TREBOR HEALEY

Last year I discovered by chance a beautiful anthology of american gay short-stories, titled "Beyond definition" and published by an independent publishing house. Driven by emotion, I wrote the publisher to ask informations and, to my greatest surprise, the editor himself of the anthology answered me. It was the start of a wonderful (postal) friendship, enriched by a constant exchange of news, small books, magazines.
Trebor is mostly a poet, and you can say it even reading his fiction works.
This short-story, very hard to translate, is his first work ever to be published in a foreign language. He is excited by the idea and I am honored by the cohincidence.

A Tree of Knowledge

(original version)

Lost, lost and by the wind grieved,
ghost come back again.

Thomas Wolfe

I called my father and asked him if we could have dinner together. I needed to talk to him about something important. He suggested a lively and crowded seafood place that was a favorite of his. I told him it really needed to be a private place. I didn't want to have to tell him I was gay with his response being: What? I can't hear you! and the bar crowd carousing, men picking up women. I knew that place.
«Somewhere private and quiet, Dad, OK?»
«Sure,» he said, «I know a place in Chinatown with very private booths. How about six o'clock?»
«OK, where is it?»
«On the corner of Sacramento and Grant. It's called the Garden of  Eden.»
I almost wanted to laugh or sigh at what a bad joke it sounded like.

I'm going to tell my father I'm gay in the Garden of Eden. The fall from grace. I hesitated.
«Are you there?» he asked.
«Yea, yea . . . that sounds great. The Garden of Eden at six o'clock.
See ya then.»

I had a very quiet day, I think preparing myself for something I knew would be final with him. I suspected it might be our last conversation. As usual, I was working in some anonymous office, surrounded by the hollow and lonely sounds of telephones ringing and the xerox machine, ceaselessly duplicating misunderstanding. I'd been temping for a couple of years now. It had enabled me to spend springs and summers in the Sierra, trying to sort things out in places no society had ever planted its proscriptive, tangled roots. My father of course thought temping a bad idea, what with no benefits, no future, no security. You want to start building your assets he would say, you may have a family some day.

But I knew I would never have a family. And that he would be disappointed in me, just as I was disappointed in myself for not having the guts to explain to him why. Instead I wandered around the city and the mountains both, with a tear poised in the gutter of my eye, despairing of my fate.

I'd endured a silent truce with my father through the holidays when I'd privately told the others. It was easy. I'd been doing it for nearly 20 years. We seemed like different people now. When I was 6 or 7, my father used to tell my brothers and I bedtime stories about an imaginary man named Sam Smeller who would rescue us from scaliwags, liliputians and other such creatures who had nothing to do with their namesakes, but sounded sinister and strange to little boys. I loved the stories but they left me with a longing. I wanted a story of our own, one that lived just between my father and I, separate from my brothers.

One summer it happened. We were returning through Oregon from our annual summer trek to San Francisco to visit the relatives. I had been ill with a cold on the ride home, so it was decided that I would not be going to Sambo's with my mother and three brothers. I began to cry and whine, and my mother, normally doing all the parenting, was for once unable to deal with it anymore. She asked my father to stay behind with me while she took my brothers to the diner. I remember being suddenly overjoyed and a little terrified, not knowing what to expect. I had never in my life spent time alone with my father. My tears ceased, as much out of curiosity and anticipation as out of genuine fear. He asked me to sit at the little round table with the ashtray and the matches and the motel postcards on it. Then he opened a bag that stood down on the floor and pulled out a big jug of apple juice. It was all new and odd. My father did not perform any domestic duties; I'd never seen him wash a dish or dress a wound. Even open a bottle like this. It was alien and disorienting to me; it seemed to emasculate him, change him before my eyes into someone else that I'd never seen before.

«We'll have some apple juice,» he said. I simply watched like a hungry dog who's been bad. He twisted the cap off the bottle and poured the golden liquid into two motel glasses. Other than the fact that it was obvious, how could he know it was gold to me? He said nothing, just sat with me sipping, smiling. I don't remember him ever giving me anything before that. I knew that he worked, and that because he did my mother was able to buy us cookies and ice cream; make us dinner. But it was all a secret. She told us in the market when he wasn't around; told us he would get mad if we spent too much money on candy and sweets.

«Isn't that good?» he said, swirling his own apple juice like a straight scotch. But I just looked at him expressionless and silent, wondering what was happening. As if watching him make this strange confession that it was he all along who had been feeding us. Then he started telling me a story about the maid who we'd seen in the hall. It was all a fabrication, about her 23 children and her big lopsided house in the middle of an apple orchard.

«Plenty of apple juice there,» he laughed.
I cherished that glass of apple juice alone with him; I cherished our story. That day, for the first time, I received what I'd always wanted from him and he became a real flesh and blood father who could be reached. A fleeting moment which came to be my hope and my faith, even when I didn't know it; a seed planted that would take 20 years to finally sprout from the ground and show itself. After I had long forgotten and given it up.
But then, I just remember I wanted to become his friend more than anything. So I did what I thought I could do to make friends with him after that trip. I would go to the bus stop at the bottom of the hill in the afternoon to wait for him returning from work in the city. I'd cut through the forest behind our house. The forest was dark and silent and giant, with Douglas fir and maple trees. It was frightening to walk through alone; usually, I would only go there with my brothers. But now I would think of my father on the other side of the forest and I would feel that I was not alone. That I could make it. And so began the fantasy of a father.
Down the path I would go into the forest thinking of him in his suit stepping off the bus. Down through the chartreuse filtered light of the maple groves, the black shadows of fir, the bee and the bird sounds, the wind in the big branches and the pine needles at my feet. To the light at the other side where the traffic sounds came from. The land of men and busy-ness. A place to be wary and cautious my mother warned.
I would crouch there by the sign and wait. And then the bus would come, like a big green and white dream of FATHER. He would smile a contrived smile when he got off the bus and saw me, surprised—a little disturbed by the second or third day. He acted delighted, but I was not convinced. I could see he wanted to walk alone. That he didn't necessarily want to be my friend. He had things to think about I supposed. It was probably the only time he had just to himself, walking up that hillside road on the edge of the forest. So we'd walk up the hill mostly not saying anything, following the road, the long way back, because he was in a suit and he was an adult and I understood that adults didn't spend a lot of time in forests or dirty places. That those places were for children.
He might ask what we were having for dinner. I usually knew and was proud of being an imparter of knowledge: Chicken and rice. Flank steak and potatoes. Lamb. «You can put mint jelly on yours!» I'd exclaim as he smiled. One afternoon I found a machete along the side of the road as we walked home. The public works people had been cutting back the stickers and bushes and had probably left it by accident in the ditch. I saw it glimmering there and ran to fetch it, bringing it back to show my father. He told me it was a machete, and I asked him what that was, and he told me a story of Japanese soldiers in W.W.II who cut off men's heads with them. He said it had probably been left there by the Japanese long ago when they tried to take over America. I was fascinated by his lies. I knew they were somehow stories and was never surprised as I grew older and learned the truth. We had been boys together when he told me stories. There was a great light in his lies that was bigger and brighter than facts. He could have told me anything. If our friendship had been based solely on lies, that would have been good enough for me.
But his stories were too infrequent. He didn't see how I fed on them.
There was too much distance between one story and another, as sure as the distance between the truth and his lies; the bus stop and home. My father lived at the end of a dark wood. Perhaps I did not believe there was an end to it. It seems that with time it became an ever-more-elusive bus stop, further and further away, unreachable as if in a fitful dream. I stopped going to the bus stop after a few weeks. We weren't becoming pals. Or because the man I was looking for who used to tickle me and tell me tales about Sam Smeller rescuing us from the evil scalawags at bedtime—and who drank a glass of apple juice with me once—couldn't be counted on to get off that bus. He was rarely there. Someone else in his place. Probably, I didn't have the patience for the slow way what grew grew between us. I replaced him with a friend or friends my own age when I saw how long it was taking to get to know him. One day I must have just given up and then we were strangers again, without even lies between us. And the forest became a seemingly endless labyrinth. I can't remember when, but I suddenly felt as if everything seemed to have been consumed by the forest so that the entire town was lost in it. I just started noticing how the trees were everywhere. My father and the bus disappeared into darkness along with everything else, swallowed by chartreuse maple, lost in shadows of fir. It seemed to me as if everything and everyone were trying desperately to get to the other side of it, to a bus stop, to some father that would walk with them. But God was dead.
Impatient, I had turned from the light of the road and returned to forest darkness. Because it was bigger? More dramatic? Because the forest and its darkness were hungrier for my soul? Because it begged: Feed Me! and I wanted to give. And my father wouldn't take me. From then on, I spent time in the forest alone, avoiding my father, not searching for him. Or I didn't think I was anyway. I was hounded by scaliwags of a teenage kind. Only Sam Smeller could rescue me. My father was no Sam Smeller. My father made up stories he couldn't live. My father only told me lies. I'd find other fathers. In music and books. At school. In older boys. Lost in a wood, at odd unlikely moments, I'd think of my father and long for the road that led back to him. But I couldn't find it; assumed it gone; covered over. I'd need a machete to hack through the jungle that had consumed it. And what would I find if I did? An old woman in a lopsided house with children and apple trees, making apple juice? Would she promise his return shortly, reassuring me that he was out hunting scaliwags with his machete? Not a chance, I'd cynically tell my teenage self. She'd be half-starved, her children dying, waiting for him.

But here the road was again, 20 years later, opening before me, though I didn't know it as I hustled through the crowded city streets that night to meet him. I couldn't know it. I hadn't even imagined it since those teenage years. It was as gone as anything could be. Which is to say that nothing is ever completely gone, though I didn't understand that then. I just braced myself. There'll be no lies tonight in the Garden of Eden, I resolved half-mockingly. I'll lay down my truth like pavement. God will be there and the serpent and those accused of the crime. And the world will be a different place at the end of this day.

The Garden of Eden. The beginning of all time, or just a story. My father.

Tell me a story, papa? And the tear in the gutter. But I was to tell the story tonight. He didn't tell stories anymore.

Crossing California Street, I remembered how once I had tried to share
other's stories with him. I'd found a dusty old copy of Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel in the cellar. When he asked me what I was reading, I showed him the book and told him that I had found it in one of his old boxes in the basement. He grinned and leafed through it, reminiscing. Encouraged and excited, I began to talk about it, when he cut me off, saying: «But it's all so adolescent.» So I stopped talking about it and went away. It is only now as I tell this story that I feel the full impact of that rejection for that book is about losing one's father.
I suppose that that was the last time I tried. From then on I saw my father for what he showed of himself: a conformist, a philistine, a victim of a drone-like job in a feudal economic system; slowly dying. I dismissed him more and more as pathetic. He lived in my mind now, and it was as if that dark wood of my heart where he'd been was cut down and paved over—a definite dead end. I'd done what he'd warned me never to do: I'd underestimated him.
Imagine my satisfaction when I traveled to Seattle during college and went back to the childhood house and indeed, the forest was gone, cut down, replaced by a cul-de-sac. Imagine my gloating and then the sudden horror that disintegrated into tears when I found such satisfaction appallingly trivial and almost evil next to what had been lost. A forest. A past. My heart. My father. I tried to tell him in a postcard what had become of the forest, but I ended up crying and wanting to shake him. I ended up mailing the postcard anyway, but without an address. I couldn't forget our last conversation. He'd harangued me about my studies and over what I was going to major in. «English? We're not wealthy people, Tom, what's wrong with Engineering or Business?» «They bore me» was all I could respond at the time, not convincing him of anything other than a bad attitude. How could I explain, or even understand within myself then, that it was our story I was searching for. I didn't want it to be an engineer's hydroelectric dam, solid and impenetrable; a businessman's corporation, downsized to a thin, soulless, biological bottom line. What about Sam Smeller? What about that apple orchard? I wanted to shake him. Parents want their children to survive. They feel responsible to instruct them in how to do so. I only wanted to know what to do about being gay, but I couldn't ask that. There is more than one kind of survival I would muse. I was sick of my truncated relationship with him. It seemed all a part of what was killing me. I never wanted to be your child, I wanted to be your friend. And how could you expect different being that you failed me as a father? Why didn't you jump at the chance to befriend me? Perhaps you could have succeeded at that relationship. You failed twice and now you want explanations from me? I didn't want his advice on survival; he wasn't my father. He and everyone else like him in fact were what threatened my survival. So I went to the mountains, and he went back to his desk in the city.
And now here he is entering the Garden of Eden and smiling. He removes his coat and hangs it on the coat rack. «Hello, Tom,» he says as he reaches out to shake my hand. «Hi, Dad.» All of it feels like goodbye. We are shown to our table, a wooden-benched booth with high backs and a curtain that is pulled across the opening. I felt like laughing and remarked that indeed this was private. I didn't say that it also reminded me of confession, what with he a father and all. I simply thanked him, looking him in the eye to impress upon him my appreciation. We discussed the menu and ordered our food. We exchanged small talk until it arrived. I wanted to be sure we would not be disturbed before I revealed what I had to tell him.
I told him I'd been having a lot of difficulty for a long time. Years. He looked at me quizzically. «What I asked you to come here for Dad is to tell you that I am gay. And you need to know that.» He said nothing at first, took a bite of his food while I swallowed mine hard, staring into my plate, waiting for the silence to break. «Do you think it's being in San Francisco that is causing this?" was his response. I guess now I understand where those crazy ideas come from that the fundamentalists bandy about. Like the plague, it must be the water and the Jews must be doing the poisoning. He continued: "It's just curious to me that you lost your religion at U.C. Berkeley and now you're becoming gay in San Francisco.» In the Garden of Eden no less, I wanted to answer sarcastically. But I was not here to make fun of him. Nor was I here to attack him with anger, though I felt like doing that too as it ran through my mind: Hey man, this is my pain we're talking about, not some half-baked theory; this is my life! But I held my tongue as I did so well with him. There was hardly any passion at all between us on the surface. We dealt with each other as men. No emotions shown, lots of bluffing and poker faces. Collecting myself, I finally said I didn't think it was the places themselves, but wasn't I lucky that I had lost my religion in a place of alternative ideas like Berkeley, and wasn't I blessed to be able to deal with being gay in a place like San Francisco? He didn't answer. Then he asked me if I was sure? I told him I wouldn't be telling him if I were not sure. He asked me how long I'd known. I told him since I was eleven. And then I remembered his words from that very day I first knew, 15 years ago on a street in Vancouver, Canada. All packed into the family station wagon: The boys, Mom and Dad and all that luggage. The carnival of my childhood. We were all a bit punchy from a four-hour drive. I remember he turned from the wheel smiling mischievously, to look back toward his boys. It was almost the long ago face of the storytelling, something there of the smile from the bus stop. I remember telling myself not to believe it, and in that, I may have saved what fragile identity I had constructed. And he said: «Look boys, that's a fag, over there with the poodle.» Walking along the street was a man in a blue pantsuit, wide bell-bottom slacks and white platform shoes. He had a bouffant hairdo and he swung his hips like only one kind of man would.
And he lead a little white poodle by a leash as he strolled.
I can laugh about it today. And today instead of horror, I sigh at how I wish I could have met this ‘fag’. A fabulous queen indeed, and perhaps a better father figure for a boy like me. But that day I remember a bolt of fear ran from my eyes down into my throat, striking across my heart, tearing it asunder, before it lodged in my gut. Somehow I knew—knew absolutely when I looked upon that man—that we were one and the same in fate. My face must have collapsed into some kind of woe because my mother looked at me with concern, saying: «It's OK honey, don't be afraid; he can't hurt you.» I stared back at her momentarily and then turned to watch the man recede into the distance.
He is inside me mother. He can hurt me. But I said nothing.

And here I am now in the Garden of Eden, eating tofu and telling my father. Perhaps a second chance. He said it then. That he always knew I was different. I asked him why he had never treated me as different then. He said he didn't think that would be right. He didn't want me to feel like he thought I was different. Of course, different to him meant strange—not normal or healthy—so I understood what he meant. I said I was glad he had known I was different. And now I was telling him why.

This is what it was, papa. Always, it was this.

He looked at me with a great sadness then in his eyes that I had never seen. And I think I saw a boy there, and for a minute I thought he was going to tell me he was gay too, and who knows, maybe he is. I almost reached out to grab his hand and say: Remember, remember that machete we found? Remember the lies you told me? Please, papa, I waited 20 years at that bus stop to tell you this. Please don't leave me. But everything was hesitation between us and I saw that another moment of possibility was being lost. If not for him. It was as if he had turned to notice me after I'd been pulling at his sleeve for 25 years. And now that he had turned, it was I who wanted to run away. «I'm so sorry that you suffered with this for so long alone. I'm so sorry there wasn't something I could have done to make it easier. To help you not be so alone.» I was surprised at this. He had not matched my hesitation, but had in fact preceded where I never thought he would. I suddenly felt a rushing inward of something. Not so much an invasion of his feeling as the invasion of the feeling that had always been between a father and a son. A wave, a gust of wind, a flame leaping, the ground broken by a spade—a leaf, a stone, an unfound door. What was I supposed to do? Cry? I shoved it back. I was a man. I'd keep bluffing. Tears have their gutters. Let them run there. Alone, yes father. There was a time I thought. I only managed to respond that I appreciated that. We didn't eat much. He paid the bill and we got up to leave. Back to the old talk of practicality on the way back to the subway station. How was work, etc.
But at the turnstile, when I said goodbye, content to have delivered the news and left it at that, he looked at me intently. Suddenly his eyes were full of tears and he reached out and hugged me and gave me a big sloppy kiss on the lips. And I felt the machete of healing lop my head off. My silly head I live in. I felt the tickle of let me go, please don't stop. Like blood. Don't stop, let me bleed. I almost staggered backwards, but I hung on to his hand, seeing before me the old road uncovered, and he there with a machete clearing brush from it.
«I love you» he said and was gone. And he didn't turn back for this was a man who didn't permit himself to cry. I watched him go, so small and broken, this man who had appeared so big, so cold and gray in those suits; so untouchable. And yet he'd lived a humble life that would not last much longer.
He had his pride and I saw his modesty. How tiny and weak as he walked away toward the escalator in the cold bigness and sterility of the subway station, with his poor posture and his thin, graying hair. And yet how enormous was his gesture, his courage to rise to what I had asked of him. A courage one can only truly understand when one sees how absolutely fragile and helpless and hopeless we each and all are. Little animals washed away in floods.
In my mind's eye, I had fallen to my knees weeping. But I was the man he had taught me to be and I stood proud. And I felt sorry suddenly for having seen my parents as gods and having expected as much, too much. I'd done the same to myself, was still doing it standing here like a soldier or cop. But inside I felt released from those expectations, from the prison of those lies and the lie I had been living. I felt somehow like we got somehow free together that night. Not so much about me. The big things don't have anything to do with anybody in particular. They are as mountains, and forests. They're about all of us.
Did he love me? sounded suddenly like a joke, and I felt like a spoiled child. No, it had always been there. I was just sure of it now. An acknowledgment. It was his friendship that I had gained. We were two people now, equal before the mountain. Not fathers or sons, but two people.
We never spoke about it again after that. Perhaps it is enough to remember. Something changed; was completed. A story of our own. I think of him whenever I stand waiting for the bus; the squeak of its breaks; the jarring opening of its doors. He does not step off, but something is received. I remember that it is he above all others who has acknowledged my loss. He whom I had written off as hopeless. No one I have ever come out to has responded by saying: ‘I wish you didn't suffer all those years.’ No one. Everyone else just says: ‘Oh, that's OK, I have nothing against you being gay.’ As if I wanted or cared about their acceptance. They accepted my gift—which is what the truth is—but gave nothing back. Whereas to acknowledge is to respond in kind. And so, my father and I exchanged gifts in the Garden of Eden one night. And the heavens were not rent, and no one was cast out or aside. Lies fell, carried away by tears, and the truth rose like a golden apple, pulling us up and into a new day where a road leads through an orchard into the distance. And in that road is a little boy who may or may not be my father. Who may be both of us, or neither. But who was not there before.

©1997 Trebor Healey