I Love You and I'm Leaving You Anyway Read Online Free PDF Page A

little like saying “I’m one of those guys who’s into blow jobs”) and I’d been waiting a lifetime to find out the hour and minute of my birth so I could calculate my rising sign, which in astrology is the equivalent of You Are Here on a map.
    “It was in the afternoon,” Linda remembers, sounding quite certain.
    “Really?” I’m breathless. I’ve been wondering about this since I cracked my first astrology book, in my teens. “You’re sure?”
    “Yep. Positive. I remember because your dad was at the hospital and I was nervous that my mom was going to show up any moment because school was out for the day.” Linda’s mom, Helen, was a second-grade schoolteacher. She could print like nobody’s business. “My mom hated your dad, you know. Hated him.”
    Of course she did! My dad was black and a pimp. To Helen he must have been a rolling, strolling, overdressed billboard announcing the fact that she was not a typical college-educated elementary schoolteacher, but rather an abandoned wife who raised her only child to be a welfare mom and prostitute. There is, as we say in the news business, a story there. We may never know the details, butfigure the story is the approximate size and shape of Linda’s insanity. Or Freddie’s diamond rings.
    “Do you know what time? I mean, exactly?” I’ve tried to find out on a number of occasions by obtaining a copy of my birth record, but Hennepin County General Hospital was torn down in the 1970s and all the actual birth certificates were packed away when the data was computerized, so now when you request your records, they just send you a piece of paper that essentially says, Yeah, you were born, on September 12, 1964 .
    Thanks. I knew that already.
    There’s no time of birth on there, or little footprint, or doctor’s signature. Nothing that would say, You’re specific, there’s only one of you, you are special and wanted. This is the kind of indignity you suffer when you’re too poor to be born in a hospital with an actual name. General Hospital. It means no one claims you, not the Seventh-Day Adventists, or the Methodists, or the Catholics. You don’t really have a tribe. Unless indigents and welfare cases are your tribe.
    No wonder I’ve always felt like I was hatched, not born.
    “Four ten in the afternoon,” Linda says adamantly. “Yep. School was already out.”
    Now this is something I can work with. Later, I ask my dad, and he corroborates the Helen part of the story, including the part about seeing her in the waiting room after school. He thinks the time was a little bit earlier, though. Perhaps around three thirty P.M.
    I run off to do my birth chart and immediately discover my birth time is right on the cusp between rising signs. If I was born at 4:10 P.M. , I’m a Capricorn rising. If I was born at 4:30 P.M. , I’m an Aquarius rising.
    Great. You’d think that would settle the question, but it doesn’t. A teensy bit more research reveals that my parents are either liars, or dimwits, or both. (Surprise.) And here’s how I know.
    Because I was born on a Saturday. There’s no school on Saturday.
     
    MY DAD WAS AHEAD OF HIS TIME. Thanks to his, er, nontraditional job and my mother’s complete inability to take care of me due to her bipolar-y/alcoholic problems (think Britney, early 2008), my dad was my primary caretaker.
    Freddie played Mr. Mom twenty years before Bob Saget ever met an Olsen twin. He cooked for me, fed me, bathed me, dressed me, and took me everywhere with him. Pictures from that time consistently show me—always with a fierce look on my face, always dressed to work in the RuPaul sense of the word—being toted around in my dad’s arms. Except for when he was dropping me off with a babysitter (“babysitter” being another word for some chick he was fucking), I was his constant companion. His sidekick, talisman, and ultimate accessory. We were inseparable.
    Presumably I even attended a drug deal or two.
    Later, when I had