What!? Well, what the hell does he do at night?” Right away I thought,
We talk about the moon and the stars,
but prior to age sixteen, those conversations had mostly been reserved for just Mark and me. Suddenly I had to imagine,
Well, what if…
And then I panicked.

For me, the best part of talking with Mark was that he didn't care if you were some kid unaccustomed to these sorts of discussions; he spoke and argued with you as if you were his peer, fully expecting you to keep up. And though I loved it, in that moment in the car, it occurred to me that maybe my friends wouldn't. But it was too late. There we were, pulling into the driveway.

The look on Rob's face when he first saw Mark is one that sticks with me, something like,
Holy shit. Is that a man, or is that an oak tree wearing chinos?
There was still shock on his face when they shook hands, but it softened as Mark led him toward the croquet court. “Mella and Antonetta tell me you're quite the basketball player, so I'm guessing you'll be a natural with a mallet.” And for the next few hours, there they stayed, side by side on the court, one 6
'
10
"
, one 6
'
3
"
, one in canvas boat shoes with a popped-collar polo, one in neon Nikes with a popped-collar polo.

The day went without a hitch, but that night, after we finished dinner and moved to the pine wormwood table for dessert, I could feel my nerves start to go. Mark started swirling the cognac in his snifter.
Oh, man.
Then his chair goes tipping back.
Here it comes.
“So…” he says, “if we were to presume we could fix all societal ills right here and now…” And now he's teetering. “Where would you begin?”

Straightaway, my eyes lowered to my lap, then shut.

It's worth noting a few realities here. 1) For the duration of our three young lives, no one had ever asked us anything like that before—and even for me, having a decade of deep conversations with Mark under my belt, this was a new one. 2) While we might have been at an age, sixteen, where a person might be starting to think bigger picture—what you want to do for a living, etc.—we came from a world where it always felt there were essentially only two job options: cop…not a cop. What else
could
there be? With little exception, our teachers, parents, uncles, aunts, et al. constantly touted that taking a solid city job, be that for the NYPD or the sanitation department or the post office or the department of education, was the reasonable career choice. It wasn't too tough to see that the subtext therein was that it was the
only
choice. In other words, why even bother thinking about
solving all society's ills,
when the machine needed cogs?

With my gaze still fixed on my knees, I took a long, panicked breath, but then I heard Rob say something. I looked up just as Lynette jumped in to disagree with him, and I saw Mark nodding along. I did my best to hide my relief and took a minute to feel like shit for having doubted the whole situation in the first place. Then, naturally, I jumped in, too. And just like that, yet another moon-and-stars talk was off and running—for Rob and Lynette it was the first of many more to come; on another weekend, Esther would get in on the action, too.

When, starting at age twelve, the most extravagant luxuries gradually started disappearing—limousine school pickups, charter planes, the Riccobono parties in Bridgehampton—I didn't notice. But, come age eighteen, a month after prom, the very first time Mark went straight to bed after dinner in Bridgehampton, I followed my mom into the kitchen.

“Whoa, no moon-and-stars talk? He sick or something?”

“No, dolly…it's not that.”

“What, then?”

“Well, honey, I don't know what to say. He doesn't want anyone to know.”

“Ma. Come on!”

“Oh, God, dolly. Between me and you, business is bad. Very bad. Has been for some time now. And he's depressed. I've tried everything I can think of to help him, but he won't let me, and he sure as hell won't talk to anyone else, professional or otherwise. I'm at a total loss. I'm so sorry, dolly. I don't know what to say, except, I miss him, too.”

Even though we would be missing Mark for a long time to come, that his business would never really recover, that his depression sounded the death knell for the moon-and-stars talks, nothing could take away from the fact that those earlier talks had forever changed the way my friends and I all thought of ourselves. Those conversations, alone, had made us realize that there was more to us than we knew. And for some, not all, but definitely for me, they also made you think:
Well, shit, if, a) I like talking about all these big things, and, b) The universe is infinite, then, c) There's gotta be more job options than being a cop.

I'm sure that, without the moon-and-stars talks, I wouldn't have read that copy of
King Lear.
I wouldn't have taken AP English. I wouldn't have told my dad that the police academy wasn't right for me, and I wouldn't have applied for college, instead, to study Shakespeare.

Getting from my house on 253rd Street in Queens to my college in Manhattan took a forty-three-block bus ride, followed by a seventeen-stop subway ride. Getting there and
not coming back
—i.e., moving to “the City,” for a Queens kid—took the herculean, cyclonic efforts of my mom, dad, grandparents, aunts, and uncles, plus anyone who ever knew them. All together, fueled purely by love and armed only with landlines, they jerry-rigged the most Rube Goldbergian web of favors and hookups, Riccobono-rendezvous-style.

Mom started the phone chain—she rang up her brother, Uncle Sal, who called a guy who used to work with my grandpa at MetLife, who called a girl who worked for the MetLife–owned Stuyvesant Town apartments (which was then a middle-income housing complex, dubbed by some “the White Projects”), who couldn't get me a place straightaway but nudged my name to the top of the waiting list. Her best guess was that it would take six months to a year, so my uncle then reached out to his ex-girlfriend's sister, who let me illegally sublet her apartment in the meantime.

For his part, Dad called his friend Anthony “Bootsy” Zito, who ran his family's Italian bakery on the West Side and was going to open a pizza joint on the East Side. Dad got him to agree to hire me once he did, but that wouldn't happen until September or October, so again, Mom called Uncle Sal, who called his current girlfriend, Patty, who called her high school friend, Ang, who could get me occasional catering gigs at the company she'd worked for starting in July. But I needed a bit of service-industry experience before I could land either job, since prior to this I had only had summer jobs as a receptionist at a podiatrist's office and with Dad at a frozen-bread distributor. So Dad called his buddy who ran Connolly Station, an Irish pub and restaurant, who hired me to bus tables starting the day after high school ended in June.

My Aunt Lucille, whom Grandma now lived with in Westport, Connecticut, and who knew something of the efforts it took to climb the ladder (one summer in high school she got a receptionist job on Wall Street and, without ever having gone to college, worked her way up to being a top trader) bought me a proper leather shoulder bag from a shop on Bleecker Street.

And of course Grandma herself was there to ease me into my new life in the city. Her contribution was to give me an exorbitant amount of money, every month, to clip her toenails.

“Take a fifty! That's what they charge at the place anyhow!”

“No they don't! It's fifteen, at the most—”

“What do you know from these fancy-ass salons they got around here? Take fifty, I said! Now she's a college girl she wants to talk back,
minchia!
”

Financial aid paid for 75 percent of my tuition at The New School, and my parents each chipped in to cover what remained. And, come the start of college at the end of August, with my catering job and my cheap Stuy Town apartment, I was able to cover my rent and living expenses, so long as I got a roommate—Kristy. She was going to Hunter College, plus working twice the hours that I was because she had to foot all her bills on her own. (Because
her dad
hadn't paid taxes in ten years,
she,
who deserved it most, couldn't get a dime of financial aid.)

Though I wasn't more than fifteen miles away from where I'd grown up, college felt otherworldly. Esther also wound up at The New School, and along with a handful of other kids from Planet Outer-Borough, we spent the first few weeks huddled up in the cafeteria in shock.

“Yo, it's like these kids have read every book ever written!”

“For real, I didn't think my high school was that bad, but, damn, I feel like I don't know shit!”

My first hard lesson came in our required freshman-level creative writing class: the teacher put an apple on her desk and said, “Okay, I know this will seem silly to some, but bear with me, I'm going somewhere with this—I want us to go around the room, and I want everyone to give an adjective to describe the apple.” I started to sweat, and when it got close to being my turn, I bolted for the bathroom. I had heard the word
adjective
before, and, based on everyone's replies—
crimson, crisp, globular
—I thought I knew what it meant, but I wasn't 100 percent sure, and I was mortified.

The next week, after class, the teacher pulled me aside to give back my first paper. She had a plastic grocery bag in her hand, and she handed that to me, too. “Tara, you have a lot of potential, but your grammar is…well…not where it needs to be. This will help.”

Inside the bag was an elementary-school grammar workbook. I about cried the first time I sat down to do those exercises, an eighteen-year-old, in my own apartment, paying my own bills, No. 2 pencil in hand, as if I were back in the third grade. The next semester I changed my major from Literature to Education—a worthy pursuit, no doubt, but, for me, a consolation inspired by my crushed self-esteem.

As it turned out, my bruised ego was quickly put in check by much graver matters—a week after I was given that grammar book, I got a call from Alli's little sister, hysterical because Alli had dropped off the baby at her parents' house for what was supposed to be three hours of babysitting and hadn't come back for three days.

When I had moved into the city for college, Alli had moved in with a new boyfriend in Brooklyn. When she first called me, the situation seemed great.

“Tara, I finally got myself a good man! He took me and the baby to Chuck E. Cheese, bought us both sneakers, then he got me earrings and that North Face I wanted; he's a straight-up angel! He even pays for a babysitter, so we can go clubbing at night!”

But by the time I went for a visit, a few weeks after that call, the picture was far from rosy: the only furniture in the apartment were ripped-out bucket car seats and plastic milk crates, and, judging by the smell, it wasn't chicken soup they were cooking on the stove. The baby wasn't there—Alli had been leaving her with her parents for longer and longer stretches of time, until that one day when she just disappeared.

I was the only person who had been to Alli and her boyfriend's apartment, so her sister asked me to go try to find her. As soon as I hung up, I jetted straight out to Brooklyn. When I got there, Alli's apartment door was wide open, and the place was cleared out. She called me two days later. “Tell my parents I'm okay, but I can't be a mom right now. I just can't. I love her so much, but I'm fucked up.”
Click.

For the next six months she'd call her parents or me every few weeks so that we knew she was alive, but it would be another year before she and her boyfriend cleaned up their act and she got her daughter back.

Even if my bad grammar and badass friends set me apart from the other kids, I still had some of the more typical college experiences that year. I overheard a song in an East Village café and wound up singing it for the salesman in Tower Records to see if he could tell me what it was—after a full minute of my doing a New York–accented impression of Tom Waits, he was cracking up, but he got it. “Step Right Up.” That weekend, in the time it took me to ride the A train from the city to Broad Channel for my cousin Deanna's bridal shower at the VFW, I had listened to the whole
Small Change
album.

By my sophomore year I was using the words
hegemony
and
patriarchal
in sentences (luckily, that shit was short-lived). And then, right before Christmas 1999, I did the thing all girls like me, no matter where they're from, do in college: a girl.

Suzanne was a fine-arts student at Parsons School of Design. She had grown up ten minutes away from me, just across the city border, in the kind of Long Island suburban neighborhood that all my friends' parents had been shooting for when they left Brooklyn—the fact that they ended up in Queens was a sort of baby step in the right direction (a kind of White Flight with a layover). Likewise, Suzanne was my baby step into the world of East Village lesbianism—her parents had grown up in Queens, and we were both Italian/Irish mutts with pretty much the same accent, but she already owned a couple of Ani DiFranco albums.

She showed up to our first date on roller skates, wearing very Long Island girl–style gold lamé pants, but with a very East Village–style white vest made of feathers—she looked like a hooker and a chicken collided. I fell for her right away. And I nicknamed her “Birdie.”

On our second date she introduced me to Fellini, and on our third, she decided my first Woody Allen film should be
Hannah and Her Sisters
. After that we spent every night together, and every morning before school we'd dance to Al Green's “Tired of Being Alone.” I had slept with boys in high school and had loved one of them, but my love for Suzanne was unlike anything I had felt before. When she agreed to move in with me for our junior year, I knew it was time to come out to my parents.

Seeing as how Mom had been trying to tell me I was gay for almost a decade, coming out to her at nineteen was a lot more like admitting defeat than anything else. Her response was, “You see, dolly?!”
Done.
(If optimists had an extreme fundamentalist wing, my mother would be its leader. There she'd be in their propaganda videos, walking on clouds with a handful of daisies humming “Good Day Sunshine.” Incredible.)

Telling Dad, it turned out, would be a lot harder than I expected.

At the same time that I had moved to Manhattan, my dad had gotten a new accounting job that required him moving to Atlanta, Georgia. When I turned nineteen and started dating Birdie, he was forty-nine and officially a white-collar guy living in the suburbs—albeit one who still carried two guns at all times and kept a picture of the Pope hung around the rearview mirror of his truck.

Despite his being a former cop, wannabe priest, staunch Catholic, Republican, when I called to tell him I was gay, I expected it to be fine, because, after all these years, he was still very good friends with several of the gay regulars from Gregory's. I guessed wrong. The second that sentence came out of my mouth—“Dad, I have a girlfriend”—he flipped out and insisted I fly to Atlanta to talk in person, “Now!”
Click.

Three days later we got into his truck and drove, his only words being, “We're going to a hotel.” Two hours passed in total silence, he and I practically motionless, the Pope swinging left and right.

Another hour, and we were on a one-lane road in the middle of the Blue Ridge Mountains. “Hotel, my ass!” I started to think. But just as I was imagining how he'd shoot me—or, worse, throw me into some “pray-the-gay-away” Jesus camp—a billboard appeared.

A woman not unlike the St. Pauli girl, with blond braids and huge, ahem, beer steins, smiled down at us. Next to her, in giant German Gothic lettering, it said:
WELCOME TO HELEN, GEORGIA
!
A RE-CREATED ALPINE VILLAGE
.

Somehow we had passed through an invisible transdimensional portal. Having been the lone car on a deeply wooded, curvy road, we were suddenly in a long line of minivans rolling through this Disneyland-bad, fake Bavarian town. Whole families wearing matching green hats adorned with feathers crammed the sidewalks. Three elderly guys wearing lederhosen played glockenspiels outside a place called Charlemagne's Kingdom. And there were windmills. Lots and lots of windmills.

This was it! As in,
this
was the place my dad chose to have the conversation of a lifetime with me.

We pulled into our parking space at the Heidi Motel—no shit—and headed right to the bar. For the first ten minutes we sat, stone-faced, drinking Johnnie Walker out of our complimentary beer steins like idiots. Then, in one fell swoop, he set out to discover if, how, and why I was gay, in a room that had not one but two cuckoo clocks.

First he blamed me. “You're confused, and you need therapy,” he said.