January ‘92

My family of origin broke apart in July of 1985, but the real shattering happened in January of '92. My mother, Ann, announced that she was taking my brother Andrew and me out to dinner, and that she had something important she wanted to discuss with us. We left our one floor duplex in the early evening darkness and piled into the car. The windshield wipers squeaked and monotonously battled the sleet, which thrashed the glass in quick gusts. We pulled slowly into the parking lot of Baker's Square, one of the reliable dining mainstays in our village suburb, which my mother frequented a little too often for the health of her checkbook. Our shoes skated along the icy walkway which led to the heavy double-doors of the restaurant. As we entered, Ann very loudly said hello to the young hostess working the front register. The woman and a couple of waiters chirped back, “hey Ann!”. Receiving their greeting, she raised her chin slightly, bathing in the glow of being recognized as a regular. My mother constantly looked for and clung to these strange little notches of status.

The hostess led us to a booth near a large set of front windows that looked out onto a busy, suburban, boulevard-style street. My brother and I nervously joked with each other, sharing familiar tv references, unknowingly seeking comfort as best we could. Angela continued to glance around, attempting to catch the eye of someone she might recognize, giving her that irresistible hit, feeling like she belonged in a place.

We settled into the smooth, vinyl booth seats and quietly scanned our menus. I knew exactly what I wanted to eat but kept my eyes locked downward, reading over entrees I had no interest in; avoiding my mother’s awkward attempt at starting her “discussion” with us.

The waiter came by after a couple of minutes and absently chit-chatted with us, my mother laughing harder than was necessary at his half-assed jokes and Andrew and I smiling in knowing annoyance as we gazed out the window. Eventually, our orders were taken and we waited for her to speak. With what can only be described as methodical emotion, my mother dropped the news.

“So...this is really hard. I have to tell you something that is difficult and sad…Your dad wanted me to tell you this because he is out of town on business, but he also wanted me to be the one to tell you because he is ashamed and scared to see how you will react. So he asked me if I could sit you two down and talk about it with you.”

My face quickly flushed and I started to feel suddenly like I was someplace else. I looked across at my brother. He began fiddling with the damp corner of the paper placemat in front of him and glanced uncomfortably at me with a forced, fearful attempt at a smile. I just stared at my mother, waiting. She calmly continued.

“Something happened to dad recently that is very serious. One of the men that your dad has been spending time with got very sick. Your father got tested for HIV, and it came back positive. And I want you two to know that I am so angry at him and I told him how angry I was.”

My brother shrank down slightly in his seat, deeply absorbing what my mother had just put out there. At 13, Andrew had probably heard of HIV and AIDS, but confusion at that moment blanketed his face. Being three years older than him, most of my health education in high school centered around AIDS awareness and safe sex. We gen Xers had this messaging relentlessly drummed into our consciousnesses. The terrible revelation of my father’s possible death was not lost on me with this news. I felt myself unraveling quickly and immediately started peppering my mother with angry questions.

“Why isn’t he here telling us this? Is he that much of a coward? How long have you known? How sick is he? Have you been tested?”

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My father’s coming out as a gay man four years earlier had been difficult enough for two kids under the age of twelve to process. It triggered separation and eventual divorce. It framed my dad as a mysterious, independent figure who was traveling on a whole new journey. It planted seeds in me of both fascination and boiling resentment that he broke up our family. And layered on top of all that was the stigma of being gay in the late 80s. During a particularly nasty argument shortly after he had come out to us, I retreated to my bedroom and screamed through a slammed door, “I’m not going to live with a gay guy. What are you going to do? Bring AIDS into this house?!”

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This information that my mother had just revealed added a new, even heavier weight to the mental burden we had already shouldered for the last few years. Sitting in that diner, my mind swayed back and forth between rageful thoughts about what a mess my parents had made and feeling deeply sorry for my mother that she had had her marriage swiped out from under her. I could also sense her paralyzing guilt at not being able to protect us from the uncontrollable tides of life. Here her boys sat, internalizing yet another monumental set of circumstances.

At this point in the discussion, my mother rattled off what felt like empty platitudes about any feelings we were having about this being ok and healthy. Looking back, as cliche as it sounded coming from her at that moment, I am grateful she said it. One of the healthiest things I took from my childhood was the encouragement of talking about any feelings we might have had about anything, ugly or not. Her voice sounded like a vague recording; muffled, detached. My recollection of the time between the platitudes and our food arriving is spotty. I remember it as if I am looking at and rearranging large shards of mirrored glass on a tabletop. It’s there, but it’s patchy and confusing. Fight or flight at its vicious best. Receiving a full plate of food had never felt so odd. I looked down numbly at my go-to, burger and fries, glanced absently up at my mother, and flatly stated, “I’m leaving. I’m not hungry and I don’t want to be here anymore.”

Sliding out of the booth, I drifted listlessly to the front doors, like a boat with a torn-off rudder, keeping my eyes fixed on the burnt-orange colored, tile floor. Pushing the door of the restaurant open with unnecessary force, I stepped quickly out, zipping up my black, ma-1 flight jacket and aggressively pulling a tightly-knit, navy blue stocking cap down over my head. I reached the sidewalk and turned up Capital Drive, catching, out of the corner of my eye, the tableau of my Mom and brother sitting stoically in the window, silently eating and staring straight ahead.

The sleet blew in a stinging, sideways column, in typical Milwaukee-in-January fashion, coming off Lake Michigan up the street, about a half a mile away. Three blocks up, I cut through the 1920s college campus-like grounds of Shorewood High School, exiting on the other side a few minutes later. As I crossed the street and made my way into the neighborhood across from the back of the school, I took out my Sony Discman, clamped the small, foam stereo headphones on my ears, and pressed play. With a mix of justified anger and, in retrospect, a nauseating amount of teenage self-indulgence, I let Morrisey’s iconic collection of songs, Bona Drag, pour into my head at full volume.

Not completely sure where I was walking to, I subconsciously set my heading for the older mansions a few blocks east, along the bluffs overlooking the massive lake. The only person I wanted to see was my girlfriend. She had been an island of understanding and sanity for just under a year. She lived in this tucked back corner of Tudor-style giants just off the lakefront. In a haze of forgetting how I got there, I walked quickly up the slate walkway to the large, front door of the house and swung the heavy knocker three times loudly. After a few quiet moments, I saw my girlfriend's father's eyes filling a small iron-framed window. As the door slowly opened, I immediately asked if she was home and he recoiled slightly at the sound of my voice. I asked again and then realized I couldn't hear his reply, and that I was talking very loudly. I hadn't taken my headphones off and Morrissey was crooning "Last of the Famous International Playboys" into my ears, drowning out both of our voices. I fumbled quickly in my pocket, my freezing fingers trying to find the stop button. I clumsily hit the eject button instead and could feel the disc spinning against the side of my index finger, like a dull saw blade, as I frantically pulled the phones off my head. He stood for a moment, looking slightly square but still imposing in his Brooks Brothers khakis, and Ralph Lauren sweater over a starchy-collared Arrow shirt. Friday night casual, I guess.

Taking in the sorry sight in front of him, he politely informed me, “She’s not here. She’s visiting her grandparents in Ohio this weekend.”

I shifted my weight nervously and let out a long sigh. “Yeah...I forgot she would be gone. I don’t know...this was the only place I could think of to go”, I said.

He moved to the side and said, “Well, why don’t you come in? It’s pretty crappy out there.”

I stepped into the large entryway.

After an awkward silence, I quietly and hoarsely mumbled, “Can you talk for a minute?”

He swallowed apprehensively and said, “of course”, motioning me into the dimly lit dining room on our right. He walked through toward the kitchen and casually offered over his shoulder, “you want something to drink? Water? Coffee? A soda?” I cleared my throat uncomfortably and told him water was fine. I stood in the dark butler’s pantry staring into the kitchen as he filled a glass from the tap. He brought it over and I took it, vaguely thanking him. He passed me and led the way back into the dining room, offering me a chair at the head of the beautiful, cherry dining set. I sat, painfully aware of how wet my clothes were against the expensive wood. I self-consciously extended my feet a little, out of sight under the table, realizing for the first time since leaving the restaurant, that my checkerboard high-top vans were soaked through, and my toes completely numb from the cold walk.

Her father leaned back a little in his chair, and with a mix of genuine concern and strategic distancing, he asked, “so what’s going on?”

The president of a large regional bank headquartered in Milwaukee, he had a fatherly cadence that just barely concealed the corporate driver in him. Even in everyday conversation, one could imagine him in the boardroom.

I proceeded to tell him everything; About my dad being gay, about the news I had just heard about his health, how I was confused, angry, at a loss. He listened with a furrowed brow and said how sorry he was. The conversation drifted quietly away, and I stood up to leave and saw myself out. At that point, the memory vaporizes. I don’t remember my walk home that night.

Two weeks later, my parents took my brother and me to a store-front gay men’s health clinic on the city’s East side that offered free HIV testing. I had used my dad’s razor a month before to shave, so there was some concern about that, and my mom and dad wanted all bases covered for me and my brother. I still remember the waiting room- the posters with cautionary messages on the walls, the bowls of free condoms, pamphlets, and grassroots newsletters written by members of a community who were simply trying to stay alive and help one another.

Over the next couple of years after we all got tested, my Dad’s friends, who I would see from time to time, started to disappear, one by one. He didn’t have to tell me what had happened to them all. I knew that the insidious virus and syndrome he was surviving, had finally gotten them. His dinner parties got smaller, with fewer place settings.

A little over two decades later, I had a conversation with my father about some things I was angry about growing up. At 39, I was making a real mess of things as a husband, and I wanted to excavate whatever I could from my childhood, to help shed some light. I told him that, in particular, the fact that he made our mother tell us he had contracted HIV because he was scared to tell us himself, had been cowardly, and had ignited in me a wave of long-simmering anger that created a gut-wrenching distance between us. He got quiet on the other end of the phone and took a slow, deep breath, years of meditation habitually kicking in to center him. He spoke calmly and intelligently, “That is not what happened. Before I went on that business trip, I specifically told her not to tell you guys; that I would tell you when I got back. I was adamant about that because she was so angry with me, understandably, that she wanted to be the one to tell you. I asked her not to. I wanted to be the one to tell you the truth. When I got back from that trip, she informed me she had done it. I didn’t want to start up a major conflict between me and her. I didn’t want to tell you and your brother that she had ignored my wishes. It would have pulled you guys into our incredibly unhealthy conflict.”

I had never felt such an intense mix of relief and anger when he told me this. The fact that my mother had defied his wishes and taken it upon herself to drop that momentous news on us all those years back, planted a poisonous resentment of my father that in varying degrees, lasted twenty-three years. I told him that while I felt that resentment falling away, I didn’t understand why he hadn’t taken the opportunity to set the record straight earlier in my adult life about what she had set in motion by not letting him tell us, and painting him as not willing to take responsibility. In a way, I still feel that on some level, as a parent, he let Andrew and me carry around that piece of festering misinformation for far too long. It is an omission of action on my father’s part I will probably never understand. And as dynamic, funny, and engaging as my mother was back then, her tragic insecurity and voracious need to be validated were key ingredients in how she functioned. My brother and I, unfortunately, were the collateral damage of her unresolved personal chaos.

As I settle into middle-age, I have done everything I am capable of doing to change any destructive, ancestral patterns. It is beyond difficult, but a worthy effort that I have to be conscious of every day with my wife and our children.

To this day, I still listen to Bona Drag in its entirety at least once a month. Except that when I listen now, there is less (although admittedly not much less) self-indulgence. Also, there is no fumbling with a Sony Discman while standing in the blowing sleet. I just simply ask everyone’s favorite electronic friend, Alexa, to start it as I clean up after my two teenagers at the end of many days that are infinitely challenging, but strangely fulfilling. Unfortunately, the things that were said and done that shouldn’t have been said and done back then during that long January of 1992, set in motion ripples that turned quickly into waves. I just hope that now, decades later, I, myself, have not disturbed the surface of the water too much.

Copyright Benjamin Shaw 2023