by Dorien Grey
When I moved to Northern Wisconsin, Mike and Rick came to visit. Within months after their visit, I received a note from Rick saying that Mike was dead. They’d both known that Mike was dying (and in the early years of AIDS a diagnosis was a death sentence) when they visited, but didn’t want to upset me. Friendship sometimes makes me cry.
My next-door neighbors, Bill and Larry were among my best friends in Los Angeles. Larry was an entrepreneur, always busy with one business venture or another. Bill was what some might call “ditzy”…totally irrepressible, totally spontaneous, always with grand schemes which never came to fruition. Larry and Bill had been together well over 10 years when I met them, and they had an “open relationship.” Well, Bill had the open relationship; Larry didn’t like it, but he loved Bill too much to give him an ultimatum.
Bill developed AIDS just before I moved to Wisconsin. I was devastated for both him and Larry, but they both took it with amazing calm. The last time I called to check on how Bill was doing, I talked to him briefly. “I had a dream about my grandmother,” he said, casually. “I’ll be seeing her soon.” And then he was dead.
Ed was one of my oldest friends in L.A. He was unique among them in that we were what is now known as “friends with benefits” (our relationship was similar to that of Dick and Jared in the Dick Hardesty Mystery series). When either of us was dating someone, the “benefits” were put on hold, to resume again when neither one of us was involved. Ed was a children’s dentist and had a very lucrative practice. He bought a beautiful home on a hilltop overlooking the city. However, he grew tired of being a dentist and gave up his practice to move to San Francisco to become a psychologist specializing in gerontology. I moved to Northern Wisconsin about the same time and we lost touch. And then one day a rabbi from San Francisco, traveling cross country, stopped overnight at my B&B. I asked him if by any chance he might know Ed, who was Jewish. “Yes,” he said. “He was a member of my congregation.” “Was?” I asked. He looked at me and said, “You didn’t know?” And in that instant, I did. “I was with him when he died,” he said.
And then there’s Ray, about whom I’ve already talked and will undoubtedly talk again.
These stories are not unique to me. Every gay man who survived the early years of AIDS has similar tales of loss. So many friends. So many decent, kind, warm, loving men snuffed out like so many candles in a windstorm. We cannot forget them. We must not.
* * *
ROBERT
I met Robert through a roommate shortly after I bought my first house in Los Angeles. I always got home from work before Paul, and one evening, the instant I stepped in the front door, I knew I was not alone. I didn’t just know it, I KNEW it. Afraid that the house was being burglarized, and calling out “who’s there?” several times, I cautiously made my way from room to room. The feeling was almost overpowering as I approached the front bedroom, but when I finally gathered the courage to enter, no one was there.
As soon as Paul came home, I told him of the incident. He laughed and said: “Don’t worry about it: it’s just Robert.” Robert, he told me, was a ghost who had lived at Paul’s former apartment with him and three of his roommates. He was totally harmless but had a habit of playing tricks, his most favorite being hiding things. And he was, I learned over time particularly fond of bedrooms and classical music. Though I was frequently aware of his presence, it was never the least bit frightening. In fact, I grew to be very fond of him.
Paul told me of the time one of his roommates had come home from grocery shopping with a carton of cigarettes. Setting the bags on the kitchen table, he made a quick trip to the restroom, and when he returned, the carton of cigarettes was gone from the bag. He was the only one in the apartment at the time. Three weeks later, when another of the roommates set out to do some minor repair on his car, the carton of cigarettes showed up at the bottom of his tool chest.
Though I never learned Robert’s history, he did travel back and forth between my house and Paul’s former apartment. When one of Paul’s former roommates came for a visit, Robert would go home with him and return on the next roommate visit.
When my mother came to visit for Christmas shortly after my father died, we were sitting in the living room on my sofa, talking. The sofa sat toward the center of the room and faced a huge front window, and I could easily see the living room, part of the kitchen, and the entry/dining room, where the Christmas tree had been set up reflected in it.
I was telling my mother about Robert. As I did so, I saw Paul, who had been in the back of the house, enter the living room from the kitchen and walk behind the sofa and into the dining area. He was wearing a bright blue bathrobe I’d recently bought, and when I turned to ask him why, the dining area was empty. When I called out to him, he answered from the back of the house. He was not wearing my robe.
“I don’t believe in ghosts,” my mother said, and at that moment, three ornaments fell off the tree.
Mother apparently changed her mind.
The next morning she told me that she had awakened in the night, knowing that someone was in the room with her. I asked if she’d been frightened, and she said, “Not at all. I just said: ‘go away, Robert,’ and he did.”
When Paul moved out, Robert all but disappeared from my life, though there have been a few times since Los Angeles that I have been aware of him. I do wish he’d show up more often. I miss him.
* * *
ROBERT’S RETURN
I’ve often spoken fondly of “my” ghost, Robert, whom I met when living in Los Angeles. I always liked Robert. He was/is the most pleasant and least intimidating of ghosts, who loves classical music and has a particular fondness for bedrooms. I even saw him once, reflected in a window, walking across the room behind me.
Robert takes great delight in hiding things. Not just hiding them, but removing them from plain sight. Something would be there one minute, and gone the next, not to resurface for days, weeks, or months. The classic example, which I always cite, was when a friend stopped by on his way home from the grocery store. He set his bag on my kitchen table, with a carton of cigarettes clearly visible at the top of the bag. When he returned to the kitchen to pick up his groceries, the carton of cigarettes was gone. There was no one in the house but him and me.
Two months later, I opened a tool chest looking for a hammer and found the carton of cigarettes neatly sitting atop the tools.
Then there was the jar of pennies I kept atop a kitchen counter. One day it was there, the next day it wasn’t. And then, several weeks later, it was. I sort of gave up wondering where missing things had gone. Chances are they would show up either exactly where I’d last seen them or at the back of the top shelf in a kitchen cabinet, or somewhere equally illogical.
When my mom came to visit the Christmas after my dad died, I was telling her about Robert. She smiled one of her “if you say so” smiles, and said, “I don’t believe in ghosts.” And the minute she said it, three ornaments fell off the Christmas tree. He later paid her a visit one night. She said she woke up knowing someone was in the room and merely said, “Go away, Robert,” and he did.
I really missed Robert when I left L.A., but he would make occasional visits over the years. But since I’ve moved to Chicago, nothing. Until today.
When I bought my laptop, I found the little “mouse pad,” which requires moving the mouse around by squiggling the tip of the index across the “pad” a gigantic annoyance. So I bought an external mouse with a retractable cord which works fine. Then, two weeks ago, as I was getting ready to come to “work” at the shopping center information desk, I disconnected the mouse and distinctly recall putting the power plug and the computer into the carrying case. When I got to work, I could not find the mouse. I searched every inch of the case four times, then because I could not specifically recall having put the mouse in the case, assumed I’d left it at home.
Got home, no mouse. Not on the computer desk where I’d disconnected it, not on
any countertop, not in any drawer, not on the floor, not in the refrigerator. Nowhere. No mouse. Tried using the laptop without it, with the totally predictable result. Finally ran out and bought another mouse with a retractable cable.
Today, on my way to work, I packed my computer into its carrying case, making sure I consciously picked up the mouse and put it in the special pocket into which I always put it. And as I did so, I felt something else at the bottom of the pouch. Would you care to guess what it was? Yep. It was NOT there any of the four times I’d searched the case the day it disappeared, nor any of the subsequent times I’d put the computer, mouse, and power cord into the case. But there it was.
Welcome back, Robert.
* * *
KIDS’ PLAY
When we were living on Blackhawk Avenue on Rockford’s south side, the ten or so kids in my block would get together during summer to have picnics. Tommy Colatta, who lived on the fringe of our recognized play area, was a couple of years younger, and whenever we had a picnic, usually in the empty lot next to my house, Tommy would always show up, but he would never bring anything.
“What’s that?” he’d ask, pointing to something one of us was eating, and no matter what it was, Tommy would say “I like…” whatever it was. You could say “It’s a worm sandwich” and Tommy would say “I like worm sandwiches.” Sometimes we’d share, but most times we wouldn’t. And it never occurred to me, until years later, that perhaps Tommy didn’t bring anything to our picnics because he didn’t have anything to bring. I would certainly hope that was not the case, but that it might have been truly saddens me.
World War II ended and peace broke out during those years on Blackhawk Avenue, but it didn’t make all that much difference to us kids. Our favorite game was “Machine Gun,” which I can claim with no little modesty as being of my own invention. It involved one of us being the “shooter” and the rest of us falling down in the most dramatic way possible as we were “shot.” We had, after all, a wealth of newsreels and patriotic movies to draw upon. The one who died most dramatically became the “shooter” for the next round.
I think I mentioned somewhere before that although I was almost painfully shy and insecure, I was the “boss” of our little clique of kids. I remember once, while my dad was a deputy sheriff and working the night shift, that the gang was getting a bit boisterous in the empty lot, and I yelled: “Shut up! My dad’s sleeping!” so loudly that I of course woke him up. He was not as fully appreciative of my efforts on his behalf as I might have hoped.
With the return of the soldiers, sailors, and marines from the war, the country embarked on a vigorous post-war building boom. Blackhawk Avenue was only a block long, and at its west end bulldozers suddenly appeared to clear the trees for the construction of ten or twelve red-brick cookie-cutter houses. This afforded the kids of the neighborhood endless hours of fascination and fun, scrambling like monkeys through the unfinished houses that smelled of newly-sawn wood and wet mortar.
Anyone doubting the relation of humans to monkeys need only watch a group of kids clamoring over a construction site or…another favorite pastime…climbing as high as we could possibly get in every tree on the block. (And I know for a fact that every kid loves bananas.)
Billy Pearson, who lived two doors to the east of the empty lot, was something of a cipher. My age, he was and wasn’t quite part of our group. He lived in a large, very nice brick home which rather stood out on our block of small-to-tiny frame houses. I don’t recall ever having been invited into Billy’s home, and we all had the impression that Billy’s mom was convinced he was far better than we.
Across the street lived a family with a two-year-old son named Kenneth. Not Kenny: never Kenny. Kenneth. And Kenneth’s mother insisted that when we were around him we speak the King’s English. Contractions were not allowed. “That-there” and “ain’t” were viewed with shocked horror, and anyone who used them within Kenneth’s earshot was in for a firm and increasingly familiar lecture. I wonder if Kenneth ever had a real childhood.
As a matter of fact, do kids today have a childhood? Do they ever climb trees, or scramble through construction sites? I rather fear they are far too busy being hauled to soccer practice (and you can’t convince me that every kid who plays it is doing so out of love of the game), or sitting in front of a TV or computer monitor. Why play games with other kids when you can sit all by yourself and see how many Extruxians you can blast with your Nucleator?
* * *
PETS
“Pet” is one of the few English words which is not only both a noun and a verb, but its own definition, like “fly”…a fly is what it is called, and fly is what it does. A pet is what it is called and also its primary purpose: to be petted.
Pets—primarily dogs and cats—have been mankind’s companions for a couple of millennia now. Countless books have been written on our inter-species relationship, its role in our society and in our individual lives. Pets are not human, but our emotional bonds to them can often rival that of all but the very closest of our human relationships.
While comparing cats and dogs is like comparing tangerines and tangelos, they both fulfill basic human needs. Dogs provide around the clock unconditional love. Any time we need, or the dog senses we need, affection, it is right there to provide it. And while cats can also be great sources of comfort and affection it is far more frequently given on the cat’s terms, not the human’s. Call a dog, and it is immediately at your side. Call a cat and 9 times out of 10 it will just stare at you, if it deigns to look in your direction at all. It’s just their nature. Dogs are and have since their first bonding with humans thousands of years ago been “pack” animals. They consider man to be just another member of the pack.
Cats are, by their genetic nature, far more “loners” than dogs. Being part of a group is not nearly as important to them as it is to dogs.
In my life, I have had innumerable pets—probably more cats than dogs, yet it seems on reflection that I am basically more a “dog person” than a “cat person.” The first family pet I can really remember was a Doberman pinscher named Kaiser. Dobermans have the reputation of being a one-person dog, and my dad was that person. Kaiser tolerated my mother and me, but it was to my dad that he was totally devoted. Kaiser once got up on the dining room table when no one was around and ate an entire cake my mother had baked for some special occasion. If Mother was not Kaiser’s favorite person, he was not her favorite dog.
The first dog I remember distinctly as being my own was Lucky, a black mutt who my dad found one day and brought home. Lucky was my dog, and I loved him almost on the same par as I loved my parents. I’m not sure how long we had him, but when we moved into a new home, my dad said we couldn’t have a dog there, and gave Lucky to my grandfather, who lived on a farm. It broke my heart, but Dad was adamant, and that was the last I ever saw of Lucky. Grandpa reported that he had run away. And within two weeks of moving into the new house, Dad bought me a boxer pup, Stormy. I never forgave him for taking Lucky from me, and I have never, after all these years, stopped grieving for him.
I of course eventually grew to love Stormy, who we had from the time I lost Lucky to after my two years in the Navy and completion of college. I forget just how Stormy died, and I don’t want to remember. When I moved to Chicago, I got another boxer, Thor, who had very serious mental problems as a result of inbreeding. He became impossible to keep in our apartment, so I gave him to my aunt, who had a large yard. Thor tried jumping over her chain link fence while wearing his leash and hanged himself. I felt terrible, but it was not the depth of sorrow I felt over Lucky.
When I moved to L.A., I had Cindy, a German shepherd, and Boy, a wonderfully loving large mutt, both of whom died of old age at my home. Overlapping Cindy and Boy was Sammy, another mutt who strongly resembled Toto from The Wizard of Oz. Sammy was a total delight and lived to be 15 or so. She moved with me from L.A. to northern Wisconsin, and died of old age while I was on a trip to L.A.
> Bozo, a huge golden retriever, was surely one of the most loving dogs I have ever had. He loved to sit at my feet, with his head on my lap while I was watching TV, waiting for me to feed him popcorn, a kernel at a time. One day I let him out and he did not come back. I found him dead by the side of the road. For months after, I could not eat popcorn without crying.
My last dog was Duchess, a beautiful pure-white Samoyed I found on the street and who no one claimed even after I put an ad in the paper. Duchess was my only “outside” dog in that she loved winter; the colder the better. I built her a large doghouse attached to my garden shed, and filled it with bales of straw. And then one harsh winter I noticed her drinking a lot more than normal. I thought it was because the water in her bowl had frozen, so I brought her fresh water more often. She couldn’t seem to get enough, and I noticed she was getting thin. I will never forgive myself for not taking her to the vet immediately. When I did, I was told she had severe diabetes. I hadn’t even known dogs could get diabetes. The vet said they would keep her overnight to see what could be done. When I called the next day, I was told she had died during the night. Is it any wonder I think so little of myself?
I now live in an apartment and having a dog is out of the question, so now I just have my cat, Spirit.
And I see that I have rambled on and on and have not yet even mentioned the cats in my life, some of which were, like my dogs, memorable.
Well, another time, if you’re interested.
* * *
CATHARSIS
When I knew she was dead, I picked her up from the kitchen rug on which she had lain, barely moving, for two days, and laid her on her blanket. I folded the blanket over her, picked it and her up, and put them into a large blue plastic bag. I got the box I’d saved for the purpose, and put the bag, the blanket, and Crickett into the box. It was not an easy fit, but after considerable gentle readjusting of the bag, I managed. I got a roll of clear plastic box tape and closed and sealed the box. I then carried it to the elevator, rode down to the first floor, went out the back door and laid the box carefully in an open dumpster. I covered it with a couple other empty boxes and returned to my apartment.