Treehab
Treehab
LIVING OUT
Gay and Lesbian Autobiographies
David Bergman, Joan Larkin, and Raphael Kadushin
SERIES EDITORS
TREEHAB
Tales from My Natural, Wild Life
Bob Smith
The University of Wisconsin Press
The University of Wisconsin Press
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Madison, Wisconsin 53711-2059
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Copyright © 2016 by Bob Smith
All rights reserved. Except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles and reviews, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any format or by any means—digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise— or conveyed via the Internet or a website without written permission of the University of Wisconsin Press. Rights inquiries should be directed to rights@uwpress.wisc.edu.
Printed in the United States of America
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Smith, Bob, 1958– author.
Title: Treehab: tales from my natural, wild life / Bob Smith.
Other titles: Living out.
Description: Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, [2016]
| Series: Living out: gay and lesbian autobiographies
Identifiers: LCCN 2016012945 | ISBN 9780299310509 (cloth: alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Smith, Bob, 1958– | Comedians—United States—Biography.
| Gay men—United States—Biography.
Classification: LCC PN2287.S58 A3 2016 | DDC 792.702/8092 [B] —dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016012945
“Walking My Dog through the Valley of the Shadow of Death Is a Nice Way to Start the Day” was originally published in I’m Not the Biggest Bitch in This Relationship: Hilarious, Heartwarming Tales about Man’s Best Friend from America’s Favorite Humorists, edited by Wade Rouse, copyright © 2011 (New York: New American Library, 2011). “Silence = Death: The Education of a Comedian” was originally published in Love, Christopher Street: Reflections of New York City, edited by Thomas Keith (New York: Vantage Point, 2012). Both essays are reprinted by permission.
To my Nature Boys:
John Arnold
Michael Hart
Eddie Sarfaty
Michael Zam
Contents
Treehab
My Stone Age
Coffee Point
Nature Boys
Homer and Yukon Island
Finding an Arrowhead
Walking My Dog through the Valley of the Shadow of Death Is a Nice Way to Start the Day
Juneau
My Call of the Wild
Silence = Death: The Education of a Comedian
WWJD: What Would Jackie Do?
At Walden Pond with Henry
Acknowledgments
Treehab
My partner, Michael Zam, and I had just climbed into bed and pulled up the comforter. We’d driven three hours northeast of Toronto to Little Straggle Lake and were staying in Elvira Kurt and Chloë Brushwood Rose’s cottage, which they’ve named “Treehab,” a joke of Elvira’s that I not only love but also wish I’d thought of myself. It was the end of August and the night was chilly. Summers in the far north remind you—even on the hottest days—that the sun is a fire in the sky: when it goes out, the room grows cold. Before turning off the light, we overheard three-year-old Madeline having a conversation in the bedroom next to ours.
“Are Bob and Michael boys?” Her sweet babyish voice sounded as if she was inquiring about the gender of the Easter bunny.
“Yes, honey,” Elvira replied. “They’re boys.”
Michael and I chuckled quietly. “I’m glad she cleared that up,” Michael whispered.
I said, “Maybe Maddie’s confused because we’re not as butch as some of her moms’ lesbian friends.”
“Speak for yourself.”
This was Michael’s first visit to see Maddie. We had flown from New York City to Buffalo to stay with my mother and then headed to Toronto. Madeline had instantly taken to Michael, grabbing him by the hand. “Michael! Hurry! Come inside my house!” He obeyed, promptly entering her “house,” an area near the sofa where her toy stove stood. “Bob! You too!” Madeline was at the delightful age where she sounded exactly like a children’s book: speaking in short declarative sentences that ended in exclamation points. It’s probably the only time in our lives when conversation naturally emulates literature.
Treehab is located in Harcourt Park, a 6,900-acre cottage commune near Algonquin Provincial Park. Harcourt Park has eighteen lakes, but only eight lakes have cottages, and the rest of the land will never be developed. As soon as we arrived at Treehab, Elvira and I took Maddie for a canoe ride. Michael dove in the water and swam beside us. We stopped in a swampy part of the lake, where Maddie and I hunted for frogs among the reeds. We caught a small green frog, which Maddie held in her palm for a second and then released.
Her elation reminded me of the start of my fairy tale. I’ve loved the wild since I was a five-year-old and went camping with my family in the Adirondacks. I was given a pagan welcome to the woods while running in the forest at night with my brothers and sister. Tripping over a log, I tumbled to the ground and then stood up and realized something was squirming in the front pocket of my shorts. I reached in and felt something alive. It was a toad. It didn’t disgust me; it thrilled me. My one regret was not kissing my toad, since it might have been my first prince. I’d always tried to capture frogs and toads and knew instinctively that one seeking me out was a hug from the wild.
Four years before Michael’s introduction to Maddie, Elvira and Chloë had asked me to be their sperm donor. I was surprised and flattered, and it made me understand why so many straight men are insufferably cocksure. A big part of the appeal of heterosexuality is that every act of sexual intercourse holds out the possibility of reproduction: the condom could break, the diaphragm could leak, or the pill could be a placebo. Therefore, having sex with a woman is a pat on the back of every man’s penis—even for men whose DNA should be thought of as an abbreviation for “Do Not Approach.”
A few years before she met Chloë, Elvira had discussed having a baby with me.
“I want to do it the natural way. I think we’ll only need to do it once.” Then the comedian in her added, “Believe me, we’ll only want to do it once.” We both laughed. Elvira and I have been friends for many years. We first met when we performed stand-up together in Toronto and became close when we lived together for two weeks in Sydney. We were performing at a queer comedy festival, and the performers lived in a lavish residential-style hotel where each room was a two-bedroom suite. When we arrived in Australia, the festival’s producer told Elvira and me, “I’ve put the boys with boys and girls with girls except for you two. Somehow I know you’ll get along.” She was right. We were predisposed to becoming friends since we each thought the other was funny. It’s impossible for a hilarious comedian to become close friends with a comedian who isn’t; it’s like a vegan falling in love with a butcher.
Before Elvira brought up the subject, I’d never really seriously considered reproducing. At least that’s what I’d always believed until recently. Eight years ago, I moved from Santa Fe to New York and, while going through some files, found the proposal for my second book of comic essays. It was written in 1998, long before Elvira mentioned becoming her donor and when I was still with my ex, Tom:
On Being a Father�
��Our friends Judy and Sharon recently had a baby, and our friends Nanette and Tommy have just had their second child, so Tom and I have officially become Gay Uncles. I would love to write about the possibility of becoming a father because to my astonishment, I actually think I would make a good one.
I’d forgotten I’d written this. Rereading it reminded me how much I’d changed since I first came out in the early eighties. Back then I presumed that my being gay precluded having children. In fact, I thought of it as one of the advantages of my sexual orientation. My friends and I never talked about children unless a baby was crying on an airplane. Most of us were aspiring bohemians, and artists feel overwhelmed providing day care for their inner child—let alone nurturing a real kid.
Back then, I had one gay friend who had a daughter, but he was considered an understandable anomaly because Gary was in his early forties—most of us were in our twenties—and he had once been married to a woman. His daughter was a souvenir from his trip to heterosexuality.
But the Reagan era was a time when gay men and lesbians realized that our government and much of the culture didn’t care whether we died of AIDS. Their enmity actually did gay people a favor since when people are rooting for your death they immediately lose any influence over your life. They didn’t want us to join the military, get married, or have children. And since reproduction is the simplest do-it-with-someone-else project, many of us started families.
In the midnineties, Sharon Callahan and Judy Gold, two of my closest friends, wanted to start a family. They decided that Sharon would have their first child and Judy their second. They briefly discussed having my ex Tom or me as a donor. During the conversation Judy—another comic—said, “Let’s see, Tom’s good looking but can’t decide on a career, and Bob’s smart but his father was an alcoholic. Great!”
Lesbians can afford to be ruthlessly discriminating when picking a sperm donor. In fact if all women were as selective as lesbians, we’d have evolved into a race of gods by now. Like most of us, my family has genetic pluses and minuses. My dad died of alcoholism, and my mother and sister both suffered from depression, which makes me think of my DNA as a make-it-a-double helix. On the plus side, I’ve never been prone to depression, I’ve tried to keep my booze and pot intake recreational instead of vocational, and I’m smart, funny, and handsome— though when I look back at photos of myself in my late twenties, I find it hard to believe I never thought I was. I’m not being conceited because there is one thing I do know: if you can’t admit your virtues after forty, you won’t make it to fifty. Our biggest drawback as donors for Judy and Sharon was that Tom and I were goys; they wanted a Jewish donor and didn’t buy my argument that every successful stand-up comedian should be considered part Jewish. There were no hard feelings on my part when Sharon chose an anonymous Jewish donor. I knew Judy well enough to know that the child would be their son except when he did something wrong; then he’d be mine. My contribution of a Y chromosome would allow her to yell an accusatory “why?” in my direction every time our child did something she disliked.
It took Sharon almost two years to get pregnant. Sometimes after she went to the doctor to get inseminated, I’d suggest the two of us should lie in bed and smoke cigarettes in order to increase the chances of her getting knocked up. Sharon eventually gave birth to Henry. I became his “Uncle Bob,” and the two of us developed a rapport almost immediately. I’m not exactly sure what it was he liked about me, although I always answered his questions without talking down to him. This wasn’t a conscious strategy to win Henry’s affection. Rather it was more of a response to my own childhood experiences. I resented being treated as a child and fondly recalled the occasions when I’d been treated like an adult. When I was in the fifth grade, I loved that my grandmother would always bring me the previous week’s copy of Newsweek because she knew I followed current affairs—cheering on the Czechs when the Russians invaded in 1968.
When Henry was very young, we took him to Disneyland, and he insisted on sitting next to me on all the rides. As we were leaving a restaurant one night, Sharon said, “Henry, you need to put on your jacket.” He twisted up his face into a small fist of protest. Sharon shot me a conspiratorial look. “Uncle Bob is wearing his jacket,” she said. Henry looked up at me and without another word put on his jacket. Sharon leaned over to me, “Isn’t it nice that someone idolizes you?” “Nice” hardly did justice to the bliss I felt.
It was entirely gratifying because children’s affection is straightforward. There’s no underlying agenda of sucking up to you because you can advance a child’s career selling lemonade or boost his reputation by attending his next show-and-tell presentation. Henry liked me because he liked me. And I liked him. He was curious about everything and cracked jokes almost from the time he began talking. Henry had always been able to talk about his feelings, which made me feel I could also talk about mine. When I took Henry to the museum of natural history, I could say, “Look, we all want to have fun today, so as soon as you’ve had enough, tell me.”
After Henry’s brother, Ben, was born, when I’d take them to the playground, I’d say, “No fighting or crying.” And for the most part, there wasn’t any fighting or crying. I know that encouraging boys to suppress their feelings could be considered psychologically unhealthy. But from my experience, men whose emotions are stunted can learn later to express their feelings, while men whose every emotion is unbridled end up as either unbearable queens or psychotic dictators whose every murderous impulse is acted upon.
Henry and I don’t share the same interests in everything. He loves basketball, and it made me laugh when after we played he told his mothers, “Uncle Bob’s terrible at basketball.” It wasn’t said maliciously but more as a statement of fact, which made his mothers and me laugh even harder.
My relationship with Henry profoundly changed how I thought about children. The first time I babysat for him, I brought the New York Times, assuming that I’d read the paper while he played a game or watched television. No. Henry insisted that I play with him for the entire time—for five hours. When Judy returned from her television taping, I admitted, “I don’t know if I could do this full time.”
“Now you know why I’m exhausted all the time,” Judy said.
“How did our mothers do it?” My mother had four children and Judy’s had three.
“With Librium,” Judy said, naming a tranquilizer popular in the sixties. “I’d be drinking vodka gimlets for breakfast if I had four kids.”
After spending the morning with Henry, it was clear that I wouldn’t enjoy being a full-time parent.
About a year after Elvira met Chloë, the two of them asked me to be their sperm donor. It was a momentous occasion, but unfortunately Hallmark hasn’t produced any greeting cards to mark this special event:
Roses are red,
Sunflowers are huge,
Stay out of our bed,
We just want your splooge.
I said yes and they were ready to begin baby making ASAP, which suddenly gave me qualms. I barely knew Chloë; I’d liked her immediately, but then every gay man has a history of meeting guys you like immediately whom you don’t like later. It was awkward to admit that I needed more time; I wanted to get to know Chloë better and feel as close to her as I did to Elvira. I also wanted to be clear about exactly what our roles would be. Soon after, Chloë and Elvira visited me in Los Angeles, where we talked about everything, and then I visited them in Toronto. During several months of discussions, we agreed they would be the parents and I would be the funcle. The baby would know I was her/his biological father, but I would be the baby’s Bob. We discussed what would happen if the two of them split up, and they assured me that I would always be a part of the baby’s life. My reasoning was that since I trusted Elvira and Chloë to raise our baby, I could trust that they weren’t going to screw me—literally or figuratively. For me, this was an emotional commitment among all of us, a commitment that would last our lifetimes. While we weren’t starting
a family, we were choosing to become Family.
The more time I spent with Chloë, the more I grew to love her: she’s a super-smart bookworm, has a great sense of humor, makes delicious meals, and even though she’s younger than Elvira and me, she’s more mature than either of us. When I finally said, “Yes. Let’s do it,” I had no doubt that it was the right decision; I looked forward to spending time with Elvira and Chloë for the rest of my life.
Before we tried to have a baby, I needed to be tested for sexually transmitted diseases and also needed to have a sperm count done. In California, you can’t have a lab do a sperm count without a doctor’s prescription, and I was warned not to mention my homosexuality since many labs refuse to test gay men. Fortunately, a friend of mine, Jay, had just graduated from medical school. When I told him my problem, he wrote me a prescription. Jay was gay and actually got a kick out of screwing the homophobic medical system. When I went for my sperm test, the jerk-off room had several issues of Hustler magazine, which made me think less of the straight donors and made me wish I’d brought an issue of gay porn to leave as reading material. My test results were fine; it turned out my boys could swim and I had no STDs. We were ready to go.
My first donation took place at my house in Los Angeles. No doctor was involved as the gals had thoroughly researched how to make a baby without fucking. In some ways it felt like we were doing a science fair project. I went into my bedroom and masturbated into a disposable, clear plastic cup. Part of me wondered if the kid would come out looking like the guy I fantasized about. After a short time I came out of my room bearing a hot cup of Joe or Josephine. Elvira came out of their room, grabbed the cup, thanked me, returned to their room, and closed the door. It was definitely awkward for all of us, but none of us commented on it until weeks later in Toronto when my jerking off into a cup twice a day had become a household chore. I realized that we might have become too comfortable on the day I brought my cup upstairs while Chloë was on the telephone. When she saw me, she said to whomever she was speaking, “I’m sorry, I’ve got to go. Bob and I are inseminating this morning.” I suggested her declaration would be the perfect way to fend off unwanted phone solicitations.