Part 1 • New Rituals
1992
In my father’s Pierce Street flat, the three of us—my sister Alexa, my father and I—sat by the bay window as we would before going out to dinner on Friday evenings. This was one of my father's rituals. And because we were here in the city with him, it would become a family ritual.
But this was new.
Dad's weekend sanctuary was now his home, and where he was always meant to be. There among the Union and Chestnut Street strolls of quaint whitewashed meat markets, striped-awning sidewalk cafes, and boutique apparel shops. The colorful rows of polite chateau-ettes tucked so tightly together that only their potted, obelisk-shaped bushes serve as front yards. And the Marina Green vast park lawn that lines the harbor, where a fractured family of three would watch displays of vibrant kites sail in blues, reds, and yellows, and drink rootbeer-flavored milk bought from the poshest Safeway in America.
My father was the Marina District, and it was him. Aspirationalism embodied in a neighborhood—a Ralph Lauren brand unicorn proudly securing the scarce breathing room between Pacific Heights’ cascade of old-money and the waterfront. For in a town where any flamboyant demonstration of wealth was thought vulgar, the barometer of prestige is proximity. And Dad had permanently joined the club of inhabitants with a front row view of where the iconic vermillion bridge leaps through a garland of white over sparkling waterways into weathered hills flecked by scant sun rays.
Alexa and I had arrived that afternoon on a train from Stockton, an unglamorous inland town where, just six months before, my father had been a suburbanite family man—couched in the den reading his paper on Sunday mornings, occasionally tilting to one side to release a celebratory burst of gas through his khakis. And where we had been his obedient flock of lambs that drew compliments from onlookers. It was under that tri-level roof that a fallacy, an illusionary bubble had grown, and was primed to implode. He and his wife Kim (our stepmother) mercifully dismantled our contrived, patched-together household and Dad fled permanently to the apartment he kept out in the city. And now we were here, with Dad, in his bachelor pad by the bay, creating new rituals.
My older sister Alexa was a pretty, soft-faced Mediterranean brunette, insecure as any high school freshman but twice burdened with the wounded child thing—the condition that makes it impossible to ever be comfortable in your own skin. Even at that awkward age, however, she was somehow bullish enough to plow through.
Not me however. I moved through the world as if an odor of fear preceded me. Simply leaving my bedroom spiked anxiety. Likely an undiagnosed form of agoraphobia. I was unsettled in the world. I wouldn’t know what to do with social capital if I ever acquired it. Probably give it away as soon as it appeared—quickly passing the ball in a game I possess no command of.
Dad was in his casual, afterwork attire—a colorfully striped rugby shirt tucked into relaxed-fit jeans, brown woven belt and loafers. His crisp, white dress shirt from the day tossed in the hamper awaiting its trip to the cleaners, his black or gray or brown suit already carefully returned to its designated glossy hanger labeled Sax Fifth Avenue or Bullock & Jones.
Yet this particular evening felt uncharacteristic. He didn’t make his usual martini—dry, vodka, “up” with an olive. And he was unusually attentive to our needs—seemed genuinely interested in our thoughts and feelings.
This was a rare moment with my father. Dad was so outwardly bolstered against his true fragility, there was always an emotional expanse I’ve never successfully bridged. And the depth of connection that lacked between us resulted in, for me, a more abstract way of relating to him. He was like the leading man in a film I’ve watched repeatedly, but could never reach into the screen and make contact with. He was Carey Grant, whom many (including his ex-wife) had compared his looks to, with his fresh-shaven olive jawline and swept black hair framed proud against a crisp bright collar. A presence that’s at once commanding yet softly sophisticated. Warm dark eyes, a smoky smile, wise and reassuring. Complete with a little foreign convertible—in the movie of my childhood, this is my father.
Sitting together in his tiny city apartment there was an unease among us; we all could feel it. Poised with palpable vulnerability, he seemed to be preparing to tell us something that would drastically change our course—an important briefing from the chief of operations.
“Wait, I have to use the bathroom first.” I interrupted.
“Ok... we’ll be right here,” Dad said reassuringly.
I stood up and dashed across the wooden floor that groaned and creaked, sending loud hollowy clatter throughout the apartment. I caught myself, anticipating being scolded for disturbing the downstairs neighbors. But his deep, nagging voice was silent.
I paced through the hall, rounding dad’s bedroom—which was a flat futon bed in a walk-in closet that must've sprouted and bloomed there, in how awkwardly it lived among its peer fixtures in the already tight quarters. The bathroom door squeaked as I shoved it closed, the decades of paint build-up keeping it from fitting right in the frame. Spattering the porcelain bowl, I stared out through the small window pane at the dark, narrow space between buildings, and into the peepshow of a neighbor's bathroom. I sometimes saw the outline of what I thought was a woman showering there. It was together thrilling and uncomfortable. Uncomfortable only because this was my father's bathroom. This was his private world—the smell of the old walls and hallway carpeting, the liquorice flavored natural toothpaste that I’d never tasted before, the strange closet bed. I was merely a tourist in it.
“Are you coming Zack? There’s something important I have to tell you guys.” He gathered his stray lamb to the flock. What I didn’t know is we were about to be allowed to peek over the wall into the hidden land beyond.
“Ok we’re all here now.” His arms folded, gaze directed downward as if leading us in prayer, only occasionally glancing up at our faces. We listened intently, with eyes also bowed.
“Ok. You know how typically men and women are attracted to each other,” he explained, “well sometimes women and women will like each other and same for men and men.” His brow tensed to see that we were understanding everything. “Well, I haven’t told you this before but I’m telling you now. I am bisexual, meaning that I love women like your mother, Beverly, and your former stepmother, Kim, but I also like men.”
I sat listening, nodding as if I deeply connected with his words. But in truth I was blank inside. Not because he was being unclear, but because he was talking about himself, and that almost never happened—in that way, or any. A more typical family state-of-the-union address would sound something like: “Kim and I are getting married and we will all live together and you can see your mom and your brother every other weekend” or “Kim needs some time away from children so you will be going to a long-stay camp this summer” or “Kim is going through a hard time right now so let’s be on our extra good behavior” or “Kim and I are getting a divorce and you will be going to live with your mom and brother, so gather everything you can in the next 30 minutes and I’ll put it in the car.”
So what he was saying now just sort of wafted through me. Like the fog that had already swallowed the western half of the city. And I sifted through it to find some declaration of the fate to come. But that was it. There was none. He just needed to tell us this, let us know this about him, and hope we would understand. He asked if we had any questions and if we were ok, and we nodded.
What I would learn over the course of the next several years, was the subtext to his disclosure, which was, ‘I like men. And I’ve spent most of my life living and sleeping with women, but I honestly don’t like them all that much. Well... not as much as men.’
Part 2 • Old Rituals
It was a palm reader in a tent at The Renaissance Faire who’d told my father he should reveal his new lifestyle to his children. We had gone up there a few weeks earlier—just Dad and I—driving north from the city, across the Golden Gate Bridge, into Marin County’s late summer. “I see you much happier after you do this,” the cloaked woman advised him. I was gnawing on a giant turkey leg seated on a stack of hay outside—proudly donning my new velveteen jester hat and transfixed by the passing corseted breasts jubilantly burbling like beerfoam on a mug of ale.
My father was known for having a lifelong preoccupation with the ‘dark arts,’ which he’d turned to many times in his life. He’d spend a healthy portion of his money on telephone psychics, mostly with financial questions. Before I was born, he and my mother attended seances. When she began showing signs of clairvoyant ability—magically ciphering information from people’s personal objects—he put money into lessons to help her develop the craft. ‘No more expensive calls to psychics when you have one under your own roof,’ he must’ve calculated.
This venture came to a head one evening while I slept in my crib. They had Warren over, their friend and nutritionist. He was a tall, young, blonde-haired, blue-eyed, ‘80s soap star type who was really into wheatgrass. My mom was in a trance and channeling the spirit of George, a higher dimensional entity that often came to her with paranormal predictions. She’d been ‘under’ for over an hour—a dangerously long time to be channeling—and beginning to slur her words. But my father was determined to get the information he needed. “C’mon George,” my dad insisted while grasping at my mother's limp forearms, “tell me what you were saying.” Warren angrily snapped at him, “John, she’s been under too long...” and ran into the kitchen for a piece of cantaloupe which he rubbed on her mouth to wake her up. She came back, and was mostly fine. But following the session she would be haunted by demonic dreams and disturbing images.
Not too long after that, she left my father and became intimately involved with the church, which would provide her with a wealth of strange, single men. But first, she dated the nutritionist—Warren—her knight with shining cantaloupe. He drove a sun-yellow porsche 914 convertible that my sister and I called “the buggie-eyed car” because the headlamps would rise open from the front hood like the car was coming alive. When he’d come visit, he and my mother would spend most of their time in the bedroom while I sat in the living room listening to the radio.
It was 1983, I was 3, and while mom made love to the nutritionist, I was falling in love with music. The Police’s Every Breath You Take, Elton John’s I’m Still Standing, Duran Duran’s Hungry Like a Wolf, Eurythmics’ Sweet Dreams, Irene Cara’s What a Feeling, Kajagoogoo’s Too Shy, Kenny Rogers’ We’ve Got Tonight and Islands in the Stream with Dolly Parton, Lionel Richie’s All Night Long, Naked Eyes’ Always Something There, Thompson Twins’ Hold Me Now, Genesis That’s All, Hall & Oats’ I Can’t Go For That, Paul Young Come Back and Stay, Yes’ Owner of a Lonely Heart, Madonna’s Lucky Star, Rufus & Chaka Kahn’s Ain’t Nobody, Herbie Hancock’s Rock It, Spandau Ballet’s True, Joe Jackson’s Stepping Out, Rockwell’s Somebody’s Watching Me, The Romantics’ Talking In Your Sleep, Bananarama’s Cruel Summer, Matthew Wilder’s Break My Stride, Double’s The Captain of Her Heart, Micheal Sembello’s Maniac, and nearly every song on Michael Jackson’s album Thriller played on heavy rotation while my half brother Nick was being conceived behind the bedroom door.
Nine years later, I was living with my Mom, brother, and sister in a two-bedroom apartment on the border of Stockton and Lodi. My sister Alexa and I were, at this point, nemeses. It started when I was born eighteen months into her life. I was completely attached to her as a toddler, but after she pushed me off a table (literally) and continually threw me under the bus (figuratively) I learned the laws of survival in this jungle of a childhood—it’s every kid for themselves.
My brother Nick was a beautiful little boy with blue-green eyes and Norman Rockwell charm. I was painfully envious of him and was constantly conceiving of ways to commit manslaughter. I came very close to getting him to drink windex out of the bottle. If I couldn’t hurt him, I would humiliate him—catch him sitting in his towel in front of the television, his hair still wet from the shower, and drag his naked body outside onto the porch and lock the door. I can still hear his persistent whelps, begging me not to. He learned how to break into the apartment through the window, naked and crouched in the bushes. Eventually the implorations turned into exclamations, and one day, after being tormented by me, he ran into the kitchen and grabbed every sharp utensil in the silverware drawer. He chased me into our bedroom where I jumped up onto my bed against the wall and shielded my face. He threw everything he had at me, until finally a fork wedged into the drywall an inch from my thigh. “Ok, ok!,” I yelled, and I told him I wouldn’t hurt him anymore, and I never did again.
My mom, having to parent these three opposing forces, was a barely functioning madwoman. Every day she would come home from work to some chaotic drama that had unfolded. Her days were plagued by calls from either Nick or Alexa complaining about something I was doing or had done: trying to get the mentally-slow neighbor kid to drink some crazy concoction we’d blended up, or using the boombox to make dirty mixtapes, or putting insects in the microwave, or stealing eggs from the local duck population and trying to hatch them in a shoebox using a desk lamp, only for them to rot and no amount of Right Guard deodorant spray could kill the stink.
My mother finally cracked one day when she came home from work for lunch and discovered I stopped going to school and was flunking out of the eighth grade. At home it was safe and I could eat and watch tv. If I took those two city buses across town to the middle school, it was guaranteed to be a bad day. In class, the gifted program kids would bully me, and without the protection of the group during lunchtime, I was easy pickings for the rough neighborhood kids who’d punch me, take my money, or humiliate me in front of the school. Mom called my dad and told him he needed to remedy the situation—essentially to ‘stop being a city playboy and take responsibility for his problem-child son.’
Part 3 • Dad
The morning after our father’s announcement Alexa and I woke in our impromptu sleeping arrangement of a fold-out couch and cramped aluminum cot. Dad came into the living room showered and dressed. He got us ready and we tromped down the two flights of musty carpeted stairs, through the ancient apartment lobby, and up the block to a Chestnut Street breakfast. Bechelli’s was Dad’s favorite art deco ‘greasy spoon’ tucked under the mauve and emerald lines of the Presidio Theater marquis.
Through its large rounded street window, mottled sunlight poured in glinting on our o.j. glasses and casting radiant specks on our table of pancakes and eggs. It was just another Sunday morning in the Marina. We talked about the usual things—what we were going to do that day. What was going on in school. But the air was thick with what wasn’t being said. How was Alexa responding to Dad’s news. She’d been enjoying a personal renaissance as a high school freshman at a catholic school. She had nice clothes and was shedding her baby fat. Boys were interested in her and she’d been anointed by the popular crowd. Things were going well for her in Stockton. Would a gay dad living in San Francisco be a welcome part of the picture?
What we couldn't have understood was that Dad was experiencing a personal renaissance of his own, one that he wasn’t looking back from.
Dad had lived in San Francisco before—in the 60s. But he was deeply closeted. His liaisons were more private affairs between close friends and colleagues. Gay bars were intimidating to him. They were dark, smokey places filled with sordid characters, that could be raided any moment at the police force’s discretion. A noose of shame and public ridicule awaited anyone caught in one of these establishments. The very notion of an ‘other than strictly heterosexual’ romantic preference reeked of mental illness and perversion. It was not edgy. It was not cool. It was not celebrated. As libertine and progressive as the city may one day be, not all of San Francisco was a friend of the fringe.
For example, in 1978 a disgruntled conservative politician (a former cop) walked into city hall and gunned down the city’s mayor and a beloved gay rights activist. And, in the aftermath, was given a ‘white glove treatment’ by a sympathetic police force and justice system, and walked out of a California state prison serving only five years. So while artsy, culture-jamming intellectuals had made North Beach their New New York and a youth influx turned the midtown panhandle into a hairy, naked hipster jungle, the bones of the city were still very much of the ‘old guard.’ Second, third, even fifth generation blue collar Irish and Italian policemen and prison guards, cable car operators and fish mongers, shop owners and dock workers were pushing and tugging the levers behind a gritty town of antiquated architecture over layers of cobblestone and rails over layers of shore mud and ship parts.
And no more than 100 miles eastward began America’s bible-toting, cowboy-boot-wearing heartland. California has a great sprawling valley that is agricultural, rural, socially traditional, and where the dial is tuned to country-western radio. It is a place my father was very familiar with. He was raised on a farm out there in a community of Portuguese wine growers and dairy owners. His desire to escape was twofold. He did not want to be a farmer like his father. He knew he was different and his mother was constantly scolding him about acting effeminate. He craved a world of sophistication. He liked foreign cars and foreign film. He liked fine dining and martinis. That’s why he came to San Francisco.
Dad worked in the drafty narrows of the financial district, a smaller building beneath the lumbering towers of concrete and glass. It was for an insurance company run by a Portuguese fraternal brotherhood, for which my father sat as junior president. His boss was a mentor to him, grooming my father to take his place one day as president of the organization. That was the kind of young man my father was on the outside, the clear choice among boys and men for grooming and leadership—a dependable, trustworthy type with a bright future.
And that is why he had to tell his boss his secret. It would certainly come out and scandalize the whole organization, or eat him alive inside. So over a plate of osso bucco at Marconi’s Restaurant & Cocktail Lounge on Battery Street, he sought his boss’s guidance. Surprisingly, the man was not aghast.
“Don’t worry John,” he advised him, “just get the help you need and we’ll keep it to ourselves.”
My father did as he was advised. He went to therapy and got married to a woman (my mother). His ‘issue’ was kept secret—until one evening. At a work event, among a small private group of young members, he found himself taking a boose-influenced verbal jab at the board of elders (which his boss was on). “You know these old-timers,” he remarked, “they are never going to change, they’re too conservative and stuck in their ways.” His boss’s son was one of those listening. A few minutes later Dad’s boss stampeded over, wielding an angry finger, saying, “You watch what you say John. I know things about you.” My father’s flesh ran cold. To those that didn’t know, the statement could have meant many things. But when you have a secret like this one, everything is always about that one thing. The incident sealed the doors to his personal closet like the lid to a coffin for the next 25 years.
But now it was the early 90s and, after two straight marriages, he was a solo 45 year old professional with a charming apartment in a cute neighborhood. The old dank gay bars were just aged and weathered soldiers. What was a hidden outpost in the wilderness had flourished into a full blown mecca. An entire neighborhood was deemed the center of the gay universe. So when Saturday night came along, Dad went dancing. He trotted down to the most popular gay dance club in the city, a cowboy-western two-stepping bar called The Rawhide II. And that’s where he met Brad.
Part 4 • Brad
A month or two later it was my birthday. Dad surprised me by proposing that, on the weekend that I would be visiting him, we drive down to Magic Mountain—an amusement park near Los Angeles. ‘Why don’t you bring a friend,’ he suggested. I didn’t really care if he was trying to buy my approval, I liked this new version of my dad. He was fun-loving and present, rather than serious and avoidant. A weekend with him at Magic Mountain was the perfect birthday gift.
At school, I leaned over to my friend Randy to ask him if he wanted to come to Magic Mountain with me. The truth is, I didn’t have any real friends. But while it seemed every kid in school was just waiting to get their shots in, Randy was actually nice to me. He was a tall, popular kid from an upper middle class family with an Abercrombie & Fitch dress code, who’d confirmed rumors that he’d hooked up with a college-aged girl the summer before the 8th grade. He was charmingly modest as I dragged every bit of the story out of him. Sometimes I would go over to his house after school. He invited me to go with him and his parents to Santa Cruz once for the weekend. I don’t know why. Maybe because he was tired of being the popular kid and could act like a dork around me. Maybe because it was a class thing, and I was the only non-asshole child of parents in the same income bracket. Maybe because I had such a timid personality that I was easy to be around. And maybe everyone else he’d asked already had something planned that weekend and I was the last available person.
“I’ll check with my parents,” he said when I asked him about my birthday trip. I had the uneasy feeling that he probably wouldn’t be going with me. He didn’t seem very interested, slouching in his desk in the social studies classroom, flirting with the girl across from him. The next day I asked again, and then the next. Then a voice from the desk behind his said, “hey, you’re going to Magic Mountain? Man, I’ve always wanted to go! Can I just catch a ride with you there? I’ll pay my own way.” I didn’t know him—or recall ever seeing him in class before. He was sort of a scrappy neighborhood kid. He wrote his number on a torn piece of paper and handed it to me. “Let me know.” Above his number was his name: Colin.
When the weekend got closer, it was clear that Randy wasn’t coming. I broke down and called Colin. ‘Awesome man!’ he said on the other end of the phone. ‘It’s gonna be so much fun!’
Dad picked me up after school on friday, and then Colin, and we drove an hour and a half back to San Francisco. “Are we heading straight to Magic Mountain, Dad?” I asked. “We’re pickup up Brad first,” he answered. My heart cracked. I felt like, what meant so much to me—a trip with my father for my birthday—wasn’t about me at all. Sure I was a little worried about this kid knowing my dad was gay and that his boyfriend was coming on this trip (and they were too). But that wasn’t why I was heartbroken. This was his trip, with his boyfriend. And I was just an accessory. For everything that I had to endure because I was his son—eight years under the tyranny of his cold cruel second wife, a lifetime of his neglectful apathy—this was the point when something broke in me that could never be repaired. I knew then, what I had always suspected—that my father was incapable of caring for anyone but himself.
By the time we arrived at the unfamiliar apartment building, I had already processed through the familiar stages of suppressing my emotions. The heat burning, coursing through me, trapped beneath my skin, never rising out, never erupting. Melting into myself and pushing the anger and sadness down so they couldn’t fully develop, kept like a larva trapped and crystallized in a cocoon, not allowed to grow fully into a winged creature fluttering about the car. It would be slowed and stunted, a grub slowly continuing to feed on my insides. My eyes would drift out the window, look at the hills and the sky, asking them in my silence if they will be my witnesses. ‘At least it was not hell. At least it was not Kim,’ my subconscious tallied.
“Hey guys,” Brad chirped as he got into the front seat of the car. “Hey, whatsup” my friend and I responded. Brad was a fit guy of thirty five with a trim, reddish-brown beard. He wore a black T-shirt tucked into blue jeans, a pro-quality SF Giants baseball cap and 1950s style tortoiseshell Ray Ban Clubmaster sunglasses. He was friendly and difficult to dislike.
“Have you guys ever been to Magic Mountain before?” he said and looked around at us in the back seat.
“No I’ve always wanted to go,” Colin said excitedly.
“No,” I said quietly.
“It’s one of my favorite places in the world,” Brad enthusiastically responded. “This is going to be fun. I brought a bunch of CDs to listen to on the trip.” He clunked down a hefty nylon case on the middle console. “Go ahead and take a look if you want.”
I zipped open the nylon case. Compact Discs were a hot new technology in music listening. They advertised higher quality sound than their precursor, the cassette tape. Where tapes were small, plastic cartridges that contained a miniature reel-to-reel ribbon of tape enclosed within it, CDs were flat, round, hand-sized discs of shiny holographic plastic.
With the arrival of this sexy new music format to stores and mailboxes, there was also a felt loss of something specific to the cassette tape. There was a sense of interaction with tapes beyond their capacity to play music in your car or boombox. You could record and re-record onto any tape (even commercially distributed ones—with a slight modification to its plastic cartridge) with the press of a button that came standard on most tape players. Tapes produced sound by way of particles sitting on a ribbon of film. When hitting play, a mechanical device would physically engage with the cartridge, reading these particles off the ‘tape.’ This meant that over time, dust and scratches would slowly alter the sonic space adding texture like hiss, fuzz and warping. These qualities made tapes feel warm and alive. More human.
The Compact Disc, by comparison, was ‘space-age’ technology. CD players would spin the disc insanely fast and a laser would ‘beam’ the music off of it. It was cold and foreign, alien even, and much more fickle. If dusty or scratched, the CD could spin and spin aimlessly—the player failing numerous attempts to sort out the problem. The CD itself was the least substantial part of the packaging. Each was enclosed in a flat, square case that was strangely slim and confusing to open at first. But for all that, they had one feature above tapes that was an irrevocable improvement. One that, retrospectively, marked a shift in the way people interacted with their music forever—you could ‘skip’ to the next song.
I looked through the titles in the CD case for a band either I or my friend might recognize: Pearl Jam, Guns n Roses, Nirvana, Stone Temple Pilots, AC/DC, Metallica, REM, Lenny Kravitz, Spin Doctors, Arrested Development, P.M. Dawn, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Toad the Wet Sprocket, The Cure. None of the albums had designs that looked the least bit edgy or grunge.
Brad pulled one out and asked, “You’ve probably heard of this one, right?”
The cover design was mostly white with black letters spelling out the word, ‘Seal.’ In place of the letter ‘A’ was an androgynous person standing in a power-A posture with glowing brown skin, short dreadlocks, and futuristic black clothing. “No but sure, we can listen to it.” I said.
The sun was setting and the freeway lights gleamed amid the colors of dusk as we sped along weaving roads southward out of the city. Brad plucked the CD out of its case and fed it into the car stereo. The music filled the silent space of the car, beginning with a club dance beat around some bouncing synth notes. A keyboard ‘trumpet’ timidly played over it. I was skeptical. But then a wave of strings swelled up around it, the groove morphed into a gritty, hard-knocking beat, as a dirty synth bass groove dropped in consuming the song. A man’s voice surged up through it, soulful and raspy. Lyrics reached out and spoke to me, “When you need a place to live and no one understands you, and all you want to do is to cry out loud—but you don't know how.” It wasn’t grunge or punk or indie rock or heavy metal, or anything I thought was cool at the time, but it was unignorably good. And I thought, ‘yes I’m hurting, but different doesn’t have to mean bad, it can be good.’
Part 5 • Vince
1993
I was still ditching and flunking the eighth grade during the week. I’m sure it wasn’t an easy decision to make, but this is why I had to move to the city. Dad and his relatively new boyfriend Brad were planning to move in together in the summer, and I would move in with them.
“Are there even kids there?” I asked Dad.
The San Francisco I knew was a spectacle, a destination. A place to get a highrise hotel room with expansive windows looking down onto neon wet streets. A place for Christmas shopping trips through the legendary window displays of Union Square. A place of labyrinthine hills and cascading buildings. A place surrounded by silver waters and the embrace of angelic bridges.
I’d gone to its restaurants and stores. I’d ridden its ferries and street cars. I’d visited its museums and theaters. I’d walked across that colossal red bridge. Stood beneath its inhumanly tall towers. I saw how, up close, all those elegant art deco details disappear. How its true brutalism is revealed. How when you’re standing amidst a crowd of three hundred thousand commemorating the primitive archway’s 50-year lifespan—and you have to pee—the only place to go is down through a rain gutter, a sheer gap in the construction with no safety or obstacle from an obscene expanse of baywater. How no amount of charming, vintage-red paint can soften that.
But never in that time did I ever recall seeing kids. There must’ve been, because I was there and I was a kid. But if there was, it wasn't apparent. And that’s something I would eventually understand about the city. There are, in fact, no children there. There are smaller underdeveloped people whose eyes are not ready to see the things the city shows them, and whose insides are not entirely prepared for the world in which they are planted. But they aren’t children; they don’t act like children, they don’t look like children, and they don’t look back at you from a crowd like a child. Between the streets and structures and cars and windows, there among the dense patchwork of the city—whatever they are—they just blend in.
I couldn’t imagine what living with Dad and Brad in San Francisco would look like or feel like. Brad was still a stranger. But more than that, major life transitions were always rough. Even if the previous situation was undesirable. I would get panic attacks or hives. Like when Dad left Kim and I was given no time to say goodbye to the room in that house on the bottom floor where my bed was and where I drew pictures and made things—the one with the window that looked out onto the back yard where the rosemary bushes were. And the bees that hovered around them. And the snail whose extended eyeball I snipped with scissors, who destroyed me with the horrid cringe I felt watching it gurgle into itself, knowing the pain it was experiencing and that it had done nothing to deserve it.
Dad abandoning his sacred Marina district seemed implausible. But even the Mercedes convertible had to be let go of to make way for a four-door sedan. Sacrifices would have to be made. I was visiting the city more often now and would (in theory) start high school there later that year.
He moved to a large one-bedroom ground level flat on 14th street between The Castro and The Haight. It had a den with three-panel folding doors where I would sleep. The kitchen was small with a breakfast nook and a back door out to the garbage bins. It had a fake fireplace that would light up red.
Alexa rarely came with me when I’d go visit dad in the city every other weekend. She was busy with her boyfriends and swim meets. I’d board the Amtrak alone from Stockton and wave through the train car window to my mom and younger brother—their colorful clothing vivid against the dusty-white, half-condemned station building.
The train ran along the delta, the same route that the old riverboats would run in the years of the goldrush—from the port of Stockton, pass the mouth of the Sacramento river, widening through the Carquinez strait and into the expanse of the San Francisco Bay. I had one cassette tape playing on my headphones. Just the same song on repeat: Spin Doctors: How Could You Want Him (When You Know You Can Have Me). Its melodic guitar rambling to remains of old docks and boathouses lining the water, river rat communities, and old bridges all moving at a steady, lilting pace past my train car window. I connected with this, the way I connected with my grandfather’s farm as a child, his dilapidated barn and decrepit farmhouse full of empty cans and stacks of newspapers and cats with no home. It was the tempo of my being, a kind of slow numb vibration with too many feelings that don’t belong anywhere. On pause. The world moving around them. Like the hounding by my father to do something, to move faster. Pushing me to dress myself and get out the door. Until I get time to myself and then I can just sit in it, be with it, and watch.
“I want you to think about this school called SOTA,” Dad said that weekend. “I think you’d like it. It’s very artsy.”
“Soda like soft drinks? Or like soda crackers?” ‘Everything in San Francisco is weird,’ I thought.
“No it’s an acronym for School of the Arts,” Dad explained. “It seems very ‘cool,’ kind of bohemian. They don’t sit in desks, they sit on stools at big tables. Doesn’t that sound interesting? I think it would be very good for you.”
My most recent experiences did not leave me very excited about school in any form. Though Dad was clearly inspired by the whole thing. Like as if he were attending. For me, it was like being asked, “what kind of socially painful experience would you like in your future? … How about an art themed one?”
I did however enjoy aspects of school. I went to an ‘arts magnet’ elementary school in Stockton where I discovered I could think in music, sing in key, was a decent visual artist, and that when I get on stage, I was able to unleash something from inside, something supernatural, no longer the child whose internals were in a constant terrible cringe. I wasn’t choking over my own words that I’d been told were ugly and wrong. Every bit of me that had been stuffed and shoved and battered down came rushing out as if I were not in control at all. I was something else. I was free.
I bellowed and sang and leaped around that stage like the bird let loose from the cage, fluttering about the room. My fifth grade teacher Mrs. Porter loved it. And I loved her. I watched her with nervous admiration, the proud elegant woman. Dark brown golden skin with piercing green eyes.
‘Look up,’ she would command as she drew the eyeliner across the trembling skin beneath my eye. In those moments I felt both terrified and eternally special. I would do anything for that woman on that stage. I would make our audience cheer.
“I picked up some books for you,” Dad said the next time I saw him. “They’re monologues for your SOTA audition.”
I’d never performed a monologue. I had never acted without a director. In fact, I had never done any kind of theater not from under Mrs. Porter’s wing. I didn’t know how to act. I knew how to exclaim and rage and cause a ruckus that would enthrall the parents of a nine year old.
“Just go through them and pick one out that resonates with you. You can practice with Brad and I as your audience if you like.”
“Ok,” I muttered and took the books over to my stuff in the spare bedroom.
•
The next time I came, Alexa came with me. We woke up Easter morning in the guest room. Dad came out of his bedroom wearing green and white plaid pajamas with black-and-white cows all over them. And then Brad, with his golden country-western rodeo themed pajamas.
Brad was hiding it well, but he was very much a fish out of water—not sure if he would be accepted by his boyfriend’s teenage kids. He had stayed the night, and it was the first time he had done so with Alexa or I there. It’s one thing to introduce a new person into your family within the default paradigm of heterosexual relationships (and all the questions no one ever asks). It’s another when there are too many questions. This was entirely new territory: where was the comfortable line where a gay lifestyle and a childhood meet?
We all gathered on the facing couches for breakfast, where Brad handed Alexa and I each wrapped gifts. “Woah, what’s this?,” we said in surprise. Easter, evidently, was a special holiday to Brad who grew up a devoted believer in the miracle of Jesus Christ. I suppose it’s hard to break old habits—even when your religious community is diametrically opposed to your ‘choice of lifestyle.’
I unwrapped it. It was a bottle of cologne. Like, nice expensive designer cologne. Not the cheap samplers from JCPenny of Stetson or Old Spice or Brut or Preferred Stock. It was Polo by Ralph Lauren. Alexa got a bottle of Lauren, also by Ralph lauren.
This was kind of a big deal. Kim had never let us have cologne or hairspray or gel—anything that had a smell she didn’t like. I would dream of having cool hair. I imagined it would change my fate entirely. As if that was the reason I had such low social standing. We’d go to Santa Cruz in the summer and I’d see punks with Mohawks. I’d say, ‘when I grow up, I want a green Mohawk with black polka dots.’ While everyone else had cool waves and buzzed sides and tails, my hair was always fluffy and flat. It was this ‘Mo’ from ‘The Three Stooges’ or ‘Dumb and Dumber’ bowl cut reminder that I was no one special. I needed cool clothes and hair and cologne.
Brad knew this about our lives with Kim. Dad had told him. And he bought us these special Easter gifts. Maybe it was a gimmick. To endear him to us. Didn’t matter. It was a symbol. That sad old suburban life with that stepmother is now gone. Welcome to your new life. You’re in San Francisco now. Dad’s happy. His boyfriend’s nice. The world is your oyster. Let’s celebrate.
As soon as we were dressed and ready the doorbell chimed. “Vince is here!” Brad announced, and with a “Hey! Hello! Oh my god Brad and John!”, the phenomenon that was Brad’s best friend, Vince, exploded into Dad’s entryway. It was like a Culture Club MTV music video just paraded through the door singing Karma karma karma karma karma chameleon!
“My god John! Of course you choose the tallest hill in San Francisco to move to!” Vince shrieked, drawing his hand to his forehead like a fainting southern belle.
He was an immaculate conception of loud chic late-eighties Manchester club style, with round mirror-chrome sunglasses gazing upward into illusory stage lights, a mezzanine of wet-black hair topping a Berlin side-buzz, and a blousy polka dot shirt barely tucked into half-on overalls, rolled up to reveal crazy socks and unlaced sneakers.
“Hello Vince,” Dad said warmly and greeted him with a casual hug. Brad too then embraced Vince, making a very clear rolling of his eyes. He had just brought into our world the one person that would most blow his cover. Not that there was any confusion about the sexual identities of any one of these adult men. But coming out of the closet is more often like stepping through a series of many closets. Perhaps the closet doors never really end, they just get thinner and more transparent—the final ones made of frosted glass or sheer chiffon.
“And this must be Zack and Alexa!” The stardust trail of Vince’s personal red carpet finale’d on the couch across from us. “Oh wow, I’ve been waiting so long to meet you guys! How exciting!”
To meet us? This intimidatingly cool rockstar of a human is excited to meet us? Two credless underdeveloped nobodies? Alexa and I still hadn’t yet appropriated the teen-aged self-preservation technique of not giving a fuck. We were still sweet and polite kids. And so we both awkwardly smiled and said hello.
“Tell me all about yourselves!” Vince cooed.
Starstruck and dazed we uhhh’d and ummm’d until Dad and Brad came to our rescue on the facing couches. “Well, Alexa is a straight-A student on the swim team and Zack is very creative and draws and plays piano and performs in school plays,” offered Dad.
“Vince is one of my best friends of 10 years,” added Brad, telepathically begging him to ‘turn down the gay.’ “We lived in L.A. together and he just moved up here.”
“Oh Brad! Weren’t those the days! Remember when…”, Vince plunged into a colorful narrative while Brad unsuccessfully needled his foot. Truthfully, ‘gay’ wasn’t what I was thinking at all. I sat there quietly wondering to myself, ‘What was this life that Brad had before he met Dad? Full of wild parties, full of… fun?? …but Dad’s life is so quiet and normal. How do those two fit together?’
“Anyway!,” Brad interjected nervously, “we were thinking of heading down to the Castro and then taking the streetcar into downtown.”
“How great!,” Vince slapped back “Let’s get these kids some cool digs, huh?”
“Yeah!” I cheered, “I’m getting my first pair of Doc Martens today!”
“Oh Awesome! High tops or low tops?” asked Vince.
“Boots I think, but I don’t know what color to get.” I said.
“Well let’s take a look! I bet they have a lot more styles here than where you live. Let’s get you something that’ll make those boring normal kids jealous!” Vince smiled, casting a sparkling wink.
•
My audition for School of the Arts had come too soon. I hadn’t touched the monologue books Dad had purchased for me. No one around had asked me about them, or about the performance I was assumed to give that would secure my place in this prestigious high school. All I could do was bring them in my backpack to the city that Friday and somehow pull off the impossible in the next 18 hours.
Dad was pissed. “I got him all those books and he’s not prepared—he hasn’t even looked at them!” he fussed to Brad. “Zack, you’re going to go and sit in that bedroom,” he commanded, “and pick a monologue—ANY of them—and you better have one memorized by the end of the night!”
I sat there and leafed through the one-to-two-page solo plays. I don’t know what I was looking for—something that didn't look too long. I’d try reading a sentence, and then my eyes would gloss over and my body would feel numb. Then the page would stare back at me—smug. This bully. This intimidating block of words and letters that knew all the secrets of how to be a successful student, how to make adults like you, how to win awards and get good grades. It knew everything and if it would just tell me I could be like my sister Alexa and life would be so much easier, like how she makes it look. But it wouldn’t tell me anything.
Every page was a locked door and I flipped through each one hoping for an easy one, pleading for leniency. And then I found one, where the sentences were more separated. Where there was more space around them, where I could find my way in. And it started to speak. It said, ‘in this monologue, you will pretend to be a child who is nervous about asking another child out to the prom.’
I read it from start to finish, twice. But I had just gone to my 8th grade prom. And it was nothing like in the monologue. The kids I knew in the gifted program were there. I walked up to them and said ‘hi.’ There was Randy, the cool tall nice one. Next to him was Corey, the other kid (besides me) who was skilled in the parlor trick of drawing cartoon faces and stuff. Nathan was there also—tall, handsome and post puberty.
“I thought they don’t let school ditchers come to prom,” he snarked.
“Yeah, haha,” Josh chuckled, a fourth husky freckled kid I thought might be poor due to a wardrobe scarce in brand name clothing.
I didn’t say anything. Nothing came to mind. Plus, my attention had been taken by the room, knowing this physical space so intimately well, being the same school gym/cafeteria I’d eaten lunch in nearly every day of the past two years (when I actually showed up) attempting to huddle in with my classmates but often feeling unwelcome and wandering about until I was saved by the ring of the period bell.
Seeing this room in the dark, in dazzling mirror-ball lights, it was transformed. Not just the look of it. It felt different. The herd anxiety and tension of the past two years was gone. No more posturing and verbal jousting. No more physical threats from larger boys. No more looming humiliation by teachers or peer groups. No more games of survival. I was standing inside the reprieve of all that, the reward for somehow mustering through.
And it was magical. Though not purely without the feeling that I’d done nothing to earn it. That I didn’t deserve to be there.
Couples were taking pictures together. They looked really happy and in love. I watched and thought, ‘wow everybody’s doing this, they all have boyfriends and girlfriends and they’re dressed really nice in matching suits and dresses, their hair is perfect, they are all so lucky and beautiful.’
I thought of all the girls I knew that I would’ve wanted to go to prom with. I wondered if they would want to dress up with me so we’d match. I would’ve asked Patricia. Who I’d been in love with since back in the 3rd grade. But she was dating this kid Vincent, who stole my gold necklace that Kim’s mom (my Grandma Verde) gave to me when Dad and Kim divorced knowing she’d likely never see me or my sister again. I would’ve asked Anne, who I had a sapiosexual crush on in grades 4th through 6th when she was the class over-achiever. She reminded me of Shelly Long’s character Diane on the sitcom Cheers. I wished I was Sam, her romantic foyle. So tall, handsome and charismatic. More so, she reminded me of the daughter in the sitcom My Two Dads. A mixture of wholesome and mischievous. I tried sitting next to her once in the 6th grade. As suspicious as she was of why I had decided to abruptly become her table neighbor, she didn’t seem to catch on. I watched and studied how she moved and what she loved. She liked getting the best grades in class, and seemed to achieve this by paying attention and focusing. So for a few months I tried to be like her. It was so different a feeling. Perhaps what it felt like to be proud. To be esteemed. I remember such furiousness and disbelief in her eyes when our teacher passed back out tests announcing that I had scored the highest (not Anne). I was also in disbelief. I had done it too well. My plan had backfired. Trying to get close to her by being like her I was now getting the best grades in class. And Anne hated me. So I stopped sitting there and stopped getting good grades and things went back to how they were.
I wonder what would’ve happened if I’d asked them? Would we be able to have enough normal conversations to make that happen? Seemed unlikely. It would be nice. But my life didn’t support that kind of planning and precision.
The music was loud—kids had to yell to be heard. I stood there for a few minutes longer watching the young lovers dancing, or frozen on the sidelines negotiating the next song worthy of taking the floor. It was a slow jam called Twisted by Keith Sweat. I’d heard it before. I had inadvertently formed a bond with it. I hadn’t meant to, and of course, maybe it doesn’t work that way. There was something about it. It had me. It was the girls singing on it. They were singing to Keith saying, ‘you know you are my lover’ and ‘I know I got what you need, so what you wanna do?’ And it felt like they were singing to me. They sang so sweetly and yet there was something almost taunting about it. Like they knew exactly what to say to make me fall for them. But I wouldn’t be falling into anything, just a lonely pit of my own fixation.
Keith sang back to these girls saying, “Baby, I love you so.” And I knew exactly how he felt. He was in love. But in the next part he sang, ‘but you don't feel like I do. Tell me, what can I do?” I felt his heart breaking in that moment. I wanted to help him, save him from his pain. ‘Be strong, Keith,’ I thought. And Keith did keep it together, showing such great strength. “But I gotta be strong. Did me wrong,” he sang, “when I thought that we were really down…”
They were saying sweet things and they sang them so lovingly. But Keith doesn’t feel safe or secure. And that is what made the song special. Because Keith wants to believe them. And I want to believe them. And Keith will keep singing this song over and over and they will keep deceiving him over and over.
I had by this time dislodged myself from my sarcastic familiars (Randy and Nathan, and Corey and Josh) who were still just standing around and commenting on whatever.
I’d gone wandering around, once again overly conscious of myself in the space, knowing there was nowhere I fit in. Nowhere for me to be. And so I decided to go outside to the courtyard where it was quiet and warm and the evening air was filled with quiet sounds like sprinklers and the chirps of singing crickets. Where I could be nowhere, an appropriate place for nobody. And where, if I felt like secretly crying a little, just because of the overwhelming feelings of it all, I could, and no one would know.
I headed that way and was nearly to the door but was intercepted—“Oh hey, are you Zack?”
I was just trying to go outside. I wasn’t expecting to be spoken to. Not from out of the dark. I must’ve looked startled. It was a girl. Not even a girl, a young woman.
“Yeah,” I responded, disoriented.
I was trying to get my bearings of what this scenario was all about that had thwarted my attempt to get outside to feel sorry for myself, and she injected— “Oh I’m sorry, uh, this probably sounds crazy, but, I’ve just had a crush on you all year and wanted to tell you.”
I looked at her. She was so much taller than me, even without her black heels. She was elegant. And pretty. In a girl-next-door sort of way.
Had it been a prank, I would’ve fallen for it easy. She was a stranger, but so kind in her face. I believed her. In a way that wasn’t about my battered sense of self—about who I had been the past two years (or the past twelve). I saw in her a vulnerable truth, standing there in her dress and heels. In her crush. Regardless of whom it was for. And I suddenly shared in this with her. I was an accomplice. In her tenderness. In this moment.
I remembered in that moment that I was in fact someone that girls could have crushes on. Back in elementary school Alisha liked me it seemed. She would bring me things that she’d got over the weekend. Like an eraser made to look like a little penguin in a tuxedo, or a race car.
The terms and conditions of junior prom had just changed. I felt responsible for the situation knowing it had just improved greatly and there were two of us in this now. I should probably know her name, I thought. So I asked.
“Oh it’s Veronica,” she said, embarrassed she’d forgotten to introduce herself.
“I’m Zack,” I said out of impulse, forgetting she already knew that. “Well, do you want to dance?”
“Yeah sure,” she approved.
I felt safe with her. She was real. I wasn’t alone. It was different. We walked together through the dark toward the half of the gym that was the dance floor. The lacquered wood beneath our feet seemed to be moving—the colorful lights sweeping across it. There was a space inside the crowd just for us. I was half floating above myself. But grounded just enough to put my arms around her waist and see her nervous smile widen. She had a light, meandering odor like an old kitchen sink sponge. I think it was her black dress. Likely from her washer. Some old washers make all the clothes smell like mildew. I knew many washers at all the houses and apartments I’d lived in that would do this. If we’d leave wet clothes in my mom’s washer too long you’d have to wash them all over again. The smell was a little distracting, but at the same time, it was real. Smells happen. The glow of her joy at being there with me was louder than the smell, her sparkling eyes looking slightly down at me.
That is the monologue I would’ve performed. That is the story I should have told. But I didn’t. The next day when Dad took me to the SOTA auditions and I walked into that big room with just two adults sitting behind a table—not amused, not cheering, just watching, staring with blank faces—I tried to recite something, but it all disappeared. It was gone. It was just me standing there emotionally naked, returning the same blank stare at the adults behind the table.
“I’m sorry,” I said and walked out of the room back over to my eagerly waiting father. “I couldn’t do it,” I told him.
“Ok, that’s ok,” he reassured me, “we can go.”
Part 6 • The City
San Francisco is full of hills and flats, and roads that meander to secret neighborhoods that you’d only find if you were lost, intentionally or otherwise. The city is an island—culturally speaking. Geographically, it’s the northern head of a peninsula, created by ocean to the west and bay to the north and east. It measures seven miles by seven miles. From the air, it resembles the square palm of a right hand without fingers or thumb. In the very center is the highest point in the city—a swell of land topped by two points called ‘twin peaks’ that look like a bra from the ‘50s. From there you can see a near 360º view of the eclectic, sprawling township below and the surrounding water and islands, and fading hills beyond them.
If Twin Peaks is the center of the palm, the ‘head line’ (the crease that runs through the center of the palm to the right edge) would be Market Street—San Francisco's classical thoroughfare that begins its life snaking the base of twin peaks before diving through Castro Street and shooting a perfect diagonal line to the clock tower at the city’s edge where ferry boats arrive and depart daily. Adding a thumb to the palm so that it continues the trajectory of the head line, is the Bay Bridge—the four-pillared silver expanse that connects the city to Oakland and the extended East Bay. The ring finger would be the Golden Gate Bridge that takes you north to the sailboat town of Sausalito and the forested hills of Marin County.
Crowning Twin Peaks is a colossal, striped-red radio antenna called Sutro Tower. There are a lot of things called ‘Sutro this’ or ‘Sutro that’ in San Francisco. If they didn’t know what to name something, they’d just name it after Adolph Sutro, who was very rich and built a lot of things in the city, and was also the mayor at one point. However you imagine Sutro Tower, you must imagine it bigger than that. It can be seen from 50 miles away without obstruction. Because of this, every neighborhood in the city—each with its own personality and style—lay in the shadow of that tower. Wherever you are standing, it will be in your horizon, like the north star.
About a mile’s walk north from Sutro tower in the Upper Haight neighborhood is a walled in wooded space with beckoning staircases called Buena Vista park. Across the street from that park, with a view of the downtown skyline, was a modest house—one that Dad, Brad and I would move into together at the beginning of summer.
Brad had a ginger-coated samoyed-mix named Sasha—a friendly-faced, clever bulk of ruddy fluff with a full mane and proud fanning tail perched on her rump. I was allergic to dogs. Cats mostly, but dogs too. It could stop my breathing. Making the air passages shrink up. Like a snake living coiled around my lungs. It would be subtle at first, stealthy, almost undetectable. Then just a tingle running through the airways, and a hiss and a wheeze. And without evasive action that snake would eventually get a stranglehold and begin to tighten and smother me from the inside.
It took a long time to figure out what was causing it. Perhaps the taste of red wine I’d had when I was about 7 years old, over at my mom’s friend’s house—the lady that stole from her it would turn out. I don’t even recall if she had cats. I just remember being laid out on the bed (because beds make sick people better, I suppose). I violently flailed, as the two women held onto me—drowning, dying in front of them. I needed them to do something. To save me. I kept lurching up and gasping for some more breathable air in the space above me. But that’s not how it works, despite my mind and muscle-memory convinced otherwise. My mother just held me, attempting to soothe me with her voice, to get me to relax. And eventually exhaustion overtook the fight to remain alive. To stay in this body and live this existence. I had no fight left. I stopped trying. I let go. And only then did the snake release its grip.
It was an invisible creature, the Asthma. It was in the air and on the surfaces of everything. It was waiting there for unsuspecting prey. In the odor of dust or animal fur. In the indicators of poor cleanliness in stranger’s houses. But Dad liked his spaces to be very clean and tidy. The new house had hardwood floors, not carpet that traps allergens. There was a housekeeper that came weekly and vacuumed and swept and dusted.
Perhaps all would be well.
The panel of faculty judges at the School of the Arts audition were incapable of seeing my potential. Even as tragic as it was. I’d screwed up. I’d screwed up everything my dad had worked on setting up for me. What were we going to do? What would happen next?
Thankfully, Dad had a backup plan. I don’t know what I would’ve done without his backup plans. He had me write an essay—a personal statement—to apply to a small, private high school called Drew. He knew that having a gay father would help me stand out from the other applicants and endear me to enrollment staff from a diversity angle. I have no memory of what I wrote in that essay. But I imagine the process looked very similar to sitting at the dinner table with Dad and Brad throwing ideas out to me that then turned into full sentences that then formed paragraphs. I suspect I was more a scribe than an author of the final . But nevertheless it got the job done. I was enrolled and would start summer school there in a few months.
Dad had one final trip to make—to take me out of Stockton forever. I didn’t have much to bring with me. I’d left so much behind already when we’d fled from living with Kim. I might’ve brought school pictures from those years. Or the portable black-and-white TV Kim had gifted me for christmas that I watched during sleepovers with the neighbor kid Andrew. Or comics with my favorite characters Wolverine, Nightcrawler, Rogue, and Jubilee, and all the drawings I’d made tracing over them to design new heroes with unique costumes and abilities. Or my bag full of Legos I’d kept in the closet. Or my two favorite action figures, Bebop and Rocksteady from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles TV show. I would’ve brought my bike had it not been stolen from behind the bushes of my mom’s apartment. But all there was to bring was a suitcase of clothes, a backpack, a pair of in-line skates, a skateboard, some CDs and a CD player, and my army green Doc Martens.
•
Brad, Dad, and Sasha had already moved in and were situated when I arrived. They walked me through the front door and up the stairs. There was an entryway at the top—light brown varnished wood floors and white walls which led to a bedroom.
“This is your room,” Dad gestured and gave me a cursory tour. “It’s not huge but it’s actually pretty nice. See, your things can go here,” he put my suitcase down next to the bed. “This is your bed and dresser. And if you want you can pull the shades up and see the street and the park. Boy, that’s a pretty nice view—better than from our room.”
I walked in, a tourist in an unfamiliar space, and put down what I was carrying. Brad watched from the doorway and then deposited my final items against the wall.
“What do you think?” Dad asked.
“Ok” I replied. Brad stood there smiling. “You like it?” he checked.
“Yeah,” I said.
“It’s new but, you know, you’ll get used to it.” Dad reaffirmed.
“Ok.” I said.
There were french doors adjacent to my bedroom that opened to a living room that Dad and Brad referred to as ‘the den’. There were couches and a TV, and a bay window just like Dad had in the marina flat. It also looked onto the park. Down the hall was the bathroom and across from that, Dad and Brad’s bedroom. It was dark inside. Only a narrow window with the blinds half drawn. You could see from there it was large. The bed must’ve been a king. It radiated with Dad’s grandiosity. Like a cathedral or temple. All his suits and nice clothes and watches and pocket coins from the day were kept in there, in a closet or forbidden drawer somewhere.
Further down, the hall led to a dining room with a corner office, then more french doors to another living room, this one with even wider bay windows and a view I’d never seen from inside a house before. You could see everything. How everything moves from atop the hills sweeping down to the flat parts that are so alive with grand streets and boulevards and the antique buildings and fancy towers grasping for a sky that is still so vast and out of reach.
There’s a cognitive dissonance seeing something like that from within a quiet living room with a couch and chair and coffee table and small tv on a metal stand—without paying a fare for it or having to walk steep paths or drive winding roads. It’s the feeling of looking down from the window of an airplane not yet in the clouds, seeing a world of people and their lives interwoven in miniature, the subconscious trying to hold at bay the obvious meaning of it, that the preciousness of subjective reality is a fragile paradigm, and that knowing or seeing certain truths will always be there looming, threatening to destroy it all.
To Dad it was a rite of passage. To Brad it was simply a beautiful view.
In the kitchen, to the right, we all made dinner together. I was in charge of the instant mashed potatoes which required pouring a box of freeze-dried potato flakes into a pot of boiling water, adding butter and milk and salt, and mixing. However I’d gotten decently gourmet-savvy from making all the (what my mom called) “concoctions” in her blender. I found a jar of minced garlic in the fridge and onion powder and some parsley flakes in the cupboard. I whipped it together into a bowl and threw a pad of melting butter on top for effect.
It was the first time I had been creative in what felt like years. Or at least the first time it led to anything positive, because both Brad and Dad were impressed.
“Woah these are really good,” Brad lauded in disbelief. “These came from that box?”
“Yeah, I added a few things,” I responded, the proud chef.
“Wow, I could eat these every night,” he added.
“Sounds like you’re our designated mashed potatoes cook, Zack.” Dad anointed me.
“Ok,” I smiled proudly.
After dinner we all went into the den to watch a movie.
“What movie are we watching?” I enquired. I hoped maybe it would be a sci-fi action adventure or fantasy movie, or at worst a fun comedy.
“We picked it up at the Blockbuster Video down the hill. It’s called Torch Song Trilogy.” Brad answered. “Your dad hasn’t seen it yet. I’m guessing you’ve never heard of it?”
“It’s a trilogy?” I reacted, “Like Star Wars?”
“Haha, no. It’s a comedy… with gay characters… I mean, not all of them are gay. Well, most of them. But it’s still really funny! I think you’ll like it. It has the actor from Ferris Beuler’s Day Off—Mathew Broderick. You know him, ya?” Brad explained (hoping Ferris Beuler plus comedy would help achieve an endorsement from this assumed-straight thirteen-year-old).
“Ok yeah.” I said.
And so we sat down and watched a story about a man named Arnold. For his work he sits in front of a big mirror and puts make-up on his face, transforming into an entirely different person—a very glamorous woman. Then he walks through a pair of shiny curtains out into a room filled with smiling, happy people. I knew this experience from elementary school theater. When I played the Grand Exar—the disgruntled king of the aliens on Planet X. And when I was the character of Moe tromping around performing slapstick shenanigans in the play, Christmas and the Three Scrooges.
But when the show is over, Arnold walks home through dark gritty streets to an empty apartment. He’s alone. And there’s something about his face that suggests he’s been sad for a long time. Arnold is the type of person that really wants to fall in love. His world revolves around the hole in his life, one filled only with the hope of someone that could see him as special and lovable.
I knew exactly what that feels like. I've wished for that so much. When I was the age of nine or ten, and left alone in that bedroom in Dad and Kim’s house back in Stockton. And everyone had gone. And it was because they said I was bad—I had done something bad, or I was just that way. I wished someone would come rescue me. At first I wished my dad would. I thought for sure he would see that I was suffering and come to my rescue, because he surely was a very important and powerful person in the world. Everything seemed to revolve around him—perfectly quaffed and more handsome than anyone else. But at some point I lost hope for that. It was obvious how I felt and what was happening to me and he could see (I knew he could see) and he did nothing, as if it wasn’t happening. And also because of that time when I was seven, when he and I and my sister Alexa and Kim’s daughter Rachel were in the car together in Santa Cruz, and I said to him from the front passenger seat, “Dad, I think I want to kill myself.” And his face turned worried and he said, “No Zack, don’t say that. Why would you say such a thing? You shouldn’t say such things.” And so I never did say that to him again. And I never waited for him to rescue me either. It would have to be someone else.
But what is wonderful about Arnold’s story is that he does find someone—Ferris Bueler. It is Ferris except he’s no longer in high school, he’s a young man now. His hair is a little bit longer than in his senior year when he ditched class all day with his girlfriend and best friend for downtown Chicago. It’s more like Michael J Fox’s hair in Family Ties now. And he seems sweeter somehow, more kind. He likes Arnold and Arnold likes him, and they fall in love. They meet each other’s friends and take trips together. The scowl on Arnold’s face lifts, as if it just floats away with the clouds.
But in those same streets Arnold walked through to get home, Ferris is walking alone this time. It is nighttime and the street lamps are dim. And a group of men encounter him on the street and begin to bully him. No wink at the camera for Ferris, no clever ways to escape this time. He runs away but only down a dark alley that ends at a brick wall. He is trapped and all he wants to do is leave and go home. But the group of men have decided they don’t like him and call him names like Queer and Faggot.
Where are his friends? Where is his red Ferrari to take him away? Where is Arnold who loves him? Ferris was always a smaller guy—no match for even just one of these large angry men. And they all begin to hit him and hurt him, and he can’t even try to fight back or even defend himself. And they keep hitting him and hurting him until he’s not moving anymore. And only then does Arnold find him, laying there, only just his body now. No Ferris left inside. And Arnold cries for help, and there is no one to cry to. Only Arnold holding the body that once contained the love of his life.
I thought about the movie as I laid in my new bed, in the dark of my new room. The curtains hung barely illuminated by the street lamp outside. There was nothing to imagine for the future. It was as empty and quiet as the void of the room. There was a clock radio glowing a dim, digital ten-thirty on the side table next to it and I turned it on to a radio station of just a man talking softly. Until that drifted away into the darkness too.
In the morning Dad said we were walking to The Castro to get breakfast. It was just a handful of blocks away, downhill. The sun was out and casting leafy patterns onto the passing houses and colorful doorways and windows. The sidewalks were steep and some had stairs. Red and blue and yellow and turquoise cars climbed and dove down the roads between. And below that was the intersection of Castro and Market streets. We took the crosswalk to the other side, making sure not to trip on the grooves of defunct street car rails or the cobblestones.
And like Dorothy landing in Oz, we crossed into a world of brilliant color. It was the tall, neon marquee of the art deco movie theater, and the store signage and ad posters and window displays of the multitudes of eclectic shops and restaurants, and the rainbow-striped flag banners hanging from each of the vintage street lamps that lined the sidewalk—and of course the rare glow of sunshine.
But more than that it was the warm radiance of people smiling and talking and walking and laughing. It was the genuine embraces of joyful people, arm in arm, affectionate. We joined them, became part of them. It was infectious. I was a child of course, but like a journalist or anthropologist I could walk among them, and even pretend to belong. And it was thrilling in that way. I saw the way they were full of light and life in how they filled the sidewalks. I saw how they expressed themselves and how they dressed. In some, a carefree sensuality. In some, a regal hypermasculinity. But in all cases there was an artistry. The way whiskey was adopted by the Japanese. Refined, softened in some ways. Made acute in others. But overall reimagined and perfected.
We walked past where the underground transit station staircase rises to meet the sidewalk. Past the modest bank building with a rounded front and tall arched windows. Past the tiny pizzeria and the deli, and in through the doorway of a bustling diner called The Cove.
“I’ll be with you in just one minute!,” a man with a thinning buzz cut, goatee, and waiter’s apron greeted us, pausing from taking an order from seated diners.
“Busy morning!,” he addressed us and grabbed a handful of thick plastic menus. “Table for three?”
He seated us at the only open spot—a table against the wall near the center of the diner with vinyl bench seating on one side and a couple chairs on the other. Dad and I sat down, our backs to the wall, looking out. Brad sat across from us.
“So, this is The Cove,” Dad said, “What do you think? We’ve been coming here pretty regularly.”
“Yeah, I think I recognize some of the faces in here,” Brad added.
“Seems popular,” I remarked.
There was nothing particularly unique about the little diner, except that the walls were completely covered in framed photos. Some of the people in the photos were drag queens. Some of them were leather-daddies. Some of them were wearing pageant ribbons or holding awards with the words: Mr. Bare Chest. ‘Were these friends of the owner?,’ I wondered. ‘Or people that come here a lot?’ I wasn’t sure. They were gay, that’s for certain. An almost stereotypical cartoon of ‘gay.’ But maybe a different kind of gay than Dad and Brad, who seemed so normal to me. They didn’t wear makeup or dress up like women. They didn’t wear leather, or walk around bare-chested. Or maybe they did—I just didn’t know about it.
In fact, the whole diner was filled with very normal-seeming people. We could’ve been in a small breakfast restaurant somewhere in the midwest. Just regular townsfolk in their 30s and 50s and older, sitting talking over their coffee and bacon and pancakes. It was nothing necessarily flamboyant or dramatic, or even celebratory. They were all really just people on a Sunday morning, eating their breakfast. And the people in the photos—perhaps they were also just normal people too, when they weren't in a Mr. Bare Chest pageant.
Outside on the street after breakfast we strolled along looking through the windows of bakeries, and variety shops, and clothing boutiques of mannequins in beachwear—appropriate for the summer of course, but not a San Francisco summer (colder than the coldest winter Mark Twain ever knew reportedly). This being a novel sunny day in the city, however, the locals were virtually raiding the store for the shortest shorts and tightest tanks.
Next door was a window full of what looked like dog toys and pet collars, with a mannequin torso amongst the display wearing a t-shirt printed with a drawing of the character Spock from the original Star Trek series. He was squeezed into a kind of leather lingerie and holding a whip, and he had a talkie bubble beside him that read, ‘Beat me up Scotty.’ Dad saw it and read it, laughing aloud. I didn’t understand the humor but enjoyed that Dad was laughing. He didn’t laugh very often. But when he did, it meant we were all having fun.
“Oh like, instead of beam me up Scotty?’ I said.
“Yeah but he wants Scotty to beat him up, ha ha ha,” Dad chuckled.
I was looking. I saw that it was a caricature. I saw that he was wearing an outfit that female pop stars Madonna or En Vogue might wear in their MTV music videos. That it was sexual in nature. And that the shop sold sex-related stuff. But I didn’t see the humor. I searched for it in my brain, in my memories and thoughts, in my mental collection of moving images and meanings. But there was nothing in there that could explain the correlation between sex (which I had limited but sufficient understanding of) and the experience of being physically attacked by someone (which by that point I knew intimately).
I hadn’t really been ‘beaten up.’ Not like Arnold’s boyfriend in the movie. He was beaten up until he was dead. I didn’t know how many punches it took to kill someone. Is there a specific amount? Is it less if you’re a smaller person than a bigger one? I just knew how many punches it took before I would cry, and that was just one. I got punched a few different times in the seventh and eighth grade by a few different kids. In fourth through sixth grade there was just one kid, Jose, that was constantly trying to be my friend and then about once a month he would just punch me in the stomach seemingly for no reason (almost always in the same part of the playing field). He’d say, ‘you’re being so annoying!’ as he was doing it and I’d cry (it is remarkable how easily tears could flow back then). Then he’d feel bad and try to cheer me back up.
The only time I didn’t cry when getting punched is when my mom did it to me. I think because I’d gotten used to it. It had mostly started happening that past year. I began to expect it. If I got too close to her even, I would flinch and prepare for it. Not a punch to the face like in a movie. More like a hard slap or a fist coming down on me—on my shoulder, or on my back, on my head. One time she hit me just for flinching. As if me being scared of her enraged her. Maybe some part of her was actually angry that it was true. I don’t know.
“Maybe we should keep walking,” Brad hinted, seeing that the store’s theme may not be appropriate for a 13 year old’s eyes.
“Ok yeah, let’s keep walking,” Dad agreed. “I don’t think you’re very shocked by this stuff though, are you Zack?”
“No I don’t care,” I said.
It was the Dr. Ruth era, where on daytime talk shows a middle-aged gnome-like woman with a German accent was discussing the importance of sex. I couldn’t imagine her having sex in any sexy kind of way, but I also couldn’t imagine that for me either. Dr. Ruth was a cultural phenomenon, encouraging us all to talk about our sexuality openly—to acknowledge its existence as a natural part of life, not something taboo or secret to be only whispered about—to release our sexuality from the repressed cultural Stone Age of the 1950s.
Also the word ‘sex’ had just become so normalized between George Michael’s platinum-selling music single ‘I Want Your Sex’ and the Color Me Badd’s R&B hit ‘I wanna Sex you Up’ and hip hop girl group TLC wearing colorful condoms pinned all over wild baggy clothing, and Salt-N-Pepa’s party rap track, ‘Let’s Talk About Sex’ which could've easily been written by Dr. Ruth herself.
We crossed the street toward a restaurant called the Sausage Factory (which has ‘a really nice garden patio’—my father remarked) and continued up the street where there were more shops, and a window display that caught my eye. An array of t-shirts with humorous graphics on them were folded into 12x12” squares and arranged into a grid of about 4x7. They were in all colors and some bore popular logos but with each spelling out different words than the original. Like the UPS logo but with the letters rearranged to spell ‘Sup. Or the adidas logo but the trefoil was in the shape of a marijuana leaf and below, in adidas font, was spelled—addicted.
I was completely captivated. I wondered how it was done. I’d never considered that logos were made or designed by someone. I’d just never been introduced to the notion. They were everywhere, and on everything. I didn't have the words to describe it at the time. But it was something about the unshakable power of a logo and how altering it slightly dismantled it just enough that it both preserved and broke the spell simultaneously. Brad read each one aloud and laughed at each.
“You’d look good in that one, Zack” he remarked, his eyes smiling.
“Yeah, how about that one for Dad?” I pointed to a t-shirt with the FedEx logo but it read—FedUp.
“Haha, yeah that’s good.” he laughed. Dad wasn’t paying attention. He was looking at the architecture of the store building.
“You know… I think this was Harvey Milk’s old camera shop.” he speculated. ‘Who’s Harvey Milk,’ I wondered.
“Oh really?” Brad took several steps back and looked at the row of buildings. “Oh no John it’s this one,” he pointed to the ground, “There’s the memorial plaque outside of it.”
It read Harvey Milk followed by a description and explanation of the memorial plaque that I didn’t fully read nor understand the meaning or significance of. But I new he was gay and that he was im portant and that he died. And that was enough to pause there and look at the building and feel the sunlight on my shoulders and notice the shadows on the sidewalk pavement for a moment.