I Came Out for This? Read online

  I Came Out For This?

  Lisa Gitlin

  This one’s for you, Dad—

  wherever you are …

  Contents

  October 1999

  November 1999

  December 1999

  January 2000

  February 2000

  March 2000

  April 2000

  May 2000

  June 2000

  July 2000

  August 2000

  September 2000

  October 2000

  November 2000

  December 2000

  January 2001

  February 2001

  March 2001

  April 2001

  Lisa Gitlin

  Acknowledgments

  Bywater Books

  I Came Out For This?

  October 1999

  All right, let’s get the particulars out of the way for all you attentionally challenged freaks: My name is Joanna Kane. Jewish, 47, living in Cleveland, Ohio, which will prejudice you against me immediately because what’s Cleveland, Ohio? A loser city. When you say you’re from Cleveland, Ohio, people look at you with no expression, trying to think of what to say. Anyway, Joanna Kane, forty-seven, Jewish, living in pit stop on the lake. Professional fucking writer. Two parents, four siblings, no children because I never had a boyfriend or husband and I’m gay and was too stupid to come out until I was forty-five years old, so now I’m one of those aging pathetic spinsters that people feel sorry for, living in Cleveland, Ohio, that everyone laughs at. Typical history of troubles for a gay Jew. Was in a loony bin at age 14 for six months because I set fires to dumpsters and told my social worker at Child Guidance Clinic that I was going to blow up a gas station, so she put me in a bin. Not really crazy, just hiding my homosexuality and none of the stupid mental health people could figure it out. Attended Ohio University and moved to New York City to write. Ended up back in Cleveland after a mini-nervous breakdown, which I did not admit I was having. Have lived here for almost two decades and am sick of it, sick of my friends, sick of writing for the same boring publications and sick of being in this rut and will probably move to Washington, DC to be with Terri Rubin, who I hate.

  I hate Terri Rubin, the woman I’m in love with, because she has put me in this hideous mood. I was in a perfectly good mood about a half-hour ago, and then she called and told me she’s dating a woman named Sonya, who has an apothecary store in Bethesda, Maryland. What’s an apothecary store, anyway? Doesn’t it sound pretentious? I hate this Sonya and I hate Terri and I hate myself because I was never like this in my life. You know what it’s like to come out when you’re in your forties, having menopausal symptoms, for God’s sake, and then fall madly in love with someone? All of a sudden you’re in adolescence for the first time. You don’t recognize yourself. I was a cool, collected writer who strutted around in jeans and a leather jacket, advising friends and siblings about their relationships, being a devoted daughter and a responsible professional person and a good citizen— well, except for not paying every dime of my taxes and having a couple DWIs— but you know, being pretty much on top of things, and then BAM! I realized I was gay and a couple months later, this sassy girl strutted into my life and I fell in love at first sight. After spending my life thinking that never really happened and only watching West Side Story because of the gangs. And then I became the kind of person I had always made fun of, who falls into a murderous rage because her beloved tells her she’s dating some woman named Sonya, who has an apothecary store in Bethesda, Maryland. I’m sorry. I know I sound strident and … and … what’s that word they always use to describe angry middle-aged woman? Abrasive. Yes. I’m sorry I’m being so abrasive. I’m just so upset. I’m just so upset. I don’t know what to do anymore. For months I’ve just been sitting around in this apartment which used to be beautiful but I’ve let it go and it’s filthy, and my cat died, and I’m not returning my friends’ phone calls, and I pretty much stopped working because I couldn’t write one more article about Life on the Streets or one more brochure for some airheaded nonprofit or one more newsletter for the Regional Sewer District— yes, I’m serious, I wrote about sewers, but I stopped doing that too. I’m done with everything. Friends, family, work, housekeeping. My bills are piling up. I don’t even know why I’m writing this. But writers write, writers write, writers write. Writers are idiots. Submitting themselves to torture. For what?

  I need to stop carrying on like this. Sonya will be history in two weeks. Terri never likes any of these women she dates. She is critical of everyone, including me. God knows what she tells people about me. She thinks I’m nuts because I fell so hard for her and won’t let it go even though she keeps saying she only loves me as a friend. I suppose she figured when she came here last year to visit her parents that she would meet this friend of Willi’s who just figured out she was gay, “initiate” her, and then gallivant back to DC and leave the little de-virginalized wretch to “move on.” Move on! That’s what everyone says. Well, Joanna, you need to MOVE ON! That’s what we do in this life! We get over our first big love and MOVE ON! We accept the loss of our first big purple-passion love, the one that made us burst like a rocket, the one that made us howl at the moon, the one that turned us into animals, and we MOVE ON and end up with a more mature love that we stop fucking after about two years and with whom our most exciting activity is discussing which cheese to purchase at the local Fancy Foods. Well, fuck that. I don’t want to move on. I’ve only been young for two years. Why should I MOVE ON and find some companion and spend the rest of my life eating popcorn in front of the TV in my sock feet?

  My mother just called right in the middle of this tirade and I was mean to her. I dissed Cleveland. I called it a pit stop. My mother thinks Cleveland is custard on a stick, and carries on endlessly about the Cleveland Orchestra and the Cleveland Playhouse and the beautiful fall leaves and the adorable way Minnie Minoso, who played for the Indians a million years ago, referred to Cleveland as “Cleeblands.” Now I feel bad. Maybe I should call her back and apologize.

  Oh, the hell with it. I’m going across the street and getting some flavored cigarettes. I only smoke when I drink, and I’m going to drink. I feel like having a glass of the Chilean red they have over at the new wine bar and a cherry-flavored cigarette would taste real good with the wine. I’ll get a nice buzz and realize that Terri’s dalliance with Sonya what’s-her-name is just a drop of piss in the wind.

  That was a good idea. The wine settled me right down. I do like that little bar on Coventry Road. I must have the vestiges of alcoholism from when I was a young maniac whose life revolved around rum and cokes, because even though I don’t drink that much anymore— well, maybe only once or twice a week— I still get that thing that alcoholics describe when I have my first drink, you know, like Oh, so this is real life, this is why I’m alive. And now I realize why I love Terri. Because she’s so damn sexy with her sashaying walk, and because she’s wickedly funny, she’s affectionate and fun, she’s out and proud, and most important, she has a sweet caramel-colored neck that compels me to kiss it every chance I get (she looks like a light-skinned black girl with her dusky skin and soft kinky hair, but she’s really Jewish). I know that many people such as most of my friends and my sisters and brothers and her ex-lovers and a lot of her friends do not share my rapture over her and, in fact, think she’s an evil bitch, but that’s not a well-rounded assessment. (She would be very insulted if she read this. Maybe I should take it out.) See? This is the problem. I’m a wimp with her, always afraid of what she’s going to think, and that’s why she doesn’t want me. Well, no, she doesn’t want me because I’m not one of those trashy vamps in tight skirts and high heels, those high-femme women who
Terri thinks are such hot babes but are really just neurotic whores. Most of those women aren’t even gay anyway; they’re just sick of men and are fooling around with women as a temporary distraction. I wonder if Sonya is like that.

  But I digress. What I was saying was that I don’t fit Terri’s image of the ideal girlfriend. I’m on the femme side but I favor jeans and sensible shoes and I don’t wear makeup except for lip gloss, and in my younger days people would tell me I looked like Mick Jagger, but now I just look like my mother. Anyway Terri is searching for someone different, someone who not only is a high-femme tart but who doesn’t pour herself all over her like I did, but for God’s sake, I was just coming out! I know I poured myself all over her, and then when she finally said she didn’t want a relationship with me I hounded her like an overwrought child pursuing one of the Beatles, and now I regret behaving like such a ninny. But how absolutely divine it is, to experience your first love! I’ll never forget the joy of meeting her. I was already all keyed up from having realized I was gay a few months before, and then Willi called and said her former social work volunteer that she’d been telling me about was in town and she arranged for us all to meet at the Mardi Gras Lounge and I walked in there with my friend Ann and this sexy Jewish girl sitting across from Willi flashed me a white-toothed grin and my outer layers just seared off. Even if I had known she was just seducing women to quell the pain of a broken heart, it wouldn’t have made any difference. I blushed and giggled while she sat in the Mardi Gras with her arm draped over the booth behind me, flirting like mad, calling me a “hatchling” because I had just recently come out, picking up a lock of my hair and saying, “How can you see through all this?” She swaggered to the bathroom and I watched her sashaying butt in a grinning, stupid trance while Willi and Ann looked at me in amazement because they’d never seen me that way before. I asked her to go out to dinner with me and the next evening we went to a Chinese restaurant and afterwards she kissed me in the car and suddenly I saw myself in every romantic movie or ad or billboard, every song sung by anyone named “Frankie” that I’d ever heard, and soon thereafter she succumbed to my advances and I lay naked in bed with her and ran my palm through her coiled hairs and she whispered, “See how wet my pussy gets when you touch me down there,” and finally I knew what the fuss was all about. Oh stop crying, Joanna.

  I know Terri thinks I’m in la-la land. She’s one of these down-to-earth, practical people that would never let herself get carried away like I did. But she liked that I was in love with her, the wench. She liked that I wrote her love letters saying that her breasts were like ripe peaches, that I declared my love for her in this silly coming out piece I wrote for the local weekly paper, that I wanted to move in with her two weeks after we met. She just didn’t count on my being so persistent about it, didn’t know I would call her in DC and nag her to let me come and see her even though she told me she was dating another woman, and when the woman didn’t work out and she broke down and invited me down there for the 4th of July weekend I tumbled off the plane all ga-ga over her and she was freaked out and kept me at arm’s length the whole time and told me it would never work out between us and I flew home all smashed up like roadkill.

  After a couple weeks of sobbing I couldn’t take it anymore, so I called her, and then she called me, and so it went, and when she came back here in the fall to visit her sick mother I was convinced she was here to visit me, and I hung around her, mooning over her the whole time. And then her mother died and instead of being properly sobered I continued to act like I was on speed, running down to visit her all the time to clutch and comfort her and have drunken sex that was tremendously exciting to me but for her was just an outlet for her grief.

  The last time I visited her, which was this last summer, she told me before I came that she wanted me to sleep on the couch and I went anyway, and she was all lit up over this other woman and treated me like a beat-up table she meant to get rid of. But I refuse to let her go because I can’t accept that I have ruined what is probably my only opportunity for love by being so naïve and stupid. I keep calling her, and she calls me too and tells me awful things like she’s dating some woman who runs an apothecary store, and now I may just have to move there already. The hell with what my friends think. They all would be perfectly thrilled to see me go back to being that robot that I was before I came out, that marched around spouting my little philosophies and getting over-involved in their lives like some meddling auntie, and writing short stories that no one could relate to, like the one about an elderly couple with a pet fly. I didn’t know beans about anything people would want to read about like love and romance or even sex because I always just faked it with all the men that had the misfortune to go to bed with me (although I must say in my own defense that I gave a very mean TOO MUCH INFORMATION!) all right, but my point is that I wasn’t a total drip. But I sure as hell am a drip now, sitting here on this blue couch for months, not returning phone calls and hardly ever working and being two months behind on my rent and thank God for Albert, my sweet old Cuban landlord, for not throwing me out of here. I can’t stay here and I’m afraid to leave. I’m terrified to go to DC because what would I tell people? What would I tell her? I know you don’t want me, but I’m moving there to be with you anyway, heh heh? I could kill her for ruining my life. Well, not ruining it but throwing a wrench in it. I was all set to move to DC and turn my life into an adventure again, which it has not been since I left New York City because I just stayed here like a slug instead of moving back there where I belong or at least becoming a war correspondent, but then Terri came along and I thought I was saved not only from a loveless life but from being stuck in the antithesis of a city that anyone wants to write about. And then she yanked away that string of goodies that she dangled before me— just pulled it back out of my reach and now I’m ruined. You can live with deprivation, but dashed expectations are a killer. It’s not the desert that will do you in but the mirage. And fuck her anyway, lording it over my destiny, like the wizard spewing smoke and saying, “Take your broom and go away!” Or whatever it was he said, after poor Dorothy risked life and limb on that treacherous journey.

  I miss my cat. I think I subconsciously let her die because I knew I couldn’t leave Cleveland while I still had her. I bought some cheap carpet that only cost two hundred dollars, and the gases from it killed my cat. I should have gotten rid of the carpet as soon as I saw her never lying on it and always wanting to be outdoors after I bought it. She got some kind of cancer and died, I’m assuming from being driven out of her home. I used to be a nice nurturing person and now I’m a selfish distracted child who can’t even care for her own cat.

  This wine is wearing off. What should I do now? I wonder if that egg salad is still any good.

  November 1999

  I’m being carried down the rapids. This idea that we are the captain of our fates is ridiculous because when you’re in the rushing river what are you supposed to do— turn around? You can’t. I gave Albert notice and I’m moving out of this apartment in two weeks. I’ve already started to pack, and you should see this place. It’s disgusting. I’m wallowing in dust here; I’m in a diaphanous world of dust. I’m being carried down the rushing rapids and I’m in a diaphanous world of dust at the same time. How can you be two places at once when you’re really nowhere at all? (Remember that line from Firesign Theatre?)

  I’m going to put my stuff in storage and stay upstairs at Tommy’s until I move to DC. Everyone is saying, “But Terri’s in DC,” as though they were saying, “But that’s where the cholera epidemic is.” Willi, who is kind of upset that she introduced me to Terri, especially because she used to be my therapist, said resignedly, “Well, maybe you have to put yourself in the lion’s mouth.” But I’m already in the lion’s mouth so I might as well be in the lion’s mouth down there. The problem is, I have no money and no job and no place to live and nobody just moves to Washington, DC. They go down there after they get some position. But I’ll figur
e it all out, because once I set my mind to something, I find a way to do it. Don’t I? I think I do.

  My younger sister Queen (a nickname; she calls me Peeps) is the one who nudged me into the rapids. I was visiting her in Toledo last week, and we were sitting in our favorite coffee shop, surrounded by leering paper pumpkins, and I was babbling about What should I do, what should I do? Finally she said, “You just need to go.” And that was it. That decided it. I just need to go. It’s better to be in the rushing river than to sit and stare at the froth day after day. So here I am, being carried along, and I’m feeling all pumped up except when I remember that I haven’t even told Terri yet. That’s right, I’ve started to pack my things and I’m checking newspaper ads for storage facilities and places to stay in DC and I haven’t told Terri I’m coming. She was on vacation for two weeks, so I couldn’t call her, but she’s been back for two days and I keep putting it off. But I am going to call her today. In fact, I’m going to call her now. I’m going to stop writing and call her.

  The thing is, I don’t know what to tell her. I feel as though I’m disrespecting her, like I don’t believe her that she doesn’t want a relationship with me. I used to hate it when men I had turned away continued to call me and would leave twenty messages a day on my machine, or banged on my door unannounced. It infuriated me, in fact. It seemed so … so … presumptuous. And here I am, acting just like them. But it’s not as though she’s the only reason I’m moving there, I’m leaving for other reasons, and I should at least give myself a chance to be in the same city with her. We’ve never lived in the same city before, going about our daily business, without some melodrama occurring every second. I can’t just stay here, poaching in my own juices while she cozies up to a woman who runs an apothecary store. Sometimes she exasperates me. She’s so stodgy and unimaginative. She bases all her conclusions on cold, hard facts and fails to see possibilities. I always see possibilities. I can make champagne out of sour lemons. Terri would say, “You can only make sour lemonade from sour lemons,” but what does she know about alchemy? She is Dionysian, of the earth, and I am Apollonian, of the sky, and only I have the perspective to see that transformative place where earth and sky meet. She can’t see it because she’s down there stuck in the mud.