I might be the only person who ever moved to Minnesota not to get sober. Though, in the Land of 10,000 Treatment Centers, sobriety eventually found me anyway. But that wasn’t why I left Mississippi. My reasons were far more complicated.
It all came to a head one April morning in 1979. I was nursing a brutal hangover when my boss, HB, called me into his office and shut the door. He began speaking in circles, uncharacteristically tense. My paranoia immediately offered two possibilities: either his wife had confessed to making advances toward me while he was away on business, or I was about to be fired. Maybe both.
HB and I had a complicated relationship. He was an organizational consultant whose primary client was my father—a man who, like he did everyone else in the Western world, terrified HB. I often wondered if that was why HB hired me in the first place: to curry favor with my dad. After all, I had few qualifications. I was a confused, immature, self-doubting mess with little practical experience. Then again, maybe he just wanted a convenient sex partner for our frequent business trips. Like I said, complicated.
I first met HB a few years earlier when I was still in college, taking his management class. One of his assignments required us to analyze our deepest thoughts and fears. He insisted that understanding our “own psychology” was essential to becoming effective leaders. The more “authentic” we were, the higher the grade. It was all confidential, so I took the opportunity to share my secret: my sexual ambiguity.
After class one day, he pulled me aside and praised my honesty, insight, and ability to express myself on paper. He invited me to his house one evening to discuss my work further. That night, he got me drunk—or maybe I got him drunk. Either way, he confessed he was between wives and wanted to “experiment” sexually. I wasn’t physically attracted to him, but HB was an important man—a nationally recognized consultant, charismatic and brilliant. I felt honored, even affirmed, that he chose me. How could I say no? But as with most of the men I slept with, once was enough. Anything more might lead to intimacy, and intimacy was something I couldn’t handle. Not with so many secrets.
A couple of years later, I worked up the courage to ask him for a job. He agreed, but on two conditions. First, I had to come out as bisexual (that’s what I called myself at the time) to his new wife and the other business partners, including their wives, to ensure they were comfortable working with “someone like that.” Second, I had to swear never to mention our night together, especially to his wife. It was humiliating, but I revered HB and would do almost anything to please him. Almost.
Even after he became my boss and remarried, HB continued to pressure me to resume our “experiments” during business trips. Though he acted like a dejected lover, I couldn’t bring myself to comply. By then, he had become too much of a father figure to think of him that way.
To make matters worse, I was terrible at the job. With no training, I was tasked with presenting to rooms full of executives, leading them through management exercises while HB hovered in the back of the room like a disapproving specter. In those moments, he wasn’t just my boss—he embodied every rejecting man I’d ever known: my father, disapproving teachers, the boys who bullied me in school. I stuttered and shook, often losing control of the room. It was doubly humiliating when the topic I was teaching was “How to Be More Self-Confident.”
Unsurprisingly, HB’s partners resented me. I was siphoning dollars from their personal incomes, and my incompetence only made things worse. HB tried to keep me busy with odd jobs—stocking liquor for company events, mowing his lawn, washing his Porsche. During meetings, one partner even began referring to me as “HB’s n----r.” I had become a bad joke. When the company formalized its five-year strategic plan, my name was conspicuously absent.
So, when HB called me into his office that April morning, I was pretty sure I was being fired.
“Bottom line,” he said, “we think you could use some personal development.” He slid a brochure across the table. It was for the Esalen Institute in California. “It’s life-changing,” he said. “You won’t be the same person after a month there.”
We both agreed that would be a good thing.
As he talked about Esalen, I grew more excited. It sounded like a place where I could finally find myself, away from the expectations of everyone I knew. As a child, I had often dreamed of a summer camp for misfits—a place where I could just be myself without fear of judgment. Esalen seemed like that dream come true.
And the best part? I wasn’t being fired! The company was finally going to invest in my training.
“Thanks!” I said. “I appreciate you believing in me like this.”
“Well,” he replied, “you’d be paying for it, of course.”
Oh. That made sense. I was the one who needed to be fixed, after all. HB had done a great job selling me on the place, and I was determined to go. I needed it badly.
“Okay,” I said. “I guess I can ask my dad for the money. If you think it will help me do a better job here.”
“Well,” he said again, avoiding my gaze, “after going through this experience, I doubt you’d want to continue working here. This could be a way to launch yourself into an entirely new life.”
Finally, I understood. He wasn’t firing me outright, but he was letting me go without having to say the words. That way, he wouldn’t have to explain to my father why I was no longer employed.
There’s an old African American saying: “Just because the Devil brought it, don’t mean God didn’t send it.” As it turned out, HB was right. Esalen was life changing. It was the height of the New Age personal growth movement, and Esalen was its epicenter. It was everything Mississippi was not. There was no emphasis on what I thought, believed, or how I performed. No one asked about my job, education, or cared how straight I acted. It was all about sensuality, feelings, and connecting with what I knew to be true on a deeper level. For the first time, I glimpsed a part of myself that had been hidden away, surviving on scraps in a society that hated the best of me. And I had allowed it—even invited it—because I thought that’s all I was worth. Scraps.
No more.
I returned from that summer drunk on personal growth, positive affirmations, and New Age psychobabble. I was determined to get the hell out of the South before I destroyed myself with drink, drugs, and dangerous sex. My plan was simple: grab the first job offer that took me as far away as possible.
On a snowy January day in 1980, with a Miller tallboy between my legs, I drove my U-Haul trailer—loaded with all my earthly possessions—my Marantz stereo with a busted speaker, my ex-fiancé’s leaky waterbed, and a wardrobe completely unsuited for a Minnesota winter—into Minneapolis. I was filled with indescribable joy, convinced I had left my past behind. If I were Mary Tyler Moore, I would have thrown my beret into the air and sung about how I was going to make it after all. I thought I had escaped the worst of myself. Could it really be that simple? Was the cure for all my troubles just a matter of geography?
Not quite. That’s the funny thing about time. When you flee the present into the future, your past is always waiting there to greet you, baggage in hand.
But that’s another story. Today, I was happy.
