Read Online Does This Baby Make Me Look Straight?: Confessions of a Gay Dad by Dan Bucatinsky - Free Book Online

I didn’t wish she wouldn’t.
    “I like taking off my underwear, Daddy!” she announced the other day. I flash forward ten years and pray to God she’s not saying the same thing to some guy in his parents’ Volvo hatchback on level P3 of a mall parking structure, after seeing Fame for the third time. Oh wait. That was me.
    I know I have to help my daughter learn to drive her vagina responsibly. Eventually. You know, so she comes to realize the respect she should have for her hoo-hoo. And maybe by then her daddy will too. Or at least have evolved enough to stop calling it a “hoo-hoo.” But what’s the hurry? Don wants grandkids early, so he may have a different approach. For right now? I’d be happy to put police tape over the area and scoot her in another direction: Move along now, nothing to see here .

 

chapter five

Aunt Cuckoo
    I met my friend Julie (not her real name) at the same game of Celebrity where I met Don in 1992. She had worked with him on some eighties television show about a hospital staff that spent a lot of time disrobing. They jokingly referred to the show as High Hair and Underpants . Don and I were forced by Linda, who set us up, to be a team during the first round of Celebrity. I remember feeling like an idiot when I couldn’t guess the clues for Boutros Boutros-Ghali and Rula Lenska, and Julie very sweetly came to my rescue. I liked her right away. She was funny, smart, and irreverent. And she immediately made me feel comfortable when I was clearly an outsider. At the time, she sort of worked the grunge thing before anyone else had—and then worked it way past its expiration date. She wore a lot of hats. I teased her that one of them looked like a colander and she laughed. We both did. That was it. We were friends. Pretty soon we were talking every day, laughing, gossiping.
    Many years later, Julie came down with a pesky case of depression. She retreated, closed herself off, and rarely left the house. Occasionally, though, she would agree to meet at aSizzler or an Applebee’s, where she wouldn’t run into anyone she knew.
    A short time after my fateful call to Don from the film set in Italy, Julie and I met for one of her trademark clandestine dinners deep in the Valley, where you can’t throw a rock without hitting a blooming onion—or a meth lab. I told her the good news: Don and I were thinking of adopting! Now, there’s a reason people like being bearers of good news. The response is always predictably great: a squeal of delight, a big hug, a “hip, hip hooray!”
    But Julie distinguished herself from everyone else by her reaction: she tried to talk me out of it. “Your life will never be the same.” “You’ll never sleep soundly again.” “You can kiss your relationship goodbye.” “Do you know how fast people age once they have kids?” “Old and fat. Get used to those words.” “You don’t have a house for kids. Your floors are limestone. Your stairs are treacherous. Try recovering from a dead baby.”
    And then, as though she still saw a tiny bit of life, in my still and lifeless body, one more: “It’s not just babies who die, mister. You know how many people die during childbirth?”
    I managed to croak out, “But we’re going to adopt.”
    She was obstinate: “Google it!”
    I didn’t quite know what to say. I just started laughing. Nervously. The way you laugh when you think, Oh dear, am I in a car, miles from anywhere with a crazy person who might at any moment whip out an axe and hack away at my neck in what will undoubtedly become an urban legend told by frightened campers zipped into sleeping bags?
    We had limited contact with Julie over the next couple of years. A few short visits to see the baby. Once with a gift:a pink, stuffed elephant in disco pants, seriously, which I decided to take as a dig. And that was it. Until Eliza was almost two and having a procedure to repair a hole in her heart called an atrial septal defect (ASD).
    Julie fought