by Wade Rouse
The last image I had of my mime as I scurried past the restaurant window was of him sitting there, his mug all squenched up in a troubled look, his hands in midair, doing the “I’m confused!” bit to a nearby group of diners. As they laughed, he transformed his rubber face into some sort of goofily asinine expression and began swirling his right forefinger around his temple in order to indicate that I was crazy.
Perhaps I am, I thought as I strolled down the street, but at least I knew I was sane enough not to have sex with a mime.
I mean, can you imagine the hand gesture that would have prompted?
ST. PATRICK’S DAY
The O’Rouses
The only Irishman I knew growing up was my father.
Okay, he wasn’t Irish in the least. And we lived in the Ozarks.
He was “pretend Irish,” as my mother called it, “which is exactly like being a little bit pregnant,” she’d finish. “Either you are or you aren’t.”
My dad looked Irish, however, with his sandy-blond-reddish hair, his short, scrappy stature, his pale skin, and, of course, his love o’ the ale.
And my dad attended the University of Missouri-Rolla, an excellent engineering school that was perhaps more famous for its St. Patrick’s Day celebrations. My father was in a fraternity that helped lead the green riot on campus, and every St. Patty’s Day he prided himself on wearing an old sweatshirt from his frat-boy days that featured a drunken leprechaun dancing on a four-leaf clover.
When he looked in the mirror, I’m convinced he saw Danny Kaye.
I remember emerging every year as a high schooler on St. Patrick’s Day morning to a giant pinch from the green Grinch.
“Ouch!”
“Where’s your green?”
“Stop it, Dad! I don’t wear kelly green! No one should!”
“We’re Irish!” he would say.
Now, our family was about as Irish as the O’Charley’s restaurant chain. We were mutts, Ozarkians, a chromosome away from being cave dwellers or performing in minstrel shows. We were anything but Irish.
I would roll my eyes dramatically at my father, who would pinch me again, harder, out of spite, before returning to a skilletful of scrambled eggs that he had dyed with green food coloring.
Every St. Pat’s Day, on cue, just as I would pour my bowl of Quisp cereal, my dad would look out the kitchen window, the strong March wind whipping our oak branches around, and say, in an awful Irish brogue, “Oh, you know, a windy day is the wrong one for thatching.”
Come again?
“Looks like it might rain,” he’d continue. “You know, you can take the man out of the bog but you can’t take the bog out of the man.”
Seriously?
“May your blessings outnumber the shamrocks that grow, and may trouble avoid you wherever you go.”
That’s when I would grab my books, coat, and keys, and sprint for the back door.
And then I went away to college, and my father’s Irish eyes smiled upon me, and my first roommate was as stereotypically Irish as you could get: Irish name. So pale as to burn under a one-hundred-watt bulb. Solar system of red hair (in fact, a full-on ’fro in homage to Julius Erving). Funny as hell. Could drink the entire Rat Pack under the table. He was even prone to offering up phrases at the drop of a hat, such as when making a toast: “May the road rise to meet you. May the wind be always at your back. May the sun shine warm upon your face. The rains fall soft upon your fields. And until we meet again, may God hold you in the palm of his hand.”
Though he would lead me into more trouble than Eve, he became one of my best friends, and my father couldn’t have been prouder—more so even than if I had gone on to marry Angie Dickinson.
In graduate school I seemed to have been blessed by my father’s green blood again, as another Irishman danced into my life via one of my journalism classes. He, too, was clever as hell and prone to partying. I remember my first week at Northwestern, when the professors tossed us newbie reporters onto the streets of Chicago and told us to return at the end of the day to hammer out a story on deadline on a typewriter. It was so All the President’s Men.
I returned, feeling like a real city boy for the first time in my life, only to be called out by a professor for using the verb “get” in my lead.
“Laziest verb in our vocabulary!” he screamed. “Who wrote this?”
I raised my hand, head down, the professor continuing, “Class? Give me twenty verbs better than ‘get’!”
As my new classmates fed off my carcass to prove their worth, my soon-to-be new Irish friend finally said, as the class quieted down, “Get off his ass and get a life, you pathetic suck-ups!”
He saved my life. He could’ve led me to the top of the building after class, told me to jump, and I would’ve giddily catapulted to my death.
Instead I spent months slowly killing myself, hanging out with him on Rush Street, a main center of business and nightlife, which was where he lived, interned, and also worked in a club as a bartender.
When I wasn’t writing, I drank.
When I wasn’t studying, I drank.
When I wasn’t drinking, I was drinking.
Usually with him.
Of course, St. Patrick’s Day was a huge celebration not only for my friend but also for the entire city of Chicago, which has a huge Irish population and great heritage. They toss a citywide party, complete with a huge parade and an official dyeing of the Chicago River a shade of green so iridescent, so shocking, it’s like seeing Mickey Rourke in person: You’re mortified but mesmerized.
Considering it was my first St. Pat’s Day in Chicago, my friend offered loads of advice, all bad, culminating with this: “If you want to be in the middle of all the fun, I can get you into the festivities if …”
Whenever anyone says “if,” I shudder.
If is the word that introduces the most nightmarish of situations:
“If you only loved me as much as I love you …”
“If you would just put this in your mouth …”
“If you would only swallow these drugs in a balloon and haul them across the border you could make ten thousand dollars …”
His if was: “If you would be willing to sport a leprechaun costume, you could walk with my bar in the parade and get all your drinks for free.”
Now, I was roughly 240 pounds. And I was sure I’d never seen a leprechaun that big, or they’d be sent to Jenny O’Craig. Still, I was intrigued. My parents were paying mucho dinero for me to attend grad school, I was not working, and any little savings seemed like a good idea.
“If you think you could find me a costume that fit …” I mistakenly uttered.
He didn’t.
Instead the bar provided a Goodwill bag of green hodgepodge, including a supersized kelly-green tux with tails, a green bowtie, a giant green top hat with a bouncy shamrock, giant shiny black pilgrim shoes with big buckles, and white tights in which to shove my pant legs.
I looked like the Hulk.
Especially when surrounded by hot bartenders, including my friend, who sported “sexy leprechaun outfits” composed of a green vest and bowtie over a bare chest, a shamrock painted on their biceps.
“Holy Rosemary Clooney!” I screamed at my friend outside his bar after taking the El downtown with a throng of drunken Chicagoans taunting me with calls of “They’re magically delicious!” and “Pink hearts! Yellow moons! Fat leprechaun!”
“I look like an ass!” I said.
“You do!” my friend said. “A green ass. But you get free drinks all night!”
I called my dad for some reason, at the height of my drunkenness, to wish him happy St. Patty’s Day.
“Where are you?” he yelled, so I could hear him over the din.
“In an Irish bar in downtown Chicago! I watched them dye the river!”
“Are you wearing green?”
“I’m dressed as a leprechaun! And I’m wasted!”
I thought I could hear him crying.
&nb
sp; Then he gave me the best advice of my life. “Listen, sonny boy. An Irishman is never drunk as long as he can hold on to one blade of grass and not fall off the face of the earth.”
SPRING BREAK
Heaven’s Waiting Room
“I haven’t been on holiday in years,” Gary said to me the third fall after we had moved to Michigan.
“Who are you? The princess of Monaco?” I asked. “Holiday?”
“It’s just that winter is nearly here …”
And then Gary’s voice trailed off.
We were outside raking leaves at the time, and there was already a skiff of snow dotting the woods and high points in the yard. We could see our breath. Gary was blowing on his hands, and I could see him shiver.
And this was still, officially, fall.
Winters in Michigan are a lot like John Holmes’s penis: awe-inspiring but way too long, leaving you to wonder—after the initial fascination and get-to-know-you phase wears off—if you can really take the whole thing.
I knew I couldn’t. I’d tried. I knew, pardon the inevitable pun, what was to come.
Which is why I was already loading up on antidepressants and sleeves of cookie dough. I had already purchased an African violet to set on my windowsill overlooking the woods, a single dot of purple to cheer the vast wasteland of whiteness, knowing it would likely do as much good as placing a Nexium on the distended, pale paunch of a serial belcher.
However, I was floored to hear my ever-optimistic partner—the one who loves to ski and make snow angels, the one who doesn’t go bonkers after three straight weeks of whiteout—express his desire to retreat from winter’s battle.
“Why can’t we go on holiday?”
Gary dropped his rake and was again blowing on his hands. He was staring at me with that look that kids give their moms right before they scream like a banshee at McDonald’s because they received the wrong Happy Meal toy.
I was shoveling frozen coils of dog poop, my nose dripping snot.
And then I thought, Why can’t we holiday?
“Holiday” is what older gays call spring break. Except that it is an extended winter vacation. It’s not a week to Disneyland or a three-day Funjet trip to Punta Cana or a college frat week in Cancún. It’s fleeing the cold for a more tropical clime for a few months.
We knew lots of gays who go on holiday, fleeing St. Louis or Chicago or Michigan for Fort Lauderdale, Palm Springs, the Carolinas, Costa Rica. But we weren’t the jet-set gays. And we certainly weren’t retired. We had two dogs, including a new puppy, Mabel, a labradoodle-beagle mix we adopted at the shelter who was a gene short of being absolutely nuts. And we had to work in order to do the little things in life, like eat and have shelter and heat.
Still, for the very first time in our lives, Gary and I had total flexibility. We had restructured our lives in order to be unstructured. We no longer had a daily nine-to-five routine to hold us back, no corporate overseer to dispense ten days of vacation and seven holidays a year.
I could write anywhere. And winter was slow season from Gary’s work as an innkeeper.
As I raked, I realized that I hadn’t been on a real spring break since college, when I went to Daytona Beach and vomited for seven days straight, sleeping on the floor on top of a float raft lined with nacho-cheese Doritos and Domino’s boxes. My fellow fraternity brothers and I had stacked empty beer cans in the window of our motel room—like a holiday display at Macy’s—and when the windows were fully covered, we threw the beer cans under the twin beds until our room began to rattle every time someone snored. The highlight of that last spring-break trip, however, was being accused by one of my best friends, for reasons still unknown to me, of jacking off while eating his Baby Ruth candy bars while everyone else was passed out.
More than anything, however, I remember being a young man trapped in an old soul’s body, a hideously overweight closeted college gay boy who could only hide his secret and his fears by drinking until nothing made sense. I went to strip clubs and felt boobs, or so I was told, and, thankfully, remember very little, except when I would fight off my hangover and rise early—before my friends or other college spring breakers had taken over the beach—and walk, watching the ocean, watching old couples hold hands as they walked along the beaches at Daytona.
I longed to fast-forward my life. I wanted clarity. I wanted to be with someone I loved. I no longer wanted to be young.
I had all of that now.
I looked over at Gary and said, “Let’s do it!”
So Gary and I researched Southern cities and rental homes that took pets. And, after the recommendation of several older friends whom we trusted implicitly, we settled on Sarasota, specifically a narrow residential key south of Sarasota and an adorable little salmon-colored Florida-style bungalow sandwiched between the bay and the Gulf of Mexico.
We booked it for nearly two months. I’d never been on vacation longer than ten days.
But this was holiday, I reminded myself.
We left, two neurotic dogs and two neurotic men, all panting excitedly, for Florida at four A.M. in February during a complete Michigan whiteout, our SUV packed to its gills with luggage, dog crates, food, laptops, books, beach chairs, and more skin-care products than the downtown Chicago Sephora. The trip was supposed to take roughly twenty hours total; it took us nearly three hours, in the whiteout, to drive a hundred miles.
Slowly, the farther south we drove, the snow stopped, the highways cleared, the weather warmed, and things turned this bizarre color known as green. I stopped at nearly every Starbucks on the highway, ingesting enough caffeine to power the car, if needed, with my blood.
Exhausted after driving thirteen hours, we passed out at a Best Western in southern Georgia that accepted pets, rising early to eat grits and waffles in a sad-looking lobby overlooking the highway with a gaggle of snowbirds who had trouble opening their cartons of milk with knobby, gnarled fingers. While Gary stole boxes of cereal from the buffet, cramming them down his shorts and into his jacket so we could snack on them while we drove, I was checked out by ConnieSue, a desk clerk who was entranced by the silver-and-diamond ring Gary had designed for me for my fortieth birthday.
“Is your wife’s the exact same?” asked ConnieSue, an older woman with an accent thicker than the sausage gravy on the buffet.
“No, it’s different,” I said. I had lived in Georgia for a brief time. I knew how to play the game.
“I notice a lot more men are wearin’ their weddin’ bands on their right hands. It must be the newest thang. Call me old-fashioned, but I like it on the left hand, where it belongs. Anyhoo, it’s eggsquisite! My fuckin’ daughter-in-law—excuse my French, young man—would never do such a thoughtful thing for my son. You must have a wonderful wife.”
“I do.”
“Well, she shore must be somethin’ special.”
“She is,” I replied, just as Gary waddled up with roughly fifty dollars’ worth of tiny cereals on his person.
“We are set, sugar pie!” he said to me, crunching with every step. “I gotta go unload our loot!”
I said so long to a bewildered ConnieSue, and we bloated ourselves on Sugar Pops, Frosted Flakes, and Fiber One for the last leg of our trip down the long finger of Florida.
Finally, hours later, Gary and I crossed an old swing bridge and onto a tiny key no wider than a flattened snake. It was like traveling back in time into one of those old paperback mysteries or 1960s beach movies, a world filled with palms and sultry breezes and turquoise waters on both sides of the key, a road filled with sand and coconuts and wind-blown fronds. Ancient, low-slung stucco motels drenched in turquoise and aqua and sea-foam green snuggled against the sand, places with names like Sun Tan Terraces, Palmetto Arms, Gulf Breeze, Sandy Shores, The Place to Be, and Gulf Winds. Old-timers were drinking beer and sunning on lounge chairs, their faces leathery and turned toward the sun like the bloom on a flower.
And then—Bam!—the landscape changed into an episode of MTV Cri
bs. On the left was a big home, then, on the right, a giant home, then the Taj Mahal, then the Kennedy compound, and then gated Spanish-style mansions with land stretching from bay to ocean.
We searched house numbers, wondering if perhaps we had won the lottery and would be staying in one of these mansions for a few hundred dollars a week. And suddenly, there, sitting amidst these mansions like a zit on the nose of Jessica Alba, was our little bungalow, cute as a button but dwarfed in size, grandeur, and sheer shimmery, dripping opulence by homes we were to later find out ranged in the upper millions.
“We’re the Clampetts,” I said to Gary, as we stepped out of our SUV into eighty-degree weather, palms dancing in the wind, a Bentley whizzing by us while Marge and Mabel relieved themselves on the crushed shells that served as a lawn.
Gary spent the first forty-eight hours of his holiday bleaching like one of the Merry Maids. Since the house was a rental, it had—obviously—been previously lived in, a mystical fact that seemed to bypass Gary until he actually walked into the house.
“People have lived here?” he said, horrified, wide-eyed, as though he had happened upon a mass murder. “And there’s carpet. I thought it was tile. Carpet hides things.”
So we immediately got back in the car and went to the grocery to buy carpet cleaner and 409 antiseptic spray and Purel and more bleach than the Mayo Clinic would use in a year. We scrubbed until the house smelled like an ICU and the skin on out hands burned.
Only when Gary is close to cartilage and bone does he stop cleaning.
And then Gary, the ultimate nester, began his Extreme Home Makeover, covering Three’s Company floral couches with shell-covered king and queen sheet sets he found in an old chest, transforming the furniture into clean, beachy sofas that would turn Vern Yip’s head.
Satisfied that he could finally sleep and shower without getting dysentery, Gary led me again to the store, this time for food. It was then that, finally paying attention to our surroundings, we realized we were in an updated version of Cocoon.
It took us roughly three hours that day to make our way through Publix, considering we were the only ones flexible enough to bend over and pick up a loaf of bread without breaking a bone, the only ones not fresh out of cataract surgery, the only ones young enough and willing to help, considering the grocery-store shelvers ran when anyone said, “Excuse me, young man …?”