Colton Haynes - Miss Memory Lane

Colton Haynes

A Memoir

Miss Memory Lane

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Copyright 2022 by Colton Haynes

Many names and identifying details have been changed.

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First Atria Books hardcover edition May 2022

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Interior design by Erika R. Genova

Jacket design by Laywan Kwan

Photograph frame by Getty Images

Jacket photograph by Greg Gorman

Author photograph by Dylan Forsberg

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

ISBN 978-1-9821-7617-4

ISBN 978-1-9821-7619-8 (ebook)

To all the queer kids who long for love and attention,

to the ones whod break their own arm,

if only to have somebody sign their cast

know that you are deserving of love without pain.

And to my beautiful mother,

I look for you in every smoke signal I send,

in every glance in the rearview, down every road I travel.

I will always love you.

F irst, there is a road, a road that takes me away from my house in the San Fernando Valley, the house where I live alone with the picture of a buffalo my mother sketched in pencil on a white canvas hanging above the fireplace. That road takes me east of there and south, past the shake shop on Hollywood Boulevard where I would sit and eat fries and drink a chocolate malt and study the black-and-white faces of the old movie stars plastered on the walls. Just south of there is Cherokee Park, where my mother told me she did drugs for the first time when she was a seventeen-year-old runaway and a bad shot made her wrist blow up like a balloon. A little bit west of there is the convenience store where I bought my first legal beer, twenty-one and on a tear, and a few blocks farther is the tower on Sunset where I saw my face on the side of a building for the first time, my chin tilted toward the camera and my eyes looking down, all of me plastered twenty stories high and gazing out over the city. I keep driving. Theres a trance beat playing from the stereo, cigarette ash on the dashboard, crushed fast-food bags on the passenger side, a banana peel on the back seat like an unfinished joke. I let the beat drive me as the buildings whip past.

In the trunk of my car are shoeboxes and duffel bags and plastic containers stuffed to the brim with photographs and notebooks and letters, everything I could find about who Id been. I spent all night combing through pictures, reading old diaries, searching long-abandoned email accounts. I do this most nights. Im trying to find something in my pastthe way a detective in the movies might search when theyre just about to crack the casea bloodhound sniffing the air, evidence tacked to a corkboard with pushpins that you study, waiting for the shape to reveal itself. To anyone else, all those pieces of myself I shoved into my car would look like a bunch of old junk. To me they are clues, a scavenger hunt with an unknowable prize, mile markers that, if followed correctly, will lead me somewhere important. I keep driving. East and out of the city, on the widening freeway, past strip malls and drive-thrus, pawn shops and liquor stores, that same beat playing, frenetic as my heart. Red and blue flashing lights in the rearview, but not for me, and for an instant I can remember the heavy weight of a police badge I once held in my teenage hand, the metallic chill of a gun. When I pass the exit for Hemet, I can smell my mothers perfume.

The roadit takes me farther into the desert, past the fields of wind turbines outside Palm Springs, past the hotel where I kissed my husbands face in front of a hundred guests, past the facility where I was wheeled in for twenty-eight days, wearing Jackie O sunglasses, and still I drive, faster now, pumping the accelerator under my foot, willing the car to fly. There were so many roads, and when I look back at them, I can visualize it all like a map: a path cut through the sun-bleached Kansas fields, Canal Street teeming with activity, a trail that led from a white-sand beach on the Florida Panhandle back to the highway, and thisthis road, the one that I am on now, taking me away from where I was. I tell myself that this is my one last trip down memory lane.

I dont know where Im going, but I am beginning to see where Ive been.

I was four, and we were in Hot Springs, Arkansas, a town where the debutantes dined on chicken-fried steak at the Arlington Hotel, a town where it was better to be seen than heard, and I would have just about died for somebody to pay attention to me. I would have set the Arlington Hotel on fire if Id thought it would make my mom turn to me and smile.

But I never would have done that, because my mom and I both loved the Arlington Hotel more than anywhere else in the world. It towered over a wide green lawn like a castle from Candyland, a proud American flag whipping in the wind above the tall stone steps leading up to the ornate entrance. Inside, past a grand piano, you followed the black-and-white-checkered linoleum tiles, gripping tightly onto the black banister that spiraled two times down to the basement, which led to a video arcade that was always empty, the Galaga and Pac-Man boxes lit up like Christmas trees, and a machine containing brightly colored spheres of bubble gum the size of golf balls you could buy for a quarter. My mom knew a secret trickjiggling the mouth of the machine and shaking it from the baseto get the machine to deliver two, sometimes even three, gumballs at once. I knew you werent supposed to swallow gum. It stayed in your stomach for seven years. Thats what my mom had told me. But the taste of it was so sweet, I couldnt resist. As soon as it cracked open in my mouth, I wanted it to be a part of me.

Across the street from the hotel was a hot spring where people gathered to throw coins into the warm, dark water and make a wish. Beneath its rippling surface, you could see the cemetery of coins, the gleam of metal. All those wishes. I wondered how many of them had come true. My mom would take me to that hot spring to throw a coin in when she got off work some afternoons. She worked there, at the Arlington, as the banquet manager, setting up luncheons and parties for companies from Little Rock to Fort Smith. Leaving home in the morning, she looked the part of a working woman: flowing black slacks and a white blouse with buttons and an enormous collar, and her hair tied up in a chignon, held tight with hair spray.

I went back there once, as a grown-up, and the piano looked weathered and tuneless, the arcade games gone dim from neglect. But in my memory, it is all perfect. The way my mom and I wanted it to be.