Dreams and Nightmares 4: Disinvited

Disinvited

In the spring of one of those years in the late 80s I heard that my youngest brother was going to get married. Weddings are always huge family events, with many of the plans happening at all intervals and in chaotic ways. Vince decided that he didn’t want to go in so I made reservations to fly alone. I would use that time to reconnect with some old friends in Cincinnati, Jimmy with whom I was especially close, and my cousin Paul. I was happy and relieved that Paul and Jimmy had become friends because I had felt guilty about leaving both of them behind when I moved to San Francisco.

Sometimes we get so absorbed in our day-to-day lives that we don’t realize how much time is past. But suddenly it was three weeks before Kevin’s wedding and I have not received an invitation. Not unheard of since the formal invitations were more of an obligatory detail rather than an actual guest reference. Yet even in a family as large as mine this was an unusual oversight. I called my mother.

“Oh, he didn’t write to you?” She asked after our typical greetings and catching up on the mundane and details of our lives. Mom wasn’t very good at acting nonchalant.

“No, why would he write to me? I thought he would just send an invitation.”

“He doesn’t want you to come to his wedding. I was hoping he would change his mind, but last week when I talked to him he was still insisting that you not come, so I told him that he should write to you, that you had already purchased plane tickets.” She gave a full explanation. She was probably sitting at the desk in the living room where the phone was. She was probably trying to thing of some way to change the subject.

“Why doesn’t he want me to come?” I asked.

“Why do you think, dear?” It was a rhetorical question. We both knew he didn’t want me there because I’m gay.

“Well, I have nonrefundable tickets, so I’m coming.”

“Oh, please don’t!” She pleaded it would cause such a scene. I could sense her dilemma of being caught between two insistent sons.

“Look,” I said, “according to the Catholic church, weddings are public events. Anyone can come to a wedding. I may not be invited to the reception, but anyone can come to the wedding,” I repeated.

A few days later I received a letter, if you could call it that, from my brother. It was really a note hastily scrawled on a piece of spiral bound notebook paper, torn out, crammed into an envelope, and sent to me. He hadn’t even written a “Dear Mel” on the paper, but he had taken the time to fill it with hatred and vicious comments. He said if I were an ax murderer or a rapist, he would invite me, but since I was a faggot he would not. In his note he answered my question about why Paul had been invited, and not I, since Paul is also gay. Kevin explained that Paul had never told anyone that he was gay, so that no one really knew whether he was or not. But I had done him the great disservice of coming out, of being honest with him, and so he could no longer avoid the truth. My mother had also told him about our conversation and my intention to come. He threatened to kill me if I dared to attend his wedding. 

I went to Cincinnati. I stayed with my cousin Paul in his small hometown in Indiana. The trip also gave me the opportunity to visit with my friend Jimmy and others I had left behind.

On the day before the wedding I called my parents’ house. My mother said my name as she answered the phone, which set my father into a tailspin of cussing and vitriol. My Aunt Sally was visiting and she couldn’t figure out what was making my father so angry until he yelled “You tell that goddamn faggot he’d better not come to church tomorrow! I’m going to bring a gun in my trunk and I’ll shoot his ass if he dares to show up.” My mother asked me if I’d heard what he said. “Of course,” I replied.

From my current vantage point of time I can see that I did not have the best motivation when I called my Uncle Ted. He was the most reasonable of my father’s brothers. I told him about the situation, about being disinvited from the wedding, and about my brother’s and father’s threats to kill me if I should show up. I also told him that my father was planning to bring a gun to the wedding.  He was sympathetic and kind. He told me he didn’t understand why my father would object to my attending the wedding. In my family occasionally people to get into drunken brawls at weddings, so I told my uncle I didn’t want anyone doing anything stupid with a gun. The next day, before the wedding started, two of my uncles confronted my father about his threats. He denied having a gun. They escorted him to his car and made him open the trunk to prove that he had not brought one. When my mother told me that story, I felt a bit vindicated, I must admit, because my father would have been embarrassed.

Although I encouraged my cousin Paul to go to the wedding, he didn’t. I thought it would’ve been a terrific site to see him attend the ceremony at the church, wearing one of his silk suits and carrying a matching clutch. He was rather obviously gay and I’m still surprised he was never accosted because of the way he dressed, considering where he lived.

Instead of going to anywhere near the wedding on that day, we went to visit Paul’s friend, William, who was in a nursing home, very sick with AIDS. “You’ll just love William!” Paul squealed. “He’s such a queen! And he’s so funny!” All of Paul’s friends whom I had met were funny queens, so I was looking forward to meeting William. Maybe at some point William had been a screaming queen, but he wasn’t when I met him. He was very lethargic and could barely sit up in his bed. He smiled and was glad to see Paul and made some attempt a conversation with me. I was courteous and pleasant, but I felt really awkward. I could tell that William and Paul were close friends and that William was nearing the end of his time. I felt like I was intruding on the closeness of their friendship, because our meeting could never, would never develop into any type of relationship because there simply wouldn’t be time.

Later that afternoon Paul and I spent some time riding his horse, and walking through the small town of Osgood. It was there that Paul owned his beauty shop (He and She!) and a home right next to each other. His yard was large enough for a nice lawn, a garden, and a chicken coop next to his garage. We were tending to his small garden, pulling weeds. 

Paul started, “I like peapods, the kind you get in Chinese food. Do you like them?”

“Oh yes,” I said. Paul could have gone on and on talking about anything and everything and making me laugh, but suddenly he was quiet.  

“Mel, I need to tell you something. I have it.” We both knew what the unexplained it was. I couldn’t believe my ears I could only imagine Paul, like another William, barely able to sit up in bed. I didn’t know what to say. 

“I’m so sorry.”

            “And Jimmy, too. He has it.” I stared at the dirt, the rows of green beans, the chickens in their 

coop. It was strange, the whole weekend, being disinvited from my brother’s wedding and learning 

that my cousin and one of my best friends were probably going to die. I wondered if this much shit 

ever happened in one weekend in anybody else’s life.