by Dorien Grey
Oh, to be 19 and with friends in New York City again!
* * *
STU
I learned, from the same long-lost friend who sparked my recent “Letter to a Nun” blog, that one of my very best friends from college, Stu, had died of AIDS…20 years ago! How could that be? How could that possibly be? Stu? Tall, crazy, skinny, incredibly talented, hyperactive redheaded Stu, dead? For 20 years??
I met Stu when I entered what was then Northern Illinois State Teacher’s College in September of 1952. He, Zane, and I were all interested in theater, and soon became friends. (Isn’t it odd that even today I hesitate to mention last names out of concern for opening closet doors?) We were something of the Three Musketeers, though Stu and Zane were far more outgoing than I. Not having to even attempt to hide the fact that we were gay when we were together was exhilarating.
During the break between our Freshman and Sophomore years, we agreed to meet in New York City for three days. I got my first direct evidence that my dad knew of my sexual orientation when, after an argument over the money for the trip being better spent in other ways, Dad finally said, in exasperation, “All right, go to New York with your queer boyfriends.”
One weekend at school, Stu got hold of a makeup kit from the drama department and he and Zane decided they were going to give me a makeover. I wasn’t happy about it, but went along. They wouldn’t let me see their work until they were done, and when they finally gave me a mirror, I saw an eyelinered, rouged, lipsticked drag queen. I fainted. Literally.
Stu was, as I’ve said, multi-talented. One time he designed costumes he, Zane, and I were to wear for Halloween (Zane was to be the sun, I the moon, and Stu the stars). They were beautiful. But like everything else Stu started, they were never completed. He was the poster boy for A.D.D. before the condition had a name. He would start one project, then drop it after 20 minutes to go on to another, which would be dropped in the same amount of time.
He was totally impulsive. At one point, while I was on my two-year break from school for the Navy, he decided there was a play opening in London that he absolutely had to see. He somehow scraped together enough money for a plane ticket to London…but not enough for a ticket back…and took off. I still can’t remember how he got back, but he did.
Our friendship was interrupted for the four years it took me to do my two year military service and to finish my last two years of school. When I graduated and planned to move to Chicago, Stu and I agreed to get an apartment together, which we did…six blocks and on the same side of the street as the building in which I am now living after my return to Chicago following a 38 year absence.
Stu could easily have starred in a play about Ichabod Crane, whom he strongly resembled. With his red hair and gangly frame, and his flamboyant style, it didn’t take much for perfect strangers to determine his sexual orientation. People would stare at him, and it would hurt him deeply, and he would react by becoming even more outrageous. If they wanted queer, he’d give them queer.
I got on his nerves (I can’t imagine how that could possibly happen, but it did). One night I asked him five separate times what time he wanted dinner. Finally, he snapped. I don’t remember what he said, but he never spoke to me again, and he moved out of the apartment within a week.
Several years later, I turned on the TV and caught him on a game show…a little older, but the same old Stu. It hurt.
True friends come along very seldom in life, and I always thought of Stu, even in the years after we parted ways, as one of the best friends I’ve ever had, and I was so very sorry to have lost that friendship. That it can now never be rekindled fills me with a renewed sense of loss.
Here’s to you, Stu.
* * *
PAT
One of my favorite people during my Los Angeles days was Pat Mallon, who when I first met her was secretary to the President of the statewide (and politically powerful) Engineering and Grading Contractors Association. I was working at the time for a firm called NPR, which was contracted to produce a glossy house organ, called simply EGCA. I was the magazine’s editor, so Pat and I were in frequent contact, which developed into a friendship.
Pat was…well, to call her “one of a kind” would not come near to describing her. Pat was one of those wonderful Charo-like souls who, in her passion for life, simply ignored age. She was probably in her 60s when we met. Her hair was very long and pitch black. She wore probably about as much makeup as Tammy Baker, but she wore it much better. She favored toreador pants, spiked heels, low-cut blouses (often tube-top) and lots of expensive jewelry. (She at one time had worked with noted jeweler Harry Winston and conducted a side business selling jewelry. Her business card referred to herself as “The Diamond Lady.”) Unlike so many outwardly effusive people, her joy for living went to her very core. In many ways, including her voice and certain of her actions, she reminded me of Carol Channing, and I found her just as charming.
I’d see her every time I went to the EGCA offices, but our friendship was cemented during an EGCA conclave in Las Vegas, over several French Cannons…a delightfully refreshing libation consisting of a equal parts champagne and brandy, three of which could easily have rendered me comatose. But Pat could belt them back like water and never bat an eye.
When we first became friends, she was married to a great guy named Chuck…I am totally embarrassed not to be able to recall his last name (forgive me, Chuck)…who had been a singer with one of the big bands in the 40s. They lived in a beautiful house in the hills overlooking the entire San Fernando Valley. The memory of looking out from their patio at night, with the valley spread out below like a carpet of glittering jewels that put the stars to shame, is one of my fondest memories of L.A.
Chuck traveled a lot, so Pat spent a great deal of time on decorating the house to suit her unique taste, including curtains made of strands of crystal which, when the sun hit them, became a million prisms reflecting their light on every surface. She also spent literally hundreds of hours painstakingly gold-leafing every door frame in the house.
But though I considered Pat and Chuck to be the perfect couple, apparently they did not, because Pat filed for divorce and their house was put up for sale. She could not understand why the realtor did not feel that all her expensive gold-leaf and hard work would not be reflected in setting the selling price. The fact that the new owners may have different tastes or even want to repaint the house and door frames was incomprehensible to her.
Her second husband, Bob Mallon, was a very nice guy who adored her, but was not overly fond of gays, though he was always very pleasant whenever Pat would have Ray and I over, or invite us to one of her lavish parties, for which Pat would spend several days in preparation. Their house, on a hillside just up a winding road from Ventura Blvd., did not have the view of her old house, but there was a large if steeply inclined back yard set into a hillside, on which she and Bob spent a fortune landscaping and decorating with colored lights.
After I moved from Los Angeles, we more or less lost touch, though every year I would get the same mass-printed postcard saying “Keep in touch!” and signed “The Diamond Lady.”
While reality (my arch enemy, as you know) tells me that Pat may no longer be alive, I cannot (or, rather, refuse to) accept the idea. But I tell myself that of course she’s still alive, bubbly as ever, still throwing her parties and being her effervescent self. In some ways, Pat was for me a symbol of all my L.A. days, and every now and then, I truly miss them…and her.
* * *
NICK
While I didn’t really know Nick long enough to call him a friend, he was definitely a part of my journey through life.
Nick never knew his father, though his drug-addict mother named her son after him. His name was Nicholas, and the fact that she deliberately misspelled her son’s name as “Nickless” was only the first indication of his fate.
While still very young, he was taken from his mother and placed in the Foster Care
system, where he was passed from foster home to foster home like a bowl of potato salad at a picnic. His last ten years in the system was spent with a former marine drill sergeant who continually sexually abused him.
Whether he aged out of the system or ran away is not clear, but he wound up basically on the streets. No real education, no idea of how to behave in the society to which most of us belong and take totally for granted, he drifted. His few friends tended to be other lost souls like himself who simply existed in any way they could.
He was, not surprisingly, frequently in trouble with the law.
I was living in northern Wisconsin when I met Nick through a friend from Milwaukee, who had picked Nick up one evening while hitchhiking. Nick was living with a fellow lost soul he referred to as his “brother,” and the “brother’s” girlfriend. They spent their time smoking pot and dreaming the dreams of the lost.
He did whatever it took to survive, and worked at menial jobs wherever and whenever he could, but never for very long at any one place. And of course when each job ended, it was never his responsibility. Responsibility was not a word in Nick’s vocabulary.
My friend took Nick under his wing and asked if Nick might stay with me for a while, to try to break him free of those chains to his past, and I agreed.
Nick was around 23 at the time; a tall, handsome, and basically good young man who, like an abused animal, trusted no one, and his entire life experience had proven him correct. But of all the things that had been denied him, from the day he was born, the greatest by far was the feeling of being loved for anything but his body. He revealed himself only through his drawings, which he kept in a tattered notebook. He carried a sheathed knife in his belt and it was with him everywhere. When I arranged for him to apply for a job at a local supermarket, he wore the knife. He did not get the job.
Even in a small area like the one in which I lived, he managed to find others like those he had left behind in Milwaukee and soon got into the pot habit—it was, after all, a form of escape from a world he simply could not relate to and did not understand.
On the verge of being arrested yet again, Nick returned to Milwaukee…where he subsequently was jailed yet again. With absolutely no other realistic options, and without far more help than is available, Nick defines the term “lost soul.” He is so deep into the dark forest that I fear he will never find his way out.
When I think of Nick, and of what he could have been had someone…anyone…taken the time to care for him, to love him as any child should be loved…my heart truly aches.
I wrote a poem about Nick, called “The Broken Child.” If you might be interested in seeing it, just drop me a note.
So why have I told you about Nick? Simply because those of us blessed with all the things of which Nick was deprived simply do not comprehend just how fortunate we are. We too often are so consumed with our own petty problems that we cannot appreciate what we have.
Nick is the candle I hold up in the darkness of my own self-absorption. I hope he can somehow, someday, find his own light.
* * *
REQUIEM FOR UNCLE BOB, PART I
When I received word that Bob Combs, my “Uncle Bob,” had died May 19, on his 92nd birthday…a birthday I never remembered, though he never failed to remember mine…I felt nothing, like the song from A Chorus Line.
Bob wasn’t my blood uncle, of course. He became “Uncle” only when, as my parents were leaving for home after visiting me in Los Angeles, where I was sharing a large home in the Hollywood hills with Uncle Bob, my dad gave him the instruction to “look out for Roge,” which Bob took to heart and exercised diligently for nearly 40 years.
I’d met Bob through his roommate, a beautiful young man named Skip who exuded the joy of life from every flawless pore, and both Bob and I were enthralled with him.
I didn’t feel anything when I got the news because I didn’t want to feel anything. I’ve felt the loss of loved ones too often in the past. I did not want to start thinking of him; of our ability to make one another laugh at the most inappropriate times, or our bickering or my frequent irritation with him for being unrelentingly cantankerous. However, he was also one of the most intelligent people I have ever met; it seemed he knew everything and everyone and had read every book ever written. He wasn’t boastful about it: it was simply a fact.
I did not want to think of the house on Tareco Drive, or my parents’ visit, or to be reminded of Skip, who died with incredible bravery only recently after a several years’ long battle with cancer. Uncle Bob had cancer, too…of the larynx. He endured it without a word of complaint for about as long as Skip did. I don’t think it was the cancer that killed Bob: he’d fought it too long and too hard. I think he went when he did because he was simply ready to go.
To think of Uncle Bob would be to think of all the people I associate with him, many of whom I met through him: Jimmy Stone and Ron Crawford and Bill Weed, and Jason Peugh, and John Pitt, and George Little. Reacting to Uncle Bob’s death would inevitably mean I would have to once again feel something for each of them. Uncle Bob’s death dropped a huge boulder into the quiet sea of the past, sending unwelcome waves of memory through my mind and heart.
When Mom moved to L.A. to be near me after Dad died, Uncle Bob took her under his wing and they became fast friends. They would go out to a Marie Callender’s restaurant often for coffee and pie, and to talk and laugh. Uncle Bob bought a Toyota my dad had had at the time of his death, and still had it on the day he died.
How can 40 years of friendship be crammed into one short blog entry? It can’t, of course, so I won’t even try. And even though the next entry will also be about Uncle Bob and his last message to the world, it only underscores how much more there is to say about him.
Uncle Bob is dead, and I’m trying so very hard not to feel anything. It isn’t working.
* * *
REQUIEM FOR UNCLE BOB, PART II
Uncle Bob took great pride in being a curmudgeon, in expressing total contempt for everything that might even smack of sentimentality. He was on occasion too good at it, and his unwillingness to suffer what he saw as stupidity could often border on hurtfulness. Yet his capacity for love and goodness for those close to him was boundless.
For many years, he wrote a column for his local newspaper, the Atascadero (California) News, which totally belied the face he liked to present to the world. It was called “The Sunny Side,” and I am sure the paper will not mind if I present his final column below:
The time has come to say farewell—while it is still possible.
It’s been such fun these past 13 or 14 years, since Lori got me started on this every-Friday essay, or column, or whatever-you may call it, in an attempt to balance out the Letters page—that is, to point out all the wonderful, beautiful, happy-making things around us “On the Sunny Side of the Street.”
Stevenson wrote: “The world is full of such a number of things. I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings!” Well, as Kipling wrote, “The captains and the king depart,” but we are still here—until our time runs out. There will always be spring flowers out by Steel Creek, and the beautiful, winding, climbing roads of our county, and Black Mountain out past Pozo, lifting its lordly beauty, with its calm and silence.
There will always be an annual crop of children, full of curiosity and joy—sharing all their exciting discoveries with us, as we once shared with our grandparents. What delights they are, and we must strive to see that the world they grow up in will be even better than the one our parents built for us.
In due season will come the breezes and the winds, the black clouds or the fleecy clouds of purest white. The trees and bushes will bud and leaf out and blossom, and flowers will pop out of the ground, seemingly overnight. The birds will come back and my favorite mockingbird, Moxie, will sing his heart out under the moons of spring and there’ll be Moxie XVIII before we can blink!
In its season will come rain, but nothing, in our part
of the world, will rule us as will the sun—and its “Cooker Days.” And so the grapes ripen, “to make glad the hearts of man.” And this old earth turns and our solar system does, too, and our galaxy goes spinning through space—a tiny dot in the vastness of the unknown.
So let’s do the best we can, while we can, and smile oftener than we groan, and chuckle more than we sigh, and look on the sunny side…and so, goodbye.
Goodbye, Uncle Bob.
* * *
LOST FRIENDS
For reasons totally unknown to me, I found myself thinking of Matt Rushton. Matt and I were never more than acquaintances, but he was both charming and charmed. Chest-achingly good looking, he had everything going for him. He was a P.R. man for Studio One, the hottest predominantly-gay dance bar in Los Angeles. Studio One also had a show lounge featuring mostly high-end B-list entertainers, and as editor of a major gay men’s magazine, I was invited to every opening. Matt was always right there, effortlessly efficient, and giving me the definite impression each time that I was the most important person on the guest list.
Beautiful. Charming. Young. Friendly. A truly nice human being. And dead of AIDS within three years after I met him.
I met Mike at a San Francisco bar during Gay Pride week. We got together on a Friday night and spent the weekend together. We became friends, exchanging frequent visits between L.A. and San Francisco. When he met his partner, we remained friends, and thru Mike, I met his best friend, Tim, who was cute and funny and about as promiscuous as they come. Rick and Mike brought him down with them from San Francisco for a visit, and he and I established the same sort of back-and-forth visiting that Mike and I had enjoyed before Mike met Rick. It wasn’t long, however, that Tim phoned to say that he had just been diagnosed with AIDS, and did not think it wise for us to see one another again. He did not want me to come up to visit him. We talked often on the phone, though, and within two months he was dead.