I Love You and I'm Leaving You Anyway

by Tracy McMillan

  A short time later, as I walked to school on a snowy day, I happened upon a stack of girlie magazines dropped off outside the aforementioned corner store. Titles like Cheri, Oui, and Hustler. I stole a couple and stashed them under the bed, where they, too, became interesting reading material when I was bored.

  As I said, I had a lot of free time that year.

  The thing about it was, there was something very familiar about pornography. Not necessarily the pictures—some were highly explicit and shocked me at first—but the energy in the pictures; it was familiar, almost normal. I should say I’d been sexually, er, awake ever since I could remember. Without going into crazy details, let’s just say even at age four, when given a “time out” I knew how to make the minutes pass quickly in ways that were probably not what my foster parents were thinking when they named the time-out spot “the naughty chair.”

  Back to my moment of choice, though. I was in the basement with my friend Jody and this kid named Keith, who was somebody’s cousin or nephew and who just happened to be visiting. As happens with seventh graders, the discussion turned to sex, and a dare was put forth: I should French-kiss Keith. In theory, I really liked the idea. I was going to get to kiss this boy (and he was cute) without having to risk “liking” him, with its attendant possibility of rejection. Furthermore, since he was visiting, I would never have to see him again.

  Well, my mind may have been in agreement, but my body most definitely was not. As soon as the kiss became imminent, my heart began to pound and an unbelievable fear took hold. I couldn’t move.

  “Go!” Jody urges me. “Kiss him!”

  I’m looking at Keith, and he’s just standing there. Waiting. Ready.

  “Kiss him!”

  And…I…just…couldn’t…do…it…

  I couldn’t do it.

  I couldn’t even force myself to do it.

  Jody, ever the bolder of the two of us, muttered something about my being a loser and stepped right in front of me with a confident, “Okay, then, I’ll do it.” She put her arms around Keith’s neck, and he put his arms around her waist, and right in front of me, they started going at it.

  A tsunami of shame washed over me. What is wrong with me? Why couldn’t I just kiss the guy? He was standing right there. He wanted me to. It would have been so easy.

  But something really deep inside had just frozen me to the spot—like a wet tongue on metal when it’s ten below outside—unable to carry out the command that Jody Jeffs, and my mind, had just given.

  Even though I wanted to do it!

  It would take me, oh, a couple of decades to figure it out exactly, but eventually I would come to realize that I had two separate but interrelated sexualities: one with myself, and one with men. Two different selves I would spend the next twenty years synthesizing: the one who knew too much too soon and was hypersexual and kind of perverse, and the other, more powerful one that would keep me in check, up to and including trading sex for money.

  MY DAD SWEARS THEY VOLUNTEERED. Every last one of them.

  “Not once did I ever walk up to a woman and say, ‘I’m a this and I want you to be a that.’ That’s not how it happened.”

  He swears it. And I guess I believe him.

  Here’s his side of the story:

  One night in 1956 he was sitting at a bar, and a woman came up to him. “Can you come upstairs with me?” she asked. “I have a piece of furniture I need help moving.”

  My dad, ever the gentleman, was eager to be of service. “I was twenty years old,” he remembers. “A square. Just off the bus. I honestly thought I was going up there to help the girl out.”

  So upstairs he goes, to a small room in a building over the bar. Once inside the room, he says, she broke it down for him.

  “I want you to be my man,” she told him, point-blank.

  “What do you mean?” Freddie asks. Recounting the story, he articulates every word, like “What. Do. You. Mean.” He really sounds like he had no idea what she was talking about.

  “I’m a working girl,” she explained. “I make money, and I’ll give it to you, if you’ll be my man.”

  Freddie gives a big throaty laugh at the memory. “Man, I didn’t know a hooker from a loaf of bread,” he says, clapping. “I’d heard about them, but I’d never actually seen one. But this girl, she just…” He stops. Then he finishes: “I said, ‘Sounds good to me.’ And boom! I was in bidness.

  “We went around to all the clubs in Minneapolis, the Key Club and Moby Dick’s. And she made money and she gave it to me. And she fucked me silly.”

  Freddie goes on to tell some version of this story—She came up to me and said she had decided to become a hooker, but she needed a man, and would I do it?—for every woman he ever “worked” with. The way he tells it lends credence to the adage “There are no victims, only volunteers.” But even though these women were in agreement with trading sex for money, it doesn’t change my mind about the real costs to them of doing so.

  Not that anyone has ever asked, but as the child of a prostitute, I don’t really believe there is such a thing as a happy hooker. Even the ones making thousands a night. Yeah, maybe sex work is cool in the short term, in the same way it’s awesome to smoke cigarettes in your early twenties. It looks cool and feels glamorous. But poll any smoker over the age of forty-five. They all want to quit.

  TURNS OUT MY MOM WASN’T REBELLIOUS so much as she was crazy. This might have been predicted. My dad once told me that when Linda found out she was pregnant she wanted an abortion, and the only reason she didn’t get one is because he essentially locked her in an apartment and kept her there until I arrived.

  I was born in Hennepin County General Hospital on September 12, 1964. In fact, one of the first things I asked my mom when I met her was the time of my birth. I’m one of those chicks who’s into astrology (which is a little like saying “I’m one of those guys who’s into blow jobs”) and I’d been waiting a lifetime to find out the hour and minute of my birth so I could calculate my rising sign, which in astrology is the equivalent of You Are Here on a map.

  “It was in the afternoon,” Linda remembers, sounding quite certain.

  “Really?” I’m breathless. I’ve been wondering about this since I cracked my first astrology book, in my teens. “You’re sure?”

  “Yep. Positive. I remember because your dad was at the hospital and I was nervous that my mom was going to show up any moment because school was out for the day.” Linda’s mom, Helen, was a second-grade schoolteacher. She could print like nobody’s business. “My mom hated your dad, you know. Hated him.”

  Of course she did! My dad was black and a pimp. To Helen he must have been a rolling, strolling, overdressed billboard announcing the fact that she was not a typical college-educated elementary schoolteacher, but rather an abandoned wife who raised her only child to be a welfare mom and prostitute. There is, as we say in the news business, a story there. We may never know the details, but figure the story is the approximate size and shape of Linda’s insanity. Or Freddie’s diamond rings.

  “Do you know what time? I mean, exactly?” I’ve tried to find out on a number of occasions by obtaining a copy of my birth record, but Hennepin County General Hospital was torn down in the 1970s and all the actual birth certificates were packed away when the data was computerized, so now when you request your records, they just send you a piece of paper that essentially says, Yeah, you were born, on September 12, 1964.

  Thanks. I knew that already.

  There’s no time of birth on there, or little footprint, or doctor’s signature. Nothing that would say, You’re specific, there’s only one of you, you are special and wanted. This is the kind of indignity you suffer when you’re too poor to be born in a hospital with an actual name. General Hospital. It means no one claims you, not the Seventh-Day Adventists, or the Methodists, or the Catholics. You don’t really have a tribe. Unless indigents and welfare cases are your tribe.

  No wonder I’ve always felt lik
e I was hatched, not born.

  “Four ten in the afternoon,” Linda says adamantly. “Yep. School was already out.”

  Now this is something I can work with. Later, I ask my dad, and he corroborates the Helen part of the story, including the part about seeing her in the waiting room after school. He thinks the time was a little bit earlier, though. Perhaps around three thirty P.M.

  I run off to do my birth chart and immediately discover my birth time is right on the cusp between rising signs. If I was born at 4:10 P.M., I’m a Capricorn rising. If I was born at 4:30 P.M., I’m an Aquarius rising.

  Great. You’d think that would settle the question, but it doesn’t. A teensy bit more research reveals that my parents are either liars, or dimwits, or both. (Surprise.) And here’s how I know.

  Because I was born on a Saturday. There’s no school on Saturday.

  MY DAD WAS AHEAD OF HIS TIME. Thanks to his, er, nontraditional job and my mother’s complete inability to take care of me due to her bipolar-y/alcoholic problems (think Britney, early 2008), my dad was my primary caretaker.

  Freddie played Mr. Mom twenty years before Bob Saget ever met an Olsen twin. He cooked for me, fed me, bathed me, dressed me, and took me everywhere with him. Pictures from that time consistently show me—always with a fierce look on my face, always dressed to work in the RuPaul sense of the word—being toted around in my dad’s arms. Except for when he was dropping me off with a babysitter (“babysitter” being another word for some chick he was fucking), I was his constant companion. His sidekick, talisman, and ultimate accessory. We were inseparable.

  Presumably I even attended a drug deal or two.

  Later, when I had my own (stroller-hating) son, I started to realize what it might have meant to be carried around by him all the time. When you are a baby being held by someone, you absorb all their energy, you see the world from their viewpoint, you smell their hair. They, in turn, have full access to your face. They can kiss you whenever they want, and you can see all their expressions in extreme close-up, like being in the first row at a movie theater. I don’t know about you, but I get motion sick in the first row.

  It’s no wonder, then, that I’ve always felt so connected to my dad. For the first three years of my life I was literally closer to him than I was to anyone else, emotionally, physically, and metaphysically. I’m so close to him, every choice he makes in his life reverberates through mine in a very big way. So when he gets his first major prison sentence, there is only one word for what I am.

  Fucked.

  Three

  I Love You, but I’m Stuck in Here

  I ALWAYS GET A NEW DRESS for visiting day. June Ericson takes me to Dayton’s Velvet Coach and we pick out something special to wear to see Daddy. This time I get a dress the color of cotton candy with a full skirt and a big sash. I’m pretty confident I’m going to be the best-dressed girl at the prison.

  Leavenworth is a long way away. Four hundred forty-eight miles, and those are circa-1970 miles, before the interstate was built. We take a very impressive Braniff 747 and get there in two hours. I’m one of the only kids at my school who has been on a plane, so I feel really special. Even though the only reason I got to go on one is because my dad is stuck in prison for the next four years.

  June is my new mommy. She is forty-one years old, pleasantly plump, and wears her hair just like Carol Brady in the early episodes of The Brady Bunch. She is the nicest person I have ever met. The fact that she promised my dad that she would drag me all the way to Kansas to see him twice a year gives you an idea of just how nice. This is probably because she is a minister’s wife. I forgot to mention, I am a Lutheran now, baptized and everything. I’m not sure what I used to be.

  Last summer, we came here in a car, detouring a couple hundred miles out of the way on our family vacation to see June’s sister in California. I spent most of the journey in a Dramamine-induced stupor on the floor of our wood-paneled Ford station wagon. I regained consciousness just long enough for June and me to pop into the prison for a quick visit. My dad totally mentioned how calm I seem now.

  The rest of the family—my new dad, Pastor Gene Ericson, and my three new sisters, Faith, seventeen; Sue Ann, sixteen; and Connie, eleven—waited for us in the prison parking lot. My other new big sister Elin doesn’t live with us because she married a guy with serious facial hair and moved to St. Paul. Neither does Carl, my new older brother, who is studying to be a minister, just like Daddy Ericson. I’m not the only kid the Ericsons picked up in an act of Christian kindness. My new sister Connie was adopted from Korea when she was four. We share a bedroom, which is unfortunate for her since she’s super-perfect and quiet and neat, and I am Pippi Longstocking without the monkey or the chest of gold doubloons.

  In Leavenworth we always stay at the Cody Hotel, which was once owned by Buffalo Bill’s mom. I think that might be her behind the front desk, with a tall chestnut-colored beehive and a twang to match. The lobby crawls with large men reading newspapers and exhaling thick blue smoke from filterless cigarettes. Who knows what they’re doing here? They don’t look like their daddies are inmates.

  We call a cab to take us to the prison, about a fifteen-minute drive away. Just outside of town, the road gives you two choices: go straight to something called Fort Leavenworth, which has to do with the army, or take a left and go to the prison. I don’t know exactly how—maybe it is the cab driver’s expression—but I can tell that if you go forward, it means something entirely different than if you turn left. One way and you’re sort of a hero; the other way and you definitely are not.

  A couple of minutes after the turn we come to a stop in front of an electronic arm. A guard’s voice booms out of an intercom:

  State the purpose of your visit.

  June quickly rolls down her window and speaks into the intercom while gazing upward at the two-story tower where the voice is apparently coming from. It looks like there is a gang of air traffic controllers up there.

  “We’re here to see an inmate, sir.”

  Do you have any firearms, blah blah blah, narcotics, or other contraband?

  Maybe it’s just me, but that seems like a stupid question. “Why would we tell them if we did?” I ask loudly. The driver smirks.

  “Be quiet, honey,” June shushes me. She’s not at all harsh about it, but she says it in such a way that I’m definitely not going to be raising my hand for a follow-up question. “No, sir,” she says to the guard. “We don’t.”

  Go ahead.

  The arm lifts and the taxi pulls up to the drop-off area. We get out, and June pays the driver. “Thank you,” she says politely. He takes off without saying anything in response, glad to have these prison-visitor types out of his cab.

  I gaze up at the prison. I am wowed by this building! It’s massive and white, with a big dome—not quite as grand as the Minnesota state capitol, which I visited on a field trip for school, but close. With its white marble and neoclassical lines, Leavenworth is both flashy and severe. As if Nurse Ratched was being played by the lead singer in an eighties hair band. And the windows! There must be a thousand of them. As we climb the steps, I pick out a window and wave and smile in case my dad is watching me from his cell.

  I’m secretly proud my daddy lives in such an impressive place.

  Right inside the front door is the guard station where you check in, which looks like a cross between a drive-up bank and a single-room-occupancy hotel—a few guards behind bulletproof glass and a little silver vent to talk through. June fills out some paperwork saying who we are and which inmate we’re here to see.

  Then we’re off to the waiting room to cool our jets for a while. The waiting room is a medium-size institutional square with built-in molded chairs in shades of olive, mucilage, and rotten sherbet lining the wall. At one end of the room is a bank of vending machines. The Pepsi machine takes thirty-five cents and of course I want one, but June says no. So instead, I go around in a frenzy, checking all the coin returns, hoping someone els
e’s forgotten nickel or dime will turn this into my lucky day. June rummages through her bag, pulling out the coloring books, Rook playing cards (“real” cards would be, like, the Devil), and Barbie dolls that I’m allowed to take into the visiting room.

  There’s a clock staring down from the wall, and I watch the second hand sweep around and around. This part of the visit always seems to take forever, but today it’s taking forever and a day. It’s not just me, either, because I can see that June is starting to lose her patience as well.

  “What’s taking so long?” June glances at her tiny wristwatch, the one that I play with in church on Sundays, which leaves deep indentations in her cushy wrist. “Man alive! You’d think they went to China to get him.”

  We are not allowed to say “gosh,” “golly,” “gee,” “gee whiz,” and certainly not “god,” “jeez,” “Jesus,” or anything else that even comes close to taking the Lord’s name in vain. That doesn’t leave much except “man” and “man alive,” which isn’t much to work with at a time like this.

  (June told me that when I first came to live with her, I used to sit on my suitcase and swear a blue streak. Just reel off a litany of crazy swear words, the kind pimps, drug dealers, hookers, and other less god-fearing individuals tend to favor when provoked. I don’t know what she did, but I learned real quick. We don’t say those words here.)

  After what seems like forever, we hear our name called over the intercom.

  “Ericson,” the voice says. “To the guard station.”