Jake’s Life

This post is long overdue. I realize that I left everyone hanging with the last part of my coming out story, so here’s the rundown to finish it up. When we last left off I had left the home of the person who had taken me in.

After I moved out I moved in with some friends, then some other friends, I was able to afford my own place. My very first place…it brings back a lot of memories. A 450 sq. ft. studio…$605 a month! Anyway, despite being tiny and expensive, I spent a year here before moving into what I consider to be my favorite apartment/living situation I’ve ever had: It was a 1200 sq. ft. one bedroom right off a main “gay” area, the living room was the size of my living room now, plus the two smaller bedroom. The bedroom was big too, and the kitchen had more cabinet and counter space than I would ever have needed. I was only paying $650 for the place.

It was in this apartment that I got my cat, and it was here that I was sitting when I found out from my grandmother that my mom had died a few minutes beforehand. Based on the previous posts on my coming out it’s not hard to see what my being gay did to my mother, and to our relationship. I’m an only child, and she was an only parent, and our bond was pretty strong.

The few weeks prior to my mother leaving her body we started talking again. Due to the pain she was constantly in it was heart breaking: She didn’t know who I was sometimes, often she couldn’t understand me through the pain, and she could barely talk. The day before she died my grandmother put the phone up to her ear and I started talking, but all I heard were moans and sounds of the pain she was in.

Anyway, the only person in my family that I am still close with is my grandmother. She recently moved out of my uncle’s house and into a senior apartment building about a mile away from me. In each other’s eyes, we’re all we have when it comes to family. To be honest, I don’t really mind that this is true, all except for my mother. The other morning on Thanksgiving I realized that Christmas was right around the corner, and some of my best memories during the Holidays was with her. Sure we didn’t have much money, but we had each other. It was really hard for me to even leave my bed. Sometimes, despite what happened with my coming out, it’s really hard to not think about her. My grandmother suffers from this even more. It’s hard to watch your child die, and in many ways that’s unnatural. The only reasons I am as strong as I am is because I know she isn’t, and I have to be strong enough for the both of us.

Why am I going into all of this even though my story has covered when I came out? All of this is directly related to my coming out, and I believe that things would have been different if I either didn’t come out or my mother had taken it better. I also want to show readers of my blog the different paths one can be set on when they do come out, what risks there are, and how lucky most of them are to just get a cold shoulder from their family when they find out. I have to say, I have little patience for people who wig out when their parents have shown nothing but love all their lives, have hinted to them that they know, and the person (or in this case, blogger) still freaks out about telling them. News flash buddy, they know, they’re just waiting for you to show the trust with them that they have with you. Knock off the “what-will-I-do-what-will-I-say-how- can-I-hide-it-from-the-people-who-love-me-the-most-in-my-life” mentality and cherish the time you have with them while you can. Chances are that others have already bore the brunt of your coming out negativity so you don’t have to.

Lots of time being covered here. Bear with me.

After being released from the hospital the next morning was when I first began to feel truly homeless. I had nobody to turn to for a place to live, I had not been to school in a few days, and was overall flabbergasted at what I should be doing. I went from a super-secret youth housing facility to a downtown emergency youth shelter. If you don’t know how these work here’s the skinny: They are usually open at only certain times (for example, 7pm to 7am). You arrive during a certain time, your belongings are searched for weapons, drugs, and porn, and for the first few hours you are allowed to eat provided food, take a shower, watch TV, and then bedtime rolls around and you’re sentenced to sleep. Staff wakes you up at a certain time, and you leave by a certain time. You were not allowed to store anything at the shelter.

Since I was still enrolled in school I filled the huge gap of time during the day by trying to go back and get things back on track. I tried to keep what happened from people at school but they found out anyway, like they usually do somehow, and I got a combination of sympathy and ridicule from students. I hated both sentiments and usually everything in between too. The only four people I really confided in were my CDC (Chemical Dependency Counselor, from the outpatient treatment for being found drunk at school), her secretary, my school nurse, and a school security officer. Most of the time when I was supposed to be in class I was either ditching and at the CDC office, the school’s nurse’s office, or the security office. I hated being around other students, I couldn’t focus in class, and my teachers were wearing on my nerves with their chipper attitudes. The CDC and her secretary took it upon themselves to look at long-term residential centers for me, and while low-end, found the best nearby my high school. They went to see it, took photos, and showed me during my next session with them. (Just to give you a clue about these groups, it was held at a hospital but mandated by the school, and was in a group format with others from my school. The youth ranged in “addictions” from alcohol, marijuana, to heroin and meth.) I figured that anything was better than the shelter so I went for it.

This facility held about thirty youth, with a floor for boys and a floor for girls, with 24-hour staff and volunteer coverage. There were structured chore lists, house arrest, “rent” (one third of your monthly gross income from work, which was required), counselors, and other activities. I hated this place. At this time I was in high school, working part time for a well-known GLBTQ youth advocacy program, and part time at Taco Bell. My first job took me around the country one Summer, speaking at different functions (ACLU, Center for Disease Control, various high schools and colleges, etc.) and left my shared room and belongings unsupervised in the home. I usually came home to find condoms and lube all over my bed (not lube packets, just flat out lube), the clothing rifled through and destroyed, and one time while in an after school photography class I had my leased camera equipment stolen (which was supposed to be locked in a staff storage room but they never got around to doing this). I was usually on house arrest every time it was my turn to clean the bathrooms because when people saw I was cleaning it they would do some effed up stuff to them before I cleaned them, and sometimes after to make it look like I didn’t. I would usually flat out refuse to do it and stay on house arrest for the next week rather than clean someone’s shitty ass marks from the walls and piss out of the clogged up sink.

Taco Bell, now that brings up a lot of memories, mostly bad. After working at Taco Bell for a few months the manager and her partner invited me to dinner one Thanksgiving. The staff at the shelter said that I could go, but since I was on house arrest I had to be back by nine that night. I was back before then and went to sleep to wake up the next day to them telling me that I had to leave. They said that I never checked back in the night before when I arrived and must have snuck in sometime during the night. They were arranging me transportation to the emergency shelter I was in before here when I called my manager and told her what was going on. She said that after the night before at dinner that she and her partner had talked about adding a new person to their household and asked if I wanted to come live with them, helping to save until I was eighteen and giving me a much better living environment. I went for it, obviously.

I moved in with her, her partner, and their two kids (one was 8 years old, the other was 2 years old). Before I get into the rest of the story I have to explain that I was a much different person back then. Considering what I went through I was at a low, emotionally and socially. Anyone who knows me know knows that what I’m about to explain would never happen to me now. Over the next few months things were great: I had a new home with welcoming “parents,” two new “brothers,” and a job. This was the most stable position I had been in for a while. I was with them for well over a year, from when I was almost seventeen to after I was eighteen. The first six months saw me working more and more shifts at Taco Bell, mostly doubles each day so that she could “spend time with [her] family.” I didn’t have adequate ID to open a bank account according to her so my paychecks got signed over to her and were put in a separate account, saving until I was eighteen and taking out enough to support me.

My doubles turned into triples, and off the clock so as to not flag anything in payroll with minor labor laws. She was either always sick and needed me to stay, graveyard wouldn’t show up and she couldn’t come in because the kids were sick, or the fact that I “owed” her for “rescuing” me. One night while we both were working there was a gang-related shooting in the parking lot involving an employee. She made a big deal out of seeing who she thought was the shooter and was afraid to come in for a few days. From that shift until the time I actually left the store was almost four days. No kidding. I slept in the back while graveyard worked, and all off the clock.

The first time I got to look down the barrel of a gun was here too. The fourth night I was there it was just after bar rush, the night crew wouldn’t come in because they were scared, and I was working alone. I was still 17 at the time. A man came in (I remember him to this day…black male, 6’2’’, 180, black baseball cap, and this horrid gold Adidas running suit) and told me that it was a robbery and to give him the money. I had been at the store for four days, the last 16 hours alone, was tired, smelled, and didn’t care. I laughed, tapped in a new order and asked what he really wanted. He took a handgun out of his waist band (one that I now know to be a Glock…good gun), stepped back, put it a few inches away from my face and told me to give him the money. I put my hands up and told him that my keys were in my right pocket and I needed to get them. After I got them I put them in the till, hit the panic button next to it, and removed the drawer setting it on the counter. He took every last cent.

While the police were there and I was being interviewed she called…and called and called and called. I finally picked up the phone and got bitched out so I hung up on her. This was a considerable amount of balls I had grown as before I could never stand up to her. Whenever I said or did something that was “wrong” she paraded the kids in front of me and demanded I tell them my mistake and why I made it (usually something to the effect of “I don’t care about either of you or your mothers, and I am not grateful for the help they’ve given me”).

A few months after the robbery her boss kept coming down on her about labor laws, wanted to know why I was the only person on, being underage, in the middle of the night. Soon after all of this heat a few deposits ended up missing. She was in charge of dropping them off at the bank although sometimes I did on the way to the bus stop on the way home. This time it was all her, and she prepared a written statement to the company saying that she dropped them off. All of a sudden she said that she found the deposit slips in my bedroom and decided to come forward. The company saw through the lie and fired her, pressing criminal charges along with it. At this point I was already 18 and went to her for the money out of my account to move out, and was told that there was no separate account and there was no money. I found some friends to move in with and left without any of my stuff.

My trip to Seattle was great. Not only did it get me out of my element and help me focus on other things besides what had been happening over the past year it also really opened my eyes to the whole gay thing. I met a lot of people who were like me, in that respect, and it felt good. When I got back to California, I wasn’t doing so well. I was starting the Tenth Grade at a high school that I completely hated in the sticks of California. I wasn’t able to be myself and I wasn’t making friends at all. Besides my grandmother, I was all alone.

Nearer to the time that school was about to start my grandmother arranged with my uncle for me to move to Seattle and live with him. This really helped get me out of the funk of my placement, but I was still almost a year later broken up about my mother. If my own mother couldn’t love me, then who could?

The first few months of living with my uncle were great. He worked nights in the medical field, and many nights that he was off or called in sick he was out. It didn’t take me long to figure out where he was those nights (mostly hitting up bath houses and similar places), and he was an avid marijuana smoker. I mean avid. After twenty years of using it every day, he almost couldn’t function without it. The morning, all throughout the day, and falling asleep with it. It always gave me a huge headache, and it was a “get used to it” type situation.

By now I had already started at a high school in Seattle and made a few friends, probably not good ones given my recent history and the inherent attraction to other people with effed up lives. One morning when we all got to school it was closed due to a power outage and created two hours before it was expected to open. Of course what did we do? We went to someone’s house and drank, then being the fifteen year old we were thought we could pass at school and went back. This got me entered into a teenage treatment program and caused issues at home, namely with me confronting my uncle on his drug use.

Can anyone guess what comes next? Yeah, he packs my bags for me and gives me a deadline to get out of his home.

The night I was supposed to leave I still wasn’t able to find anywhere to live. I was a gay youth drop-in center (which is a whole different story…if you think the early twenties gay community is bad, the teenage one is worse in how it treats its own). Being the fat, ugly one I was even a source of humor for these people. It was almost closing time and a few of the youth here knew of my issue with finding a home. They also knew that I was on medication for ulcers. They went into my backpack, flushed all of my pills, then reported to staff that I told them I took them all and was trying to kill myself.

That night was spent in a hospital having my stomach pumped and being questioned by all sorts of people. My uncle was called, and being the nice guy he is, brought my belongings to the hospital and left them there. So here I was, back at square one. The next day once I showed that no, I wasn’t trying to kill myself (they found no pills in my stomach when they pumped it), and that with all that I’ve been through I’m confident that I could handle more, they released me to a homeless shelter for youth.

End part three.

When my mother heard the message she asked me about it and I of course denied it. I thought she believed me, but she didn’t. Within a few weeks she told me that we were losing our house and she needed to take another trip to Henderson in order to put more time into the shop so that we could have enough money to rent another, and that she would only be gone for a few weeks. I came home from the school the day she left and found very little left inside the house. She told me that it had been put into storage to get that out of the way and make the move easier when she gets back.

Wait, are you catching on yet? She wasn’t coming back.

She called me one night and let me know that I had to call friends and family to see who I can move in with because she can’t have a devil-worshipping, prostituting, drug using son (which in her mind directly translated to “gay”). So here I was 14 years old, no mother, and no way to even think about what was going on here. I stayed with one friend for about two weeks before the police showed up at their home and letting them know that my mother was pressing kidnapping charges if they didn’t release me to them. They took me, dropped me off at the empty home, and that was that. I then moved in with my best friend, and that lasted a few weeks before she was transferred out of her mother’s custody to live with her father.

A few days prior to this happening I had heard that my mother was back in town. When I was told to leave this house I called her and she hung up on me after telling her that I had nowhere to go. I called another friend’s mother who immediately came to pick me up and that’s where I lived for a few months. After the financial burden weighed too heavily, they called my aunt who came and picked me up to live with her and my two younger cousins.

Living with my aunt was no treat. Her idea of providing for us was going to McDonald’s on $.39 cheeseburger day and buying 50 of them to last through the week. When my grandfather sent her money to help with the cost of adding me to the household she bought one shirt and one pant for me to begin the tenth grade, and put the rest up her nose. I was constantly at my wit’s end here and walked to my grandmother’s small studio apartment every night until my aunt fell asleep (which was often really late). I ended up moving in with Gammy (who moved to Washington and lives near me now) and finishing my ninth grade year here.

Between ninth and tenth grades my grandmother sent me to my uncle’s house in Washington to get away from things, and also knowing that my uncle is gay and should be able to give advice on how to develop from here. I spent two weeks up here and found a lot of things that I have never seen before, namely people living the life that was inside me that I have never been able to experience. I actually found a place where I felt I could fit in, and his circle of friends welcomed me more than I have ever felt welcomed before. It really was the best place for me to be, but I came back at the end of Summer to go back to school.

End part two.