Travels with Penny: True Tales of a Gay Guy and His Mother (6 page)

THE NEW
MILLENNIA
MAY HAVE MARKED
the year of “Y2K” to the rest of the world, but in my corner of the universe only two milestones existed: getting my Master’s degree and (finally) getting to see Europe. As much as I love learning, enduring the two years of graduate school felt just slightly easier than enduring an evening of watching
Glitter
on an endless loop. I stood on the edge of graduation like a guy skydiving: The journey ahead holds nothing but a downhill slide, but it’s better than standing still. Not to mention there’s only so much of the usual grad school slavery one can do before one’s head explodes: the papers, the volumes of reading, the grading papers handed in by freshmen who can barely find their dorms, much less a reference book, and the politics of the average Master’s committee. (Note for those considering graduate school: Your grade is directly proportional to your expertise in ass-kissing.) To compound this, I had a culture clash to contend with. I’m from Chicago and have lived in Los Angeles and Seattle—the Southern way of life was as alien to me as another dimension. The first time someone asked me, “Are you cold?” I answered that, no, I wasn’t. Only later did my kind-hearted boss teach me Southern lingo: South of the Mason–Dixon line, “Are you cold?” means “I’m cold. Can I shut the window?” Who knew?

I needed out of the apartment, out of the city, out of the rat race. I needed a celebration. How did I make it to thirty-seven without seeing Europe? I was a theatre major, for crying out loud! Why weren’t tours of The Globe and London’s West End a course requirement?

When I suggested to Mom that she accompany me, my then-boyfriend and his sister on this trip, she lit up like a Christmas tree. I wish I could take credit for the idea of asking Mom, but, as usual, it just sort of happened. My father listened patiently to my excited description of the upcoming trip and then ceased his usual bitching and moaning about traveling abroad by surprising me with saying, “You should take your mother with you.”

“You should be the one to go to Europe with her, Dad, not me,” I said. It was a taunt, I suppose, as I knew fully well that his first trip overseas was the AAA-approved love child of a nightmare and torture. Just bringing up the idea probably caused him to break out in hives.

“Like hell!” he said, swinging the remote around to watch ESPN on the biggest large-screen TV I had ever seen in my life. “I wouldn’t go back to that place if you paid me.”

“I don’t know, Dad … ”

“Well, if you don’t want to … don’t … ”

“It’s not that—”

He glared at me while I floundered. “You can show her around all the sights. She’d like that.”

I watched him fondle the TV remote and shift his recliner into third gear; the gear of SLEEP. A thought suddenly struck me—he wants me to take her because he couldn’t. He had come to accept the fact that while he may physically be able to trundle up and down European cities, his own psyche prevented him from doing it. He knew that he could never bring his wife back to the place to which she wanted to return, so by getting me to take Mom, he would be giving her the gift of Europe while never leaving the comfort of his recliner. He was asking me to be his surrogate.

“I think it would be fun to take Mom. Do you think she’d go if I asked her to?”

He snorted. “She’s probably already packed.”

Ironically, Dad turned out to be the one who, later, almost killed the excursion. The plan was almost identical to the plan Mom and I had devised a few years ago when she went with me to New York: Mom would fly out of Nashville, we would rendezvous at JFK, board a plane for London and for the next two weeks, throw caution to the wind and hurl ourselves through Europe with all the abandon of wayward teenagers.

For thirty-seven years, I’ve avoided going on vacation with a group of people out of fear of being stuck in a tour group. I know myself—I would hover over my travel companions with the co-dependent fervor of Julie the Cruise Director. We would all be responsible for our own expenses, thereby alleviating the fear of getting stiffed with the check at some five-star European restaurant. After we discussed the ground rules, Mom eagerly accepted. It was Dad who balked.

“You’re going to go all the way overseas without any hotel reservations?” he grumbled, digging into the Sunday football snacks Mom prepared for him. “She’s not eighteen years old, she needs a bed to sleep in and a place to sit down once in a while. She’s going to get hurt in some Goddamned backward country.”

“Dad, we’ve got to follow our hearts … go where the spirit takes us … let the universe guide us. It’s going to be an adventure!” That was during my “free spirit” phase when the idea of becoming stranded in some remote city on another continent seemed artistic and bohemian.
Note to self
: The difference between thirty-seven and forty-seven—common sense.

“It’s going to be a disaster! That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard!” he spouted. “How can you go to a foreign country and not even know where you’re staying?”

I tuned him out for a few minutes while he rattled on about how I would wind up getting my mother arrested, how communist-loving Europeans love to prey on naïve Americans, how he heard from a friend-of-a-friend that a second cousin twice removed was abducted by fiendish Scandinavians—the usual overprotective spousal issues. I don’t blame him, really. He never forgave me for the New York sex shop fiasco. Add to that his own negative experience oversees and his belief that any place where you can travel for an hour without seeing a McDonald’s is primitive, I can see why Europe may be more frightening than Freddy Krueger. Besides, I’m the template for Scarlett O’Hara. I tend to be irresponsible and lack the DNA that predisposes one to plan … anything … I don’t read emails thoroughly, I leap before I look and worry about things tomorrow. In his shoes, I wouldn’t let my cat go on a vacation with me.

Spurred on by both the self-imposed expectation that Mom should have a good time and Dad’s insistence that Mom avoid living on the street for three weeks (apparently she’s not cut out to be a Bohemian), I promised Dad that I would secure a place to stay on three nights; the two nights following our arrival in London and the night in Germany, before she headed back to the states. Thanks to a website specializing in low-cost vacations, I arranged to rent some guy’s apartment for three days.

“What about the rest of the time?” Dad asked, picking at his pork rinds.

“I gave you three days!”

“You want to stay for three Goddamned weeks!”

“We’ll take it as it comes, Dad,” I assured him. “I don’t want to be tied to schedules.”

“That’s bullshit!” he spat. “What if you can’t find a place to stay?”

“Dad, Europe is a big place that’s older than the United States. I’m sure someone, someplace is going to have a hotel room with running water.”

“Yeah, at some dive or opium den.” Dad’s voice was hitting a higher octave, so I knew this was important to him. I may be taking my mom, but she was his wife.

“Don’t worry about it,” Mom assured Dad. “It’ll be fun. I’m easy. I ain’t cheap, but I’m easy!”

“I’m trusting you won’t let anything happen to her,” Dad’s face hardened as he pointed his finger at me.

“You worry too much,” I laughed at him. “What’s the worst that can happen?”

“That’s what you said about New York, and she wound up in a sex shop!”

I wanted to remind him that a gay sex shop was one of the safest places for a mother to be, but I held my tongue. Fathers didn’t carry the political sway with homos like mothers did. Besides, he was shooting me the Dad Look.

* * *

The night our train rolled into Brussels, the rain poured down so thick and heavy that we suspected the residents would be two steps away from building an ark. The then-boyfriend, his sister and I grabbed our convenient, easily-stowed-in-an-overhead-compartment roller bags and breezed off the economy class sleeper car, while Mom hauled her behemoth duffle bag out of the bowels of the train. I stood on the platform and shook my head while she wrestled with the oversized monstrosity. I had purchased a large backpack-style travel bag with a sturdy, reinforced frame and wheels. I knew Mom couldn’t throw something like that on her back, but she could wheel it around. I offered to buy her one, but she convinced me she had it under control. But when I got off the plane at Heathrow, I knew we were in trouble when we stood by the carousel in the baggage claim area and she said, “Just lift it off of the carousel conveyor belt for me. I can roll it from there. It’s not too heavy.” In fact, I nearly gave myself a hernia yanking the thing over the lip of the baggage carousel. The following three days were spent convincing Mom she needed to get a new piece of luggage. I kept hoping she was going to get in touch with her inner bohemian, throw her underwear to the wind and downsize to a fits-easily-into-the-overhead-bin kind of travel case, to no avail. What she selected was a duffle bag with wheels. While it was still smaller than her previous leviathan, it still looked large enough to hide Jimmy Hoffa and his cement shoes. For weeks prior to leaving America, I pleaded with her to pack light. She assured me she was.

“I’m bringing old underwear, so as they get dirty, I can throw them away.”

“That’s not packing light. That’s
un
-packing light.”

“They don’t weigh anything.”

“Tell me what you have.” For the next six minutes, I listened to the litany of items that constituted “packing light” for my mother: namely everything in the bathroom except the toilet paper.

“Don’t you think that’s packing light?” she asked.

“No, Ma, I don’t,” I told her. “To begin with, you can’t use a blow dryer in Europe without some funny connection doohickey. They have 220 electricity and we have 110.”

“Oh, that’s right,” Mom said. “I knew that. I ran into that problem in Italy visiting your sister. I’ll bring the connector.”

“No! Ma! Dump the blow dryer.”

“But the blow dryer doesn’t weigh anything!”

“How about the shoes?”

“I can’t go everywhere in the same shoes! Besides, they don’t weigh anything.”

“Tell you what: I plan on doing laundry along the way because I’m only bringing clothes for four days. Take less. We can do laundry together.”

“That’s a great idea!” she said. “We can use the time to bond.”

I thought our discussions had cinched it. But there we were— oversized, overweight duffle bag full of stuff she’d never use: 1; Son: 0.

Brussels was my first European train station, and I exited the Eurostar with a giddy sense of excitement. In movies, all European train stations seem perversely romantic, full of acute shadows and wayward corners for clandestine meetings. Brussels: not so much. What greeted me was a tattered building with fading paint, dirty windows and the overpowering smell of urine. Urine is a popular smell in Europe. Maybe it’s the throngs of people practically living on top of each other; maybe it’s the lack of bathrooms (although by now we’ve learned that there’s money to be made in them there loo visits), or maybe Europeans don’t harbor an aversion to bodily fluids like Americans and don’t mind pissing in alleys. I never discovered the answer to this perplexing question, so I prefer to remember the smell not as “stale body waste,” but as a harbinger of good fortune; as if the Powers That Be were purposely leaving puddles of piss to mark us as their chosen ones. We were the visitors to God’s dog park.

We hauled our bags outside into the night. Storm clouds blotted out what stars hung out over the Belgian sky. I’m sure Europeans can name the constellations visible in their night sky … but let’s face it, I’m American. I have an iPhone with a constellation app. The wind blew lightly across the city, picking up speed and dropping the temperature, so by the time it blew across us, the chill eradicated the remnants of grogginess that had set in during the train ride from Brugge. We had exited at the main entrance to the station and stood on a cracked cement sidewalk that paralleled a vacant, dark street, surrounded by wet pedestrians and dim street lamps. By European standards it was a street, but by U.S. standards the four-feet-wide ribbon of pavement barely qualified as an alley.

“Well, we’re here,” Mom asked. “What now?”

“Well … we walk to the hostel.”

“How far is it?”

“Haven’t a clue.”

“Yeah, right,” Mom sounded less than thrilled.

I shrugged. “I’m sure we can find it.”

“I don’t think so.”

Ever since I moved to Seattle, rain has never been a deterrent for me. The first joke I learned about the Pacific Northwest is, “What do you call a Seattleite with an umbrella? A tourist.” It rains here. A lot. Days can pass without seeing the sun. Which is exactly why I enjoy living here, as I am more apt to walk in the rain than walk in the sun. Rain gets you wet. Sun gets you skin cancer. You can live with wet clothes. Living without epidermis is a bit trickier.

In the end, Mom and I decided to hail a cab. The driver spoke no English, but, thankfully, could read. We presented him with the printout of the website for our hostel, nodded and motioned for us to get into the car. I hauled Mom’s duffle bag to the rear of the vehicle, thinking I was being kind to the driver with my offer to help load the bag into the trunk. As I approached the rear, I heard a soft “click” and the trunk popped open. The driver made no move to get out of the car. Perhaps it was the rain. He was Middle Eastern and Middle-Easterners are like Southern Californians—they melt in water like the Wicked Witch of the West. After the four of us squeezed into the vehicle, we took off into the darkness with the same gusto as a Manhattan cabbie on speed. The task of calculating the exchange rate fell to me, as I was the unlucky sod with the mother who loves to give people gadgets as gifts. Just before we left the states, Mom presented me with her latest find; a thin calculator device that came in a box along with a very thick instruction book.

“What is it?” I asked, unwrapping the surprise gift.

“A portable dictionary and exchange rate calculator!” Mom’s enthusiasm knew no bounds.