by Wade Rouse
He looked at me and I could tell the wheels in his head were spinning, preventing him from saying what he really thought. Instead he just smiled, and said, “Thanks for telling me.”
And then late one fall afternoon, as Gary and I were leaving the mall after shopping for Thanksgiving table runners and any leaf-bedecked tchotchke that could be tossed onto a buffet, Gary accidentally smacked a bum in the head with a Williams-Sonoma bag containing a ten-pound turkey platter he had just purchased.
This homeless man, begging for leftovers while seated over a grate outside California Pizza Kitchen, yelped when Gary strode out the mall doors and struck him, and then quite literally fell forward.
“Sir! My God, are you all right?” Gary yelled, stroking the man’s face. “Wade, what should we do? Wade? Wade?”
By now I was standing some twenty feet off, having tiptoed away like Scooby-Doo used to do. I was not only embarrassed by the spectacle but also nauseous because the man smelled like piss, BO, vomit, and Boone’s Farm.
“Get over here and help me!” Gary yelled. “Now!”
“Not my fault,” I said. “And I haven’t had a hep-B shot.”
The man began to come to, slowly, moaning loudly.
Suddenly I grabbed the Williams-Sonoma bag out of Gary’s hands, yanked him to his feet, and dragged him into the parking lot.
“What are you doing? We can’t just leave him!”
“He’s fine!” I yelled. “And he was drunk and lying over a grate before you whacked him with a turkey platter. Believe me, he’s got bigger problems than a headache.”
“My God, you’re a monster!” Gary said.
I looked at him. He was staring at me, his mouth open.
He finally said out loud what he’d been holding inside, finally uttered the words even I was too frightened to formulate in my own mind.
I got in the car and gripped the wheel.
Then Gary slammed his door and I was entombed in silence.
For days.
Gary, in fact, did not speak to me for what seemed like an eternity, and when I would catch him looking at me, it was if he had finally come to realize that the love of his life was actually a vampire, a werewolf, or Mussolini.
I really could not have blamed him if he had wanted to leave me: How I had responded—or, rather, not responded—was cold, inhumane, heartless.
But hadn’t we, I tried to reason with myself, already done our good deeds? I mean, we recycled, we were cordial to Republicans, we donated to the Humane Society.
Still, Gary’s cone of silence forced me to think about my actions, or, should I say, inaction: Perhaps I responded the way I did simply because I grew up in rural America. I was not used to seeing homeless people.
Perhaps I felt that nothing I did—or anyone did—would truly ever make a difference in their lives; perhaps it was already too late.
Perhaps my nonresponse was the only way I could trudge through the inhumanity of life, shutting off my emotions like a bathroom faucet.
Or perhaps I truly felt the homeless deserved their fate.
Yes, perhaps, just perhaps, I was a monster.
Gary smashed our silence one night after work as I was trying to season and stir-fry cubes of tofu, which stubbornly refused to taste like anything but our kitchen sponge.
“I had an unusual lunch today,” Gary said.
Whenever Gary said this, I braced myself: His “unusual lunches” have nearly led him into joining a cult, buying a log cabin in Wisconsin, becoming a gay porn star, and debiting a Viper.
“Uh-huh,” I said, tossing a touch more hoisin sauce onto the tofu.
“We’re going to volunteer at a homeless shelter on Thanksgiving.”
And with that I spasmed, flicking a sizzling-hot piece of tofu into my cornea.
“Blind or not,” Gary said unsympathetically, “you’re still doing this.”
I rued my Thanksgiving invitation with the homeless for weeks, already feeling ghost pains from my lost pumpkin pie, mom’s turkey, stuffing, sweet potatoes, Macy’s parade, and Cowboys and Lions football games.
“I already miss my green-bean casserole with Durkee’s french-fried onions on top,” I told Gary.
“At least you have legs,” he said. “Oh, and a house.”
What I didn’t have, it seemed, was an option.
The morning of Thanksgiving, I found myself in the kitchen of a drafty inner-city homeless shelter, peeling potatoes on a concrete floor next to an elderly woman without teeth and a giant mountain of a man who at any minute could have picked me up and shoved my head into the cauldron of water boiling next to him.
I looked over at Gary, who was chopping apples and slopping pumpkin into bowls while dancing with a man whose entire arm was a tattoo of a snake.
The shelter was helmed by an energetic preacher who believed that a good dose of Jesus and a hot meal could work wonders on a man.
I was hoping that combo might just also do the trick for me today.
The goal of the shelter was to get a homeless person into a solid routine—bed by nine, up at six for breakfast, in line for a chance to work a temp job by seven—and then, slowly, one hour, one day, one week at a time, get him back into the routine of life.
I looked around.
Most of those surrounding me were men, most were black, but they varied greatly in age.
“Most are addicted to drugs or alcohol,” the preacher told me. “But many just fell on hard times: Some lost a job, some lost a wife or child, some lost a limb or a friend in service to their country, and they just weren’t able to recover.
“Like Joe here,” the preacher said, nodding at the mountain of a man peeling potatoes next to me.
Joe looked over at us and smiled a smile that he seemed to force out from somewhere beneath impenetrable layers of sadness. “My family was killed on Christmas seven years ago,” he said, his muscled jaw clenched and quivering. “My wife and my babies.”
“My wife and my babies, my wife and my babies,” he said again.
And again.
And again.
Until I had to excuse myself and run to the bathroom.
When I returned, I peeled some more potatoes, and then some onions, and then a few layers of my own hard outer shell, all while listening to Christian hymns in the kitchen, and I thought of my life this Thanksgiving morning—this day when Americans finally stop for a minute to gorge, spend time with family, and, supposedly, be thankful for their bountiful blessings.
I thought this Thanksgiving about just how close I came at one point in my life to being like Joe, being this close to not recovering from the death of my brother, from the sudden loss of too many family members, from not being the son I thought my parents deserved.
I had nearly committed suicide, but somehow I found my way back.
What separated me from Joe? Why had I been so fortunate?
Nearly a hundred of us—homeless men, homeless families, volunteers, children, mothers, black, white, young, old—shared Thanksgiving dinner that Thursday at noon, the city sidewalks quiet, the wind their only companion, the most profound moment coming when we all linked hands and prayed.
And I did pray that day. I didn’t just tap my foot until I could dig into my parents’ dinner. I prayed for Joe and these families and these men whom I ignored every day as I got on with my life, a life that was full and blessed.
I prayed that day to be a better person.
I was, for the first time in a long time, thankful.
After we finished dinner we played some games and then cleaned the dining hall and kitchen. Before we left, I asked the preacher if I could pack a plate to take to a friend.
“Of course,” he said.
I told Gary of my plan as we drove farther into the city, toward the Rams dome, and he seemed genuinely touched, amazed at my transformation.
I found my torso near the same spot he occupied most Sundays. Today, however, the streets were empty—just like his cup—the Thanksgivi
ng parade long over, no one shuffling to a football game, no one giving him a dollar or two.
Everyone was home, safe, warm.
“Happy Thanksgiving!” I said, placing a full turkey dinner on the wheelchair tray in front of the man.
The torso bent down, smelled the food, and then flipped it into the air with his forehead.
“Ouwannadoobledie?!” he screamed. Or asked. “Ouwannadoobledie?!”
I listened closely, trying to pick apart what he was trying to say, just like I do during the first ten minutes of every BBC drama or Emma Thompson movie.
Was it “I wanna drink?!” “I wanna die?!” or “I wanna kill you?!”
No matter. Each seemed chilling in its own right.
“Can I take you to a shelter?” I asked. “Can I help you?”
“Ouwannadoobledie?!” he screamed. Or asked. “Ouwannadoobledie?!”
And then he flipped the pumpkin pie I had just set in front of him high into the air and onto the concrete.
I backed away, plucked his piece of pumpkin pie off the sidewalk, the only item still intact, still trapped in plastic wrap, and I took it home.
“What more could I do?” I asked Gary on the drive.
“I don’t know,” he said, rubbing my shoulder. “At least for once you tried. You cared.”
I laid down on my favorite couch and ate the torso’s pie while watching the second half of the Cowboys game. I was warm, safe, blessed, happy to be back in my home, happy that I had indeed tried.
But just as I was about to doze off in front of the roaring fire, very satisfied with myself, it was then I realized: I was a monster.
A true American monster.
Although I hadn’t pillaged any cities or ransacked the Brooklyn Bridge, I felt I’d done something more heinous this Thanksgiving day: I had filled myself not only with pumpkin pie but also with the satisfaction that I had changed, although I hadn’t really been transformed in any discernable way except to cease my fire-breathing ways for one day of the year, knowing the very next Sunday I would once again walk past a legion of homeless people like an upper-middle-class zombie with a two-hundred-dollar football ticket instead of a heart.
THANKSGIVING (TRADITIONAL)
Where’s My Marshmallows?
For years I traveled home every Thanksgiving a single man.
I would arrive and be offered a seat at the foldout card table where the children sat while all the married couples ate at the dining-room table. That night I would be offered the couch in the den with the metal support bar that had the psychic ability to follow my spine all night, no matter which way I rolled.
Then I met Gary.
And I believed my dreams had finally been answered: I would be offered a seat at the big table and a bed with a mattress that wasn’t made from glass shards.
I didn’t realize I was instead doubling my pain, until we attempted to plan our first Thanksgiving with each other’s parents, who quite simply refused to compromise their holidays in any way to accommodate our new status as a couple.
So I instituted the rules I learned from the children with whom I used to sit at my family’s Thanksgiving card table—not the five-second rule for food on the floor or rock, paper, scissors for the last dinner roll. Rather, Gary and I flipped a coin to determine which set of parents would “win” us on Thanksgiving day.
“Heads!” Gary yelled as the quarter rotated in midair.
“Fuck!” I yelled when it came to a stop. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”
Thus we arrived at my parents’ house in the Ozarks on Monday night for a pre-Thanksgiving Thanksgiving and were greeted by my mother, whose countenance seemed to say: “Just remember that a Tuesday Thanksgiving does not count as a real Thanksgiving. Just ask your mother how she’d like to celebrate Christmas in April.”
Yes, my mother, it seemed, felt as if she had received the short end of the wishbone.
And I must admit that I felt the same way, really, though I dared not say it to Gary. But come on: Thanksgiving on a Tuesday? It was sacrilegious. I mean, if Thanksgiving were religious.
So I kept my mouth shut. Literally.
I opted not to warn Gary about my family’s holiday eccentricities. He could figure them out on his own.
And he did.
By noon on Tuesday, my mother, already on her second pot of Folgers, began telling Gary an elaborate tale about how the Jews, rather than the Pilgrims, were the first to celebrate Thanksgiving.
Rather than contradict her, distract her, or try and explain my mother’s fascination with Judaism to Gary, as I typically would have, I remained mute.
“I saw on TV that the french-fried onions that top our green-bean casseroles today were actually invented by the Durkeesteins, but they had to drop the ‘stein’ out of fear for their lives, kind of like Sacagawea, whose original name was Sacajewea. So we are really celebrating a Jewish holiday, like Hanukkah.”
Gary looked at me. I simply smiled.
He tried to turn his attention to the TV, but my father—who was already on his second glass of wine, which had taken twenty minutes to trickle out of the box—was screaming at the stock ticker on CNBC and the radar on the Weather Channel as if his yelling might alter the price of Procter & Gamble or blow that stubborn low-pressure system out of the Midwest.
I stood up, rather enjoying this chaos, and dribbled myself a glass of wine, realizing the day might fly faster if I were very drunk.
I turned to find Gary standing shell-shocked in the middle of my parents’ kitchen, just out of view from them.
He looked drained, slap-happy, ashen.
“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling immediately guilty. “She’ll settle down once she switches from coffee to wine.”
“That’s not it,” he said, and began pointing.
I followed his finger up to the top of our refrigerator, where our Thanksgiving turkey sat.
It had been sitting out, unthawed and fully stuffed, for five hours now.
“We’re … going … to … die!” he mouthed slowly.
“It’s fine,” I whispered. “It’s the way we always do it.”
“Well, it’s not the way sane people do it!” he whisper-yelled.
And then my dad busted Gary, following his finger point, and said, “Lookin’ good, ain’t it, boys?” He came over and touched its damp skin. “Not quite room temp, though.”
When my father went to pee, Gary motioned for me to head upstairs, gesturing wildly, as if he had just found a bomb in the cargo hold of the plane and was trying not to tip off the hijackers.
“First of all,” Gary said as soon as he got me to the upstairs guest room, had bolted the door, and moved the mannequin-sized spray of eucalyptus so we could sit on the bed, “has anyone here in the country ever heard that a stuffed turkey’s not supposed to sit out at room temperature all day!” He said this panicked, in a half scream, half mumble, like the teen campers did in Friday the 13th before they were beheaded. “Second of all, I like my stuffing cooked in a separate tin, so it gets crisp on top. I’ll gag if I have to eat soft stuffing. And third—yes, there’s more—is anyone going to be sober enough to actually serve our dinner?”
Now, this ticked me off.
In fact, I was beginning to miss the way things used to be: sitting at the children’s card table, sleeping on the uncomfortable couch, everything.
I mean, we arrived too early for me to see any of my family. His Thanksgiving was going to be on a Thursday. When people had Thanksgiving. People were still at work today. And talking about how great Thanksgiving was going to be.
And so I said, like a fifth grader, “I guarantee my parents’ Thanksgiving dinner will kick your parents’ dinner’s ass.”
Gary did not speak to me the rest of our first Thanksgiving together.
The man who had never taken a nap in his life, who thinks naps are only for the weak or those on life support, wound up fake sleeping on the couch upstairs all day—me telling my parents that “he’s jus
t exhausted from work”—before he appeared for dinner and sat silently through the entire meal.
The one and only noise he made was an audible gagging sound, strictly for my benefit, when he ate the soft stuffing.
But, damn, my dad’s turkey was good.
I knew I was in for payback when, on the drive to Gary’s parents’ house, we stopped at a gas station that sat between a silo and a hay field, and Gary said his first words to me in hours: “My mom tends to overcook her turkey in order to ensure it’s not contaminated. Oh, and all the grandkids are joining us.”
We were the only SUV at the gas station. Everyone else was filling up their tractors. A windburned young farm boy who looked as if he was smuggling an anaconda in his jeans leered at me while I pumped gas, and I thought briefly about running away with him, sitting behind him on that tractor, holding on tightly to my man as he plowed a field even if it meant he had to hit me occasionally because he didn’t understand what he was feeling. That would still be better than what I was about to endure.
Because I quickly learned that while my parents follow no set rules at the holidays—they improvise recipes, they wing the time to eat, they lounge around, they drink a bit too much—Gary’s family has hard and strict codes that must be followed.
First, his mom cooked every single item (“No help needed!”) following recipes that had been handwritten on hundreds of index cards, passed along from grandmothers and great-grandmothers. Every ingredient was measured, even though every dish had been made hundreds of times before and really required only three ingredients: sugar, Velveeta, or Jell-O.
Second, dinner was always at noon, meaning Gary’s mom started cooking at three A.M.
The food also adhered to strict rules: Everything was prepared to meet the complete and utter satisfaction of the grandkids, all other guests be damned. (“The grandkids like this,” or “The grandkids won’t eat this, you’ll see,” Gary’s mom started telling me five minutes after we had arrived, as though I was being prepared for the fact that they were conjoined twins who could eat with only one shared mouth.)