by Shaw Sander
“The Timberline. I want to watch the country boys line-dancing. Did you know that line-dancing caught on for queers because of the old dance laws?”
“Tell me.”
I knew this but it was important for him to tell this story again. There were a few Gay History stories he repeated in a wide loop, pulled out for party entertainment or in a conversation’s lull. The running shoe craze came from a summer on Fire Island. “Don’t wear green on Thursdays or you’re queer” originating with the Faerie People and their weekly woodland ritual orgies. Pinkie rings, the reason the color lavender was important, he could go on. Most of his knowledge came from Judy Grahn’s ‘Another Mother Tongue,’ her detailed investigation leaving no sparkly gay stone un-turned.
“In the thirties it was illegal for men and women to single-sex dance, and they’d get arrested if they tried. So at least one woman had to be present at a men’s bar or vice versa to make it look legit. Conga dancing in lines became the acceptable way for the same sexes to touch---they’d just stick an opposite sex person at the head of the line.”
“Is that true?”
I asked this every time, too. It was a ritual now. I suddenly had a vision of us as very old people, still going through this charade in senility five or six times a day.
“I swear on the grave of Agnes Moorehead.”
“Then the Timberline it is.”
“See if Simon wants to go. Bring the whole gang. Malcolm and his Bubblehead Barbie wife. Gitta and Dick Van Dyke, too.”
“He does look kind of like him. You’re right. I’ll ask ‘em. Malcolm’s wife isn’t healed herself yet. I think she’s still at home on a catheter. How’s next Saturday?”
“How’s Jerry?” I asked Gitta over Fair scones and Frappucinos. We met downtown for coffee at her secretarial job in a building with not one but two Starbucks. We often wondered what the exact plural of Starbucks was---Starbi? Starbuckses?
“Fun, nice, warm. He makes me laugh. No sex yet. I’m too chicken. How’s Simon?”
“Fun, nice, warm,” I smiled. “He makes me laugh. Sex on the first date. I needed to know and so did he. It was just…the right thing to do. We about got engaged from the moment we met so we had better know if the sex would work.”
“And?”
“Oh, it works,” I grinned. “He can fuck as good as any man and as good as any woman, too, which is a high compliment. He’s not afraid to…how do I put it…use his hands and mouth as well as his dick.”
“Right on. Good for you.”
Gitta slurped her drink through her bright orange straw, hitting the cup’s bottom.
“I’m too scared. What if Jerry’s all show and it’s awful once we settle down? I can’t go through the divorce thing twice, Al.”
“You hear the AA story on worrying about that?”
“No.”
“This lesbian was at a party of a friend of hers, lots of women there, everything cool, and the host says, I’ve got someone here I want you to meet, she’s from Brazil. The host takes the lesbian by the hand and pulls her along toward this woman she’s supposed to meet and suddenly the lesbian pulls her hand away and says out loud, ‘But I don’t want to move to Brazil!’”
“In other words,” Gitta summed up, a veteran of meetings now, “the lesbian had futured an entire relationship in the first ten seconds before she even met the woman.”
“Right-o.”
“Okay, I’ll loosen up with Jerry. Things are going to be fine, right?”
“Yes, they are. You trust the Universe to send you someone good, don’t you? Didn’t you say you were making a list ala Malcolm, too, after you heard me doing it?”
“Yes. But…”
“But nothing. Stop at yes. Just say yes. Remember those trust games in the seventies, where you’d have to stand with your back to a bunch of people and fall backward so they’d catch you?”
“I hated those.”
“Me, too. But I never fell on my ass. Someone always caught me.”
“Okay, okay.”
“Hey, whatchu guys doing Saturday? Drake wants to go to the Timberline. Malcolm says he’s in, and Simon’s game as long as I don’t make him dance.”
“The macho Marine at a gay bar?”
“He loves the idea of going to a gay bar. He said in California he was part of the Hash House Harriers and the most fun run was through the gay neighborhood during the Red Dress Run.”
“Serious? Did he wear a red dress?”
“Swear to God, I have seen the photo of my new Marine Corps boyfriend, secure enough in his hetero masculinity to wear a red tu-tu over his running shorts, hoisting a beer after with other Red Dress men and women.”
“You sure he’s straight?”
“Loves titties and pussy. Good thing for me he likes big tits and curvaceous white women. He just likes everyone, is all. He thinks gay bars are wonderfully fun.”
My writing was going nowhere.
Flooded with first exhaustion over Dew for weeks, then relief and joy with Simon, I couldn’t put fingers to keyboard. Everything felt too raw, too close to the bone. I was no longer an authority on anything, smacked down by the Universe over my son’s collapse then lifted by the warm kisses of this damn-near-perfect new man. I felt like clay, pounded down flat then molded back up to human, re-formed with new inside parts I couldn’t explain. The words sat behind my skull, a silent pool.
I cleaned the house instead, playing loud music at night, sipping on herb tea. The curtains looked dusty so those came down, revealing mildewed windowsills and cobwebs in every corner. One project led to another long into the night, my feverish sleep unable to keep me going during my FedEx workday. Naps after lunch sustained me until I fell out on my evening couch in front of the news, only to wake at nine p.m. and start doing home chores.
Simon would email short notes or call once in a while, playing it cool. It felt like we already had the future locked up so why hurry it along? We had obligations to our respective households for a while---my mortgage, his lease. It felt like long foreplay to stretch things lazily out.
He wanted to give me breathing room, he said, let me write in peace.
I had never had a supportive partner who thought I had the Right Stuff, that my creative ability might weigh in heavy someday. I doubted my own flow sometimes, but I’d ended relationships over my art. No reading my shit was allowed, a rule that drove jealous partners to test it, ending trust. Simon couldn’t have cared less what I wrote, he was never going to snoop at it. Reading was a chore to him, something they’d made him do at school, something with which he struggled. His support was completely altruistic, then, and all the more pure.
I tried children’s stories, re-working George and Beezy and Cheepie-Weepie, making up new Babushka the Mouse, Aphrodite the Giraffe and Feluga the Beluga stories. The unimaginative twists seemed structured and flat, just like the children’s stuff I’d hated as a kid, insulting my intelligence.
Porn might make a quick buck, I thought suddenly one day, and who can’t write porn? Cracking my knuckles, I put fresh sheets sandwiched around purple carbon paper into my IBM Correcting Selectric, hoping for raunchy gold that refused to appear. My own fantasies were full of color and breadth but words felt awkward and stilted, like I was trying too hard. The repetitive nature of the work actually was very difficult to keep interesting. How many synonyms were there for dick and pussy? I couldn’t find the plot vs. action balance.
Narrative, maybe, I wondered, thinking Sunshine stories would have a nostalgic feel, maybe qualify as family drama or cultural exchange. Maybe I could point a piece at a quarterly, or an upscale magazine. But opening the Sunshine Tribe to such scrutiny felt like prostituting my own family. I couldn’t hang them out there to dry in the sterile, cruel Real World for a quick buck and fame flash.
Waiting under its plastic bubble cover, my typewriter looked like an old bonnet-style hairdryer, gathering dust.
As it turned out, Simon owned not one but two pairs of
cowboy boots. He was late picking me up because he’d had trouble choosing between the two. Since one pair was black shiny leather and the other creamy buff ostrich skin, he’d had to tailor the entire outfit to the boots.
I had learned that though he looked awesome in casual shirts and jeans, Simon loved to dress well. He owned his own tuxedo, had five pairs of cufflinks, a bigger closet than mine stuffed with dress clothes and his seven pairs of shoes included white bucks. He wore shirt tail garters attached to his socks. The man always looked impeccable.
He said it was something he picked up as a teen, that others dressed too sloppily and he wanted to look like the men in the magazines. He intuited that it drew women, watching them go crazy for a sharp-dressed man.
For this reason Simon had skipped shop in high school, already well-versed in mechanics from working in his father’s gas stations. He’d squeegeed enough windshields back in the full-service days to see a lot of good cleavage and wanted more of that. He joined Four-H and took all the ladies’ classes, entered the baking and jam-making contests, and took Home Ec at school, surrounded by pretty girls who all wanted to “help” the lone man in their midst. Smart man that he was, Simon had found his bliss, women fawning over him from every angle.
He had more pussy than he could ever handle and took six dates to the Berkeley High Senior Prom, three on each side. Instantly crowned Prom King and all his beauties Queens, the roar of the crowd at his audacity was one of his highest moments. They rode in a stretch red Cadillac to His Lordship down on the Bay for their post-prom dinner, afterward partying in the park until dawn in his best clothes.
Simon had chosen the ostrich-skin boots and gone with a wheat-colored Western yoked shirt. His jeans over his incredibly long legs were heaven. I wanted immediately to stay home, and pushed him onto the couch, my legs straddling his lap.
We kissed a few times and he said softly, “C’mon, now, the others are waiting. We’ll take care of that later.”
His hand swept under my skirt, over my pussy.
I could get used to this man.
Malcolm pushed Drake’s wheelchair up the ramp to the Timberline, with Gitta and Jerry close behind.
“You two make the cutest couple,” Simon wisecracked as Malcolm turned the chair around the ramp’s corner.
“Oh, Malcolm is much too good for the likes of me,” Drake assured us, waving his hand. “His wife Brigette Bardot waits at home in a Merry Widow, ready to service him the moment he walks in the door like J, The Sensual Woman.”
Malcolm stopped the wheelchair and looked at Drake, then burst out laughing.
“She does do that shit,” Malcolm said. “She’s always taking those Cosmo quizzes: How To Tell If Your Man Is Satisfied, How To Give Great Head In Three Easy Steps; How To Leave Him Begging For More. I hate that shit. It‘s like she’s experimenting on me, doing secret reconnaissance. We’ll get done and she’ll say ‘Well, how was it?’ and then I realize I am supposed to critique some recycled Butterfly technique or some shit she read about. Jesus, I hate that. My dick won’t even get hard for her anymore.”
The silence in the group was stunning. An identical-looking lesbian couple pushed laughing past us while the greatest vulnerability a hetero man could speak hung there in mid-air.
“Darling, we all have our moments,” Drake chimed in, reaching up to cup Malcolm’s cheek affectionately. “Why, I couldn’t even get Queen Mary to blow her smokestack by myself the other day, she just stayed limp in the harbor no matter what I tried. Don’t let it bother you, you gorgeous creature. You are about to be worshipped as God Incarnate with that body of yours tonight. Why, these queens are going to think you’re straight out of that gay Hootie Burger King commercial. Let ‘em buy you drinks and fawn all over you. No need to worry about your dick. Just absorb the good energy and go home and jack off in the bathroom like the rest of us.”
“Hootie it is,” Malcolm smiled, put completely at ease, and he pushed Drake up to the door.
Simon and Jerry visibly relaxed, the fragile man-moment handled with enormous diplomacy by the least macho of them all.
We swept into the Timberline, the back of our hands stamped with a day-glo horseshoe and nestled up close to the rail as George Strait wailed “You Know Me Better Than That.” Couples swirled on the peanut-shell polished oak floor, the colored gels spotlighting the better dancers. Pearl, the tiny ageless Asian regular, was wearing her pink petticoat dress tonight, a huge Minnie-Mouse bow in her beehive, and she was on the whippet-thin drama dancer’s arm. All was right with the world.
I heard a slight buzz to our left and saw we were being stared at. The crowd of couples and groups around the elbow-high leaning tables were all watching us, with some rumbling underfoot.
A small lesbian came toward us in an Australian outback cowboy hat, its sides curled in and pointing down to the ground for and aft. Our eyes were adjusting to the dark as she approached.
“Excuse me,” she spoke, looking down at Drake in the wheelchair and removing her hat out of respect. “Aren’t you Drake Astor?”
“Yes,” he preened, sitting up straighter. “And you, Precious, are…?”
“I’m Petey, and my friends and I would be honored if you and your posse could join us at our tables over yonder.”
She pointed with her hat to the little crowd, who all suddenly smiled sheepishly then waved little hellos.
“Why, we would be delighted, wouldn’t we, oh my Posse On Broadway?”
Once we were comfortably ensconced with Petey and her friends, drinks appeared for which we did not pay. The Seattle Gay News photographer and his little pocket camera flashed blinding Magicube shots of Drake Astor, new Poster Boy for International Peace. No fewer than fifteen dancers came up and shook his hand as if touching the hem of his garment.
Then came the kicker.
“Mr. Astor?” said a tall older woman I recognized from the Pride Parade.
Greta Cammermeyer had shaken my little Dew’s hand at the Pride Parade a week after he’d wiped out on his foot-scooter, making half his face hamburger. High-ranking military status aside, she was a nurse first, expressing concern for my child when she’d stopped to greet us. Her lover had asked Dew if the bike was alright. When Dew grinned and said yes, she’d told him gruffly “Good man.”
“Yes, I’m Drake Astor,” he’d said, looking up into the eyes of this military wonder.
“Thank you for making noise,” Greta said, shaking his hand.
“Thank you for your service,” Drake choked out, his mouth left hanging open.
The waters parted as she moved away, Drake left speechless for once.
“Flies gonna come in you don’t shut your lower jaw,” Simon laughed, raising his Guinness with the other hand. “Hell, straight or gay, I know a military higher up when I see one. She’s been in the press. Good for her. Here’s to Greta.”
Simon was a most unlikely military man, embracing the concept of aid all over the world but rejecting the war aspect. He himself had participated in two war actions and seventeen humanitarian missions, saving countless lives. He knew how many sacks of grain, pallets of material, jeeps or medical clinic set-ups it took to fill a ship or plane or any size, calculated down to the square foot, organizing more freight into the cargo hold than any of his predecessors. That had been his specialty, affording him his double-entendre Marine Corps nickname: “Squeezebox.”
Jerry and Gitta danced around the outside edge in the wide beginner’s circle. I hit the dance floor with a blond butch who asked politely, nodding first to all the men and butches, unsure who was my partner and so covering all the bases. Simon and Drake, surrounded by well-wishers, watched as I was twirled and spun, my body directed by another’s grip and pure centrifugal force.
As Drake’s muscle, Malcolm was the man literally behind the hero, holding the chair grips. The boisterous gay men recalled Malcolm’s television debut at Shelly’s funeral and soon dubbed him Secret Agent 007. Malcolm was plied with drinks all night as
the worshippers tried to pry intimate truth from his lips. Reveling in his 007 role, he remained mysterious and aloof, enjoying himself immensely.
Drake was bookended between lesbian twins and shouted to me about Romulus and Remus. An SGN reporter yelled questions to Drake over the country twang, and Drake did his best to be witty at a high decibel level. The camera man with his Pocket Instamatic loved the twins framing his shot for next Thursday’s write-up.
“Mary, Kate and Ashley, fame is exhausting!” Drake shouted in my ear when the Tush Push was announced and his new entourage all took to the floor. “When, oh when will the paparazzi leave me alone?” he grinned, squeezing my wrist with his good hand.
I thought of Whoopi Goldberg taking Sally Field to the mall in “Soapdish,” creating an adoring mob of fans.
“You were great out there,” Simon whispered in my ear as I sat on his lap to rest. His hands circled my waist as he held me tightly. “Go dance some more so I can watch. It’s foreplay for me. Go on,” he smiled wickedly. “It’ll pay off for you handsomely later.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Jerry, wanna dance?” I asked just as he and Gitta were sitting down.
“Sure,” he grinned at me. “You’re probably gonna have to back-lead, though. I’m new at the two-step thing. Let’s hope for a waltz, while we’re at it, and then I promise you, I’ll take you on in a more manly way.”
Gitta waved us onto the floor and Jerry assumed the lead position.
“You’ll do fine. Slow, slow, quick, quick, slow, slow, quick, quick. Relax.”
Jerry held my hand tentatively but got stronger as he began to get the hang of it. I gently steered the action from my follow position, thinking of the feminist quote about Ginger Rogers: She’d done everything Fred Astaire had, only backwards and in high heels.
“You’re quite good,” Jerry commented, finally able to talk and dance at the same time.
“Thank you,” I said, limiting the conversation so he wouldn’t falter.