Redefining Realness (11 page)

“You’re not gay, are you?” he finally pleaded, defeated after his fifteen-minute diatribe. Dad’s face was glowing red, reflecting in the stoplight hovering before us. His voice was sweet as he asked the question, one he was sure I had the answer to. He hoped that my answer would assuage his concerns about me, his sissy boy, the one he gave his name to—the first of his children he held in his arms—as he said, “I saw you come out of your mother, man. I was there!”

I didn’t know if
gay
was the right fit for me. The label hovered over me for years like the red glare settling over my father’s face. I’d been called
gay
and
sissy
and
faggot
ever since I stepped foot on playgrounds
in my earliest youth. My father’s thoughts filled the car:
My son is an effeminate boy pretending to be a girl in front of other boys, so he must be gay, right?
Uncertainty rode shotgun in our conversation.

As a tween, I was living in the murkiness of sexuality and gender. I knew I was viewed as a boy. I knew I liked boys. I knew I felt like a girl. Like many young trans people, I hadn’t learned terms like
trans
,
transgender
, or
transsexual
—definitions that would have offered me clarity about my gender identity. For example, a trans girl who is assigned male at birth and attracted to boys may call herself gay for a short time—a transitional identity on her road to self-discovery. In actuality, though, since her gender identity is that of a girl, and she is attracted to boys, then her sexual orientation mirrors that of a heterosexual girl, not a gay man.

Regardless, gay was foreign enough to my father—a proud black man raised in a Southern Baptist home—that I can’t imagine proclaiming that I was trans would’ve put him at ease. For many parents, having a gay or lesbian child is a lot less daunting than having a trans child, especially in a culture where gay and lesbian people are increasingly becoming more accepted, whereas transgender people, especially trans women, are still stigmatized.

I didn’t have answers for myself or my father, so I cried. I was hurt and afraid. By the time we got home to Denise’s, Dad was talked out, and he wearily whispered to me, “Get in the bathroom.”

I had pulled the vinyl polka-dot shower curtain back and begun taking off my shirt to prepare for my shower when Dad opened the door. He had a stool in one hand and his clippers in the other. I didn’t see this coming, and cried harder in protest. Dad didn’t say a word as he plugged his clippers into the outlet by the sink. I kept my eyes closed and opened them only when containing my tears stung. With the sound of each buzz, my curls fell against my bare shoulders and back before finding their way to the floor. When the buzzing stopped,
the black-and-white-tiled floor was covered in tendrils and tears. The mirror reflected a hard truth:
You are a boy. Stop pretending
.

By the New Year, when every television was tuned to the proceedings of the O. J. Simpson trial, my curls had returned thicker and wilder. They were no longer silky, choosing to grow up rather than down and demanding more room. The only thing to tame them was Blue Magic grease, which I lathered on my hair after every shower, waking up with an oil-stained pillowcase and consistent dreams of Mom.

Though her phone calls and birthday cards halted after my eighth birthday, I held tight to the day that she’d rescue us. I extended blind optimism to Mom. I expected the best from her because my image of her, despite her actions, was untarnished. Instead of facing the reality of rejection, I made excuses for her: Mom was busy; she had a career; she just needed a little time to build a new life that would include me one day. My optimism won out in 1995 when Auntie Wee Wee’s phone rang as the news commentators discussed the latest from the courtroom. “Baby, it’s for you,” she said with the widest smile.

“Hello?” I said into the receiver.

“Charles? It’s Mom.”

When I heard her voice, the opportunity for better emerged, and I immediately forgave her years-long absence because she was a dream come true. I can’t remember what we talked about, but I remember the feeling that things would be better, that Chad and I would have the life we deserved. Auntie Wee Wee had gotten ahold of Mom through Grandma Pearl, who was listed by the operators in Honolulu. Our aunt didn’t tell us about her search because she said she didn’t want to get our hopes up. I realize now that she didn’t trust Mom to follow through and call back; many on Dad’s side of the family didn’t understand how a woman could leave her children.
Abandoning us broke some golden rule in the motherhood guide, an invisible set of laws that they all silently abided by.

Over a series of conversations, I learned that Cori was eighteen and had two little girls. I learned that our baby brother, Jeffrey, was in kindergarten and couldn’t wait to meet us. Most important, I learned that Mom wanted us back, something she and Dad would debate for months. Dad later told me that he fought hard to keep us but knew that Mom would give us the stability that we needed.

Dad didn’t drink during the weeks leading up to our flight to Honolulu in May 1995. He didn’t say much as he drove Chad and me to Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, where they had two Continental tickets with our names on them.

The sun was shining through the windows of the gate, where we stood looking in awe at the plane that would take us to Mom. My anticipation of my reunion with her didn’t allow me to think about how this move affected Dad or Chad. This moment was what I had dreamed of since the day Mom sent me to Oakland so I could have a proper male influence. I felt I had done my time and my move was long overdue. I thought Dad had taken his turn, done his part, and now it was Mom’s shift. I didn’t give my father much credit and didn’t take his heartbreak into account.

As we were readying to board, Dad squatted down in front of us. He looked unblinkingly into our eyes; his were teary and sullen. “Y’all gotta take care of each other, man,” he said. “And never forget that if you have no one, I mean no one in this world, that you feel loves you, remember that your dad will always love you.”

He wrapped his arms around us, cradling us in his grasp. I kissed his ear and held on to him in a way I never had before, because I knew that this time, when I let go, I would run into the arms of my mother. My father bid farewell to us with a kiss as we followed the lady in the blue uniform and sensible pumps down the Jetway. Unknowingly, I
would evolve beyond the boy he had raised and greet him nearly a decade later, in 2004, in that same airport, as my own woman, his daughter, at age twenty-one.

Dad would dance toward me with his golden grin, his contagious zest for life, and his new wife, Auntie Wee Wee, and Auntie Linda Gail and Uncle Bernard in tow—a welcome party designed to ease all apprehension.

“I told you I was bringing
everybody
to see
my
baby,” he told me in my ear as he hugged me. “You
my
baby—no matter what.”

All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naïve. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: that I am nobody but myself.

—RALPH ELLISON,
THE INVISIBLE MAN

M
y head rested in my mother’s lap. She laid a hand on my hair, frizzy from the humidity of Hawaii. It had been more than five years since she had sent me away, since I had felt her. Now I was finally home. She smelled of plumeria blossoms in the sunshine. Her soft, steady breathing matched the lightness of her touch. My warm face rested on her bare olive-skinned thighs. She wore black high-waist denim Bongo shorts, the ones with large red-and-white letters blazoned on the back label, the kind I noticed all the girls wearing in Honolulu in 1995. Her hair was wavy except for her straight blown-out bangs, and lifted at the roots a bit, strategically covering her large ears, handed down from Papa, who was out on the lanai drinking beer with my uncles.

We lounged in the living room at Grandma’s that first day in Ka’ahumanu Housing, where I had spent my early grade-school years on Oahu. Like Grandma Shellie’s house, Grandma Pearl’s was packed with family, elated to welcome Chad and me back. Mom and I sat on a twin daybed covered in a soft aloha-print quilt, perched above Chad
and Jeff, who sat in reluctant brotherhood on the wicker love seat. They were feeling each other out. It would take a couple of months for them to find their groove, both battling for the role of baby in our family.

Mom was no longer a dream. She and Hawaii were real, beyond anything my twelve-year-old mind could imagine.

What’s difficult about being from Hawaii is that everyone has a postcard view of your home. Hawaii lives vividly in people’s minds, like the orange and purple hues of the bird-of-paradise flower. It’s a fantasy place of sunshine and rainbows, of high surf and golden boys with golden hair, of pigs on a spit and hula dancers’ swaying hips, of Braddah Iz’s “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and the North Shore, of hapa goddesses with coconut bras and Don Ho’s ukulele.

Like the chalky, sweet taste of poi, Hawaii can be appreciated only from the locals’ perspective. It’s a special place, a melted and cooled lava rock in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, the anchor of Polynesia, once ruled by kings and queens before religious, military, and tourist occupation, a place where the people, those from the land and others, adopted and migrated, harvested sugarcane for little profit and created their own collective language (pidgin) and food (mixed plates) that became their portal to home, belonging, and fellowship.

Ages before Hawaii’s sugar boom, voyagers from Tahiti left their home to see what was beyond the horizon. Navigating the seas in handcrafted canoes with the mere guidance of the stars, they arrived in Hawaii and created new lives. Centuries later, I landed in 1995, and it was here, on the island of Oahu, that I would mirror my ancestors on my own voyage, one guided through a system of whispers, to reveal the person I was meant to be. I will forever be indebted to Hawaii for being the home I needed. There is no me without Hawaii.

Our first home was on Owawa Street in Kalihi, where the sound of our neighbor’s finicky rooster woke me every morning. With his
full black tail and flaming reddish-gold feather mane, he’d call out to the world, his cock-a-doodle-doo met with the collective cackling of neighboring cocks. Their chorus shook our block awake, making it impossible to sleep past seven
A.M.
in our home, a shabby mustard-colored house that Mom rented from an elderly Filipino couple who lived on the ground floor.

I woke every day with red, itchy eyes and a runny nose, unknowingly allergic to the fragrant plants that surrounded us. Our neighborhood was not rural or rustic. It was urban, a heavily trafficked Likelike Highway away from Kamehameha Shopping Center on School Street, where I’d get formula or diapers for Cori at Long’s Drugs, the place where I would later get busted for slipping clear nail polish and a bottle of remover in my pants in the eighth grade.

Many of the roosters on Owawa Street and other Filipino neighborhoods like ours were in training, living in makeshift wood and steel pens expertly hidden in backyards. The rooster behind our house had long since retired his spiked boxing mittens. He was cranky and omnipresent, clucking near us as we played or fought. He was there when I punched his owner in the face after hearing him call Chad and Jeff “niggers” while shooting hoops in his driveway. I was fiercely protective of my brothers in the seventh grade, adopting a persona that aligned with my goal to be the perfect son for Mom.

Many of our neighbors’ houses were two-story McMansions, and there were always a few under construction. They were palatial pads, symbols of success for first-generation emigrants from the Philippines holding tight to the American dream. The blocks were overrun with columns and balconies and etchings in marble and gurgling fountains where mongooses would splash around and large driveways that could hold a hundred-plus people on first-birthday or graduation celebrations.

Still, Kalihi was all potholes and
pansit 
s, plumerias and
paifala 
s.
Walking up and down Gulick Avenue, I’d smell gardenias, lychees, and mango trees, and then I’d pass a house with pungent fish being fried by nanas at dinnertime. Our house wasn’t as impressive as our neighbors’, but it was packed as if it were just as spacious. Cori and her boyfriend—the one she ran away with at thirteen, returning pregnant with Britney a year later—lived in the room in the back. They had their own entrance and a sliding rattan door that separated it from the living room. I can still hear baby Rissa, Cori’s second daughter, crying from her room while lying in mine. Rissa was the first baby I’d ever held and watched grow to become a young woman.