Wilde Lake(72)

“I have theories, but they’re only theories. You should ask your brother.”

“AJ?”

“He’s your only brother, isn’t he?” And with that Davey glided away.

Left alone, surveying the room of gorgeous men and Noel’s friends and family, I realized Davey was the only black man. Not even Noel’s actor friends, from New York and Chicago, included anyone dark-skinned. Again, I thought of the party in the glass house, the sense of an ant farm, but so many white ants, so few black ones. African American, I guess I should say here. In just my lifetime—from 1970 to now—the accepted term has kept evolving. Negro. Black. African American. And now politicians such as myself are trying to learn the minefields around gender-identity issues. Not that long ago, two prostitutes from Baltimore stole a car, drove into the National Security Agency campus, got shot, one of them fatally. They were originally identified as “cross-dressers,” men in women’s clothing. But they were trans women. “Had they had the surgery?” my father asked and I tried to explain that the question is no longer allowed, that we accept people as they see themselves. “Then they’re transvestites!” “No, Dad, no.” I tried to explain “trans” and “cis,” which, it turns out, I didn’t completely understand myself. He waved his hand in front of his face, as if I were an ignorant child again, frustrating in my stupidity. Only my father never treated me that way when I was a child. It is only quite recently that he has become impatient, crotchety. Well, he has cause. I remember Gabe’s father, on his deathbed when we tried to explain how we were going to have children, the nice lady in Texas who was carrying our twins. Gabe knelt by his father’s bed, saying, “So the first thing you do, is you find a Texas lesbian—” His father waved his hand, said “Pah!” Or was it “Pa”? He was lucid, but down to words of one syllable. He probably thought we did not know how babies were made. Ten days before he died, the twins were born. He saw their photos, but it was never clear if he understood he finally had grandchildren, thanks to some cheerleader’s donor eggs, a Texas lesbian and a suave Egyptian doctor who had blended our baby cocktail and then inserted it into our beloved surrogate. On Yom Kippur of all days. So while Gabe was in synagogue, praying and fasting and atoning for whatever, I was roaming the sterile suburbs of Northern Virginia, trying to find a Five Guys for our ravenous savior, a woman who could do the one thing that had eluded me: hold two fertilized eggs in the lining of her uterus. She was the one who introduced me, in fact, to the wonder that is Five Guys.

Thirty-five years ago, I would have had no chance to have children with a biological link to their father; Penelope and Justin would not exist. How can I long for that world? Thirty-five years ago, people I loved made disastrous decisions that made perfect sense within the context of the world they knew, the moment in which they had to act. They were men of their times. How can I fault them?

Then again, people died, people were hurt, however indirectly, because of those decisions.

You can argue people died because of my decisions. Some people blame me for Rudy Drysdale’s death. But I regret his death only because I will never know exactly what happened, despite my best efforts. To be clear: Rudy Drysdale was guilty of murder and he killed himself. He hit his head against the wall of his cell over and over again. Do you know how determined you have to be to kill yourself that way? Determined and stoic. And stealthy. He beat his own brains out with a steady, persistent drumming on the wall. If he had miscalculated, he might have ended up in a coma. Maybe he wouldn’t have minded that. And maybe you’re a step ahead of me, or have been all along, but I understood, when I got that phone call, why Rudy had attacked me in court. He was counting on being shot. Suicide by cop is a glib term, but it’s real, it happens. That’s why Rudy hesitated at the courthouse doors. It wasn’t my imagination or a case of blurred vision brought on by being slammed to the floor. He wanted to be shot. Yearned to be shot. It was April 2015. Police were obligingly shooting young men everywhere. Four weeks later, Baltimore would burn in the wake of Freddie Gray’s death, his body broken on a classic Baltimore bounce, an unsecured rough ride in a police van.

But Howard County is not Baltimore. Or Ferguson or North Charleston or Cleveland or—you get the point. Rudy Drysdale was a middle-aged white man in a suit that his mother had bought from JCPenney only a week earlier. Now she would bury him in it. Did that mean I got the win, even if I never made it to opening statements? I decided it did.

It was a victory that cost me almost everything I hold dear.





PART THREE





APRIL 7


Lu debates visiting the funeral home where Rudy Drysdale’s body was taken after the autopsy. Pro: She will appear magnanimous. Con: She will seem calculated and insincere. It is hard to know how such a move will play and she is—at heart, in her marrow, in her DNA—a politician. If you don’t care about what people think about you, then don’t run for public office.

So far, the media attention has helped her more than harmed her, raising her profile considerably. One Beacon-Light columnist tried to make hay out of Drysdale’s mental illness, harping on the absence of a competency hearing. “I think that’s for his attorney to speak to,” Lu demurred. “My office was open to discussing a plea of not criminally responsible.”