"No Seas Maricón” (Don’t be a Fag)

Today is the day I survived suicide.

I woke up at 6 AM to find that I had wet myself during the night. There is suicide, of course, but there is hygiene and self respect as well. I am disgusted to find that my comforter, my bed, my jeans are all wet. I have not urinated on myself since I was five years old. My parents were furious whenever I got the sheets wet, and as punishment I was made to stand on the balcony, with no underwear, until the sheets were dry. My brothers Xavier and Gabriel also wet their beds. In fact, they continued to do so well into their teens. However, they were not made to stand naked on the balcony; they received no punishment. They were not gay, they were not feared to be abnormal. When I asked my parents why Xavier and Gabriel were treated differently, I was told, “They are younger than you!” I was warned, “No seas maricón (don't be a fag).”

As the oldest son in an upper middle class Latin American family, I was made to tow the line. “No seas maricón” was my constant admonishment. So today, the day after suicide, I wake up wet and my first thought is that only a fag would allow such unsightliness. I go to the bathroom to take off my blue-jeans, and wrap myself in a beach towel. Slowly I get back into bed. I have no recollection of having taken the pills. All I remember, all I fear, is my parents’ teaching. “No seas maricón. ”

I go back to sleep, thinking of Xavier and Gabriel. In my dream, all three of us are rolling down a grassy hill in Buenos Aires. For several hours we roll effortlessly, time after time, and we giggle shamelessly. The dream lasts for two hours, when I am awakened by the alarm clock. I have no understanding or fear of being late for work. I notice that I am wearing a beach towel around my hairy muscular legs; I notice that my legs are alive and throbbing; I notice that I am not dead. Now I remember the suicide attempt. Why am I alive?

I stumble to the bathroom, and throw up. I must have knocked around the middle of the night, because my legs and knees are bruised and they ache. Even in my stupor I notice that they are black and blue. Perhaps in my sleep walk I was recreating grassy Buenos Aires and rolling down hills with Xavier and Gabriel. I feel the urge to throw up again. The sleeping pills come down my throat. Chemistry has betrayed me; it has not allowed me to die. I wander back to bed, my legs in pain. This time, thinking of Xavier and Gabriel will not help me go back to sleep. I am hurting, and lucid enough to be scared. I call Anne on the phone. Anne is a doctor; she’ll know what to do.

”I need help,” I say. “I took 90 sleeping pills and I need help.”

Anne is busy rounding up the kids, getting them ready for school and getting herself ready for work. The last thing she needs to hear this morning is that her gay ex-husband has tried to commit suicide. However, above all, she is kind. She listens to me with patience. She hears the fear in my voice.

“What did you take?” she asks.

“I think it's called Ambien,” I say, “or something like that. I threw up.”

“You have to stay awake,” says Anne. “I’ll be there as soon as I can, but you have to stay awake.”

Anne’s mother (my ex-mother in law) is visiting her. I hear Anne telling Celeste to get on the phone with me. Celeste is quick. She nurses me over the phone, “Sweetie, you have to stay awake,” she says. I don't know who it is, but I recognize her voice. I don’t know its Celeste, but I know its the voice of someone I once loved. “I took sleeping pills,” I utter, like a child confessing to his Nanny. Celeste is cool. She has always been strong. She repeats incessantly, “Sweetie, you have to stay awake.” I hear her voice, but I also hear Xavier and Gabriel as we giggle, rolling down the hills.

It takes thirty to forty minutes to get from Anne’s house to my house. Time, however, is irrelevant to me. I am in a drug induced stupor. I can’t move out of my bed. Fortunately, the night before I decided to leave the front door unlock. Anne is able to come in without using a key or ringing the bell. She comes straight to my bedroom. I’m surprised that she brought the kids with her. I had supposed that she would leave them with her mother. Anne asks the kids to stay downstairs, but they will have none of it . They come to my bedroom, with Anne, and jump on my bed as is their custom. Joey is silent. I can tell from his look that he is scared and wants to ask questions, but he says nothing. Intuitively, he knows what has happened. I am naked, with a beach towel wrapped around me, and my king size bed is soaked in urine. I am not wearing my usual silk pajamas.

Christina, my six year old, is never one to keep quiet. She finds the whole thing comical. “Why are you sleeping with a towel around you?” she asks. She has not noticed the urine and my nakedness, which are evident to Joey and Anne. She giggles, nervously and innocently. “You are naked!” she squeals.

Anne asks the children to go their room, and this time they obey silently. Anne puts on her doctor’s hat, and begins to assess the situation. “Where’s the bottle for the pills you took?” she asks. Groggily, I point to table next to my bed. The empty prescription is there. She reads the label. “Did you throw up?” she asks. I answer yes.

Apparently there’s no danger. Anne informs me that I would need to have taken ten times the amount of pills I took to cause any damage.

“Why did you do this?” she asks. I have no easy, stock answer for her. Right now, all my mind can deal with is trying to understand why I survived. I was not supposed to wake up; I was supposed to die last night and this conversation was never meant to take place.

The children get tired of waiting in their bedroom. They noisily creep back into my room and jump on my bed. “Daddy,” asks Joey. “Are you sick?”

“Yes,” says Anne. “Daddy is very sick, and he needs to stay in bed. I’ve asked you to leave him alone. Now please go downstairs and get a snack. I’ll be taking you to school in a minute.” Anne is angry.

Reluctantly, the kids go downstairs, smearing their hands along the wall from the top of the stairs to the bottom of the stairs. On the last step, they jump on the floor and scream, “Safe!” I’ve asked them a thousand times not to do this, and I will ask them a thousand times more before they listen to me. I laugh at their stubbornness. Anne looks at me, perplexed by my laughter. I keep quiet, and she continues to play doctor. “I want you to call a psychiatrist, right now,” she says. “You need immediate intervention.”

Anne picks up clothes that I have left on the floor. It’s unlike me to leave a messy room, but there are soiled shorts and wet socks next to the bed. I don’t remember leaving them there. Maybe I slept-walked last night. Anne is moving around the room, ostensibly tidying up. She moves my shoes that are next to the window and puts them on the other side of the room. There’s no reason to it. She picks up a vase, one of the ones that I painted, and appears to be admiring it while she talks to me, without facing me. “You have to see a psychiatrist,” she repeats.

I can’t talk. I need caffeine, or something like caffeine to wake me up. I can’t understand why Anne is in my bedroom. I feign lucidity. “Sure,” I tell her. “I will call the psychiatrist. I promise.”

And this, now, what I write next, is the hardest thing to recount in this chapter. These are the words that I have dreaded writing. In my grogginess, in my doped-up, sleeping-pill stupor, in my idiotic, imbecilic and anesthetized state, I was able to detect a tear on Anne’s cheek. As she held one of those blasted vases I painted, as she avoided eye contact with me, I saw a single wet droplet. Anne never cries. She is Mother Earth, Betty Homemaker and Hilary Clinton rolled up into one. She is not supposed to weep. Not my Anne. She’s supposed to be strong and invincible Just yesterday she had told me that if anything ever happened to me, she would be alright.

I want to puke again. I run to the bathroom, with the wet towel clinging to my ass. I throw up profusely into the sink. Anne respects my privacy, and waits for me in the bedroom. When I return, I find that she has written down a telephone number on the pad next to my bed. “Promise me you will never do this again. Promise me that if you ever feel this way again, you will call me. Promise me.” She wipes the tear, and faces me head on. She puts on her Germanic face of strength and valor. Here’s my Mother Earth once again. Here’s my Wagnerian mistress of strength! She points to the paper with the number she scribbled on it. “That’s the number of a shrink,” she says. “I want you to call him, today.”

“I will,” I say. “I will, I will I will.”

I have become such a good liar. I have no intention of calling. As a gesture of sincerity, I rub my hands through my thick black curls and nod my head three or four times. All I want is for her and the kids to leave my house, so that I can go back to sleep. Perhaps, I tell myself, I have already died or I’m still in the process of dying. This is simply a dream dreamt in limbo, a bad dream of having failed suicide, a transitory dream from life to death. Perhaps, after the kids and Anne disappear and after I go back to sleep, I will find that I am truly dead and that this life is over. Then there will be nothing but dreams of giggly boys rolling on Argentine hills.

Anne nods her head simultaneously with mine. She probably does not believe I will call the shrink, but she has no time to debate the matter. She yells down the stairs, telling the kids to get ready to leave. She looks at me strongly, in her “I’m taking no prisoners” look. She lays down the law, lovingly. “Stay in bed. Drink lots of water. You need to flush out whatever is still inside you. Call the psychiatrist, and see him today. I’ll be calling you at noon. Don’t you dare do this ever again. I would stay with you, but I have meetings all day. Faucci would kill me if I didn’t come in today. Do I need to send in my mother to take care of you or will you be OK?”

I’ll be OK. Go away. I’ll be OK.

* * *

Anne and the kids are gone. I close my eyes firmly and resume my splendorous sleep. I am certain that I will not awaken again, that I will die in my sleep. Unfortunately, two hours later I wake. The incessant green clock tells me it’s 10:30 am. I have neither hunger nor thirst. I am neither tired nor awake. I simply “Am” (in that horrible Descartes sort of way), I “Am” alive, and I “Am” confused.

Without knowing why, I go to the kitchen. I find the plastic bags with all the keys. I guess Anne and the kids did not notice these this morning. I put them all inside a cookie jar. Behind the cookie jar are the plastic bags from the supermarket, the ones that I bring my groceries in and that I collect in order to recycle. Fate is cruel to have placed these plastic bags here. As soon as I see them, I concoct a plot. These bags are lethal; everyone knows that you should not play with plastic grocery bags because you can suffocate. I’ve told this to my own kids many times. In defiant denial, I decide that I will wrap two plastic bags over my head, and seal them tight with duct tape. I will suffocate. I will die and it will cease to be. Yesterday I failed, but today I will succeed.

Without thinking, moving quickly so that I won’t lose my courage, I place the bags over my head and seal them tight with tape around my neck. I have no idea how long this will take. I hope that it will be very quick and painless. Faster than I realized would be the case, I run out of air. I panic. My inner voice tells me repeatedly, “No seas maricón. You said you would kill yourself, so go ahead and do it. No seas maricón.” Panic, however, prevails. I rip a hole over my mouth so I can get some air. I tare the bags off my head. I breath heavily and desperately. I can’t go through with it.

With the towel still wrapped around my ass, I go back to bed. I decide that at 3 pm, I will stick my head into the gas oven. That will surely do the trick. But I won’t do it now; I want to enjoy my sleep until 3 pm. Sleep is so incredibly comforting. Every fifteen minutes I wake up and look at the clock. At 1:30 I draw comfort that I still have lots of time to sleep before 3 pm. Lots of hills to roll on until then. At 2:30 I start to lose my cool. At 2:45 I feel dread. In my last dream before waking at 3, there are no giggles from Xavier and Gabriel, and their faces have changed. Now they are no longer my brothers rolling down hills, they are my children, Christina and Joey jumping on my bed. I don’t see the green hills of Buenos Aires, I see Anne’s face instead. I wake up. It is firmly 3 pm. I feel incapable of going through with it. I remember Anne’s single tear, and I realize I cannot do it.

* * *

I’m drinking coffee. I don’t know why I’m drinking coffee, other than its familiar. Usually, it is comforting, but today it is only familiar. I sit in front of the television, with the sound off and with a mug in my hands. I sip. It is tasteless. I turn on the volume. It is uninteresting. My mind wonders. I think of Anne. Why didn’t she call? This strikes me as odd. I check the answering machine, however, and it tells me that I had a message at 12, exactly at 12 noon as she said she would. I must have been sleeping. “Listen, I’ll be over with the kids at 3:15,” says the voice message on the machine. “Hope you are sleeping and resting up.” Good, I say. Good.

* * *

Anne and the kids arrive at 3:15 pm, as promised. By this time I have changed out of the wet towel and into shorts. My hair is dirty and disheveled, and I have not brushed my teeth. I open the door for them when I see them coming up the brick pavement. Christina wraps her arms around my neck and kisses me on the cheek, “Daddy!” she says. “I missed you today!” She proceeds to give me five get well cards that she made for me in art class. Joey is more standoffish. He looks at me with his beautiful green-blue eyes, and sheepishly asks me, “Are you ok? I was worried abut you all day!” My heart sinks. How could I have almost done this to this boy, to this child who will never fear whether he is gay, to this all-American creature with soft blond hair and eyes so different from mine and yet so alike, to this rascal who will never hear the words “no seas maricón.”

The kids go to the kitchen to get a drink. Anne sits me down in the living room. “Did you call the psychiatrist?” she asks. I tell her no; I tell her that I’m feeling much better and that, besides, my internist has already put me on Zoloft two weeks ago. I should start feeling better any day now.

“Are you still seeing your therapist?” she asks I tell her yes.

“Does he know you are suicidal?” she asks.

I get defensive. “I’m not suicidal,” I tell her. “It was only one time. One time attempt does not make a man suicidal.”

There is no logic to my madness, but Anne lets me slide this time. “In any event,” she says “I want to see you start eating. You are too thin.”

I confess to her that I have not had a meal in three days. I have no food in the house, only frozen dinners. Anne insists that I make one of these and that I eat it in front of her. Reluctantly, I agree.

The kids are watching Sponge-Bob on the tube, and eating ice pops. Anne and I are sitting outside. She’s wearing one of her fashionable business casual outfits from Nordstrom’s. I’m wearing smelly shorts and a tee shirt. I have not shaved nor bathed. I’m eating my frozen dinner. Slowly, with effort. Anne is observing ever mouthful I take. She begins do therapy on me

“What are you afraid of?” she asks. “Why do you feel you have to end your life?”

There are so many answers, and there is no answer. There’s Xavier and Gabriel and the hills of Buenos Aires, but this makes no sense to me either. There’s having messed it all up, and never having had it to begin with. There’s being a fag and being called a maricón. In the end, I decide on the economical. I have always been the strong provider, the “better-than-your-average-heterosexual” income earner. But it’s crashing in all around me. My company is going under, and I don’t know how much longer I will draw a pay check. I tell her I am afraid of losing my job, and of not being able to provide for the kids. I almost tell her that if I fail, that if I become just another ordinary Joe without a job, that if I’m not super-income earning Dad, it will prove them all right. It will prove that I am, truly, a maricón.

Anne tries to convince me that even if I lost my job there are plenty of things I could do. I could get another job; I could open a business; I could teach law school. None of it seems plausible to me but I listen to her anyway. Having food in my stomach makes me feel better. It gives me courage to ask her: “Anne, if I were on the street, would you take me in?”

I don’t see the tear, but I hear it in her voice. Anne assures me that I could always come live with her. How this would be possible is not clear to me. “No seas maricón,” says my inner voice, “no seas maricón.” How a gay man and his ex-wife and kids could live together is clearly implausible. Again, the inner voice: “No seas maricón.” Yet, her assurance gives me strength, and silences the inner voice.

I continue eating. I finish my first meal in three days.

Anne clears the plates and looks me firmly in the eyes. “OK,” she says. “Now that you have that in your stomach, you are coming over to my house for a real meal. I’m going to fatten you up.”

Yes, Mother Earth. Yes, Betty Homemaker. Yes, Hilary Clinton. I will let you heal me back to health.