I looked over at Bill, who looked shocked beyond belief. Most of the other graduates cheered and applauded, and there was polite applause from the audience, except for my mom and dad, who were jumping up and down and cheering louder than anyone else. Bill stepped forward to claim his award certificate and his check for $2,000. Fortunately, none of the recipients were expected to say anything, but simply to accept their awards and return to their seats, which is what he did.
But I hope he didn’t get too comfortable, because he was called back up as the recipient of the next award as well, which featured another nice check. They called a couple of other people up to present them with awards before moving on to the next item.
The final award of the evening before the presentation of the diplomas was the announcement of the graduating senior selected by their peers as the person most likely to go the farthest in life. This one didn’t come with any cash award, but it was still very coveted. After the appropriate introduction and citation of some of the previous winners of this award, Bill’s name was called, and he returned to the podium to shake hands and receive a plaque. Turning to the graduates, he held it up with both hands, high above his head, and smiled. Turning to the audience in the grandstand, he did the same move. He had earned it, and I was so proud of him.
One by one the graduates were called to the front and were presented with their diplomas, both of ours with honors. We were a small community, so there were only about 150 of us graduating. Still, this process took some time. There were some other parts to the ceremony, but quite honestly they were all a bit of a blur for me.
Finally we were finished, and we recessed from the stage in the same way we had processed. Well, almost the same way. There was one change now. Rather than leave at his designated spot, Bill had remained and waited until I moved forward from my seat to march off the stage. I smiled so proudly when I saw him. He held up his hand, took mine, and we walked off the stage together, holding hands and holding our heads up high. We were making our public statement, “We’re here! We’re queer! Get used to it!”
That night, as we made our way from one party to the next and then the next, we were clearly attending as a couple. Since these people were by and large Bill’s friends, most of them his sports friends, I followed his lead throughout the evening. I stuck by his side when he seemed to want me there, and when he wanted to talk with some guys alone I made myself scarce and found someone else to talk with—either that, or simply watched people.
While watching people at one of the parties, it hit me that I wasn’t the only person who found such social interactions difficult. From what I could see, many of the people present did as well. The only difference was that some people were able to bluff better than others. Some were also pretty good at making small talk. At each party I only saw maybe one or two people who were really good at working a crowd. They also knew the people there and were able to toss into conversation some small fact about the person they were speaking with, which gave that person an opening to talk, thereby taking the pressure off the person who had initiated the conversation. In each case it was a joy to watch the person in action, to see them going from person to person, group to group, and in each case masterfully showing off their social and people skills.
By the end of the weekend, we had hit I don’t know how many events. All I know is that I was partied out. I was tired, and at the same time so high on life that I was practically bouncing off the walls.
While I would have liked nothing more than to take a few days to unwind and to do some private celebrating, the days were ticking past, and we needed to get ourselves out to California by July 1 to take occupancy of our new apartment and get some jobs lined up. One night at dinner we were talking again about how I was going to get my stuff moved out to California if we flew. Out of the blue, my dad proposed something that he and my mom had clearly talked over already, a proposal that I never would have expected in a million years.
“We’ve been thinking that maybe you two guys should consider taking your mom’s SUV and drive out to California. That way you can take all the stuff you want and need, plus you’ll have a car out there if you need one to get around. From what I’ve read, southern California is car culture—big time. We’ve been talking about how it might be difficult for you to get around out there without wheels.
“As you know, her SUV is not the most efficient on gas mileage, but it is in tip-top shape and hasn’t got that much mileage on it since she mostly uses it for around town trips. I realize you may need some time to talk it over, but when you’ve had a chance, let me know what you’re thinking.”
“What will you do for wheels?” Bill asked my mother.
“Well, interesting you should mention that,” she said coyly. “My sweetie of a husband has decided that I should drive his car, which, as you know, is a lot nicer than mine.”
“And…,” Bill tried, still missing a piece to the puzzle. It still seemed like they were one car short.
“Didn’t I tell you,” my dad said, “I’m getting a new one. We have a lot of driveway, but three cars would just be too much juggling, so you’d be doing us a favor if you could take one of them off our hands.”
“Okay, okay,” Bill said to get everybody’s attention while he thought for a minute. “In case I haven’t told you this recently, and because I’m not going to be here to tell you this on a daily basis, I love you two more than I can ever tell you! You’ve done so much for me, more than anyone else ever did or will again. If Mark is willing, I think having a car out there would be a good thing. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that my old car would never make the trip. It would try, but I think it would give up the ghost way before it finished the job. It’s been running on a wing and a prayer—and a new battery, thank you very much—as it is.”
I nodded at Bill. Between that and the smile on my face he knew my thinking. “Yes, we’ll take you up on your very generous offer,” Bill answered my father. Bill stood and walked around the table, giving each of my parents a big hug, first one at a time and then both together, at which point I think he was really close to losing it.
This was a wonderful thing, but it changed everything about us getting to California. It was already the twentieth, and the drive to California would take quite a few days. We immediately pulled out an atlas and started exploring options for routes and trying to calculate how many miles it would be and how many days we should allocate. We also talked about whether there were any things we wanted to stop and see along the way.
When we did the math, figuring roughly 2,500 miles to LA, about twenty-five miles per gallon for highway driving, four dollars per gallon as a pessimistic price for gas, we figured we’d need one hundred gallons to get there, or about $400. We’d of course have to add to that the cost of motels along the way.
If we planned to drive about four hundred miles a day, it would take us six and a quarter days of driving to get there, or just a little under eight hours of driving each day until we got out past Chicago, when the roads opened up more and there was less traffic and less restrictive speed limits. If we pushed it and drove a little more each day, we could get farther, but we weren’t sure how much we should plan, since neither of us had ever done any long-distance driving. So initially we settled on the seven-day plan and just about eight hours a day. There were a few things we wanted to stop and see along the way. Mount Rushmore and the Grand Canyon were the two big ones. There were a few other things we could have added, but for a lot of the trip there was only miles and miles of miles and miles.
After hours of study and discussion and contemplation, we decided that we needed to be on the road in three days if we were going to make it to California on our rough schedule. Two days would be better, given that we wanted to make two stops along the way. And then it hit me: agggghhhh! I was leaving home! I needed to think about what to take, what to leave, what I really needed, what I could do without. I also realized that I would not be seeing my parents again for a real
ly long time, most likely, which would be something entirely new for me. Add to that the whole issue of becoming an independent couple for the first time in addition to the anxiety about starting a whole new type of schooling, and suddenly I was bouncing off the walls for an entirely new set of reasons.
Chapter 4
The Move to California
SOMEHOW we got it all together, got things sorted out, got the car packed, unpacked, repacked, unpacked again, and repacked again—better each time, though. And we were ready to hit the road. My Dad had updated the insurance so that it would cover us completely. He had also bought a whole bunch of gas gift cards which he stocked in the car, choosing different brands that we might be most likely to encounter along our intended route. He also purchased the latest printed atlas that he could find that covered the entire continental United States. If nothing else, my mom’s car had a built in GPS system, so we could always fall back on that if we needed to. We were guys, after all, so anything that smacked or even hinted of asking for help along the road was so un-guy-like.
My mom stocked the floor behind our two seats with enough snacks to allow an Army to successfully navigate its way across the country. On the back seat she also had set up a cooler that plugged into a cigarette lighter and cooled the contents with electricity that it drew from the car while it was running. She filled that with a case of bottled water and even more food. She tossed two more cases of bottled water into the back end of the car.
On the morning that we were due to depart, we stood in the driveway beside the car getting our last-minute instructions. Both Mom and Dad shoved cash money into each of our pockets for the trip. Bill objected, but it was of no use whatsoever even trying. We thanked them both for everything. There were tears. My mom complained that her babies were leaving home and that she was going to miss us every hour of every day, and would worry endlessly until we reached California safely.
My dad had made sure that we each had a car charger for our cell phones so we could talk to them each and every day—without fail! Finally, after more tears and lots and lots of hugs, I got behind the wheel, started the car, and with Bill as navigator, we started on the greatest adventure of our young lives. California, here we come!
AFTER the first day, the novelty of traveling the open road wore off pretty quick. There wasn’t a lot of traffic across New York State, but it increased as we crossed into Ohio and approached Cleveland. We had opted for the more southerly of the two basic routes across the country, taking I-40, so from Cleveland we steered south, bypassing Chicago.
Our route took us south into Columbus, Ohio. In Indiana we passed through Indianapolis and then Terre Haute. In Missouri, we went through St. Louis, Columbia, and Kansas City. After that it was Wichita, Kansas, through the northwestern corner of Oklahoma, through Albuquerque, New Mexico; Winslow, Arizona; Flagstaff, Arizona; Kingman, Arizona, where we detoured north a little ways to visit the Grand Canyon; Barstow, California; and then finally on into Los Angeles.
In the end, our trip took us a little over 2,700 miles. Driving time alone was something like forty-five hours. When you factor in meals, gas fill-ups, traffic slowdowns, and other such things, the number goes up quickly and substantially.
We traveled simply. The first day we drove eight hours. We were both wired enough to keep pushing on, but we very much looked forward to the opportunity to have some time together off the road as well. We spent a quiet evening in a cheap motel bed somewhere in nowhere, Ohio. While we didn’t break the springs on the bed, we did give them an enthusiastic workout. As usual, Bill was insatiable, and I was only too happy to accommodate his needs and desires. And it was wonderful.
We relished the opportunity to make out to our heart’s content. It was a wonderful experience—the start of many, many more to come, I hoped—not to have to worry about my mom and dad hearing something next door. I’m sure that the people next door to us that night heard a lot, but we weren’t related to them so we didn’t care. And besides, we were all done and lights out by ten o’clock. Driving was dull, but tiring at the same time.
The next morning we were up early, ate a cheap breakfast at a roadside place, and pushed on for nearly five hundred miles. That turned out to be just too much driving for us for one day, so the next day we backed off to only three hundred and fifty miles. We knew five hundred miles was too much when we started arguing about stupid stuff. When the temperature of the air conditioning caused a nearly full-out war between us, we knew that we were overtired. After that, at a more reasonable pace, the peace and tranquility we had known returned to the journey.
Each night we stopped in another cheap (but clean) roadside motel/hotel and did things that would scare the sheep. Actually, I don’t think they would have been scared so much as jealous. Each day we pushed on, covering more and more miles, getting farther and farther from our starting point and slowly closer and closer to our destination. When we started planning the trip, we had talked about making two stops along the way, at Mt. Rushmore and at the Grand Canyon. In the end, given the routing that we selected, we ended up making only one stop, at the Grand Canyon, and what a stop that was.
We didn’t hike down into the canyon or do any of the serious climbs that were available as options. I could see Bill practically salivating at the thought of going down into the canyon and hiking back out. But we agreed that the canyon had been there a lot of years and would be there a few more so that we would stop and spend a few days there on another trip. Still, it was a spectacular place to visit, and everyone should at least stand on the south rim and peek down into the ginormous chasm that had been slowly carved away over millions and millions of years. The canyon had the most amazing ability to change appearance as the light changed. We were there several hours, and it was truly amazing to see the scene take on different qualities, depending upon the angle at which the sunlight illuminated the scene.
We both took bunches of photos, and between the two of us we hoped that we got a couple of good ones to send home. To pass the time on the drive out, some of the time when I was riding I worked on setting up a blog. It wasn’t all that hard to do. In fact, the hard part was choosing between all of the options that were out there. Actually, setting it up was the easy part.
As you might expect, each night when we stopped in nowhere, whatever-state-we-were-in, our initial entries were fairly concise. We were, after all, more interested in each other’s bodies than we were in writing about the cornfields we had seen that day. I knew that once we got to California and got settled we would have more time and more things to write about. I did, however, keep a notebook of scribbled notes while we drove so that someday when I was bored I could go back and write out a more detailed commentary on the trip. Memories of Isabella, Bill’s ancestor, whose foresight at saving signed first edition books to provide for his education, kept prompting me to record what we saw, no matter how minute it seemed.
We had deliberately timed things so that we would arrive in Los Angeles in midmorning. Several days earlier we had alerted our soon-to-be-landlord by e-mail of our trip and our expected arrival in Los Angeles. She had told us that she wouldn’t be available until late that night due to a work obligation, but that she would leave a key for us. She gave us careful directions as to which rock in the garden to turn over to find our key
We had to use the GPS to navigate once we got into the city, and since the city was huge and started way out, it came into play as the traffic volume increased. We had sort of expected that there wouldn’t be a lot of traffic at that time since the morning rush hour should be over and everyone who was going to work would already be at work. Wrong! We had lots of company on the road. Even so, we had no difficulty navigating to our intended destination.
When we pulled up in front of our new home, we looked at each other with two of the biggest smiles two people have ever worn on their faces any time before in history. After so many days on the road, so many days in this car, neither of us moved for a moment. “Well,” I s
aid, “I guess we’re here.”
“Yeah, I guess we are.”
“You excited?” I asked.
“Yeah. And scared, too. But mostly excited.”
“You?”
“Ditto.”
Bill had driven us into LA—he was much more unruffled about driving in heavy traffic than I was. I was good on the open road, but I hated driving in heavy traffic, never sure where someone was going to go. Once I learned the patterns of traffic and how people drove out here I didn’t think it would be an issue, but until then I was quite happy to have Bill do the driving.
Chapter 5
Getting Settled in Our New Home
WE DROVE into the driveway and right up to the door of our new home. Finding the key was very easy, given the careful instructions we had received. True to Moira’s word, the place was immaculately clean. The floors shined, the walls had been repainted, and the windows had been washed until they sparkled. We walked through the place to see what else had changed in our absence.
Upon entering the bedroom, we were both pleased to find a queen-size bed set up and ready to be made up—that is, once we bought sheets. Thing number two on the list of afternoon necessities, after grocery shopping. I was glad that we had brought two pillows with us from home so that at least we wouldn’t have to buy them immediately.
We unloaded the car, putting things into the appropriate rooms. When we had been packing the car in New York it felt like we were bringing way too much stuff, but once we got it unloaded and into the apartment, it looked like we hadn’t brought anything. Everywhere we looked we didn’t see what few things we’d brought, but we did see things that we needed.
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