Buffering
Page 10
The funeral was in New Orleans. (I’m not sure why. Maybe they had family there.) Annette went with David, and, to be honest, she was being pretty monstrous to David at the time. But he stuck around for four more years, until his grief had destroyed the last of his patience for her and, with that, the last of his love. He filed for divorce, was assigned to pay spousal support, and then disappeared.
I was twenty-one and trying to finish school when we last heard from him. It was over e-mail: September 29, 2008, at 6:20 p.m. The economy was crashing and people were losing jobs left and right, and he wrote us to say that he had lost his and would no longer be able to keep paying my mom spousal support because he could barely meet his own rent/utility/food/gas obligations. He said that he would be completely unemployed by Friday. He apologized and described how he was trying to find work.
The e-mail was sent to my mother, but Naomi and I were CC’ed. He wrote to us directly at the end of it saying that he had done his best and he was including us on this message so we would know our mother was in trouble. He was still trying to help.
I never replied to that e-mail. My mother, on the other hand, wrote thousands of e-mails to David from the library. They were all roughly the same; here is one of them:
From: Annette
Date: Wed, Jan 23, 2008 at 5:59 PM
SUBJECT: love
To: David
CC: Hannah Hart
“Marry me and
share my name.” David C. Whitney Jr. Spring of nineteen ninety four. We met in October of nineteen ninety
three.
In October of this year we will have known each other for fifteen years of our children’s lives. Hannah and
Rebecca were seven years old. Maggie is now ten. “We’ll grow old together and laugh while we watch each
other fall apart.” I love you.
David disappeared after that. He changed his phone number. Something I understand. Annette’s tendency was to call nonstop until your voice mail was full. Then, as soon as you cleared it out, she’d begin again. She does that with me, too.
For his sake, I’m glad he disappeared. I don’t blame him. I know it was an act of self-preservation.
So, dear reader, if you’ll indulge me, I’d like to take a moment to reply to his e-mail. Just in case somehow, someday he might read this, too.
From: Hannah Hart
Date: Wed, Apr 20, 2016 at 2:45 PM
Subject: Re: Out of money
To: David
Dear David,
Thank you for trying. Thank you for trying harder than anyone else tried. I remember the holes in your shoes. I remember the hours you worked. I remember the attempts you made to get Mom into a hospital and get her help and proper care. The system is broken and I know you did all you could. I know that because I’m doing all that I can now.
Thank you for telling me I had great hair. Thank you for your songs and your tears and your encouragement and your laughter.
Maggie, Naomi, and I are doing very well. Maggie loves theatre and musicals. It hasn’t been easy, but she’s made it past 17 and she’s an amazing young woman. She has much to be proud of. But that’s her story to tell.
I think about Rebecca every day. Fresh tears. I wish I had that picture of us from the car show. I feel responsible and guilty and sad about what happened. I still feel like there was more I could have done.
They say it’s called “survivor’s guilt.” I’m trying to turn that guilt into gratitude. Her death taught me such value for life. I hope it taught you the same.
With love and understanding,
Hannah
1 This probably should have been a red-flag for David’s type of woman.
2 Meals Ready to Eat: military rations that come in sealed brown plastic bags.
3 That would happen again in 2008, when I was living in Hoyt Hall. A freshman came to my room, knocked, and said, “There’s a woman at the door who says she’s your mom?” Knowing that Annette was homeless, I rushed downstairs and spent the day driving her around to shelters and service centers in the East Bay. Either she refused to enter, or they refused to take her unclean and unmedicated. I eventually drove her back across the bay and dropped her off near a shelter but told her I had to go back to school. She begged me to let her live in my car. I drove away.
4 I think about Rebecca when I listen to Sia. I think she would have loved Sia. I think she could have sung like Sia. But now she’ll never know Sia’s music. I guess this is a message for those of you who contemplate permanent solutions to temporary problems. You never know what could be coming in the future. There is so much music you’ve yet to hear.
SHADOWBOXER
Sometimes I hear my father’s voice saying that the Devil wants us to misplace the anger we have at this System of Things and point it towards Jehovah. It makes me feel wicked and wretched to be angry. But our Creator has not wronged me. The weakness is in myself.
—Spring 2007
I’D LIKE TO START THIS CHAPTER WITH A SMALL DISCLAIMER:
As an LGBTQIA+ figure I feel a great responsibility to be as informed a representative as possible. The thoughts and views expressed in this chapter are simply a retelling of my experience of coming to terms with my sexuality. This is not doctrine on gender, identity, fluidity, or any of those realities that we are creating room for in society today. If I say anything here that offends you, please know that I’m still learning, too.
I’D ALSO LIKE TO START THIS CHAPTER WITH A BIG DISCLAIMER:
I was raised to believe gay people are sinners. All queer people, really. Growing up, I was taught that some people are gay, in the same way that some people molest children or practice bestiality. That’s actually a direct quote from my father, from once when we were in Home Depot. We were doing something fun,1 and I was young, I must have been under the age of ten. I have no idea how the issue even came up, but when he wanted to make a firm point, he didn’t spend much time dancing around it.
“All sins are equal in the eyes of Jehovah,” he replied.
And sinning against Jehovah really meant sinning against my father. Which was the last thing I wanted to do. All I had to do was be good enough and Christian enough, and maybe one day he would say “You know what, girls? Life is looking a little rough for you, and I’m worried about your mother. Let’s combine our powers and try to tackle this stuff as a family.”
Instead when he picked us up for a visit he told us that we needed a bath.
It’s hard for me to revisit all the fear and judgment I held in my heart. All the loss I felt in coming to terms with my sexuality. The loss of my faith, the loss of my father, the loss of so many things just to have this one small, insignificant thing.2
Or at least that’s how I thought about it at the time.
I first learned what “being gay” meant after my Grandpa Peter, Dad’s father, had an accident and ended up in the hospital. Naomi and I were spending the weekend with Dad, and we were planning to go clean out Grandpa’s apartment while he was recovering. Before we left my father took us into the backyard to talk to us about something very serious. Serious and dark and shameful. He sat on the picnic table while I stood on the bench. He was probably only a little older than I am now. He looked somber and sad. A single father with his daughters for the weekend and an aging father he had to take care of. I’m sure he was overwhelmed.
He told us that Grandpa Peter was an alcoholic (and later he said he was a speed addict?) and that he was very ill. He said that while we were cleaning out his apartment we might see some things, disgusting things, because of how sick my grandpa was. I was pretty confused, but Naomi seemed to have a better understanding of what he meant. He then told me that Grandpa Peter was sexually attracted to little boys and if we stumbled across anything dangerous and scary we should clean a different part of the apartment or tell him so he could come and clean that area himself.
As we drove to Oakland for our big cleaning adventure, I started to imagine a lot of terrible th
ings. My dad didn’t believe in TV (so ahead of the curve!), and he really didn’t have any idea of the sort of things kids could see in the media. My mother had a job transcribing the news, and since we were her only companions before David came into the picture she would tell us about all the awful things that happened in the world each day. I was convinced that children were kidnapped nightly.
We’d never been to Grandpa’s apartment before. And honestly, we never saw him very much at all. So I had no idea what to expect. As we drove along, I started to imagine a locked room filled with children that my grandpa was abusing. Chains and all sorts of dark shit. Were we on a rescue mission? I guess I would have to wait and find out when we got there. I looked down at my hands and made fists and tried to imagine myself as big and not small and helpless. Maybe I could help those trapped boys. I promised myself that I would hug them no matter how dirty they were. I was dirty sometimes, too!
When we arrived, the scene was not that of a psychotic kidnapping. It was the home of an old man who was very much alone. His hobby was mycology, and he had a collection of dehydrated mushrooms. Cigarettes and bottles and hoards of objects and newspapers and magazines, all covered in a layer of grime, filled the apartment. The place was filthy, but Naomi and I exchanged a look when we entered that said “This looks like home.”3
We cleaned without much conversation. It was gross, but frankly it was nothing that Naomi and I weren’t used to. Having to clean a house from “inhabitable” to “habitable” was a biyearly event for us. My dad was tackling the kitchen. There was a lot to sort through, a lifetime of knickknacks and sundries. There was a particularly cool mushroom in a glass case that I wanted to show Naomi, so I went to find her. She was cleaning in Grandpa’s bedroom.
I walked in, and Naomi was crouched over something on the ground.
“Hey, Nomes, how do they get the mushroom in there? Look.”
I startled her when I approached and she grabbed my arm and conspiratorially whispered, “No. Look.”
What she showed me was definitely not a mushroom.
Naomi was sitting in a pile of magazines she had found. She had her hands on one with a naked man in it. She flipped it open to show me, and there were lots of naked men in it. They were muscled and tan and hairless4 and just . . . naked. Naomi suggested trying to find a way to keep one, and I just couldn’t stop staring, because I had never seen anything like those magazines. Was this what my dad was talking about? I was certainly shocked, but I wasn’t horrified. My reaction was absent of terror. These were men, not children. Just naked pictures. What was the harm in that?
As we turned the pages, things got more complicated, with bodily fluids involved. I started to feel grossed out by the functions of the male sex and instead focused on their arms and chest and muscles. They looked so big and cool and strong. Look, this one is a fireman. This one is chopping down a tree. They are doing so many things because they can. They can because they are strong. I want to go to the woods and chop. I want to be big and strong.
“Woah, this one has a girl in it.”
Naomi turned the magazine to share. There was a woman with her legs spread and breasts spilling out over her shirt. Despite my limited understanding, the image was inescapably sexual. My face was hot. But it wasn’t the position she was in or the flesh of her body that had transfixed me. It was the look on her face. Open mouthed and wide eyed.
Our father called for us, and we hid the magazines under the bed. I felt dirty and shameful. Naomi said we should keep it a secret. I kept a lot of other people’s secrets at that time without really knowing it.
But I suppose that was the first one that was mine.
If you ask me about “the first time I thought I might be gay,” I could say it was that moment. But that would be a lie, because I didn’t really understand the feelings I was having when I saw that picture. There was no cognition behind the way I was reacting. It was just natural.
I might also say it was earlier, when I was in kindergarten, and spending time with the girls in my class would make me feel shiny and sparkly and I always wanted to be the prince in every story. Not out of a desire to be manly5 but out of a desire to have a princess to save.
Or I could say it was any time I was near another girl at all and she smelled so clean and nice and I wanted to be her favorite thing in the world.
Or I could say it was when I was in middle school and I heard that my friends’ sister might be bi and I felt repulsed.6
Or I could say it was when I watched Britney Spears7 do anything and felt everything.8
Or I could say it was the first time a boy kissed me and it was fine.
Or I could say that it was during my senior year in high school when Ashley Arabian told me to put out my cigarette before going into a party because “boys don’t like girls who smoke” and I immediately crushed it in my palm because I wanted her to like me and think I was so so cool.
Or it was when I realized I was having that thought and hated myself for caring so much about what Ashley thought of me and so little about the boys.
The truth is that I think it was all of those moments combined. It was in every moment. It was in every breath of my big gay lungs and every beat of my big gay heart.
Denial is both active and passive, and I fought against my truth at every move. Shadowboxing myself in my subconscious. Ducking and swinging and watching my footing to make sure I was always outpacing my true desires.
Until denial and I circled each other in our final rounds. Until I went to college and met my match.
The smell in the air is the same,
But the feeling has changed
You and I
are different now
We speak
We smile
We spend
the same time,
in the same spaces
but the air is different here,
and words travel the distance
in different ways.
And visions filter into different eyes.
But when I look at you
In the light of last summer
I can’t help but remember,
How nice it felt
to have
Your hand against my face.
—Spring, 2007
Berkeley’s campus is green year round, with a variety of flowers that all seem to bloom at once. That’s how it looks in my memory, every moment on the verge of blossoming, every breeze laced with opportunity.
When I found out I was going to college, it was a dream come true. Not only was UC Berkeley my “reach” school, but it was the only school I applied to that had accepted me. So it must have been fate. The application process wasn’t smooth, and before accepting me they asked for two additional letters of recommendation and gave me thirteen essay questions that I had to complete and return within a ten-day window. I remember walking into my yearbook class after school and talking through the application process with Mr. Morgan, one of my favorite teachers, a man whose approach and dedication to education and his students had saved many lives, including mine. (Just wanted to take a moment to appreciate this teacher. All teachers really. Big shout-out!)
Anyway, being admitted to Berkeley was great not only because of its academic reputation but also because it was in the Bay Area. I wouldn’t have to leave my mother or Maggie behind; they would be only a BART ride away. I was also provided with financial aid and assistance in the form of work-study. Life was looking up.
Everything was falling into place, and I was determined not to screw it up and to do better than I ever had academically. I had been blessed, and I would not squander the gifts the Lord had provided. So freshman year I was a good Christian girl who wore a cross and lived in Freeborn Hall, the substance-free dorm on campus. That year I didn’t party,9 and I went around to Christian church groups trying to find one that was liberal enough for my political views and had a man that I could marry. Despite dabbling in dating in high school, I had yet to fall in love or expe
rience that head-over-heels feeling. I was determined to find a partner so my real life could begin.
At that time I also chose a major, Communications—Advertising.10
At that time, I also continued my studies of French.11
At that time, I also . . . was bullshitting myself a lot.12
I read more Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter fanfic than was healthy and kept my mind as tightly locked in a fantasy as I could. Sure, maybe I was avoiding something. But what about Draco and Harry, huh? What were they avoiding? Their love for each other??? I shipped that shiz.
When the holidays arrived, I would stay on campus and continued to work. My financial aid provided me with meal points, but when classes were out of session the dining halls were all closed. I remember one rainy week (must have been just before spring break) walking across the campus carrying boxes of instant mac and cheese I planned to make in the microwave. I’d live on that all week. Pasta never let you down. And if I wanted a real hot meal I could take the train for an hour and a half south to visit my father or back across the peninsula to visit Maggie and her adoptive family. The holidays were lonely, but when school was back in session I was happy as a clam. I loved being in the dorms because I loved being surrounded by people studying different things.
During that first year at school I met one of my (to this day) closest friends, Becca. She was someone I bonded with because—well, actually, I don’t know why we were so instantly fond of each other. On paper we’re totally different. Becca has a very wry, dry outlook on the world, bordering on pessimistic, yet she is supportive and delightful. And hilarious.
Once I invited her to go check out some church event with me and her deadpan reply was “Jesus? On a weekday?”