Father Son Story

This is my final for creative nonfiction. I managed to open up something I haven't hit for awhile in revising and rewriting this, and thought an exercise in heartfelt sharing might be good for everyone during finals. Further, if you have a chance to take this course with Lawrence Ypil at WashU, do it.

Father Son Story

My father gave me his story when he was thirty-seven. When I pass it to friends and strangers now I make the joke that he was “a little late.” Of course, if he had been a little earlier I wouldn’t have come to possess his story, or anything else. If the story had grown heavier sooner I wouldn’t have been summoned into existence. I imagine him dredging up that story of his, which had been buried so deep, and tossing it, as gently as an anvil can be tossed, atop my mother. A divorce, move, and six months later, when he came out to my brothers and I, we learned how to manage and wield the story he gifted to us.

He is an excellent story teller. His gestures are grand, his pauses dramatic, and his voice hushed at all the right moments. He hid himself by way of repression and exaggeration for years – leveling and sharpening edges of his narrative to avoid it catching on society’s wayward glances. It only follows that his ability to weave stories, from the mundane to the epic, has earned him the status of master craftsman.

He practiced more than anyone else.

When he gave me the story it was as smooth and small a pebble as he could make it, though my eight-year-old self described it as monolithic. I carry it lightly, now. It is not something that weighs me down. I have refashioned that pebble, that boulder into a lever and a looking glass.

The first time my father gave us his story was six months after he and my mother separated. They had just finished building a house out in the country. Six miles away from everything, with blue-grey shingled roofs, two turrets, and a terraced garden, it was their own personal Camelot. It anchored them in their childhoods where the outdoors represented life and unspent adventure.

Woods, prairie, and ponds encircled our home. There were plenty of stories nestled in the wilds. My brothers and I spent nearly all of our time scouting around for them, digging them out of the earth, climbing trees to fetch them. We would return home after a day outside to give our parents the stories we had acquired during our rounds. Sometimes we were bleeding, crying, sometimes we were bouncing ecstatically while cooing the sounds of a mythological beast we decided we had encountered. But every time we returned our parents were eager to be burdened by the stories we had gathered.

My father was now eager to burden us with a story of his own. We were in his apartment, circled up around a dingy dining room table. He gifted the entire home, six thousand square feet and forty acres, to my mother, and left with a sack of clothes, a few pictures, and that achingly heavy pebble. He restarted with next to nothing and moved into a shady apartment on the west side of town where, I imagine, he put that intangible pebble on his desk next to the pictures of our family.

We managed to arrange ourselves in birth order around the table. Clockwise from my father sat my two older brothers, aged twelve and eleven, and then me, a spirited eight. Adam, the spitting image of my father, had started growing. Seth, always a bit of a runt, rested his disproportionately strong arms, crossed, on the table in front of him. My father sat straight backed with one hand on the table, the other resting lightly on his leg. His two blue eyes bounced between our six.

“Boys, I wanted to tell you why your mother and I are separated.” He shifted his hand to the table and looked at us like a deer in headlights. “I’m gay.”

Being that we had, as brothers, only recently discovered and accepted that girls do not have cooties, we weren’t entirely sure what this meant. The only notions of homosexuality we had were from the chiding remarks of our middle school peers who claimed that any malfunctioning object was “gay.” Not entirely sure what to make of this development, we left my father in a state of limbo for a good fifteen seconds while our tiny brains tried to work through things.

“...is that all?” Asked my oldest brother, Adam.

“Yeah, is that it? No wonder you can’t go back out to the house!” Seth exclaimed.

My dad’s look of terror and anxiety shifted, and he laughed nervously. He had broken that pebble into four and placed one, gently, into each of our pockets. The sharing strengthened him.

I hadn’t said anything as I was, during this entire period, much more caught up in the separation of my parents than were either of my brothers. I had not yet developed the strength to carry the divorce story, let alone this new one, and so was at a loss. Perhaps luckily, then, being the youngest of the three, I habitually copied my brothers’ sentiments when I was confused. I adopted their loving stance with ease.

“Well, you’re still going to be our dad, right?” Adam asked. He, like all of us, unsure of what this “gay” term meant, was trying to measure its impact on the only important topic at hand – how close we would be to our father, and whether he would be around for the years to come.

My dad chuckled. “Yes. Of course.”

To which Adam replied as haughty as the overly intelligent twelve-year-old he was, “Then I don’t see how it matters.”

I experienced a taste of the relief, and the freedom, my father must have felt when years later I, for the first time, gave the story to my best friend.

We were walking to the buses after school. They were lined up neatly, all twenty-or-so of them, down the street in front of us. Their yellow siding provided a simulated barricade between us and the rest of the world. The atmosphere felt protected and anonymous. I had wanted to let the story out for quite some time, to get it off my chest. I told friends, when they asked why, that I wasn’t entirely certain what had happened between my parents. I was still reforging that pebble, heavy in my hands, into something useful. It was deceivingly dense.

So when Christian and I approached his bus, our stage of separation, I stopped him. My heart had leapt into my chest and the amount of adrenaline in my system suggested that I had seen a pack of lions loping toward me. It was my first dose of the storytelling drug, and it was crashing over my brain with all the force of a tidal wave.

In typical proto-man style, I delivered the shortest story summary I could fashion. I clumsily hurled the story into my friend’s face.

 “Hey... My dad’s gay.”

To which Christian replied, with a similarly nonchalant but wonderful response, “Cool.”

We then high-fived, said bye, and went our separate ways.

The immediacy of the relief I felt from sharing this story was empowering. The story had lodged itself in my psyche as a boulder lodges itself in a river bed; my thoughts navigated around it at all times, constantly brushing up against it no matter what I did. By sharing the story with Christian I loosened the silt beneath the boulder, let it sink into the mud. I did not want to remove it. I wanted to integrate it with myself, my thoughts. Unburdening my brain allowed me to transform a divisive story into an empowering one. It made that boulder, that pebble more manageable. It gave me control.

By the time high school rolled around I no longer held the story as a burden. I told the story countless times, to friends at camps, parents, teachers, to anyone who listened. The story lost its weight and gained an element of buoyancy. It was something I clinged to when other stories became heavy.

While it lost its negative effect on me, giving the story to others routinely had an impact similar to when my father had first given it to me. It tended to elicit alarm and concern, despite the lack of fear or trouble on my face and the humor with which I wielded it. It was as if the story, when given to others, did not retain the same qualities I had managed to imbue it with but rather took an immediate turn back to its origin. It was only after reassuring people that, indeed, everything worked out well that their pebble, a near copy of my own, managed to synchronize itself appropriately.

The boulder became a pebble became a lever. I grew so accustomed to its buoyancy that I learned of its power in disarming people. The first time I told one of my professors in college her immediate reaction was to tearfully divulge her difficulties in childhood and how she had been a promiscuous boozehound while an undergraduate. The telling of her exploits occurred within twenty minutes of our first, and only, one-on-one visit.

The story has allowed me to pry open the lives of the people I interact with without manipulation or pressure. Acting on an air of reciprocity, people have taken the pebble from my hand, which is at once dense for them and buoyant for me, and replaced it in an Indiana Jones style maneuver with a dense story of their own.

            A boulder cannot become a pebble without shedding a few pounds.

            In the course of transforming my father’s story a great deal has been lost. Its emotional effect is, in an everyday telling, non-existent. Like my father before me, I have leveled and sharpened aspects of the story to selectively remember and forget how it all happened. The story, in becoming an object, a tool for me to wield, has to some degree lost its validity. It is not what it once was, not by a long shot.

            I did not realize the extent to which I had truly reforged my father’s story until my senior year of college when, at the behest of a lover, I told the story with the inclusion of how I felt, rather than simply how it occurred. I had not handled the story in this sense for nearly a decade. The associations and lost memories which flew back into being hit me with all the force of a cannon blast. There was my tantrum in my dad’s apartment over his cooking, where I had demanded my mother’s food instead of his; there was my head between the balcony bars when my father, with a bag in hand, was leaving the house; there was me calling him to ask, with all the terrified diplomacy I could muster, if he would come out to the country and read me a bed time story; and there was the memory of him staying with me until I fell asleep, so that I would enter the dream world feeling as though he were still in the house.

            The story I have crafted has, like many difficult stories that are retold, become a mere sliver of the boulder that originally carried it. The gift my father split between the three of us that day around the dining room table, with all our blue eyes seeing him from different angles, came from a simple phrase that at once told everything and nothing. “I’m gay” was the pebble, the shard of a story which was too big to be told at that table. It was the tip of something much greater, something that had been worked on for hours by a master craftsman who, in the years after sharing his gift, would teach his children how to work their own stories into more than mere weights.