The Last Lovers on Earth: Stories from Dark Times

by Charles Ortleb

  Presently, the panel was next to her on the passenger side of the front seat of her car in a large black garbage bag. The mother wore dark sunglasses. She prayed that none of her neighbors would by chance be at the city dump that day. When she arrived at the dump she used a large pair of shearing scissors to cut up the panel into several small pieces. As she drove back home, the memento of the AIDS death her son had not died lay beneath old egg cartons and rusty cans of V8.

  At home there was still one secret to dispose of. At the back of her own closet, behind shoes her husband would never wear again, was a large cardboard box. In that box were hundreds of old newspaper clippings. Following her son’s announcement that he was gay, almost every day she began to cut stories out of the newspaper. Some days there were two or three stories to clip. Because her son was gay, she began to worry about every gay person in the world. Whenever there was a story about a gay person who was beaten up, murdered, dismembered, or discriminated against, the mother clipped it. In her box there were clippings about gay people who had been stabbed, shot, beaten with baseball bats, even thrown from bridges. Gays who had been beheaded or stoned in other lands. In one fundamentalist country, they toppled brick walls upon gay people. The story that had gotten to the mother more than any other involved a woman in the American Northwest. She had taken a retarded gay man into her home in order to protect him from violent bigots during a period when their redneck county was in a frenzy over an anti-gay referendum in their state—one that was going to pass. When a local group of bullies found out that the retarded gay man was staying at the woman’s house, they firebombed it, killing both their target and the good Samaritan.

  Subsequently, for many weeks the mother woke up in the middle of the night, struggling in the flames with the woman and the gay retarded man. One by one, every gay person that she read about who was harmed not only became one of her concerns, they became one of her children. Her motherhood expanded out of her body, through the roof of her house, and spread across the sky for as far as the heart could see.

  Like a surprising number of housewives in America, the mother had been a closet atheist, at least before her son came out. The accumulating clippings in her cardboard box began to weigh so heavily on the mother’s psyche that she had what can only be called a mini-theological breakdown. Or you could say that her soul had a stroke. One night, out of the overwhelming fear for her son suddenly came a new faith and a god she could pray to. There just had to be a god to protect her gay son from everything that was happening in her box of newspaper clippings. Her longing for a god to protect her son was so ferocious and desperate that sometimes she felt palpitations in her chest. She prayed to her new gay-friendly god for her son constantly. It was the kind of naked-unto-god extreme praying that soldiers do in foxholes next to dying buddies. It was the only thing that gave her peace. Her gay son had taken his mother on a journey into the deepest mysteries within.

  But now she was proceeding with the box of her people and her children toward the patio in the backyard. There she removed the grate from the barbecue grill and, after filling it with charcoal and sprinkling the coals with starter fluid, she poured all of the newspaper clippings onto the black mound and struck a match. Within minutes the world she thought she would spend the rest of her days fighting for went up in flames. The clipping about the woman and the retarded gay man in the Northwest was the first to turn into ashes.

  There was a new quiet in her house when she went back inside. There would be no more dark nights of fear and prayer. The poor souls on her barbecue outside would have to fend for themselves. God. Politics. Friendship. Commitment. What an odyssey it had been. But now it was over. Her son had changed tribes, and she and her husband felt the sad duty to follow him once again. She hoped their son was happy even though, like most sons, he had no idea what he had done.

  Ex-gayville, Connecticut

  Beth and I had been talking seriously about settling down in Ex-gayville, Connecticut for several months. We were still a little shaky in our ex-gayness and ex-lesbianism, but we thought that we could make a lot more progress in Ex-gayville than on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

  We had both recently experienced some momentary relapses, and we felt that we were being challenged too frequently by our liberal environment. And we both had been imbibing a little too much. The ban on liquor in Ex-gayville struck us as just the discipline we needed to embrace our incipient ex-gay lifestyle.

  The night I got really drunk and started singing the Streisand-Summer hit duet "Enough is Enough," doing both voices was probably when I hit bottom. The next morning we called a real estate agent in Ex-gayville.

  We were full of hopes for a new life in the sleepy Connecticut town as we drove out of Manhattan.

  "Matt, I pray that they don’t have any softball or volleyball teams there," she said.

  "Oh, don’t worry," I said. "I’m sure they’ve cleaned the whole place up. I’ve heard that they even have a city ordinance against women’s golf."

  "Thank God," said Beth. "My hair doesn’t look too short, does it?"

  "Not at all, honey. No one would know."

  "Know what?"

  "Know where you’re...where you’re coming from."

  "You mean know I used to be a big ol’ dyke?"

  "Beth, you know that Dr. Frick and the group have suggested that it doesn’t help either of us solidify our ex-gayness if you talk that way."

  "I’m sorry, honeybun," she said.

  "That’s more like it."

  "Did you have to wear that shirt?" asked Beth. "You look like you should be marching at the front of a Gay Pride parade."

  "Boy, are you in a bad mood, Beth. I saw Regis Philbin wear a shirt like this last week."

  "Now there’s a macho icon for you."

  "Beth, you’re exhibiting unresolved anxiety about change. Dr. Frick said this would happen."

  "Go ahead and say it, Matt. My lesbianism is acting up."

  "I haven’t said that to you in months, sweetie."

  When we arrived in Ex-gayville, we were escorted around town by an ex-lesbian real estate agent named Ethel Perkins, who had brokered half the houses in the Hamptons in her prior life when she was a very active lesbian. There were quite a few available houses in Ex-gayville because lately, for some reason no one could put their finger on, there had been a larger than usual number of relapses in the community. The real estate broker joked that backsliding was good for her business, but Beth didn’t quite see the humor in it.

  Ethel the ex-lesbian showed us a Cape Cod, which I immediately nixed because it reminded me too much of Provincetown.

  "I know just what you need," said Ethel. "I have just the right ranch for you two ex-gay lovebirds."

  "Not too many windows," I insisted. I had a deathly fear that someone would look into our bedroom sometime and see what a dreadful, complicated mess we made out of sex.

  "I’m sorry, but all houses have some windows," she replied.

  Beth and I immediately fell in love with the place. We thought we had found the Promised Land of our ex-gayness. I could imagine puttering around the house and fixing things to keep my mind off my former life. And Beth could see herself baking up a storm in the large kitchen. We wanted to have children, but weren’t quite sure how we were going to pull that off. But if in fact we did, there were two little bedrooms for our ex-gay children. We made a down payment that day, and within two months we were moving all of our sophisticated Manhattan designer furniture into our ranch in Ex-gayville.

  The welcome from our new ex-gay and ex-lesbian neighbors could not have been warmer. Most of the men had two names, their prior gay name and their new Ex-gayville one. Our next door neighbor Ted was the former Miss Coco Puff of New Orleans. Joe, the husky guy across the street, was once Miss Big Thing in Harlem. (Yes, Ex-gayville was very integrated.) Ted’s wife, Alice, was the former Motor Mike of the West Village leather lesbian scene. Joe’s wife, Cerise, used to be known in the lesbian bars of Atlanta
as Thunder Thighs.

  We were given a very pleasant cookies-and-lemonade reception at Joe and Cerise’s. I didn’t dare ask for a little shot of something in the lemonade, because, as I said, booze was strictly forbidden in Ex-gayville. It was considered to be the water from the river of gay temptation, a definite no-no. One counselor had said to us that the drunker one gets, the gayer one gets. I couldn’t argue with that.

  We did our very best to fit in. Like all the other ex-lesbian women, Beth stayed home every day and cleaned and cooked and watched Oprah. This was quite a change for Beth, because when I first met her, cleaning usually meant putting everything in her apartment in five or six piles.

  Beth took to cleaning our new home with a vengeance. She washed all the floors every day and our house was so dust-free you could have assembled a computer chip in any room. She even took apart the clock and toaster and cleaned every moving part. I marveled at her transformation the night I pulled into the driveway and found her cleaning the garage with a toothbrush.

  The competition among the ex-lesbians to be the best housewife was fierce, and Beth got right into the fray and tried to claim first prize. She quickly achieved the reputation in the neighborhood of being the most ambitious cookie baker. Maybe it was that remark by Hillary Clinton about not staying home and baking cookies for her man that got all the ex-lesbians going. Or maybe it was the questionable research that some Ex-gayville academic had done showing that Sappho never baked anything. I don’t know what it was, but for some reason the air in Ex-gayville was always fragrant with freshly baked cookies.

  Beth baked far more cookies than the two of us could ever eat. I took cookies to the office. We gave tins of them away to the children in the neighborhood. I even gave cookies regularly to the toll booth operator on the morning commute. Every night we had cookies for dessert and then later for a midnight snack. It was strange seeing a woman who didn’t have children constantly baking cookies. Beth gave so many cookies away on our block that several mothers complained that she was causing eating disorders in their children. There were several bulimics in the neighborhood.

  Actually, all of the children in Ex-gayville were a little weird. Many of them had a spaced-out, faraway look in their eyes. I also noticed that the children were always a little nervous and they didn’t seem to know what they were supposed to do or say. Maybe it was because they were raised by parents who were in a constant journey out of their gay and lesbianness. Conversations in Ex-gayville went by in a blur. People spoke in wary sound bites. Everyone seemed to be afraid to stand still. The only child who seemed at peace with herself was Ted and Alice’s little Vanessa. She was an unusually calm child, but Vanessa also had a little morbid streak. She believed she had the gift of prophecy and she was always foretelling the deaths of neighbors. On one occasion, little Vanessa told Beth and myself that we were going to die soon.

  Beth and I looked horrified at her parents, but Vanessa’s mother merely shrugged her shoulders, saying, "Look, we can’t control her gifts. What can I tell you? She says that to everyone and sometimes she gets lucky."

  Many of the children in Ex-gayville eventually had troubled adolescences. It was not unusual for some of the friskier teens to act out the issues of ex-gayness by spray-painting graffiti like "Mr. Olsen has a lisp," or "Mrs. Patterson still eats pussy," on the sides of the houses in our highly sensitive community. And making matters worse was the fact that the graffiti was often right on the money.

  In such a world, I had to stay on my toes and keep my ex-gay nose to the grindstone. I had already cut off my ponytail and ditched the single earring. I continued actively working on my ex-gay makeover. My voice was getting deeper, my walk more manly. For the most part the word "fabulous" was exiled from my vocabulary except for very special occasions. I tried to glance at the sports page every day, even though my hands perpetually strayed to arts and fashion. I took the draconian step of ditching all my Brad Pitt movies. I took to wearing a fedora and occasionally smoking a pipe. My cynical next door neighbor was not very helpful. He barely concealed a giggle whenever he saw me in a smoking jacket lighting up my pipe.

  "Ted, do you have to sabotage my emerging masculinity?" I once asked him indignantly.

  "I didn’t mean no harm, Miss Scarlet," he responded.

  "Ted, you could get thrown out of Ex-gayville for a crack like that."

  Luckily for him, there was a rather endearing amount of loyalty among the ex-gay men in the neighborhood. We often had to cover for each other’s faux pas. Ex-gayville men didn’t tend to turn each other in for such infractions. The loyalty was ironic in that it resembled the loyalty we felt when we had been gay and in the closet.

  The men in the neighborhood often gathered together to watch baseball and football. We were supposed to be bonding without cruising. We all watched each other watching these games, to see who was looking too closely at the players’ asses while trying not to do so ourselves.

  Near the end of our first year in Ex-gayville I began to notice subtle changes in Beth that soon grew into dramatic ones. Some nights in the middle of dinner, she would get up to clean something or wash a floor and then return to the table.

  When I questioned her one night about this strange behavior, she snapped at me.

  "I want this house to be perfect for you. And this is the thanks I get? Twenty questions?"

  "I’m sorry, Beth."

  She left the table and went to bed. I sat eating the rest of my dinner even though I could hear her sobbing into her pillow. It sounded like someone weeping millions of miles away.

  When I finished my meal I did all the dishes myself and went into our bedroom as though nothing had happened. I undressed in the dark, listening to Beth mourning in the darkness on her side of the bed.

  I knew that our relationship was really not on the right track to complete ex-gayness. I could see that we were taking our frustrations out on each other. Beth must have known what I was thinking, because all of a sudden, from her side of the bed came the words, "I bet every marriage in Ex-gayville is a marriage from Hell."

  It was one of the few times I really felt close to her. I pulled her over to my side of the bed and we were uncharacteristically affectionate toward each other before we fell asleep.

  Beth didn’t give up on our ex-gay marriage, and neither did I. But the more she tried to throw herself into her role, the more bizarre her behavior became.

  Between Thanksgiving and Christmas that year, she started spending more and more time watching television and less and less time cooking and cleaning. And she watched the same thing over and over and over: episodes of Leave It to Beaver.

  One night, when I arrived home, she greeted me at the door in her apron. After giving me a big kiss, she called me "Ward."

  At first I was amused, but when she began calling me "Ward" all the time, I sensed something bigger was happening.

  She had videotaped all of the Leave It to Beaver episodes and played them nonstop day and night. She would sit staring at the set, only periodically getting up to imitate June Cleaver. She dusted things exactly like June Cleaver. She sent for a retro fashion catalog and bought clothes that looked exactly like June Cleaver’s. She began to talk and gesticulate like June Cleaver all day long. Whenever I protested, she ignored me or just said, "Oh, Ward, run up and see if Wally and the Beaver are washing up for dinner."

  I didn’t know what to do or say. I couldn’t tell the neighbors and there was no one I dared tell at the office. I was thinking about calling her parents, but I didn’t want to give them the satisfaction. They never believed our marriage would last in the first place.

  Things came to a head the week before Christmas when I came home and found Beth in a state of total hysteria.

  She screamed at me as soon as I walked in. "Ward, I found a bra in Beaver’s underwear drawer."

  "Beth, calm down."

  "Ward, I knew it. The Beaver is a lesbian."

  "Beth, the Beaver is a boy. I mean, there’s no Bea
ver. We don’t have a Beaver or an anything."

  "And Ward, I have some terrible news about Wally."

  "Beth, there is no Wally."

  "Ward, I caught Wally disco-dancing in the basement in the nude. And he was wearing a cockring."

  ‘Beth, we don’t have a basement. Or a Wally."

  "Ward, I think Wally’s gay. The Beaver’s a lesbian, and Wally’s living the gay lifestyle."

  "Beth, I think you need help. I think we need help."

  I ran to the phone and called her parents.

  Her nasty younger brother answered the phone. I told him vaguely what was happening, and he predictably responded in a snide way: "Well, that’s quite a marriage you two have got going there. I bet she’s still a lezzie."

  "Calvin, let me talk to your parents."

  Within a few hours, her parents had made the drive from Manhattan to Ex-gayville. While Beth was marching around the house screaming at Wally and the Beaver, I packed a big bag of what I thought were her favorite clothes. She was screaming so loud that I was afraid the neighbors could all hear.

  At the top of her lungs she shouted, "WALLY AND THE BEAVER, YOU MUST STOP BEING GAY AND LESBIAN THIS MINUTE! WE’LL ALL BE KILLED!" She kept screaming it over and over.

  As soon as they walked through the front door, Beth ran up to her parents and said, "Mother and Father, Wally and the Beaver are gay and lesbian, and it’s all Ward’s fault."

  Luckily, they still knew how to deal with their daughter. Of course, they gave me dirty looks, as if I had done something terrible to her.

  They took the bag I packed and got Beth out to the car without her even looking back. Oddly, I felt an incredible sense of relief as I watched the car disappear into the night with my ex-lesbian wife and perhaps the last remnants of my marriage. Her parents had always desperately wanted her to be like June Cleaver, and now their wish had come true.