I am trying out the text editor on my not-so-new, but never before used, Apple. On one of those binges of buying superfluities in which I indulge far too often, I bought an Apple micro-mini or whatever it's called, one of those little white 8"x8" boxes, a year or so ago when I was having trouble making my iPod and my PC work nicely together. Where my much more frugal brothers, for instance, would ask somebody, or keep trying - or maybe throw the iPod against the wall; I went on my usual ill-informed buying spree. The Apple worked awesomely with the iPod, but what I didn't realize until too late was that one cannot download songs from the Apple to the same iPod on which one has downloaded songs previously from a PC. Of course I had immediately bought a bunch of stuff from iTunes and had it nestled in the heart of my new computer before I discovered this. I am sure if I were to decipher all the material available on the subject, I would find a way to save one set of music in some format or other and translate the whole thing and re-program the iPod for an Apple and yadda yadda - and little Davy, lemme tellya, does not go there. So the Apple sat for a year or so, languishing in those areas of my closets labelled "Oops". A second factor in sticking with the PC was the difficulty in getting on the same wireless router as my PC was using, with the new Apple; when trying to link up one is always asked things like IP-somethings - those numbers with 3 decimals interspersed that one always writes down on little scraps of paper - if one writes them down at all - just before one moves to a new city or has that once-a-year urge to clean this place up. Believe me, the moving is the far more common occurrence of the two. My brother Liam who is the only one of my siblings who can make me look industrious by comparison used to put his failed enthusiasms, such as my Apple was to me, in his basement, which was known as The Boulevard of Broken Dreams. Anyway, my current PC with all its virus protection and firewalls and phish-filters and so on, has finally slowed to the point where it was actually easier to haul out the old Apple and try again - and, gee, a call to customer service actually makes all work smoothly. What does NOT work smoothly is the formatting when I move from my Apple text editor to MSN. All the italics, paragraphing and so forth are gone.  So I have to move it into my PC Word program and re-edit it there.  Hardly worth it, you are thinking; I know you are.

Speaking of soi-disant boulevards, there was once a stretch of the stockroom of an F. W. Woolworth store that was known as Shaughnessy Boulevard in my honor. This was a narrow passage from the vast main stockroom where I worked on my first job that led past the back entrance to the Ladies' room to a small vermin-proofed room lined with wire mesh in which was stored all the boxes of loose candy of that kind which Woolworth sold by weight at the candy counter. Grace, a woman who clerked out front, would come back to the stock room and find me and ask, "Shall we stroll down Shaughnessy Boulevard?" And the two of us would make our way down this unromantic passageway and fill our pockets with a selection of our favorites. We'd spend our time, as we stuffed both pockets and faces, comparing the merits of fireballs, taffy pinwheels and the like. Grace knew her candy, and had the figure to prove it. I had begun working at Woolworth at the beginning of my senior year of high school, when I was 18. Of course, I had no desire whatever to have a job, but one day I overheard my Aunt Lucille speaking with Mom in tones of deep disapproval of some lad who was 19 years old "and didn't even have a job!" I valued Aunt Lucille's good opinion so I did a quick calculation and realized that I was but a year or so away from this unknown lad's disgraceful status. This actually impelled me to get up off my butt and make a few desultory attempts to find work at the first mall built in our area; malls were just beginning their cancerous spread at this time in the very late 50s and the first mall built outside the local city was constructed in Charlotte, the neighboring town which comprised half of my school district. Nearly every rural school district in New York seems to span two towns and each is known by a hyphenated combination of the two towns' names. My school, Reedville-Charlotte, was no exception. Anyway, to my intense surprise, Woolworth liked - or at least could tolerate - what they saw, and soon I had a job at $1 per hour, working as a stock-boy from 5 to 9 p.m. each school night and all day Saturday. There are those, no doubt, who will point to this type of judgment on Woolworth's part when discussing the eventual demise of that once-mighty chain of stores.

"Stock-boy" was mostly a euphemism (is that 'a euphemism' or 'an euphemism'?) for 'janitor'. Although I occasionally received incoming stock and moved it into the long lines of shelves in the stockroom, very little stock arrived after my evening shift began, so I spent most of my time cleaning the bathrooms, sweeping the aisles, and being on-call to the lunch counter, which needed constant garbage can emptying and supplies brought out to them (such as the potatoes which I cut into the right shape for French fries), especially on Saturdays when they were very busy. I became good friends with nearly all the clerks who worked at Woolworth. These were nearly all women; either middle-aged married women or young women just out of high school on their first jobs. There were also a number of high school girls - mostly from one of the high schools in the City - who condescended (they would have you believe) to supply their services, part time. These girls - especially three who were in a high school sorority - seemed incredibly sophisticated to me - all of these three had coats with real fur collars, as I recall, and they referred to their friends and each other by their last names. "Sweeney got caught smoking in the john," and so forth. Of course they all smoked; back then, who didn't?

Nightly, about 8:30, I would begin to sweep the aisles between the counters with a wide cloth push-broom comprised of long strands of thick yarn-like tendrils. This broom was just over half the width of an aisle, so I would push it up one side and down the other, cleansing each aisle of the accumulated detritus dropped by our rather messy customers. I had to complete this duty before I could go home, so I really resented interruptions, since then as now, my whole goal on my job was to be out that door on the stroke of the quitting hour.

My boss was a short acerbic red-faced man named Roi Benson: he actually spelled it 'Roi'. Roi had liked my predecessor very much, and as Paul, the predecessor, had "moved up" to being a clerk, I had mighty shoes to fill, if shoes can be said to be 'mighty'. Paul seemed to know everything about the job, and I felt suitably humble in his presence. He was still in high school as was I, but he attended one of the Catholic schools in the city and thus seemed way more old and wise than I could ever hope to be. Roi and Paul had a code language which consisted of using the first letters of each word of known phrases, most of them unusable in polite company. They'd spot each other and yell, "S.A.C!" which I am pretty sure I understand, though I never actually was told what it meant. There were elaborate insults - particularly about Barbara, a somewhat peculiar woman who worked at the lunch counter and who was Roi's sworn enemy. Barbara's last name was Bellhouse, and one could hear Roi holler to Paul, "B.B.E.P.W.A. M. L." or the like - which I actually understood, once I became familiar with Paul and Roi's preferred insults. Barbara, who was not the most finely honed knife in the drawer, once yelled at Roi one of these alphabetic insults including the "B.B." which actually referred to her if one understood it, to the intense amusement of all who heard – which was most of the ladies who were pretty familiar with Roi's patois - and all enjoyed the constant warfare between Roi and Barbara.

Roi was a good boss, and he liked me. He would stick up for me when I was particularly bone-headed, which was often, and then he'd yell at me later in private. He had contempt for most women, with a few exceptions which I gather he deemed were "as smart as men". He had no use whatever for any of those feminine wiles that some of the clerks employed - I can see him now, standing there rolling his eyes and waiting for them to get to the point. Roi loathed the store manager Mr. Collins. This was a tall dark-haired man that strode about looking like an undertaker. Among Roi's most treasured moments was one in which he overheard a customer say to her unruly child, "If you don't behave, I am going to have that man get after you," pointing to the manager. Collins exuded the vibes of a disciplinarian, and was pretty much humorless. Oddly, the assistant manager, who was a woman, was one of Roi's friends and allies; often she acted as the peace bridge between Collins and Roi. There were also two young trainee managers in the store, men who seemed old and authoritative to me, but who I now realize were probably in their 20's and as clueless, most of the time, as I was. For these guys Roi had no time whatever, although it wasn't entirely clear to me if he outranked them or they him. Roi was very, very good at his job and it was well for him that he was, because he was not a man to mince words, nor to flatter where a dose of unvarnished truth would actually make his way rougher. His run-ins with Mr. Collins were the stuff of legend.

It dawned on me slowly that Roi was gay, and that although he never actually said anything about it, he wasn't the least bit embarrassed about it or ashamed of the fact. Moreover, I realized after while that all the older women, at least, were perfectly aware of this, as was Paul, who was straight. Roi was not at all effeminate; he was never inappropriate, and he certainly in no way ever behaved toward me other than in a friendly professional manner. This was a matter of astonishment to me; how could he not be embarrassed by a condition that had me so tied in knots in my own internal life? How could he bear for people to know? Once in a while, he would make an oblique observation about someone - perhaps a public figure of some sort - that presumed I knew what he was talking about. I usually did, and I always feigned ignorance; although I am pretty sure I would get all red-faced and awkward.  I would wonder - would he say this to Paul and other guys, or only to me? Did he know? Looking back, I am pretty sure he did know, and although he couldn't resist a gentle poke at the issue now and then, he was a kind and forbearing man to his friends, and he never really put me in a difficult situation. And he never did this in the presence of others - except possibly Paul, in which case he was speaking to us both. So I never felt exposed.  Despite his bluster and contempt for incompetence, Roi was never mean-spirited.

My year at Woolworth ended, and I went off to college. I had secured a job at the store next door to Woolworth for my brother Gary, and my own job passed to Gary's best friend, Charlie Westfeld whose family farm marched with ours on the eastern side of Reedville. I returned from my first year of college to find that Gary and Charlie frequently went to Roi's place in the city for a few beers of an evening. Not burdened with the guilty secret which I bore, they were indifferent to the appearance this might present, and certainly showed no concern that a sexual issue might be broached. I went with them at times (I never went alone) - as I said, I liked Roi, and he was a very amusing host. I am not sure now, but I suspect he also supplied much more than his share of the beverages consumed. At Roi's we sometimes met a close friend of his named Howard. Howard was the embodiment of all things that I disliked about gay people, and all things which I truly believed I would become instantly were I ever to let myself become active sexually. I was a true believer in 'slippery slopes', those dangerous inclines so often cited by politicians who are against something. Howard was somewhat effeminate, but more annoying to me, he turned every remark into a sexual innuendo. If he were actually striving to be a stereotype, he could not more completely have encompassed all I believed gay men to be. With that 'worst case' mentality I had then (and perhaps now), I saw Howard as my possible fate, completely ignoring that fact that I had the example of Roi, a decent and honorable and competent man, right there in front of me. I don't mean that Howard was dishonorable - I mean that such was not the quality I was most aware of in his presence. Charlie and Gary just thought he was funny - and not even in a contemptuous way. As has been the case so often in my life, I kept myself from enjoying a fun and innocent situation because of my own inner dialogue.

While were still seeing a great deal of Roi, Howard died. Roi was devastated, I think, much more than he let on. I don't know if the two had ever been lovers, but I do believe Howard was for Roi that one true friend that lasts through thick and thin, who is there for the times both good and bad. It has been my observation that for gay men of my generation and older, lovers may come and go, but there is always that one true friend whom one met at the very beginning of one's life as a gay man who is, more than any sexual partner, the one true significant other in his life. Charlie, Gary and I all drifted off into our own lives and only Gary saw Roi occasionally during the rest of Roi's life. Gary moved to a tiny town some thirty miles south of Reedville after he married and Roi ended up living in the country not far from there. For years I was unable to afford to return to New York from California, where I had more or less settled, and so it was only after Roi died that I saw enough of Gary to drift into the kind of conversation that ranges over topics that are not immediate. I gathered from him that Roi had died a very lonely man. I wish I had the vision, when I was younger, to see outside my own fear and misery on the subject of sexuality, and to recognize Roi for the gently heroic figure that he was. In an era when men of his - our - nature were objects of hatred and derision (as if it were over and Mike Huckabee had not recently reaffirmed that AIDS was a fitting punishment for a sinful lifestyle; although apparently taking expensive gifts at every opportunity is somehow not sinful, an inspiring thought for all of us), Roi had the integrity and courage to be who he was. He never pushed his life style into others' faces, a behavior which is annoying and objectionable in my opinion, but he was who he was, a good friend, a kind boss, a humorous and caring friend, and an unashamed gay man. And like so many good folks, he ended sad and alone, a situation that I did nothing to alter, and which I am only now beginning to truly understand. I hope that he had some clue, before he died, that his example was not wholly ignored and that he gave me, at least, a glimpse of what a good man can be, and how many ways an honorable life can be lived by one who has the courage to accept himself as he is made.

My New Yorker came a few weeks ago packaged with a slick glossy magazine entitled Movies Rock.  Being stuck in Smallville surrounded with white billowy mounds stretching as far as the eye can see, which for once are not the outer layers of my aging flesh, I started reading some of the articles in this magazine and came across a short article inspired by the author’s discovery of a packet of undeveloped negatives of photos of Miles Davis that her husband had taken in 1955.  The article featured a full page of shots of Miles in which he seems smiling and friendly and open, a handsome young man one would like to know.  I got as far in the article as the author’s remark that her husband, who shot the pictures used to hang out with Miles at the time, when they’d hit some NY clubs and hang out at parties in the West 50’s (an address that probably means something to an urban New Yorker) with Jack Kerouac and the like.  I was thinking, “Oh, my God!” and “Shit, why wasn’t I doing shit like that when I was in my 20’s?”  And suddenly I thought of Tommy Johnson, a friend of mine of whom I hadn’t thought in years. 

I met Tommy in a therapy group; the same one led by Doctor Schactner where I met Gil, the fellow with whom I finally dropped gratefully from my icy pedestal or, more accurately, icy ledge of virginity.  Doctor S worked part time at a prison outside San Francisco somewhere and Tommy had been one of the inmates who attended the therapy sessions he held there.  On his release Tommy wanted, or was persuaded, to continue therapy with the doc at one of San Francisco’s public health clinics.  Tommy was a handsome, compact, muscular man – something about the pictures of Miles Davis reminded me of Tommy – maybe the smile, his size, or the idea of a jazz musician – likely all three.  Tommy was a shade or two lighter than Miles, and very handsome, in a sort of boyish Sugar Ray Robinson way.  There was something very youthful and twinkling just under his skin.  Tommy played progressive jazz on sax, a music whose charms escaped me utterly then and escape me utterly now, and he was passionate about it.  I have no recollection as to what actions had brought Tommy to Santa Rita, the prison in which he’d been incarcerated, but Tommy was such a sweet-natured, easy-going guy, I can’t imagine it was anything violent and there was nothing dishonest about him.  Most likely it had been drugs, since the state of California was at that time extremely vindictive toward anybody who’d ever smoked a doobie.  The counterrevolution had begun in the state under the smiling Nazi aegis of the Great Communicator and throngs of kids who were no different from a bunch of the boys in the country out for a few beers except for the intoxicant involved were receiving long life-destroying sentences, as indeed is the case today across the nation. 

Also in the group at the time was an attractive red-haired woman from one of the less expensive San Francisco suburbs to the South.  Carol had not seen the inside of a jail so far as I know, and I am not clear as to why she felt she needed therapy (she did, but I don’t know why she thought so).  Carol was one of those lost souls, looking for thrills, a compulsive thief, her own worst enemy.  She was a laughing, energetic, fun sort of woman drawn to every bright light, the more dangerous the better.  Sadly, however she had three children, a girl of about 12 with whom she was at constant war and two younger boys.  The year was sometime after the Summer of Love and before Disco, a time when black/white couples were very much remarkable, the Panthers as well as the Reaganites were in full cry, and it was wise for such couples to limit their range to urban hip venues.  Naturally, little time elapsed before Carol and Tommy were a couple. 

Tommy played his sax in a band or group or combo, whatever such nexuses of jazz were called at the time.  These were not like the groups of today – or even the groups who made records then – which had names and a static membership; they were fluid ad hoc combinations.  Someone got a gig and hauled in the other players he knew who were congenial and this would comprise the band for the duration of the engagement.  Often they didn’t even have a name – the groups, I mean, not the players; so far as I know they always had names. 

Looking back, I’d say that Tommy and Carol were about the worst possible choice for each other in terms of mental health (especially his), but they were a lot of fun to be with and both members of our therapy group, as I have said, which caused me to view anything concerning them in the light most favorable to them.  As I recall, Tommy was trying to stay sober while playing in venues which were cornucopiae of the very refreshment, whether smoked, drunk, injected or sniffed, which he most needed to eschew.  Haight Street was still jammed and busy, although the gentler spirits had begun to flee to rural communes.  Tommy’s group had a gig for a time at a place which initially I was thinking was a place called “Relaxxxxxx With Yvonne”, but which on second thought, I believe it was a place near it – something with a black and white striped canopy over the entrance – “The Juke Box” or something like that – whatever.  This was on Haight Street, on the south side, about halfway between Ashbury and Stanyan which latter bordered the beginning of Golden Gate Park.   

When people connect hippies with music, I think they tend to picture them carrying guitars on straps slung over their shoulders, and this picture is accurate in many cases, but there was a large sector of the musically ambitious who carried a much subtler, more deadly weapon, the flute.  Wispy women in tie-dyed or batik garments, white skinned and pre-Raphaelite in appearance (even the black female players, rare though they were, seemed to give this impression)  harbored within the folds of their garb the deadly flute.  Pasty men (it is scientifically impossible for a man to both have a tan and play a flute) with knotted and tumbling locks, harbored within their meager hoard of possessions this pernicious weapon.  The zeitgeist then more or less compelled any band in the Haight or in Berkeley to acquiesce to the desire of any of these musical ninjas to ‘jam’ with them as they attempted to entertain the assembled audience.  In nearly every case it sounded much like a war between Metallica and The Singing Nun, musically speaking.  After such evenings Tommy would have much to say about the experience, which to him was painful in varying degrees, but since I attended his performances from motives of loyalty and friendship, and found no pleasure in progressive jazz whatever, I found these flightss of flutitude to be highly entertaining.  Part of it was suspecting the harsh thoughts that were racing behind the band’s blandly benign faces, and part of it was the fact that I had just discovered that the term for a flute-player was ‘flautist’, a word that I find even today so exquisitely humorous, that I long to find occasions to say it.  So I would listen to the bwaw!  bwaw! twee-EEK! of these impromptu collaborators while mentally composing puns and divers other mots employing the term flautist to amuse Carol and the other friends who would be with us at the Juke Box.  These I would deliver sotto voce, making them laugh which was a pas of the faux-est kind in the hippie world of music. 

Come on; I mean, flautist!.  Sort of like ‘flaunt’ and ‘flout’ with the prissy little nipped sound of ‘twist-tie’ and words like that.  OK, maybe it is just me. 

Legend has it that the shopkeepers of Haight Street were a moving force in the Haight Ashbury scene, generous, non-rapacious, enlightened and welcoming.  And it is true, I believe, that there was such a group which at first drove the Haight engine.  But amongst all the peace and love, there were a number of greedy Republicans in sheep’s clothing who could see there was a buck to be made off all this.  Like their alter egos, the drug dealers, who were rapidly turning the Haight scene into the broken shards of a Morning After of a great party, they had nothing but contempt for their employees and customers; they loved everything about the Haight-Ashbury scene except the people in it.  Such was the owner of the Juke Box.  One night when Carol and I had just settled ourselves for an evening of jazz and I was eagerly awaiting the advent of the first flautist of the evening, Tommy came to our table and said the band had been fired and wouldn’t be playing that night.  Tommy and the drummer were going to drive over to Oakland and see if they could sit in with some of the guys playing in some of the jazz clubs there.. 

I had never hung out with the other guys in Tommy’s group; I had never actually met them socially except for ,"Hey, Man.".  So I knew nothing of the drummer, though he was clearly in a rage.  Carol knew a good deal more about the dramatis personae than me, and was quite insistent that I come with them.  Really, at that time I was more naïve and oblivious than was reasonable – it was remarkable that they’d let me out of the mental hospital at all the previous year or so (although the thought did flit through my single working brain cell when we pulled up at the first of these venues that it was not the most welcoming of places) - and I agreed to come along.  I was fairly fearless then about going places, not because of any bravery – I avoided perceived danger like the plague – but because I simply did not imagine anyone could not like me, or could wish me ill, without at least knowing me first.  I was so used to being white, that I was no more conscious of it than I was of being male or American.  I assumed that when people looked at me, they saw me, not some particularity.   

Tommy and the drummer were not successful at getting to play much, but I would imagine I got to hear some pretty fine jazz, if only I had the taste or wit to recognize it.  The drummer was not raging or talking much, but he was a kind of angry presence and he got madder and madder.  I didn’t have a clue at the time, but the back story to the whole evening was as follows.  The Juke Box owner had insisted that the drummer let him try playing his drums before their gig was to begin.  These drums belonged to the drummer and were expensive equipment; and at this time none of us had more than an extra nickel among us.  Although the drummer did not want that man playing his drums, he really had little option but to agree and the owner had somehow ‘broken’ them – I have no idea what he’d done, but apparently he had rendered some portion of them unusable.   Now that he had no drummer, the owner just fired the whole group.  Tommy was pretty pissed also, but poor Tommie had been on such a bad roll for so long that he just didn’t have the kind of rage in him as that which the drummer conjured up.  Unknown to me, the drummer possessed both a bad temper and a pistol.  And both these interesting possessions were in the car with us that night.  I was only aware of the temper to any degree.  The reason Carol and Tommy were so insistent that I come along on an evening where normally I would be the biggest obstacle to a smooth flow, was that I was an accomplished chatterbox. 

A couple of weeks before, the subject of my flow of conversation had come up, and I had jokingly said that my talent in life was ‘light luncheon chatter’.  This phrase had gotten to be a mild joke in the therapy group, where such discourse was discouraged in favor of ‘real’ insightful and useful discussion.  When people drifted off point and into irrelevancies, the phrase was hauled out to shepherd the conversation back to something of more use.  So when Tommy and Carol found themselves saddled with this explosive and armed drummer, they felt that the thing that was needed was an easy flow of irrelevant foolishness to defuse the situation.  I live, after all, to serve, ever anxious to use my gifts in the service of good.  Unfortunately, they failed to acquaint me with this expectation, and the general air of fury as well as the daunting environments we encountered during the course of the evening pretty well sealed shut even such a gaping cavern of blather as the one I possessed.  I was more of an irritant than a soothing balm.  A week later, Carol indignantly asked me, “Where was your light luncheon chatter?”  I guess I don’t customarily lunch late on Friday evenings. 

As it turned out no disaster occurred, although only later did I realized how close we came when after an evening in which none of the drummers in any of the clubs agreed to let the drummer sit in using their drums, there was some sort of disagreement between the drummer and Tommie and Carol at the approach to the Oakland-side toll booth before the Bay Bridge on the return to San Francisco.  Although it is all very hazy in my memory, I think the drummer was wanting to return to confront the club owner – I was mercifully still unaware that he was armed.  Carol kept throwing out topics designed to set my tongue in motion, as she later informed me, but I was beginning to be so daunted by the whole experience that I was performing an excellent imitation of Marcel Marceau in a straitjacket. 

One recollection I have of Tommy - which is really about me – was during a weekend marathon, which was a therapeutic weekend where Doctor S gathered two of his therapy groups – one a middle class group from the San Mateo area, and the other this ragtag band of sort-of-hippies from the San Francisco Public Health clinic – i.e., us.  (Talk about an interesting mix!)  This marathon took place in a pretty darn nice beach house in Half Moon Bay or somewhere like that south of San Francisco.  Most of the meeting-type activity took place on the main floor, but during a break we explored the basement and there hung in a rack a surfboard.  Since I had, alas, bemoaned more than once the end of my surfing life, everyone there immediately raised a clamor for me to go forth and show them how it was done.  I was, as I have said before here, a very poor surfer, hampered among other things by only a cursory ability to swim.  Perhaps I had not made this entirely clear. 

“Come on,” Tommy said, “I’ll swim out with you.”

There was nothing for it, but to hide my qualms and go forth to do battle.  We entered the ocean, which had some pretty good (and thankfully, not too large) waves that day.  About halfway out to the break, which seemed to me to be about a mile and a half out (Yes, I exaggerate), Tommy said something along the lines of, “Wo! That’s a long way.  You go on and I’ll stay here and watch.”   Secretly I was more or less depending on him to rescue me if the worst, and most likely, happened.  Much disconcerted, I continued out to the break and, after commending my spirit to the fates, I picked a likely wave and was off.  It was like a miracle; I just was in the zone – it was one of the finest rides I ever got.  It seemed to go on forever and I could do no wrong.  It was one of those times in my life where I got lucky beyond my desserts.  I think an unspoken bargain with Fate was struck that day; she gave me a great ride in front of my friends and I agreed that never again would I push my luck like this in matters of surfing. 

I was the hero of the hour amongst a crew who admittedly knew little of surfing.  Tommy, who was certainly the one I wished most to impress, was suitably admiring.  Thus, in that odd way that things connect in one’s memory, any mention of saxophones tend to make me think of surfing, and any mention of surfing reminds me of those nights in the Juke Box and the floating flautists and the throbbing of Tommy’s sax. 

Carol got rid of the unwanted daughter – some woman took her in – and Tommy and Carol moved in together into a new housing project in West Oakland called, I think, Acorn, along with Carol’s boys.  It was a very attractive complex, at least at the time; I recall it as a series of white cubes.  First Tommy, then Carol left the therapy group.  I had met Tumwell in the meantime, and although we socialized somewhat often with Tommy and Carol as long as he and I stayed together in West Oakland, after Tum and I returned to San Francisco to live we saw little of them.  They soon separated, and Carol also gave up the boys.  She had the maternal instincts of Britney Spears.  It is a pity that some folks have kids; they were never meant for parenthood, and without the kids to think of, one can enjoy the adult antics so much more.  From time to time Tum and I would hear from Carol, who remained an extremely fun person to spend time with.  She laughed easily, and conversation was never dull when she was around.  But our encounters grew further apart; she was sliding ever further into drugs and self-destruction and I suspect Tum and I weren’t exciting enough.  The last time we heard from her, she called from a payphone.  She had just been thrown out of a Synanon meeting; apparently she had shown up there high.  I wasn’t aware that one could be thrown out of Synanon.  I thought they just mailed you a poison snake or something.  She asked to come by – we were living then out by City College and I guess we were as close as anyone else she knew.  Also, I imagine everyone else had probably given up on her by then.  She was going to come by to visit, but she never got there, and we never heard from her again. 

Some years later, Tumwell and I bought a house in Oakland halfway between the middle class Diamond Heights district and 14^th Avenue which was decidedly not middle class.  One day while riding the BART to work I encountered Tommie – I hadn’t seen him for several years.  He had married and lived in Oakland.  He had never been a hippie or a rebel, he was not one of the black men of the time who moved easily in the white world, firing off salvoes about Whitey to the intense delight of the assembled white listeners who were all sure they meant other white folks, nor did he wish to be such.  His association with all of us had been driven by circumstance.  He’d met Dr S while in prison, he wanted to succeed outside prison and Doctor S believed in him and brought him into the therapy group, which apart from him was composed entirely of whites.  Then there was Carol for a while, but his music world was almost entirely black.  He was, I think, a decent, goodhearted, conservative guy, in the true meaning of the word; he wanted the values and the milieu he had grown up with.  He was a good guy, but never entirely comfortable with the fact that Tum and I were gay, in that non-hostile way of good people who are presented with a phenomenon that has no sense or interest for them whatsoever.  I don’t recall where Tommy was headed that day, for some reason I seem to recall he was headed for a job interview, but it may be that he had a job.  He had married; I believe he had kids.  It was awesomely good to see him, but we were each a piece of the past to the other.  Some vague talk of getting together went nowhere.  He had that slightly frayed look of a drinker.  I suspect he had backslid; it was fairly clear that the music was over for him in every sense.  I didn’t get a feeling that the marriage was going all that well.  My life with Tumwell was going well just then; I imagine Tommy and I might connect a little better now that I too have outlived the good times. 

I guess there is no point to all this; I was just reading here, inches from the snowy landscape, and those pictures of Miles just plucked a chord.  Well, that and the idea of partying with Jack Kerouac; am I hopelessly old?

My eyesight is still quite blurry and, frankly, there are those among you who look a lot more lovely that way.  The PRK procedure which I had because they weren’t sure my eyes could withstand the pressure involved in LASIK takes a lot longer to heal, it turns out.  I probably have another week of this inexactitude in my vision, which, when one is on a computer (by ‘on’ I mean staring at, not literally mounted upon, although the first day or two, that was touch and go) all day at work, it can be pretty wearing.  When the doc wheeled me into the operating theater – OK, I walked in, but the feeling was the same – he announced to the assembled helpers in their blue smocks and white snoods that they were going to see something old-fashioned which was not often seen any more.  I am fairly certain he was referring to the PRK procedure rather than the patient, but one can never be sure.  The deal is that with PRK they scrape away the outer layer of cells on the cornea, instead of the old ‘saw it open around the edges and flop it down’ of LASIK, so the blurriness and longer healing period is because these cells have to grow back.  Apparently they slowly re-grow from around the edges toward the middle like pond scum and I am patiently waiting for these edges to meet in the middle.  This meeting does not entirely end the sight issues, because, like any other coming together of rent flesh, they make a scar, which, I gather, is worn away by constant blinking until – ta-da! – perfection is achieved. 

I had considered remaining in Smallville this weekend because the drive home is tiring to the eyes even in daylight, but it was such a sunny day that I decided it was worth it to make the journey.  Alas, simultaneous with nightfall came snowfall, and the drive up a local road between some of the minor Finger Lakes took me over a long 11-mile “marrowback” which was graced by a blizzard.  My eyes are still somewhat light-sensitive, and to celebrate this fact a near-unending line of cars decided to make a special trip south during that time in order to complete any blinding not already taken care of by the thick snowstorm.  In case any little discomfort was overlooked, a driver from Hell stayed affixed to my back bumper to provide glare in all my mirrors.   Yet I arrived home no more than 10 minutes later than is my wont.   Sometimes just shutting one’s eyes and putting one’s foot on the gas is the best solution. 

I am flummoxed completely, to change the subject, by the following small phenomenon.  I have a thistle seed dispenser to feed the finches, which before I had my house painted, hung from a hook on a part of the house that overhangs part of my back deck.  The finches – especially the chickadees (are they a finch?) – used constantly to occupy two or three of the perches on this feeder, and to eat their way through tons of seed a week.  When I had the house painted, the painter removed all the hooks and so forth, and I transferred the feeder to a hook in the pear tree out back.  Although the chickadees continued to land on the feeder, and sometimes took a single quick peck, they mostly avoided it, and the level of seeds has not changed in weeks.  Thinking I might have hung the feeder too low, I moved it to a higher branch and later added one of those holders for blocks of seed-encrusted suet nearby.  Though all kinds of birds fall upon the suet and its seeds as did the Assyrians upon the Israelites in days of yore, the thistle-seed feeder remains shunned as if those same Assyrians had discovered a leper colony in Lower Samaria.  I have refreshed the seed and everything, but no dice.  The birds continue to gobble all the thistle seed from a feeder, also in a tree, in the front yard but this once-popular dining spot in the pear tree is as popular as a restaurant serving rat droppings.  What, I ask my self, is up? 

It just occurs to me to wonder why those born in biblical times were Israelites, but the same folk born today are Israelis.  When exactly was the turning point where the final ‘te’ was discarded?   Were the older folk sort of lower in fat content – so they were Israel-lite?   These things keep me awake at night. 

I have received a number of e-mails from first-cousin-once-removed Warren since his arrival in Mesopotamia hard by the Tigris River, which he insists on calling the ‘Tigress’.  Apparently the major impression he has gained is that the places stinks, in the literal sense.  Since his baggage took more than two weeks to arrive with changes of clothing, so did he – a new take on camouflaging oneself in order to blend with one’s surroundings, and one he did not undertake cheerfully.  Apparently a major annoyance for him is the corpse of a dead kitten right in the only spot where cell phone coverage is best.  Thus to commune with his bride, he is obligated to endure an especially unpleasant fragrance; why he does not remove this cat he does not make clear.  He is still in the first flush of marriage; many men I have known would have willingly have endured the stench of two dead cats to avoid talking to their spouses.   Warren does not specify why he does not move this inopportune feline with its consignment of maggots with which he assures me it is replete, to a different location; perhaps the proximity of the late cat is germane to the good cell phone reception; it may be good for an added bar or two. 

I do not know what the situation is in Iraq concerning cats and dogs, but Saudi was rife with feral cats.  Dogs are considered unclean by the devout Muslim, and I have heard that feral dogs in the time of Abdul Aziz, founder of the Sa’ud monarchy and father of the present king, were so numerous and troublesome that Abdul Aziz decreed that all be caught and placed in enclosures.  As I heard the tale, the king (who was quite an enlightened and interesting man) said that it was not in keeping with Islam to kill creatures who had done no wrong (unlike rape victims who had placed themselves somehow in harm’s way and thus sullied the beds of their spouses), so he placed the female dogs in one area and males in another and had them fed until Nature solved the dog problem.  Whether this is a cause or not, the current situation is a huge surfeit of cats in the urban areas.  They are everywhere. 

They are wont to crawl up into the engines of parked cars, which in the 130+ heat of the Saudi cities baffles me in the extreme.  But cats are not celebrated for their intelligence by any but the most fatuous.  Thus it came about that I left work one day to find a note under my windshield written in the sprawling block capitals of the neophyte in English reading “Dead Cat Under Car”.   For reasons obscure to me now, I found this funny; why would someone find this phenomenon worthy of such a laborious scrawl?  I could see “Dead Bedouin under Car” or “Dead Baby under Car” worth mentioning, but one of the ever present cats?   However, when I looked, I found a cat, not lying in some state of squashedness on the blacktop as I had expected, but rather one somehow caught by the neck in some of the mysterious rods and so forth that were a part of the machine.  Having made the quick and semi-silent observation, “Eeeyewww”, I determined that the simple solution to ridding myself of this unwanted adornment to the undercarriage was to drive home as fast as possible, taking every corner at a speed which I hoped would dislodge the unwelcome, though relatively undemanding, passenger. 

Alas, the solution did not lie in this mode of action.  I arrived at my apartment with the passenger still in place, and seemingly little the worse for the ride.  I am totally squeamish about dead things which are not precooked and cut into bite-sized pieces, so I decided that the solution was to engage one of the Sri Lankan guys who were employed to clean and maintain the apartment blocks where I lived to remove the corpus delicti.  Imagining them to be nearly as squeamish as myself, but in a good deal more need of cash, I first drove to the store and purchased a pair of rubber gloves (the cat did not complain of the extra trip) and then I paid a guy 200 riyals to remove my encumbrance.  I always feel guilty asking a person to do something for me which I would not do myself – it seems to imply demeaning him or somehow to flaunt a hierarchy of sorts, where I am on the upside. Since 200 riyals was one or two weeks pay for the man, he must have thought I had taken leave of my senses, but he was entirely willing to supplement his income, while I had such a plenitude of ready cash in those happy days, that I hardly noticed the expense. 

 We recently hired an intern at Smallville Solutions who is of Sri Lankan descent, and it occurs to me that while he is earning a good deal more than that Sri Lankan in Saudi (even with the cat-related supplement), I am earning a good deal less than I did there.  I just kind of wish, as the world goes on changing, that a little bit more of the change was in my favor.