A Rag in the Tailpipe - Riley Mac
When I was 14 my mom read my journal and found out I’m gay. She picked me up from my friend Liz’s house after a sleepover one day and her vibe was off.
Back then, I was always waiting for the needle to drop. I’d recently cut my hair. I wanted to look like Shane from the L Word so bad. I wore skinny jeans and chunky sneakers, baggy t-shirts, eyeliner but not like a girl, like Pete Wentz from Fall Out Boy.
I was always online looking for people to emulate. Butch lesbians with tattoos and labret piercings and trucker hats. I was always online looking for girls to talk to. I’d met Liz that way, on MySpace. She found me.
Because of the circumstances of our introduction, she didn’t go to my high school. She lived 45 minutes away, across state lines, in a Philly suburb of Pennsylvania. It was basically a dream come true that my mom was down to chauffeur me to hang out with my bisexual internet friend who I was hooking up with. The reading-my-journal-and-finding-out-I’m-gay was a casualty of the situation.
“We need to talk,” my mom said sternly. My stomach dropped with the click of the car door lock. I kind of chuckle thinking about that click of the car door, so immediate it marked a period at the end of her sentence, a pile of shit dropped on my chest. Where would I run, ma? C’mon.
She explained that she read about my feelings for Liz and that I’d been with another unnamed girl, too. I was grateful I’d omitted the details of the unnamed girl. See, Liz was my age. A naughty little thing who smoked Nat Shermans and hung out with older boys, but she was my age and our moms had met. The unnamed girl was a 6 foot tall 19 year old butch with “We Do Recover” tattooed across her chest. We had also met on MySpace.
Whenever I tell people this story they interrupt me in a huff like, “Your mom read your journal? That’s so fucked up.” “It’s fine,” I say, “She ripped off the band aid. Secrets suck.”
I wouldn’t have been such a pussy about coming out had my mom not made an impish little comment a few months before this all went down. I’d been listening to The Con by Tegan and Sara, out in the open, minding my own business (it was an album I listened to so often that my mom knew they were Tegan and Sara with their album, The Con), when she looked at me and with a straight face goes, “You know what the real con is…? That their parents have two twin daughters and they’re both gay.” (She currently denies that she ever said this).
Freshman year of high school turned to junior and senior year of high school, MySpace turned into Facebook and sometimes OkCupid where I’d lie about my age, and I continued my habit of meeting girls online.
When I was 22, my dad, a lifelong alcoholic, who I grew up seeing occasionally but never often, died. He got in a bar fight, was knocked out, hit his head on the cement, drove home, and never woke up. Hemorrhage of the brain.
For months, the only person I told was my then live-in girlfriend, Jamison. When my mom called me she said “I know you have final exams tomorrow and this is bad timing. We can call the school and figure it out.” I insisted, “no, no, it’s fine. I’ve grieved him my whole life. This is just the nail in the coffin”, pun intended. I didn’t cry, I felt smug. I took my finals the next day. I went to work the day after.
I hadn’t seen him in three years since he moved to Florida to be closer to his mom. We’d only talked on the phone a few times, usually when we were both drunk. I told him I was working at a kink shop and we talked about women, sex, feeling addicted to love and being loved, and I’d never felt closer to him. And then that was it. He died.
I struggled with my own relationship to substances for years and blamed everyone and everything but my dad, my ultimate secret.
I remember a green-eyed girl I’d met on OkCupid in high school. I met her at her parents’ house and she said “I apologize in advance. They’re hoarders.” She wore a Neff beanie and had snake bite piercings, an aesthetic that by senior year I considered dated but I found her beautiful enough that I looked past it. We smoked cigarettes in her room and ashed on the floor, passing a bottle of wine back and forth until she cried to me about how her dad drinks mouthwash and she feels so alone. We kissed and I told her I was sorry about her situation. I never saw her again.
I didn’t have an inheritance from my dad. I picked through a storage unit of some crap he’d left behind and took a blu-ray DVD player, some DVDs and comics, and some notebooks. I had no use for the blu-ray player so I gave it to a friend of mine.
A few days later, she texted me. “Look what I found in your dad’s blu-ray player”, with a photo of a porno DVD collaged with images of girls taking it in the ass. I smiled and laughed, and for the first time, I cried.
Riley Mac is a New York based writer from South Jersey.