Up to now, this had been a pipe dream. Few in our family had even finished high school. Now I was both petrified and invigorated by the thought of calling Los Angeles my home, of one day walking with a cap and gown as a genuine college graduate, of studying storytelling in one of the best schools there was. It was only thanks to seventeen years of watching my mom’s imprudent determination that I had even dared fill out the USC application. Now I knew I would need her approval, and whatever little financial support she might be able to offer, in order to make this dream real.
I stepped into her perennially floral bedroom and flopped down on the bed. Even after leaving the children’s hospitals, she’d never let go of her beloved flowers. Now she was sitting atop a rose-print comforter, the month’s bills spread out before her. As casually as I could, I handed her the college acceptance letter. She looked at me, curious, stopped what she was doing, and read it. I remember her taking a moment for herself before she looked up again. Then, with tears threatening, tears I couldn’t quite read, she hugged me tight. She told me how proud she was of me, and how she had always loved watching USC football games on TV, with their white Trojan horse running across the field at halftime. And though I felt a shadow in her tone, she rushed to do what she wished her mom could have done decades before when she had been accepted to college: take the whole family out to dinner to celebrate. This never happened. We didn’t have the money for nights out. But when we went to the local Sizzler restaurant that night, she even added the salad bar buffet to each of our meals. This felt overblown—reckless, even. And I began to surmise why she was putting on such a grand display.
In my mom’s tight smile lived a devastation born of long-unspoken truths that this letter would now drag out into the open. We came from loving but poor Southern people. Folks like us just didn’t get to go to college. My mom had been able to only thanks to a scholarship for polio survivors. I knew it long before she ever had to say the words. She couldn’t afford to send me to college. To add insult to injury, I was now forcing my family to admit the truth of our station.
That night, once Todd was fast asleep in the twin bed near mine, I did what I still do all too often: I quietly blamed myself for bringing pain into our home. There was no such thing as a school counselor at North Salinas High who could teach us poor kids how to rise above our family histories and circumstances, but I felt I should have done that homework myself. I shoved my acceptance letter down between my bed’s frame and the wall. A grave for dreams. Then I put a tape in my Walkman and quietly cried while listening to Joey McIntyre of New Kids on the Block sing me “Please Don’t Go Girl.” I didn’t even like the boy band, but I had a crush on the blue-eyed kid crooner—another dream I was sure to never touch. No matter how far I stretched, it seemed life lived just beyond my fingertips.
But somewhere over the course of that sleepless night, I began to feel what my mom must have felt in her own childhood beds. My grief started spinning and churning into a rage that made my jaw grind and my head hurt, because as much as I loved our hard-won family, I heard a call from beyond it, from beyond our town and the black-and-white nature of military life. I started plotting insane ideas, and the next morning, I set out to share a brand-new plan with the one man I hoped was crazy enough to hear it out—Salinas’s own Mercury-stache closet case: Ryan Elizalde.
“I’m leaving this place when I graduate,” I told Ryan over a Sprite in the Toys “R” Us break room. I explained my plan: I would pack up and leave this small town before my mom was forced out of California by Bush, then I’d enroll in and ace community college down in Los Angeles before applying to UCLA’s film school, where with the help of scholarships, the in-state public tuition might be within reach of a kid like me working a few retail jobs. “I’m doing this. I’m getting out of here. Whether you come with me or not.” I tried to act like I didn’t give two shits if he came along, but he could see through my piss-poor performance.
“Yeah? Where ya gonna live?” he said, acting like he didn’t give two shits either.
“Guess I’ll move in with whoever’ll take me.”
I was laying a trap. He didn’t like the sound of “whoever,” and he hated the sound of “take me.” I saw it in his eyes. Platonically or not, I was his and his alone. So I added: “If I leave, and you don’t come, where will you be in two years when I’m all done with community college? Who will you live with…or be with?”
That was as close as I could get to acknowledging our shared but still unspoken bond. He looked sick about it. Over nearly four years of high school, we’d become incredibly close, pushing all others away. Now we were each other’s lifelines, and I was pointedly threatening that in pursuit of a pipe dream that was even more impossible than I knew at the time.
I was terrified he’d say no. The truth was, I wouldn’t have been brave enough to go without him, but of course I couldn’t let him know that. So it took weeks of heavy conversations, lofty pitches, buckets’ worth of false confidence, and at least a dash of emotional blackmail before he agreed to leave his prized job at Toys “R” Us and his tight-knit family and move down to Los Angeles with me for two years. Two years. That’s what he’d give me, and in that offer was a helluva lot of faith, so I ran with it. With no jobs lined up, no apartment, and only a few hundred bucks in savings between us—mine from nights and weekends working in Taco Bell’s kitchen and at Target’s refund desk, his from what little he had left after all his parties and adventures—we began scratching out plans to move south when I graduated.
Perhaps Ryan hoped that the big city might allow him to live more openly, or even to love. Perhaps he interpreted my ceaseless pleading as affection—not the kind our parents had, not the kind that could ever be spoken or fulfilled, but affection just the same. And wasn’t that better than nothing? The truth is, I loved Ryan more than any other human being whom I didn’t share blood with, but it was a brotherly love. I wasn’t looking for romance. I was too dead set on achieving my silver-screen dreams, and far too naïve to know that a life without love would ultimately hinder my ability to tell decent stories.
A week after my graduation, Ryan and I loaded up the oxidized old Chrysler he’d bought off his dad. My mom watched from our driveway with Jeff as I put her powder-blue suitcase in the backseat—the same case she’d headed off to college with decades before. Her mom had shed tears on that day, but she’d felt certain her baby girl was making solid choices. I was headed off to a city my mom feared was wicked, with no college safety net to speak of, alongside a slightly older man she’d grown fond of (like Texan women do their hairdressers) but still feared was a “homosexual” who might lead her middle son astray.
My mom tried to get me to reconsider, to enroll in community college in Salinas, but we both knew that she and Jeff would soon have to find new jobs, possibly outside of California. So, in this sea of uncertainty, I gave Todd a big hug and told him to watch over our mom. Todd was quickly growing tall and strong, and given the responsible young man he was shaping up to be, I trusted that he could protect our mom now if anything happened in my absence. Then I looked around for Marcus, but he was nowhere to be found—an increasingly common occurrence in our home. Jeff gave me a few words of encouragement, telling me that he too had left home at seventeen—evidence that such an adventure, so young, wasn’t necessarily doomed.
Then I kissed my mom goodbye and held her close. I was her first child to leave home, and this wasn’t how she’d hoped it would go. It wasn’t my dream come true either; this was a backup plan. So after she shed a river of fear-filled tears, and I shed just as many, Ryan and I loaded into his car, got onto the 101 Freeway and began the five-hour drive south to Los Angeles. I was sick to my stomach. Up to this point, I had been my mother’s fierce and loyal protector; now I was the source of her greatest anxiety. Mile by mile, as Ryan and I got farther and farther from John Steinbeck’s Eden, I grew less and less certain that I
had made a wise decision.
CHAPTER 12
Secret Somethings
I
Within a week of arriving in L.A., I got a job working in J. C. Penney’s boys’ department. Turns out if you close the door on any small white room, little boys think it’s time to drain their bladders. My task was to remove all traces of these “accidents” from our changing rooms. It wasn’t glamorous work, but it was my only hope of making enough money to survive here. Ryan and I stayed in a cheap hotel with a loud, rusted mini fridge for the first two weeks before accepting the fact that the only place we could afford was a studio apartment in a rather dangerous corner of town.
Our tiny enclave of Section 8 housing was full of contradictions: it was where I learned to speak more Spanish with the neighbors who cooked us food when I looked “demasiado flaco,” but it was also where gunshots often woke us up at night, and where we heard a young man being stabbed to death outside our building’s front gate on Halloween night.
Ryan and I agreed never to tell our mothers about the murder, or how often we went to bed hungry. I also never told my mom just how bad the car wreck was that sent my salvaged junker of a Honda CRX smashing into the side of a Del Taco drive-through, or that I couldn’t afford a new car even with the insurance payout. Every morning for months, I walked nearly an hour on crutches to Pasadena City College, where I’d signed up for classes, on the busted kneecap that had gone through my Honda’s dashboard. My mom couldn’t know. Besides, who was I to complain to her about crutches?
The details of these years tended to cycle and repeat: I studied my tail off to earn all As, I worked any and every job I could to help pay rent, I avoided any situation that might lead to romance, I visited my family in Salinas as often as I could afford to, and I cried for a week after returning from each brief visit. The only big change in this time was that my tears lasted a month straight when my mom and Jeff officially lost their jobs at Fort Ord and could only find new ones at an army medical hospital in Washington, D.C. From now on, frequent visits home would also prove too expensive.
Looming over my head was what a PCC counselor had unceremoniously pointed out during my first week of classes. According to her, my “far-fetched” plan was “highly impractical” at best, because I wasn’t the only kid who had figured out that UCLA’s tuition was much cheaper than USC’s. She didn’t hesitate to share that UCLA’s film school received thirty thousand applications a year and accepted only fifteen students annually from outside its own campus. Fifteen out of thousands upon thousands.
I’m not going to lie. Many a night, with the sounds of helicopters, gunshots, and the 110 Freeway outside our studio apartment’s one small window, I worried that this adventure was a naïve miscalculation. And Ryan, who’d always provided inspiration, was losing his spark. Working at Macy’s gave him no power or influence in a big city like this, and with few new friends, he rarely left our apartment outside of work and began putting on more weight.
So as my worries grew too large to hide, I chose to share a few during my brief long-distance calls with my mom. We talked at least once a day, me learning as she once had how to jam every bit of gossip into the handful of minutes we could afford. But even with my growing list of concerns, she could hear past my fears to what lived beneath: the passion for a dream others were branding “impossible,” the sort of dream my mom knew best. I can almost hear her now, whispering in my ear from across the country, “Who am I to tell you any dream is too big, Lancer? I had a few ‘impossible’ ones once too. Their names were Marcus, Lance, and Todd.”
So I followed her advice, put doubt to the side, and kept my shoulder to the wheel—our Mormon pioneer way of saying “work hard, and be diligent.” That year, I sold more J. C. Penney catalogs than any other employee at our store and earned enough credits to buy my first video camera. I never imagined I would actually have one of my own, but I’d found a way.
With that camera, I shot stop-action animation films, then got up the guts to write scripts and convince actors to perform them. But as much as I enjoyed making these films, a classmate pointed out that my only genuine tales centered on parent-child relationships. Anything I wrote about love or romance came off as tired and derivative. It was a tough criticism, but I understood it. I had no experience with romance. I was a virgin. I’d never even been kissed. So I entered one of my father-son short films into our school’s festival. Ryan attended the screening in my place when J. C. Penney wouldn’t give me the night off. And when it was announced that my film had won, Ryan collected the prize. It was my first. But when I finally got home and saw it, I didn’t feel pride, I felt like I’d gotten away with something. I knew full well that like my own life story thus far, my raconteur tool chest was sorely lacking.
Then one sunny afternoon, on the heels of my long walk home from school, I stopped to check our rusty mailbox with its busted lock—two familiar ex-cons watching my every move from behind their barred screen door, just like they always did. I waved. They looked away. Same as ever. But on this day, there was something unusual inside the box: a nine-by-twelve-inch envelope. I carefully pulled it out. My heart wobbled when I saw who it was from.
There are dozens of moments in my life that are still far too painful to fully recall or comprehend. There are four that still feel too magnificent to grasp. This was the first.
There’s a photo of me on the day I received that envelope because Ryan quickly grabbed his camera to snap it. My nose and the edge of my eyelids are bright red from tears…and I’m holding up an acceptance letter to UCLA’s film school. By some miracle, I had been chosen as one of those fifteen students out of thirty thousand. Like my mom, I’d proven the seemingly impossible possible, and to this day, I still can’t believe it.
But this good news presented a new problem: I now needed Ryan to extend his promise and put his faith in me for two more years, despite the fact that the first two hadn’t been easy on him. He had put on more than forty pounds since we’d moved to Southern California. His belly now lapped far over the belt of the cheap suit he wore to work at Macy’s each day. At only twenty-four, he looked like a forty-year-old begging for a heart attack. Two more years of this might kill him, and I couldn’t let that happen. I loved him. Despite all the challenges, he had kept me safe, sane, and hopeful on this adventure. But it was painfully evident that he was self-destructing.
I had a sneaking suspicion what was to blame: hunger—that hunger of the heart we couldn’t sate, that secret “something” we had long since wordlessly agreed to never name.
II
Before I go any further, I ought to come clean about what anyone’s big differences (including my own) signaled to me growing up. To do that, I’ll need to step back to 1982, when I was still a white-as-rice, eight-year-old Mormon closet case living in a household below the poverty line in San Antonio, Texas.
According to the census, well over half of all Texans in 1980 considered themselves religious, with Southern Baptists edging out Catholics with 18 and 16 percent of the population, respectively. Mormons made up less than half of 1 percent of all Texans, and at less than .25 percent each, finding a Hindu, Jewish, Muslim, or Buddhist neighbor was as rare as catching a golden sparrow, and just as tough to get your classmates to believe. Baptists and Catholics ruled the roost. The trouble for the rest of us wasn’t so much religious intolerance (though that did rear its head) but that being a member of a religious minority meant being excluded from the centers of social life, business, politics, community, and the Baptists’ heavenly deep-fried-everything.
Then there was the “homosexuality” thing. The census still doesn’t ask that question. If it had back then, I can only imagine that few LGBTQ people in my home state would have dared divulge. It was still illegal to be gay there. Many still considered it a mental illness. If you answered, “Heck yes, I’m a gal who likes gals,” you could legally be kicked out of your home and fired from yo
ur job. Truth is, you still can be today. So as far as I knew then, I was the only boy like me in the entire Lone Star State.
The studies that do ask the LGBTQ question today can only count those brave enough to come out to a complete stranger. According to Gallup, that number is 4.1 percent. God knows it would rise if they could count the gays who suddenly deepen their voices, pretended to lose service, or plead the Fifth. Bottom line: I was less alone than I feared, but that bit of life-saving data wouldn’t find its way to my wrinkled-up ears for far too long.
I did tick one majority box, though—the race box. Texas was 78 percent white at the time. And although my family’s income was below the median, I figured out that I could keep my secondhand clothes tidy (like the better-off kids), never bring up the Angel Moroni or my crushes on neighbor boys, and let people make their assumptions based on my pale skin. I could hide from the label of “too different”—a label I’d seen provoke alienation, harassment, scorn, and violence at school. At eight, I foolishly believed that my zipped-lip policy was a workable long-term strategy. I could not yet see, much less understand, the daily micro-injuries I was inflicting on my pint-sized soul with such denials of self and my cowardly reliance on our region’s history of racism.
But those are mostly just the numbers, and as much as I enjoy statistics, I don’t believe they do a whole lot of good when light needs shedding and hearts need opening. So here’s how some of those numbers played out for me in 1982, on a bright spring day that already felt like July.
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