Fashion Faux-pas

Grandmother had a way with malapropisms.  In the 1950s she was clunking around the kitchen in Cuban heels, warbling Please Don't Knead Me When You Squeeze Me Oh So Much.  In the 1960s, she was confusing two hot topics when she consistently used Napalm in a sentence that required Valium.  In the 1970s, Barbra Streisand had great birth control---which evidently was true.  And in the 1980s, she was a willing participant in the laid on look.

Of course, so was I.

I grew up in a world of gay discrimination of a different sort---at least at the familial level.  There was acceptance and a niche for gay men, for apparently they were all florists or beauticians.  I could go along with that, for I loved flowers and certainly had design sense, having drawn in perspective since kindergarten.  As for hair, my interest fell off after Mother would rat hers out and then cackle like the Wicked Witch of the West.

Perennially Grandma would pipe: "I love gay men; they're all so sweet."  And invariably Mother or one of my aunts would groan: "Mommmm, that's such a stereotype."  Grandma would get that 1930s ingenue look, brows towards her hairline in wonder of why the world wasn't as she saw it.

The last time Grandma professed her opinion on the subject, she stood her ground.  "They're not macho or anything."

"Mom," Mother and aunt chorused, "Gay men are like all men:  They can be sweet or macho or ineffectual or just plain assholes."

She turned to me, now a young man.  "Is that true?"

"I'm afraid so, Grandma," I sighed.  "And I should know.  I've slept with a few."

Her eyes bugged a bit, but then relaxed into a twinkle as she let out a giggle very much like Toby Wing.

Spring Has Fallen

Spring has fallen
The ground is petal white
Snowbirds flying low
Over asphalt
Back to Wild Rose Country

My Husband, My Beard

The good thing about growing old is that you finally believe you can do whatever you damn well please. The bad thing? The resulting pain is simply the weight of time on your body, not a social repercussion.

And then there are those lucky few---the few that are timeless. Such as my husband.

I'm not offering this as an endearment. It's simply a fact based on fifteen years of careful observation. And discussion. Yes, we discuss his 'condition' not because we're vain or conniving but are amused by the mystery of it all.

We have decided this aura is based on his small stature. A short man can either fight his supposed shortcomings or revel in the fact that a major social expectation has been removed. The perception of power is shifted, causing strangers to relax into chatty, even forward behavior. Women find him an endearing equal, which may have its own sex appeal. Men, safe in there looming size, make the pretense to treat him as an equal, or gush over his mustache.

Yes, his handlebar mustache is definitely part of his petit mystique.

"You're so cute---you're so cute!" a woman cried out at the local Dairy Queen a few years ago. "You look like the Monopoly Man! You should go to McDonald's and see if they’ll give you a free Happy Meal!"

I was sure she'd wet her pants.

She was with her teenage daughter, and her distraction over my husband went on sporadically as we indulged in our two for one Blizzards. He happened to be away from our table when she came out of the restroom and repeated her mantra to me up close and personal, and I just smiled back at her. When she got to her table, she turned back to ask:

"Is he your dad?"

"Nope," I replied---not quite looking at her in the eye.

I heard her daughter swat her and tsk mommmm. She seemed more embarrassed by her mother's stupidity than her impropriety.

In writing this I've realized that I haven't been asked since if my husband is my father---which means I'm aging in the public eye while he remains the same. The question used to annoy me since we're so physically opposite, but now my ego might welcome it. No one believes he's almost seventy, while I must look very much forty-something.

If age has changed my husband at all, it's expressed in his increasingly matter-of-fact attitude. Recently he was being chatted up by an older woman while in line at another Dairy Queen inside a truck stop. She was momentarily distracted but still noticed when the first Blizzard was handed over to him, so when she turned back and noticed the Blizzard missing, she was shocked.

"Where did it go?!"

"Oh, I handed it over to my husband."

The trucker in front of her spun around as if my husband said he just handed it to a supermodel or a martian, but I was already safely away in the twelve volt appliance aisle.  There was nothing for them to do but duly note his truth and continue waiting for their order.

In case you haven't noticed, the evolution in facial hair continues.  There were goatees, and some men just can't leave behind what Mother called muff mouths.  Beards are still hot, but mustaches are cutting edge.  My husband has overheard the teenage boys in the coffee house murmur that's the mustache I want.  Another, hardly any older, recently flagged us to stop for a construction zone on the Feather River Highway.  He peered through the glare on our windshield which could not hide the white mustache inside.  He gestured grandly over his bare upper lip and gave the okay sign---and then hocked a big loogie.  Eventually he let us on through, but he had to lean towards my open window to voice his approval.

"That's one hell of a mustache, brother."

 I smiled wanly as he grinned beyond me, knowing I was quite invisible.  Brother?  You mean Grandpa!

The Queerest Little City in the World

The other day my husband and I walked into the Mill's End remnant store in Reno on a quest for colored denim.  Once again I was reminded that if I tarry too long in any fabric store the strangest thing happens:  Customers start gravitating towards me, asking me where the seersucker is.  So far I've never seen a fabric store clerk wear cowboy boots---so they must presume some sort of expertise from my jeans of green instead of blue or my fussy little mustache.

"Is this where the swimsuit material is?"

I turned and looked down on a fireplug of a woman.  She's definitely not making herself a swimsuit.

"I'm sorry, but I don't work here," I smiled.  "But, yes, this is where the swimsuit material is."

We calmly studied one another---all the unspoken questions being answered as clearly as dogs sniffing one another.  Her mouth half opens, and I expect her to ask if I'm family, but that would seem archaic to her.  Besides, she had no time for such pretense.  She looked back and forth between me and my husband and simply intuited.

"I need to make myself a binder," she launched off.  "Someone stole mine and my packing too!  Can you believe that?"

Well, no, I can't.  Someone in Reno is now packing her---I mean his packing.

"I'm thinking Spandex," he continued, pushing his tongue through the gap where his front teeth should be. 

"Yes," I nodded, casting a glance over to my husband.  "But he's the tailor.  My interest falls off somewhere below rayon challis." 

My husband didn't seem to mind being volunteered.  He pulled some Spandex off the racks and they discussed the merits of each fabric and ideas on how to sew a binder, which included stretching the material over each others chests to see how much material would be required.  Of course Roland really had only a vague idea of what sewing a binder would entail, and 'Sam' had never done more than some simple mending.  Roland thought that buying something like a small sports bra at a thrift store might be a good way to experiment on how to sew something that might actually work.

 "Oh, I'm not experimenting," Sam misconstrued.  "I've been doing this for years.  I just haven't the money right now to replace the real thing."

So Sam gave us a grand detour through Chicago, operations desired and hormones.  The latter perked up my husband, since he knows way more about hormones than binders.

"You know, they have excellent transgender services in Sacramento."

"Really? Cool."  He pulls out a folded piece of paper from his shirt pocket.  "Do you have a pen?"

My husband gave him a pen and some information.

"There's a casino bus that goes between here and Sacramento," Sam mused aloud.  "It's real cheap, like six bucks."

But in Sam's mind the bus was already leaving for Phoenix, where there's a famous and handsome Native American transgender---and for me this surreal situation started falling into place.  I had stood back a bit once my husband took over, occasionally looking over the challis for a sundress for our house sitter but occasionally engaging in the conversation, too.  Frankly I was uncomfortable with Sam's forwardness and the leaps in his thinking process, but underneath my uneasiness I was receiving a sporadic buzz that made me stay engaged.  Now I could deduce Sam's ancestry, and it matched my admittedly limited exposure to Native Americans---of speaking with people boxed into Western civilization.  I started reviewing the scene outside of that box---the spiritual communication,
and found a person in the now and without pretense.  Yes, he spoke of change in the form of operations and hormones, but the goal---for the lack of a better term---was not an exchange of physical for spiritual, that thing we call happiness.  He was literally seeking a more comfortable form to be present in.

The conversation wound down, and Sam reached to shake my hand.  I had to juggle a bolt of challis to do so, and it gave him enough time to decide to fall back into what came naturally to him---to reach out and hug me and kiss me on the cheek.  I was amused by his generosity---amused by the fluidity of gender that knives can't cut or hormones alter.

On the freeway on our way back to our hotel, the Atlantis---the proverbial lost and therefore exotic---a car came up behind us and started beeping as if my prairie skirt was caught in the door.  The car slowly passed by, a middle aged blond man waving from the driver's seat.  Below his Nevada license plate was a bumper sticker stating Family Car.

Dead Ex-tra

I made contact with Dead Ex’s sister.  No, not that way---the way everybody does it these days, via Facebook.  I’ll probably never know why it took her six months to respond to my simple query---obviously she isn’t as addicted to social media as the rest of us.  Or perhaps the simple question ‘are you Rob’s sister?’ froze her for awhile.  I doubt it, though---there’s a hunger there, starting with the present tense of her reply: “Yes, I am.  How do you know him?”

Oh, let me count the ways.  I know him by the punched in plaster on the wall into the kitchen.  I know him by forgetting he always took his aspirin dry and the resulting glass of water flung across the bathroom floor.  I know him by his suggestion that I take up with the young blond who had a crush on me.  I know him as the first man to have me totally, and you don’t forget that.  And I won’t ever forget the thin blue January morn he appeared in the passenger seat of my speeding car to apologize.

She didn’t flinch at my surreal story, she only wanted more.  What did he look like?  What else did he say?  I tried to collect up suitable situations to share, but everything seemed a bit too personal and irrelevant to her.  When he comes up behind me from the right, he takes my breath away---just like the first time.  He doesn’t wear clothes anymore, he’s naked.  Wait, he was wearing clothes the first time he appeared---and so I describe them to her: the warm gray sweater vest, the white long-sleeved pinpoint oxford shirt with the pinstripe plaid pattern.  Suddenly I can recall each article as I pulled them from the washer at the Laundromat---ironed them, hung them, folded them---twenty two years ago.

Dead Ex died in a single occupancy hotel in The City.  These were nothing new to him.  We started our first days in one, unbeknownst to the landlord---sharing a twin bed, the feeble light from the window that looked out onto a brick wall and the toilet for all down the hall.  Quite a departure for this young man raised in suburbia.   The City had been shaken down by the Loma Prieta earthquake just a couple of months before; it was quiet and slightly emptied that January.  It was easy for me to find us a nice sunny little studio at a decent price---a studio that would soon have the wall with the punched in plaster.

The news that his last days were lived in a similar place matched a death scene that had been given to me months before.  She made no report that jived with the visual dramatics I’d seen in that room, though.  The coroner wouldn’t let her view his body due to decomposition.  This gave me a lead into the details I saw, though:  There was blood on the edge of the bed and on the floor, darkened with age.  I certainly didn’t offer this information to her---I may never know the time when it’ll be appropriate to do so.

My husband was going over my responses to her latest email.  I asked him to, least the various pressures put upon me were causing me to write inappropriately.  After all, Dead Ex died from alcoholism and my husband is an alcohol/drug rehab therapist.  At one point I responded that her report of where he died matched closely to a visual I had been given.

“I’m suddenly recalling the blood you saw,” my husband said.  “I hadn’t thought of it before, but you know, it’s likely he died from a ruptured esophagus.  It’s fairly common with chronic alcoholics from vomiting so much.  He would vomit a quantity of blood as that happened.”

I stopped pacing and felt energy shoot down my legs and into the floor.  I heard Dead Ex say your old man’s right on.  He seemed pleased we got it.

“This rupture would not be visible on his body, though, would it?” I asked.

“No.”

“So the visual of his wounded chest remains symbolic.  He was only giving me an interior view of what happened.”

My husband nodded as I went back to that scene.  Not of the room where Dead Ex died, but another time, in the living room of a friend I do spiritual work with.  It was much like the first time in the car, when the setting is very ordinary and real and then the dead appear in our midst.  He was clothed in the same manner.  He walked in, turned to me and ripped open his sweater vest.  Next he tore open his shirt, buttons popping.  His broad chest look like an explosion took place.  I thought he had committed suicide with a large caliber revolver.  After all, he died three days after my friend hanged himself, and Dead Ex had once owned such a pistol.  He had hocked it by the time we came together, but he still had the bullets.

“Does this scare you?” he asked me.

“No.”  I wasn’t scared, I was in awe.

“I didn’t think it would.”  He stepped closer.  “Touch it.”

I made no move to.  It wasn’t repulsive, but it seemed very alive---raw and forbidden.

“Go ahead, touch it.”

I slowly reached out.  I was aware of my friend watching me reaching out into thin air, but my fingertips touched flesh, wet and warm.  I shivered.  It was as sensual as any other spiritual meeting with him.

“You can do anything,” he said.

Domesticated Doll

I'm still famous for my meatloaf.  It's about the only thing that has survived the years when my friends used to call me the Happy Housewife.  Oh, I'm still a housewife and I'm still happy, but they don't go together in quite the same dust 'n' douche manner anymore.  The dining table is now covered with artifacts to write about and the dust is thick here at Rancho Notorious---gray in the winter, red in the summer.  Every so often I just have to invite someone over to dinner so I have an incentive to knock down the cobwebs and clean the whole house.  Well, most of it.

I just went to the Frigidaire to see if I had the secret ingredient for my meatloaf but found no half empty and half dessicated bag of frozen mixed vegetables.  Oops.  Well, there you have it: Starchy frozen mixed vegetables, ground down to a coarse crumb, is my secret ingredient.  One of them, anyway.  The ratio is to substitute about two to one, meat to vegetable.  Your fresh ingredients must be minced and your meat can be a combination of anything---and if you can't figure out the rest you don't like to cook so you don't care anyway. You're welcome.

No matter how delicious the meatloaf is sliced hot, it's always twice as good the next day in a sandwich---or, if your at all clever, served on crackers as a suburban pate of sorts to impress your neighbors.  Tell them to bring the wine.

So we're going to have to settle for a bit of broiled and glazed pork if anyone is coming to dine here at Rancho Notorious.  This always amuses our usual guest, since she's nominally Jewish.  Unusually I apologize beforehand for serving pork once again, but once I found some chicken in the interim and she seemed just slightly disappointed to find it on her plate.

Dead Ex

Life’s finger has been on the rewind button as of late.  I can press pause, but if I press again the scenery just continues in reverse.  At first the views are fleeting.  Words, significant or otherwise, blurt out midst the blur.  But as the days progress the past develops nuance, and I start recalling myself in that room---or on that roadside, standing so close to him that our foreheads almost touch.  It’s my silent plea for comfort, and he growls: “Don’t you know where we’re at?!”

No, not exactly.  Twenty-two years later I still don’t know where we’re at.  I only know you’re dead now, because that’s the only way you could slip into my car at sixty miles an hour.  It’s the only way you could tell me you’re sorry because pride, shame and physical distance came between us.  Some of the best times of your life, you said.  I’ll have to accept that as a gift, because I’ve come to believe the only way I can grow is to believe in what others can’t see.

It took me a month to look up your name, because knowing more is sometimes less.  You can only go so far on this planet, and then there are fees to pay or issues of privacy that block the way.  There you are---on some obscure interface called My Life.  But I’ll never know about Your Life after we parted, because a pop up insisted I become a member first.  Still, for a brief moment, I saw your face.  You looked back at me, older yet still the same---the same confidant gaze, like a movie star.  Your hair was now white---and not the expensive white we processed into your drab, graying brown.  You looked pink and healthy---and very much your Scottish ancestry. The only difference was your brows, which had gone brushy, like my husband’s.  Oh, the irony. 

And yes, you are dead.  Here’s the little en memoriam type remembrance printed in the San Francisco Chronicle---the paper you used to walk to the corner store to buy on Sunday morning, along with another pack of Marlboros.   The date surprises me.  You died years ago---well, two years ago, last October.  Your dropping in on me wasn’t exactly a courtesy call while on your way out like some people experience.  It takes me awhile to figure a startling correlation: you died within a few weeks of my friend’s suicide.

I start reading---and grow slightly incredulous, because this is not the man I lived with:

We mourn the loss of our dear friend, Rob Radabaugh. Rob was known and loved by colleagues and friends over several decades at UCSF, Genentech, Neurex, Elan, Medarex, and Avigen. Those of us who loved him were the recipients of his tremendous kindness and unstinting loyalty that extended over the years to many of us. Rob was warm and funny. He was smart and charming. He could be goofy and laugh at himself too. He was quick to spot pretense or hypocrisy, and was adept at lampooning it. He lived out the words of that old verse, "Life is mostly froth and bubble, but two things stand like stone: kindness in another's trouble; courage in your own." Rest in peace, dear friend.

I wonder who wrote this.  A woman friend, I suspect---not a man you laid with.  She could see all this in you, and send you home when it faltered.  Because as I read it again, I can recall you being warm and funny---and certainly charming.  You charmed my whole family.  And then you turned it off when things stopped going your way.  That horrible Thanksgiving when I said I couldn’t go on, you wouldn’t even speak to my mother as you got behind the wheel to take us away.  I cried for a hundred miles, and you showed no kindness for another’s trouble.  You had already seen in me the PTSD you saw back in ‘Nam, but you never spoke of it.  You never said: ‘Dan, let’s get you some help.’  We were both so afraid of our pasts.

I rest on that written phrase courage in your own trouble.  Did you stop drinking?  Did you face the memory of your abusive, alcoholic father head on?  Did you find a way from rage to a state of grace over that doctor that botched the operation that killed your mother?  Your career tangent suggests you did, and yet that’s a lot of companies in less than twenty years.  It’s a leap between wanting to be a drama professor to being a patent holding medical research librarian, but I am not surprised you took a scion from your past to grow a new future.  I hope it was a clean start, and that your friend was writing from truth as well as from her grief.

I’m thinking of your sister now, even though I can’t recall her name.  We met only once, you know.  I was nervous and she was kind.  I wonder if I found her that she’d speak to me---that I could learn how you died, and thus learn why my body aches so.

And I wonder if she found among your possessions that Polaroid of the time your cat decided to park on my naked lap.  I hope so.  I hope of all the things I left you and the money you took, it was the one thing you kept.

Author's note:

This was written a while ago, and Dead Ex's name was changed to protect the innocent.

In the interiem there has been several adventures with Dead Ex that I'll be exploring in the future.