9/12

I can’t bring myself to talk about it, not even to Norman, especially not to Norman. I want to talk about it, I really do. I know I need to talk about it. It may just be too much. Especially today. I had forgotten, it’s the anniversary. When they showed pictures of the planes and the towers all over again, I just had to shut the TV off. The worst part isn’t about the planes. The worst part is about Dylan. The worst part is about my son. It was the day after the planes and the towers. That was when it happened.

I had been in love with the idea of love, just like I had been in love with the idea of Jesus as a dewy youth, searching for a way to belong and somebody to belong to. Love was abstract, a salve, a balm to heal the wounds, the rewounding, the self-wounding. It was an illusion, my idea of love, blurred by the sex. In the old days, back before both Dylans, even way before that, sex was my magic potion, sex kept me alive, sex created the illusion of love. I got laid all the time, festivals and fireworks, sex galore. I would walk into a room, I had the superman thing going on. Drugs and alcohol and money and sex, that’s where I thought I would find love.

The years brought me to my senses, brought sobriety. They also brought erotic famine: my heroic charm and flirtatious gearbox simply didn’t work anymore. I was alone and lonely, an older gay man, fattening, unmedicated, bolted invisibly to the wall.

One morning after, in a moment of descent, I sat with my coffee and woke up. What if the balm were divorced from the romance of it all? What if I found it from a different kind of love, an unconditional love, love without sex, love based on need, love like a dog’s, love that wouldn’t go away, reliable, tender, perfect, immutable?

Baby love?

What if I gave my love to a child? What if I found a child, got a child, had a child? Loved it? What if I gave up on the bullshit, the shame, the games, the failed romances, the cycle of breaking up? It was a blinding flash, like a mudslide hitting me, that idea. I Googled my way through the what-if’s. There is adoption, the gingham induction of the forlorn, suspiciously angry at foster annihilation and disgrace. There is fake insemination, finding the appropriate pillow to accept my sperm, and the right Salvadoran midwife to cash my numerology. But, no, the universe was telling me something else. I didn’t know what it was, but I tried to listen. Calling out my intention to the winds, I found her; calling out my desire and need, she came; calling out, shouting out, crying out was how it happened.

I found Dylan in my own kitchen, drinking a coke. Here’s the deal, let’s get to the point, he was a she, on the way to he-dom: transgender, transitional gender, gender reassigned, you get my drift? His life began as a gal, ended as a pal, but he still had the right plumbing for my request.
Dylan and I met at an AA meeting. We had become close, real close, her as a guy. I really dug him, so what if he didn’t have a dick? And so, one night, I put it to him. How about it buddy? Would you let me fuck you so I could get a kid?

I guess I was surprised at myself for asking. I know I was surprised at him for saying yes. I don’t know if it was pity or charity or exactly what, since he’d have to stop taking the testosterone and the steroids and the other drugs that buffed him up and made his mustache grow. But he agreed. “It’s like a little break,” he said. “You deserve a break. I’ll give you a break.”

Why was I nervous when that night finally came? All the sex I’d had —- men, women, high, sober, vanilla, kinky. You’d think it would be no big deal. But it was, some kind of sacred show, some kind of test, some kind of serious. He walked in as butch as I’ve ever seen him, a guinea-T pulled across his pecs, or rather his breasts that were flattened and shaped by the tape he wrapped each day. His biceps bulged, and I could see the tightness in his jaw. He was a little freaked too. I let him be the top, it turned him on. He was hot.

And so that’s how it happened, that’s how I became a Dad, how I became a man. That one single night, that one coupling with two deposits, many returns. Dylan missed his period, called me up when he was sure.

“Hello, Daddy” is what he said, and I didn’t know who he was at first.

“No, I mean it, I mean it, you’re gonna be a daddy.”

We spent that nine months watching his stomach and his breasts grow and his mustache wither up. Even without the drugs, though, he never let go of the butch thing. He certainly never went to the maternity store. Instead of mumu’s and oversized blouses, I would buy him larger jeans and men’s dress shirts every couple of weeks. He was a hip hopper, all baggie and streetwise, our story hidden under waves of fabric.

He moved in with me after he started to show, and I stayed close. I stayed in every night and stayed away from the Internet. I stayed close, I moved into the orbit of the growing stomach, I touched it as often as I could, I kissed it. Some evenings all we did was lay still on the bed and listen for the little heartbeat under the intake and out flow of our synchronized breaths.
I took a leave of absence in the seventh month. I was deathly afraid of complications. This was no ordinary birth, no ordinary woman, no ordinary child. I was there for the vomit and the swelling and the anger. I stayed in and cooked and cleaned and tried to show my gratitude for the gift that Dylan was about to give to me. I worked hard to change my personality, zipping my lip, trying to say “yes,” avoiding at all costs any disturbance in our temporary domestic situation that could impact the little boy growing in Dylan’s stomach.

Oh yes, it was a boy, we found out one day at the doctor’s, a babbling brook up there on the computer monitor, the black and white and gray movement throbbing with a heartbeat, and a little tiny blob that the doctor assured us was a penis. Imagine that spurting and thrusting and maybe making babies of his own some day, maybe not, who knows what the box of the future might contain?

By this time I was praying, formally, on my knees, praying to the God of my fathers for this little boy to come out OK; praying to an atheists’ god, the god of doubt; praying to the God of the Baptists and the Catholics; praying to the Jesus in the picture under glass, Jesus with his hand on the shoulder of a soldier in an Eisenhower jacket, the glass I used to put out lines of cocaine; praying to the God of the Buddhists, which is no God at all, no Buddha God except the god that is everywhere and nowhere, the god of the particle and the molecule and the speck of dust; praying to all the gods on my altar, the dancing Shiva and the Ganesh I picked up at a Hindu shrine near Kuala Lumpur.

We must have had the magic touch — that, or maybe there is a God, can you believe I just said that? That there was a God that day in the hospital, a God just for us, two men having a baby, one with breasts and a giant stomach, huge, like he swallowed an overripe watermelon: Did you hear the one about the two men in the maternity ward? Yes, everyone stared, we were used to it by now. Fuck, I would have stared!

It was, as these things go, an easy birth, only a couple of hours of his pain, my pacing.
“Are you the new father?”

“Yes, I am, thank you very much. One of them.”

“Well you can see your baby now.”

I can see my baby now, I can see my baby now, I cry to the ceiling, to the heavens, I can see my baby now, the love vessel has arrived, and I can see my baby now, the hope of the future is alive, I can see my baby now, the blood wet mess of a child is held to the sky and he cries out, I can see my baby now, the mother, yes the mother with a mustache sleeps, I can see my baby now, the bleeps and whistles of the hospital machines no longer needed, I can see my baby now, the blank eyes stare at the middle distance, I can see my baby now, the nurse pries my fingers loose & I stare through the daddy room glass, I can see my baby now, I can see my future now, I can see.

The baby, sweet pink little thing, became little Dylan, an honor certainly earned by the man-child who sacrificed everything for my love — not to receive my love; no, to help me find a way to give it. Big Dylan moved to San Francisco the month after little Dylan was born, after a month of recuperation. That was our deal. He would get on with his life; he would not be part of the baby’s life. I would be a single momdadparent, all alone raising the little baby. Big Dylan slept all the time that first month, and exercised when he wasn’t sleeping. He refused to tend to little Dylan. I understood. Of course there was no nursing: little Dylan went on the bottle straight away.

I didn’t care, I didn’t care about anything really, my world focused right down to that little mouth and that little nose, and hell, that little butt that spurted and seeped the stinky monkey shit, right on schedule, all day, all night. I didn’t care that I was a sleepless zombie, up at all hours, grabbing a nap when I could, washing and cooking with little Dylan strapped to my chest, a papoose of love, a little bundle of everything I wanted. The doctor told big Dylan that he could start the testosterone after the month of resting. Since the steroids were illegal, he didn’t ask the doc about those, but it didn’t matter, he would find a source up in the Bay Area and get back on track. He hadn’t decided about the surgery yet anyway. He needed to do the drugs first for a while.

I tried not to cry. I really tried; I held back my tears the day Dylan left us. I tried for as long as I could, right up until the point when he turned to me, his funny manly upper register voice forming the sentence that got me, you know, really got me: “You’re gonna be such a great dad.” I caught the sob in my throat, suspended it for a minute, then it burst, I burst inside. I wanted to give him my thanks, but he knew everything already. I wanted it all to come out in words. It came out in sobs as he closed the door behind him.

Love is what came to me in a 7.6 pound bundle, love disguised as little eyes, little toes and fingers, a little pee-pee, little everything getting bigger so much faster than I wanted it to. Every moment offered love, every sense delivered it, love conducted an experiment on my neural pathways, soldering connections here to there and back around, new strolls into the regions of the heart that had become so overgrown in the years of love drought.

I could give you the blow-by-blow of this little bundle’s growing up. I would, but besides taking way too long, it’s really only of interest to me, nothing special, nothing new. Happens to everyone, doesn’t it, every new parent? You’d boo me off the stage in a minute if I started up with Baby’s first sort-of word (da-da), Baby’s first real word (doggie — similar to da-da); his first crawl, first walk, first bike, first song, first toilet-trained shit. Jesus, this is what our species does, you’re saying this right about now, or something like it, I know you are.

Dylan was a shy child with large brown eyes, curious, even thoughtful. He considered his answers carefully when I asked him a question, even before he had the words. He was neat, but not fastidious, active with his body. He seemed to be able to find joy and fun with all the other boys, and even the girls, largely through some kind of physical grace that had been gifted to him as a natural right.

Birthdays came each September, tumbling over time and marking a moment when I, along with every adult I knew, would exclaim, just look at how big Dylan has grown. My, what a big boy! His fourth birthday blew in with the Santa Ana winds that parched the air and burned the scrub that covered the hills surrounding Los Angeles. The smell hung over our back yard in the flats of Silver Lake as the kids gathered for his party. They didn’t notice —- the cake and the juice and the baseball mitt I gave Dylan distracted them.

The foul air made my eyes water, I thought it was the air. Maybe I was crying, my eyes reflecting my heart. My heart was crying from joy, my soul was breathing and I was telling the god that brought me Dylan that I was finally all right. I was crying not for him, but for the little four-year-old me, whose Daddy was away in the wars, and he was left all alone. I was crying for my own lonely self and was grateful that I would never be alone again, and would never have to fear that somebody would find me and would, sooner or later, leave me.

I wanted to cry out to the legions of the lonely and the alone: take heart, you don’t have to be this way anymore, you can be loved. Find a sapling to nurture and watch it grow, help it grow, let it flourish. Find this forest of endless joy to shade you from the harshness of the arid sun, or the frozen blizzard of the shutdown soul. Take heart, there is an answer, and I have found it. Take heart, you know you have one. Take heart, stop trying to run from the love that will not pause. Turn around and run towards the light.

That fall I quit my regular job and went freelance, so I could work at home. It was technical writing, sitting for hours on the computer constructing simple sentences in simple English so that translators in two dozen countries could provide a manual in their native tongue, a manual that could be tossed in the trash with an expletive expelled in two dozen languages. My Dylan came into the room one day. He was about three feet tall, his brown wavy hair covered by a little San Francisco Giants baseball cap, a gift from his other dad, the original Dylan, sent anonymously. He wore a plain green T-shirt and denim shorts.

“You look sad, Daddy,” he said, pulling at my arm. I turned towards him. I moved into him and I felt him so intensely there was color. Pale blue. I let go of it all and moved down to pick him up. He started to cry.

“What’s with the tears, Big Boy?” I asked, waving my willow in the wind.

“When you’re frosted, I’m frosted,” Dylan said. “You’re everything to me, Daddy.”

The year went by in a blink, a stack of outgrown clothes carried to Goodwill every few months: He was getting so big. The summer before his fifth birthday, when I would lose him to the kindergarten, to the institutions, to the ones who make little boys into dead citizens, that summer we took a long road trip. We got into the big station wagon and drove.

I had a vague idea for the trip, but I let that go too. Each morning at breakfast Dylan and I would pull out the oversized Rand-McNally Road Atlas and put it on the table between us, no matter what table we were eating from. He would squeeze up his eyes as tight as he could —- no peeking —- and we would recite our special incantation: On the road again, tell us where to go. On the road again, tell us how to live. On the road again, show us the way, show us the day.

From within his momentary blindness, Dylan would drop a finger somewhere on the map, spread open to the page displaying our current location. I would yell Hoo-ray, we have a winner! And Dylan would squeal. We would load up the back of the wagon and point the car to the spot where the Rand-McNally map met Dylan’s little finger, and head out for another day.
I was the winner, of course, no matter what. I was the winner each day and the winner inside. I won the prize, the holy prize, the grail, the love prize that I had never hoped to win. I was never going to find love again, but I did. I was in the winner’s circle for the first time in my life. I was a winner that whole trip, and, I thought, for the rest of my life, my life as a Dad, my life with Dylan.

That’s how I came to appreciate the cliché about living in the moment. Not the shopworn wisdom shoveled to the forlorn during their trials and daily setbacks — just wait a day, your luck will change, it always does —- not the 12-step advice of ‘one day at a time’ that is hauled out on bad days, white knuckle days, not-drinking days when you want to. No this is the appreciation of the good moment, the moments on the trip, the ordinary joyous fantastical never-to-happen-again moments. These moments too will die, just like the bad ones. The point is the same: this too shall pass.

It was the morning before his fifth birthday, that day in September, the year: 2001. Everyone in the world, certainly everyone alive in America remembers where they were when they found out. I heard it on the radio. I was in my studio, typing away at some especially nettlesome technical solution, trying to allow people without engineering degrees to understand why an obscure piece of software required so many clicks. It was early, but it was one of those Southern California days without a marine layer to burn off. The Santa Ana’s would be coming soon, the hot desert breath would come upon us and deliver hellfire to stupid homeowners in the brush and badlands. The light was so bright already I had flipped down the wooden shutters all around the room. The monitor was glowing in the gloom, and I remember cursing the bad software design. Thank God technical writers get no bylines, I thought, or I would be given all the blame for these stupid engineers.

I heard a smooth voice come out of the radio, but it didn’t register: a plane has crashed into the World Trade Center. It was the first plane, and nobody really knew yet what was to come, what the day would bring, how the weight of history would reassert itself, would smother us all with every emotion we had within us, well, at least every bad one.

I ran to the den and found the remote. Right away the TV went on, like millions of others, tuned to CNN as the horror and the madness and the unknown future unfolded before our eyes. My eyes filled with tears, open wide for hours, blinking, staring at and through little Dylan, who hovered near my leg like a hummingbird. Of course, after the second plane and the continuing madness on the screen, I had to turn the TV off. I couldn’t have those images rearranging his neurons, not the day before his fifth birthday, not at age five, not ever. I would hold back the future, I would block what he knew, what he would ever know. I would keep him safe in my arms.

There was no party to cancel, thank God, nothing planned on his actual birthday to cancel. I had intended to buy a little birthday cake and light five candles for just him and me in the middle of the day, as the finale to a nice little lunch, right before naptime. But there were no stores open that morning, at least not in my area. Nobody wanted to leave their house. So I rifled around in the pantry, keeping the radio low in the background, and found the fixings for a cake. We spent the morning making it, just Dylan and I. He sifted the flour beautifully for a five-year-old, and he picked out the right measuring spoon for the other dry ingredients, once I lined them up in size order. We made a huge mess with the electric mixer, but that was OK. I was grateful for the mess, for the cleanup, for the sponge, for Dylan. The three layers looked lovely in their round pans, popped sharply on the counter to lure the air bubbles onto the surface.

They only needed 30 minutes in the oven, so I let Dylan play outside in the front yard, just for 30 minutes. Then we could ice it together. My favorite, and now his: yellow cake with creamy milk chocolate icing. All from scratch. Like mama used to make. Now like Daddy used to make.
Truth be told, I wanted him to go outside so I could watch CNN. I had seen only a half hour that morning, snatched in the time before he crawled out of bed and sleep-walked to find me. It was on the little set in the kitchen, with the sound low. It was at eye level for me, I reasoned, so even if he burst in on me, I could cut it off before too much damage was done. Before too much damage was possible. Before.

So I stood in the kitchen, staring at the little 9” screen, so bright and sharp it hurt. There were no more clips of the planes and the towers by then. There was so much to tell, the story was still to be told, big stories and the small, an orgy of detail, numbing. I switched around. All of the networks ran nothing but the horror, nothing but the news. They had all had already somehow managed to compose anthems worthy of Sousa and animations rivaling Spielberg, drumbeats and rhythms that quickened the pulse right before the tasteful commercials. I stared at a shot of the beautiful California coast, a car gliding on a ribbon of road, water so blue on the little screen, the silvery finish of the car glinting like a sword.

I think it must have happened when the CNN theme music came back on, so loud, so martial. I didn’t hear anything from the front yard; I didn’t hear anything for ten minutes. I know because I was checking on the yellow cake in the oven. The three pans were turning a nice golden brown, like the tan I used to get on long vacations in Florida. I could see them through the safety glass when I turned on the oven light. I was ready with a toothpick in my hand, ready to open the oven door and stick in the toothpick, when the knock and the doorbell came. Turning, I heard the siren.

I ran to the door, and it was Debbie from the next house. Debbie had thinning hair from chemo, so she wore a brick-red turban. Her face was in shock, which made sense. I had seen her in the yard earlier, she had that wide-eyed, slack-jawed look of disbelief. All of us did.

“You have to come, it’s Dylan,” she said, her mouth still open after the words came out, after the sound hit my ears, after I understood the words, after I pushed the screen door open and ran onto the driveway leading to the street, the dead-end cul-du-sac where there was never any traffic, the reason I bought the house the year Dylan turned two.

The ambulance arrived just as I did. There were neighbors standing in the middle of the road, blocking the way, my way and the way of the man who burst out of the cab of the vehicle and yelled something, making the people step aside, showing me what they were staring down at.
His little Giants cap was right-side-up on the cement. He was face down, his arms reaching towards the curb. He’s sleeping in the road, I thought, That’s funny. It’s not even nap time.

Every face turned up to look at me. Their horror was like the people’s on the TV set, the people walking away from the towers. Only there was no dust or debris in the air, only horror.
“Dylan, big boy,” I yelled, as I ran over to his little body. I kneeled and reached out, shaking his little arm. Nothing happened as I shook harder and yelled out his name again, louder this time.
The ambulance technician pulled at me as he said, “This is an emergency, sir, please, stay back while we do our job.”

I fell backwards as he pulled on my arm, and that’s when I saw the back end of the car on the other side of the street. It was an old Mazda, not gleaming silver, but a kind of nondescript color. It was angled funny, half in the driveway, half in the street, the engine still running. I could see the exhaust from the crummy old engine, puffing out of the tailpipe.
Gloria Chung was in her husband Daryl’s arms. Her shoulders were heaving, and Daryl was looking down the street at something, I don’t know what he was looking at.

The medical guy was saying something, he was saying something to me. He was shaking me, and saying something. I couldn’t hear him. I turned to Dylan, and I heard my voice. Dylan, honey, the cake is going to burn. Let’s go in now. Let’s stop playing. The medical guy was putting a sheet over his head, and trying to lift me up. I was not able to stand. I was not able. I was not able to hold it any longer, I could smell the shit in my pants, I could feel the shit as it took over my body, I was a runny pile, impossible to lift up and take away, to get out of the street. I was not there anymore.

I was covered with blood. My hands had scooped up only a little of it, the rest pooling on the black uneven surface of the street dividing my house and Daryl and Gloria’s house. The first injection was administered in the ambulance. We drove away and they shot me up.

How long I was under sedation? What were the various gradations of drugging involved in the care of the instantly insane, which is certainly what I was. I came to in a nondescript room. A nurse with a stiff uniform was patting down my forehead with a cool wet towel, but I was too groggy to talk. I fell backwards into the pillow, deep into my real life, the dreams that saved me. Most of my dreams involved large groups of people, furiously rushing back and forth to get something done. There was always such urgency to these dreams. Sometimes we were in a big church. Sometimes we were in a stadium. Public type places, not my house. People I knew kept rushing in and out of doors and appearing out of nowhere with questions. I was in charge, and I had answers to give to the people who were asking me questions. Dylan was not in these dreams. Sometimes I thought he was there, I felt his presence. I even smelled him once. But there was never any dream that I remembered, anyway, where Dylan was visible. Looking back, I think this is weird.

They transferred me from the hospital lock-down to a long-term care facility, that’s what they called it. I must say, most of the people I met seemed perfectly normal to me, even those people there who had not been on the other side for years. This was their home, and they liked it. There was a door, it was painted dark gray. On the other side were the problem residents. At night if you got close to that door you could hear them. They were the ones that shouted and hurt themselves. They were the ones that got special attention.

All I ever got was drugs and bad meals. And therapy sessions. I don’t know if it was the drugs or if it was me, but I really had no energy whatsoever for a long time. They would bring me into the office of the therapist, Dr. Liebman, and I would just sit. There was no couch, that’s another cliché. There was a nice chair, though, upholstered with a flowery print on a very nice glossy cotton fabric. I would finger the surface of the fabric on the arms of the chair and just sit. I wasn’t unhappy to be there, it was a nice room. Dr. Liebman was OK, but I couldn’t bring myself to answer his questions for a long, long time. I don’t know how long it was, how long it took me to respond.

I kept my questions to myself. I tried not to talk. I had spent my life as a talker. Talk talk talk, all the time. I always needed to fill the empty air with words. No longer. That was somebody else’s job. My job was to stay quiet and still. I hated moving the air around me, and so I didn’t even want to eat. I began losing weight. I had no muscle tone.

One day Norman came into my room. I noticed his name when he leaned over the bed to move me so he could change the sheets. Norman was an orderly, an attendant, a medical assistant. He had the whole wing to tend to, so I didn’t see him that much at first, but I noticed when he came into my room. He wore scrubs. They fit nicely. He was probably in his forties, he had some gray hair, which flipped up in the front. His teeth were uneven on the bottom.

The thing about Norman was that he didn’t act like I was crazy. He talked. He did the talking. He filled in the spaces. Boy he could really talk. All that talking was good. He talked about the TV shows that he liked. He really liked science fiction, and he talked about the science fiction, the books and the movies. He really loved the classics. Wells, Asimov, Heinlein.

One day Norman walked into the room, but before starting to work on me, he said, “I have something for you,” and he smiled. I did not move. I wasn’t moving then. He held up a three-by-five-inch index card with something written on it. The card was pale blue. “I’ll just put it here for you,” and he carefully placed the card at the edge of the nightstand.

The next day he brought another card in; this time it was pastel yellow. “Here’s your gift,” he said, smiling. And he placed it right on top of the blue card. Norman brought in a card every day after that. The ritual was always the same. I wouldn’t acknowledge his gift, or move in any way. But after the first week, when he had run out of new colors and the card on top was blue again, I started to read the cards. Late at night when nobody, not the staff, not the other patients, when nobody could see me move, that’s when I read the cards. The words on the cards were quotes from his favorite writers, mostly science fiction writers, mostly Heinlein. They were little moral lessons, I think, things Norman must have believed, or thought I should believe. I began to want to ask Norman about the cards, but I didn’t, I continued to lay still.

“Why don’t you try smiling?” Norman said to me one morning, as he rolled me over and pulled at the bottom sheet, still wet with my sweat. “Or better yet, how about getting out of bed so I don’t have to roll you around like a catatonic. You don’t want to be catatonic, do you?”
I felt his hands on my side as he shoved me over. I liked the way it felt. I liked the words that he spoke.

“I know you’re not catatonic, because I know you pick up the cards that I leave. Don’t you?”
There were hundreds of cards by the time they let me out of the hospital, so many that I put them into a large box, after I started moving around again. My time in the hospital erased my life. I had no friends any more. My brother was my only visitor, an infrequent presence. He was the one who sold my house at the height of the market, sold my car and my things, and banked the money. I guess he wasn’t so bad.

When it came time to leave the hospital, when they said I was better, he wanted me to move in with him and his wife. We’re empty nesters, we have that huge house, you know? I wasn’t that crazy. I wound up in a small apartment in Santa Monica, which I thought I could afford with all the money in the bank. In Santa Monica I could walk on the beach, stare at the tourists, go to a coffee shop. I wouldn’t need a car. And it was far away from Silver Lake, and the streets that Dylan and I had traveled every one of his 1,825 days.

I opened the door that first time, and Norman stood there in blue jeans and a light tan jacket. I wasn’t really surprised. Naturally, he had access to my records. He held a bunch of roses and a green three-by-five card. On the card was another Heinlein quote:

Sin lies only in hurting other people unnecessarily.
All other "sins" are invented nonsense.
(Hurting yourself is not sinful - just stupid).