My father and I were strangers for most of my life. Our shared quiet exteriors hid contrasting temperaments. He was, and still is, the most practical man I’ve ever met. As for me, well, I wrote a lot of poetry as a kid, trusted dogs and kitty-cats more than people, and wound up in places like New York and San Francisco where I could barely afford the rent.

I was a gay dude with a gay father, and in our relationship at least, “father” weighed more heavily than “gay.” What I mean is that, like a lot of fathers and sons, we weren’t so skilled at talking to each other.

That began to change ten years ago after my mother’s death, and that change is a part of my book, and since I’m wary of giving away much of the book’s story on the blog, since I want the book to be fresh and full of new stuff for you to read, I won’t go into great detail.

But the years I’ve spent writing the book came with all kinds of obstacles and awkward moments, including the times I’d visit my father, as he struggled to understand why I was going so long without a real job and benefits and a 401k, working on something that might never make one single cent, and as I struggled to reframe the project in terms he might better understand:

“Hey Dad, it’s like, it’s like an investment! In my future. You know, with, like deferred benefits…”

But the benefits weren’t guaranteed. I could spend seven years working on a book that might still go unpublished, and my reframing explanation to my father worked about as well as you’d expect.

Don’t get me wrong. Most of the time we got along just fine, and when the Manly Fireplug came with me, he amped up the fun factor (as he tends to do) and I even one time, after years of second place, BEAT MY FATHER THE EDITOR AND ALL-TIME REIGNING FAMILY CHAMPION IN SCRABBLE. I tried not to gloat. Wait, I’m still totally gloating. Sorry, Dad.

But at some point during every visit we’d find ourselves alone, and he’d ask me about the book, and work, and money, and down the rabbit hole we’d go. I walked away from these talks frustrated and angry, convinced that he wanted me to be someone I didn’t want to be, with a different set of priorities and dreams, and though I won’t pretend to know how he felt after our talks, I doubt they were any easier on him.

Eventually, as I’ve told you here before, the money ran out, and I was forced to get a couple of jobs, and struggle, and feel broke since I was paying $500 a month in health insurance, and after a year the two jobs turned into three, one of which finally offered me benefits, and for the first time in a very long time I had money in my interest-bearing savings account, and dreams of a house with my husband.

And a new energy swept through me.

I found myself finally using my Mint iPhone app, categorizing my spending and planning monthly budgets. Every day while waiting for MUNI I’d check the balances of my linked accounts before opening my Kindle. Checking my balances turned out to be more fun when the sums went above the double-digits.

This led to me creating all sorts of spreadsheets and lists that I uploaded to Google Docs, where I sorted everything into collections. I don’t know if any of this will actually lead to greater productivity, but man do I feel organized.

This led to me taking ownership finally of my desk at the firm, no longer assuming I had one foot out the door, but instead committing myself to making the three jobs work, and I cleaned out the desk drawers of the last guy’s junk and set up a couple of framed pics of the Fireplug and our wedding, and blew half a can of compressed air into my keyboard (OMG GROSS!).

This led to me taking greater ownership of my second job, where I grabbed hold of the weekly conference call reins and created a brand new categorized agenda template, and got more done in two weeks than I had in the previous three months.

This led to me taking on more freelance clients for my third job, and having a lot of fun with invoices.

This led to me writing down all sorts of tax deduction questions to ask the tax preparer when the Fireplug and I meet (for the first time as a couple) next week to figure out how a domestic partnership (not to mention three jobs) will affect our returns.

This led to me cleaning out my desk at home. Which led to me cleaning out my closet and finally getting rid of clothes I hadn’t worn in two years and all the underwear I’ve been wearing that have been falling apart, since I now had money in an interest-bearing savings account and could spend some of it on underwear that the Fireplug agreed were worth the price, since they made me look, well, like that.

I can be a stubborn ass sometimes. I don’t always acknowledge other people’s influences on me. Dead writers, sure, but real live people? Don’t hold your breath.  But I’ll say this much: the Fireplug is also a practical man, more practical than me, and it has served him well, and it fills me with pride to walk into his shop on a Saturday afternoon and see every chair filled with waiting clients.

He’s a practical man who allowed me the space and time to work on my impractical dream of writing a book, and he allowed me to work on it without complaint until my circumstances changed and I could see for myself that I also had to change, to meet those circumstances. He let me get there at my own speed.

And though this burst of energized productivity, all aimed towards the larger goal of affording us a home together in a beautiful but prohibitive city, feels new, it also feels too thorough to lay entirely at his feet, as much as I love the guy.

Every parent echoes within his child. There was a practical man lurking within me, all this time.

I took this photo in Palm Springs, from the passenger seat of a borrowed car, on the Fireplug’s birthday, as he drove us downtown to meet my gay dads for a birthday lunch at Tyler’s. I like this shot because I remember how I felt, full of this new energy and hope, a feeling that had spilled out and colored other feelings, like my love for the man beside me, which felt like it had expanded in recent days.

And when we met them for lunch I told my father about my three jobs, and the benefits, and the money in the bank, affecting a nonchalance, since I didn’t want to appear, at the age of forty, like a man in need of his father’s approval.

And I could see the change in his eyes as I told him the news, and he smiled broadly and reached out and patted me on the shoulder. We had never been a physically affectionate family, and I’m telling you this so you can feel the full weight of his gesture.

At the end of the meal I slyly handed my new debit card to the waiter.

“Cash only,” he whispered. I blushed, for I had none.

“Oh, no, you don’t,” my father said. “It’s his birthday. Our treat.” He reached for the check, and I let him take it.

I spent seven heavenly days crashing at a friend’s house (thanks Fred!) in Palm Springs with the Manly Fireplug. Sort of a combination honeymoon/sabbatical where I worked on my book – writing six hours a day – took a dip in the pool, then an evening with the hubby. World Gym, dinner, then a cigar in the hot tub. In this case sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. At least at first. It was a honeymoon, after all.

And a very hard honeymoon to leave for the real world again. Since then I’ve been back to the three jobs, interviewing for others, and trying to get the last 3% of the book finished so that I can send it off to a few agents.

If you’re in San Francisco and free tomorrow night, I’ll be reading at the Fireplug’s shop as part of Litquake. Decided I’ll share the What-Happened-When-My-Dad-Found-My-Blog chapter (new material in case you’ve heard me read other sections). Hurt feelings, D.C. snipers, a Banana Republic sales boy with a lopsided mullet, and much more…

A Little Off the Top, and Over the Top
Tuesday, October 11th
Doors open at 8:30 pm; show starts at 9:00 pm
free; $5-$10 suggested donation
Joe’s Barbershop
2150 Market St (between Church and Sanchez)

You can have your astrology. No, really, just keep it. I have yet to read a description of an Aries that fits me, and no, I don’t care what light my rising moon might shed on that discrepancy.

But as long as we’re talking categories (and who doesn’t love, deep down, categories?) I will admit a soft spot for the Myers-Briggs. I don’t care if it’s out of fashion, or disproven, or simplistic. It’s the only kind of categorization system in which I’ve ever recognized myself.

That’s because, according to Myers-Briggs, I am a very special person. My type, INFJ, is the “rarest of all the types.” Which makes my personality “intricately and deeply woven, mysterious, and highly complex, sometimes puzzling even themselves.” I am a freak of nature and you will never get to the bottom of me. Fortunately you are just as self-absorbed as I am, which means you will quickly tire of my infuriating defenses and return to mulling over your own problems.

I mention INFJs here because our supposed first line of defense has been on my mind. “Mute withdrawal,” it’s called, and any friend of mine, and anyone who’s been a regular reader here, knows that I tend to drop out of sight every few weeks. I stop posting because, usually, life has once again grabbed me by the gonads, reducing me to the kind of of pre-verbal vegetative state that makes activities like blogging and cocktail parties challenging at best.

A few weeks ago I was involved in a car accident, an accident that sent someone to the hospital and an accident for which I was eventually deemed “100% responsible.”  I hadn’t had an accident in 18 years; it happened as the Manly Fireplug and I were picking up a pizza, and though I was eventually able to eat a couple of slices, I spent the rest of the night throwing them up.

As the Fireplug kept trying to assure me, accidents are called accidents for a reason. But I have a habit of looking for meaning in everything, a habit common to writers and maybe to the INFJs of the world. And so, traumatized, I turned to this habit with full force.

I can’t say for sure why the accident felt like such a rebuke, only that I harbor low-lying feelings of guilt at most times, and the $500 deductible cast a glaring light on my personal finances, and so that’s where I began my atonement. Somehow, through a deeply intuitive process of association,  fueled by dimly-lit anxieties, I came to believe that my eyes had been closed for some time. To life, to reality, what have you. I’d been blind, and now I wanted to, well, you know…

I gave up a few monthly subscriptions to various non-essential (i.e. porn) websites. I cut down on Starbucks and protein shakes and stopped buying clothes. Most importantly, I gave up my office, a little rental in the Mission, since I had yet to break even with my writing and it felt like an ostentatious display of…something.

Naturally I expected, having made the smallest of sacrifices, to reap immediate karmic reward. But life had other plans.

Due to circumstances outside of my control, money got incredibly scary incredibly quickly, such that as of today I do not know how I will be paying rent. Long story short, I must now get a real job.

I know. It’s so unfair. And though you will want to shower me with pity, I ask for my own sake that you refrain.

With a bank balance that makes it rather difficult to be picky, I’ve started casting my net. And though I just began my search, today I heard back from two prospective employers who had posted on Craig’s List. Asking for my name, address, telephone, social security number, and perhaps my bank account routing number, too, you know, just to get the wheels in motion…

So yeah, for a few seconds here I will set aside this self-protective self-deprecation, and admit that as I fast close in on the age of forty, I am as confused as ever by life. I have spent several years putting all of my eggs into one basket, writing a book, an art form that any cursory glance at media will tell you is going the way of dinosaurs. I did what they say, Follow Your Bliss, though they decline to tell you what to do when the bottom drops out.

All month I’ve been hearing the voice of my father, the most practical man on the planet, whom I have put in severe psychic pain by my lifelong ambivalence towards Jobs That Come With 401ks.

Yes, Dad, I hear you now.

I have a new recovery sponsor, who asks me every time I come to him with a problem, “Have you prayed yet?”  Yes, I usually want to punch him first. And though none of my gauzy-lit visions of a higher power include an omniscient dude who sits up there pulling all the strings, I try to take this question seriously. Really what he means is, “Have you asked for help?”

I hereby argue against the American myth of the self-made man. The up-by-his-own-bootstraps guy. No such man exists. We are helped, all of us, some more than others, all along our lives. Parents, maybe, siblings, friends, coaches, the occasionally stellar English teacher. Someone gave us a break. Maybe our first, maybe every single one. Someone opened a door, someone gave us a job.

Which is not to say that we ourselves don’t need to do most of the work. Only that we can’t pretend to be the complete and total masters of our own destiny. And now as the Manly Fireplug and various friends begin to circle around and prop me up, I must once again face a fact I’ve tried often to ignore. Though I retreat into mute withdrawal, though I’m no good at parties, though I think of “networking” as a particularly insidious form of torture, though I find other people to be at times absolutely confounding and infuriating and disappointing, it turns out that I still need them.

My gay fathers, now retired, split their time between a house in the Carson Valley of Nevada, and a condo in Palm Springs, both of which make for good escapes from San Francisco. Last year the Manly Fireplug took off for Philly, to visit his own family for Christmas, and I drove down the long, dry, stretch of Interstate 5, Finley curled in his little doggie seat beside me, the windows rolled up against the thick cloud of air pollution that had settled in the valley, until I reached Palm Springs, where I crashed in their spare room for a few nights.

There’s not a whole hell of a lot to do in the desert. Too cold in December to lay out by the pool, and none of us golf. So we played a few games of Scrabble, where I got my ass handed to me by my father, who worked as an editor for thirty years, and who uses every “Triple Word Play” square with relentlessness and skill. His humility, upon winning each and every game, does me no good, and merely feeds my resentment and my primal desire to one day Trounce. Him. Good. When not playing Scrabble we took long, slow walks around their neighborhood off Ramon Road, or watched game shows as Finn chased their little Maltese from one end of the condo to the other.

Every time I visit, when we have a moment alone together, my father asks about my health. He means of course the virus in my blood, the virus that neither he nor his partner have, the virus he only found out about a few years back, when a strange dream about my mother woke him, and led him to the computer and, after a few clicks, to my blog, and the words that I had so far kept from him. Words from which I wanted to protect him and the rest of my family. And each time he asks I tell him the truth, that so far I’m one of the lucky ones, with no viral load and no meds, and though there’s nothing to worry about I think he still worries about his son, who should, if there’s any justice in the world, outlive his father.

Always an awkward moment, that talk, every time. I’m careful with my voice, my words, the casual shrug of my shoulders. The truth is that I do have it easy, compared to others, and that there’s nothing much to worry about. Still, that question pulls me from the corner to center-stage where I stand, separate from him. Always an awkward moment, for I shouldn’t have the virus, for I had all the facts, unlike him, long before I ever had sex. In that spotlight I see the consequence of every mistake I’ve made, for this path through life that I’ve willfully taken, a path that diverged from the calm and measured one he himself has traveled, a practical and guarded path, that has kept him safe.

So each time he asks I reassure him of the truth, longing for the awkward moment to pass, for when I can step away from center stage and rejoin him and his partner, and return to my place as just a member of the family.

The days around that Christmas run together in my memory, a sort of pleasant, lazy haze of a weekend. My clearest memory is from my last morning there, when they took me out for brunch at this popular local restaurant, the kind of place that has brassy waitresses and little containers of Smuckers grape jelly in dishes at every table.

My father’s partner gave his name to the hostess, and we sat there in the lobby for a few minutes, gazing around at the small crowd waiting for tables, at the families and the couples who had wandered in after the holiday for brunch, all of our faces lit from the bright harsh light of the pasty cases nearby.

We didn’t wait all that long. The hostess checked her list of names and then called out, in a clear, strong voice that carried across the crowded lobby:

“Dick, party of three?”

If she only knew. She gathered up the menus, and I followed my fathers to our table.

So tomorrow my homosexual lover and I will drive to Nevada, to spend the holiday with my two homosexual fathers in their tastefully appointed home in the Carson Valley. I anticipate that there will be several other dinner guests in attendance, all of them Known Homosexuals. Over plates of turkey and cranberry sauce we will, as we do every year, conspire on our most recent additions to the Agenda. This year I will put forth a motion to pursue legalized marriage between men and farm animals, which I anticipate will receive a unanimous vote of support from my peers. After dinner and a light dessert, we will play board games and hope for a knock on the door from some Mormon boys. Failing that, we will disperse in various cars to roam the neighborhood for potential recruits. May you and yours have an equally fulfilling holiday!

Thanksgiving in Palm Springs, again: dinner at my father’s friends’ house on the edge of town. Outside, a rented table and chairs near the pool which was lit with colored lights. Over the fence, the mountains in the distance. Twenty, twenty-five people, family and friends. After dinner the straight people went inside to watch the game on the big flat screen hung over the fireplace. Seven gay men, myself included, stuck it out by the pool. The sun slipped behind the mountains, and Terry found fleece jackets for us as the desert air turned cool. Three couples, all in their forties and fifties and sixties, and me. Someone told a story of a road trip that two of the couples had taken together last year, on which they played a card game fashioned after Truth or Dare: how many sexual partners have you had?

“Um, twenty,” Steve had said.

“Fifty?” said Craig, thinking back.

Allen cleared his throat. “A thousand.”

All heads turned. Peter, Allen’s partner, was driving, and the car drifted towards the shoulder. “Excuse me?”

By the pool, in Palm Springs, everyone began offering, again, their own sexual mathematics. I looked over at my father, who hadn’t been on the road trip. He looked back, and at the same moment we said, “I don’t want to know.”

Over those three days I interviewed him and his partner on tape, five hours total. Later, after dinner, we headed to the movie theater for Capote, which I had just seen in New York. Half-way through, around the time that Capote decides to sell his interview subjects down river for the sake of art, for the sake of his book, I glanced over at my father and his partner and thought, “Why the fuck, of all the movies open, did I bring them here?”

As we’re leaving the theater his partner turned to us and said, of Truman, “What a piece of shit.”

///

Christmas in Indiana. The hotel room was about twice the size of my apartment.

My grandmother is now 88 and weighs 82 pounds. Sitting together in the living room, I ask her what kind of kid my father was. She thinks for a moment. “You know how he has a bit of wander-lust?” I nod. “Well it started early. He wandered away so many times that we finally put a harness on him, and tied him to the clothesline in the backyard.” Later, going through some photo albums, we find one of him, three years old, sitting on the grass in the backyard of their home in Gas City, Indiana. Over his t-shirt he wears a harness, and a leash trails off behind him. “That didn’t last long,” she said. “He took his clothes off, came around to the front door, and asked me if I had any cookies.”

Among the photo albums is a stack of papers: someone had done our family tree; it went back into the 1800′s. This is how I come to find that I am related, distantly, to homesteaders, and to people named Jimmy and Beulah Lee Turnipseed.

///

The last six weeks of the semester I became obsessed with San Francisco. Images interrupted my day, certain views I knew well: the Marin headlands across the Golden Gate Bridge, the houses on the hills from my bedroom window, the Castro Theater marquee from the museum parking lot at the end of my street. I daydreamed about my old car, my foot on the accelerator, driving somewhere, anywhere on my own volition, somewhere out of the city, surrounded by the colors green and blue, mist, air smelling of sea. Walking down sidewalks that I shared with a couple dozen people, rather than a couple of thousand. And light: through my bedroom window, through the skylights of Gold’s Gym. I dreamed about space, and light, and the sight of green things blooming all year. I pulled on my parka and slipped into the crowds on Broadway, and remembered the sound of fog dripping from the eucalyptus trees on my old block.

I began to feel like an animal in a zoo, and spent most of my time in my apartment, just recovering from the onslaught of New York. Everyone knows this is a hard city. And people who live here strike that bargain because they get something back from the things the city offers. I began to realize that I didn’t really care so much about those things. I didn’t want to go out to bars and clubs and cool restaurants all the time. I like the museums and plays, and the readings. I saw Joan Didion read twice here. But neither meant as much to me as the book she had written. And what did it matter where I read it? What if, at heart, I’m one of those people who say it’s a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there…

I’ve been struggling here since day one. Struggling to stay on top of everything, struggling with my depression, struggling to find some kind of balance. I know that grad school is part of the problem, and most of my friends here have said that if I just waited till after school ended, and maybe moved downtown someplace, then I would really come to love New York.

I try to imagine an ideal New York life, with an amazing apartment in a great part of town, with enough money to take part in everything, but it still doesn’t solve the essential problems for me of living here: having to share the sidewalks and the subways with millions and millions of people, all of us in each other’s way. Weather (gross summers, cold winters) that drives you inside for much of the year. The difficulty of getting out of town without some major planning.

After Christmas Bearbait picked me up from the airport in San Francisco, and dropped me off on my little dead-end street on the hill. And when I stood on the sidewalk outside my old apartment, all I could hear was the wind through the trees, and I breathed in the smell of damp eucalyptus leaves, and that moment mattered more to me than just about anything I’d done in New York.

I can have that apartment back. My ex, who took over my room, isn’t getting along so well with my old roommate, and told me he’s ready to move on. The roommate misses me. And I saw that I had a one-of-a-kind deal there: a great big apartment on the side of a hill, on a quiet street that always has parking, surrounded by trees, with views from all three floors of the houses on the hills above the Castro, for only five hundred bucks a month, far far less than what I am paying for my dark little studio here in Manhattan.

And though it stormed the entire week I was home, I didn’t care. I sat in the living room looking out at that view, the rain falling across the hills. It took me moving to New York to understand how important a certain balance of city and nature was to me. I never would have thought of myself as a nature boy, but so be it. I loved living in a city where I could hop in my car, and within an hour be at Mount Tam, the Marin headlands, Stinson Beach.

Even with men, I realized that I was becoming more attracted to guys who had some ability to survive out in the wilderness, rather than men who knew the hottest drag queens on the Lower East Side. I don’t really care where you bought your couch, but if you can read a compass, you’re a hottie.

There are less than 800,000 people in the city of San Francisco, a small fraction of New York’s population. And for the first time I saw this as a tremendous asset. I had breathing room, empty spaces, quiet sidewalks, sleepy, foggy streets to drive home with the windshield wipers on low.

I’ve had friends argue that one can live in New York and vacation in these quieter places to recover. I’d rather do the opposite: live in a quieter place, and visit the more rambunctious places.

I would sacrifice some things by leaving New York: some valuable friendships; a greater, truer diversity; an incredible cultural vibrancy. Most of all I could lose out on some professional contacts. But I’ve made a few already, the internet has come a long ways in helping writers stay connected, and though there may be more opportunities for writers, there are also a hell of a lot more writers here competing for them. I’m not convinced that I need to live here to make it as a writer. Most writers, after all, don’t live in New York. I’m going to have to work a little harder to make those connections from San Francisco. But at least I’d have the energy to do so, rather than spending my days recovering.

Most important is the sense of family I have with my friends in SF. One night, Bearbait and Joe the Barber and I were walking down Polk Street when we came across an intersection blocked off, fire engines surrounding an old fish and chips restaurant on fire. Thick black clouds of smoke billowed out into the night. Flames licked up through the windows. We stood with the crowds on the sidewalk, watching the firemen work. Joe bought a slice of pizza and the three of us leaned against a building and watched another burn.

One afternoon Jeff and I took the ferry over to Tiburon and found a coffee shop. I sipped my hot chocolate and pointed out the window behind him at Angel Island, which was wreathed with a low cloud of fog. “I know this is cheesy,” I said, “but that image right there is feeding my soul, dude.” Of course what I neglected to say was that his company was doing the same. Even later that week, after he’d had his accident, I had the same feeling sitting in his hospital room. Good conversation, comfort, none of us having to rush off on neurotic errands. Of course he couldn’t rush off, since he had a couple of cracked ribs and was tied to a few pieces of medical equipment, and I didn’t need to rush off because I was on vacation, and maybe everything I’m saying here is an elaborate justification of a decision I’ve already made. But that’s how I work. I have to justify it to myself first.

Even the Ex and I had fun. Nearly five years apart, we’ve reached a point where we still know exactly how to make each other laugh, but without having to put up with each other’s ugly boyfriend characteristics.

And Louie. If I moved back to SF, the Dogpoet could have his dog again.

Naturally I’ve been mulling this decision over and over and over, and burdening my friends with long monologues about the advantages and disadvantages of each city. A guy who reads my blog, in a stunningly generous move, sent me an email that contained a few dozen quotes pulled directly from my blog, all concerning New York and San Francisco, and my feelings about both. There, in black and white, was the writing on the wall. “Notice here,” the reader pointed out, “that you say you love New York on the days you don’t hate it. I’m wondering if you’ve ever said that you hated San Francisco. I couldn’t find anything on your blog.” He couldn’t find it, because I never wrote it.

I have no regrets. I wanted to come to Columbia to become a better writer, and I wanted to move to New York to see if I could live here, and I’ve succeeded on both counts. I’m a better writer, and I’ve seen first hand that New York is not for me. It’s such a relief to finally realize that I don’t have to somehow “live up” to New York, that I am happier in a smaller, backwater kind of city, and that this preference is something I like about myself. And isn’t it rough, to have to make this kind of decision? Yeah, I know you really feel sorry for me.

“You can’t go back again,” someone told me. But I’m not trying to recapture something I once had so much as putting myself in the place from which I want to go forward. I can move back this summer, and finish my thesis in my apartment on the hill, the view through the window, Louie curled at my feet. And maybe, with a little bit of balance, and a little more humor, I could stop writing such amazingly self-absorbed posts like this one, and actually engage with the world a little more.

New York hasn’t been an entirely negative experience. In San Francisco I got my hair cut by Joe at his barbershop. Joe lived in New York for quite a few years, and he works with a certain hunky barber who grew up in Brooklyn. This hunky barber has a hot, tough exterior, but I’ve always suspected that there’s something else underneath. I asked him how he was doing, and if he was dating anybody. “Nope,” he said.

“If I moved back to San Francisco, would you let me take you out on a date?” I asked.

He paused for a second or two, then launched into this long speech about the different kinds of dates in the gay world: the coffee date, which could be just between friends, the sex date (self-explanatory), and the date-date, which would be dinner and a movie with the possibility but not the guarantee of sex. There were a few other types as well, but I interrupted him.

“Dude, just tell me what the fuck I should ask you when I move back.”

I’d never seen him speechless before. He may have actually blushed. “A date-date,” he said, quietly.

“Alright,” I said. “But just so you know, I don’t put out on the first date-date.”

He nodded. “That’s fine.”

Joe caught my eye in the mirror and patted my shoulder. “New York’s been good for you,” he said.

Last August, my father and I swapped coasts. I left San Francisco for New York, and he moved from D.C. to Nevada, ten miles outside of Lake Tahoe. He and his partner retired with full pensions after thirty years each with the federal government.

My fathers are practical men. They choose glamorous locations, but buy real estate just beyond the truly desirable neighborhoods, ten, twenty minutes outside of sexy. For the past fifteen years, since I’d left home, they’ve gravitated towards housing developments: little communities of carbon-copy, freshly-built homes surrounded by curving streets named Thistle, Willow, or Tulip. There’s little shade below the young trees. Nearby are similar communities, distinguished from one another by varying shades of roofing tile.

I visited their Nevada home in June. They picked me up from the Reno airport and drove me the hour through Carson Valley, which is, like much of Nevada, experiencing a phenomenal population boom. We passed dozens of new developments on the side of the highway. I imagined what it would be like to return there each evening, to wake each morning in a house that looked just like every other in the neighborhood. It felt suffocating: my life diminished, sliding from view among housing tracts devoid of character, my hand waving for attention before slipping below the surface.

One could say the same for living among millions of New Yorkers, but I would gladly settle for living in a row of Manhattan brownstones. Is it merely the difference of a hundred years that makes a housing tract appealing? What’s “character,” except age and higher heating bills?

They kept apologizing for the bucolic atmosphere of their new home. But coming from New York I found it peaceful, and beautiful: the green Carson Valley surrounded by snow-capped mountains, cut through with slender silver creeks, horses grazing in rolling pastures. It was, to my mind, a substantial improvement over D.C., a town whose appeal I never really understood (save for some high-class bloggers).

Their new house (on Tulip Court) was typically immaculate, with all-new furnishings from some Reno megastore. They’d recently subscribed to XM Radio, with a port in both their car and their living room. Satellite radio has a few hundred stations, but during my visit I only heard two: the first was elevator music, and the second was something called “The Heart”, which featured ballads by such compelling performers as Celine Dion, Whitney Houston, and Mariah Carey. Somehow the elevator music was the worst. They left it on all day at home. After forty eight hours I began hunting for their sharp instruments.

During a tour of the house, they showed me the master bathroom, which contained this framed artwork:

“These are just a few of our new local friends,” my father joked.

I choked back my horror and attempted a smile. “I should move to Nevada,” I said. “Make some friends.”

We bought tickets on a sailboat excursion around Lake Tahoe, which was typically glorious.

After silently capping on my father’s taste all weekend, I realized with dismay that we wore the same shoes.

As soon as I got back to New York, I replaced them.

“You’ve got skinny ankles,” my father said. “Like me.”

Though I’ve been going gorilla on the sitting calf machine, there are some things that resist replacement.

Something got in my eye that day. Tanning lotion, maybe, which I put on too late. For the next several hours my right eye threw a tantrum, reddening and watering till my left eye – sympathizing, no doubt – joined in. After the boat ride we hit a casino. My father’s partner handed me a five dollar voucher, pointing me towards their favorite nickel slots.

But the dark ages reign in Nevada. People smoke in the casinos, cigarette in one hand, cocktail in the other, their bifocals reflecting the whirling, flashing lights of the slot machines. I lasted five minutes, then stumbled out into the merciless sun. I hiked a hot stretch of strip mall road till I found a grocery store. Five minutes later I sat outside, by the rocking horse machine, drenching my eyes with a new bottle of Visine. I held my head in my hands, saline dripping from my lashes to the sidewalk, and listened to the hot engines of SUV’s gliding behind me through the parking lot.

“Are you okay?”

My left eye cracked open. A gray-haired woman, her hands gripping the handlebar of a shopping cart, paused before me. I gave her a tear-stained, squinty-eyed smile, and she wheeled away. Further down the strip mall was a sporting goods store. Five minutes later, hiding behind a ten-dollar pair of shades, I wandered like a drunk into Starbucks where I bought a grande chai that only cost me three bucks.

“That’s it?” I cried. “Three even?!?”

The blonde barista, stunned, nodded slowly, as if I had a learning disability. I grabbed the chai before she could change her mind, and pushed through the doors back into the parking lot, cursing Manhattan under my breath.

Of course I lied. I had told the woman with the shopping cart I was okay, but I wasn’t. By the time I made it back to the casino an hour had passed, and my fathers were sitting by the fake plants in the lobby. Shades on, I waded like a rock star through the waist-high bank of cigarette smoke.

They watched me approach. Self-conscious, I read both sympathy and amusement in their expressions. I’d seen those expressions far too often for my comfort.

Once, during Thanksgiving vacation, shortly after my father had stumbled across dogpoet and found out I had HIV, I caught the flu and hid like a miserable recluse in the seedy motel room down the road from their Palm Springs condo.

Last summer, visiting them in D.C., I’d twisted my ankle while wandering around the Holocaust Museum. I limped well into the next day, the day I discovered that my two-year online relationship had been delusional, that I wasn’t the only one wooing the space monkey, and that nearly everything he’d told me was a lie. When I finally pieced it all together, outside a coffee shop in Dupont Circle, I literally stumbled across the sidewalk into traffic. When I got back to their townhouse in Alexandria I locked myself in the spare bedroom for the next 24 hours.

What pissed me off was my inability to keep up a strong, mature appearance in their presence. Life conspired against me, locking me into the role of pathetic dependent. It was like attending my high school reunion, over and over, unemployed, overweight, and alone. Later that afternoon I lay on the bed in the spare room, eyes throbbing, head pounding, the blinds shut tight against the brilliant Nevada sun, feeling like I’d been taught some kind of lesson.

I’d spent many years feeling superior to my fathers. My whole life had been a refutation of practical: the nomadic artist with the addictive personality, trailing across the country from one glamorous city to another, renting (never buying) tiny apartments I could never quite afford.

That weekend I realized, as we sat together on the living room couch (serenaded by the instrumental version of “Copacabana”), that I was going to profit from my father’s practicality. Due to his financial savvy, his ability to invest, his lack of debt, his choice of value-doubling real estate, I’d be financially set for my retirement. He went through his living will with me; each document prepared, completed, filed in place. It was more than practical: it was his expression of love.

I’d always sneered privately at their tastes, the carbon-copy townhouses, Celine Dion on the stereo, the guest bathrooms designed with an “Asian theme.” I secretly scoffed when my father’s partner told me that The Da Vinci Code was his favorite book. The truth was that I wanted his approval: I worried that – should I ever get published – he’d find my book less than compelling, and set it aside half-read.

I didn’t like knowing these things about myself. I held my breath till I got back to New York, where grande chai’s cost $4.27, to my little studio, to my less-than-practical life, to my everlasting faith that one day I will arrive, one day I will be my own, self-fulfilled, self-possessed man, the success story at his school reunion.

There are lines of Christmas trees leaning against plywood fences along Broadway; seasonal stands strung with white lights, a few feet of sidewalk that smell of pine. Outside University Hardware are squat trees that change colors; I passed a man staring into the lightshow, entranced.

One of my favorite things about this time of year, apart from more gallons of cider picked up at the farmer’s market heading home from class, is Vince Guaraldi’s “A Charlie Brown Christmas”, which I put on repeat around Thanksgiving. I’m amazed that such a melancholy soundtrack made it on network television; then again it was a long time ago. Now they’d commit some travesty; Snoopy ice skating to Destiny’s Child; action figure and CD packaged together at Wal-Mart, across the aisle from Housewares and Shotguns.

Spent Thanksgiving in Palm Springs with my dad and his partner, who are waging war with their new Home Owners’ Association due to some mold in the kitchen of their new condo, a winter home away from their new home: Minden, Nevada, near Tahoe. They are obsessed with real estate; they sold their place outside of DC after retiring from the government with pensions, and now have two new properties under their belt. We swapped coasts the same week, back in August when I arrived in New York with no more than a dance belt and a tube of Chapstick. Palm Springs was lovely though I must admit I watched a lot of TV. I own a TV here in Manhattan but haven’t subscribed to cable, which is a necessity even for network channels. This helps with bills and with homework, though not with escape.

I brought a little voice recorder along and interviewed my father for three hours for this memoir/big project/book-that-I’m-too-superstitious-to-call-a-book-yet thing. He was surprisingly candid, to the point where I wondered if he realized that I might use his words in the project. I’d say more but you’ll have to buy the book thing. When I finish it. Later. Sometime.

I didn’t tell you how Maria, good ‘ol Maria, asked the professor during the critique of my last submission if “we” could discuss my big project, then turned to me in front of the others and asked, “Um, where’s the action?”

I guess you had to be there. Maybe she has a point; what’s a memoir without a few car chases?

It’s been a challenging day at school. I applied for one of the highly coveted teaching positions last month – teaching writing to undergraduates – and everyone applies because they pay your full tuition plus a decent stipend. Got my rejection email today, didn’t even make it to the second round. Also applied for a fellowship where they match six students up with six established writers who are working on books and need research assistants, which pays a few thousand dollars. Was a finalist for that but got the rejection email today as well.

One of those days where you sit down and reevaluate your goals and priorities. With the Peanuts singing “Oh, Christmas Tree” in the background, steam hissing from the radiator under the window, a glass of cider on the desk. The good news is that I now have more time to develop the important scenes of my so-called memoir. My mother and I on a cross-country crime spree which ends with our convertible accelerating over the Grand Canyon. Wal-Mart could package the book with a tasteful nickel-plated handgun. The Da Vinci Code will be knocked off the bestseller list, finally, and I’ll go on tour with David Sedaris and sleep with groupies, but only the ones who read Joan Didion and buy me dinner first.

My poor, neglected website. Like a withered houseplant waiting for my return from vacation. I’m blaming it on the move. My personal narrative, the ongoing story I tell myself, has unraveled. My head can’t thread anything together; everything is reduced to a series of to-do lists.

1. Moving estimate. Done
2. One-way ticket to New York. Not done.
3. Change of address form. Not done.
4. Etc. Not done. (Anybody want to buy a great car? 2003 Subaru Forester X. Less than 10,000 miles. Email me.)

The school’s housing office is taking its damn sweet time assigning me an apartment. I have no address, no move-in date. I’m practicing patience and consoling myself with small markers of the passing time. I now have a Columbia e-mail address, and I’ve been receiving announcements of literary events and readings in New York (which, of course, I cannot yet attend. But I feel better, just knowing they are there.) I pre-registered for the fall semester’s classes: a workshop, a “Writer as Teacher” seminar, and a lecture in 20th Century Literary Nonfiction. I’ll pick an elective when I get there. This weekend I’ll get a couple of passport photos taken for my student ID.

This is the longest goddamned good-bye of my life. I was accepted to the program on March 12th. Four months later, and I still have a month to go. If one more person asks me when I am leaving, I’ll just…I’ll just…have to deal with it.

…

Last weekend I flew to D.C. My father was retiring after thirty years with the government, and since he and his partner are moving to the Tahoe area about the same time that I head to New York, it seemed a good time to visit before we once again switch coasts. I tried to hold my own, making small talk with his co-workers at the retirement party, balancing a cup of fruit punch and a paper plate with a slice of sheet cake in my hands. It was kind of sweet, actually; people got up and made speeches about my dad; giving me a glimpse into a side of his life that I’ve never really known. Later I helped him carry a few boxes of personal belongings out to the car. I think he was a little sad; that weekend he kept referring to his job in the present tense, and his partner would correct him, using the past tense.

That night I took the Metro to Dupont Circle and met up with a few good men; Jimbo and Chris and Bob. We went to a restaurant that had a waterfall for a urinal. It intimidated me, so I used the toilet. Bob had the Atkins burger. It came wrapped in lettuce. I’ve been trying the low-carb thing, but it mostly makes me sad. So I had curry chicken. With rice.

Later we squeezed into the Green Lantern just in time for the shirtless drink specials. At ten the bartenders pulled off their t-shirts and tank tops, followed quickly by the entire bar. Except me, of course. I was self-conscious about the last five pounds I can never seem to shed, probably because I keep ordering rice dishes. Plus it had been five whole days since I last hit the gym. I told myself that I kept my shirt on because I wanted to save my nakedness for someone special. But that was a lie. Mostly.

I can get stubborn. One night, back when I was bartending, a drunken customer kept insisting that I take off my shirt. When I refused he started offering me cash. Five dollars, ten. I think he got up to thirty before he quit. I kept my shirt on. By that point it was the principle of the matter, something that won’t get you very far as a bartender.

Next day I grabbed coffee with Bob and we talked for about four hours. Later he walked me to Mimi’s, where I met up with my dad and his partner for dinner. Someone started playing the piano and each of the wait staff took a turn serenading the entire restaurant with old Cole Porter songs. Some of them had better voices than others. I picked up the tab, which I think kind of embarrassed my dad and his partner. But I insisted. Again with the principles. “Happy Thirty Years,” I said.

During my visit I learned of some bad news. The kind of news I could write an entire book about, if it didn’t hurt so much. It hit me like a truck. I did my best to be a good son, but unlike my dad I don’t hide my sadness very well. They tried to distract me, dragging me to the new WW II memorial and later, to Spiderman 2. But I don’t distract easily. I sat with the sadness, twisting it around like a puzzle, as if there would be a solution, some intricate combination of moves that would separate each color from the others; everything in its place. After the movie I went up to the guest bedroom, closed the door, and climbed in bed, where I lay in the dark for three or four hours. I don’t distract. I dwell.

Later I emerged, a bit of my energy restored, just in time for Wheel of Fortune. “Pat’s hair has gotten bigger”, I said, which broke the tension a bit. My father solved every single puzzle with only one or two letters revealed. I thought I was good, but he blew me out of the water. He was an editor for thirty years, as was my mother’s father, so I must have inherited something from both sides of the family, though my father tells everyone that I am the “creative” one, a word almost as suspicious as “interesting”.

Later that night I had a total Woody Allen moment. I’ll admit it now: I had an hour phone session with my therapist, who was back in San Francisco. It was that kind of night.

The trip home, two flights and a layover, lasted about nine hours. I suppose it’s an indication of my mental state that I only read about ninety pages of Portrait of a Lady. I probably could have used Stephen King, but I’m trying to gear up for the Ivy League. Now whenever someone asks I can say “Ah, yes, Henry James…”

When I got home there was an email from my dad:

I’m forwarding a message from Hank B-, who was the bearish looking man about my age who came to my retirement party late and talked to you near the end. He’s visiting New York in a couple of months and asked for your e-mail address, and I didn’t want to be the one to give it to him. You can decide whether to or not (and I told him that). I don’t know Hank really well, but my sense is, well, that he’s a letch! I don’t think you’d have any reason to want to spend time with him, but if you want to, you can send him your e-mail address.

Sometimes having a gay dad is cool.

…

Recently my student dentist gave me a book when he graduated. “For being such a good patient,” he said, meaning I was a damn good guinea pig. He gave me Eats, Shoots & Leaves, a title that reminds me of a boyfriend I had in college.

And thus the long good-bye continues. One more week of work (rock!) then I’m headed down to LA for a weekend to see my buddy Brian in his new digs. My jet-set life glimmers like cubic zirconia.

I got a thin envelope from Sarah Lawrence on Friday, which contained a letter informing me that I was neither accepted to nor rejected from their program. Rather I was stuck on their waiting list. I don’t suppose I’ll ever know why they were less convinced of my writing ability than Columbia. They were the only school to ask for an essay responding to the question “Why do you want to come to Sarah Lawrence?” Perhaps they could tell that I had a difficult time answering. Or perhaps it’s because I have testicles.

It’s funny, there’s nothing they could have offered me that would have made a difference, and yet I was still a little wounded by their decision. And though I’ve tried to learn, through much trial and error, not to fire off e-mails when my Irish temper flares, I did just that, saying thanks but no thanks, Columbia offered me a fellowship, please give my spot to someone else.

I admit it. I am human. And vindictive. Frankly their decision was a little dose of humility, and good practice for me.

All notions of rejection or half-hearted acceptance aside, I asked for it. Not long ago, before I heard from any of the schools, I was driving home and (naturally) obsessing over what would happen if I got into more than one school; what if one school gave me more money than the other, which one should I pick? What if I made the wrong choice? So as I sat at a red light I asked God to give me a sign, preferably a very clear sign. I got more than one.

This whole school thing is already changing my life in unexpected ways. My father, who is absolutely brimming over with pride that his son is going Ivy League, asked if he could read the work that got me admitted. I hesitated. Remember when my father found my website about a year and half ago? He read the whole damn thing. Then he told me he couldn’t read any more. “I went from knowing too little about you to knowing too much.” I’m pretty sure he’s kept his word.

So I had to make a decision. Send him the essay about my mother and my HIV. Or the cum-on-the-tank-top essay that includes my first sexual experience. I chose the former. At least he already knew most of the details.

I sent it off on Wednesday. A couple of days passed. I was getting nervous. Normally he’s very quick to reply to my e-mails. What if he hated it? What if he hated the fact that his son is writing memoir, drudging up unflattering, messy personal details for public consumption? What if he thought Columbia made a mistake?

Sunday night he finally replied. He said it was very well-written. Then he said he wasn’t sure how to react. He said he sometimes wishes that he were more than a footnote to my life.

He said he hoped I didn’t wish that he had died instead of my mother.

I sent a hasty reply (we both prefer e-mail over the phone). I tried to reassure him that the essay was just a slice of my life. That I valued his privacy over my right to tell a story. That I didn’t wish he had died. I told him that we’ve only just begun to get to know each other. I told him that he has to tell me if I can write about him.

I’ve done a lot of thinking about him lately. I was accepted into Columbia’s nonfiction concentration. And while I can take classes in fiction or poetry, I will be required to write a book-length manuscript in nonfiction. Which means, at this point, that I will probably keep writing memoir/personal essay-type stuff. And if I do write this memoir, it will seem pretty strange if there’s nothing about my father in there. After all, he, my mother, and I all ended up gay. Which is somewhat interesting, to some people. And that’s where it gets sticky.

He and I weren’t particularly close growing up, for many reasons. Some of those reasons, if written about, would only cause him pain. And yet many of those reasons shaped me.

I’ve read interviews with several famous memoirists, who are adamant that the truth must always prevail, hurt feelings be damned. My guess is that most of those writers have less than brilliant relationships with their families.

I can’t justify hurting him just to tell “my story”. Not after the last couple of years. Not after his gestures of reconciliation. Not long ago I mentioned that I had been e-mailing him all sorts of questions; about my childhood, about his marriage to my mother, about his own coming out. And he’s answered every single question. And I’ve seen more of myself in him. And I understand why he did the things he did, just as I understand how alcoholism sometimes made my mother a different person.

Writers are often accused of being parasites, and anyone who is close to one has probably unwittingly provided the writer with raw material. But while novelists can hide behind the thin facade of fiction, those who write memoir have no such disguise. When you write memoir, you make a pact with the reader that what you are writing is the truth. Betray that trust and you betray the reader. Truth, like memory, is of course subjective. And some memoirists feel comfortable conflating characters or incidents to suit their “art”. I’m less comfortable with this practice.

Memoir is like formal poetry. The truth provides certain constraints. And like rhyme or meter, sometimes these constraints force the writer to create something beautiful, something that never could have been written with more freedom.

This probably sounds pretentious. I’m not trying to prove that I am good writer. I’m just trying to make sense of the messy intersection between writing and my personal life. How to tell the truth, how to honor the pact with the reader, without causing my family and other real people harm.

I could just not write about my father. But I don’t think that’s what he wants. He doesn’t want to be a footnote. He wants to be let into the main story. He wants to know that I love him. And he’s savvy enough to realize how I best express my love. I guess I’ll figure this out, as I go along.