Chapter 2: The House of Hidden Meanings

“Many of us have a secret girl living within us. Mine awakened when I was twelve years old

Cerritos

and the film Cleopatra Jones came out amid the blaxploitation film explosion.”

The first time I flew on a plane was to go visit my father. I couldn’t have been older than ten. Everything about it already felt so familiar: looking down at the ground, feeling free; the exhilaration of the speed, the velocity of the ride. And how high up we were! I loved it up there—the sense of limitless potential, of going faster than anyone else.

If the journey was exciting, time spent with my father was more fraught. He had moved to Cerritos, a suburb of Los Angeles about two hours north of San Diego, and he had left his job making airplanes and gotten a different one as an engineer at Best Foods, which made all the products that were advertised on television: Skippy peanut butter, Argo Corn Starch, and Karo corn syrup. I always hoped that he would bring back Entenmann’s donuts for us, but he never did.

He would go on to date Betty for the next ten years, although I don’t believe it was ever serious. I think he saw other women, too, and she never moved in with him. He kept his own place, while she lived in an apartment in the Jungle, a predominantly Black neighborhood near Baldwin Hills, not far from LAX. In my memory, she is lovely; I never felt animosity toward her. Strangely, I could feel Betty in a way that I was unable to feel my father. She seemed contrite, as though she felt badly about the role she’d played in the dissolution of my parents’ marriage. She never said anything to that effect; it was just something I knew intuitively. Betty’s daughter worked in an office on one of the Warner Brothers lots in Burbank, and Betty brought me there once when I was eleven years old to see what it was like. That day on the lot they were filming an afterschool special called The Toothpaste Millionaire. As I watched them tape, the whir of activity on that set, I felt as if I was peeking into my future. The star of the film even looked a bit like me; we were around the same age. That could be me right now, I thought. Someday, I imagined, it would be: I would become the person performing on a set. I was as grateful to Betty for that exposure as I was for the apology in her eyes.

Show business was never too far from my thoughts. I remember writing my first song after seeing the television show The Partridge Family; it was called “Love, Love, Love.” I shared it with the kids in the neighborhood to start a singing group.

My father had bought a tract home up in Cerritos, and we’d go visit him from time to time, especially in the summer, when we might stay for a few weeks. But he was mostly a ghost, so checked-out and self-absorbed that from the age of eleven, I could take the keys to his 1969 Toyota Corona and drive it around the neighborhood, making only right-hand turns—turning left intimidated me—without him ever noticing. He never paid child support, which was why my mother got to keep the house in the divorce.

After my father left, my mother took to her bed and stayed there for a long time—several years. When I was an adult, I would learn that she had been to see a doctor who had prescribed her both Valium and lithium. But all I knew then was that she had checked out in a different way from my dad.

When I was eight years old, a white girl who went to San Diego State rented a duplex in the canyon about a block from our house, and she drove a moped. I would see her sailing past the house on it, looking so free—free in the way that I wanted to be. One day she rode past me and stopped. She must have seen the desire in my eyes. “Do you want to go for a ride?” she asked me.

“Yes!” I said.

“Go ask your mother if it’s all right,” she told me.

I went into the house and counted to ten. Then I ran back outside. “She said it’s okay!” I shouted.

I climbed on the back, and she started the bike. I felt the rush of the wind on my face, the sun overhead. I was exhilarated; I was awake. We rode up to the zoo, up to El Cajon Boulevard. It made the world feel bigger than it did in my little neighborhood, like more things were possible than I had imagined. My mother never found out.

It felt exciting to have a secret from her, like the beginnings of an adult life of which she had no awareness. I knew that she was battling her own demons. She was so devastated by the end of the marriage, by the fact that she had allowed her Achilles’ heel to be exposed like that—to have let my father break her heart. For the rest of her life, she would see him as her nemesis: the architect of her harm.

For my mother, being on her own was a kind of kneecapping; the loneliness was debilitating to her. But I was never afraid of venturing off on my own; I always felt like I was alone anyway. As much as I was protected by my sisters, they had their own lives to lead, and so it was incumbent on me to become independent. After the incident with the moped, I began catching the bus and taking it all over San Diego to see more of what I’d had a glimpse of. The bus stop on our corner, at Hilltop Drive and Forty-Seventh Street, was a portal to the rest of the world, next to the stairs that led to Sally’s Candy Store, where I would buy ChocoStix when I had the money, and the record store that sold the latest 45s.

One day I took the bus to the beach and spent the entire day there, walking up and down along the sand, watching the people whose lives felt so much bigger than my own. I must have told one of the boys who lived on my block that I was doing this, because when I got off at the bus stop near my house, there were a bunch of neighborhood kids waiting for me with their arms crossed. They were looking at me like I had done something wrong.

To them, I had. I had violated the parameters of the universe of our neighborhood and the people in it. We were supposed to know our place; this showed that I refused to accept mine. The kids I knew might go up to a reservoir and try to catch some fish, then come back with welts on their backs from being in the sun all day; I might even go with them. But that was man-made, familiar—a practice that was known to everyone. Those kids stayed where they were supposed to stay, and they stayed with people who were like them. Very rarely did they break out of those grooves.

By wanting something as vast and untamable as the ocean, I had revealed my own desire to experience the fullness of life. And they didn’t like that one bit.

My mother’s heart was broken. The only thing that had given her purpose was that she belonged in that marriage, and she belonged to her husband, even if her love for him was fleeting; once he was gone, she felt duped. Without him, her identity was gone, and she had to go find it anew. As a young girl in parochial school, my mother had wanted to become a nun—I imagine she liked the order and hierarchy more than the dogma—but instead she had ended up going to secretarial school, where she learned to type sixty-five words per minute. After a couple years in her bedroom, grieving the end of the marriage, she decided to go back to work.

I know she was inspired, in some part, the same way I was inspired: by what we were seeing on the television. I remember her watching Jacqueline Onassis with absolute wonder and amazement; she must have been thinking That is one bad bitch. She had overcome the most horrific thing imaginable—holding her husband’s brains in her hands—only to bounce back, marry a billionaire, and keep on living her life. Jackie O, then, was perhaps the most famous woman in the world. My mother had the same proportions as her; she was modelesque, and she knew she could wear the same kinds of things that Jackie might wear and had the body to pull it off. So she resolved to go back out into the world and live her life again, just as Jackie had. Gone was the durable polyester caftan and in were tailored pantsuits, which she sewed herself out of taupe gabardine.

My sister Renetta, who was now a teenager, was working for Planned Parenthood as a nurse’s assistant; she would go in alongside the women, just so they could have another body there to feel safe. My mother decided to get a job working at Planned Parenthood, too, in the office. It was part of a movement toward progressivism that represented values she took seriously, and perhaps as importantly, it made her feel like Mary Tyler Moore—a modern woman who was doing it for herself.

When my mom came home from work, I watched The Flip Wilson Show with her. Flip’s signature character was a woman named Geraldine, which was just Flip in false eyelashes, maybe some lipstick, and a wig. Flip would play Geraldine as a flight attendant or meter maid, and the guest star, someone like Dean Martin, would fall for her. When they made advances, Geraldine would scream, “Don’t you touch me! Don’t you put your hands on me!” and we would howl with laughter.

I knew even then that this was a major cultural event. Certainly it was for Black people, to see a Black comedian host a successful prime-time variety show. My mother had always felt shut out of Black culture because she was light-skinned; here, in the laughter, she felt free. But to me, it was even more significant that this character was popular even though it was transgressive—a man dressed as a woman. Flip was someone who was violating the pact and still winning, which meant that such a thing was possible.

History had shifted in such a way to create space for a character like Geraldine. It was the sexual revolution, in the midst of the civil rights movement. People were spreading their wings and experimenting in ways that had never been done before. Now, here was a person pushing the limits of gender on television. Milton Berle and Jonathan Winters had done drag, too, but Geraldine was a Black woman—the kind of Black woman we knew. She had a wink, too; she liked to have fun. She had a sense of humor, but only up until a point, and then she’d get fiercely indignant. In costume as a waitress, she’d announce, “Oh, and by the way—I’m not on the menu!” She wasn’t gorgeous, but she made us believe that she was.

That’s not to say I grasped what drag was, but it was a crack in my understanding of the world—this, the possibility that men could behave like women in certain ways. And seeing that it could make people laugh—even make my mother laugh. Not long after that, Renetta cut out a newspaper article about Christine Jorgensen, the first woman who became well-known in America for having gender confirmation surgery. I wasn’t sure why she was giving it to me, but I had my suspicions. It felt like she was trying to be helpful. People had always mistaken me for a girl, because I had a big Afro and soft features. And like Jackie Onassis, and like my mother, I, too, was developing proportions that were modelesque.

Many of us have a secret girl living within us. Mine awakened when I was twelve years old and the film Cleopatra Jones came out amid the blaxploitation film explosion. I could watch it on the drive-in movie screen that we could see from my front yard. There she was: fearless, powerful, strong. She wore bell-bottoms and a fur car coat and had a voluminous Afro, and she wouldn’t hesitate to gun a motherfucker down. Cleopatra Jones didn’t play by the rules. She couldn’t be told what to do. I loved Cleopatra Jones so much that I wrote a letter to Warner Brothers and asked when the next movie was coming out.

It wasn’t until I was an adult that I realized: That’s how I see myself. Or rather, Cleopatra Jones was who I wanted to be. When you understand your secret girl, she can be useful to you. You can know her, this little avatar that lives within you, see what she’s made of, what her characteristics are, and understand when she needs to be revealed to the world and how. But as powerful as your secret girl can be, she’s equally dangerous when you refuse to acknowledge her—and what she needs.

There was also value, I understood, in realizing who your secret girl wasn’t and what she didn’t want. Around the same time, my mother and a friend of hers took us all to see a double feature: Valley of the Dolls and its unofficial sequel, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, which was rated X. In that movie, there was a flamboyant gay man who was revealed to be a woman after he took off his binding and exposed his breasts. Later, that same character put a gun in a sleeping girl’s mouth, and she began sucking it like it was a dick. Then he pulled the trigger.

I knew intuitively that this content was all too explicit for me. The cheekiness of Flip Wilson spoke to me, but the overt sexuality of these scenes I found traumatic. Humor was straightforward in its pleasure, but sex was confounding. I came from parents who I couldn’t really trust, who were trapped in their own vampire psychodrama that didn’t have anything to do with my well-being. Within my own family, I felt like a eunuch; certainly, there was nobody to say, “Here’s how you have sex.” In that respect, I was on my own, and nothing I saw on-screen provided any further insight.

It seemed like there were just so many different ways to be a girl—more ways, perhaps, than there were to be a boy. My sister Renetta carried herself so graciously, in the Barbizon Modeling School style—a kind and gentle hostess, allowing everyone else to be comfortable no matter how much she might have to contort herself. Renae was so different, so combative with my mother. There were the women I saw on television, like the elegant, polished Diana Ross, or Cher, who my sisters told me never wore dresses, which I thought was so cool. And then there was my mother, who was tough and fearless, but held a brutal grudge.

Sometime after my parents split, my father’s sister Bea came over to the house. My mother had just gotten home and was hanging up her coat when Bea knocked on the door. Bea wanted to discuss something related to my parents’ separation, and my mother wasn’t having it.

“What the fuck are you doing on my motherfucking porch?” she yelled. “Who the fuck do you think you are? Coming up to my house? Talking to me about my kids? You know what, bitch—get the fuck—”

She swiped the hanger at Bea like a knife, slashing open her nose. Blood ran everywhere. Bea had to get eighteen stitches, but she didn’t press charges. If my mother’s intention had been to teach Bea not to fuck with her, it worked. But the truth is, I don’t know my mom’s intention: if she had really wanted to hurt Bea, or if she had just lost control. Bea represented everything that she hated about my father, and his sisters were like a chorus of witches who encouraged his philandering because they had never liked her in the first place. When Bea showed up at the door meddling, my mother lost her last shred of restraint.

My mother had been undone by the divorce, but none of us kids were reacting much better. It created so much upheaval. Renae, who my mother had sent away as a little girl, sided with my father. On their sixteenth birthday, Renetta and Renae went to dinner with our father, who brought Betty along. When they came home, and my mother learned that Betty had been there, she became furious. “Get your fucking shit and get out of my motherfucking house,” she said. After she kicked them out, she turned them in as runaways, although they had never stopped going to school or work. Eventually, they would go to live with a counselor from their school, a woman named Alfrieda. She was very dark-skinned and very beautiful, with a cropped Afro, and she wore fashionable clothes—I remember a linen Mexican smock dress in tomato red, bright green, and cobalt blue. Alfrieda seemed very hip and understanding, which infuriated my mother. “That’s one educated Black bitch,” she said bitterly.

My mother had always privileged education. As a little boy, I told her I wanted her to call me RuPaul “Education” Charles. She laughed endlessly at that, because she could see how I was playing with her: It was the thing I knew she revered the most, sandwiched in the middle of her own son’s name.

Unfortunately, I hated school. I didn’t want to do my homework; I wanted to run around the neighborhood with my friend Gary. He had an older brother, who we called Junebug. One night Gary stole a joint out of Junebug’s pants and we went to a construction site in the canyon just a block from our house. We sat up on a power box and lit the joint, coughing at the smoke. After a few minutes, I started laughing. And then both of us were laughing, rolling around on the ground, hugging ourselves, and in that moment, everything shifted.

It felt like freedom I’d never experienced before. The margins collapsed. The hilarity that I had always suspected was just beyond the perceptible realm came bubbling up to the surface. The illusion that I knew the world to be snapped into focus for the first time. It was confirmation of the thing that I had always, on some level, known: Life was just one big fucking joke. Anyone who was taking it seriously was missing the point.

Gary and I began getting high together any chance we could. Other times, we would stake out a market in the neighborhood called Big Bear when their liquor was being delivered. While the delivery man was hauling cases of liquor into the store on a dolly, leaving his truck door open, we would jump into the bed, each of us grabbing a pint of bourbon, and then run like hell to the canyon. We would sit and drink in a manzanita treehouse. One night I drank too much. Stumbling home, I beelined for the bathroom and vomited.

My mother knew exactly what had gone down. “See, motherfucker?” I remember her saying as I hugged the cold porcelain of the toilet. “That’s what you get.”

Another time, I smoked some weed sprinkled with angel dust—which wasn’t hard to come by in those days—out in the canyon, then staggered home. But I couldn’t make it past the retaining wall in our front yard to actually enter the house; instead, I started doing somersaults off the wall onto the sidewalk. She came outside, looking at me suspiciously.

“What’s wrong with you?” she said.

“I’m just happy,” I told her.

She didn’t press it. But she must have known something was up.

I suppose that each of us was trying to escape our circumstances in our own way. Renae ended up moving in with my father in Cerritos for a time; not long after that, she joined the Air Force. Renetta fell in love with a fellow student named Gerald, who she met in school.

I liked Gerald. At the time, it felt like he was opening my eyes to the possibilities of what I could do. He was so ambitious; he had his mind set on being an entrepreneur, not an employee. He was leonine, intelligent, and—like me—I understood that he dreamed of a bigger life. On Sundays, my mother, Renetta, Rozy, and I would drive around with him in his car looking at the houses in affluent La Jolla. Gerald wanted to live in a fancy house someday and drive a gorgeous car.

“Wow—look at that,” Renetta would say.

“I want that one.”

“No—this is the one I want right here.”

Wealthy people lived there: Dr. Seuss, Jonas Salk, Efrem Zimbalist Jr. We drove past their homes, even to Del Mar, where we looked at Desi Arnaz’s house. All the houses were beautiful, but it was also the shared ritual of doing these things together—planting seeds for the future I wanted to build. Gerald, I felt, understood why doing this was so crucial. Like me, he dared to want more.

Gerald and Renetta got married when she was seventeen and he was eighteen. The wedding was at city hall, and the reception was at his parents’ house. In the wedding photos, both of them have Afros, and she’s wearing a white dress with a line of pearls around the empire waist. My mother called Renae after the wedding. “I just wanted you to know, your sister got married today,” she said casually. “And we’re over at the Covingtons’ house having cake.” She was only using Renae to send a message to my father, probably to emasculate him: Another man has taken your daughter, and you didn’t even get to be present for it.

The newlyweds moved to student housing in La Jolla while Gerald was attending UC San Diego. On the wall of their apartment was a picture of Sylvester, the disco singer. He was lying on a chaise longue, wearing satin. He looked luxurious, decadent, and feminine.

I pointed at the picture. “Who is that?” I asked Renetta one day when I was visiting.

“Oh,” she said nonchalantly, “Sylvester is this transvestite in San Francisco who puts on shows.” It was complete anarchy to do what he was doing; it was rock ’n’ roll. And I knew, even as a teenager, that it was important.

Most queer people understand the experience of growing up feeling that you are at least a little bit different. But I was really different, enough so that everyone knew it. I had been codified in the neighborhood consciousness from a young age as a sissy, such that I couldn’t even pretend to be like other boys. It wouldn’t have worked for a second.

There was something intangible that set me apart that people could see. I knew other kids liked me, yet I felt as if I was held at a distance, understood to be above or beyond the fray of what the other boys were doing. When I was in junior high, a kid named Cliff moved into the neighborhood from Los Angeles. Cliff was rough, rougher than anyone with whom I’d grown up. In me he saw an easy way to prove his dominance, and so he let it be known that he was going to beat me up. I dodged the situation for as long as I could, but eventually, I knew I had to face it. I thought it would be better if I got there first, so I met him outside his class and threw the first punch. He hit me back, and the ring that he was wearing slashed the skin below my left eyebrow, drawing blood. Quickly we were broken up. It remains the only event of childhood violence I can remember. I was protected, as if by some unseen force, but in that protection, too, I was often lonely.

Because I was so conscious of the ways in which I didn’t belong, it felt significant when a boy at school named Lamar expressed more than polite kindness to me. He was so tall and handsome; to him, the interaction we were having probably felt completely normal, but to me, there was an electricity—as if he was oblivious to the distance I felt was there with other kids. The next morning, there was a knock at the front door. It was Lamar. My mother answered. “Who the fuck are you?” she said. I scrambled to get ready, embarrassed by her hostility, and slipped out the door to walk with him to school.

I was touched by this, beyond words. Why would he do that—go all the way out of his way to pick me up? I thought it was the absolute sweetest thing a boy could do. It was the first time a boy had acted as if he liked me in a way that to me was romantic, and I was overwhelmed.

Years later, I would understand that Lamar waiting for me on my front porch was the upside down of my father leaving me there waiting. That front porch represented a portal to love. My father was blocked; he had a canned, easy charm, but it was never sincere. In fact, it was so plastic that it would never even occur to him that I might be waiting for him at all. His thoughtlessness was the opposite of Lamar thinking of me enough to stop by. The waiting melted me; it moved me beyond my imagination. Immediately I fell in love with him.

There was a way that boys treated girls when they liked them, with a kind of affection that I’d always craved from my father but had never received, even as he doled it out to my sisters. That was what Lamar had done. He wasn’t bothered by the way everyone saw me; he wasn’t alienated by it. This was my Achilles’ heel. From this moment on, I would be putty in his hands. Before this, I had walked to school with Shirley from across the street, listening to music on her Panasonic AM/FM radio, a tomato-red orb that played the hits of the day. But now I would walk with Lamar.

In our friendship, I know there was sexual tension, because I felt so tingly; the sight of him would make my heart flutter. And he was flirty with me, too, though nothing ever came of it. Looking back on it, I realize that I can’t remember anything about how I was with him, only the way that he was with me. When I transport myself back into his living room, I see him in my memory—but I do not see myself. Now I understand that there’s a certain type of man who is like my father—funny, charming—who makes me lose myself entirely. It is as if I, in all my self-consciousness, disappear, swept away by a man’s charisma. To feel that with Lamar was intoxicating.

Isn’t it strange the way those first early crushes take on this mythic dimension? My fantasy life with Lamar was just that, and in my heart I yearned for him, day after day that I spent at his house. I must have performed that it was just a normal friendship—I became friends with his younger brother Jimmy, too, and I remember us getting stoned and laughing together—but within me there was something snagged, an unresolved question I didn’t yet know how to answer.

Outside of that friendship, I was depressed, trapped in provincial San Diego. School bored me endlessly—when I went to class at all, which wasn’t often. After junior high, I went to a high school far away in the suburbs, only because Lamar went there and I wanted to be close to him. Lamar mostly distracted himself by flirting with girls. I never learned anything in school. Everything I learned was from reading books, watching television, and studying people. Renae subscribed to the San Diego Union for me from the age of eleven so I could keep up with what was happening in the world, and I loved that, much more so than anything that happened in school. It felt like I was standing at the crossroads of the matrix, knowing how hard it would be to fake playing along. I still hadn’t found my community. I could see them on television, but I hadn’t found them in my real life; I knew that they existed, but not anywhere close enough to touch.

I would stand on the retaining wall looking out on Hal Street, feeling the claustrophobia of the city. There was just one clear, unbearable thought: I gotta get out of here.

In the first quarter of tenth grade, I would take the bus to school, then not go to class, just sit in the quad smoking cigarettes all day until it was time to go home. Finally, at the end of that quarter, my report card arrived, and it was all Fs. I had flunked everything. Because I lived outside the school district, that school was not going to extend an invitation for me to return, which put me in a dilemma: The neighborhood school was tough—a ticket to nowhere. For Black boys, especially in a place like San Diego, there was a sense that many of us were doomed. The trajectory was limited. Most of the boys I grew up with fell through one of two trapdoors: They’d end up in prison or doing drugs.

Upon learning that I would have to enroll at the neighborhood school, Renetta intervened. “That’s it,” she said. “You’re coming to live with us.” I understood what she was saying: Ru, this is not the way your story goes. She was trying to put me into an environment that could set me up for something better—something different. But I was a teenager, and so I experienced the decision as a way to restrict me, to choke my freedom.

I left the decision up to my mother, hoping she would fight for me to stay. Surely she wouldn’t want to see her only son leave the house so soon—I was just fifteen. But she agreed with Renetta. “You should go,” she said. She was sitting at her sewing machine, looking down at the fabric, refusing eye contact.

I was furious. “I hate you,” I said. It was the only time I had ever said that to my mother, and instantly I regretted it. But instead of flinching, I could see her blocking it out—as if she had heard it and made the decision not to let it in, because she knew it wasn’t real. And true to her word, she let me go.

I moved in with Renetta and Gerald across town, in Tierra Santa, and enrolled at another school. There, I went to a few more classes, but mostly I just hung out and smoked weed. I befriended a hippie girl named Belinda, a white girl with sandy brown hair with whom I would cut class. One day we were walking down an alley off campus, and one of us noticed that there were little remnants of marijuana all over the ground; clearly there had been a bust of some kind. We spent the next hour picking up little pieces and rolled a nice doobie out of it. “We are all witches,” she said very seriously as we sat on the ground, getting high. “And the greatest spell we can cast is laughter.” That was a lesson much more precious than anything I picked up in class.

The other great teacher for me turned out to be Gerald. It wasn’t anything he said; rather, I learned by watching him—the way his hunger moved through him and made him ambitious and fearless, unwilling to settle for life’s first offer. Somehow, he’d gotten into University of California San Diego with a scholarship. Now he was working as a promoter in the nightlife industry as well as flipping cars, and he was making real money doing it—or so it seemed. Not long after I came to live with them, we moved into a big house in Mount Helix—a sprawling, beautiful estate overlooking the city, with a three-car garage. He always managed to pull that kind of thing off through sheer bluster and confidence. I knew him well enough to know that he was bluffing, but people believed it enough that they were game to invest in him. As much as there were many systems in place to stifle opportunities for Black people, there was also an energy of change in the air, such that it was cool to be in business with Black people—a sign that you were liberal and progressive enough to look past race. Gerald capitalized on that, and I watched him speak his self-assurance into reality. He understood that he wasn’t just selling cars—he was selling himself.

After we moved into that house on Mount Helix, I transferred yet again—to a third school in the same year. Unsurprisingly, I ended up flunking the tenth grade altogether. It was an unimaginably depressing thought that I would have to do the entire year over again.

Renetta was still working at Planned Parenthood, going to satellite clinics and doing intakes. She had been struck by the reality, a painful one, that there were so many babies that nobody wanted. She and Gerald decided to adopt a little boy named Scott, who came to them when he was two months old.

I spent some time looking after Scott, who seemed to need a lot of attention. As soon as he could walk, I would take him to the mall, and he would start walking in one direction, never looking back to say, “Where are the people I came here with?” He was always searching for something, something I was afraid that he would not find. I thought of him as my baby—it was as if, like me, he had come from outer space. Like me, it seemed, he was different. He had come to this world alone, without the allegiances to convention that bonded people to normality.

That spring, my father and Betty took my sister Rozy and me on a trip up to Sequoia so we could see the redwoods, packing up Betty’s brand-new, green-on-green Ford Gran Torino with suitcases and snacks and heading north up I-5 from Cerritos. On the way, we stopped at Busch Gardens, which had a park in Van Nuys, to ride a tram and see the bird show. I hated it, the same way I had hated such trips when I was a little kid, feeling the wrongness of it all, the ways we didn’t fit in as a family.

There was always a fake sincerity with my father; I couldn’t quite feel him. We were meant to be having fun; it was clear from looking around at all the other families, sticky-mouthed and sunburned, that fun was on the menu. But all I saw was an opportunity for my father to get drunk and expect me to pretend. To pretend that I was a little kid again, as opposed to an angry teenager who was already drinking and getting high whenever he could. Here we were making up for all the family trips we hadn’t taken in the years that he was absent, and it felt so suffocating, because I wasn’t the person that he was asking me to be. But for the sake of his ego, I had to play along with the fantasy.

We never talked about what happened, this traumatic division within our family, nor did we talk about the fact that he never paid child support or really engaged with me as a father. If any of it came up, he might allude to my mother being difficult, but it was always in broad strokes. There was so much that went unsaid.

On our way to Tahoe, we were speeding down the highway when out of nowhere a deer appeared in the road. It turned to stare at us, its eyes reflecting the headlights of the car. I was sitting in the front seat, close enough to see the placid look in its eyes. My father slammed on the brakes, and we screeched to a halt.

My heart pounded in the silence, all of us catching our breath as the deer scampered off. It was a miracle that we didn’t hit it. None of us had seen it coming—least of all my father.

That moment—its thrilling, terrifying surge of adrenaline—was the only thing between me and my father that felt tangible enough to touch. It was the only thing that happened on the trip that felt real.

What do I mean when I say “real”? I mean that there are moments that snap you out of the illusion, the waking daydream that we all move through in this, the world that we have created. Everybody is born awake, sharp and conscious, and then as you get older, you go back to sleep. But those moments, those near-misses—the feeling of dodging a bullet, of circumventing a fate that seems so obvious—there is nothing realer than this. It wakes you right up. It jolts you out of your waking dream into something bracing and difficult. Because life can be bracing and difficult, even in all its magic, and when we taste its bitterness, we know that it is real, and so, too, are we.

This was the difference between my father and Gerald: My father couldn’t distinguish his artifice from his true self, like a mask that had been grafted to his face. Gerald knew that he was playing a game; his awareness of the game was something real. This was exactly what I was chasing: the feeling of breaking the wall, of grasping something sturdier than the theater that we were all being asked to participate in. I hated those roles, boring and predictable as they were. Me, nothing more than a sissy. School, something that mattered. Families, meant to act like they belonged together despite how poorly some had behaved. Why were we taking life so seriously, anyway, when so much of it was clearly bullshit? It felt as though I was on the operating table and the anesthesia wasn’t working.

All I wanted was to feel something real, something beyond all these mistaken priorities that I was sure didn’t matter. But the way it felt in the car as we all stared at that deer, our lives hanging in the balance—that was something that counted. That was real.

For a little while, as a teenager, I worked part-time for a man who sold cars, a white guy in his midthirties; I can’t remember his name now. He had a little Cessna plane, and one day he was flying to Yuma, Arizona, for a meeting and he asked me if I wanted to come with him. Of course, I said yes—I always loved being up high in the clouds, feeling the dizzying sense of freedom that came with being on a plane.

The two of us were in the sky, flying east toward Yuma, when he tapped me on my knee. “Look forward,” he said. There were two Air Force jets heading directly toward us. And with so much agility it astonished me, he swerved into a nosedive.

My stomach dropped. The air disappeared from my lungs. The jets passed over us.

And then we rose back up in flight.