"When I left my home and my family
I was no more than a boy
In the company of strangers
In the quiet of the railway station
Running scared"
--Simon and Garfunkel
When I was fourteen, my uncle Wes gave me a present, even though it wasn't my birthday or Christmas or anything. He just got it for me because he felt like being nice.
Uncle Wes and I both loved the television show Dr. Who. It was a cheesy British science fiction show about a guy named the Doctor who time-traveled and fought aliens. The show began on November 22, 1963 and ran on the BBC for over twenty-five years. It owed part of its longevity to the fact that seven different actors played the lead character; the Doctor, being of a more advanced species than us Earthlings, could regenerate himself a new body whenever he was mortally wounded.
Whenever Uncle Wes would come to visit us in Illinois or we would go to see him in Florida, he would usually give me something that had to do with that show, like a videotape of a new episode that had yet to air on the St. Louis station. Once he gave me a poster of the Doctor and one of his time-traveling companions. Despite the fact that it was a picture of one of my least favorite Doctors, I left it on my wall for ages, surrounded with photographs of other cast members that I had cut out of magazines Uncle Wes had also given me.
That time he gave me some action figures. They were really hard to find because they, of course, came from England. They were expensive too. I know because I saw them in a catalog once, and they were listed as costing over fifteen dollars apiece. Three weeks worth of allowance in the language of a fourteen-year-old, before the cost of shipping and handling. But my uncle got them for me. My mom must have told him how much I wanted them. I know I didn't.
One of the action figures was a Dalek, an alien monster that the Doctor was always fighting on the show. The figure was shaped like an oversized saltshaker and was made out of a hard black Plasticine material, sort of like clay but almost like plastic too. When you pulled it backwards against a flat surface, a little motor made its wheels spin forward quickly like a toy racecar.
When I was seventeen, I had the toy in my locker at school as part of the decorations. It was on the top shelf. One day after school I went to my locker to put my books in it, and when I opened the door, the Dalek fell off of the top shelf. It hit the floor and shattered into a dozen different pieces, which in turn scattered across the floor of the hallway.
* * * * * * * * * *
When my uncle Wes was young, Santa Claus brought him a gift.
My mom and Uncle Wes grew up near Chicago in a small rural community called Hinsdale. Their house was about fifteen miles from the Sears Tower and was next door to a horse farm. Their school was about six blocks from their house, but I-55 was in their path. Mom and Uncle Wes normally had to walk almost two miles out of their way down a frontage road to get around the highway. Occasionally they would make this trip carrying between them the mellophone they both played in the school band.
My grandma was active in the village community, their substitute for a city council. She was the head of the social committee and had over the years organized a variety of functions, including a large block party called the Dandelion Festival that featured craft booths and a DJ. One year she organized the community's Christmas party, Santa and all.
That year Uncle Wes wanted nothing more than a hockey stick. All of the other kids (who had more money) had ice skates and toboggans and played winter sports all the time. Uncle Wes didn't even like sports; he just wanted to fit in with them. Then maybe the girls in the neighborhood would stop drawing comic strips that featured him with buckteeth and Alfalfa hair. Maybe then his PE coach would stop calling him "a little queer."
When Santa arrived at the Christmas party, there was a hockey stick poking out of the middle of his knapsack, and my mom couldn't help but get excited for him. "Look! Look!" she screamed to him, jumping up and down and pointing at it while tugging her big brother's sleeve.
Uncle Wes wouldn't get his hopes up. He said to my mom then, "They wouldn't get it for me." He knew that his mother was clueless. He had been the one wearing to school plaid pants with a striped shirt because the lady at the store had told Grandma that it was the style of the time. He had been laughed at, not my mom.
But still my mom was optimistic. "Who else could it be for?" she cried excitedly.
Uncle Wes was right. The hockey stick was for another boy named Jeff, who knew that Uncle Wes wanted it and used that knowledge to taunt him further. He was always snotty, a rich spoiled kid who got everything he wanted and flaunted it in front of the poorer kids.
Uncle Wes got a baseball glove. He hated sports.
* * * * * * * * * *
When I was ten, my uncle got me a gift for Christmas which most kids would have hated. He got me a key chain. But luckily Uncle Wes wasn't as clueless as Grandma.
This key chain was in the shape of a key itself, a key to a very special vehicle called a TARDIS. The Doctor used it to travel through time. I was ecstatic; Uncle Wes had given me a key to a time machine.
I lost it a few years later but found it again a few years after that in the back of a junk drawer in my playroom. By that time I was older, in high school, so I took to wearing the TARDIS key as the Doctor himself did, on a long chain that hung around my neck. I was so proud of it that I always made sure it was showing in pictures, and I often said that when I met a girl who actually knew what it was, who didn't just think it was a strange religious symbol, that would be the girl for me. At first the key hung down to my navel; later after the chain had broken innumerable times I removed some of the links so that the key hung in the middle of my chest instead.
When I was first in college, my girlfriend back home asked me to give it to her to wear as a token of our undying love, even though when we first met, I had to explain its significance to her. We broke up a few months later and I never got it back.
* * * * * * * * * *
When my uncle Wes was young, his uncle Donald gave him a gift, but it wasn't one that he wanted. Not in the least.
Every year the family came down from Chicago to Southern Illinois to visit relatives for a week in the summer. Uncle Wes loved this vacation, looked forward to it every year. He would play with my mom and all his cousins, sing songs with Aunt Cathy like "You Are My Sunshine," and go swimming at the nearby lake.
One day when everybody was piling into their cars to go to that lake, Uncle Donald asked if Wes could ride with him. Wes said sure. He wanted to ride with Donald; he was having a great time.
When everybody else had gone, Donald took my uncle Wes, only ten years old, into a cornfield to tell him things. These were things, said Donald, that his parents wanted him to teach Wes, because they were too shy to tell him themselves. In fact, Donald said they were so embarrassed by it, even though they planned for it to happen, that he better not ever tell them what happened. If he did, they would pretend not to know what he was talking about.
Wes was confused, but he agreed to never tell his parents what happened. After that, Uncle Donald taught him much more than a ten-year-old ever needed to know about sex. Then they went ahead to the lake and acted like everything was OK.
My uncle Wes finally told someone what happened a month later. He told my mom, who in turn told their parents. But Uncle Wes was scared and asked them not to do anything about it. So they didn't. They did nothing. What Uncle Donald had told him in that cornfield was reinforced, and Wes only felt more alienated from everyone he knew.
* * * * * * * * * *
When I was seventeen, my uncle Wes gave me his car for my birthday. It was one of the best gifts I ever could have received, and also one of the worst.
My uncle Wes was incredibly sick at that time, so much so that my mother had to drive down to Florida to visit him in the hospital. One of his last wishes was that I get his car, a gray 1984 Chrysler Fifth Avenue, and I couldn't help but be torn. On the one hand, I was getting what every teenager dreamed about: freedom in the form of four wheels. On the other hand, it was at a very high price: his death. Part of me didn't want the car; part of me did.
It didn't matter what I wanted. Mom made the twenty-hour drive in the car to deliver the car to me a mere three days before his death.
The car didn't last too long, since it was ten years old when I got it and already had been driven over a hundred thousand miles. I went home from college a lot during my freshman year, and half of those times it broke down on the way. I traded in the car that following summer, only two short years after I got it. The used car dealer told me it was worth only a thousand on the trade-in.
* * * * * * * * * *
When Uncle Wes was living on his own in Chicago, someone gave him another gift.
This was years after high school, when he finally found a clique in which he could fit in: a group called the "freaks." Today they might be called "stoners" or "hippies." It was the sixties, so I can't really blame him for a little bit of drug use.
His parents sure did. A psychiatrist they took him to said it would be best to commit him to a hospital for "troubled youth" in order to get him away from the bad influence of his "freak" friends. In the hospital he was diagnosed as a homosexual; at the time they considered it an actual clinical mental illness that could be treated. Uncle Wes, who all his life had simply wanted to fit in, had just sort of fallen in with that new group, replacing the "freaks" of his school with them.
He did date a girl for a while after they released him from the hospital. But the girl was pregnant, having gotten knocked up by an illegal Mexican immigrant who shortly afterwards had been deported. Uncle Wes and this girl were going to get married even, but his parents didn't approve. Instead the family moved down to Southern Illinois to get him away from her. He ran away several times after that and eventually moved back to Chicago to live on his own.
He finally came into his own in Chicago, working as a night auditor at various hotels there. He was a troubleshooter for them; he would work their books over and fix their problems, then move on to the next Holiday Inn. He met Art Garfunkel one night at one of these hotels, talked with him about his music until the sun came up. He also "came out" then, fully embracing his homosexuality. One Christmas he came home to visit his family in Southern Illinois, dressed like David Bowie and with a boyfriend in tow. Mom met him at the train station, and her jaw dropped.
He partied quite a bit while living in Chicago, and at one such party he was raped. He ended up getting VD from the encounter.
This rape was probably also where he got his most consequential gift: AIDS. But it might also have come from his next partner, Michael, with whom he moved to Florida, or it might have come after Michael, when he and his next lover Dan were working at a blood bank and were giving platelets as frequently as they could. It was there that he was tested, months after giving blood so many times when HIV was first coming to be discovered. And that was when the gift was discovered, the gift that would eventually kill him.
