Drive

Somehow I feel the failure, partly because there is a sting of truth in it, & partly because I tend toward anthropomorphism, grieving for the loss of life for a plant, believing that electronic equipment hates me, & knowing that I failed in my love for an automobile.

I have always held that Happiness is not a state of being, but rather Happiness is in the moments. For a few tiny moments in my considerable life, the stars aligned, my luck stuck, & all the points came together & everything worked. That was when I experienced an extended era of ecstatic enchantment. The blessed bliss brought prosperity, pleasure & possibilities for a life well lived.

The early 1970s: goofy, original good looks that only the young can posses because they don’t understand that it will all be gone someday. I could do nothing wrong. It all came easy to me: meaty roles in the theatre, meaty men in my bed, attention, admiration, humor, hilarity & hopefulness. Boston, LA & NYC.

Seattle 1982- 1989: Hot boyfriend, hot apartment, hot buzz about my acting on stage & in commercials, films, & TV. My image is on the side of buses, on the back page of the newspaper, on billboards, & I am mentioned in the press. We can rarely go a day without my being recognized & commented on by strangers & feted by friends. The hot boyfriend considers that it may not be all that good for me, but he remains a fan, attending all of my opening nights. I gym daily. I have single digit body fat. Sexual performance is never an issue. Never a mention that I might party too much.

Portland 2002-2006: comfortable, curious, & cultivated. We own our own home for the first time. Our Own Home. The boyfriend becomes my husband. We have respectable employment. The Husband is thin, tan, talented, sleek & sexy. He wears beautiful clothing at work & no clothing at the beach. We have hundreds in checking & thousands in savings. We vacation in NYC, seeing Broadway shows & shopping. We weekend in Palm Springs, imbibing & inhaling poolside.

For a couple of weeks, I had been eyeing a bronze Volkswagen station wagon at a car lot on the way to the gym. On one of those happy days, I walked into the lot & drove out in that station wagon. After decades of driving clunkers, I had a real automobile for the first time & it felt fine.

In my beautiful new car, handsome silver fox husband at the wheel, singing along to Tegan & Sara’s Walking With A Ghost & Dave Matthew’s American Baby from my summer mix, driving along a rustic rural road on Sauvie Island on a perfect August morning, headed to the nude beach with a book, blanket, & a thermos of vodka lemonade, having already dropped a half a hit of E… I was experiencing perfectly, profoundly happiness.

2011: barely1 ½ incomes, bills, hospital visits, prescriptions, old dog, crushing depression, strained relationships, strained budget, strained bank accounts. Yesterday, it was agreed that the Volkswagen would go. I calculated that we would save us $8000 a year by not paying car payments, insurance, gasoline, & maintenance. We will sock it away & someday purchase an old pick-up truck so we can go to Lowes, the salvage shops & nurseries. We will join ZipCar for $75 a month for 15 hours of driving (enough for the Husband to deal with clients). They pay the insurance & the fuel. ZipCar has a car parked just at the end of our block.

We will not be able to be able to be spontaneous. If the Husband forgets an ingredient in tonight’s dinner, it will require a trip to the supermarket 10 blocks away.

I have that tingle of tumult for trying something strange & unaccustomed. We will walk when willed. Bicycles are in order. I don’t need a lot: house, garden, dogs, books, music, local watering spots. Using the ZipCar & leaving the neighborhood will be our big adventure.

Your host, a decade ago, with his 1970 Ford Pickup Truck

In Seattle, I a drove a red 1970 Ford pickup truck & the Husband got around in his yellow 1960 Ford pickup. It seemed too daunting to get them both to Portland when we moved. The Husband sold his truck & I traded with my father, my pickup for a junker. I always mourned the letting go of those 2 trucks. Now with the giving up of the station wagon, I feel remorse. Why does this place I find myself in make me maudlin & make me cry? It is just an automobile; they come & they go. It always ran perfectly, it never gave me any trouble & the bronze Volkswagen Station Wagon came into my life at a point when my existence was uncommonly, uncharacteristically upbeat, & dare I say, for a moment… happy.

This photo of Junior has nothing to do with the post, except that loving him makes me happy.

A gentle reminder that the love you take is equal to the love you make.

Two For The Road

The Husband & I are just about to hit the road. We are traveling 6 hours NE of Portland to the city where I grew up (ages 6-18) & The Husband went to high school. In the late 1960s, we actually lived within a 1/2 mile of each other & we knew some of the same people.

My parents live in the country, about 15 miles from Spokane, but we lived in town while I was in school. I left on the day I graduated from high school, but I returned in the summer of 1977, after being exhausted from the experience of living in NYC in the mid-1970s. At the very same time, The Husband returned after living in Europe. We both came back for the same reasons & I like to think it was so that we could meet. I returned to Spokane, a city that we both did not really like, to put myself back together, regroup, & decide what was next. For a short time, I enjoyed being a very a big acting fish in a very little theatre pond. It was rather thrilling to get work & attention in my hometown after being one of millions attempting to make it in NYC (I know...if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere).

Spokane, The Lilac City, is a mean little town that does not take kindly to anyone who is perceived as different. But it is a pretty small city, with a gorgeous set of waterfalls right in the middle of the downtown, & of course lots of lilacs. I believe there is one gay bar. The Husband has observed that the entire place seems frozen in 1971.

Riding in a motor vehicle that the other is driving is always driving us to divorce. We each dislike how the other pilots an automobile, no, that is too polite... each of the other's driving make the other fully daft. But, we seem to do well on a road trip. We have a few games that we indulge in the automobile: Favorites (favorite flower etc), Best (best year etc), & Unlikely Casting (Carol Channing as Lady Macbeth). A car trip is the only time we ever stop at a McDonald's. We both are crazy for fried potato products, & we let traveling be an excuse to indulge.

I may not do any posting until our return to Post Apocalyptic Bohemia on Tuesday. I will miss you. Be good while I am gone.

This Really Happened To Me... Baby, You Can Drive My Car

Seattle, spring of 1978, the Husband is part owner in a unique grocery store, delicatessen, cafe with the clever name- Plenty, & as would be expected, he worked long, problem plagued days. I had joined him a few months earlier as the dining room director of Plenty, because quite frankly, they needed my help. Plenty was a great looking space- designed by the Husband, that served excellent, innovative American cooking to go or to eat in, but the table service suffered. I wanted Plenty to be the big success it deserved to be, & I knew just how to fix the problems. This ruffled a few feathers. But, I was a gifted dining room manager, & a deluxe, distinguished waiter. I had the dubious honor of having been named 1992 BEST WAITER IN SEATTLE by the Seattle Weekly. I would like to have been named best actor, or even best lay. The staff at Café Flora, my place of employment, razzed, ribbed & ridiculed me, so I couldn't actually take any pride in the honor. They even defaced the article with my picture on the bulletin board. That crew really knew how to keep me in my place.

I left my estimable position at Café Flora, to jump on board at the Husband’s venture. After a fagged out & frazzled 15 hour work day, my man & I were anxious to get to our car & get home to our cottage & our dogs. In the spot where we had parked the automobile was… nothing. The car was gone. Vanished. We ascertained that it had not been towed, there was no restrictions on parking where we had left the auto & no violations.We were weary & worn down & wanted nothing more than to get home, but apparently someone had stolen “Granny” (so named because she was a gift from the Husband’s grandmother when she was no longer able to drive). Granny was a 1982, 2-tone Chevrolet Caprice & she was as ugly as my husband was handsome. Granny was especially lovely because we were never able to find the source & fix her considerable oil leak, & many a catering order had spilled inside of her on the way to the deliveries. Granny was temperamental, crabby, leaky & stinky. I eventually became just like her. We didn’t like her much, but on this evening we really wanted to get home.

We reported Granny to the police as stolen & thought it was the end of the story. Stolen autos are rarely recovered & being a 4 wheeled piece of shit, we couldn’t imagine the car’s fate. As we would have it, Granny was recovered, with the thieves riding in it, caught red-handed. The auto thieves had torn out the dashboard & burned cigarettes into the unholy upholstery. The crew was 4 Afro-American girls, all under age except for the ring leader- Clinique. The court had written me, inquiring what sort of punishment (community service, restitution) I would want for the minors, if they were found guilty. I answered that I wanted them to fry. I wanted them to suffer. I wanted to pull out their press-on nails. We had worked a long trying day & we just wanted to get home & the girl gang had taken my only transportation.

On they day of the trial,  I represented myself; it wasn’t so tough- they stole my car, simple & clear, the young ladies explained to the magistrate: “that man gave us his car to use, if we would perform certain sex acts with him. We needed the car, & we were afraid to bring it back, because we didn’t want to have to do the sex stuff with him.”  I was gob-smacked at the audacity of the gang.  It was however, one of the great moments when being gay had its own payoff.  I addressed the magistrate & the girls’ lawyer & stated: “I am an adult gay male, in a 15 year relationship with the same man. I like men sexually. Not young black girls. I really like firemen, if you know any. My boyfriend & I own the car together… & I need the court to understand, I am not above loaning out the car in exchange for sexual favors, but I was thinking of something along the line of Keanu Reeves as the loanee.  In fact there are a number of men that I would let barrow the car with the understanding of special favors as payment. Please, please… don’t tell my boyfriend.”

The girls did their short time & the restitution, but the story does not end there. For years later, we would receive calls on our answering machine (remember answering machines?) with the voices & the giggling of young black girls: "Hey, you got a new car we can barrow, faggot?"

This gentleman may borrow my automobile, anytime.