Ah, Youth!

Well, the question, the sizzling question that bedeviled our days and vexed our nights was…

…would Montalvo be able to piss in a bottle?

He’s back, you see, having wedged his way in through the door of the sister shop first, and then having passed once or twice in the gift shop that adjoins the café—where he has worked and been fired so often that no one can remember how many times it’s been—and then having appeared in disguise on Tuesday night for Poetry Night.

“I was not in disguise,” sputters Montalvo, whose name has been changed to protect the guilty. Montalvo, you see, had formed a mystical, transcendental, liminal attachment to a rare blue bird—of which there are only five thousand or so in the world. Nor was it surprising, that attachment, which was greatly enhanced by a drug that only guys in Colorado can do legally. So he had a tangle—no, call it a collision—with the law, was the object of a lot of men’s attention during his eight-day jail stay, and got off by agreeing to piss in a bottle weekly for a year.

“I was wearing shades and a hoodie, that’s all,” say Montalvo.

“You looked like a hood, and nobody recognized you,” said Lady, “so that’s a disguise, right?”

So he’s back, which is where he should be, since home? Well, it’s sometimes not all domestic bliss.

“She was slapping me, just ‘cause I came home at 3 in the morning after smoking cigars and drinking whisky with some friends! Can you believe it? Slapping me, my own mother! And why do women think they got the right to slap men? If I did that to them, they’d call the cops on me, slap a restraining order on me, throw me in the jug! Sure, it doesn’t hurt, but it hurts here….”

He taps his chest above his heart.

“It’s your mom’s house,” I tell him. “Her house, her rules. You know what? My mother would never have allowed me back in the house, at age twenty-one, unless I were working—and paying rent—or studying. And there would always be rules, one of which would have been not coming home drunk at 3 AM. So why Puerto Rican women let their sons come home, use the place like a hotel, expect food and laundry services—I just don’t get it.”

He’s upset; his girlfriend has broken up with him. Oh, and slapped him around, too.

“You know what? If you got two people slapping you around, you must be doing something that really pisses them off. So maybe it’s time to think about what that is?”

Am I man enough to be a dad?

“Yeah, but it hurts here….”

Again the tap.

“They shouldn’t have done it, but that doesn’t let you off the hook,” I told him. It’s a balancing act, this fatherhood thing, and you gotta cut a little slack sometimes.

So we’ve agreed to get together every Friday and work on our projects: his first book of poetry, and my magnum opus,  A Year at The Poet’s Passage. It’s all the best posts of this illustrious and international blog. Order your copy today!

The problem? Montalvo doesn’t have a computer, just an iPad, and a keyboard that his sister doesn’t seem to be using, so he’s sure that he can take it….

“Do you want a third woman slapping you?”

Did I mention that Montalvo is fatally, and certainly criminally, twenty-one?

So that meant that Montalvo showed up around ten one night, when Mr. Fernández and I were sitting around, errr …. drinking whisky and smoking cigars. So guess who joined us?

It wasn’t enough, you see, to procure the legal services to save—and I mean this quite literally—Montalvo’s ass for eight days (he was the object or subject or maybe both of constant catcalls, those eight days in the slammer), now I had to lend him a computer. Why? Because whatever app he was going to use to process the words that would then turn to poetry probably wouldn’t produce a file format that any publisher could work with. Which was easier? Lend him my spare computer, or go through the headache of file conversion?

So here I am, writing this, and in thirty minutes he’s supposed to show up. Oh, and guess what? It turns out that we’re not going to be working on our projects but, instead, on his project, since what has Lady told him?

“You know, you can send me these poems, and they’re good and all, but they’re full of misspellings. I could correct them, but you know whose really a great editor? Who can really tear a new hole in you? Marc! Man, he’s fierce!”

Damn….

“So what did he say?”

“He said, ‘yeah, my man!’”

“That’s what he always says,” I tell her, and Lady goes off to see what might be going on in the kitchen.

So he’ll be here, or he won’t, and I’ll know, or I won’t, whether he peed in the bottle today because yesterday? It was the beginning of the National Stop (Paro Nacional—which should be General Strike, but I like National Stop better….) And indeed it was a national stop because all of the protesters took over the tunnel that connects everything to everything else, and nobody moved. Well, not the cars, at least, but the protesters had brought guitars and tambourines and various percussion instruments—all to keep up the ánimo, and very important that is—so there was plenty of stationary movement. As well as entertainment….

I think I’ve learned the first lesson of fatherhood….

…youth must be served!

Our Kids on the Street

As I write this, there are four children playing in the Poetry Space of the gift shop next door. And guess what? The kids are loud, so periodically one of the parents has to come and give a directive—quiet down! That works for ten minutes, and then the crescendo begins. At some point, the other parent can abide it no longer, and will come down and reapply the directive. I, of course, am currently not attempting to squelch the noise, since these are not my kids. But I am observing the different parenting styles, and trying to assess the efficacy of each. My conclusion—both are pretty much as effective, which is to say…not very.

These kids are lucky—their parents are loving, concerned, educated. And there’s something else as well: these parents have known a lot of gay people, and if any of these kids is gay, the parent will barely blink an eye.

Now then—time for some facts:

One in every four LGBT kids who comes out to his or her parents ends up on the streets, either because she or he was kicked out, or because the child decided to leave.

The average age for kids to come out, nowadays, is fourteen. In the seventies, most people came out much later, when they were in college and relatively more stable.

Lastly, here is a paragraph from the Human Rights Campaign:

Youth homelessness in the United States is a national crisis in urban, suburban, and rural communities affecting nearly 2.8 million youth between the ages of 12 and 24. Furthermore, consistent research finds that gay and transgender youth are over-represented among homeless youth, comprising anywhere between 20 and 39 percent of the total homeless youth population even though they make up less than 10 percent of the overall youth population.

OK—my toy computer doesn’t have the calculator that my Mac does, but my feeble math skills suggest that we may have one million gay and lesbian kids on the streets. And while marriage equality and anti-bullying efforts are important—isn’t doing something for these kids important, too?

What are the problems? Well, the first is what to do with kids who are on the streets—are there beds in the shelters for them?

Answer—no. According to the clip below, called “A Day in our Shoes,” there are 3,800 homeless youth in New York alone, and 1,500 of them are LGBT. And how many beds are there for them? Two hundred.

Shelter is just one issue. A kid on the street is at major risk for drug and alcohol abuse, sexually transmitted diseases, prostitution, and being the victim of violent crime. That kid you see sleeping after “school” on the subway? That’s the only safe—relatively—place for him to sleep. He’ll be up at five minute intervals all night, checking to make sure he’s all right.

It may be there are treatment programs which will help a kid achieve the daunting task of being an adult: paying bills on time, going to the dentist, convincing the bank to let you open a checking account even though your only ID is a high school identification card. But even those programs “age kids out,” as one of the directors in the clip “Kicked Out” put it. So at age 21 you’re supposed to be on your own—but what happens when you fall at the disco and need to go to the hospital? Ask any parent—it doesn’t stop at age 21.

Which is why Caitlin Ryan’s work at the Family Acceptance Project is so exciting. She starts with a simple premise—virtually no parent wants his or her kid on the street. No matter how terrible the parent is, or how badly drunk or addicted he or she is—no parent wants that for their kid. So the trick is to find a way to get parents to accept their gay kids.

It makes intuitive sense—families do change. Mine did, and Raf’s as well. And as you can see in the second clip below—even very macho, Hispanic families can change. And as the clip on the Family Acceptance Project website shows—the Mormons can change as well. Perhaps especially so, since the family is of huge importance in the Mormon church.

Ryan has reached out to John Kerry, who in 2011 introduced the Reconnecting Youth to Prevent Homelessness Act. Here’s what the Human Rights Commission has to say about it:

The Reconnecting Youth to Prevent Homelessness Act requires that the Secretary of Health and Human Services establish a demonstration project to develop programs that are focused on improving family relationships and reducing homelessness for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth. These programs must include research-based behavioral interventions designed to decrease rejecting behaviors and increase supportive behaviors in families with LGBT youth and research-based assessment tools to help identify LGBT youth at risk for family conflict or ejection from their homes. Additionally, the Secretary must provide educational tools and resources to help families identify behaviors that put LGBT youth at risk as well as provide multimedia educational tools and resources that are focused on helping a diverse range of families understand how their behavior affects LGBT youth.

And now a confession—I know that this legislation was not approved in 2011, and I think it has been reintroduced, though as of June of this year it hadn’t been. But after Googling frantically for 15 minutes, I can’t find who reintroduced it or when.

Normally, this would upset me, but nowadays I have more perspective. Not being able to chase down a reference is annoying. Being fifteen, gay, and on the streets?

That’s major!