I Can't Date Jesus Page 17

  I wanted to be better than my father. I didn’t want to repeat the cycle. I became obsessed with not doing so, but not necessarily with doing the work to unlearn things, to settle my feelings, and, most of all, to let go of my anger.

  I spent much of my childhood wishing my dad were dead. I understood that I was considered fortunate to have a two-parent household; people would tell me as much. However, because they did not live in that house and endure what we did because of my dad’s unsettled trauma and alcoholism, they couldn’t get how incredibly stupid that sentiment was when expressed to me. I did not feel lucky. I hated him. I hated him so much that I wanted to kill him. I wanted to kill him so much that I carved “DIE DAD AND MOM” into the wall of my childhood bedroom. Him because he was a menace, and her because sometimes I would blame her for keeping us there or because she wasn’t always kind herself. Still, most of that fury was aimed at him. I knew how I wanted to kill him to boot. My dad always kept a knife near him. He kept one underneath his bed. I used to fantasize about taking that knife from under his bed and stabbing him profusely until he took his last breath. I thought about that as a child. That is how much I resented him. Once, while he was cursing at my mom and threatening her and then the rest of us, I looked him in the eye and told him what I wanted to do. I couldn’t do it, of course, but even the fact that I thought about it still troubles me deeply.

  Whenever I go home and sleep in my old room, I sleep beside that carving made in the wall. I loathe seeing it. I tried to scratch it out once, but it’s carved in so deep that it can’t be totally erased. Neither can the memory of my doing it. I hated him so much because none of us deserved that, especially not my mom.

  I had to get away for college, both for my big dreams and for a much-needed escape. Of course, my problems followed me. I was a combination of my parents in that I could keep cool like my mom—up to a certain point—but I could also blow up just as ferociously as my father. I kidded myself into thinking I could control that residual anger. Suppression was not the answer; forgiveness was. Even so, despite knowing that I needed to change, there remained the rightful presumption that my dad was incapable of giving me a proper sense of calm or closure.

  He was never going to admit wrongdoing. He was not going to say, “I’m an alcoholic and I’m going to get help.” I had already heard those false declarations as a kid. He was not the kind of person who opened up in that way. Nor would he ever say, “I’m sorry for the pain I caused your mom, your sister, and your brother.”

  My dad was also never going to take ownership of having stalled my acting career. As a kid, I used to be in plays in both elementary and middle school. Of course, the one time that my mom appeared to be fed up with my dad enough to divorce him was when I was in middle school and interested in such things. Seemingly unable to stomach his ass any longer, she took us all to our grandparents’ house in the middle of the night. After that, we stayed at our aunt’s house. Based on the way she was talking to us, she truly seemed fed up. Then my dad followed us: first to our aunt’s, and then he rolled up on me at my middle school. I spoke to him but scurried the hell away, because I figured I could be done with him for good. That proved not to be the case. We ended up back at home, and barely any time passed before he huffed and puffed and blew all that same bullshit back at us.

  This was near the end of my eighth-grade year, and I was applying to schools. My grades were slipping and my conduct was the worst because I was lashing out at teachers—cursing at them in some cases—and getting into fights. My only real shot at avoiding my zoned school was HSPVA, the performing-arts school in Houston. Naturally, my dad acted a fool damn near to the very day I had to go and audition. I ended up blowing my audition and didn’t get in. In my mind, had I gotten in, I would have perfected my craft and gone on to have a successful acting career. I mean, that could have been me playing Bobby Brown in BET’s New Edition biopic (I would have tanned). If not, I could have settled on Ronnie DeVoe. But no, my dad took that away—and it was another thing he wasn’t going to apologize for.

  We’re not a family sitcom about an affable, affluent family trying to solve life’s greatest hurdles in twenty-two minutes, so I had to minimize my expectations. My dad was an old-ass Black man who was not afraid to hurt people, and like many people—including myself—he had been raised not to talk about his problems but instead to pretend that they didn’t exist. The idea was to keep going in spite of them, without admitting that no amount of running from your problems or feigning amnesia about them would prevent them from catching up to you one way or another.

  I had to create my own level of closure. First, I had to see my dad in totality. He wasn’t all bad growing up. I liked the trips he took my brother and me on, where we could catch fish and crabs. I remember the smiles on our faces when he would filet the fish after we were done and fry everything in the back of his truck. Cooking had always been his way to show affection: the gumbo, the barbecuing, the chicken strips that I obsessed over and always asked for. The fast food he would buy me even though he kept complaining about how expensive it was and that we had food at the house. I appreciated when he would buy the basketball rims, the baseball stuff, and the punching bag. I understood that he tried to be present in the ways that he could be. These gestures did not absolve him or cancel out my fears that one day he might get too drunk and angry and do the unconscionable. But reflecting on the whole story helped, because I was able to humanize him and not only view him at his worst.

  I didn’t forget anything that had happened, but making the conscious choice not to cling to the past as much as I used to do was helpful. As was giving the man the benefit of the doubt. Moreover, if I wanted to have a better rapport with him, I had to make some effort myself. Every so often he would call me, not to talk at length but just to see if I was alive and if I needed anything. He always said the same thing: “I’ll dial that number if you need something, boy.” At those times, I barely recognized who the hell was on the other end of that line, and it was a genuine gesture that I often promptly shooed away. He routinely said, “I’ll give you my last.” He would preface it sometimes with “I’m just a poor man, but . . .” or something similar, but no matter how he said it, he did mean it.

  The intent was to show that he wanted to be there for me in some way, because I was physically present only once or twice a year. When I was, he would turn back to cooking. So I would eat those smoked turkey legs he made for me. When he asked if I needed food, I stopped snipping “No” and went with, “Well, can you gon’ ’head and get some seafood boudin and put it on the pit?”

  One time, my dad also offered to stab anyone who might have been fucking with me. Honestly, that was sweet for an old, thuggish man who truly would try to fight you even in his sixties. Around this same time, he also called me his nigga. I wish they made greeting cards for statements like that.

  I’ve learned to call him on my own without prodding from my mom. I’ve learned to call him and wish him a happy Father’s Day and sound sincere about it. And I now call every so often simply to say hello. The calls do not last long. He’ll ask how I’m doing, mention the weather, and once again ask if I need to “dial that number.” Most times he’s pleasant, though there are instances when he bemoans that my siblings and I favor our mom over him. “Y’all’s ya mama’s boys” is what he’ll say. I don’t fall for the bait, and the second I think I’m going to regress and get irritated, I change the subject or end the call. We don’t necessarily know how to hold extensive conversations, but being able to have the short ones we do is significant progress. That’s mostly attributed to my ending the call with “Love you, Pop.” We were never really in the habit of saying “I love you.” I always maintained the position that I loved him for giving me life, but left it at that. Now I don’t say “I love you” with any asterisk. I love him, as complicated a figure as he is. And he now says it without my pushing him to do so. It’s not that I ever doubted he loved me, but I gather it’s not something he w
as used to saying out loud.

  He continues to drink, but as far as his rage goes, age has slowed him down. I don’t know if he’s tired of the fighting or just tired. It’s long been time for him to stop, all the same.

  I’ve come to learn that a lot of things he can’t say to me out loud are said to my sister, whom he calls most. Years ago, I did a video for a media outlet about my coming-out story. A first cousin from his side of the family found me online through my writing. First, she tried LinkedIn, which I often forget exists, and then she found me on Facebook, where she watched the video. In it, I was blunt about my experiences and my parents’ reactions. So my cousin went to my dad and said, “Your sons are gay and it’s your fault because you’re an alcoholic.” My dad did not call me about this. Frankly, I think he knew better than to come to me with it. Instead, he called my sister and said, “I know my boys are gay. It’s not my fault, though, and I don’t care as long as they’re happy.”

  “He said that?!” I asked her.

  My sister said that he had indeed. He also relayed a familiar claim: “I’m not an alcoholic. Alcoholics can’t take care of their families.” He thinks being functional in one’s addiction negates said addiction. I don’t bother with that now. Watch your mouth and your hands with my mama and do whatever you want with your liquor.

  That’s another thing I’ve learned to do: indulge him when he offers me alcohol. I understand how dicey that is. I worry about whether I’m enabling him. But I’ve settled on accepting that there are things about him that I cannot change. And I’m not going to turn down free booze. I’m also more inclined to accept his offering because he did not shun me when confronted by some cousin whom I’ve seen twice in nearly twenty years’ time.

  My sister informed me of something else too. I never talked with her about our uncle until I was barely thirty-three. I told her that I remember vividly how our father reacted to Daniel’s death and all of the “faggot”s he hurled after the funeral. She didn’t remember that. I told her that she probably wouldn’t because it wouldn’t have affected her in the same way. Having said that, some days later, she said she vaguely remembered some of it, only she filled me in on more details about their relationship. She explained to me that my dad and Daniel were incredibly close, to the point where Daniel lived with my parents for a minute. It was her theory that my dad’s reaction, as I recalled it, had more to do with his own hurt than anger directed at me. That made sense, given his pattern.

  There are still some questions that linger in my head. I wonder if he, like me, had those same nightmares of his father killing his mother. Was he also so angry that he wanted to do the worst to his dad in retaliation? Has it ever hit him that he’s repeated some of his dad’s own mistakes, and if so, did he worry about his own children having a similar fate? I’d ask these questions if I thought I’d get answers. I wouldn’t, so I won’t.

  I do know a few things. I know that in spite of his faults, he is a funny, charismatic, hardworking man. When my friends would pick me up to go out in high school, most of them would note how cool my dad, who introduced himself as “Doc,” was to them. An eye roll was the response I’d give them, given that they had no idea what was going on, but in the interest of fairness, I will admit now that his ass always has been cool. You see it in his old pictures.

  I also know that he is proud of me. He’s never read anything I’ve written, bless his heart, but he doesn’t know how to use a computer and rues the day he got a smartphone. But I know that he knows I have worked hard to create a life for myself, and as a man, he respects that. He admires what I’ve accomplished, and I know this based on how his friends know that I went to Howard, that I lived in LA and New York, and that I’ve gone a lot farther than most people who grew up around us. The one and only time he’s been on a plane was to see me graduate from college. He needed a tranquilizer in order to sit still for the flight. Washington, DC, was an unrecognizable world to him, but thanks to the hotel workers, whom he managed to befriend fast and who told him that he looked like Katt Williams, he enjoyed a certain familiarity and comfort.

  Most of all, I know he knows that when I used to look at him eye to eye, love was not in my sight. But now when I say “I love you” over the phone or before hugging him good-bye as I leave Houston again, he knows I mean it.

  When I look in the mirror, I mostly see my mom’s face, but from certain angles and with certain expressions, my dad is there too. In the past, this would make me angry or bring me to near tears because when I saw that in myself, I saw a nightmare. I have worked hard to successfully shake that off. If I hadn’t reckoned with my past, it surely would have continued hindering me in the present and future. As I’ve learned with my dad, no one is completely good or bad, and many of us carry the potential for monstrosity. Whether or not we give in to this is determined by how we deal with our demons. My sense is that my dad was born with an ebullient spirit that was literally beaten out of him. My long-standing fear was that it would be taken away from me based on how I was raised. But that too was just something I finally needed to let go.

  The Impossible

  Chris, the same friend who, a few years prior, had told me that my dick was dry and suggested I turn to technology in order to have a more active sex life, apparently believed that my penis was better moisturized now, which led him to offer me new advice.

  “I really just want you to settle down with a nice Black man,” my personal Iyanla Vanzant explained. “It’s time, Michael.”

  I immediately thought of old episodes of Living Single, in which Regine Hunter’s mom would constantly call on her to “settle down and put some buns in that oven.” Chris’s comment was both an encouragement to seek a relationship and a thinly veiled reference to a noticeable shift in the sort of men I had been dating. Before moving to New York, sans for that one Asian dude who I had thought was mixed but turned out to have merely braided his hair and gotten a grill and chosen a name that screamed Negro League, I dated Black American men exclusively. It wasn’t that I didn’t find other types of men attractive. Again, anyone attractive can get it. However, in terms of the sort of men I had been around socially and who responded to my advances, they primarily had been men who looked like me and whose experiences mirrored my own.

  Something changed when I got to New York City. It’s not as if I suddenly became repellant to Black men or repulsed by them. Throughout all these quips from my friends, I had dated a few. Still, it was Latino men who started to be the most responsive; who wanted follow-up dates; who engaged me as much as I sought to engage them; who wanted to have sex. Some of this was due to the fact that I lived uptown, where there were a lot of Puerto Ricans and Dominicans. When I first got here in 2005 to intern, people kept walking up to me and speaking Spanish. Outside of being able to tell them my name and most of the days of the week, I was lost. My old pre-AP Spanish teacher would probably be so disappointed in me. Once I moved here, the Spanish-speaking only seemed to occur more frequently, so I did learn how to say one thing in particular: “No soy dominicano.”

  As for dating Black American men in the city, my experiences have been a little muddied. Sexually, I’ve attracted them, but in terms of dating and trying to forge something more substantive, it’s been different and more difficult for me. One scrolled through my social media accounts as we were talking, caught a glimpse of me on television talking about Beyoncé, and concluded that I was too “feminine”—well, he said he didn’t do “feminine tops.” I do not call myself a top. I do not call myself a bottom. I have a preference and can be selfish if I don’t care that much about you, but I don’t lead with that preference in the context of dating, because I’m in my thirties and asking someone whether they’re top, bottom, or verse seems tacky and simple. That’s just a fake-ass progressive way of me saying if we’re not in a relationship and you don’t nag me to bottom because of love, it’s not going to happen, because that shit is painful and only Ja Rule believes “pain is love.” So, yeah, unless we’r
e in a deeply committed relationship that includes obnoxious IG vacation photos, good luck booking that night of me bottoming you speak of.

  There is also the issue of dating men who don’t have a college degrees, which sometimes results in slick comments about my being “oh-so-smart.” Or there are the educated men—often with more degrees than me—who know I am educated but do not find me as, uh, cultured as they are.

  I sometimes felt that way at Howard. Although I ended up loving the school in the end, when I first got there, I met people from “Houston” who were more from the suburbs. They’d hear where I was from and what high school I had gone to and would react snootily. Once, a girl said, “Ohmigod, you’re from Hiram Clarke and you went to Madison and you’re at Howard with me? I’m so proud of you!” It was a patronizing pat on the head. You little hood booger, look at you managing to be around the likes of me.

  I can’t forget the one guy that I really, really liked. We hung out a little bit, and then all of a sudden he said he wasn’t focused on dating. Naturally, he had a boyfriend from Houston a few months later, and he gleefully told me this via text. A year and change went by, and all of a sudden we started to run into each other again. I told him it was Beyoncé telling him to take the hint. We started hanging out once more. A few months later, he ended up telling me during the birthday dinner I treated him to that while he found me attractive and thought of me as a “great catch,” he thought we would be better as friends. “You’re like a lawyer, in that even if you don’t believe what you’re saying, you will say it with conviction for the sake of being right. Like, you need to be right. And I’m emotional, so that wouldn’t go well.”

  I raised my hand as if I were in class and asked him if I had ever done anything to give him the impression that I would operate that way in a relationship. “No, but I just have a feeling.” Man, fuck your feeling. I did go ahead and treat him to the dinner, but I wanted the universe to reach down and trip him from the stool he was sitting on as he projected his own insecurities onto me.