The Daily Write: The errand (June 6, 2013)

Writing Prompt: The errand

When I was a kid, there was a rule in my dad's house; we were not allowed to say, "while you're up," from the dinner table and then ask for something. If a person was getting up to get themselves seconds, or pull a can of Tab out of the fridge, they weren't up to take care of the other two at the table. We were allowed to be direct. We could ask someone to get up and do something for us, but no passive waiting and then pouncing. I guess he was trying to teach my brother and I not to be opportunists.

Perhaps you've already created a visual in your mind's eye. I could add a few more morsels to help paint the picture you might be seeing. We had to set the table every night, napkin folded under the salad and main course forks on the left, knife with blade pointed toward plate on the right, spoon on the outside. Glasses were always placed in the upper left hand at 2 o'clock, above the tops of the knife and spoon.

When we ate, we were never allowed to have our elbows on the table, always had to have our napkins in our laps, and use polite dinner voices. We were required to eat with our mouths closed and say "excuse me" if an accidental burp escaped.

Have you got it now?

I wonder what you see. Perhaps a  lovely dining room with a big mahogany table.cloth napkins and formal china. Maybe you imagine a multi-course meal cooked by a mother or chef. What color is the room? Are the walls rich ocher with gold accents? Are there oil paintings on the wall? Or do you have us seated at a 1970s suburban table, mid-century modern accents surrounding us, cheerful yellow wallpaper making the room seem festive.

I believe I imagined these things for myself as well, starting with a homemaker mother who wore aprons to cook wholesome buffets, and ending with large sunny rooms that were filled with happy conversations and the sounds of merriment.I spent an awful lot of time watching and wishing for a Brady Bunch reality, and coveting the rich girls at school with their wall-to-wall carpeting and formal living rooms done all in white.

My father grew up upper middle class, his father a doctor, his mother a volunteer. They were Jews in a wealthy town near Boston. Not religious or observant, they celebrated Christmas and had my father and his sister raised by nannies, most of whom treated them with disdain, and sometimes outright hostility.They were assimilationists and drinkers who didn't seem to understand or care about the delicate nature of their childrens' psyches.

It must have been there that my dad learned his manners and the rules of social etiquette which he then passed down to us during the 9 months of the school year when we lived with him in California. I didn't think anything of it as a kid, except I found all the rules stifling. He watched and corrected. Corrected and watched.

It wasn't until I was older that i realized the strange juxtapositions of our lives. We lived in a wealthy bedroom community. Even now to hear its name would evoke in your imagination big houses, groomed back yards, horses, fancy cars, and swimming pools in gated communities. It's true, many children I grew up with had these things. Us, not so much.

If you placed us in a formal dining room, a do-over is required. If you imagined us in a well furnished home, you might want to try again. My brother, father and I ate in the kitchen of a small unattractive tract house built with haste in the early 50s. We ate at a shellacked wooden picnic table, sitting on  benches to have our food - Hamburger Helper, frozen mixed vegetables, ice berg lettuce salad. Or Burger King. Sometimes we ate Dinty Moore beef stew, my favorite. On warm days my father would throw a thick steak on the grill of a patio covered with yellowed plastic sheeting to keep the sun's torturous light to a minimum.  I loved steak and potatoes nights. Unless something wasn't working out and dad got angry. That ruined everything.

My father had the crossing guard at school sew patches onto our clothes to make them last and went shopping every night for dinner, never planning ahead. Our luxuries - a roll away dishwasher with a clunky nozzle connector, and eventually, when they were invented, a microwave that sat on top of the fake butcher block of the dishwasher. Our house was sparse and undecorated. Our kitchen without a mother. I didn't realize until much later that cooking stove top casseroles from a box at the age of 9 did not make me a good cook. At the time, it seemed like I was taking care of the family.

Ours was a house of cobwebs, radio parts, soldering wire and shelves made from 2x4s hung on metal bars. The back yard was huge, but unkempt, and backed up onto a golf course which we could see through the chain link fence. Sometimes the golf balls went over the top and landed in our yard. And sometimes we gave them back.



I can tell you a lot about growing up with a single father during a time when divorce was a novelty. I can describe , with mouth watering detail, the taste of Hamburger Helper Beef Stroganoff. And no matter what kind of table I'm at, I can still tell you which utensil is for which course.

The Damage Done (June 5, 2013)

Marc was lost to me before I ever met him, the victim of a bad upbringing. By the time he disappeared, he had been kicked out of his apartment, lost countless jobs and alienated his few friends after borrowing money and ranting loose and drunk on 3 am phone calls. This is not something I would have predicted the first time we met in our grad school "Life Art" class when it became immediately clear we were kindred spirits. He laughed at my jokes and cried at my revelations, confiding in me his life story before we had even finished our first project.

I should have recognized the pattern of this exceedingly beautiful and generous man who immediately included me in his life, seeming to toss aside his straight female roommate and former best friend, even as she doted on him and did the cooking, cleaning, bill paying and whatever he demanded. He was the kind of man that could be so charming one was grateful for his attention, and he knew it.

I might have had a sense when he drank heavily sweetened drinks every night, turning liquid-eyed as he read to me from scripts he had written, rambling dialogs that seemed important, if hard to follow. But these signs were not enough to dissuade me. Marc and I were soul mates for a time: expressive, sensitive, larger than life and misunderstood. He was outspoken, beautiful, and emotionally intense. He made me feel special and I made him feel seen.

If he was shallow, that illusion only ran skin-deep. Marc saw the world through a veil of mistrust and pain, an effeminate boy who as a child had witnessed the murder of his father in their house. It was a fact that forever hung, like a monolith, in the back of my mind. Even on his favorite night, Christmas Eve, when his roommate would prepare a traditional Cuban feast under his tutelage and we'd sing carols together, Marc couldn't maintain. In the span of a few hours, he would transform from generous host and confidant to a ranting control freak who turned the stereo so loud that I spent my time furtively looking out the second story window of his Mission flat, waiting for the cops to appear.

One holiday was worse than the next and no matter how much his friends and I discussed Marc's problems, we couldn't seem to help him. You can't drag someone out from that kind of misery and most of the time, they can't pull themselves up either. I tried to keep loving him, and to be a part of his life, but he made it nearly impossible.

Once he fell out with his roommate, his support dried up and having used up every favor from his small group of friends, he had to leave San Francisco. Marc moved to Hollywood and after a self-reported "rocky start," seemed to be getting it together. Last time I saw him, he lived in a cute tiny apartment near the Kodak Theater with parquet floors and a collection of memorabilia carefully placed on shelves that lined the main room. He came out for coffee, talking, if too fast, about how hard life had been and how he was making changes by listening to a couple who helped people get rich with positive thinking. It was worrisome, but not terrible, or at least not yet rock bottom.

I don't know how much of what he told me was the truth and I'm not sure how long he stayed in that apartment from which he was eventually evicted. Marc's positive thinking didn't stop his mother and brother from rejecting him. With no friends, or money, or safety net, he lost whoever he had been to the streets. Last I heard he was stealing cough syrup and rubbing alcohol to get high. 

No phone, no place, no people, no trace.

The Daily Write: Photo #4 (June 4, 2013)

Writing Prompt: Photo #4

The two of us were like peas in a pod, well, except for our obvious differences. He was a tall drink of water with red hair and gold rimmed wire glasses, older than me and far more experienced. I was a short, portly over-eager sophomore. He was erudite, I was excitable. He wore a Palestinian black and white scarf with short fringe around his neck and tucked into the collar of his sophisticated and very grown up trench coat. I rarely wore a jacket, even when it was freezing and wet outside. He scowled, listened to Maria Callas and laughed sardonically. I guffawed, liked The Cure because I wanted to be as cool as the punk rockers in B Dorm, and had to make myself seem smarter than I felt in order to match his wit and intellect. He walked with a long stride so fast and sure I could never keep up.

We met in drama class and fell in love the way awkward friends do, deeply and immediately. He was a college version of my teenage friend Joel, only instead of listening to Manhattan Transfer harmonize in doo-wop, or Carly Simon croon as she lay draped across a baby grand like I had with my earlier unrequited lover, he schooled me in opera, told me about his life as an outcast and intellectual, and made me feel that being a lesbian was the most important thing I could do.

 
He became my fast confidant and sexuality cheerleader, encouraging me to be myself, come out, and eventually co-coordinate the Lesbian/Gay Resource Center on campus. We were a match made in heaven. Except that fall, when we started working as student coordinators together, he became good friends with Phillip, a gaunt man getting thinner by the day with some unnamed disease that, although not acknowledged, was frightening enough to carry an unspoken stigma. Phillip didn't like me, didn't have time for  my new found lesbian feminist reactionary foolishness and was smarter than most of his friends, except our shared and adored mutual best friend.
 

I was, in fact, a product of the 80s, focused on my female strength and unsure where to pledge my allegiance during a time when "gay cancer" was more of a rumor than a known fact, at least to us college students out there in the woods of the Pacific Northwest. I didn't understand the nuances of a not-old man, ravaged by a disease during an era when the president wouldn't utter the words, let alone help the dying. I was wrapped up in my own oppression and budding sexual awakening, quick to respond, slow to understand the horrible complexities of a time that would bring my gay boyfriends to their knees and then graves.

My friend and I eventually had a falling out from which we never recovered. It involved Phillip, a woman he worked with, a joke "defacement" of her photo  and my inability to understand the nuances and take sides. He thought me stupid; I thought him arrogant. He thought me reactionary; I thought him sexist. He thought me myopic; I thought him elitist. By the time I understood what had happened, years had past, the gay community had been ravaged, and our relationship had been ruined.

He lived; we died.

The Daily Write: The Frying Pan (June 3, 2013)

Writing Prompt: The Frying Pan

I want to be where all the drag queens are. I want to be swimming in tulle and sparkled with faerie dust. I want Gene to come over and plant big gay wet kiss on my lips while we look at each other adoringly, the way a dyke and a fag do when they fall in love and hate each other all at once.

He was someone I admired, found alluring and who often angered me. Like in seminar when we would get to discussing a book I had only read one chapter of. He, of course, would have read the entire thing. But my lack of knowledge didn't stop me from having an opinion, and whatever mine was, it was always opposite of his. While I was reactionary, he was argumentative for the love of the argument itself.

But then, after seminar was over, when we were sitting around chatting at night, it was a whole different experience. Gene was the first Radical Faerie I ever met and his stories of weeks spent each summer on the Rogue River were enchanting. This beautiful man with long messy blond hair, golden red beard and blue electric eyes; he had a slight lisp, a light southern accent and wore skirts over jeans and beads over his bare chest.

Gene showed me pictures of bearded men in drag, or naked, or naked under drag. They were frolicking by the river, under the trees, across green and golden meadows. They were hippies like my people before me, but gay and exuberant. Beautiful men celebrating mirth and magic. I wanted to be one of them, to wear gowns in mud, have sex under a canopy of green, sing songs late into the night with the frogs and the crickets for company.

In my mind, Gene is always smiling. He is bright with crinkly happy eyes and a tiara of flowers on his head.

God, I miss that man.