I'm From Driftwood

by Nathan Gibson

Bags are packed. Rejected by peers and family members. I take a deep breath as I go through the security line at the airport. At first the obvious questions begin to race through my mind. Did I forget anything in my pockets? I hope I don’t get put in that little side room for questioning. But then I start thinking; I have never been on a plane before. What if it crashes? What if I miss my connecting flight? Which leads to even more racing thoughts: Maybe the ex-gay counselor was right? What am I doing? Why am I moving to New Mexico of all places? I know nobody there. The farthest west I have ever been before is St. Louis, Missouri.

Preoccupied with my racing and anxious thoughts, before I knew it I had made my way through the security line and had already made my connecting flight, with only minutes to spare before I would land in New Mexico. I couldn’t help but think that there is no going back now. This is my chance to begin figuring out what being a young gay man is all about without any outside influences. I could only be so lucky to have a clean slate to work with. If worse comes to worse absence makes the heart grow fonder, right? The plane lands in New Mexico and I take another deep breath and make my way off the plane.

-(Share your story with us!)

by Michelle Kupiec

I come from a quiet midwestern suburb of Cleveland. Hardly diverse and overall has intolerance just lurking below the surface for anything not white, straight, and mode wealthy.

My parents’ close friend died of cancer several years back. At the funeral I met this wonderful man who seemed to know my parents and they talked. When I got home they told me he was their deceased friend’s partner. I had never knowingly met a gay person before and I wasn’t put off, I was sad to not have known him while he was alive.

He was no different from anyone else.

-(Share your story with us!)

by Roberta Zenker

On Saturday I was read yet again, this time by a car load of teenagers who hooted and jeered at me as they drove past. I began to think that if I could not make it in the world as a woman that I could not make it all, for I knew that my life as a man was over. As I obsessed over that thought it became dark indeed inside my head. I began to feel the insanity that drives us to drink, or worse. As another friend would say, “in the soundtrack of my life,” Emmy Lou Harris would be singing in the background: Oh the dragons are ‘gonna fly tonight, circling low and in sight tonight, another round in a losing fight all along the Great Divide tonight.  When we are like this, and until we accept that drinking and dying are not options, it would be better for us to drink. I white knuckled it as I began to contemplate the “worse” option with all the attendant hopelessness and desperation of a year earlier, in the box, dispirited and demoralized.

I put myself in a dangerous position, an exemplary manifestation of all the reasons they tell us not to make life changes in our first year of sobriety. As my friend from law school told me when I came out to him: “You are fucking nuts right now.” I was very much, as they say, “bat shit crazy.” I was not drinking, but I had none of the tools of sobriety to help me cope with all the loss and changes in my life. I was desperate and devastated with almost nowhere to turn, at least that I was willing to risk. I bitterly sobbed with the submarine hatches wide open as I sank in an ocean of emotion. It did not occur to me to pick up the phone and call another alcoholic as they suggested. It amazes me that I might have taken my own life rather than risk revealing myself to another person. It defies belief that a person would forfeit life for pride. I turned to Mother Mary, clinging to my grandfather’s rosary beads.

Grandpa had lived through much of the advance and technological boom of the twentieth century. He watched the automobile become a household necessity, watched the world light up with electricity, and saw radio and television as they first broadcast to the world. He saw it all come into being, including the “giant step for mankind.” His life encompassed world wars and military engagements around the globe, not to mention the rapid acceleration of social experimentation and change, including the first successful sex reassignment surgery patient, Christine Jorgenson in 1956, the year before I was born.

After his passing my mother sent a few of his things including a monogrammed key chain with the letter “R” for Ralph, his first name and my middle name, and a decade of the Rosary on a key chain. The “Rosary” is a type of prayer and meditation that Catholics of a bygone era fervently prayed. It involved devotion to the Triune God and Mary. To keep their place in a string of Our Fathers, Hail Mary’s and Glory Bes, Catholics would count each prayer in turn on a string of beads with a crucifix that went by the same nomenclature, the Rosary. A great many Catholics would be surprised to learn that one of their most venerated traditions was borrowed from the Hindu and Buddhists tradition of japa malas beads brought back to Europe during the Crusades.  A decade was an abbreviated version that involved only ten beads for Catholics on the go.

After those two incidents of getting read and laughed at, in my despair I grabbed Pappy’s beads. I prayed Hail Mary’s as I sobbed holding the ring of the Rosary around my index finger in a clenched fist. I was afraid that I might take my own life, and asked God to save me from myself. When I awoke the next morning I did not hear music, but I was still clutching the Rosary. I had found my porch to safely whether the storm of self pity, doubt and fear. I had made it through the night, and I was not drunk or dead. The rest is gratis. As I ventured out that morning after a long bath and prayer to the Mother of All Children, it was with a certain lightness and gratitude. I went to Starbucks. I deserved it.

I took my latte to a nearby park, known as the Woman’s Park. I did not know its history, but it seemed like the place for me to be. It was Sunday morning. I wore a skirt, heels, nylons, and a dress blouse. I needed to feel pretty and feminine. As I sat at a cement picnic table I watched a woman walking down the sidewalk toward me. She was a local street character whom I had seen before. Her hair was graying, short with no particular style. Her teeth were crooked, and her face blemished and red. She had white whiskers, wore no makeup, and one eye drooped. She was slightly overweight which surprised me inasmuch as I always saw her walking. She did not appear developmentally disabled as from birth, and I wondered what calamity left her in such a state.

To my surprise she walked right up to my table and in a voice as soft as angel feathers asked if she could talk with me. I told her yes and she sat down across from me. She told me that I was beautiful and looked like a model. I could have kissed her and almost started crying all over again. It was a good thing that I did not kiss her, though, as people might have mistaken her joking remarks about street corner work as something other than humor. As she told me of the accident and resulting brain injury that stole her youthful beauty and promise, I knew that I would make it in the world as a woman, and that real beauty lies within. She told me that life is beautiful and short. She made me realize that this was my second chance and that I must get up and grab it every day. It reminds me now of an Afghanistan war veteran I heard on the radio a few years after her legs were blown off as she piloted a helicopter.  She wants to be worthy of the second chance at life given to her. God always answers prayer. Sometimes the answer is yes, or, “you’ll be okay. Just trust me.”

by Bradley McDermitt

I wake up to the sound of the ocean coming through the closed window. This house is so close to the water that it doesn’t matter whether the window is opened or closed. The soothing sounds permeate the entire house. My room is on the second floor, well what little second floor there is. There are windows on three of the four walls, and the stairwell is literally right outside the door. There is no clock to be found in the room, but I can tell it’s early. There is that early morning feel to everything, even the sound of the ocean is one of it waking from a night’s sleep. I pull on a t-shirt and decide to head downstairs into the still sleeping house.

It’s not my first time in this house, my family has been to this particular one for a few years now. I lost count, all that really mattered to me was that I was here at the ocean with family for the week. My memory doesn’t remind me how old I am, but I know it’s toward the end of high school, or maybe one of my first summers after I left for college. It’s probably the latter, since I’m feeling such a strong pull toward my family during this brief week long stay together. The house is an old rental, it has that shabby, yet wonderful feel of an ocean cottage. It’s sliced right down the middle, and I’m reminded of it as I slowly navigate the stairwell down the center of the house. My parents, sisters, and “aunt” are on this side of the duplex. I say “aunt” only because we aren’t related by blood, yet my mother’s best friend has become part of the family. On the other side of the duplex are my mother’s brother and his family, and my grandparents. It makes the house sound so big, but really it’s all bedroom with very little living space. It’s so quiet on this morning that I think no one else is awake yet.

It’s the first week of July. We always come here on the first week of July. It’s a family pilgrimage that has been happening since I can remember. My habits are set; I know exactly what I am going to do since no one else is awake. I unlock the beach-side door, and walk out onto the deck to enjoy the morning. I’ve always loved to sit and listen to the sound of the ocean waking up for the day. The sea is calm, and there are small yet incredibly long waves that roll into the beach making a dull roaring sound. The breeze is warm, and the sun just right to sit out and listen. As I walk past the porch’s divider, remember it’s a duplex, and head out to the boardwalk to sit on top of the dunes, I notice my grandfather sitting on one of the benches listening to the ocean and staring out to sea.

This isn’t part of the routine, my grandfather is never up this early and my grandmother is always up with him. I sit down on the bench next to him and we say our good mornings. Then a deep silence falls between us as we both sit and stare out to sea. Minutes go by, but it seems like hours. I didn’t know we were this similar, that we both receive so much joy from the perfection that is the ocean on the early morning. Finally, he talks, but not at me. He just starts talking out loud, almost as if he is narrating the view we are sharing. He tells me about what his life was like right after he married my grandmother, and how they had to make do with what his pay from the army provided them. He tells me of the hardships they went through raising his little brother as one of their own. I’ve heard these stories before, but something is different this time. I’m not sure if it’s because we are sitting alone, or if he’s trying to relay some message to me that he can’t put into words. Once the stories are done, he looks at me and tells me that he’s always been proud of me, and that he always will be proud of me. Again, I’ve heard this from him time and time before, but there’s something different about it this time. As it’s happening I don’t know what the difference is. I just accept what he’s saying to me, and we sit and enjoy the view together. Gradually more and more of the family wakes up and joins us. The moment we shared that morning comes to a close, but it’s stuck in my memory forever.

I’m writing this almost nine months after my grandfather passed away. In recent years he hadn’t been in good enough health to go with us to the beach house. And this year he actually passed away the day before we were set to leave for our summer pilgrimage. We all prepared for and attended his funeral, and in the spirit of the trip we left and drove through the night to make it to the house. It wasn’t the same house that he and I shared our moment together. But, the view of the same stretch of North Carolina sand brought this memory racing back to me. We arrived in the early hours of the morning when it was still dark. The family friends who were already at the house woke up to great us. In honor of the memory of my grandfather, who truly loved what the pilgrimage to the small stretch of sand meant to the family, we walked across the dunes and down onto the sand in the darkness before dawn. We walked all the way down and put our feet in the surf. In honor of the memory of my grandfather, we made a toast to him right there. We were in the water, in the dark before dawn celebrating the memory of him. Everything I had wanted to say to him came rushing back to me at that moment, and I knew we had done the right thing by returning so soon after his passing.

It wasn’t until now, nine months after the funeral and return to that stretch of sand that I realized what my grandfather was trying to tell me that morning we sat alone watching the waves together. He knew what I was ashamed to tell the family, and he was trying to tell me that he loved me regardless of who I was. It was one of the best memories I have of my grandfather. He and I, watching the waves, accepting each other without exception.