In My Skin (8 page)

My dad had a rough upbringing. I mentioned earlier he was born in Texas. But to be more specific, he was born in Jasper, which was a tough town for blacks in the 1950s and 1960s and still has a lot of racial tension today. (One of the most infamous hate crimes in U.S. history happened there, in 1998, when James Byrd Jr., an African American, was chained to a pickup truck by three white men and dragged to his death.) My dad spent the first few years of his life in Jasper, but his mother died when he was real young, from some kind of heart issue, and he was raised by extended family before getting sent off to California in middle school, because he didn't really like his father's second wife. He lived with his aunt and uncle in the Watts section of Los Angeles, and his uncle made him stay in the house or yard all the time, especially after the Watts riots in 1965. My dad was a teenager by then, but whenever he asked if he could go play with friends or walk to the corner store, his uncle would say, “Hell, no. You're staying in the house.” He couldn't go anywhere.

Sound familiar?

When I was a kid, my dad still had a lot of family near Jasper, and sometimes I would tag along when he'd visit one of his aunts, who lived in the same house he had once lived in. We'd cut the grass and do some chores, and I loved going up there and exploring. The property had two houses and a barn, but I couldn't go into the house in back, his grandparents' old place, because it was all boarded up. (Dad didn't go near it because he thought there might be snakes.) I would look at that house and sigh. He made it seem like it was filled with treasures: photos, pictures, all kinds of good stuff I wanted to get. But I'll never know, because we usually just cut the grass and drove home. And once Dad's aunt died, we stopped going altogether.

I know it was hard for him, moving from Texas to California as a kid, growing up in a place that never really seemed like home, feeling like he had no freedom. He enlisted in the Marines and served in Vietnam from 1968 to 1969. The way he explained it to me, he wanted to prove he could make it on his own, show his aunt and uncle he could take care of himself. And I always said to him, “You wanted freedom, but you went to the Marines! Of all the places you could go, and that's what you chose?” But he thought it proved how tough he was. He told me stories about wading through the swamps, covered in leeches, walking through the jungle and seeing people get blown up, watching his buddies fall into pits full of bamboo spikes. He even told me about the scar he got near his right eye, from a piece of flying shrapnel. He didn't really talk about that stuff with Mom or my siblings, but I asked him a lot of questions, everything I could think of, and he was good about answering me, telling me what he could remember, sharing more stories as I got older, about the more violent and gruesome things he saw. He also had a trunk with a lot of stuff in it, photos and letters. He let me go through it and read the notes he wrote to his sister, telling her how much he wanted to come home.

SOMETIMES, WHEN I THINK
about how my dad rejected me for being gay, I try to remember he grew up at a different time, that he was raised by an older generation with old-fashioned thinking. But then I think about how close we used to be, and I can't help feeling sad, crushed, and frustrated that our relationship is so superficial now. When I was little, I wanted nothing more than to make my dad happy. We were best friends. He put me on a pedestal and made me feel like I was the golden child. I would hear him bragging about me to my mom, to my siblings, to neighbors and friends. And I loved it. I wanted to keep being his go-to baby girl, the one who made him proud because I could change the oil and find the exact tool he wanted. He and Mom would occasionally argue about how much I was doing in the garage and in the yard, hard chores, all his different projects. She didn't want me sliding underneath the car to see the inner workings of it, because she worried about a freak accident. Dad would say to her, “She can do what she wants. It's good she's learning this stuff. She's a little tomboy, is all, and she's helping me out.” I loved hearing him defend me like that, like we were on the same team.

Things started changing between us when I was in the seventh and eighth grades. That's when we began drifting apart. Actually, it wasn't drifting so much as actively disagreeing about anything and everything. I was becoming my own person, and I think he liked it better when I was his little girl, absorbing every word he said like it was gospel. I was thinking for myself more, playing soccer and volleyball and trying to make friends, challenging his paranoid assumptions about everyone. There was a bit of a cold war going on between us, but I knew our relationship would become red hot if he discovered the truth about my sexuality. I knew if he found out, the walls would come crashing down around me. My dad has always had a very narrow view of the world, perceiving anything “different” as a threat. He saw bad things every day as a police officer, and his response was to keep me close, right there in the front yard. He wanted to keep me safe, and I knew he wouldn't see being gay as a safe path to travel.

When I told my mother I was gay, we both knew, without having a long discussion about it, that telling my father was out of the question. My mom didn't tell him. I didn't tell him. Whenever I even thought about what might happen if he found out—well, let's just say I quickly pushed that thought out of my mind.

There was no road map for how to handle my dad if he discovered my secret. All bets were off. And I think I started to believe the day would never come. I made it all the way to senior year of high school without him finding out. It wasn't like our relationship was good at that point, anyway. By senior year, I had basically stopped speaking with him, beyond a few meaningless words here and there. When he was home from work, I spent most of my time in my room. I would come out to eat and shower, and that was about it. All my actions around him felt strained.

He obviously suspected I was gay, because he would occasionally say something cryptic or passive-aggressive about my scholarship to Baylor, like “Wonder what Kim is going to think about you being so friendly with gays.” Several of my teammates in high school were openly gay, and I knew my dad disliked them. One time, during my junior year, he wondered out loud what would happen if I lost my scholarship. (I hadn't officially signed my letter of intent yet, but everyone knew I was committed to Baylor.) I had already exchanged a few text messages with Kim that day, so after my dad made his comment, I sent her a text and said, “I'm gay. I hope that's not a problem.” Kim ended up calling me, and I said it again, on the phone: “I hope it's not a problem, but I'm gay.”

I remember she said, “Big Girl, I don't care what you are. You can be black, white, blue, purple, whatever. As long as you come here and do what you need to do and hoop, I don't care.” She basically did that whole thing people do when they're trying to seem cool with it but don't really know how to talk about it. (Being gay is a real thing; nobody is blue or purple unless they're choking to death.) But I didn't think there was anything strange about her reaction at the time. I was a high school junior looking for some reassurance, which is what Kim gave me. I felt relieved knowing she supported me, and that my scholarship wasn't in jeopardy.

Of course I was still nervous about my dad. One day after basketball practice, during the middle of my senior season, I walked over to my gym bag and pulled out my phone. I had about twenty missed calls from him, and a text saying, “You need to bring your ass home—now.” I also had a missed call from my mom, so I called her back right away. “Your dad knows,” she told me. She explained that the mother of a teammate had discovered her daughter was gay, and now this lady knew I was gay, and she called our home to “warn” my parents. Naturally, my dad was the one who answered. After I hung up with my mom, I could feel the panic rising inside me. I packed my gym bag, walked to my car, and drove home.

When I pulled into the driveway, my dad was in the garage. He had just finished cutting the grass. I turned off the ignition, then took a deep breath before stepping out of the car.

“Hey, what's up?” I said, not sure of what else to say. He didn't look up from whatever he was doing, fussing with his tools.

“Come here,” he said, sounding pissed, and when I walked into the garage, he glanced over and asked, “Something you need to tell me?”

I still didn't feel compelled to tell him anything, especially in that moment, when he was clearly agitated. Maybe I thought if he wanted to have this conversation with me—if he really wanted to talk about my identity—he needed to do the work.

“No, nothing that I can think of,” I said.

“Don't fuck around with me,” he said with a cold stare. “Don't be lying to me.”

“Just say what you need to say,” I answered. “What is it?”

“You're dating girls, ain't you?”

“Yeah, I am.”

He kept glaring at me, then went back to doing whatever it was he was doing in the garage, slamming things around. He would make some loud noise, bang a wrench into the toolbox, then look at me sideways. It felt like he was winding himself up for a big fight. I was scared, but stayed right where I was standing. I didn't know what was going to happen.

And then he exploded.

“I ain't raising no gay girl in my house! You can pack your shit and get the fuck out! You're letting these damn dykes influence you to do things you don't even want to do yourself.”

I started to respond—“Ain't nobody influencing me”—but he interrupted.

“Don't say nothing,” he said. “Don't say shit.” And then he stormed off, like a human tornado blowing to some other corner of the garage.

I went into the house and found my mother. “Mom, I can't take this,” I told her. “We're going to end up going at it—hard.”

I walked upstairs to my room and closed the door. A minute later, my dad came back into the house and yelled up to me, “Come down here!” I knew there was no use ignoring him, so I walked to the top of the stairs and looked down at him.

“So,” he said, “this is you?” He was glaring at me again, his voice dripping with disgust. “This is your doing?”

“Yes, this is me,” I said. “And it's been me for a while.”

I walked down the stairs and started smart-mouthing him. I had so much to say to him after five years of clashing and bumping heads, after so much time feeling like he was ignoring the real me.

“It's been me, and I don't know how you can't know that,” I said loudly. “It's so obvious. I know you see my boxers and briefs in the laundry. Who the hell you think it is?”

Before this day, I had never come out and said the words
I'm gay
to my father. But the way I chose to express myself was a pretty good indication. I was wearing baggy jeans and oversized T-shirts and men's sneakers. I also wore boxer shorts, because they're a hell of a lot more comfortable than skimpy little panties. My dad had seen my boxers in the laundry and asked about them, asked who they belonged to, and I had said, “They're mine!” So by this point, it felt like he was ignoring all the signs in front of him—ignoring me—on purpose. It was like he had one picture of who I should be, in his mind, and any time I didn't fit into that vision, he dismissed me. In his eyes, I was an embarrassment, a failure.

By now we were both downstairs, and he just went off again, saying I was being influenced by my “dyke” friends. I walked away from him and went back upstairs, but he followed me, like an angry dog on my heels, just going at me hard, telling me I couldn't use the car anymore, that no girl would ever be allowed in the house again. He kept repeating himself—“I ain't raising no gay-ass girl! You can pack your shit and get the fuck out!”—even though I was clearly trying to end the conversation by walking away.

When I reached my bedroom door, I turned around and shouted, “Look, I don't want to talk! I don't want you to talk to me!”

Then I shut myself in my room. I kept going back and forth in my mind, convincing myself I was tough and independent—I packed my bags and stuffed them underneath my bed, just in case he came into my room—while also crying uncontrollably, acting exactly like a little girl whose daddy had just walked out the door and wasn't coming back. I felt like my heart had been stepped on, like my chest had been crushed. Tears were streaming down my cheeks as I decided what I needed to do next.

Meanwhile, my dad called DeCarlo and SheKera, thinking they would come talk some sense into me. But when they stopped by the house later, they just quietly slipped into my room, sat next to me on the bed, asked if I was okay, gave me a lot of support. They both said, “Get through this year, and then you'll be at Baylor, away from all this.”

I cried all night. I think I knew nothing would ever be the same between me and my dad. I thought about throwing my packed bags in the car and just driving: away from him, away from school, away from everything. But I also knew I had a scholarship waiting for me in Waco. If I could just get to Baylor and hoop, then I could make it on my own, without him. So I called Ne'Keisha King, who was the assistant coach for my high school team, and told her everything that was happening, told her I couldn't keep living under the same roof as my dad. She said I could come stay with her while I figured everything out.

At some point during the night, my mom came into my room to check on me. I showed her the bags underneath the bed and told her I was leaving the next day, going to stay with Coach King. She was sitting on the end of my bed and started crying. We were both crying. She didn't want me to go, but she understood why I had to do it.

My dad left for work early the next morning. Despite his threats of taking away the car, a silver Dodge Magnum, he left it in the driveway. I carried my bags downstairs and put them into the car. My mom walked outside with me, and it was one of the saddest moments of my life. It felt like I was going off to war. I honestly didn't know when, or if, I would ever come home. She broke down crying again, until she had no more tears left to cry. Then she gave me some money. DeCarlo came over, too, and slid me some cash. I hugged them both and got into the car.