Laying It All Out There

Chapter Two: Nothing and Everything-1

Chapter Two

Nothing and Everything

So I cussed out my Comp Two class, and it didn’t work, and I called Nolan.

And then I called Mitch.

When I was growing up, students sat alphabetically, in rows. So, from the first day of seventh grade in junior high school and for the next six years until graduation from Hasseltin High, at some point each day, Mitchell Benjamin Teller sat right behind me, Alene Adele Sterling, because we were both GT. Inevitably, we became best friends.

In seventh grade, Hasseltin Independent School District tested its students for general smartness so it could herd us into groups of what we would someday become: car mechanics for the blue-collar boys, cosmetology for the blue-collar girls, farming for the 4-H ranch kids, and GT: Gifted and Talented, the college-bound kids. In the 1970s, this was not considered oppression; the boys in shop class wanted to be in shop class just like their dads had been. The ranch kids wanted to win 4-H ribbons and sell a prize steer in the San Antonio Stock Show covered in Technicolor detail each year by the local news. At the time, Hasseltin High owned more land than any other grade school in the state. There were stock pens behind the 700 building, which, at three stories high was the tallest building in all of Eudah, Texas; still is. The dirt track that circled the football field turned to muddy slosh when it rained, and the track teams had to time their workouts so they wouldn’t coincide with the aggie kids, who ran, holding long sticks, to run their pigs around the track to keep the pigs in shape.

The college bound GT kids were almost exotics. By the time we were in high school and taking calculus, advanced placement English, and foreign language, there were only enough of us to fill two classes, so we ended up spending all our time together.

After Hasseltin High, Mitch went to Harvard, then bicycled across Europe for a year, ending up in a cheap flat in Madrid with three island girls who shoplifted from department stores to supplement their way through the Universidad de Madrid. Mitch was teaching English as a second language to make rent. I went to the University of Texas at Austin, and, during a year off, after graduating from UT but before starting grad school, I flew to Spain to hang out with Mitch for a month.

The trip was a mixed bag. I learned pretty quickly to lock my luggage so the Ibiza girls would not pilfer a twenty when Mitch and I went out. The apartment was in a building that had been grand in Franco’s heyday, with a magnificent marble staircase winding its way up the floors, but by the 1980s, it was low rent. Other than the opportunistic petty theft, the island girls were genuinely friendly, especially after I made a big American dinner for everyone, complete with loaded baked potatoes. The girls were shocked by the amount of food I thought necessary for a single meal.

The problem was that the apartment had no heat—or not enough heat. Whatever the reason, it was cold. The Ibiza girls’ solution to a cold flat was a large bottle of cheap spirits passed around throughout the evening as, wrapped in blankets and wearing mittens with the finger tips cut out, they studied on the floor of the narrow living room. Also, they slept huddled together for warmth, and the apartment’s cat huddled with them. Mitch had mixed feelings about the cat. Once, he had awoken to find that the cat, which was in heat, had backed up onto his nose to pleasure itself.

Even before he’d graduated from Harvard and reached Spain, Mitch had realized—while screwing his second girlfriend and simultaneously calculating his spring tuition payment plan—that he was gay, but he hadn’t come out yet, figuratively speaking. Also, literally. Anyway, Mitch and I traveled across Spain together: the Prado and the Palacio Real, Toledo, Granada and the Alhambra. But there was a vague tension during the trip which, in the third week I was there, finally culminated one afternoon in a massive argument about nothing and everything as we were sitting at a little bistro table in the sparsely occupied cafe at El Escorial Palace outside Madrid.

The argument started as a heated under-our-breath exchange—did he really want me to visit, he’s not talking to me like he used to, there’s something he’s not sharing with me, and what’s with these island girls he’s living with, I think they stole money out of my luggage. The exchange gradually escalated to a tearful shouting match. It was all in English, but, for the benefit of the Spanish speakers in the restaurant, a man at a table in the corner helped out and began a line-by-line translation of the fight, like living subtitles on a TV show.

When the argument was over and reconciliation achieved and the tears wiped from my face and the tea that the waitress had kept serving us—unordered—was drained, the patrons in the restaurant began debating who was right. Every table in the cafe was now full; families with children stood against the wall waiting for a place to sit; the waitress was sweating. Behind the counter, the wife of the cook-manager had materialized, eyes as bright as Christmas morning; we were, apparently, amazingly good for business. The ringside translator had told everyone that obviously we were having an American lovers’ quarrel: Mitch secretly lived with three beautiful Ibiza girls who modeled for a department store, and Mitch insisted that he was not sleeping with them but I, deeply in love with him, had spent all my money to fly from the United States to join him, only to find I was no longer the flame in his heart, which Mitch denied was the case, but my heart was broken—see my tears? I did not know what I would do now, and for some reason, Mitch was giving me a sexy cat.

The lunch crowd divided along gender lines with women backing me and men seeing Mitch’s view as perfectly reasonable. Yet, since I was a woman, the men felt that he should have conceded to me earlier to avoid so much trouble and emotion. Over time, they decided, he would learn to handle women with more finesse. My Spanish wasn’t good enough to follow all of this, but Mitch complained later of the translator’s embellishments; he also found that we’d been given a small bag of cookies without charge. After the fight, Mitch and I toured the chilly castle, descending into the crypt holding dead Spanish royalty in black lead coffins.

Two years later when we were both in grad school, I flew to Madison for a long weekend to visit. Mitch was earning his PhD at U Wisconsin. By then he was openly gay, and, not as openly, cheating on his 45-year-old soon-to-be ex-boyfriend with a 22-year-old farm boy who had moved to the big city and become a male model, UW-Madison student. After finishing his doctorate, Mitch got a professorship at Crockett State in San Antonio in the art department. I got a master’s in writing from the University of Southern California, then moved back home and started teaching in the Bexar County Community College District and paying off thousands in student loans, eventually becoming tenured faculty in the Bexar District at Mirador College.

Over the last ten years, Mitch’s life would make a good Movie of the Week. As a Crockett State art professor, he had a career track that meant teaching classes; curating museums at two of their campuses; securing grants; and schmoozing at art show openings, galleries, conventions, and the living rooms of rich donors who feel it’s just polite to offer you some of the cocaine they are snorting off their Serengeti reclaimed wood coffee table as you explain why it’s important to fund more fellowships for Crockett State’s graduate students.

As a lifestyle, this does not actually sound too shitty except when you have to do it for years: days, nights, and weekends. Mitch declined the cocaine but not the scholarship donation. He spent weeks in the New Zealand Outback with Aborigine artists; attended conventions in Oaxaca, Mexico before the rebels rebelled and set Oaxaca on fire, forcing Mitch and five grad students to hide in a ditch overnight as they fled to the airport; and he had to conference with Yoko Ono who, it turns out, is really a handful.

On Friday nights, I went to art shows with him. I was working downtown at the time, and Mitch had just bought a historic house, because it had true character, about a mile from my campus. Twice, exterminators had to evict raccoons out of Mitch’s attic, because they had true character.

Mitch wanted kids. Actually, just one kid, boy or girl, between five and eight, with or without a history of issues. When you apply to foster children, you have to specify, up front, what you are willing to take. It saves time, and Child Protective Services is a busy outfit. Mitch figured that he had become stable enough in life to give back to, if not the world, then a kid. He figured he was patient enough to benefit a child who had suffered and needed understanding. He figured a five-year-old would be past all the potty training stuff and would also be in school all day while he worked. Mitch was all grown up now, and grown-ups had kids and a house and took their five to eight-year-old boy or girl to cultural events and music lessons on the weekend.

In fact, according to Child Protective Services, Mitch was nearly too grown up. They have an age limit for being able to adopt and, crossing forty years old, he was about to age out. So, to get foster certified, Mitch spent nights attending parent training for months and found that some of the people there were not acting on humanitarian impulses. They were calculating profit, like a human trafficking racket where you could stay at home and the state brought the children to you. When he told me this, I didn’t believe him because kids are expensive; clothes, food, deductibles at the doctor’s office, shin pads for soccer games on Saturday morning, it all adds up. Regardless of the stipend that the state gives you, serious money has got to come out of your own pocket.

Jana York was in the office to my left in Estrada Hall. She was seven months from retirement and she and her husband had just adopted a six-year-old girl through a Christian agency. Like Mitch, they wanted to ‘give back’, to provide for more than themselves, and the day after her last semester ended, she and her husband would be moving to a house in Port Aransas to raise their daughter.

Jana confirmed what Mitch had told me and she summarized the numbers: foster kids are under Medicaid, so the doctor’s covered. Now, say a couple had a spare room with some old furniture, a mattress or extra couch, and they fostered three or four children or a few of their own grandchildren who the state had custody of because the kids’ parents were in prison. Then, if you just do the minimum—some food, thrift store clothes when absolutely necessary—month after month you could make a couple hundred dollars. For people on the margins, predictable money can be a predictable motive. Jana and her husband had also done foster training and sat next to couples who saw fostering as a way to balance the family budget.

After doing a home inspection, the woman vetting Mitch as a potential foster parent called me for a reference. She clearly had a form in front of her with dozens of questions: had I ever known Mitch to take illegal drugs, did he have a gambling problem, a history of violence, criminal activity, substance a***e, alcohol a***e, threatening behavior, sudden outbursts, animal cruelty?

I called Mitch after the interview and told him it seemed to go well. Mitch sounded resigned and tired; the social worker had carried a clipboard when she inspected his house, ticking off boxes. She spent time looking at the plumbing, commenting that it was old but must have been replaced at one point and was still acceptable. Mitch confided that he did not think he would get to foster. He was single, gay, aging out, had weird Aboriginal art, worked more than full time and lived in a house that, to a social worker, was not historic, just old. And even an eight-year-old would probably take up more time than he realistically had to give. Anyway, he had a catalog to put together; there was a show coming up.