Taxicab Bandit

I didn’t set out to be a bank robber. I didn’t wake up one day and decide to be a gay, bipolar drug addict. Those are now parts of who I am, and I must own them. Being a gay child in the 1970’s was no picnic. There weren’t words for what I was, but everybody knew that I was different, and they treated me accordingly. A distant father, an overly involved mother: causes, or results of what I am? Who knows, and what difference, anyway?

My dad, red faced, in a blind rage, chasing me about the house. I can smell the bourbon on his breath. He despises me in that moment. I am six years old. I am the object of his rage and disgust, and I internalize it. I swallow the poison given to me in small doses over the years and decades by my peers, teachers, spiritual leaders, society at large. I am a faggot, a dirty cocksucker, an abomination, the butt of a joke.

As I type this, the software warns me that my words may be offensive to the reader- how I wish someone had told that to the angry mob of “good Christians” at the burial site of my best friend, who had just died of AIDS. The signs they held screamed obscenities aimed to wound- “God Hates Fags!” their hatred palpable in the air.

Somehow, I end up fleeing to West Hollywood and snagging a job selling women’s shoes in Beverly Hills. I run with the gay AA circuit, hanging with the other young, handsome, and doomed young men who have traded their self-esteems for a superficial hedonism that I understand will lead to the ruin of my soul. It’s not the being gay that makes you sick, for me it was the emptying of my values. I threw out the baby with the bath water. If being gay wasn’t wrong, then wasn’t everything that I was raised to believe in question? And when the preacher on television is grinning as he explains that AIDS is God’s judgement on homosexuals, how do I square that with the soul that lives inside of me? Most days, I’m too wasted to give a fuck. Relapse is the norm, just go back and raise your hand. They’ll judge you but let you back in.

My dad keeps trying to make up for it, and as my addictions bloom, I use the guilt to pay for the cars, apartment leases, and cash that keep me high and off the street. I’m a great salesman, otherwise known as a skilled liar. The years chug on and my addiction grows as I descend into mental illness. Lying on the ground sobbing, not wanting to be touched, the poison inside is killing me. Alcohol, crack cocaine, and painkillers make a tiny dent in the self-hatred and despair I feel, but it’s never enough. It’s a self- centered self-annihilation, and my poor mother waiting for the inevitable phone call announcing my demise. All unconditional love with her, but pity now, too. That is the hard part, letting her down. Knowing that I could have tried harder, been more.

Somehow, after many years at odds, my father decides to give me a chance. He has purchased a small, high-end, custom furniture factory, and I am given the opportunity to be the face of the business. Don’t blow this one, Dustin, this is your shot. I don’t deserve it, I’m not enough. I’m empty, defective. I’m outfitted with the accoutrements of the successful queer: an Audi, Neiman-Marcus clothes, a leased two-story loft downtown, but I know it’s all a sham. I excel at the job, until I am so dead inside that none of it matters, anyway. Mental illness misdiagnosed and untreated, core beliefs on a collision course with my house of cards life.

Painkillers and tranquilizers open the door to the black hole of my addiction, and it doesn’t take long before I lose everything. Running away from my pain and emptiness, I end up alone, with nothing. Now I go for broke, letting my addiction take me where it will. I’m tired of fighting the inevitable. Foot off the brakes, addiction full bore, I walk into my local bank. My father does his business banking there, and I am robbing the place with a child-like note. My undoing complete, I get in the taxi and ride away to meet my fate.