The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Get Pregnant (27 page)

We woke up pretty early the next morning and moved to a different room. In chasing D.J. around the night before, we'd discovered that none of the electrical outlets in the room had covers. The little plastic prong units Terry had brought to seal the outlets couldn't stop D.J. from sticking his entire hand into the wall, grabbing ancient exposed wires, and electrocuting himself. When we explained this problem to the clerk, she moved us to a much nicer room at the other end of the hotel. Here the outlets had covers, but the ancient floor-to-ceiling windows couldn't be closed. We had to move furniture in front of them to prevent D.J. from crawling out onto the balcony and into other people's rooms.

At a quarter to ten, I went downstairs, leaving Terry in bed with D.J. On a large leather couch in the lobby, I sat under a gilt mirror and read the paper while I waited for Bacchus. At ten after, a well-dressed young guy in slacks, a button-down shirt, and a black overcoat walked into the lobby. He had D.J.'s hair, the
same color blond, but this couldn't be Bacchus, not the way he was dressed. Melissa had told us back in Portland that Bacchus had a mohawk and dressed the way she did. The man stood in the doorway for a second before he saw me looking at him.

“Are you Dan or Terry?”

I got up and introduced myself, and we shook hands, looking each other up and down. He smiled and laughed nervously, and I asked him if he wanted to go upstairs and meet D.J. I had planned on sitting him down in the lobby for a few minutes, so we could talk face to face first, but that suddenly seemed cruel.

D.J. was standing at a dresser, pulling open drawers and laughing. Bacchus sat down on the edge of the bed; Terry scooped D.J. up, walked him over, and set him on Bacchus's lap. Melissa was right: the resemblance was remarkable.

“This is too much,” Bacchus said, smiling at D.J. as Terry took their picture together.

Just as we had at the hospital with Melissa, Terry and I hung back. We sat in chairs by the window at the other end of our room, and let D.J. crawl all over his birth father.

Bacchus told us he stopped dressing like a punk after a run-in with New Orleans's famously corrupt police department, as we walked down Bourbon Street with the baby. Bacchus ran into a few friends he hadn't seen since being arrested. He introduced D.J. to everyone, and us, too, and the fears we had about meeting him melted away. He was nice in that affable, unflappable way only straight guys ever are. It helped that he was just as blown away by D.J. as we were. Bacchus's broad smile, open face, and easy laugh made him seem like the temperamental opposite of sullen and introverted Melissa. Bacchus was also clean, his mohawk grown out so that you couldn't tell he'd ever had one, and dressed like a student, not a punk. A little bit of street showed around his edges, though.

“PUNK” was tattooed on the knuckles of his right hand, and “ROCK” on his left. Sitting in a park on the grass, watching D.J. crawl around, Terry noticed that the “K” in “PUNK” was backward. Was that intentional?

Bacchus looked down at his tattooed hand and laughed.

“It was an accident. I did it myself and, like, I messed it up. It's kinda punk rock though, don't you think?”

O
n D.J.'s first birthday, we packed the car and drove to Portland. The day before, we'd had a party and D.J. tore into his first birthday cake like a pro. Both of his grandmothers snapped pictures, and our friends brought him books and clothes and toys. D.J. performed his latest trick for his guests—pulling himself to a standing position and taking a couple of unassisted steps before plopping down on his big diapered butt. We had his party the day before his birthday because we wanted to be back in Portland, at the Mallory, as on the day we brought him home from the hospital.

We didn't have to argue about the music on the drive down. We hardly ever argue about music anymore, because now we listen to stuff we both hate. Terry saw something on TV about Mozart and Bach making babies smarter. With D.J. strapped into his new, larger front-facing car seat, we listened to Bach for three hours down I-5 to Portland. It wasn't a rental car this time, but our car; Terry finally convinced me to buy one by coming up with a car-related Worst Case Scenario: How would I feel if D.J. died while we waited for an ambulance to take him to the emergency room because we didn't have a car of our own? Two weeks later, we owned a Honda.

On D.J.'s first birthday, Melissa was still traveling with Ten Spot, though they had lost the van. They were stopped by cops in California, and since the van wasn't registered to them, and since Ten Spot didn't have a license, and since they didn't have any insurance, the police impounded the van they both had worked so hard to get running. Most of their stuff was impounded along
with the van, though Melissa was able to get her dog and cat out before the police towed the van away. But Melissa didn't seem upset. They'd find another way to get around, she told me, and were planning on being in Seattle by June. Bacchus was still living in New Orleans. We sent him pictures; he called us once in a while to check on D.J.

My mother and Terry's mother continued to overwhelm us. Terry's mom came to town to see her grandchild, always with gifts, and loved to get down on all fours and chase D.J. around the house. My mother, who didn't live as close, didn't see D.J. as much as she'd like—she'd like to see him hourly—but that will change this summer when she retires. We spent D.J.'s first Christmas at my father's house, and my dad couldn't get enough of his new grandson. We had something in common now, me and my father, something we could talk about. We were both dads.

Carol and Jack adopted a beautiful baby girl three months after we brought D.J. home. They wanted another child right away, a little sister or brother for their daughter, so they went right back into the pool. Bob and Kate were always there for us, offering advice, and baby-sitting—so Terry and I still manage to play a little pinball in leather bars every once in a while. Bob and Kate's kids—Lucy, Gus, and Isobel—love to play with D.J., and one day Lucy and Gus and D.J. will all share stories about their birth moms with each other.

So many very bad things could happen that I fear ending this with any happily-ever-after uplift. My Irish Catholic God, as pointed out earlier, is a murderous and psychotic God, the O. J. Simpson of Higher Powers. I don't want to tempt Him by predicting that any of the five of us—Terry, D.J., Melissa, Bacchus, me—is going to live happily ever after.

No, there's too much to worry about. We worry about D.J. falling in with the wrong crowd and becoming a fundamentalist Christian in an act of adolescent rebellion. We worry about anti–gay adoption laws, George W. Bush,
E. coli
in hamburger, and the clumps of dirt D.J. stuffs in his mouth when we're not looking. We worry about earthquakes, fires, floods, and storms. We worry about D.J.'s birth-parents, especially Melissa. Without a van, she and Ten Spot will be jumping trains together. We worry that we're making mistakes, that
we're not feeding D.J. enough, that we're feeding him too much, that he'll fall in the tub, that he'll choke on something.

We want D.J. to have a little brother or sister, but we worry that D.J. has spoiled us. He's just so mellow. He's curious about everything, and as long as he has something in front of him to examine, bang, break, or play with, he's happy. However much Melissa drank while she was pregnant, however much acid she took, it was precisely the right amount. D.J. is smart, good-natured and friendly. He cries only when we come at him with the big blue snot sucker.

When we arrived at the Mallory for D.J.'s first birthday, the same clerks who had been working last year when we brought him home from OHSU were at the front desk. They recognized us, and they remembered D.J. We took his picture with the clerks, and they took our picture sitting with D.J. on one of the lobby's overstuffed green sofas. We'd requested the same room we had last year, and when we opened the door, nothing had changed. D.J. crawled over to the desk to pull the phone off by its cord, I plopped down on the bed, and Terry walked over to the window and looked up at OHSU.

D.J. crawled around and smashed up the room for a couple of hours. After watching a little cable, we slipped him into his baby backpack and headed out. We walked past Melissa's apartment, Outside In, the steakhouse, and the Eagle. On impulse, we jumped in a cab and headed over to Lloyd Center. We walked through the toy store where we had bought his car seat with Melissa, then past the ice rink and the jewelry store where we bought Melissa's bracelet. We walked over the sky ramp to Lloyd Center's conference rooms. The door to the room where we grieved our infertility with seven straight couples almost two years ago was unlocked, and the conference room was empty. The tables and chairs were arranged as they were at our seminar. We went in, took D.J. out of his backpack, and set him on the table.

He sat there, looking around, smiling. Terry pulled off one of D.J.'s shoes and gnawed on the bottom of his foot, which he loves even more than peekaboo. I did the same with his other foot, and D.J. laughed harder, a great crackling baby laugh. D.J. leaned forward and grabbed us both by our heads. He pulled us toward his face, laughing and laughing and laughing.
Terry and I adopted D.J. through Open Adoption and Family Services, an agency based in Portland, Oregon. If you're thinking about adoption, whether adopting a child or placing a child for adoption, you can learn more about open adoption and OA&FS at their web site, www.openadopt.com, or by calling OA&FS at 1-(800) 772-1115. You do not have to live in Oregon or Washington to adopt or place a child for adoption through OA&FS.

OA&FS facilitates between 50–60 domestic adoptions per year. The average wait for adoptive parents is seven months, and 85% of the placements are newborns or infants. OA&FS fees are low, and while the majority of the adoptive parents they work with are heterosexual couples, OA&FS does not impose restrictions on adoptive parents based on marital status, age, race, religion, or sexual orientation. OA&FS is a terrific agency, staffed by concerned, dedicated people. It would be impossible to recommend OA&FS enough or to praise their dedicated staff too highly.

Open Adoption and Family Services Inc.
[email protected]
www.openadopt.com
1-800-772-1115
5200 SW Macadam Ave., Suite 250
Portland, Oregon 97201

The names and identifying characteristics of some of the individuals depicted in this book have been changed to protect their privacy.

PLUM

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Previously published in a Dutton edition.

Copyright © Dan Savage, 1999

All rights reserved

Savage, Dan.

The kid: what happened after my boyfriend and I decided to go get pregnant / Dan Savage.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-1012-1948-5

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First edition (electronic): June 2001