Travels with Penny: True Tales of a Gay Guy and His Mother (4 page)

“Thanks, Mom. It was just so expensive.”

“Stop bitching about shopping, wear the Goddamned shirt and stop complaining about being thirty-five and traveling with your mother.”

“I’m not complaining!”

“Well, don’t say I never gave you nothing.”

“No problem.” I pulled out the map. “Which way?”

She shrugged. “I don’t care. I’m easy. I ain’t cheap, but I’m easy.”

I BELIEVE
IN MENTAL TELEPATHY
. Not necessarily the “woo-woo-I-can-see-inside-your-mind-because-I’m-a-gypsy-fortune-teller” kind of telepathy, but a different, almost spiritual kind of mental connection between people who share a deep emotional bond.

Don’t misunderstand me, I wish I was blessed with the “woo-woo-I-can-see-inside-your-mind-because-I’m-a-gypsy-fortune-teller” kind of superpower, but it has never been one of my talents. I used to want that talent, though. I used to lie in the field near my childhood home watching clouds and fantasizing about reading minds, moving objects with my thoughts and using my psychic prowess to rip apart every kid in my school who taunted me for being fat. I was one of those creepy kids who ran around the house pretending to be Superman. For the most part, my parents rolled their eyes and ignored the beach towel cape, until one day when I was about six. I had morphed into Superman and flew myself through the storm door window, sending shards of glass everywhere and giving my mother the scare of a lifetime. I don’t know how I avoided cutting myself to shreds on the splinters, but I did. Since then, Mom always shunned the “hands on” part of flying. That annoying law of physics called gravity took precedence over my law of magical thinking.

I believe in telepathy for a couple of reasons. First, you ask any scientist and they’ll tell you that the average human uses less than 10% of his/her brain, which begs the question: What do we do with the other 90%, besides show an unusual interest in nosing our way into other people’s lives via
Judge Judy, Jerry Springer
and
US magazine
? Granted, any imbecile can see that most of humanity uses only a fraction of their brains just by driving down the freeway. Directional signals? Ha! And don’t get me started on the idiots in the fast lane who plod along ten mph under the speed limit because they’re busy chatting on their cell phones. I think humanity needs to revisit this idea of forced sterilization.

Another reason I believe in the kind of “emotional bond” mental telepathy is because I hang out with women, most of them mothers. More appropriately, mothers hang out with me. There’s nothing so attractive to women as gay men. It’s a symbiotic relationship; they live vicariously through us, and we get to be reminded that the label “loser” applies to men both gay and straight. So be forewarned if your mother is still alive—she’s telling me your secrets. Your mom may not know you did hundreds of drugs or you’ve lost track of how many people you’ve slept with, but she knows you’re a slut and a druggie.

I’ve experienced this type of mental telepathy three times in my life. Afterwards, I remember having a new appreciation for being acutely normal, as none of the three experiences moved me into the superhero category. Once was when I had a mental vision of my friend’s room in her house where I had never been. The second was when my biological sister went into labor with her eldest child. The third was the day my father died.

I worked in a call center at the time, which had a strict “no cell phone” policy. I had forgotten to turn mine off, so when it rang in the middle of my shift, I hurriedly snatched it out of my backpack. As I pressed the button to turn it off, I saw that it was Mom. A chill went through me. I felt light-headed. I suddenly wanted to throw up. I knew she was calling because my father was dead. I don’t know how I knew, but I knew. I knew it as surely as you can recite your social security number when asked.

The phone had powered down by now, and I heard a co-worker asking for my help. I left my cubicle to take care of some business, finishing up about thirty minutes later. Trembling, I told my boss I had a personal call to make and turned on my phone. When it booted up, the screen flashed my sister’s number, so instead of calling Mom, I hit REDIAL. It ended up that my sister was the one who told me my father had suffered a heart attack in the garage. Mom had found him; his lips already turning blue.

This story falls under the category of “twilight zone” because Mom says she didn’t call me that day. My sister agrees. True, the stress of the situation could have clouded Mom’s memory, but there was another odd fact to consider—there was no trace of Mom’s call in my cell phone’s call history. Still, the image of my mom’s phone number popping up on my cell’s display screen remains branded in my mind. I can see the cute cartoonish picture that lit up when her call came in. There was no message on my voice mail, despite the fact that my mother would rather be plowed down by a speeding bus than ignore an opportunity to talk uninterrupted. For any of those people who want scientific validation for everything under the sun, I have no explanation for what happened that day other than a psychic flash from Mom to me. I believe in mental telepathy because I believe in the bond between mother and child.

WHEN I
WAS YOUNG
, I was not the usual run-of-the-mill hesitantly shy child you see peeking around the corner and makes you smile because they’re so cute. I was the freakishly weird child that looked at you and you itched. I was the kid who read
Jaws
(I was always an advanced reader) and then refused to swim in the neighborhood pool just in case sharks acquired the ability to breathe chlorine. Whenever the family camped, I would ask my parents about the history of the campsite, prying into the possibility that we were headed for certain death as we cranked open our JayCo “pop-up” camper in a location inhabited by axe-wielding murderers. My parents would roll their eyes and remind me that “lightning doesn’t strike the same place twice.” I believed them and went happily skipping down the road of life seeking out disastrous relationships and stepping on the sidewalk cracks thinking, “I’m safe! I’m safe! The destruction has already happened!”

Imagine my surprise when, years later, I read the NASA-STI (Scientific and Technological Information) website, which read:

Contrary to popular misconception, lightning often strikes the same place twice. Certain conditions are just ripe for a bolt of electricity to come zapping down; a lightning strike is powerful enough to do a lot of damage wherever it hits. NASA created the Accurate Location of Lightning Strikes technology to determine the ground strike point of lightning and related electrical damage in the immediate vicinity of the Space Shuttle launch pads at Kennedy Space Center.

* * *

I should be thankful that nothing ever happened to me during those carefree years of youth, but this discovery raised more questions than answers, such as why doesn’t NASA invent something important—like “Accurate Location of Lost Youth” technology. Or “Potential Loser Boyfriend” finder. Life is so unfair.

So when I flew to Iowa in 2009 for the writer’s workshop, I had a hunch that some devastation would strike while I was there. The prior summer, Iowa had been hit by a flood that closed the university, crippled the town of Iowa City and left water standing on the street for months. This act of God marked the region for yet another natural disaster, I was sure of it.

So it came as no surprise that after the opening night preamble and the enthusiastic would-be writers headed to the classrooms, the sky became ominously dark. Suddenly, the wind began to whip around the buildings at a breakneck speed, bending the trees under the assault. Then the tornado warning siren blared, and the entire hoard of students scrambled to the basement, where we sat on the cold tile floors waiting for the “all clear” siren, or a Kansas farmhouse to whirl by inside a tornado, whichever came first.

In an attempt to keep the class moving forward, the teacher, wanting to fan the spark of creativity, asked about a time when we remembered feeling “pure joy.” She may as well have asked me to remove my spleen with an oven mitt and a butter knife. Pure joy? How about 99% joy? What is joy, anyway? Trying to remember when you felt “joy” is like trying to remember a specific heartbeat or a time you stubbed your toe in the dark on the way to the bathroom after a night of one-too-many beers. I don’t remember feelings of pure hate, pure horror or pure happiness, either. So when I was asked about “pure joy,” what could I say? The closest I’ve felt is the occasional nudge of something called gratitude. Was it really possible that anyone could single out a specific emotion from the myriad of conflicting, convoluted emotions we feel every day? Should we expect ourselves to do so? The parts are so inextricably connected to the everyday ups and downs that they become a part of who we are and mold how we see life.

As I sat on the floor contemplating “pure joy,” an epiphany came to me: life is
not
like a box of chocolates as Forest Gump claimed. Life is like having a bad case of the chicken pox.

On the side of my left eye, right where the two lids meet, I have a slight indentation in the shape of an oval. It’s not so pronounced that it looks like a third eye, but to anyone standing closer than five feet, the mark is obvious. I’ve always noticed it, of course, but for some reason I never asked my mom about it. The mystery of childhood—the world could end over a dropped popsicle, but a facial deformation would be forgotten as long as there are no mirrors around. One day, my mom happened to be walking past me when I was thinking about this mark on my face. She waved the story off, sighed, and told me that when I was a child, my sister and I got the chicken pox. Not being content to be properly horrified by the growth of strange red dots on my face, I set about picking at them. Despite her warnings that it would hurt, or that my face would fall off, I continued to pick at the scabs until she was too frustrated to yell at me to stop. The mark was the remnant of that early act of defiance and exploration.

She shrugged, “I told you to stop.”

“Ma, I was … what? Five?”

“See? You should have listened to me.”

At the tender and rebellious age of five, I was too young to remember being sick, so I can’t validate this story. It makes sense, though, as my parents are the type who, for some reason, never got a photo of me with red splotches all over my face, although they seem to have had the time to capture every other embarrassing moment of my childhood on celluloid. I don’t know how this Kodak moment passed them by. But the chicken pox portion of the story must be true because I have this glorious mark near my eye. The chicken pox incident was nothing more than a moment in time that happened to me without fanfare or DVD, yet the proof of my scar remains. Emotions are that way, too. We may not remember when we feel joy or sadness, but the stories behind the emotions stay with us like scars on our psyches.

I’ve heard it said that joy is a collection of moments of contentment that make up a happy life. I don’t know if that’s true or if it’s a device invented by Hallmark for sentimental blackmail. I do know that during those times I feel life can’t be any worse than being a pudgy forty-six year old balding guy or feel the world closing in around me, scattered pictures of my life’s moments of contentment play like a movie in my mind, and they make me smile. I forget for a moment that life sucks.

Directly or indirectly, many of these memories involve my family, and those mental scenarios rattle around my mind like a can of pop that escaped the easy-to-carry cardboard case. Strewn throughout my lifetime like frosting roses over the top of a cake, the memories are evenly spaced but with that ubiquitous clump in one of the corners. In my life’s story, those roses often involve my mother, Penny, and the clump in the corner are the times we traveled together. Frustrating at times, annoying at others and always unpredictable, these are the snapshots of joy that hang around the fringes of my mind, clinging to the walls of reminiscence waiting for me to dive in with a spoon screaming, “Mine! Mine! All mine!”

Another epiphany hit me while I sat on that cold tile floor in the basement (epiphanies come to me like pigeon on a summer day—in flocks of scattered, dirty chaos that everybody else ignores). This new epiphany was about the effects of emotionally-laden experiences—we remember the people who shared these experiences with us more than we remember the experiences themselves. We feel joy and pain because we are social animals, we
homo sapiens
, and the people in our lives are what shape those lives. I’m not talking about the whole storybook tale of a life filled with children, a wife and a house with a picket fence. (We know that myth was created by Wall Street for the sole purpose of selling a zillion greeting cards.) What people leave behind is more than children, the family Bible and boxes of stuff gathering dust. It’s the emotions that memories of people evoke in us that is the lasting legacy.

Let me give you an example of what I mean. The best gifts I’ve ever received were short stories that a friend of mine wrote every Christmas. He would print these tales onto textured paper, then roll the stories into a scroll and tie them off with a ribbon. I don’t have those stories today. I have nothing of his personal belongings that I could call mementos. However, every time I think of him, I remember the giddy happiness I felt when he handed me his Christmas scroll and the warmth that flowed through me after reading these heartwarming tales. I suppose, then, this is what joy means: Joy is the feeling we have when someone we care for tells us that, for a moment, we have their undivided attention.

My problem is that I tend to ride the middle of things, whether it be politics, an argument, or Coke vs. Pepsi. I spent long years dancing close enough to people to feel the pull of their personalities but far enough away that it doesn’t hurt when we part. Despite this odd emotional tug-of-war, there is a shelf in my mind where I stack mental snapshots of people. I wish I could say I mentally peruse them because I’m a compassionate and tender guy, but the truth is I only look back on my life when those snippets of memory decide to leap off the shelf and throw themselves in my face. (Honestly, who really knows when those little buggers will come to haunt us?) Getting out of the middle isn’t easy. It takes something big. It takes something so full of emotional significance that the force of it pushes you off center.

The joyous memory snapshot that came to the forefront of my mind while I sat on the floor in Iowa waiting for the Kansas farmhouse to hurl by was an old memory: I’m in New England visiting my grandparents. It is sometime around 1973, and I’m about ten years old, old enough to know that my grandparents live in Rhode Island and young enough to be oblivious to the fact that I should be embarrassed that they live in a trailer park. The gray skies stacked thick overhead, blotting out the sunlight, and the winds bit as they ripped over my skin.

My grandfather and I stood on the jagged rocks of the shore of the North Atlantic. He is a rough guy, the kind of man who would scare me if I saw him coming towards me on the street. Tall—of course, he was probably only 5’10”, but when you’re ten, everyone over four feet is tall—wrinkles, thick cigar in his fingers and stubble on his grizzled face. His voice was rough from years of smoking and heavy drinking.

Seagulls screamed overhead, water droplets clung to my coat and the frigid ocean sloshed over the rocky shore onto my leg. This was exciting for me as well as a tad frightening. I’m from suburban Chicago. The lakes along northern Illinois don’t “slosh” nor do they get whipped up from the winds. They sort of lie there playing opossum to unsuspecting children and water skiers. It’s only when people play in them that they rear up and attack. New England waters blatantly tell visitors they are unwelcome; Chicago waters betray them.

“Cup your hand and put the water in it.” He was insistent, so I did it.

“Now,” he said, “taste the water.” I didn’t understand. Aren’t we only supposed to drink water from the tap?

I wasn’t sure why I was doing it, but I did. I gagged and spit. I was grossed out. It was like swallowing a mouthful of salt.

“That’s the taste of the sea,” Grandpa said with a chuckle. “Never forget it. She covers most of the world, and she’s a finicky lady. Treat her with respect and even then she may kill you.”

He reached down and grabbed my hand. I eagerly accepted his help and he half pulled me, half lifted me from the rocks, now slippery with the seawater of the “Lady Ocean,” who apparently is a bitch.

As he helped me over the last couple of rocks, he leaned over and hugged me fiercely. His breath smelled of smoke, but it doesn’t bother me. He was warm in the chilly wind and familiar amongst the unfamiliar surroundings.

I looked over his shoulder as he hugged me. I saw my mom and dad standing near the rocky incline on the smooth pavement of the parking lot. Mom was pointing to something out on the horizon. Dad stood behind her, nodding. I saw her lips move but couldn’t hear anything. Finally, she lowered her arm and Dad reached up and put his hand on her shoulder. They look like a commercial from one of the Saturday morning cartoons I’d loved to watch: a loving couple planning the birth of their child, or some such 1960s propaganda.

The moment with my parents lasted a few seconds; hardly noticeable to the passer-by. But in my mind, those seconds froze as solid as water in a pond in January. The picture in my mind made me feel warm, despite the chill inside the university’s basement.