It was the first time by myself on an interstate highway, let alone during rush hour, and the morning gridlock started to make me feel a little nervous. Not only was it a new experience being awake so early — seven in the morning, as a matter of principle, was a time I refused to acknowledge — but the weather was intense for late August, and I felt like I was sautéing. Had I nowhere to be, and equipped with a fully functional air conditioner, the alone time and the bustle of the urban environment might have been nice, a little getaway from the doldrum of my everyday life; but, as it were, I was off to my first day of college and so the only thing I could feel was stress.
Sitting there, I listened as the quick-paced chatter of morning talk shows filled the car, but I found it hard to focus on anything they were saying. I kept looking around me, eyeing the other cars, glancing in my rearview mirror. I’d never felt claustrophobic, but I imagined that if anything were to make that happen, this would be it. And if anything were to happen to my car, I would be stranded forty-some miles from home, and for an eighteen-year-old with no mechanical expertise or intricate knowledge of city life, the idea of my engine dying or getting a flat tire filled me with dread. As it were, my experience with cars had taught me how to work the pedals, and that was about it; I might as well have been one of those spacefaring monkeys back in the sixties, the ones shot up in rockets and left to die. Anything I might do beyond driving was just luck.
I did feel like a monkey, sitting there. I’d woken up late and hadn’t had time to shave, and so my face was scruffy with five o’clock shadow at seven a.m., and as I scratched at my cheek I reached down with my free hand to itch the spot at my jeans where my ass was starting to fall asleep. This in addition to the sweating made me look like a primate, hair all matted to my face as an errant fly wandered in and started buzzing around me.
As if being nervous about the drive wasn’t bad enough, I started worrying about the entire college experience. The car ahead of me inched forward, and I followed suit. If this drive was seemingly taking forever, so, to, I remembered, had the one to take me to kindergarten that first day. Back then, I had been scared to death about school, and as my mother drove me into town to drop me off, I gripped my knees so tightly I left little impressions in the fabric of my jeans. Now, driving to college, I felt that familiar sense of fear. Granted, this would probably be a little different and, sure, I had made it through that first year fine, but watching the escapades of those kooky Letter People with a bunch of restless children seemed much less daunting than using quadratic equations to solve math problems or discussing the role of desire in Anna Karenina before a body of thirty or so self-branded intellectuals.
The old cliques and friends of high school were gone, and so I would be starting out alone. On top of making people like me, then, I had the additional burden of actually getting there. On time. The practice run my mother and I had taken was a few months prior, and we had gone just before noon, when traffic wasn’t much worse than on the highway by our house. That had been my only experience on an interstate; I’d ridden with my mother on more occasions than I could remember, but that was the only time I’d done the driving, and with the traffic mostly forgiving my presence I thought things would be fine. And they were, that day.
It was almost seven thirty and I’d moved less than a mile since merging onto the interstate and nearly taking out a van full of crippled children in the process. I kept checking the clock above the radio, hoping to see that, somehow, I’d managed to gain five or ten minutes sitting here. In my head played a scene in which I entered into my first class twenty minutes late, to a sea of eyes judging me for my apparent lack of value towards the educational system. The professor would make some snide remark, embarrassing me in front of everyone, and the entire class would sigh, as if to say, “Oh, Professor, we weren’t late. Remember that when you grade our papers.”
The thought started to worry me, and then I couldn’t keep my eyes off the clock. Each minute passed like a separate event, demanding its own sluggish beginning, drawn-out middle, then crushing climax. Though the little red digits on the display were silent, I swore I could hear something like sand passing through an hourglass; but I realized then it was just my arm, which I’d hung absentmindedly out the window, now sizzling against the body of the car.
I pulled it back in, and by then I was exhausted. All in all, I’d been in the car about twenty-five minutes and already I was starting to doubt myself, my decisions, everything. It would be so much easier to just go back home; there I could slink back into my little room, distract myself with a book or a movie, and forget about the stupid notion of going off to college. Besides, what did I need it for anyway? Plenty of people did just fine without a degree. I might get a job at a little knick-knack shop selling glass trinkets at the local mall. A hammer and nail had never felt quite right in my hand, but construction was always an option, and I felt confident in my ability to pick up the gist of it. Sitting in a stuffy car, waiting for what seemed more and more like a city that would never let me in, these ideas felt rich with possibility.
Unfortunately, there was the little detail of actually getting turned around. This wasn’t exactly a country highway where I could just swing back and head the other direction. On our practice run, my mother had showed me how to get to the college; we’d taken no other routes, gone nowhere else, and so I had no idea where to exit the interstate so that I might get going the other direction. I considered, briefly, just going for it. I would take the next exit, do my best to figure out the seemingly complicated network of lanes and signals, and go home. I was just starting to work up the courage to change lanes when I realized what I was about to do. There were things with which I had no trouble quitting: my brief interest in architecture; the fling one summer, years ago, with painting; any notion I’d had about keeping my bookshelf organized and tidy. This, however, felt different and demanded my attention. Besides, if I did go back home I would have to face my mother, and I didn’t want to show her that I was a quitter for not just the small things but the big ones as well.
Why, I had to ask myself, was I so ready and willing to go back to the small-town modes of living that had kept me down for so long?
Next to me, a young man in his early twenties sat in a shiny new SUV. I couldn’t help but watch him sit there, head bobbing slightly to the beat of some song I couldn’t place, his hair perfectly mussed up, and tanned as if he’d just emerged from an oven like a golden-brown cookie. I wanted to bite into him, and if he’d looked over to notice the sweating nineteen-year-old in the next car, he couldn’t have helped but see the slack-jawed expression on my face, the little line of drool slipping out.
I considered what it might be like to finally have a boyfriend, and the thought filled me with a nervous excitement to counterweight the growing fear of starting classes. Back home, my options in the department of love were limited to a couple of younger high school classmates and, if I were really desperate, a late-night party line telling me to “call now” if I wanted to…chat. Looking at this boy next to me, the rising sun catching on the gold sides of his Aviator sunglasses, I thought maybe now would be my time to live; I was finally getting away from the closed-off rural community of my youth and heading off towards what, to me, might as well have been a rainbow-streaked St. Louis skyline.
The boy in the SUV scratched his head, then readjusted a few errant strands of hair in his rearview mirror. I imagined him, his entire history, as a flat, smooth stretch of road. No bumps. No sudden curves. Nothing keeping him from his future. Even though we were both sitting here on the highway, I was the one who was stuck.
I searched the car radio for something upbeat and admittedly faggy, something I could turn up loud and let surge through the open windows. I tried to imagine catching the boy’s attention, but anything after him turning to meet my gaze was hazy, like looking for coins in a pool of murky water, and so I stopped. Besides, the morning radio was light on the dance beats of Madonna or Kylie Minogue, and I ended up settling for a soft rock station playing Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s In The Cradle.” Not exactly something one might dance to under the disco ball at JJ’s Clubhouse or Magnolia’s.
As I sat there listening to the words, softly tapping along with my hands on my jeans, I thought about my father; the lyrics didn’t exactly correlate, but the feeling was in the ballpark. If coming out had never seemed a viable option for me back home, the reason was the reaction I feared he would have. One of the few times I’d ever seen my father enraged was when he found me, thirteen years old, online and looking at pictures of naked men posing in any number of positions. Though it didn’t work, I tried explaining that these were “tastelessly candid” photos, “bare expressionism” or something, but I imagine anyone can tell porn when they see it. Before I knew what was happening, my father was standing before me, his finger pointed like a dagger in my face.
“Are you gay?” he asked me. “Because if you are…” He paused, as if searching for words heavy enough to hurt and frighten. “I will disown you,” he said slowly. “You will not be my son.”
Sure enough, those did the trick.
Admittedly, what did I expect in viewing the pictures right there on our den computer with my father right there in the next room? I had to ask myself, later: did I want him to see? Was it easier to set myself up for discovery than to work up the courage to reveal the real me? The answer didn’t seem to matter then, as denial can be a wonderful thing for a parent unwilling to accept what he doesn’t want to acknowledge; and so it was a few years later when he mistook one of my lesbian pals for my girlfriend. I told him no, that wasn’t quite right, but I simply left it at that. No further explanation. Coming out could be a relief, I heard, but the issue of homosexuality lit such a short fuse with him. It left a bitter taste in my mouth to think about telling him, or anyone in my family for fear that the news might spread. Instead, I liked the sound of a new beginning: one without denials or having to husband my desires in the shadows. And so the idea of going to college became going away to college. Call it necessity or good old-fashioned cowardice, but at nineteen years old, getting out was all I could manage to hope for. The rest could come later, when I was stable, secure, and ready.
Suddenly, sitting there, the growing wish I’d had to just go back home wasn’t so appealing. I was afraid of the newness, true; yes, the drive was long; and the anxiety was rising, but in the end, I told myself, maybe this would be good for me.
As the gridlock broke up and the cars around me began to move, it took me a second to go. I felt stuck, and I wondered if, perhaps, my engine had chosen this moment to die. But, looking in the rearview mirror at the sky over the distant place that was my home, I realized it was only me — my complaisance, my fear — holding myself back. I imagined sitting one day in the passenger seat of a boy’s shiny SUV, windows down and ears throbbing with the pulse of the music, carefree. And pressing my foot against the accelerator I listened to the sounds of my struggling engine as I began, desperately, to drive.
