A Man Called Mother

Summer 1978

By dusk, he’s perched upon his chosen picnic table top, boots planted on the bench. The seat of his jeans scrapes across splintered wood speckled with faded forest green paint. Wide-spread knees support his elbows as he digs through a pack of smokes. He’s a denim-and-plaid loner who sports a big brass oval of a belt buckle at his waist, a Marlboro cowboy without his horse. A snap of a Bic lighter precedes a flash of flame; moments later, the persimmon kiss of a cigarette tip traces a perfect parabola in the darkness as it rises from calves to his lips, then back again.

Nearby, beneath the pine boards of the park shelter and around its perimeter, simmers a bacchanal of sexual pleasure. At the foot of the same picnic table, one man kneels before another, bobbing above a fistful of dick. Similar clusters have formed around the clearing. Pairs and trios relish each other in the heat of the August night. Other figures wend between the scattered tables, seeking solace from the shadows who loiter against the walls. Some men bide their time, unwilling to settle for the first pair of groping hands or hungry mouth; from figures that barely can be distinguished from the darkness, they choose their target and, like a spider in its web, wait for his approach. A handful haunt this quiet space beneath the wooded pines like restless spirits, flitting in nervous circles from soul to soul in search of someone to lay them to rest.

And among the whispers, the whimpers and the sharp intakes of breath, the murmurs of approval and the hushed laughter of men coming to their senses after climax, among the feverish hurricane of courtships and love affairs commenced and abandoned in the space of mere quarter hours, the man atop the table is the tranquil eye at its center.

The men here call him Mother.

Mother. Not because he’s effeminate. Far from it. Not with that ranch hand stance, the deep drawl, the skin of leather. Not with the thicket of mustache perched on his upper lip, meticulously groomed. Mother, not because he’s passive, nor because there’s a Father around who’s the real boss. Here, after hours in the woods of Bryan Park, long after the groundskeepers have ejected the last rowdy rednecks and swept the premises for stragglers, Mother’s word is law. Every man who parks his car in the adjoining neighborhood, who casually strolls the streets as if out for a nighttime walk, then ducks up the embankment to creep across a carpet of pine needles into the park’s forbidden cruising area, knows to abide by Mother’s rules.

He’s not Dictator, though. Not King, nor Chief. Mother, because among this band of outlaws who assemble for their quick trysts, he knows gentle persuasion works best. An appeal to a man’s better nature is a more effective motivator than barking directions. Men don’t mistake Mother’s gentle entreaties as anything less than dominance, though; what we do in these shadows is against every state statute. As criminals, we all fear authority more than we should. So when Mother ousts someone disobeying or flouting our shared conventions, after park hours, they stay ejected. There’s no appeal.

I’d learned Mother’s rules from the start, a couple of years prior, after the notion of park cruising had entered my mind when my mom had read aloud to my father an item from the paper about men being arrested here for public indecency. Instead of receiving the information as a caution, I’d immediately biked over to the park I’d previously only thought of as the gathering place for the annual neighborhood cookout, and scoured every restroom for graffiti that might indicate where the action took place.

It had been less than 48 hours later that I’d made my first appearance at the park’s northernmost shelter, by the light of a half moon. Mother had observed me for several minutes to ascertain that I knew what I was getting myself into before beckoning me to take a seat at his feet. I’d made the mistake of grabbing for him, in a clumsy way, thinking he wanted sex.

Mother has never so much as unzipped his Levis, though, not in all the time I’ve known him. He watches only, observing the trespassing pack around him. He is the guardian who keeps an eye to the east, where the sole road connects this section of the park to the neighborhood beyond, so that he can warn us of a patrol car’s approach. He may stroll around his domain to witness the couplings taking place, but I never see him partake.

That night, he had swatted away my hand and blown twin columns of smoke from both nostrils. “Child,” he began. Normally it was a particularity of address that annoyed me, but in his good-natured rumble it failed to make me bristle. “I’ve seen enough to convince me you know what you’re getting yourself into. But if you intend to come back, there are some things you should keep in mind.”

Apparently the very way I’d entered the park had attracted his displeasure. “We never, ever use the road,” he told me, pointing at the paved stretch running by Youngs Pond and up into these woods, that only minutes before I’d biked along. “Now, there’s no chain across it, like at the park’s main entrance, but that road is still closed after dark. Most people might think nothing of it, but someone with sharp eyes and a suspicious mind,” he said, waving his cigarette at the long row of dimly-lit houses facing Bryan Park Drive, “might see a boy riding his bike into the park. They watch, but they never see him ride out again. And they begin to think. And wonder. They start to worry. They might even worry enough to call out the pigs. That’s what we’re trying to avoid here. Bad things happen when the police come down on us. Capiche?”

I don’t know the last word, but I can glean meaning from context. I nod, and apologize.

“Now, the other night we had the boys in blue up here. Some folks ended up behind bars. All the regulars, the smart ones who know the rules, got away clean—because we help each other. Not a damn thing I can do about dumbasses who’ve got to get in another thirty seconds of fun—thirty seconds they could’ve used getting to safety. You planning on being a smart boy or a fuckin’ dumbass?” When I reply that I prefer the former, he nods with approval. “That’s what we like to hear.”

As men drift by, some shirtless, some with their pants around their knees, Mother lays out his other rules. He doesn’t abide any hustling. Over the following months and years of adolescence in which Bryan Park is a vital part of my life, Mother doesn’t bat an eye at the sex work I do everywhere else. That’s my own business. Within the park bounds, though, I don’t dare. In Mother’s philosophy, transactional sex invites a predatory element into this sacred space. If a man chooses to slip me a few dollars after excellent service, it can be considered a gratuity. Were I ask for it, or worse, demand a payout, I’d be violating one of Mother’s highest precepts.

Mother forbids certain items. The noise from transistor radios might attract attention from the local residents. Same with flashlights, even on the darkest nights. Glass bottles are a distinct danger to our community, though many of the rougher men try to sneak in booze anyway. A beer bottle could be too easily left on a table and knocked off in the dark, only to shatter on the floor and cause an accident. If someone sliced an artery in the woods, no one would have any way of phoning an ambulance or getting someone to a hospital. And the last thing any congregation of homosexuals needs is for their enemies to discover a dead body in one of their haunts.

Cigarettes are fine, and Mother turns a blind eye to the occasional joint, but any harder substances compound our crimes. There’s no fighting allowed. If two men become riled—jealous over a swain favoring one over the other, Mother or one of the regulars steps in to defuse tensions before they rise too high.

Up here, in the dark, in the woods, we are the lawless. We offend one penal code with our intrusion; another by congregating, a third with every proposition, and add to the increasing tally with every casual act of sodomy. Outlaws we may be, but as Mother reminds us, we can still be gentlemen. We cultivate rules for a reason: when we cannot rely upon enforcers of law to protect us, we must defend each other. We may not know each other’s professions or names—not our real names, anyway—nor might we even recognize each other in full light of day. But in the most essential and ephemeral of senses, when together, we form a community.

We call the man Mother, because in this space, no matter our ages or incomes or the color of our skins, sharing a mother makes the rest of us brothers. For a short time.

In my earliest weeks at the park, in my unofficial status as the newest and most tender of meat, I often find myself at the center of a scuffle. Two strangers, each desiring my exclusive company, might attempt a tug-of-war with my arms, or react with raised hackles when I prefer one over the other. I quickly become adept at silently defusing these potential scuffles, either by uniting the men in their attentions and servicing them both, or by placating one with whispered promises to return after I venture into a corner with another. Mother notices, and rewards me with nod or a subtle thumbs-up. 

Weeks into my tenure, once I’ve proven myself, during one of my unoccupied moments he again pats the picnic table and beckons me to sit. Once I’m in position, he places an avuncular arm around me and murmurs in my ear, “How about you stop by my place this Saturday for tea? I’ll read your cards.”

With genuine enthusiasm, I agree. It’s a sign that I’ve been accepted into the tribe.

This is what I half-expect, upon being invited to afternoon tea at Mother’s home: lace doilies, scones, and pale liquid, steaming hot, poured into Mother’s best china. Mother’s home, though, set in a blue-collar corner of Lakeside not far from the park, isn’t exactly the picture-perfect setting for a high tea. From a distance, it looks like a kid’s card house constructed from flat slabs of pitted aluminum siding, precariously perched atop a foundation of cinder blocks, overgrown with honeysuckle.

So what I actually encounter is amber brown beverage both brewed in, and served from, a glass jug that’s been sitting in the back porch sun all morning with a number of Lipton’s tea bags. While my scrawny backside attempts to find a spot on his sofa between the broken springs, I watch as he pours packet after packet of sugar, no doubt collected from fast food joints, into the concoction and stirs in a splash of lemon juice from a bottle. “Let it cool a little,” he advises, after pouring it over ice.

I’m not and never have been a fan of sweet tea served in the Southern style, but it’s a blistering day and tiny sips help alleviate the July heat. While Mother fusses with the jug and places a glass coaster upon the trunk acting as a coffee table, I look around the bare bones of his room. The sofa seems like a curbside find. The television, a black and white model jury rigged with a white wire hanger for an antenna, alternates between rolling snow and a weekend fishing program. Nothing about the furnishings is outright impoverished. Despite the hovering cloud of tobacco smoke, nothing is filthy. But Mother’s home definitely strikes me as the sort of bare-bones set-up of someone struggling to make ends meet—like birds that weave detritus into their nests, it’s a domicile crafted out of makeshift odds and ends.

While I watch him fuss with a packet of Nabisco Cameo cookies, I wonder why I’m even here. Tea, sure. I’d half-expected that to be an excuse for seduction. I wouldn’t mind being bedded today. Mother’s not an unattractive man. So far, I’ve not picked up on any sexual intent in his chit-chat.

“Now,” he finally says, plopping down on the sofa near me. He regards me with speculation over the rim of his glass. “Tell me about you.”

All I can do is stammer and stare. I hate talking about myself, particularly to strangers and in such an open-ended way. I add three years to both my age and my school grade in my inarticulate accounting, to which Mother nods and conceals his amusement with an index finger firmly tamping down his mustache. My baby face gives me away and, if anything, makes me look even younger than I happen to be. I’m so paranoid of exposure that every word from my mouth is a lie. I lie about the neighborhood where I live, the grade I’m in, the school I attend.

It’s not until he changes the subject to my secret life that I hew more closely to truth. When he inquires where I’ve cruised, I enumerate a lengthy list of toilets around town that I’ve discovered on my own—the public library downtown with its peepholes, the glory holes on the university campus where my parents teach. I brag about having walked The Block after dark and loitering in the Hotel Jefferson men’s rooms on weekends. I talk about how I’d begun my sexual career as a lookout in the cruisiest restrooms, observing the action while obstructing potentially hostile intruders, and I take pains to make the experience sound more distant in the past than it actually is.

I’m so voluble on the subject that it’s a few minutes before I notice I’m the only one speaking. Yet I continue, equally as anxious to show off my sexual credentials as I am to hide anything I consider truly personal. Though aware how close I come to braggadocio, I can’t stop. I’m a baby-faced adolescent painting himself as a jaded old roué, desperate for an approval I never knew I so badly needed. I’m a fluffy golden retriever overeager to run with the grizzled wolf pack. Yet I keep talking, though I know I should shut up.

Mother sits at the opposite end of the sofa, wiping condensation from his glass and taking the occasional sip, until at last I run out of words. My jaw hangs low for a moment, then snaps shut. “Well, all right, then,” he comments, amused. “How’s that tea?”

I flush red and try to wash away my embarrassment with a swig of Mother’s evil brew. I’ve just learned a lesson in not overselling myself. Desperate to change subject, I look around the room for any inspiration for a new topic. My eyes alight on a photograph on a shelf over the TV—perhaps the only truly personal touch in the room. It’s a black and white print on glossy stock, edges scalloped, that leans against an empty frame, as if Mother never quite got around to encasing it behind glass. I can barely make out two small figures, children maybe, on a beach. “Who’s that?” I ask, pointing.

Mother’s face falls slack. He stares at the shelf, then back at me, seeming to see neither. Then he stands. “Let’s look at your cards,” he says.

I’m not the only one who wants to keep his personal life private, it seems.

Tarot cards aren’t new to me. It’s the nineteen-seventies. Everyone has an indulgence that’s a little hippie-woo-woo. My mom is heavily into yoga, which in this period isn’t valued so much as a form of exercise or wellness as it is as a key to spiritual transcendence; she’s also convinced she has the power of extra-sensory perception, which she leverages, with little success, to spy upon her partners’ cards in rubbers of bridge. Her best friend, Kay, is heavily into numerology and attends EST workshops. Kay’s kids, whom I have babysat on occasion, devour books about aliens. All my school friends, when they’re not playing Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, are obsessed with the goings-on in the Bermuda Triangle. I have a stylized used Rider-Waite tarot deck myself, gifted me as an afterthought by one of my dad’s students. She’d used to babysit us when I was younger, but she’d abandoned the cards for palmistry, shortly before I outgrew the need for her.

Never before, though, have I known anyone to handle the tarot with such authority. As we sit at the rickety dining table in mismatched chairs, I watch as Mother withdraws his deck from within the recesses of a carved teak box. He juggles the cards together a few times before handing them to me. “Shuffle,” he instructs.

I obey, gratified in a minor way by the eyebrow he quirks when I riffle the deck in what approaches a professional manner, a skill honed by countless after-school rounds of gin rummy with my mother. Then, at his instruction, I cut the deck into rough thirds, restock them, and begin the process again until he’s satisfied. Once I’m done, he takes back the deck and places the top three cards into a triangle with a fourth at the center. “Past, present, future,” he explains, tapping the cards around the perimeter. He turns them face up.

And he begins to read. I no longer remember these three cards once I’ve left the monastic quiet of his apartment. What I recall, however, is the expert way in which he conjures stories and meaning from the colorful medieval images. Details that my eye would miss, he draws attention to and explicates. My dad’s student, the babysitter, always had to pore over a tiny booklet for interpretations of any given card, and even those brief explanations seemed flat and uninteresting, divorced from the cards themselves. Mother’s means of interpretation is personal. He spins a story from the characters on the cards, making the world they inhabit feel occupied and alive.

“This last card is you,” he says, pointing at the triangle’s center before flipping it over. “Two of pentacles. Huh.” He’s resting both forearms on the table, leaning forward to look me in the eye. “I suspect this is a card that’ll be following you around all your life. See how this li’l bastard's got the two coins in his hand? He’s juggling.” His long forefinger darts out to trace the path of a band connecting the globes. “And this? It’s the infinity sign. He’ll be at it a long time. But see how he dances? This ain’t a burden for him. Change comes—change always comes, you know. It’s always on the horizon. Storms brew—see how those distant ships are in danger? Storms rock the ocean, the sun rises and sets, seasons change. Shit happens, some good, some bad. But look at you. You’ve got everything under control. You keep on juggling. You won’t be dropping those balls anytime soon. That’s just how you do. You see it, right?”

The previous three cards haven’t meant much to me, but somehow this image, the two of pentacles, hits home. I’ve always been the kid who keeps dancing, balls aloft and in motion, no matter what happens. I balance my academic responsibilities and my extracurriculars with the secret life that’s often my only joy. I keep in equilibrium my public and private worlds, good boy and bad boy, sinner and saint. On the card, those coins look large and heavy. The juggler keeps on juggling, though, even against a background of storm.

“That mean anything to you?”

I look up from the cards and meet Mother’s eyes, then nod. Though I’m not a true believer in divination, I recognize the truth of that one card. I suspect Mother is a juggler, too.

And though Mother will never know it, that one card will follow me around, the rest of my life.

Though I continue to haunt Bryan Park at night for the next three years, I never learn much more about Mother than a few rumors—how he’d had an influential job at the Federal Reserve until he’d been busted in a park vice raid, years before. How his name and photo had been printed in the Times Dispatch, publicly branded as a sexual deviant. How he’d lost his wife and two children in the aftermath and circled bottom until finding work as a florist’s assistant.

I never know if any of it is true. By the time I graduate from college and return home in 1985, even sleepy Richmond cowers under the long shadow cast by the AIDS crisis. Like so many of the tribe that once danced beneath the stars, Mother is gone. Packs of outlaws no longer congregate in the park, after dark. Those that do, leave in their wake fields of litter—emptied glass bottles of cheap booze, the charred remains of joints, the kind of harder drug paraphernalia that would have been forbidden only a handful of years before. The neighbors become vigilant; the police patrol more often. 

Camelot has fallen. Without Mother and his disciples, what was an idyllic Bedford Falls becomes a Pottersville of sleaze and vagrancy.

Those storms on the horizon, those roiling waters and the ships that flounder upon them, have arrived. As predicted, change has flooded in. So many of my companions have already been swept away in the waters, and those who remain cling onto the wreckage for dear life.

Amidst it all, I dance. I keep the balls in motion. I juggle on, and on.

Mentors arise from the most unexpected places. I’ve discovered mine on library bookshelves, in classrooms, in casual conversations in crowded bars. As a kid, I encountered one as a stranger on the other side of a men’s room glory hole, who offered tips on the culture and etiquette of cruising via a series of penned notes on squares of toilet tissue. Another later taught me the confidence of placing value in what I’d been giving away for free.

And then there was the mentor I met on the cusp between eras, a guardian who nightly sat atop a park picnic table with an eye to the horizon, watching for danger. A kind, quiet man who reminded his band of outlaws that they must remain civilized and treat each other with compassion. Not tyrant, not bully, not drill master. That lost generation called that man Mother.