Chapter Twenty-Three

One of the unforeseen side effects of cutting off all contact with pretty much everyone I'd known back home was that when I pulled into Conquistos with my car full of crap a week later, I wasn't totally sure where I was going. I'd assumed there would be enough people around that I'd be able to crash on couches for a few days until I found a room to rent, but most people I could still claim to know from high school had gone away to college and were still away, or were living at home with their parents and didn't have couch-loaning authority.

Cool. Fine. No big deal. I would just ... see if I could sleep at my mom's for a couple of days. It couldn't take too long to at least find a room to rent, right? Conquistos wasn't an inexpensive city to live in, but compared to LA, it was definitely reasonable. You weren't supposed to take out cash on your credit card, but my limit was high, and as long as I could get a job more or less immediately ... it'd be fine. Right? How much could first and last on a room cost?

That was one of many questions I'd planned to work out the answers to once I was in a sleeping bag in someone's living room. With all my belongings—all that would fit—in my car. Now that I had to suck it up and ask my mom for help, I really wished I hadn't been quite so freaking hasty in leaving my apartment.

My bed and dresser were still there, and a couple of boxes of kitchen stuff. I'd need to rent a truck or something for those, but I had a week before I'd told my landlord I'd be out.

A week. In which to find a job, a room, and a day in which I could rent a truck, drive to LA, load up my bed (... by myself?), and drive back up the coast to unload it (... also by myself?) into the place I would have already rented by that point.

I'd seen my mom twice since I'd graduated from college. Once when I'd been in town for work and called her to see if she wanted to get lunch with me. She said no but asked if I could stop by for a few minutes, which I did, except she really meant a few minutes, and she'd come out to talk to me. As in, didn't invite me inside. We stood on the front steps of her apartment building and awkwardly chatted as if it hadn't been a couple of years since we'd seen each other, as if we weren't literally parent and child.

The second time was for her wedding to the guy she was currently married to, who'd had no time for me. Not that I was shocked; my mom had terrible taste in partners. See: my dad, for a start. She'd called me a couple of times since, to tell me about her new house, and that she was working part time at the library, which was good. At least this guy let her work. (Seriously, she ended up with some absolute douche canoes. Dudes whose pictures could be on the Wikipedia page for "Domestic violence." My dad was a jerk, yes, but he hadn't acted like he owned her. Maybe that's why they weren't together that long.)

I hadn't been to the house before, but when I called, she seemed happy to hear from me. I didn't even have to invite myself over this time.

Conquistos is one of those old gold rush cities that has an ancient wooden heart and an expanding city center of taller and taller buildings surrounding it. The suburbs my mom was now living in were on the outskirts, the high-end neighborhoods on the far side of the freeway. Farther from the beach, but better prices and bigger lots. (Better prices than actually living on the beach, not better prices as in "affordable for normal people." This husband must've made bank, since odd jobs at the library did not get you into the half-acre lots in this neighborhood.)

It was nice at first. If I'm being honest. I'd never had much of a relationship with my mom, who had spent a lot of my childhood shifting from one commune to another, sometimes following gurus, other times just traveling wherever the wind took her. She and my dad had never officially been divorced, but I didn't remember a time when they lived together permanently, only periodically, as Mom transitioned from one community to the next one.

Dad was an asshole, but he was constant. I'd once heard someone describe my mom as "not of this world," and maybe that was as close as I'd ever come to understanding her. In truth, I sometimes didn't think about her for weeks at a time.

And here I was, knocking on her door because I needed something from her. Typical Des Cleary behavior.

"Des, honey, come in." Her hair was longer than it used to be, and grayer than it used to be. We didn't hug, but she did peck my cheek and giggle. "It's so good to see you!"

I mumbled my hellos and took in the house, which was all ultramodern clean lines and chrome. Not at all my mom's sort of style. It looked like a showroom for a store three price brackets up from IKEA.

"Do you love it? Isn't it the nicest place you've ever seen?"

If you want to live in an IKEA. "Yeah, it's nice."

She beamed. "Rod paid for everything. Isn't it amazing what having money can get you?"

"Uhh, yeah. Totally." Money? Since when did my hippie mom give a fuck about money?

"How long are you here for?" she asked, leading me into a perfectly manicured backyard, where we sat in a little covered living room area on outdoor furniture that was nicer than anything my dad ever owned, under a ceiling fan that was on, despite the fact it wasn't that hot.

"Oh, um, yeah, it's kind of funny. I might be moving back to town." I paused, gauging her response.

Which was blandly positive. "How nice! For work again?"

"Not exactly. Listen, Ma, is there any way I could maybe crash here for a couple of nights? I have a lead on an apartment"— Liar, liar, pants on fire —"but it's not available yet."

Which was when I saw my old mom under this new, shiny veneer. Her face froze, and I could see the shadows in her eyes. The ones that said she still lived in fear of this new guy like she had all the others.

"You know, never mind, don't worry about it," I rushed on. "Really no big deal at all."

"Oh—it's only—I'm sure it's possible, if I ask Rod, or maybe he could find you a place—"

I shook my head. "Nope, not necessary, I'm totally good. Really fine, don't worry about it."

"Are you sure?" she asked, and I knew she needed me to say yes, so I did.

I told her I was sure, everything was good, absolutely no worries. And then I stayed for dinner with her new husband, who wasn't that new anymore, and who disliked me. Mom laughed nervously a lot. I nodded a lot while her husband told stories about his job that neither explained what it was nor invited any questions, and, just as a bonus, some of his stories were that subtle brand of insidiously racist that if you tried to point out the issues, you'd be told you were being oversensitive.

Rod seemed like the kind of dude who was an expert at informing other people that they were being oversensitive. Our role was to be amused and unchallenging, and Mom had always been so good at that. If I'd been better at it, I might have had a more polite relationship with her and her various gurus and boyfriends, but I'd been raised by Dad, who didn't give a shit about what people wanted from him.

Or maybe he had, and I just hadn't seen it because he was a gruff older British guy, and neither the generational nor cultural gaps between us had enabled me to see that he was just as insecure as your average human, just as likely to make up a lie about getting a letter in a magazine when he was convinced he'd never be caught because it made him feel important.

I sat at the sleek black glass dining table and watched my mom's eyes dart from Rod to me to Rod to the food to Rod to her plate and back to Rod. She'd never felt important, I didn't think. And as long as she was always some asshole's emotional punching bag, I guessed she never would.

Maybe it should have made me feel like defending her, or protecting her, but I didn't think we'd spent enough time together to have built those sorts of bonds. Instead, I cared about her like I would anyone I was distantly related to; it made me sad that she seemed destined to be unhappy, but I knew I couldn't fix it, and nothing I could do to try to help was likely to achieve anything but instead would only make things worse.

So I didn't point out her husband's racism, thanked them for dinner, and got out of there as fast as I could.

I ended up at the beach. It was, in so many ways, the dead opposite of Orion's cabin in the mountains. The city lights meant it was never truly dark, though if you faced out to the ocean you could pretend. It wasn't isolated, obviously, but something about standing on the sand at night made it feel surreal, like you could close your eyes and imagine what it would be like if there weren't people there at all.

And then there was the sound of waves, which I'd grown up with, and maybe I was low-key delusional, but it wasn't actually that different from the sound of wind and snow.

Nature filled my ears, as long as I forced my brain to subtract riotous teenage laughter and distant traffic sounds, far below the immense white noise of the ocean.

Ten p.m. Would Orion be asleep? Probably not, as long as the electricity was back. I didn't know what he'd be doing. Watching thinky videos on YouTube, maybe. Or consulting with his attorney about how best to sue me for destroying his no-longer-secret refuge.

I sat down, low enough so the wind blew a constant sand barrage against my face, and closed my eyes.

I'd gone from being a guy with a job I didn't like but that paid the bills to being a guy with no job at all. I'd had an apartment that, to be honest, I probably hadn't really appreciated. Now I had my stuff in my car and no place to sleep. I also hadn't really understood how much I'd managed to alienate everyone I'd ever really been friends with, or how much I'd pulled away.

It's a sad thing when you go back to your hometown, and the best you can do is a super-uncomfortable dinner with your mom and some shithead she married while you were off doing other things. More important things. Or at least stuff that seemed more important at the time.

No job, no place to live. No future.

I tried to remember the last time I'd really felt grounded, like I was on a path, like I was going somewhere . That last year of school, maybe, when I was writing for the newspaper and scoping out journalism degrees and fighting with my classmates over whether print was dead (it was) and if that spelled the End of Journalism as We Know It (it didn't). I'd belonged in those classrooms, those fights. I'd belonged in the small office of the school paper, where I went to pick up whatever money I'd made writing for this or that issue.

We'd stood there looking at a relatively grainy photo of Orion Broderick kissing a man, and we'd been such asses about it. We'd chortled as if these weren't people but fictional characters, as if their lives were fodder for our entertainment. Was I trying to do a good thing for humanity? Yeah. Partially. But I was also trying to make a name for myself. I was also getting one over on a guy more famous, more wealthy, and so much more more than I thought I could ever be.

I hadn't really thought about it as bringing him down to my paltry level, but maybe it was that, in a way. In the way it always is when you laugh at someone else's misfortune. When your favorite late-night comedians crack jokes about whichever celebrity has just aired their personal shit in public, or whichever one was just found out to be a drunk, or an addict, or a small-time criminal whose crimes hurt no one but still serve as grist for the mill.

I'd been part of that. I'd laughed. I'd felt lucky to be the one who got to write this story about Orion Broderick. And yeah, it wasn't a bad piece. I hadn't attacked him overtly or implied there was anything wrong with him. It was a more general feature about the damage that not being able to be open about who you are can cause, and the way that trauma travels through generations of queer folks, just as it does through any other marginalized group.

If I had written the same article without that picture, without Orion Broderick in it, I would still be able to say it was some of my best work. And three or four people would have read it. Maybe as many as ten. I wouldn't have gotten death threats and rape threats. I wouldn't have gotten letters of thanks from people who self-righteously justified their sick pleasure in Orion's downfall because they were good liberals, good queers, and they didn't hate him because he was gay. No. They wanted to see him brought down because he was successful in a way they were not.

As if that was better. And maybe it was. Or maybe it wasn't the kind of thing you could put on a scale of "better" and "worse." I'd harmed someone who had never harmed me. Who had not harmed anyone that I knew, or done anything I felt was wrong except keep a secret that, retroactively, it was clear he probably needed to keep.

The image of him apologizing to old white men for what I'd done still made me shudder.

I'd once been on a path to being a journalist, someone who told the unvarnished truth, who believed in facts and the necessity of publicizing them. Now I wasn't sure what I was, except someone who didn't think he had the right to decide what was and was not true for anyone who wasn't me. The fact was that Orion was gay; the truth was that Orion had worked in a world he understood far better than I did, and he'd made decisions accordingly.

I wiped sandy tears off my cheeks and looked out into the blackness of the Pacific.

The worst of it was how much I'd liked him. As a person. How decent he was. He pirouetted with little ballerinas and inspired loyalty in the people whose town he'd come to because he couldn't find a home anywhere else. Strangers he kept at arm's length, but who cared about him.

It would have been so much easier for me if he'd just said, "Hey, bygones, right? Come in, sit down; have an ancient bag of chamomile tea." But I respected him for not pretending he could just get over all the things that had happened. I even respected how decisively he'd shut down my desire to explain myself. No wasted breath there.

My dad had liked to spar, and maybe that had rubbed off on me. I wanted to bicker with Orion over the best Christmas movies and the worst pop songs. There were so many more conversations I wanted to have with him that now I never would.

This wasn't like the way I'd wanted to be with people in the past. It was different. New. Which made sense, since I'd never been snowed in with anyone before, never really had to try to compromise just to get through the day, never been forced into a situation where I was exposed and also aware that someone else needed my grace as much as I needed theirs because we were both trapped in this crappy situation. I'd never felt so awkward, so powerless, so needy ... or so invested, so turned on, so joyous at the sight of that eerily perfect smile.

And I wanted it back, but, true to form, I'd fucked everything up. Indirectly this time, so maybe that was growth? But it sure didn't feel like growth.

The adult thing to do would be to find the cheapest motel I could find and get a room. But I'd been turned away by my own mom, and all I could think about was how I'd ruined everything that might have had a chance to be good in my life.

I got back in the car, drove up the coast past the city limits, pulled off on a sandy side road, locked all the doors, and tried to get some sleep.