Wednesday, December 29, 2004

 

ENTRY 157: EXIT STRATEGY


Freedom is a funny thing. Like much else, it's something you often don't appreciate until it disappears.


After spending the past three months in job hell, I finally extricated myself from it. My last day was a week ago Monday; I'd spent the previous week training my replacement, whom I actually came to like a great deal. She lives nearby, and we may even become friends.


She's also very perceptive: at the end of her first week, she told me she already wanted to quit this shitty job. I've got that T-shirt. We spent the subway ride home that night discussing exactly why our freak boss was running his own business into the ground.


There had been so much turmoil at work that I didn't wrap things up and turn off my computer until 9:30 PM on my last day there. I was putting on my coat to brave the frigid night air when the boss called me into his office.


I'd studiously avoided revealing to him the whole truth about why I was leaving. I'd said that it didn't feel like the right career move for me, and that I had decided to forego an editorial career for a marketing one. All of this was, in fact, true, but it wasn't the whole truth. There were these additional factors: his insanity; the shell game of which I'd been a victim (i.e., a magically expanding job description); gruelling hours without overtime; and the capricious and cumbersome policies that severely hindered my ability to do my job.


So I sat there, holding my cards close to the vest, and waited to hear what he'd say.


He told me that I'd done a great job and shown tremendous dedication, that I'd come into a difficult situation and handled it with professionalism and grace, that he'd be happy to provide a reference for me and say that my position was just temporary or project-based. He threw in an extra day of pay in consideration of all the extra hours I'd worked (which probably amounted to at least two extra weeks worked, realistically, but who's counting?). Then he launched into a strange narrative about a personal problem, and I sat there, at first tired and impatient, then increasingly incredulous.


What a sad and lonely man. He just needed to talk, and I was there.


At last, after a good twenty minutes or so, he said, "Well, you should get home, kid," and I nodded, having listened politely to everything despite my flickers of annoyance and weariness. I had, after all, assumed all this responsibility of my own volition, though I would gratefully shrug all that weight off my back just minutes later.


And so I did. I was free again. He gave me a hug on the way out the door, and my skin didn't crawl, and I could accept that he needed it from me. And then I vanished for good.


That left me with a day to finish up all my last-minute errands before flying to Houston last Wednesday, where my parents picked me up at the airport. They had just moved into their newly built home, the one built as a copy of those model homes I'd found so depressing months before. They showed me around, and I knew they were anxious for me to like it, and I said how nice it was, and I meant it, actually. I knew it would be fine for them, that it had nothing to do with my own tastes or desires.


I found that this visit, I could let certain things roll off my back more easily than before, like my dad's mumbled (and inaccurate) criticism of the ACLU, or my parents' tendency to overschedule everything to the brink of exhaustion: the big meals; the visit to see the Dead Sea Scrolls museum exhibit (during which, inexplicably and annoyingly, I had an unrelenting hard-on); the numerous shopping trips that prompted them to ask me, to my eventual self-conscious discomfort, "Are you sure we can't buy anything else for you?"


The Niece is nine months old now, and growing exponentially, and it's still strange and slightly alienating to see how thoroughly parental Marc and Cleo have become. I found myself thinking of the past, of the mellow sepia-tinged days in Austin when I was a fresh college graduate and they were newlyweds and we had the whole world and lazily sprawling weekends before us, without the crush of responsibility that age brings. They love being parents, of course, just as my own parents relish their new grandparent status.


As for me, the gay uncle from New York, I am quite fond of the Niece, even if I'm still figuring out how to relate to little people who can't speak intelligibly. She spent a lot of time staring at me with huge blue eyes; I would make a face, the only thing I could think to do, and she would burst into giggles. This is all I had to do to elicit a great round of approval from anyone in the immediate vicinity about how great Uncle Frank was with the baby, as though I'd actually done anything to speak of. It felt like I was perpetuating a sham, but maybe that's all unclehood is.


My grandparents arrived the day after Christmas for another round of gift exchanges and huge family meals. My grandfather's health hasn't been good lately. A survivor of multiple bypasses, he has suffered from acute arthritis and low energy more recently, and it was a shock to realize he will soon turn 80. I wanted, on this visit, to engage more with my grandparents. My grandmother often talks a mile a minute before becoming distracted by something else, and my grandfather tends to fall asleep at crucial moments, which did not bode well for my intentions. I did spend a bit of time with them playing cards, and asked my grandfather about his childhood. It was easy to read in his face how keenly he felt his age.


Even though my parents are now grandparents, they seemed still youthful as they bustled around the house, putting things away and making food and leaving me a bit at loose ends. ("There's plenty to eat," they kept saying.) At one point I wandered into the garage, where my father was organizing boxes, and made an effort to assist him. In one box we ran across a case of metal Zippo lighters imprinted with our uncommon surname (not Beekman). The lighters had been manufactured as promotional items for the cotton gin that my dad's parents had owned in the Texas Panhandle when he was growing up. He had more than once told the story of how, as a boy, he'd been playing in a pile of cotton that collapsed on top of him. Only quick action by a friend saved him from suffocation.


"You and Marc should each have one of these," said Dad, pulling two lighters, still in their yellowing boxes, from the case. He dug further in, and brought out another box. Out of it he pulled an identical Zippo, except that the metal casing was badly crumpled on one side.


"What happened to that one?" I asked.


"Your grandfather had this in the plane crash," he said, looking at the memento mori, and at last we came to the question that had haunted me all this time.


"Did you ever learn what caused the crash?" I asked, simply and undramatically, turning my own lighter over and over in my hand.


With neither hesitation nor emotion, my dad explained that the crash had occurred in "dead night," the world pitch-black, and that, in those conditions, my grandfather had experienced vertigo. He hadn't known which end was up, probably hadn't trusted the instruments on his plane because they'd just been worked on, had disregarded the artificial horizon instrument and relied on his own physical sense of what was up and what was down. And that was the end.


And I realized then that I didn't need to know anything else, that maybe there wasn't anything else to know. My father may have denied his father's true mental state, or may not even have been aware of it. In the end, the question of my genetic psychiatric legacy was something of a moot point. I'd survived clinical depression and any number of other things, and had the ability to deal with whatever might arise. I would probably never know anything more than that. My father had a right to his past, though he didn't seem to be afraid of it.


What I sensed was a different kind of fear. My parents thanked me repeatedly for having flown in for the holidays, although they'd insisted on paying for the plane ticket. Their new house included a room designated especially for me, with the very same twin beds that I'd had as an adolescent--covered with exactly the same blue-and-white striped bedspreads. On the nightstand my mother had placed a bowl of fruit and candy and animal crackers and bottled water, like something you'd get in a nice hotel.


I set down my bags upon my arrival, and took in all the details of the room, and thought, My God, they're terrified I won't want to visit them anymore. Like my boss, they were afraid of being alone.


Someone once told me that, ultimately, we are all orphans. We enter this world on our own, and leave it the same way. And I remembered this as I stood in that room, the years withering away like brown leaves and dropping off me until I was a teenager again, at that time of great turmoil for everyone in my family.


Those memories had just been resurrected a few days before, when, on a date, Craig had half-flippantly asked why I seemed so jaded.


"I think you mistake something about me for jadedness," I'd replied. "I think it's that I recognized at a fairly early age that I'd have to fight the great battles basically on my own."


I described what had happened at home, how I'd been told I could deal with all the high-school homophobia on my own since I'd refused to stay in the closet, how the family unit had basically fallen apart when my brother got sick. I told Craig that it had shaken me in a fundamental way to realize that my family, the only people who had been steadily present in my life through all the military relocations in my childhood, had let me down when I'd needed them the most. They'd always talked about the importance of truth, but when telling the truth actually cost something they reversed themselves, said it was okay to be a hypocrite and hide my head in shame. And when I made the agonizing choice to separate myself from that ugly hypocrisy, to unmask, I became quite literally the orphan that I'd been told we all ultimately are.


"I've always insisted on looking the truth full in the face, and calling it what it is, and dealing with it on an honest level," I said. "I don't hold it against them that I didn't get what I needed back then. I think we do the best we can at the time with the resources we have, even though that wasn't nearly enough for me and what I was going through. If that makes me jaded, then I'm jaded. But I'd call it something else."


And Craig agreed.


I'm not entirely sure what that something else is. Maybe it's just the sadness and strength-finding of growing up. All I knew was that, as I stood in the bedroom with all my baggage at my feet, I found myself wondering if my parents and I would spend the rest of our lives trying to figure out how I could be not-their-little-boy anymore.


But as hard as that task is, it is kinder than dealing with cancer, or plane crashes, or a father who died too young, or feeling too old. When my parents told me goodbye yesterday, I could tell they were fighting back tears, for some of those reasons and for others that, being their little boy even yet, I am too young to understand.

11:57 PM

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