On that August weekend when some algorithm served Chasten and me up to each other, I had more time than usual to spend on my phone. I’d just been through surgery to address a hernia that had probably resulted from my deployment-inspired weight-lifting regimen. So I was spending a lot of time on the couch with an ice pack, binge-watching Game of Thrones and checking for updates, when Chasten and I started chatting through an app called Hinge. This app talks to your Facebook profile and is supposed to introduce you to people with mutual friends, though in our case it didn’t reveal any common acquaintances but just vaguely said, “connected through your social network.”
It started with the usual small talk, something about weekend plans and watching TV, but it became clear to me that he had a quicker wit than most. Our first conversation is lost to the recesses of the deep web now, impossible for either of us to retrieve, but I remember being intrigued, then wanting to meet him in person. It helped that he neither dwelt on my position nor pretended not to notice it. A FaceTime conversation followed—his idea—another nice modern convenience that previous generations might have appreciated, to get a feel for whether you were about to go out with a jerk or an ax murderer. Each of us must have passed that test: we decided to meet up.
Other than the same-sex aspect, our first date was something our parents could have recognized as typical, almost vintage. He rented a car to drive in from Chicago for what was supposed to be a coffee but, thanks to slow eastbound traffic, turned into a beer at Fiddler’s Hearth, our downtown Irish pub. I talked about South Bend, he talked about his family and his experiences in the classroom. In my pocket were two tickets to that night’s baseball game, in case the date was going well, which it was. After some pub food, I proposed that we walk down to the ballpark to see our own South Bend Cubs take on the Great Lakes Loons. Somewhere around the sixth inning, we ditched the game to take a long walk along the river, through downtown, and over to the churning and multicolored River Lights display that I had just inaugurated a few months earlier at the climax of the SB150 celebrations.
Crossing back toward downtown along the railing of the Colfax Avenue Bridge, I felt the slight brushing of his hand coming closer to mine, and I took hold of it. Nothing in my life, from shaking hands with a president to experiencing my first rocket attack, matched the thrill of holding Chasten’s hand for the first time. I was electrified. We got back to the car just as the post-game fireworks began, and as the explosions and lit colors unfolded over us, he went in for a kiss. We began to see each other every weekend, and it only took a few weeks for me to acknowledge the obvious: I was in love.
BEING A SOCIALLY AWARE YOUNG PERSON, Chasten follows and cares about politics, but his background was not political at all. His parents, who have a mom-and-pop landscaping business in Traverse City, have voted for candidates from both parties but rarely discuss politics at home. Unlike mine, his political awareness came not as a dinner-table inheritance but as a response to how his world was shaped by the attitudes and decisions of those in power.
As I saw in those first photos online, he has two tattoos. On the back of his right calf is a black infinity symbol, which he got to honor his mother, Sherri, after she was diagnosed with cancer. On his left tricep is a rectangular tattoo that resembles the flag of a country, red, green, and blue—it’s one of the first things I noticed in that first picture of him that showed up on my phone, smiling brightly someplace overlooking Lake Michigan. Actually it is not a flag, but the logo of Jif brand peanut butter, in honor of his father, Terry, who lived out of a car for much of his younger years and went on to build a stable middle-class life, home, and business. For Terry, Jif had once been a luxury; having it on hand in the cupboard was the measure of a decent lifestyle. Terry would repeatedly promise to his three boys that no matter what, he would see to it that they would have Jif on the shelves. If one thing was immediately obvious about Chasten, it was his loyalty when it came to family; in addition to the tattoos he wore a ring that, he explained, was one of a set of three he had purchased, one for each of the Glezman brothers.
Sometimes supplementing his wages with food stamps, Chasten worked his way through community college in Michigan and, later, the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire, where he earned a degree in theater education with a global studies minor. I joke with him about the number of jobs he’s had; once I asked him to recite them to me so I could write them down. Not counting helping around the family landscaping business, licking envelopes, and making copies for his mom from the age of twelve or so, his first job was at a veterinary hospital, where he scrubbed kennels, cleaned surgery and exam rooms, and walked and fed the dogs. By sixteen he added a second job busing tables in the aftermath of taco and burrito dinners at La Se?orita, working until eleven some nights. Then he got a job at Cherry Republic, a touristy store in downtown Traverse City offering cherry preserves, cherry cookbooks, aprons with cherries printed on them, cherry salsa, cherry horseradish . . . you get the idea. He stained wood as the shop was being built, then worked customer service there. As he contemplated a career in health, he got a job as a home health care aide, taking care of a boy with cerebral palsy, getting him off his school bus, feeding him, helping him stretch while watching The Ellen Show, bathing him, feeding him dinner.
At eighteen he enrolled in Northwestern Michigan College for nursing, and on top of his full-time course load he worked a complementary gig as a nursing assistant at Munson Medical Center in Traverse City. With a move to Milwaukee came another job, as a waiter at the short-lived CJ’s restaurant. There was Christmas-season work as a cashier at Toys “R” Us, and during the semester a slot as a site coordinator for a tutoring service. In the summer, he taught theater classes for Upward Bound. He served drinks at a bar, worked retail at Eddie Bauer, poured coffee at Starbucks, and taught theater to children with autism at First Stage, then back in Chicago found himself tending bar at a comedy club and recruiting for a performing arts academy.
By the time I met him, he had realized that his future was in teaching, not nursing. He’d followed up his hard-earned bachelor’s degree by enrolling in the Master’s in Education Program at DePaul, fitting coursework in between work hours and maintaining perfect grades. In the absence of substitute work during the summertime, he made ends meet (and scratched the itch of his fondness for travel) with a job guiding exchange students through O’Hare Airport, driving a herd of German or Korean teenagers from one terminal to another, while checking the phone in his downtime for Airbnb customers and people to date.
The resourcefulness and work ethic, if not the restlessness, clearly came from his parents, Terry and Sherri. For them, income was never the guaranteed fruit of a lifelong career with one employer, but rather the yield of ingenuity, relationships, and hard work. As they raised their three boys in their one-story house just off Route 37, Terry was also constantly improving and rebuilding it with his own hands. Sherri works part-time helping other small businesses with their books, while Terry plows snow in the wintertime. Their landscaping business gets work throughout the year but specializes in Christmas decorations; in a peak year, Terry and Sherri sell over a thousand wreaths and eighty thousand feet of garland after making it in the garage at their house or in their pole barn nearby.