Too hurt to be anything but hurt
“Welcome home.”
It didn’t feel like home. This was 2018, when I moved back to western New York after a decade away. I never liked living there and was happy enough on Long Island, but two errors in judgment sealed my fate: believing my then-fiancee when she said she could only be happy living in Rochester (not true), and believing I was mellow and pliable enough to be cool living anywhere (not true).
Just about everyone I knew from the area moved away years earlier, but one high school friend was still here, the one who greeted me with “Welcome home” when we met at a bar a couple weeks after arriving. That word “home” always hits — well, a little close to home, I guess. Because nowhere’s ever felt like home to me.
The town we moved to when I was young, Webster, made it clear from the jump that it wasn’t home — not for me and mine. When you get jumped by white kids calling you a spic and telling you no one wants you here, while your own white “friends” quietly stand by watching you fighting kids 3-4 years older than you, not lifting a finger to help because they’re not the target . . . when the police are sent to your house because those kids’ parents made up stories about you threatening them . . . when you call the cops because an angry middle-aged white man is waving a baseball bat at your Puerto Rican friend, at his mother, at a six-year-old who happens to have brown skin, and when the cops arrived all the adults on the block come crawling out of their homes saying to you, “Now you’re gonna get it, cockroach; gonna get what you deserve” . . . when the first thing the cop asks once he learns you’re Puerto Rican is “Do you have a father in the home?” . . . you are not home. Where those things happen, you are never home.
So when, 30 years later, my friend welcomed me “home,” I wanted it to mean something. And it did. Just not what I (should have) expected.
Within a year or two, my friend stopped talking to me. This was after a rambling, pathetic message he sent during the Black Lives Matter protests, when after a series of transparently stupid posts by him about the sacred rights of property he centered his own white cis ass as the real victim, whining about how “hard” it was to be a Republican under Trump, and how no one could possibly criticize him for his politics because he has a biracial goddaughter. It just got more and more mortifying.
The man who’d worn a “At first they came for the communists” T-shirt in high school now he had a mortgage and a white picket fence in the same uppity white town we’d grown up in. Now he and his family were the victims, if only because there were people calling for the spread of equality and opportunity, and like most people born on second or third base, equality and opportunity were buzzwords and nowhere near as important his little white toehold in Bourgeoisie, USA. You can, it turns out, be a NIMBY even about something as simple as justice.
Speaking of no justice, Sam Nordquist was a trans man tortured and murdered not far from where my former friend lives in luxury and comfort with his safe little lily-white, red-cheeked, cishet kids. Local authorities called Sam’s killing “beyond depraved” and “deeply disturbing.” His killing was so obviously a hate crime the authorities are now stumbling over themselves explaining why it wasn’t. No word whether Sam’s killers will defend themselves on the grounds that they find it as hard to be white and Republican and privileged as my former friend.
Nordquist came to western NY from Minnesota, for love. Did they leave somewhere that wasn’t ever home to them? Did they think Rochester could be that home? Did they ever feel home? Anywhere?
I should have believed my former friend when he said “Welcome home.” For so many of us, there is no home; there never was. The picket fences, the one fascist front lawn after another, manicured and unfurled like a cemetery full of dead flags saluting chemical capitalism — it’s the same shit as when I was a kid. The cops retired, the old racists moved on, new cops sprung up — new bigots, too. I’m terrified for every queer person I know.
And my old friend? He’s worried about his tax bracket, and how much student loan debt his kids might end up with. Home is where the heart is, I’ve heard. I don’t know where the heartless plant their flag. I surely don’t.
