The summer I was 19, I moved out of the apartment I’d moved into with my best friend a year earlier, three weeks before high school graduation. I had become too emotionally entangled with her and her partner, who had lived with us for most of that year, and I was aware of it. I was going to move into the Evergreen dorms in the fall. I spent the summer at my parents’ house, in a little shack on the lakefront that my dad built for me when I was in high school. It was uninsulated, made of particle board, had a locking door, two windows, and a sleeping loft over 3/4 of the floor with a ladder and a hatch in the roof that could be propped open with a piece of scrap wood.
I don’t think the shack was my idea, I think it was my dad’s idea. I think he wanted to design and build something. My parents owned the cabin next door to our house and rented it out. My friends and I had slumber parties over there when it was between tenants. The lakeside shack was supposed to be a kind of clubhouse, I think. But I was friends with a bunch of girls who were afraid of spiders, or something. They didn’t think it was cool, or, I don’t know. I only remember using it once, a night I stayed awake all night, with my best friend, in the loft, trying to work up the nerve to kiss her. It was summer, it must have been the summer before sophomore year. We were talking with our lips nearly touching, but we weren’t kissing. I believe we didn’t kiss until more than a year later, in a hay maze, for a lark. My best friend may be reading this. I love you, man!
This would’ve been around the same time I wrote “…this fascination I have with gay men, I want to be one so bad. I could love men, I could love women, I could do both, but I cannot be a man in love with another man…maybe I should stop reading these books about gay guys. It certainly isn’t helping.” I was 15. It was 1998. I knew this about myself. It remains true, except I know that I could be a man, if I tried harder, and I’m writing the books as well as reading them, now.
I have a memory of being 14 years old, the summer before high school started. It was late on a summer night, I think it was a Sunday night, I think I had a friend spending the night. I was in the bathroom, by myself, looking in the extra-large full length mirror that has always been in the bathroom of the house I grew up in. I was wearing a huge olive drab T-shirt with a big neon poppy printed on it, and knee length olive drab cotton shorts. I was unexpectedly taken by an awareness of feeling like myself, looking like myself. I looked boyish. I felt good.
When I was a kid, I experienced what I now understand as depersonalization/derealization1 to some degree, with some regularity. I have no idea what caused it, but it wasn’t necessarily a problem. My mom would just tell me to swallow a gritty prenatal multivitamin, and whether it was placebo effect or not, it always resolved. The flip side of that were experiences where I felt very embodied. On the night before the first day of our freshman year of high school, my best friend spent the night (sometimes our parents were very cool); this was before I understood I was in love with her. We were lying on my bedroom floor, with the window open, and I said, “I love breathing.”
The summer of 2002, when I was 19, living in the lakeside shack, I remember listening to classic rock radio, but I only remember hearing Heart, Fleetwood Mac, and AC/DC. I remember listening to To Bring You My Love by PJ Harvey, and 10 Million Hours a Mile by Miranda July, and Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness by Smashing Pumpkins. I’d wake up and open the hatch in the roof and smoke pot and jerk off with my Hitachi magic wand, in the cool dank morning lake air. One Beat by Sleater Kinney had just come out and I hated it. I woke up one morning in September and it was cold in the lake shack, there was an ant scrabbling across my tits, and I had some stupid song from that album stuck in my head. I spent the last week before I moved into the dorms sleeping in my family’s laundry room.
My Evergreen dorm ended up being so disappointing that I quit school for a quarter to get out of the housing contract. I slept on the couch at my old apartment for a month or two, then Kaden and I moved in together, as roommates in another apartment in the same sprawling apartment complex, a 1970s faux-Mediterranean villa with whitewashed stucco façades and turquoise trim, with a grassy courtyard we called “Dog Poop Park” and a scummy swimming pool no one used. We’ve lived together for 22 years, now. One summer, when my dad wanted to design and build something, a legit tiny house for us on the land where I grew up, Kaden stayed part time in the lake house. He wanted to rough it, while I slept in my best friend’s guest room. This was 15 years ago, now. The tiny house plans fell through and we moved to the duplex on Percival Street a few weeks after we got married, 7 years into our relationship.
Lately, when I walk around our neighborhood in Northampton, especially alone, especially without my phone, I have the distinct feeling, this is like giving myself a hug. Like I really feel like I’m hugging myself, inside. I’m happy. I try to remember if I have always been happy. I know, consciously, that I haven’t. I know part of the reason I’m happy right now is because it’s summer. And Northampton feels really safe. And Kaden’s folks were visiting recently, and it was energizing to be driving, setting out snacks, cooking and cleaning up, making daily plans, talking talking talking, victorious at finding a bathroom at a nature preserve on the long drive to the Atlantic Ocean. At some point I was like damn, maybe I would’ve made a good parent.
Every summer, when my family gets together, I try to thank my parents for always making my sister and me feel safe and loved. So many kids don’t get that. I know my dad didn’t get that growing up, and I’m endlessly in awe of what a good dad he became, with no guidance. My dad broke the cycle of generational trauma. And now his bloodline is ending, neither of his children are going to have children. Like sure, my parents said some crappy things and set some crappy examples, but whatever! They’re human, and they like to drink. In March, my mom texted, “I think back on when you first told me you are gay and my conflicting emotions and I remember my love for you and it makes me unable to understand how any parent can turn away from a child who just turns out to be different than what they had expected. I love you forever!” I wrote back, “I never worried that you wouldn’t love me, it never even crossed my mind, so you were already doing something right!”
We’re staying in Northampton, so I’ll be getting a job at the end of summer. I feel so lucky that both our sets of parents are the kind of boomers who only want us to be happy. No expectations to live up to, no one we’re competing with or measured against. It’s only in the past couple of months that I’m really into a groove with my writing work, after almost a year unemployed. I wanted to finish the first draft of my book, and I did. This wasn’t, like, taking a leap of faith and placing bets I’ll make a living on my writing. I’ve made $225 on my writing this year. It’s only in the past couple of weeks that I stopped being mad at myself for not going to bed earlier and getting up earlier, even though I’ve known since 2009 that my favorite sleep time is midnight to 8am. In the late fall, the winter, and early spring, it was harder to be on my own lax schedule. It didn’t feel good, and I probably would’ve been better off working a regular job. In summer, it feels normal. It feels right. I need seasonal work, with summers off, man.
I think I love New England in the summer. Humidity is still so novel to me.
Coming next week, for real this time, as in, it’s drafted and scheduled, Fugazi and the Divine Masculine, which at least 3 people are waiting for!
One of my hobbies is reading “trip reports” on Reddit r/LSD. A couple weeks ago, I discovered the terms depersonalization/derealization, which like, I don’t know why I didn’t know them sooner, they slipped past me.