For a brief period in 2015, I toyed with the idea of cashing in my chips and moving to Sweden, mostly because I had started to develop disturbing visions and convinced myself I could escape them by relocating to Scandinavia. Damon agreed to come along for the ride; he had been wanting to try authentic Swedish meatballs anyway.
I guess you could say my visions were religious in nature, even though I am not what most religious people would call religious. I believe there’s a strong possibility that God exists. But I also believe there’s an equally strong possibility that God is a concept humans created because we didn’t understand things like gravity and lightning and DNA, and that we perpetuate because the thought of being one tiny speck out of billions of tiny specks on a large spherical mass orbiting a huge ball of fire, which is just one of immeasurable balls of fire out there in a pitch-black sky, is scary as fuck. And quite frankly, I don’t understand how anyone who has given the topic considerable, rational thought can be 100 percent certain either way. But that’s not important right now.
What’s important is my vision. I didn’t see Jesus in a waterfall or Buddha on an English muffin. One Sunday morning in the media room of our house in Connecticut I was watching This Week with George Stephanopoulos and witnessed something terrifying. It was Ted Cruz’s face. No, his whole head actually. Words were coming out of it, like a normal head on a talk show, but then it turned bright red, swelled to twice its size, collapsed in on itself, and morphed into something resembling a prolapsed anus. You can imagine the horror. One minute Ted Cruz was a US senator and presidential hopeful; the next a pulsating, crimson, gurgling sphincter. And George didn’t even bat an eye! That’s how I know God was letting me, and only me, in on a pretty substantial secret.
I went upstairs to the kitchen, where Damon was making poached eggs.
“Good timing,” he said. “These are almost done. Can you put the silverware on the table?”
“Sure,” I said and grabbed two forks and knives.
“Is everything all right?” he asked. “You have a weird look on your face.”
“Really? How so?”
“You look like you just smelled something really bad and can’t figure out where it’s coming from,” he said. “Remember that time we found the dead mouse in the sofa?”
“Yeah, that was gross.”
“Well, that’s your face.”
Over breakfast, I relayed what I saw, and Damon asked me how I knew what a prolapsed anus looked like. And so I had to explain how I had stumbled upon some photos of them a year or so ago during an innocent Google search. Well, maybe not completely innocent. I had been looking for images of Jon Hamm in tight pants.
“Wait,” Damon said. “Why were you searching for pictures of Jon Hamm in tight pants?”
“I was curious about the Hammaconda, obvi. But will you please let me finish?” You see, I continued, Jon Hamm stars in Mad Men, which is about an ad agency in the sixties, and Darren from Bewitched also worked at an ad agency in the sixties, and Darren was constantly derided by his mother-in-law, Endora, played by Agnes Moorehead, who made her on-camera acting debut in Citizen Kane as the mother of Charles Foster Kane, who died thinking about his childhood sled named Rosebud. And if you type “Rosebud” into the search bar, you’ll quickly learn it’s the slang term for an inside-out anal sphincter. And if you’re even slightly curious to see what one of those looks like, you will stumble upon images you can never fully expunge from your brain. Could happen to anyone, really.
The Ted Cruz visions continued and intensified as primary season approached, whipping me into a state of emotional distress. Every time I would turn on the news or engage in social media, there it was: the Satanic Rosebud, throbbing, pulsating, taunting and mocking me, threatening to swallow this great nation down its thorny gullet into a stinking pit of venomous bile. God was obviously speaking directly to me, but I wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was a sign, I figured, a sign to get as far away as possible. So I booked us a weeklong trip to Stockholm, reasoning that if Cruz were elected president of the United States, we could move there for four or—heaven forbid—eight years. No big deal. On paper Sweden seemed like the perfect place for us. Its people, for the most part, speak English, are immaculately clean, and appreciate a cute outfit from H&M. That’s pretty much me in a nutshell. We would go in mid-June for the summer solstice, I decided. Nineteen hours of sunlight!
On the flight over, Damon flipped through a Stockholm guidebook he had ordered online, pausing occasionally to ask me to remind him again why we might be moving to Sweden.
“Because Ted Cruz is the devil,” I said.
“You’ve mentioned that a few dozen times,” he replied. It was true. “But why can’t we live in Paris? We love Paris. And you’ve been wanting to brush up on your French.”
He was right. My French was very rusty, and I had been talking about enrolling in a two-week French immersion course in the south of France. But to be honest, the thought of actually going through with it gave me a migraine. “I’m getting too old to be fluent,” I said. “The best time to learn a language is during your formative years. I’ve been fully formed for a while now. At this point I’m well into the decay phase.”
“Okay,” Damon said. “How about Sydney? We love Sydney and you’ve been talking about surfing more.”
He was also right about that. The first time I tried surfing, in Hawaii, I turned out to be a little bit of a natural. I stood up on the board on my first attempt, rode a decent-sized wave, and impressed the hell out of my instructor. But to tell you the truth, I wasn’t too surprised. I had been passively training for twenty years on mass transit. If I can’t get a seat on the New York City subway, I stand, like everyone else. But I don’t like touching the pole with my bare hands because, well, cooties. So, I’ll just sort of stand there with my legs bent and my core engaged, and occasionally flail around like one of those inflatable air dancer things they have outside car washes.
But as much as I would like to hang ten with a bunch of tanned, six-packed Aussies, we couldn’t move to Sydney because of Mary. “The dog, Damon, the dog,” I said. “Australia requires a six-month pet quarantine. Didn’t you even hear what happened to Johnny Depp?” (I was certain he had not.) “Over my dead body will Mary spend half a year in a kennel without me. I’ll sleep in the goddamn kennel before I let that happen. I’ve already looked it up: we can get a dog passport for Sweden. She just needs a few shots.”
We played this game for a solid hour, and I call it a game because neither of us really had any intention of leaving our family, friends, and careers in the United States. It’s just nice to consider one’s options.
Stockholm’s Arlanda Airport is large and bright, with many windows overlooking the verdant landscape nearby. The polished dark hardwood floors, very similar to the ones we have in our house, shine in the natural light. “Look at the sheen on these,” I remarked. “As you well know, these floors aren’t as low-maintenance as they look. They seem like an unwise choice for a high-traffic area if you ask me.” But Damon pointed out the near-complete absence of foot traffic. The people exiting our flight were the only people in the whole airport. Suddenly I was struck by the feeling of what it might be like to survive a zombie apocalypse.
I imagined a sequel to The Walking Dead: It’s been ten years since the last zombie kicked the bucket, for the second time. A small group of Swedes and a highly sophisticated, well-dressed, middle-aged American man, played by me, of course, must reestablish civilization and procreate to repopulate the world. (My character and an adorable twentysomething lesbian, played by Jennifer Lawrence, reproduce via IVF.) Their first task is to clean shit up. They break out the Windex and the Pine Sol and just go to town for, like, the first three episodes, scrubbing, polishing, disinfecting . . .
“Look, ABBA,” Damon said, interrupting my creative flow. He pointed to a life-sized cardboard cutout of the most famous singing group in Scandinavian history. I assumed it was an enlarged album cover from the 1970s, or maybe they still dressed in clingy bell-bottoms. I’m not so up-to-date on my ABBA news. “The one on the left’s got quite the ABBAconda,” I said.
Within one hour of settling into Stockholm—taking a taxi from the airport, checking in to our hotel, unpacking—we realized we were going to be bored to death for a week. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a fine city, pretty enough with lots of old, square buildings. And the food was surprisingly good. We discovered a love of skagen, basically a shrimp salad on toast, and found a place that served the most amazing Swedish meatballs, which I consumed greedily, despite the fact that they contained veal. (I co-organized The Anti-Veal-Eaters Revolt in the eighth grade and never really looked back.) And the fine citizens of Stockholm are excruciatingly civilized, if slightly depressed and—I got the impression—slightly insecure about their city. Practically every local we met asked our opinion of the place.
“How do you like it here?” a salesman in a clothing store asked Damon while I was trying on a sweater.
“The sun is up for a really long time,” Damon replied, and the salesman nodded in resigned agreement.
We took a ferry ride and a nice old man asked us how long we were staying in town. A week, we said.
“Too long,” he responded. “I was born here, but forty years ago I moved to Sydney.”
“We have a dog,” I said. “We can’t do that.” The old guy looked at me as though something had been lost in translation. It hadn’t. I’m just incapable of rational thought around the subject of my dog.
We mostly just walked around quoting Trading Places, one of our favorite movies.
“I am Inga from Sveden.”
“But you’re wearing lederhosen.”
“Ya, for sure, from Sveden. Please to help me with my rucksack?”
On the third day, we decided to visit the Vasa Museum, the main attraction of which is an elaborately decorated seventeenth-century warship, the Vasa, that was so poorly engineered that it went ass over tea kettle and sank on its maiden voyage, right in the center of Stockholm Harbor. Three hundred years later, it was salvaged, reconstructed, and preserved in the museum, a feat Swedes seem very proud of. The museum, or museet, is actually a pretty enjoyable way to spend an hour and a half out of nineteen excruciatingly long hours of daylight.
Exhibitions throughout the museet have been designed to give you a taste of what life aboard the ship might have been like. For example, for 450 passengers, the vast majority being soldiers and sailors, there was one dentist, who was responsible for everything from tooth extractions to limb amputations. If a sailor was disrespectful to the admiral, he could be keelhauled. That’s when they tie you to a rope, throw you off one side of the ship and pull you out the other side, dragging you under the keel of the boat. In the middle of the ocean. For being disrespectful.
“Hey, Admiral, your father’s meatballs are huge and salty.”
“Under the boat with you, Sven!”
“What? I grew up next door to you. He’s a really good cook!”
And maybe even more incomprehensible: two toilets. For 450 men spending their days drinking beer and eating nonrefrigerated meat! Can you even imagine the line for those things after a meal of half-rotten caribou kebabs? I can’t. I’m the kind of guy who gags on an airplane when someone two rows ahead of me farts in his sleep.
Divers also recovered several skeletons of people who got trapped aboard the ship as it sank, some of whom were women. (Historians aren’t even sure what women were doing aboard the ship in the first place.) Based on mineral testing and X-rays of the bones, scientists determined that pretty much everyone had suffered from severe malnutrition as a child or walked with a limp because of injuries that had never healed properly.
In the darkest part of the museet, six heads glow from inside glass cases. They’re creations of forensic artists, facial reconstructions of six skulls found in the muddy wreckage. There’s a blatant honesty and exactness you might expect from a Swedish forensic artist, from the enlarged pores they added to broken capillaries to overgrown eyebrow hair. If this ship had sunk off the coast of, say, Barcelona, I’m sure the reconstruction would have gone much differently. All the dead people would look like Calvin Klein fragrance models on the receiving end of fellatio. But not these old Swedes. They are rough-and-tumble.
Except Beata, whose reconstructed face caught my eye. She was beautiful, in that profoundly dejected kind of way. Physically she was a mix of weak and strong features: pronounced cheekbones and a big nose that appeared to have been broken once or twice, small blue eyes, thin lips, and a ruddy complexion. Her blond hair was pulled back from her face, covered by something resembling a folded dish towel. I’ve done so many makeovers in my life that I’m almost embarrassed to admit my first thought was, With a little concealer and the right lipstick, I could make this chick look like Uma Thurman.
But I let that moment pass. I looked at Beata for a while, and she looked at me. Her expression was that of a woman who had been thoroughly beaten down. What were you doing aboard this ship full of men, Beata? I wondered. Were you a stowaway? Were you a whore? Was it your job to clean those two toilets? Was life so bad on land that the sea seemed like an escape? An adventure? And who broke your nose? Some guy you were shacking up with? Your father? Your mother?
I just could not even fathom a situation in which this woman’s life was anything but pure misery. Only thirty or so people died aboard the Vasa. Because it had barely left the dock, most passengers just swam to safety. But why did Beata die? Maybe she got pinned under a table or crate when the boat capsized. Or maybe she couldn’t swim. Or maybe going down with the ship was better than going back to shore.
Tell me, Beata. Tell me!
“Hey handsome.” Damon had walked up behind me. He whispered in my ear, “What are you thinking?”
“Oh, you know, just the usual nonsense,” I said. “How do you feel about picking up and going to Paris tomorrow?”
“I think that is a brilliant idea.”
The Internet service in Sweden is pretty fast, so we were able to book a flight to Paris and a hotel room in the First Arrondissement in less than fifteen minutes. It’s not that Sweden is unlovable, or unlivable, it just wasn’t our cup of glögg.
* * *
Paris, on the other hand, can make you feel like all is right with the world, that every cathedral deserves flying buttresses, every meal deserves dessert, and every pedestrian deserves painful but gorgeous shoes.
Damon and I were walking through the immaculately groomed gardens of the Tuileries when our phones started to blow up. It was June 26, 2015, and the US Supreme Court had just ruled that same-sex couples were entitled to all the benefits of marriage on a federal level. We both teared up. Our lives are nothing short of amazing, filled with people we love and who love us, but sometimes you don’t realize you’ve been a second-class citizen until you’ve received the right to be first-class.
We decided that to celebrate I should post our wedding picture on my Facebook fan page. It’s a candid shot of us taken in our backyard in Connecticut. We’re holding hands as we walk down the stone steps to our pond, where our friends and family were waiting for us. Neither of us is looking into the camera but we’re beaming with joy.
The post received 180,000 “likes” and more than 6,000 people stopped whatever they were doing that day to wish us love and congratulations.
Five people thought it was appropriate to tell us we were going to hell.
If you’ve never been told by a complete stranger that you’re going to hell, let me try to explain the feeling to you. It makes you feel something like sadness, but it’s not quite sadness. Sadness is when your favorite grandfather dies or your parents tell you the dog you grew up with has cancer. And it’s not really anger, because anger is when you see a drunk driver on the highway in front of you when you’ve got your family in the car. And it’s not exactly pity, because pity is what you feel when you pass a homeless mother and her two children on the street. It’s all of those emotions rolled up into one not-yet-named-in-English emotion. But it doesn’t consume you in the fiery way that rage can or the chest-crushing way sorrow can. It’s smaller, subtler, like a thousand shallow pinpricks.
Soon after the marriage equality ruling, Ted Cruz called the day “some of the darkest twenty-four hours in our nation’s history.” And at that moment I realized why I had been having disturbing visions of his face: God wanted me to know, in no uncertain terms, that Ted Cruz is a huge, painful asshole.
And that even if he, or someone just as horrible, becomes president, it’s not worth jumping ship.