Manhattan. Our friend’s family has a loft apartment where she lives with her parents. A claw foot tub built into a wooden frame. Washed JD’s hair, poised on her knees under the water. Something out of a turn of the century photograph, the picture of elegant sexuality. By the time I washed myself, the smell of pancakes filtered in, our host making us breakfast on the other side of the door.
Has anything ever been as beautiful as this?
I’ve never felt as much like an adult as I have in the last week.
I live life in a constant effort to preserve my childhood and childishness. I thirst for nostalgia and constantly quench that thirst. I refuse to give in to every mechanism of adulthood that I’m able to avoid, short of parking tickets and sex. I’ve made my living on cartoons and comic books and though I file taxes, it’s wonderlust for storytelling and laughter that burns through me and keeps me going every day.
My father killed himself when I was seventeen. We buried him in our family’s plot in the town my grandmother was born, a tiny place in southern Idaho. That was ten years ago and I haven’t returned until this week.
Alone, I trekked up the entirety of the 15 highway, stopping halfway for a show through the weekend nestled in the mountainous iron red streaks where Utah meets Arizona. I tingled with desire on the last stretch of that first leg in the darkest dark of night.
The hum of remembrance came to me when Las Vegas appeared out of the black desert, glistening like desire past the curves of a woman’s body. Irony was thick in me with this and the surge of innocence as I passed Wild Bill’s at 90. There was a funny sense of shame the first time I stepped into a casino on one of our many road trips. Cigarettes and alcohol and desperation. Adult things always frightened me in that way of being caught with your fingers in places they didn’t belong. I still feel a ghostly twinge of guilt when I order a beer, my inner child cringing with the fear of entrapment.
Utah unfurled like a dirty sheet before me, scrubby mountains for hours upon hours, dotted with the bloodspatter of autumn. So much silly longing on this drive. My obsession with nature and beauty was tight in my gut every time I passed a sign for a national park, just on the other side of the mountains to my right. Zion, Bryce, Fishlake, Capitol Reef, Kaibab, Dixie. Every ochre rectangle a temptation to steal away my time from my visit to the past.
Salt Lake tickled with unfermented familiarity. We would travel west to east, now I traveled north, remorsefully avoiding the unending waste of the salt flats that I so loved. Maybe I’m not missing anything, maybe they’re not as enthralling and mysterious as they are to a precocious ten year old. My father’s home embraced me from the distance in the flat face of the mountains that guard over my grandmother’s house. I told her so when I arrived. She said when I was three years old, I told her the mountains were ‘majestic’ and she laughed and laughed.
This trip trickled fear through me like I haven’t known in some time. I stayed in a somewhat frightening motel in St. George and realized upon arriving, that it was the first time I’d stayed in a hotel alone. Hotels, motels, couches — they’re second nature to me by now, hundreds of nights spent in unfamiliar beds curled around JD. Never alone. Always the confident one, fear never entered my mind, even sleeping on tatami mats in a tiny ryokan in Japan when we were twenty. Alone, it pulsed in my ears for the first time. I slept with my wallet under my pillow.
It was nothing compared to the thunder in my chest when I pulled up to my grandmother’s house as an adult.
My father’s family’s religion is the source of my terror.
As a teenager, I was fixated with the idea of the black sheep and was convinced that I was the prime example of it, as all teenagers are. The surly face in the family photo, the ugly clothes donned as soon as freedom takes its hold and the sureness that no one understands the turmoil the lies beneath.
I grew up and realized I, like all teenagers, was an idiot.
Now the Southern California mohawked faggot visiting the Mormon family in Northern Utah, the surly fifteen year old rumbled within. Shame for my lifestyle. Fear for the admonishment and judgement and discomfort that was sure to come. My Grandmother hadn’t spent any significant amount of time with me since my father’s death. She’s never been anything other than kind, even when I came out to the family two years ago. But surely after this visit, she’d never want to see me again. I’d be excommunicated as the filth that I was under the pious eye of religiosity and conservatism.
Never have I felt so unconditionally loved in all my life.
Three nights I slept in the bed that my father spent his final days, on a, feather mattress that must have been filled with heaven. A picture of Jesus looked over me, joined by Precious Moments angels and the saccharine works of Kinkade. To walk in to my grandmother’s house is like walking in to a bible book store, shelves lined with twinkling angels and tablets chiseled with reminders to keep faith. Construction paper silhouettes of my uncles and father from Sunday school gaze upon a gentle Christ with open hands, above a large print of the Last Supper. If there’s a Jesus print wallpaper on the market, I’m sure my grandmother would be interested.
Over and over she told me to sit down and let me feed her, ever squeamish at being served. She fed me like grandmother’s I suppose do. We spent hours talking about everything you can imagine. She asked about JD and was nothing but warm hearted about my lifestyle. Never once did I feel judged or looked down upon. Perhaps I was a mystery, perhaps I was amusing, perhaps I was a little odd. But never was I unwanted. Never was I an outcast. Never was I unloved.
Family, politics, depression, food, homosexuality and death. A lot of death.
An unusual common ground.
The drive to see my father was a good two hours each way. We never stopped talking. She took me to see the house she was born in and the house of her grandmother across a rolling hill. Abandoned and dilapidated and rotting and spectacular.
She laughed at me and my unexpected excitement at the house and its barn and rusting vehicles. I tried to express my love, nay my obsession, with the dying. With rust and rot and the claws of time tearing everything back down to the earth and the inescapable embrace of forever. Somehow, she understood.
She cooked me spaghetti and it was all I could do not to laugh with utter delight when she happily announced that ‘her favorite’, Jon Stewart was on.
A new shame. I struggled with getting some work done before I left and when I went to pack the car again, found her washing my windshield for me with the hose. My eyes pricked with the pain of lost time. Ten years. Ten years I hid from this out of fear. So certain that because these people believed in God, that because my grandmother spent four days a week at the temple, they would hate me. They would reject me. In the end, it was I that had rejected them. I was the prodigal son welcomed in with forgiveness and open arms and unending love.
If there is a God, he’s in that house and in my grandmother’s heart.
Once more, back down and on to my road of childish adulthood and another weekend to immerse myself in laughter to pay the bills. Devouring books about art and neuroscience and classic literature. A wildfire burned with tiny points of light on the distant mountains, pinpricks welling in orange on the surface of the earth. Pouring smoke into the cloudless sunset over the Great Basin and the sunset in turn, pouring pink and yellow into it, birth and life and death holding hands.
I felt tiny and wonderful and the world endless and overwhelming and everything I want to grab and press into my heart and my mind as much as I can. As long as I can.
Sunset gave way to night and the road that led to my remote motel was one of the most frightening I’ve ever driven. Long and winding and narrow through the darkest dark I’ve ever imagined, ravenous for my headlights. A hailstorm of bugs for fifty miles of empty two lane, the air reeking with smoke like the whole world was being barbecued. At the end, waited a run down motel run by a tiny Japanese woman with familiar kitsch filling her ‘lobby’ and a room with a big speckled moth to greet me.
This is my road. Is frightening and winding and unpredictable and I love it.
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