Hamill - Filthy beasts: a memoir

A VID R EADER P RESS

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Copyright 2020 by Kirkland Hamill

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First Avid Reader Press hardcover edition July 2020

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Interior design by Kyle Kabel

Jacket design by Grace Han

Jacket photograph courtesy of the author

Author photograph Sigi Friedman

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

ISBN 978-1-9821-2276-8

ISBN 978-1-9821-2278-2 (ebook)

To my fellow filthy beasts, Robin and Monty: You are the bravest people I know. I love you.

To my motherferocious, fearless, and funny. You taught me how to survive you.

W hen I tell people stories about my mother, as I tend to do, people sometimes ask me how long shes been gone. I think back to the spring day in 1982 when I asked her to drive me into town and she got into the car with a full glass of scotch, wearing the sunglasses that she never took off, and she chewed her nails nervously as she tried to figure out how to start the engine.

And I remember years later when I called her condo in Florida because I hadnt heard from her in a while, and she said I call you every week, and I said No you dont, and she said I leave a message at your dorm, and I said I have a phone in my room, and she said Is your math class getting any better, and I said Im not in boarding school anymore. I went to college this year.

And I remember the day, a year before she died, when I put down the phone after speaking with her, and that familiar tornado of sadnessa panic attack, really, that always started as a pinprick in my gut and swirled like a funnel cloud before traveling up my stomach and into my throat, where it swallowed my words until I hacked it out in heaving sobslost its power and I didnt cry for her anymore.

And I remember it was a hot June day in Bermuda when my younger brother Monty and I flew in from opposite ends of the Eastern Seaboard to join our older brother Robin and our stepfather by her bedside to say goodbye. I leaned over her bed, the only one of the assembled capable of being face-to-face with her at the end, and asked Are you scared? as three nurses scurried around her, one to pull out the breathing tube, one to administer the morphine, and one to shut off the machines. And I remember that she looked up at me with her bright green eyes, the only part of her body that hadnt fallen apart, and shook her head dismissivelyas if I had just asked if she wanted a cup of tea.

And I remember the day, a few days after my mother stopped breathing, when my brothers and I were eating lunch with my stepfather overlooking a private beach at Castle Harbor. The sun was warm, and the salty sea breeze was blowing up the corner of my white linen napkin in a way that made me think it was waving at me. In the distance the whitecaps hit the top of the reefs and broke apart so that the low waves came in lazily and lapped up gently onto the pink beach. And I closed my eyes and smiled, and for a moment the anxiety and sadness of the past twenty-five years was gone.

But then the tornado swirled up again, stronger this timeand I turned to Robin and told him that I didnt feel well and was going to the bathroom. But his eyes met mine and he blurted out Whats wrong? as the sides of his mouth dipped and he shifted in his seat. He looked like a little boy whose blanket had been snatched away. And Monty, who had been laughing the second before, stopped and looked at me, and then at Robin, and became quiet. So I swallowed hard, looked at my brothers reassuringly, and settled back into my seat, knowing that it wasnt my turn to cry yet. Im okay, just a little hot. Nothings wrong, I said.

I remember them laughing.

I was a four-year-old boy dressed in a pink halter top and miniskirt with pearls and heels, a cardboard Gay Liberation sign hanging around my neck. I wasnt sure what to make of the laughter. I was making people happy, but it seemed like their sharp cackles betrayed something other than joy. It was the first time that I had been the subject of adult laughter, and there was something sinister about it. The laughter spiked when I wiggled my hips as instructed, making it difficult to stay balanced on my mothers two-inch heels. My seven-year-old brother, Robin, wearing a dark suit, his hair combed down like a Wall Street bankers, walked beside me. My mother laughed the loudest.

It was the annual Labor Day skit at our Adirondack hunting and fishing club. More than a hundred people lined both sides of the enormous main room of the clubhouse to watch individual family camps perform cute skits using props like deer antlers and fishing rods. Puns like theres something fishy going on or that was unbearable accompanied lighthearted stories acted out by loving parents who swam after their kids in fake trout fins or chased them draped in grizzly pelts.

Earlier, at our familys camp, my mother had kneeled down to dress me, giggling like a naughty schoolgirl. My father rifled through his closet, trying to find a necktie that would fit my older brother.

But I dont want to, I kept saying.

Oh, hush, my mother said. It will be fun.

I was bouncing up and down and twisting my body back and forth.

Hold still, Kirkland, she said, her giggles elevating, youre going to lose youroh my Godyoure going to lose your top! Bobby, youve got to come in here!

Theres my pretty little boy, my father said as he walked into the bathroom.

Im not pretty! I yelled.

You look like a hooker, my father told me proudly.

His boobs sticking out! my mother cried.

Its not funny! I said, stamping my foot, yet at the same time cracking a tentative smile. I didnt know what gay liberation meant. But on some level I knew that I had been chosen over Robin to be the girl. It felt like a warning, and a little bit of a punishment, and I sensed the injustice of being made a prop for my mothers amusement. But I delighted in how happy it made her.

M Y MOTHER WAS BEAUTIFUL. Most people are understandably dubious of this claim, probably assuming that as a son, I see her how I want to see her. But she was beautiful, indisputably. People compared her to Grace Kelly and Candice Bergen, but it was the comparisons to Jackie Kennedy Onassis that she liked the best.

Even as her son, I was as in awe of her as the rest of the world seemed to be. I appreciated how the expression of her beauty changed with her moods, how her bright green eyes sparkled innocently when she was telling a funny story, or held somebodys gaze as she listened to them. She had fair skin and naturally blond, shoulder-length hair that fell in wisps in front of her eyes or from behind her ears in endless variations. Her smile was lit from a source deep inside of her, candid and genuine, so it was easy for me to tell when she was faking one. Her high cheekbones didnt lift, the smile looked more like a scowl, but it was the eyes that gave her away. I always knew how my mother felt by looking into her eyes.