DO TO BEING EXHAUSTED AS FUCK AND WORKING ON THE FINISHING TOUCHES TO THE BLOOD MANUSCRIPT, TONIGHT'S PORTION HAS NOT BEEN CORRECTED OF TYPOS.
We used to be so happy.
I was almost glad to come back to this house. The last time I was here was over ten years ago, and it wasn’t in the best of circumstances. Dad was living here with my brother. Mom and I were gone, but… that’s another story. I’m telling this out of order. I have to explain this house.
I loved our house in Ely, it was a giant bungalow with a huge wrap around porch, almost plain, wooden, beige with a beautiful green door, and it wasn’t a house that was unlike the other houses on our block, but these blocks were wide, and here, in this part of Ely, our neighbors were just the tall trees. There were no alleys, no fences, just land in between houses and there was a gravel road in this part of town. When you got to the center of town there were proper streets, a little old fashioned town, but right here it was almost the country. You could smell the lake. It was behind the trees..
My parents were not from here. They’d left the city and wanted something different. That’s what Mom had said many times, and when we moved back into town, I mean out of Ely and into something like city, what she said was, ‘We gave up on life. We gave up on life and so we ran as far from life as we could.”
The house had come to her, which is why it’s strange how things turned out. It was her aunt’s house and then her aunt died. I never knew her, this was before I was born. Back then Mom and Dad only had Deanna and then, when Mom and Dad moved in I was born and the next year came Freddy.
Children are not analysts, and unfortunately, even now I see the past with the eyes of a child, so I suppose the cracks in Mom and Dad’s marriage were happening little by little. Deanna could probably say more. But to me it seemed like it all just happened out of the blue. It was like we were all together and life was good one day, and then a year or so later I was living with Mom and a pastor was molesting me.
I didn’t want to say that last part, but it’s there. It’s so there that sixteen fucking years latter my body reacts in all sorts of horrible ways, I start to twitch. I get cold all over. I get depressed. The light seems to leave the room. The more I try not to say I was molested, the heavier things get and the sicker I feel. The more I can just say it, the quicker it gets better. Everyone else can’t be the same, but that’s how it is for me, and I feel like when my parents broke up, that’s when everything started to happen to me. That can’t be true, but that’s how it feels. And things didn’t just happen to me. All of us were really fucked up. I always said I didn’t blame my parents, but I think I did, I know I did.
My first night here, when I was miles away from Don, I wondered why I’d packed so quickly and hopped into the the car with Freddy right away. I think I know now. I didn’t want time to think,. He said time was of the essence, and I just didn’t want to think about it. About Dad being sick. About how I was never home to see Dad when he was well. About how he might be gone by the time I got there. I prayed a lot. I prayed in the way of people who don’t pray anymore, who are angry with God, but have to pray anyway.
I’m surprised Mom is at the hospital. It looks like she’s been there the whole time, but she says she just arrived about five minutes before we did. That “Family is family and the father of your children is aways family.”
“Did you get a hold of Deanna?” I ask, and she doesn’t answer.
We are in the chapel and Mom has one of those fake plastic roaries, She asks, “Would you like to pray?”
“Are you Catholic again?” I ask.
My voice is scornful because if we had never gone to that crazy church things would never have happened to me. I’d be a different person.
Mom says, “I never stopped begin Catholic.”
She lies a lot. I mean, my mother just patently sits there and says things that are not true, that contradict all reality and she says them with a straight face. I don’t bother to argue with her, I just say, “I don’t really want to pray. I just want to be quiet.”
“Well, put out some good energy for him,” Mom saiys. “That’s praying too. You know, I watch the Today Show a lot, and you know what they say? Hoda always says, ‘Let’s put that out into the universe.’ That’s how they pray.”
I want to say that this actually sounds a lot like witchcraft, and I don’t think the universe gives a fuck what we out out into it, but I don’t. I think of how I want to go to Dad’s house because once it was my house, and if he’s not there it shouldn’t be empty
We’re at the hospital a long time. Dad had a massive stroke that really fucked him up. He almost died. He hasn’t waken up yet. He might not wake up. I don’t know how I feel about that. The last time I saw him was my college graduation and there were some awkward words. The time before that was my high school one where he said, “Well, you made it without getting another girl pregnant,” and the time before that was when I was humiliated by asking him for money and humiliated for asking him for the money because it paid for an abortion.
Abortion.
I turn the word over in my mind. When I was a kid it was sin. It was taking a life. It was selfish. It was sinful it was what you did after you misused God’s gift of sex, and God had the natural thing follow. When I got to college it was something to be dispassionate about, especially as a gay man,, and I was becoming a gay man. I supported a woman’s right to choose. You don’t even have to feel good about it. You’re just not getting in the way of a woman’s right to choose. It’s sort of sterile, sort of passive. Evolved.
. But between my evolution into a rational liberal from a very naive Christian was the actualty. Not the growth and changing of my though,,t just the coldness of heart I still remember when Ashley said she was pregnant. That always sits with me. Because when we were kids we were told that people who have abortions are cold and selfish and fearful, and as an adult who really believes I can’t tell anyone anything, who wants to be a liberal, I think that’s a wrong characterization. But here’s the thing: at the time when Ashley came to me, I was cold and selifish and fearful. That’s always at the back of my brain.
I go back to it a lot and I think its actually because thinking about that is easier than thinking about other things.
Don said to me, “Do you know what the trouble with liberals is, why they lose so often?”
I was sort of half way paying attention, and so he had to repeat himself. I didn’t know what he was getting at so I said, “No, Don, what?’
“Because deep inside they think they’re actually wrong. Conservatives think they have God on their sides and the liberals are so used to growing up with that type of God, they think the conservatives do too.”
I hadn’t thought about it much, and Don said, “Why do you think all the regular churches spend time being religious, adhering to the old religion, being orthodox, preaching the Bible and all the new liberal churches just spend their time saying over and over again, God likes you, God likes you. We accept you. We include you, and trying to make wounded people feel better?”
But that’s true enough. I think I stayed away from church because I couldn’t’ be conservative and I didn’t feel like like hearing how much God liked me, how accepted I was, how loved I was, how open and affirming other people were of me. And what’s more, I didn’t feel complete acceptable. But when I think about what happened, even though I would never try to stop a woman from doing whatever she thinks she needs to do with her body, I think of the time when I actively encouraged a woman—a girl—to not have my baby, and I feel, quietly, that it’s all wrong. That I am wrong.
The first night at the hospital, I feel like I can’t leave the hospital until everyone else does, even though Dad is going to wake up, even though, in many ways, I feel like none of us cares. It’s bad form to leave, and the only one of us who has disobeyed the form is Deanna. Around nine Mom says she’s going to go home and Freddy says he’s going with her, but I say not until he takes me to Dad’s house first. Mom smiles at me and says something that implies I just want to be with Dad right now, want to be in the midst of his stuff. But I don’t. I want to be alone. I want some peace. I want to talk to Don. I want to say, “When this day started I was at my home with my boyfriend and now I’m at this house that I don’t need to be at, waiting so a father I don’t talk to can wake up and what’s it all for?”
The house is a mess. Freddy has given me the key, though I could tell that for some reason he didn’t want to. The house smells like someone who smokes all the time and never opens the windows. It smells vaguely of cats, of a litter box. It smells like mice. I can’t find cats or mice, but I start picking up shit, and cleaning as much as I can. I think, this place needs to be scrubbed, and its much too late in this part of Ely to walk to a store that’s actually open and get cleaning products, and there probably aren’t any cleaning products in this house. That’s a right assessment. There’s just some old Ajax dishwashing liquid under the sink. A little bit of Raid. Some bleach. The bathtubs haven’t been cleaned, and there’s mildew and pubic hair in the corners. An old bar of soap with a swirl of brown hair . Cloths all over the place.
I did not come prepared to stay in this shithole.
I didn’t come prepared. I should go back. I should have Don, who does not drive get in my Land Rover and bring me back. I should have…. I should have had the sense to drive my own Land Rover. What the hell was I thinking? But I haven’t been thinking much of anything. All the time I’ve seen saying these things to myself, I’ve been making a bucket of soapy bleach water, and I’ve found an old scrub brush. This bathroom is going to be cleaned tonight. There’s nothing else to do but clean. After I’ve scrubbed the tub I see Don has called three times and what a worthless husband am I? But if he’s called three times, what’s making him wait a little more? And I feel like I’m not ready to say what I need to say to him, so I scrub the toilet, scrub the sink, pitch the water down the toilet and then sit down on it to call him in the bathroom where some progress has been made.
I feel like such an asshole when I finally call. Have I kept Don up waiting? Am I waking him up? Shouldn’t I have called hours ago? I should say he could go to bed if he wanted to, but he wouldn’t do that. I know cause I’d never go to bed if he was out and I hadn’t heard from him.
“Is everything alright?” he says, He doesn’t know I’ve been home for hours. He doesn’t know I’ve devoted the night to scrubbing out toilets and washing tubs and sitting around looking at walls.
“I think I hate God.”
“Is your father—?”
“He’s not dead,” I cut that off. “He’s alive, but I think I hate God. I was in the hospital with my mother and we were in the chapel and she asked me if I wanted to pray, and, that’s when I realized I couldn’t pray. I haven’t thought about it. That’s when I realized how I felt, and I never would have said that, but I think it’s true.”
Don didn’t say anything, and I’m not sure what I expected him to say. Don isn’t one of those people who talks to fill the air, and so I talked instead.
“I don’t know what it is. I don’t… I don’t not believe. I’m not an atheist. There’s just… when I think about it there is this space in me. And this anger. And I didn’t know it was there.”
When don still didn’t speak I said, “Are you there?”
“I’m there,” Don said. “I’m just not sure what you want me to say, or that there is anything to say.”
“I just didn’t know I felt like this.”
“Maybe it’s your mother you hate.”
“Instead of God?’
“Along with god. Your mother and Pastor Skip. And maybe a bunch of people.”
Don has never danced away from anything once I told him about it. He wouldn’t. bring up my molester in public or really for any reason, but when he knows I’m ready to go there, or something happening to us is around that, he will just say it.
“I wish you were here,” Cade said.
“I wish you’d had the sense to take your car.”
I laughed at this. We both laughed, and after a while Don said, “I can’t find your reason, Cademon. You’ve got to find it.”
“Right,”
“Where are you now?”
“I’m at my Dad’s house?”
“With your brother?”
“No. He went back with Mom. No one’s here but me. I just wanted to be alone. Or at least without them. I thought I was through figuring shit out, and now it turns out, here I am, needing to figure shit out.”
TOMORROW NIGHT, END OF CHAPTER ONE
