My Life on the Line Page 2
Yet every joke that made fun of them . . . made fun of me. I had to stand there among the men and take it. I had to like it. I had to laugh. I watched my dad joke right along with them, then weigh in himself.
"How do you fit three queers on one barstool?" my dad asked, the guys leaning in, playing the role.
Shrugs and grins, all waiting for the laugh.
"Turn it upside down!"
Even as a young kid I knew the jokes were about me. But it wasn't just the jokes. The men in my family showed what seemed like a deep-rooted contempt for gay men. Being a kid who knew he was a bit different, hearing the people I loved talk about the "fags," and it often had to do with those fags having some deadly disease—it really sucked, because it made me think that in their eyes I was just a fag too. That got to me a lot. I didn't call myself "gay" at the time. Kissing anyone wasn't on my radar screen, and I didn't even know what sex was. But I knew I liked being near other boys in a way that I felt I had to keep to myself, in a way that I could never tell another living soul, especially the men in my family.
The time I had a real inkling that I was different from the other boys was during a family trip to Lake Tahoe. We went every year with aunts, uncles, and cousins. One day on this particular trip when I was about seven, my uncle Greg thought it would be a hoot to write Hooter Patrol on the T-shirts of my cousin and me. My cousin Derek loved it. A year older than I, he thought it was the best idea in the world that we would now be walking up to women and looking at their boobs. I had absolutely no interest in any of it, even though I watched my cousin and uncle seem to be loving the idea. It was a struggle for me to even pretend to be interested. That day in Tahoe trying to look at anything but boobs, I knew beyond any doubt that I was different, and that I was going to have to put on an act so that nobody would ever know just how different I was.
Another good hint was my interest in Saved by the Bell. Instead of the cute girls on the show, I knew it was because of Zack Morris that I watched every week. I guess everyone who was a gay kid in the early nineties has the same story about that dorky show. But I sure didn't think it was dorky at the time.
I knew beyond any doubt that I was gay when I was about thirteen and hit puberty. Suddenly my interest in being near boys became an interest in being naked near them, in kissing them. I would catch myself looking at other boys, my stare lingering just a second too long. I would consciously tell myself I had to stop doing it or I would lose all of my friends. At the time, my friends were the kids in the band. I had no self-esteem, and I was shy about approaching any of the popular kids, in part because they were often the most attractive guys in the school, and that intimidated me. I didn't want anyone thinking I was trying to hang out with the hot guys, because that's what fags did. So I stuck with my friends in the band, even though I'd given up the clarinet in third grade.
There was one moment I remember that made me feel better about myself, hiding quietly in my little corner of the world. When Ellen DeGeneres came out, I was fourteen years old and truly understood that I was different from all the rest of the boys. Ellen was the complete opposite from me, some celebrity woman in Hollywood. Yet her coming out in the middle of that world did give me some comfort that I wasn't alone. I would still leave the room any time a show like Will & Grace came on. I wanted nothing to do with anything that even hinted at the possibility of people being gay. Though I would have never admitted it to anyone around me at the time, Ellen's coming out helped me when I was just figuring out who I was.
Despite all that, by the time I hit Enterprise High School, I was looking for anywhere to hide that I was gay from my family and friends. My hometown is redneck central. Hell, it's called Redding! Everybody thinks about California as this incredibly progressive state where liberalism and acceptance reign from the Pacific to the Sierra Nevadas. Truth is, California is two states: California and Alabama. I lived in Alabama. To give you an idea of the place, Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton in my county in the 2016 presidential election by thirty-seven points. He beat her in Alabama by less than twenty-eight points.
Redding is also a very Christian place, with a couple of churches within walking distance of my parents' house. It's the home of the Bethel megachurch, which has become one of the most powerful institutions in the city. Every Sunday they draw thousands of people. They even have their own music label now. It's become a cult in Redding. There is a divide in town between those who attend and those who steer clear because they know the crazy ideas being spoon-fed to members at their School of Supernatural Ministry. When the city needed money to pay some cops in 2017, the church donated half a million dollars out of the kindness of their hearts. Of course, a few months later the city okayed the building of a massive new campus for the church. Go figure. Like so many other churches, they use their power and influence to tell people that gay relationships are wrong, and they oppose gay rights by supporting conversion therapy.
While I grew up only a three-hour drive from San Francisco, it felt like seven light-years from the Castro.
* * *
Until freshman year I had no problem hanging out with the drama kids and band geeks. But as I got into high school I realized that was the worst hiding spot for a gay kid whose every thought, every move, was becoming consumed by the need to look and act as straight as possible. Entering high school, the group I was hanging out with were the kids getting teased about being weak or gay. It never occurred to me before high school that kids who gravitated toward singing and acting in plays might be seen as gayer than the other kids. They were just fun to hang out with. Suddenly, it was my group of friends who were the butts of gay jokes from the upperclassmen and, increasingly, our own classmates. By then I was already bigger than everybody else in my class, so nobody was going to call me weak. But the gay thing would be, in my head, guilt by association. I couldn't be associated with those kids anymore. I had to make a switch.
I had been in and around the football world since I was a kid. My dad was a high school referee, and he was working his way into the community college ranks. By the time I was in high school, he had made it all the way to the Division I Western Athletic Conference. When I was nine or ten, he started bringing me to some of the Friday-night games. Sometimes I'd be on the sideline, and other times he'd have me shagging balls and helping around the field. As I grew taller and bigger, I heard over and over that I'd have to venture onto the football team once I was old enough.
I never had much of an interest in football. Before high school, I never played the sport. Heck, other than one year of Little League, I never played sports. Running around a court or a field and tossing around some ball full of air just never held my interest. The idea that you have to love football to succeed in it is a bunch of bullshit. It's a myth that guys in and around the sport love to promote, that somehow to get to the pros you have to have some deep-rooted passion for the game itself. Sure, it helps to be pursuing your passion when you're away from your family and friends, getting your ass kicked on a daily basis, but I found another passion in football: hiding.
As the drama kids in my friendship circle were getting teased for allegedly being "gay," the football players never had to deal with that shit. In fact, they were sometimes the ones dealing it out. If you were associated with the football team, you were straight. Period. No questions asked. Ever. So I decided I was going to play football. My dad couldn't have been happier about it. Finally his son was going to take up the mantle of the O'Callaghan men and venture into the macho sports world.
I damn near quit before my football career kicked off. The freshman playbooks weren't the most complicated documents in the world, but there was still a learning curve. Other kids had played football in peewee leagues or other levels for a while. Or they loved football, had been watching it every Saturday and Sunday with their dads for years. I had been to a lot of high school football games, but I was rarely paying very close attention to what was going on on the field. I had a lot of catching up to do.
At my first practice in August, I was hot and sucking wind. The coaches had to spend extra time with me just to show me how to get into a two-point stance. It looks simple enough, just standing there, knees bent, arms ready to block. Yet, like everything, doing it right takes practice. And that first practice I was just fucking it up.
"Goddamnit, O'Callaghan!" one of the coaches screamed. "Watch what I'm fucking doing!"
He got into a stance. It looked just like what I was doing, but his ass was getting lower, getting more leverage. When I tried it again, it was no better and that just elicited more screaming. I'd never been yelled at by an adult other than my parents. I was the good kid, the kid who didn't screw up. To these coaches I was just another dumb freshman who couldn't listen, and they vented all their frustration on me. Getting yelled at nearly pushed me out of football on day one. But I stuck with it and made it through the season, learning to deal with adults who love to yell. It's amazing how many of them find their way into coaching.
By sophomore year the JV coaches were utilizing me on both sides of the ball, and I was overpowering people. That's when other guys on the football team started asking me to hang out with them. If you were helping the football team win games, you were in the popular clique if you wanted to be. I had to be. It sucked to leave my friendship circle I'd spent so many Saturday afternoons with, but by my sophomore year I was desperate to keep any thoughts of me being gay out of people's heads. I knew I didn't want to have to date any girls to prove myself, so I figured that hanging out with the popular guys and kicking ass on the football team would go a long way to keeping my cover.
I also became an asshole. It's one of my biggest regrets from my youth. In my insane quest to prove to the world I was straight, I started harassing the very drama and band kids I had called friends all those years. Except that wasn't me. I had always been one of the good kids. I'm sure a lot of my friends thought the sudden mean streak came from my football success, but the root of it all was really my desperate insecurity about being gay. For my purposes, it all worked. I never heard a peep about me being gay or not dating girls. I showed girls enough fake interest to make it seem like I was just another straight football player.
I have to say, it was a lot of fun being in the popular crowd. When I was with the kids from band and drama, frankly, we didn't do a whole heck of a lot. Being a part of the athlete crowd meant typical teenage house parties, complete with beer that I found I generally liked the taste of. I also really liked the feeling of it. Even then, my size got in the way of getting very drunk. The bigger you are, the more you need to drink to get there. I didn't mind. I was way too afraid that if I did get drunk, I would somehow let something slip about being gay. But I dabbled with alcohol through much of the second half of high school. I was having a lot more fun than I had hanging out with the band kids.
Being in the popular crowd also gave me the deepest friendship of my life. It was early in my junior year that Brian asked me if I wanted to go to lunch with him. We could leave the school for lunch if we had a car and could get around, so he and I headed out one day and grabbed a hamburger. From that first half hour we hung out together, there was this great connection. Brian's mom had passed away while he was in high school, and it seemed like he didn't have any buddies to chat with about it. For whatever reason, over soda and a burger, I came off as someone who wanted to do more than drink beer and talk about girls. I don't know what signaled I was one of the dudes who would talk about serious crap, but he got that right away. At least, I could listen about serious crap. I didn't want to talk about myself too much, and Brian didn't ask much. Over the next couple of years, Brian and I would just hang out at his house, swim in the pool, and talk. Talk talk talk. Even if I was hiding a permanent secret, with Brian, getting into some other deep shit about life felt good.
Truth is, when I first met Brian I thought he was an attractive guy. That may have been one of the reasons I was cool with being his friend, but by about the third time we hung out, any attraction I had to him had disappeared, replaced by this great friendship. Even if I had continued to find Brian attractive, it wouldn't have mattered. He was the straightest guy I'd ever met, and I was just thrilled to have a new friend in the in-crowd.
On the field, when I moved to varsity my junior year, I was steamrolling people. I was already six foot four and over three hundred pounds. There wasn't a defensive lineman we went up against who could match me pound-for-pound. I was also quick on my feet, one of the marks of a great offensive lineman. When you combine my size with my quickness, in a high school game in Shasta County, there was no stopping me or the running back behind me. The coaches made up this play with an overload formation, called "O'Callaghan Right" or "O'Callaghan Left." The other team knew what was coming and they couldn't stop it. We ran it twenty times that year, and we scored just about twenty touchdowns with it.
* * *
Both sports and hard work came naturally to me.
When I was a kid, almost all I knew about my dad's past was that he was a professional baseball player and had played in the San Francisco Giants system for a while. His example gave me a lot of confidence playing sports. The idea of playing professional sports was in our family lineage. In high school, even as I was being recruited by some major college football programs, I wasn't thinking too much about the NFL. But the possibility of following in my dad's footsteps was somewhere in the recesses of my mind. It wasn't until years later that I found out that Dad never actually played in a Major League Baseball game. He had maybe made it to a farm team for a couple seasons, but an injury derailed his career before it could get started. Regardless of where his skills actually took him, he was a good athlete, as were many of the people in my extended family. Sports were a part of us.
I also got my work ethic from my dad. He was the hardest-working person I knew. Working when he was twelve to support his family, he learned at a young age that hard work was an inherent part of life, and he passed that on to me at an equally young age.
When I was five, my dad was working at a lumber mill when he got a call one night that there was a problem with one of the boilers, so he went down to the mill to fix it. With my dad perched on top, the boiler blew up. He caught on fire and had to jump two stories to get away from the explosion. He got fried. He ended up in the burn unit for weeks, getting skin grafts on his legs and his arms. A lot of people would have slapped a big fat lawsuit on the lumber mill, but not my dad. Insurance paid the medical bills, and he was content with having those covered and heading back to work as soon as possible. I think he truly loved to work.
The only time I ever saw him was at dinner, and he missed some of those. In addition to running the mill, he was selling real estate and officiating the football games in the fall, in part for enjoyment and in part to scrape together money to keep food on the table.
My dad was always trying to get ahead, but never quite getting there. Some of his cousins were getting rich selling real estate in San Francisco, which is why he decided to try his hand at doing so around Redding. My dad was always working extra to pay the bills in Redding, yet I never felt there was something I needed that I couldn't have. We always had a place to live, always had food on the table. My dad did everything he could to make sure we kids never felt like we were struggling financially as a family, even if we were barely staying afloat back then. After all the struggles he saw his family go through when he was a kid, it meant something to him to protect us from that.
Even in that tough financial spot, he was the kind of guy who would give you the proverbial shirt off his back. And he did, all the time. If a buddy hit hard times, my dad was there. At birthdays, my dad made sure my mom had the money to get something memorable for us kids. Heck, he was a football referee, and none of them get paid what they should to take the abuse they get. My dad was a generous guy who loved to laugh, and because of that people loved being around him. I took note of that as a kid. When you gave of yourself to other people, when yo
u opened up your wallet to them without asking for anything in return, they found a way to ignore shortcomings and get along. That stuck with me.
Like so many guys in his generation, he ended most nights with some whiskey. He would start in with the Black Velvet some time around dinner, and once he had a couple he would often start in on my mom. It sometimes seemed like everything she did was a problem. At the time I didn't understand it, and it scared the hell out of me, even though my dad never got physical with my mom. My dad never hit us kids either, but he was the enforcer of the family. He would often let out all of his frustration from the day on us.
When my dad's mom died, and she left her entire estate to my sister and me, skipping my dad, it didn't help matters. She had, by all accounts, been a terrible mother. My father told stories of her putting her cigarette out on him when he was a kid. That's some really sick stuff.
As I grew into my teens, I came to resent my dad for the way he treated my mom at night. I was a mama's boy for sure. With dad gone so much when I was a kid, I bonded a lot more with her. While my dad continued to raise his voice at my mom, I lost more and more respect for him. That drove a wedge between us that got in the way of our relationship as I became a teenager. My dad and I talked less as resentment grew inside me. I could take him yelling at me, but in my mind my mom didn't deserve any of it.
The wedge between my parents that was growing nightly built a deepening depression in me as a young kid. I knew what divorce was, and I figured our house was exactly what it looked like. It seemed inevitable that I would soon watch my dad move out as my sister and I were suddenly cast in the middle of a back-and-forth between their two lives. It ate at me. Yet despite all of the screaming matches, they somehow stayed together. I realize now that through all of that, I learned the importance of commitment. Despite their struggles in those stressful years, they had committed to marriage years before, and no series of arguments was going to upend that. They say what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Watching their commitment, as it seemed they wanted to kill one another, actually made my understanding of ideas like commitment and loyalty a lot stronger.