Leaving Isn't the Hardest Thing(63)

“You must think of a better story,” he said. “If someone has to meet more of you than one or two. They tell me the same stupid thing.”

That was not a problem that’d ever occurred to me. “So you know,” I said.

“It doesn’t take long. She has to say something before I meet her friends? Some are not so…You are sometimes odd, I think.” I appreciated that he was trying to tamp his German bluntness.

Jen returned with the beer. “You should say maybe the circus,” Victor said. “Can you make these animals, from balloons?” (In case clowns don’t already give you the creeps, sometime after I left, the Family’s next big push, their new fundraising method, was “clowning.”)

I told Jen I’d given him the missionary line. She laughed. “No one cares,” she said. “We’re not even that interesting here.” As if to prove her point, an old woman shuffled over to us. In her arms, she carried a stuffed hedgehog on a leash, a hedgehog identical to the toy my dog played with at home, but she had no dog that I could see. She set the hedgehog down, picked up our empty bottles, and shuffled off, dragging the hedgehog behind her. No one seemed to notice her.

   I thought, if that were true in Berlin, it could be true anywhere. That week in Berlin, not having to hide, my past just being a thing about me as interesting as, well, my being a dyke, it was like driving up to Provincetown for the weekend when you’re a closet case stationed in South Carolina, holding hands with a girl in public, making out with a stranger. Makes it really goddamn hard to go back to the closet. I finally had to admit I wasn’t who I’d been trying so hard to be. All that time surviving, I’d forgotten to live. I’d been pitying myself for a past I couldn’t change, and I’d refused to consider that I still had a future.



* * *



—

I started writing the truth. Just little stories at first. I’d never show them to anyone. But I’d told myself to get my shit together. Writing was my way of taking a nightmare, studying it in the daylight, and realizing the monsters were just shadows, or, in my case, hippies at that second location you’re supposed to avoid. And the thing is, I wasn’t even the one who followed the hippies. The fuck was I so ashamed of. I started telling friends, “By the way, I lied to you about everything.”

My technique needed finessing. But among the many problems with hiding my past, refusing to think of it, is I’d reduced my story to that entry in a listicle. “Weird Sex Cult.” Everyone still wants to know about the sex. But now I know how to tell them that you can get used to anything. It’s not like girls outside a cult are spared adult men groping them or boys being generally gross. Mostly it just meant I changed a lot of diapers.

All those memories that plagued me and filled me with self-loathing and self-pity, when I wrote them down, said them out loud, tried to explain them to someone else, they were too fucking absurd to hold the power I’d given them. I mean some of it, a lot of it, is objectively fucking funny. I’d been terrified of people so paranoid they prayed against evil spirits hiding in grocery bags and burned Dolly Parton tapes to prevent feminist influence. I’d made monsters of people who believed in a fucking drunk who told them heaven was in the moon.



* * *



—

   It turns out I have a second coming out story. Because I’m fucking proud of the kid I was. I’m proud I resisted. I’m proud I smuggled a radio into my room. I’m proud that I punched boys who got handsy. I’m proud I read hidden books in the bathroom at night. I’m proud that I was a stubborn, defiant little lesbian who made them work so hard to break me. I’m proud of every time I patched myself together and kept going when I was broken.

The last thing I expected was that once I told the truth, I’d find that others with their so-called normal childhoods could relate. I mean, the Republicans and the cop I knew don’t talk to me anymore. But those are historically the kind of friends you lose when you come out.

I found there’s always been a place I belonged; I just needed to expand the borders of my world from coworkers and friends I’d made for no other reason than they were nice to me. It started with finding other cult babies. But telling the truth about my past is a pretty effective asshole test. Allowing myself to be exactly who I’ve always been, not feigning interest in video games or zombie shows, means I end up with the sort of friends I once fantasized of having—people who read books, people who’ve been other places, people who tell the truth, people on the edges who’ve never fit in and were way ahead of me in accepting that—but I never noticed them because I was trying so desperately to be normal. I don’t know what normal is anymore. I know I don’t want any part of it.





Pet Snakes


The first time I tried to buy drugs in Austin, I ended up sitting on the edge of some guy’s waterbed while he explained the belt drive on his record player. Or maybe his record player was better because it didn’t have a belt drive. I wasn’t listening because I didn’t give a shit. He said the waterbed was vintage, but I think I’ve got it beat. When did they start adding bookshelves to the headboards, mid-’80s? It doesn’t matter. The point is, I’m too fucking old to be sitting in a studio apartment, pretending to be impressed by a record collection. But this is what we do in states run by evangelical zealots who won’t legalize marijuana.