by Wade Rouse
Which is the reason why, although Gary’s mother is the single best baker in the world—I mean, she makes Mrs. Fields and Mrs. Smith seem like lunchroom cooks—the rest of the dinner was prepared with little seasoning, so that no one could possibly be offended, and why the turkey ended up cooking, I would guess, for nine hours. When it came out of the oven, it simply vaporized.
Still, there had always been one Thanksgiving constant in my life, one tradition that pulled me through all those years at the children’s table, that made Thanksgiving Thanksgiving: Marshmallows were always melted on top of the sweet potatoes.
Until today.
When I saw the casserole dish go into the oven, I softly asked Gary, “Umm, isn’t she forgetting to melt those mini-marshmallows on top of the sweet potatoes?”
Gary’s mother heard me, stopping in midmotion, a look of absolute panic on her face, as if she had just discovered that Lancome was no longer giving out a free gift with purchase. She looked at Gary, who looked at me, who looked back at his mother, who looked at her son again, her thoughts now clearly channeled into his body.
“The grandkids don’t like marshmallows,” he whispered, as though he were trying to talk me off a ledge.
Gary’s brother’s family had just arrived, and Gary’s mom was throwing everything into the oven to rewarm it. There was no time for an incident.
I wanted to go ballistic. I wanted to run through the floor-to-ceiling dining-room windows I knew were hidden behind the floor-to-ceiling blackout drapes. Maybe then I’d know if it was sunny or raining today. But instead I gritted my teeth and smiled and walked grimly into the living room where Gary’s dad and the boys were watching sports. At least I could watch some traditional NFL football—the Lions and Packers, or Cowboys and Redskins.
“You like sports?” one of the grandkids asked incredulously.
He’s had “the talk,” I realized.
“Sure do.”
“Wow!” he said, staring at me all wild-eyed, like Pam Anderson was his prom date.
I sat down on the couch next to Gary’s brother and immediately fell into the middle of the collapsing twenty-year-old sofa, my head coming to rest on the shoulder of his brother as if he’d taken me to a drive-in on our first date and I was gently nuzzling him.
“Sorry.”
I tried to straighten my spine enough to sit upright, and then tried to adjust my eyes enough to make out the picture on the TV his parents bought when Eisenhower was president. After a few seconds of hard staring, I realized they were not watching football at all: They were watching a Class 1A Illinois basketball game between Podunk High and Hooterville RVIII, watching guys who were five two playing center for high schools of two hundred kids and asking, very seriously, out loud, “Think these guys have a shot at the pros?”
I dribble better than they do, I wanted to yell. And I look better in a tank top.
I grunted my way off the couch and went directly to the guest bathroom, where I did the only thing I could: barred myself in until I could regain my sanity.
All righty, mister, pull yourself together, I thought, sitting on the toilet in a bathroom that looked like the middle of a birch forest in Wisconsin: pinecone wallpaper and carved wood toilet-paper holders and baskets filled with twigs.
I sat and stewed.
I wanted my marshmallows, dammit.
I wanted my Thanksgiving to be the way it used to be.
Upset, I started to analyze the situation, never a good idea when you’re bitter: I knew for a fact that the grandkids were not allergic to sugar, since they’d had sixteen snickerdoodles and three fruit punches in the fifteen minutes they’d been here and were now just manically punching each other in the back.
I was near my breaking point, close to opening the bathroom door and screaming, “The turkey’s been in the oven for about nine hours. It’s done, okay? Those redneck oompa-loompas will never play pro ball, and there is no liquor anywhere in the entire house, so I’m close to drinking the rubbing alcohol out of this bathroom cabinet just to get a buzz. Give me something today, anything—just the tiny, stinkin’ marshmallows please!”
And then out of nowhere it hit me: I and both of our families were freaking out because we were all afraid of a little holiday change.
There was a knock on the door.
I put my head to the crack in the frame and heard Gary’s voice, speaking very calmly, like presidents do when they announce we’re going to war. “She’s adding the marshmallows,” he said. “And please don’t kill yourself in the bathroom. It won’t do any good. My mother will just decorate around your bloodstain with a few well-placed pinecone accessories.”
I laughed. I needed to laugh.
A few minutes later I emerged, and we were all finally seated at the table as a family. I felt good. This was all going to be okay.
And then, out of nowhere, the bomb dropped.
“What’s on the sweet potatoes?” a grandkid asked.
No one said a word.
“What is this?” the other one asked, picking up the ladle and then slapping it back down.
“Marshmallows,” I said.
“Gross!” they screamed at the same time. “That’s so gay!”
Time stopped, the earth slowed considerably, and the table turned silent. It was then that I actually saw the soul of Gary’s mom fleeing her body. Thanksgiving was officially ruined. I would never be asked back. Gary and I would now forever eat Swanson’s TV dinners alone at home on Thanksgiving, both of us crying in the dark and pretending that the apple brown Betty really wasn’t so bad, despite the fact that the corn had baked into one side of it.
But in the blink of an eye a holiday miracle occurred.
Someone farted—so loudly, in fact, that all of our water glasses as well as the cornucopia platter holding the turkey actually vibrated.
Everyone started laughing, and, just like that, Thanksgiving was saved.
And Gary and I started a brand-new Thanksgiving tradition: We began to embrace one another’s families. And they began to embrace us, no matter the day or the holiday.
And those marshmallows?
Well, they never tasted more goldeny delicious.
ELECTION DAY
There’s an
Elephant in the Room
One of the worst days of my parents’ marriage came mere weeks into it, before I was even born, over a November pot-roast dinner when my mother admitted, as she scooped mashed potatoes for my father, that she had just voted for JFK.
For my father, this was a more horrifying revelation than if my mother had yanked up her apron to reveal, say, a kangaroo pouch or a foot-long penis.
My father simply eased his chair back, according to family lore, left the table, and “went for a drive.”
My father is a lifelong Republican.
I come from a family of lifelong Republicans.
The elephant is as much a part of our DNA as astigmatism and a wicked arch.
Like singles today who seek others with similar interests—SWM seeks SWF, NS, loves dogs and kids, not into water sports—my father intentionally sought out someone who shared his political interests as a way to keep the GOP family spawn swimming conservatively upstream.
My father returned home that election night to massive defeat both on the home front and the national scene, but he coped by turning my mother into a stereotype: She had voted for JFK because she was a young woman, immature, pliable, and Kennedy was rugged, attractive, manly. My mother had been deceived by the media, by TV, by looks over substance, but this was an aberration.
Unfortunately for my father, my mother has always been a free thinker, and I believe something altered our family genes that November Election Night when my mother voted for Kennedy’s rugged good looks over Nixon’s sweat-drenched bod because—like an experiment gone bad—I was later produced, like the Fly, and I turned out to be, horror of horrors, not only a Democrat but also a boy who liked meat other than pot roast.
“I vo
ted for JFK because I will always believe in hope, in dreams, in miracles,” my mother told me when I was still too young to understand what she was saying.
Still, I was able to understand from an early age that I took after my mother both politically and sexually, and network TV—the “great evil,” as my dad often called it—was my initial gauge.
My mother and I not only used to get inexplicably turned on watching Hal Linden and Kevin Dobson play Simon Says during Battle of the Network Stars, but we also used to become inexplicably incensed listening to my father curse Walter Cronkite and his “liberal tendencies,” decades before that phrase became a heralded conservative battle cry.
“Why don’t you just switch the channel?” my mom would say to my father when he watched the CBS Evening News. “Watch someone else.”
“I need to keep an eye on Cronkite,” he would say, before adding, “and Nixon doesn’t take any fucking prisoners.”
He would then sometimes shake his head in admiration.
“That doesn’t even make sense,” my mom would answer, turning to head into the kitchen.
My dad viewed politics as he did any sport, be it football or boxing: He expected it to be ruthless and dirty, bloody and unpredictable. In fact, he screamed at the TV more watching the nightly news than he did watching Friday-night boxing or Sunday football.
In addition to the favorite phrases my dad used to yell at my brother and me, such as “Get your ass out of bed!” and “Clean your plate!” and “What’re you doing in that bathroom?” my father also had a stockpile of catchphrases he loved to bombard newscasters and Democratic politicians with such as “term limits,” “welfare state,” and “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.”
I understood where my father was coming from, though. My family was self-made. We were, as cliché as it may sound, pull-ourselves-up-by-our-own-bootstraps-type folks. My grandfathers labored in mines and rock fields and sold vacuums; my grandmothers sewed. They worked like no one else I’ve ever known just so they could have the American dream: a home, a car, a better life for their children.
And the lifetime of dirt they collected under their nails meant their families wouldn’t have to scratch and claw as hard just to make it through every single day. My mother and father were the first in their families to graduate college.
Ultimately, the older I got, I ended up following my father’s advice and turning away from my mother’s: To win in politics and life, I thought, you not only had to fight the odds and be determined, but more than anything else you had to be ruthless.
As a result, this is the philosophy I brought to school. Determined not only to make my father proud but also to conquer the popular crowd, I ran for political office.
When I stumped for student council, I ran against a girl who was undoubtedly smarter and significantly better qualified, as well as prettier and more popular.
She deserved to win.
The posters of my contestant showed her looking like a supermodel in her cheerleading uniform. Mine said simply, WIN WITH WADE. Her campaign manager, a fellow cheerleader, was obviously more savvy and astute; she was more in tune with what the electorate wanted than was my campaign manager, a girl who played piccolo and dreamed of being a mechanical engineer.
But the best, most qualified candidates, I had learned, didn’t always come out on top.
“Nixon doesn’t take any fucking prisoners,” my father told me as my election neared.
So I began by defacing a few of my competitor’s posters, drawing mustaches on her face and hair across the chest of her cheerleading uniform with a black El Marko.
On some of her posters, I penciled this important question across her chest: “Do you want a boob representing you?”
I spread rumors that she was failing algebra and I started handling my own media outreach, which included hanging some rather disturbing but attention-grabbing posters that featured baby seals being beaten, with the following slogan: WADE WILL CLUB THE COMPETITION!
When it came time for my final skit in front of the student body, I pulled a few of the most popular kids from every grade and had them do asinine things, promising them everything from more pizza parties to soda in the lunchroom.
And it worked.
I won.
That night my mom strolled into my bedroom before dinner. I expected her to congratulate me on my upset win. Instead she told me that she knew what I had done to win.
Down to defacing the posters.
“Ethics,” she told me, “is what you do when no one is looking or telling you how to act.”
I took this to heart the next fall when I ran for class office. I spoke about improving the school lunches and doing away with study hall so we could add much-needed advanced classes. Not exactly the issues rural high school kids care much about. As a result, I lost to a hot guy who made his final speech while cloaked in a mesh football-practice half jersey. He asked the class, while pointing at me with a flexed arm, “Come on, who would you rather have representing you? Me or him?”
I mean, I was ready to blow him after his five-second speech.
Fast-forward a few decades to 2000, the train wreck that was Bush vs. Gore.
Ethics.
The best candidates didn’t always win.
Politics, as my dad had taught me, were brutal and ruthless indeed.
That election (and the 2004 election) became watershed moments in my life. I felt, as a gay man, ostracized from my own nation, hated, bullied, just like Gary among those who used to spit on him in school.
I also knew I had once won using the same tactics.
During these eight years, my family stopped debating politics for the first time in our lives. Even through the good and bad, the natural ebb and flow, the checks and balances of our political system, no matter how bitterly my father and I had debated over candidates and issues, we always did so with a sense of love and respect, almost like two tiger cubs playing.
But during these Bush years, when I would visit or we would chat on the phone, we focused solely on the weather or sports.
My father, I knew, firmly believed in the president and his views on morality and “family values.”
And this hurt me, hurt me so deeply as to leave a stinging void in my chest every time I would visit or hang up the phone.
And then in the fall of 2008, when I was visiting, my mom fixed the ultimate meal of irony: pot roast and mashed potatoes.
It was a tense visit. Gary had been campaigning tirelessly for Obama. Both of us once again felt that this was not simply an election but a referendum on our lives. Electing Obama could change our nation forever. It would provide hope to any person who ever felt ostracized, different. Yet I knew my father had long admired McCain, his tenacity and fight, his heroism.
The only sounds that night at dinner were nervous knives cutting too deeply, scratching the plates, a spine-tingling scream none of us could voice.
“Dad, this has been a nasty election. Too nasty, don’t you think?” I asked, trying to bridge our gap.
“Damn right!” my dad bellowed. “And it needs to get nastier. McCain and Palin need to take those liberals to the ropes!”
I had felt the same thing at one time when Obama fell behind in the polls, screaming at the TV for him to get nasty, to get dirty, to not simply deface some posters and air some negative commercials but literally to gut his competition.
“You have to vote for Obama,” I said suddenly, without warning, staring directly at my father. “Missouri is a battleground state. You have to do it for me. For your son.”
Knives screamed.
“Dad?”
“How about this weather?” my dad said, ignoring the Republican elephant in the room. “It’s been so rainy.”
I fought back tears and gummed some potatoes.
I did not talk with my parents until November 5, the day after Obama had clinched the presidency. My mom called, and it was a gentle conversation as we tiptoed through the thorns, both of
us knowing what was to come in future years: the strain, the silence, the occasional yet unspoken tension at family dinners.
But our talk was heartfelt and necessary.
And then, in a whisper, she confided in me that she had voted for Obama. “It seemed the only ethical thing to do. As a woman, to walk into a booth in rural Missouri and …”
Here she stopped, not crying exactly, but weeping, bawling, her words coming out like ghosts that were being exorcised.
“… be able to vote for a black man in my lifetime … it means so much.”
She took a deep breath and calmed herself.
“You know, I always wanted to be a doctor, and it just wasn’t what women did when I was growing up,” my mother, the nurse, told me. “And you … to have lived a lie for so long because you didn’t feel worthy, to not be able to marry the one you love. I know so many others have suffered so much more, but each of us had a dream … and then each of us had to put that dream away … this election is the first step in changing that cycle.”
“What about Dad, Mom?”
“Your father will always be your father, Wade. But …”
And here she stopped.
“… just know he loves you, despite how he will always vote.”
In my heart I still wanted—needed—to believe that when Election Day arrived, my father stepped into that voting booth and decided to do the only thing he could: vote for his son.
But ethics, I know, as my mom first taught me, is what you do when no one is looking, and such lessons are hard to learn, especially when there is always an elephant with you in the booth, occluding your vision.
“When we recall Christmas past, we usually find that the simplest things—not the great occasions—give off the greatest glow of happiness.”
–BOB HOPE
THE HOLIDAY PARTY
Blue Christmas
If Martha Stewart were to have full-body electrolysis, breast deconstruction, a penis implant, and, well, basically just go whole hog and transgender into a man, she would be Gary.