Monster In The Closet

The End

2010-05-27T14:09:00.000-07:00

Well folks, that last chapter was the last of my memoir.
Some people may be a little pissed off, buy I can't help that. It is what is.
I hope you enjoyed it, and have some insight into my life.
If I ever get it published there will be more to follow.
Please remember to post your opinions and thoughts.

Thanks!

Sam Fowler

THE IDES OF MARCH

2010-05-05T06:18:00.000-07:00

I remember when it started with my family, it was March 10th, 1981. That was the day my step grandfather Jake, passed away from cancer and the day I was fired from my job of five years at the Cadillac dealership. I was so devastated and in shock that I couldn’t even attend his funeral. I remember when I found out that morning that Jake had died a co worker told me, “Don’t worry about this damned job, it won’t matter in ten years, you need to go to your grandfather’s funeral that’s all that really matters.” I wish I’d listened to him because he was right. I was fired at closing time that day. After I went to back to work at the same dealership three years later for another three years I was fired again on March 23rd, 1988. Even though my mother’s birthday is March 16th and my Grandma Fowler’s birthday was March 7th we still dreaded when the month rolled around and I still won’t make any major purchases, or decisions in March even now. We all just wait and hold our breath until March is over.

I remember when I found out that the wife of my old boss who’d fired me had a heart attack on March 10th and died on March 23rd, 1995 at the age of sixty five. I called my mother and told her that the curse of March was over for us and it had reversed on him. She told me not to be so sure and I soon learned she was right.

When I lived in Dallas there was this guy named Brent who lived right across the pool from me. He was short with chipmunk cheeks and had this high shrill nellie voice and a maniacal laugh. He could make you laugh till you cried, but sometimes he was a real pain in the ass. Once a friend of mine and I ran into him at this gay bar with a patio behind it. We were sitting at one of the tables on the patio and every time a guy would come out of the main bar Brent would start in, “Are you tired, run-down, listless? Do you poop out at parties? Are you unpopular? Do you have a big dick? Oh....Lucy didn’t say that!” Followed by his high pitched peels of laughter. What made it so funny was that the guys would stand there looking around for a minute, pretend they didn’t hear him and walk back inside. He had us in tears we laughed so hard we thought we would die.

Another time he was out by himself he crawled up on the flat roof of another gay bar and sat “Endora” style over the entrance while making comments on the customers coming in on everything from their hair to their clothes, to their weight, calling some of them “Heifers”. Someone finally figured out where the voice was coming from and went in and told the manager. When Brent saw the manager he scrambled off the roof and started to walk nonchalantly to his Cadillac as if nothing had happened. When the manager confronted him he denied everything and pretended he didn’t have a clue as to what the guy was talking about.
The manager said,” Then why to you have tar and rocks all over your jeans?” Brent forgot he was wearing white jeans and he looked down and they were covered in tar and little tiny rocks. He was banned from the bar for a month, but he laughed like crazy when he told me about it.

After the bars closed at 2:00 AM he would often make obscene phone calls to me and if I hung up on him, or didn’t answer the phone, he would just call back. One morning right around dawn I could hear something hitting my bedroom window and laughing outside. I looked out and he was giggling like an idiot and throwing pebbles at my window on the second floor. I opened the window and screamed, “If you chip the paint on my car I’ll come down there and kill you!” because the rocks were falling back onto my car parked underneath. He stopped, but he thought it was hysterical, but I was pissed.

I asked him once why these two guys across the pool from us always had their blinds shut tight during the day. He said, “Well, cause they take a lot of them drugs and bad old Mr. Sunshine comes in their winda in the morning and wakes them up and hurts their eyes.” I laughed of course he really was a pain in the ass, but he was so funny you couldn’t help but love the guy.

At 1:50 AM on March 8th, 1996 my phone started ringing. I rolled over and looked at the clock and groaned. I was sound asleep and all I wanted to do was roll over and go back to sleep, but I knew if I didn’t pick up he would just keep calling, so it was best to get it over with. The minute I picked up the phone I could hear shrieks of laughter and I thought, “Oh hell, it’s Brent.” and I actually started to hang up, but I thought “No, if I do he’ll just call back”, as I put the phone to my ear I realized it wasn’t him, but a woman crying so hard she could hardly breathe. I kept saying, “Hello, hello?” but she just kept on crying like her heart was broken. A part of me wanted to hang up because I figured it was a drunk who’d dialed the wrong number, but something told me that as a human being I at least owed some amount of kindness to this stranger at the other end of the line. I said “Hello?” a few more times and finally she said, “Sammy.” I couldn’t believe it, I said, “Mother?” Only then, did I realize it was my mother, I asked, “What’s wrong?” and she said, “Danny’s dead.” I heard her, but I couldn’t believe it. My father was scheduled for bypass surgery later in the month, so I asked, “Daddy’s dead?” and she said, “No, Danny’s dead.” I sat up, and swung my legs off the bed and onto the floor as I turned on the bedside lamp. “How? When did it happen?” She said he was on his way home and he flipped his car and was killed. I then asked dumb questions like, “Was he alone? Did he hit something? Was he wearing his seat belt?” Why was I worried about his seat belt? I guess I was just trying to figure our how a simple one car accident could take his life.

I still just couldn’t believe it was true. I got up and began turning on lights in the apartment. They were in San Angelo and Danny and his family lived in Conroe near Houston. My sister-in-law had called them and they’d slept through the first couple of calls, so when my mother finally got to the answering machine she was crying, “Please pick up, oh, please pick up.” I went into auto pilot after that turning on my computer and checking flights out of San Angelo for them. It worked out that the earliest flights were out of Midland and they had to drive about two hours to get there. I was worried about them driving as upset as they were, but I was five hours away from them by car. Once I checked on the availability of the flights I called my friend Todd and he said if they’d come to his house he’d take them to the airport and take care of their dogs for them. I called mother back and had her write down the flight numbers and times, gave her Todd’s address and phone number and told her how to get to his place. They drove to his house in the wee hours of the morning and he made sure they got to their flight on time and picked them up when they came back. He was a great help to them and they appreciated it so much.

The next day I was in training for a new position with Southwestern Bell Yellow Pages and I knew that one of the big things was that you couldn’t miss one single day of training. I had to make a presentation in front of the class and I stood up and did it just as I’d rehearsed it. It wasn’t until break that I told two of my female classmates what had happened and they’d been with the company much longer than I, so they immediately went to the supervisors and my trainer and told them what had happened. They came to me immediately and said, “Sam, you’ve had a tragedy in your family and no one is going to hold it against you for going, so you go and do what you need to do and you can make up the training days when you get back, don’t worry about it.” I was so grateful to them because I was really worried about having to take off, so I headed home to pack.

None of us really thought about calling any of our relatives, but mother left it up to me to call Ruby. I thought if she wanted to fly down for his funeral I could pick her up at the Houston airport, but she was ninety years old and just getting from Monahans to the airport in Midland would have been a strain on her. When I finally reached her, she said, “Oh, no, Sammy you don’t mean it?” When I told her the details she said, “Bless his heart, I didn’t even get to say goodbye, your poor mother.” She was like I was it just didn’t seem real, or possible and it took a while to really sink in. She then got a pen and paper and wrote down all the details I had to give her. She said she didn’t think she’d be able to make it because she had to take a special bus from Monahans to the Midland Airport and she didn’t think there was enough notice. She also didn’t have the advantage I had of the Internet and at her age it would have been difficult for her even it the trip had been planned in advance. I again wished I still lived in Midland, so I could just drive over and pick her up and we could fly there together. Ruby was such a huge part of our lives I knew she wanted to be there with all her heart. We found out that later that day she’d gone down to the Senior Citizens Center to play cards that afternoon and tell her friends. At first I think mother was a little mad, but I reminded her how I’d gone to work that same morning just because it seemed so unreal I didn’t know what to do.

Later in the day, she called mother at Danny’s house and she sent flowers to the funeral. Her younger sister Anna and daughter Sherry came to the funeral and mother and I were glad they did it was a nice gesture. When I hugged Anna I remembered the day my Grandfather Ragsdale, her brother, had passed away and I’d hugged her and left tears on her dress when I was thirteen years old. It was twenty eight years later, but I remembered it as if it were yesterday. It’s funny how you remember such kindnesses at a time like that, but they’re always greatly appreciated. Mother still remembers the fact that they showed up to this day even though they both died years ago.

I barely remember packing to drive down to Conroe. I would go to my closet and stand there trying to remember why I was in there and then suddenly remember I’d gone for a belt, or a pair of shoes. I was like a Zombie with nothing in my brain. As well as I’d packed mother and I still had to go to a store in Conroe to buy things we’d forgotten, and needed for the funeral. It was the strangest time of my life. I'd spent Christmas 1995 at his house with my mother and father, but I had a chance to see him one more time after that. In January 1996 I called him and told him I would give him my dining room set if he would come up to Dallas to pick it up, I lived in Oak Lawn.

He and a buddy came up and he called me from a pay phone on the corner and said, "Do you know you live in the gay part of town?" I laughed, and said, "No shit?" He and his buddy came right over to my condo and he said he recognized my parking space by my white 1992 Buick Park Avenue. He told his friend, "My family has always had a thing for Buick's.”

After my brother and his friend loaded up the trailer with the furniture I took them to lunch at "Uncle Julio's" on Lemmon Avenue. My brother told me something that day that opened my eyes forever about when we lived in Germany and my parent's fought like cats and dogs. I'd always thought of my mother as the victim as she was always the one who was in the floor screaming, crying, and clawing her face. Danny said, "Do you realize if mother had just left daddy alone when he came home drunk he would have stumbled off to bed nothing would have happened?" We wouldn't have to have gone through all the hell that she started by attacking him. He was only trying to fend her off so he could go to work the next day without a black eye, or scratches on his face, he never raised a hand to her first.

I felt like I'd been punched in the stomach. He was one hundred percent correct, but I never realized it until that moment. I'd always thought my mother was the poor pitiful victim because that was the roll she'd always played.
Danny as a ten year old child realized something that I never had. He never acted like any of it bothered him at all and he could have cared less about either one of our parent's although he became close to my father in later years. I felt he and I had many things to discuss in the future that would reveal a lot of the hurt we'd suffered as children and that I now had a new set of eyes and ear's, to see what I saw in a different light and some how we could find a way together to heal, or at least understand our terrible childhood.

I left him at my condo that day after he asked me if I had any reading material for him to read while taking a dump. I had to get my car to the dealership for service, but I left with a feeling that we had years of catching up to do and that we were going to be closer than ever. I even allowed him to have a glass of water from my Waterford Crystal.

When we went to the funeral home to make the final arrangements, no one seemed to be able to make a decision. I overheard my sister-in-laws father lean over and whisper to her that she didn’t have to buy the most expensive coffin. It pissed me off, but I kept my mouth shut. When I noticed a beautiful wood coffin we stopped and looked at it and it was three thousand one hundred dollars. She said she liked it but we kept on looking. Everyone was just wandering around aimlessly and finally I went over to a silver coffin and pulled it out. It was twenty four hundred dollars and everyone seemed to agree that they liked it. I showed my mother the manufacturer’s name “Aurora” and she didn’t get it. I had to remind her that Danny had been born in Aurora, Colorado. I offered to pay the difference between the silver coffin and the wooden one, but my sister-in-law said no.

Then came the time to buy the plots. My sister-in-law bought two for her and my brother and my parents bought two for them and at my mother’s urging I bought one for me as well. My mother later sold my their plots to my sister-in-law, so now I guess I’ll be buried in a place I’ve only been to once. It was a time of tremendous grief and it seemed like I had to guide everyone around by the hand. We went to several florists and none of them had enough flowers on hand to place our many orders. When we finally found a florist who said he could fill our order my sister-in-law insulted him by telling him she’d heard he didn’t do the best work. He said, “What?” and stopped writing. I had to step forward and apologize for her and explain that my brother, her husband, had been killed the night before and we needed his services desperately. We just wanted everything to be perfect because a funeral was a one time thing. She was just upset that was all. He then took our orders and I must say the arrangements were some of the most beautiful I’ve ever seen. I told him I didn’t want any carnations in mine because I couldn’t stand them and I wanted it to be sort of abstract all white flowers and not look so “fixed” like many of them do. My sister-in-law, my mother, and father, my aunt, my grandmother, and I, all placed our orders with him and he did a fine job and almost cried when I called to thank him after the funeral.
It was a military affair since my brother was in the Army reserve and he also worked for the Army reserve. Even though mother had forgotten to call most of our relatives and friends there were still about four hundred people there. My sister-in-law had them play the long version of “Free Bird” by Lynyrd Skynyrd and even my mother whispered to me through her tears, “God is this song ever going to end?” She said later she wished she’d had someone play “Danny Boy” because that’s what we always called him when he was little.

I took an old black and white photo my grandma took of us on her farm in 1962 just before we left for California and placed it in his coffin. I wrote on the back, “Danny, for all the times we moved around and all we had was each other, I’m glad you were there. I love you, Sammy.” My father put some kind of military prayer in with him. Mother said she wished she’d thought to bring something, but there was just too much grief to even think clearly.

I had joked with mother a few years earlier that since each one of us kids had been brought home from the hospital in a Buick I wanted her to make sure if I died that the funeral home had a Buick hearse, so my first car ride and my last car ride would be in a Buick. As we walked behind his coffin as it was being carried from the chapel to the hearse I looked up and the hearse was a blue Buick Roadmaster. Since he was a medic and a helicopter mechanic helicopters’ flew overhead and there was a gun salute, but I don’t remember how many guns there were.

One of the things we wanted to see was where the accident occurred. The day before the funeral we drove to the location a highway patrolman had given my father. It was a slight curve in the road with a soft dirt shoulder. The only eye witness to the accident was a man who was passing my brother because Danny was actually driving the speed limit of fifty five. He said when he looked in his rearview mirror to get back into the right lane he could see my brother’s headlights rolling as the car flipped and hit a tree. The tree wasn’t all that big, but Danny had a 1988 blue Camaro with T-tops cut in it and the car somehow flipped and landed on its roof, trapping his upper body between the metal roof and a tree stump. All the glass had broken out of the car and plastic and fiberglass parts were strewn all around the accident site. My cousins and I had been taken to the wrecking yard the night before to see the car and it actually made me feel better to see it. There was no possible way anyone could have survived. The passenger door was caved in all the way to the console and the windshield pillars were pushed down around the steering wheel. The guy there said they never found one of the rear wheels, and it was the only car he’d seen in his twenty years in the business that had to be brought in upside down on a flat bed truck because the frame was bent so badly no two wheels would touch the ground. My cousin Tammy saw the wheel about three hundred yards from the accident site in the woods the next day. They had send for a medical helicopter to get him to the nearest hospital, but his neck was broken at the second vertebrae and one of his lungs was protruding from his chest. He never had a chance, but if he’d lived he would have been a quadriplegic like Christopher Reeve and Danny could have never have lived that way. I’ve learned that there are things worse than death.

Our lives have never been the same since that day. My sister soon divorced her husband and she and her three year old son moved in with my parents. My mother has had back surgery, both knees replaced and has become dependant on pain pills, sleeping pills and tranquilizers. Sometimes she talks like the mother I used to know, but most of the time she’s forgetful and changes things that happened in the past to different locations or even different people. My father has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and they both still fight constantly. My parents haven’t seen much of my sister-in-law since his death. She received about four hundred thousand dollars of insurance money, had another man move in with her a few months later and married him about fourteen months after Danny died. The only reason my mother has stayed in touch with my nephew and twin nieces is because she’s put forth the effort, otherwise we wouldn’t know anything about them. My faith has been severely tested. I once believed in heaven, but after loosing several of my friends to AIDS in the nineties and most of my elderly family members have died I’m not so sure anymore I wonder if death is just a “dirt nap”?
After Danny's death I couldn't stand the idea of having any glass in the roof of my car and since my car had a moon roof I traded it on a new black 1996 Buick Rivera without a moon roof.

That summer of I was driving my new Buick from Dallas to my parent's home in San Angelo. It was late at night and I'd decided to take the rural roads for the scenery. The car only had eight hundred miles on it and I was bored, so I decided to open it up to see just how fast it would go.
The specs said it had a top speed of one hundred thirty five, but I could only manage one hundred and eight when something kicked the back of my seat hard. It was pitch dark and I'm a neat freak, so I don't allow any luggage, clothes, etc. in the passenger compartment. Everything must go in the trunk out of sight, or I can't stand it.
I immediately slowed down and got the creeps, I even reached behind my seat and waved my hand back and forth to see if I'd forgotten something that might've slammed against the back of my seat. There was nothing, but I stayed at the speed limit all the way to my parent's house. I’ve often wondered if that was my brother telling me to slow down.

I dream about Danny from time to time. He never says much, but then he never was much of a talker. Most of the time I’m doing something and he just happens to be there. Once I dreamed we were sleeping in the same bed just like when we were kids and there were police lights outside the window and I was trying to wake him up and tell him something was wrong. Where do loved ones go when they die? I know that there will always be a hole in our family that will never be filled. I miss you little brother.

VISIT FROM MOTHER

2010-05-04T16:02:00.000-07:00

August 8th, 2007
My mother came up to visit about five weeks ago. I hadn’t seen her since Christmas and I was shocked. She’s seventy one and looks and acts like she’s ninety one. Yes, she’s had knee replacement surgery and back surgery in the past two years, but there is one reason and one reason only that she is the way she is prescription drugs.

She can brag that the gene for the tendency towards alcoholism that runs on both sides of my family missed her and God knows she can make you feel like a bucket of shit if you call her when you’ve been drinking, but the gene for dependency didn’t skip her one bit. She walks around in “La La Land” zapped out on Zanex, pain pills, and sleeping pills like a Zombie. She can’t remember anything as regards to when it happened, or who it happened to and takes offense when you correct her. She shuffles when she walks, holds on to things and falls down all the time. When she gets up from the sofa, or out of a car she says “Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh!” like someone’s killing her. This all started about five years ago. Until then my mother was a fun person who could joke with anyone and was a lot of fun.

We got in a fight within two blocks from Love Field when I told her I didn’t want to spend our time together talking about how much she wants to divorce daddy, or hates him, or how crazy he is, I’ve been listening to this all my life, or how she wants to move the whole family to Mexico where it’s cheaper and they will be able to live so much better on their retirement. She can’t even walk from the car into a restaurant without assistance, or at least that’s the way she wants it, nor does she speak one word of Spanish. How in the Hell is she going to get along in Mexico for God’s sake? It was a horrible week to say the least.

Two days after she got home I called her and she informed me that they were going to send my fourteen year old nephew back to “The West Texas Boy’s Ranch” where they send him a couple of years ago because he was getting out of control. My sister divorced his father when he was three and he’s not seen much of his dad, nor has his dad tried to support him all these years, so all the responsibility has fallen on my parent’s since my sister soon to be thirty nine acts like a twelve year old herself.

I blame my mother for his behavior because she’s always let him get away with murder and when anyone tries to correct him including me, she attacks them right in front of the child. The two of them once came to visit me, and whenever I tried to make him mind he would run to her and she would wrap her arms around him and say “Its better at home, isn’t it honey, its better at home?” I ripped her a new one over that. My nephew wouldn’t be civil to me for months afterwards and he hated me as if I were some kind of monster. It was her decision to send him to the boy’s ranch until he’s eighteen, but she blames my sister. My sister called me the next day and told me my mother had been crying all day and I shouldn’t have been so mean to her. I told her that comparing what I’d said to my mother the night before with all the things she’d said to me as a child were like comparing a lightning bug’s ass to the sun.

Later in the day my cell phone showed I had missed a call from my mother, but when I called back my nephew answered. He told me it was he who’d called, but he wouldn’t tell me the reason why. He just asked me if I’d be coming down for Thanksgiving and Christmas and told me he missed me and loved me. My heart breaks for this child, he’s been raised without a father, a mother who never tells him she loves him and two grandparents who haven’t spoken a civil word to one another in fifty six years. I’ve seen Dillon walk up to his mother wrap his arms around her and say “I love you mom.” My sister just walks on like he’s dead weight on one of her legs and I had to say, “What do we say to a little boy who tell us they loves us?” Only then would she even acknowledge him. I know he feels like an unloved, worthless, piece of human garbage, exactly as I did as a child.

My once “Elvis Presley” handsome father has become a “Googly Eyed” old fool who is deaf as a post, dips snuff, and pulls his own teeth. My once “Elizabeth Montgomery” pretty mother has become a forgetful, teary eyed, drug addicted, tottery old woman and the two of them scream at each other constantly.

While mother was here she put on some chocolate colored lipstick and told me it was the color her mother used to wear. Her mother although a bitch, was a great beauty, and looked like Vivien Leigh, but my grandmother always wore a dark red lipstick nothing at all like the color mother had just applied. She said Dillon told her it made her eyes “Pop”. I told her it made her look like a corpse. Then I remembered a time in 1987 when my mother came to visit me in Midland and I couldn’t place what was “wrong” with her. Finally it dawned on me and I said, “Your lipsticks too red”. She admitted it was the color her mother used and since her mother lived near her at the time I didn’t doubt it, but the color was just wrong. It made her look all washed out and pasty faced and she admitted she could never wear that color. Where in the Hell she thought this chocolate stuff was “Her mother’s color”, I’ll never know. All I could think of was when the Jewish family in the movie “Rat Race” stole Hitler’s car and the wife found the dark chocolate lipstick in the glove compartment of the 1930’s Mercedes and realized it must’ve been Eva Braun’s lipstick. The husband wiped it on the steering wheel and when he ran through a fence and wrecked the car in front of a group of World War II veterans his lip hit the steering wheel he got out of the car in a daze with what appeared to be a dark moustache and began speaking gibberish to the group who mistook him for Hitler and started shooting. It was hysterical!

If I could rescue Dillon I would. I tried to tell him the last time they sent him to the boy’s ranch that maybe he would be better in a home where people didn’t yell at each other all the time and he maybe he would realize the whole world didn’t live like that, but he doesn’t understand he cries and wants to go home. That makes me feel terribly depressed and helpless. I know what it feels like to be forced to move away from home.

My mother is a real piece of work. She’s always threatened to divorce my father. I’ve been listening to that shit for fifty four years now and I’m fucking sick of it. I was always so afraid and scared of the future because my mother would always threaten to divorce my father that I can’t feel one moment of comfort, or peace to this very day.

KARMA

2010-04-30T15:07:00.000-07:00

“Vengeance is mine sayeth the Lord”, at least that’s what my mother has always told me. I always said, “That’s fine, but I want it to be quick and I want to see it.” For the most part mother was right. I read something the other day by a popular minister regarding the very same thing and he said that if you go about getting your own revenge the Lord says, “Well if you want to handle it yourself, then just go ahead.” But if you wait, He’ll take care of the people who wronged you. It will be in His own way and His own time, but it will happen.

When I was fired at the Cadillac dealership in Midland on March 10th, 1981 I was absolutely devastated. I’ve never had a job to this day that I loved as much as that one.
I remember when I moved to Midland in 1976 it was by invitation from a guy I had a crush on named Rusty. I drove from my parent’s house in Lampasas to Midland with my clothes, portable TV, and stereo, all in the back of my restored green 1952 Buick Super coupe with three months growth on my head from my Air Force basic training buzz cut. I didn’t realize until I got there that Rusty didn’t even have his own home as he’s led me to believe he was renting a room from a gay couple and there would be four of us in the house. That didn’t last long. I woke up one morning to find Rusty leaning out the window above the bed kissing his ex boyfriend Mark. Soon after that Rusty told me that the two guys who owned the house didn’t like me and wanted me to move out. I didn’t know what to do. Many years later I asked them about it and they said they never said anything of the sort, they thought I was good for Rusty. I didn’t want to move back to my parent’s. Lampasas meant nothing to me but cheap wages and poverty, so I called a guy in Austin who’d told me I could move in with him, but in the two weeks since he told me I could he’d changed his mind. Gay men they never change they’re always as fickle as hell and always will be.

I got a copy of the Midland paper and began looking for some place cheap to rent. I was almost out of money and I was scared as hell. I saw a room for rent ad and I called the lady. She has one bedroom for twenty dollars a week and another with its own bathroom for thirty dollars a week. I drove over to look at them. The house was neat and clean rather little old lady looking, but the lady worked nights, so I would have the house all to myself. I chose the twenty dollar a week room because funds were tight and she’d let me pay by the week. I drove back, packed my car and started moving into Kate’s house. I didn’t know it at the time, but that was the beginning of a friendship that would last until Kate’s death in April of 2003. I lived with her for about three years then and then moved back in for another couple of years from 1982, to 1983. There were many nights I cried myself to sleep in that house because I was so worried about finances. I broke my glasses and couldn’t afford new ones, so I had to find a kind jeweler in Odessa, who soldered them back together for me. I was flat broke, but little did I know what great things were about to happen.

A year or so before that before my short tenure with the Air Force I’d decided I wanted to be a car salesman and not just any car salesman I wanted to sell Cadillac’s. I’d been in love with them since I was a little boy and was taken in by those huge fins. I read about them, studied them and even knew the names of some of the colors. Back then Cadillac’s were like no other car in the world. I felt like the metal they were made from was blessed by the Pope. I had to find a job quickly and I soon found two. I worked for Pizza Hut during the day and I was a relief manager for all the Midland theaters at night. I was back to working almost eighteen hours a day again, but I’d done it before, so I figured I could do it again.

By the time May rolled around it was hot as hell and the Buick didn’t have air conditioning. I could feel the heat from the straight eight engine coming right through the floor boards. I happened to pass the Cadillac dealership one day and I noticed a maroon 1968 Sedan De Ville on the used car lot. It had a white vinyl top and maroon brocade interior, it was beautiful. A salesman came out and greeted me and told me they were asking eighteen hundred and ninety five dollars for it. He let me drive it, the air conditioning felt like heaven and it drove like a dream. I asked him to look at my Buick and tell me what he could give me for it. He had to make some calls, but with all the money I’d spent on restoring it including the real wide whitewall tires he just couldn’t get anyone to make him a decent offer on it. We parted as friends and I went on driving the Buick.

I decided I would try and get a job selling cars any kind of cars just so I could get some experience. I tried the Ford dealership and they wanted to put me on in the make ready department. The Lincoln dealership had me come back a second time, but decided they wanted someone with experience. I never even thought of going to the Cadillac dealership thinking they would just laugh in my face. I was just a twenty one year old kid after all. Then one day I was sitting at the kitchen table eating lunch and reading the want ads and there was this tiny ad for a used car salesman at the Cadillac dealership. I thought of the salesman named Terry who I’d talked to down there and I found his card and called him. It turned out he was the used car manager and the owner’s son-in-law, I couldn’t believe it. He had me come down and talk with him. I ran home between jobs and put on the only suit I owned, a polyester plaid in shades of red and white to go for my interview. I told him I didn’t have any experience, but I knew a lot about Cadillac’s. I kept thinking, “Man, if I can get a job selling used cars and I work real hard maybe they’ll let me sell new cars after a year or so.” On my third trip to meet with him he said, “Sam, I have some bad news.” My heart sank. “The position in used cars has been filled, but would you consider selling new cars?” “Would I?” I thought I was going to die right there. He took me to meet the new car manager and after we talked for fifteen minutes he hired me on the spot. It was Friday and he wanted me to start on Monday, so I went home on a cloud and quit my other two jobs. That Saturday night I took Rusty out to celebrate and spent my last one hundred dollars on a lobster dinner, dumb, I know. That Monday I got a brand new Oldsmobile Cutlass demo to drive and started learning everything I could about Cadillac’s and Oldsmobile’s. It was the happiest day of my life. Within two years I was the top new car salesman at the dealership.

Sometime in 1979 they hired this guy named Jon. He seemed nice enough at first, but I soon found out he was petty and jealous of my success. He started doing the most unbelievable things to me, like calling me “Fag” and “Queer” and telling me to “Suck his dick.” If I left paperwork out anywhere he would hide it, he scratched the paint on a new Cadillac I was to deliver the next day. He poured paint remover all over two new Eldorado’s in the make ready area one of which I had sold. This kind of shit went on for two years and I couldn’t get the new car manager Bennie to do anything about him. Jon once told me, “I know something about Bennie and I can assure you he’ll never fire me.” It must have been true because he would follow me home and just sit outside my apartment in his car. I did find out later that Bennie was a convicted felon. He’d embezzling almost ten thousand dollars from a dealership he’d worked for back in 1965.

Once Jon took a new Eldorado off the showroom floor and delivered it to a man I’d sold it to earlier that morning, when I’d already made an appointment to deliver it that afternoon. He somehow got a key to my desk and would lock it when I was outside with a customer, so that when I returned I couldn’t even open it to get my paperwork out. Then if I left the showroom it would mysteriously unlock itself. A friend of mine and I spent thirteen hours detailing a 1976 Black Eldorado convertible I owned and left it in the shop at 1:00 AM on Monday morning, and when I got to the dealership at 7:00 AM to move out of the mechanics way the car had been keyed down to the metal on both sides. All the while Bennie kept telling me there was nothing he could do about it because I couldn’t prove it and what Jon did after hours was out of his control. I once left right after work on Saturday to drive to Odessa and I was headed down Highway 80 in my black Eldorado convertible. I approached a guy on a motor cycle and started to pass him when I noticed it was Jon. I swear to God it was all I could do not to jerk the wheel back to the right and run his ass over. I wondered where I’d hide the car and where I’d take it to get it fixed without being caught. That’s how crazy that bastard had made me, now days he would never be able to get away with any of that shit.
One day one of the older salesmen told me he’d heard a rumor that Jon and another salesman Stan were going to go to Bennie and tell him that if he didn’t fire me they were going to quit. I asked him, “What should I do?” and he said, “I’d just go to Bennie and ask him.” so I did. Bennie got the books out and said, “Sam, last year you sold two hundred and forty four cars. Jon and Stan combined only sold two hundred eleven. Now who do you think I’d fire if they came to me and threatened something like that?” I went home feeling a lot better, but a week later as I was the last salesman leaving the dealership Bennie called me into his office and told me he was going to have to let me go. You could tell he was just sick about it and he even said, “Don’t blame yourself for this. You’ve set sales records at this dealership that will probably never be broken.” He gave me two extra weeks pay and even offered to let me drive my demo for a couple of weeks if I needed it. It was March 10th, 1981 and I’d been there almost five years. I was twenty six years old and I’d just lost a job I loved through no fault of my own. That was on a Tuesday and the next Monday Jon gave them his two week notice. He’d already gotten another job with an oil company and he was just trying one last ditched effort to get me fired and it worked.

I had just bought the book “Getting Even”, and I thought I’d give Jon a dose of his own medicine. Terry had told me to start fighting back, so I called while I was still selling Cadillac’s to put a “Moving Sale” ad in the paper. I listed all kinds of things like oil paintings, antiques, and oriental rugs, and gave them his address and phone number for the next weekend. They said all moving sale ads had to be paid for in advance. I didn’t want to go down there in person and have them see me, so I called back the next day and placed an ad to sell his personal car for a really cheap price. I’d found a job three days later at the Buick dealership two blocks down the street and Bennie even had the gall to call me and ask me if I’d placed the car ad. I lied and said no, but what difference did it make anyway? It was outside of work wasn’t it? I think his phone rang off the hook with calls about that car. Well, little did I know someone at the paper went ahead and printed the “Moving Sale” ad the next weekend and there were people ringing his door bell at 6:00 AM that Saturday. I was shocked, but I thought it was funny as hell. They said people swarmed his house all weekend.

While I was going through my customer files as I was writing letters to all my customers to let them know I was now selling Buicks. Every time I came across a card with Jon’s name on it where we’d split the commission on a deal I would scratch through his name and think, “I wish you were dead you bastard!” The next weekend I guess Jon decided to take a fishing trip because a bunch of the guys at the dealership had taken one about three weeks before and hadn’t invited him because they couldn’t stand his loud mouth and smart ass ways. I didn’t know anything about it until Monday morning when the used car manager at the Buick dealership walked across the street and told us that two salesmen from the Cadillac dealership had been shot and killed over the weekend. He said one of them was named Jon, but he didn’t pronounce his last name right. The owner had warned me that the other salesmen would “jack” with me any chance they got, so I thought it was some kind of joke. I snuck to an empty office and called one of the ladies at the Cadillac dealership to ask her and she told me Jon had been killed, but she didn’t know who the other guy was. I was hoping it had been Stan, but it was one of his friends who worked for the phone company. I couldn’t help myself I just laughed right in her ear. After the two years of pure hell Jon had put me through I couldn’t believe it. When I called my mother she said, “See I told you, God couldn’t wait to get that evil bastard and he just got his quicker than most. On my way home that night in my new Buick Regal demo I bought a couple of those “Club” canned cocktails, and I drove past Jon’s house and gave him a toast, then went home and cranked up the stereo and discoed all around the apartment kicking my legs high in the air, drinking and laughing.

In the days and weeks to follow I found out that they’d gone fishing on a river somewhere near San Angelo. Apparently in Texas if there is a river running through someone’s property you can go fishing wherever you want to as long as you don’t set foot on the shore it’s not trespassing. They were fishing on this seventy five year old man’s river and all the locals knew he was crazy and would shoot at anyone on the river to scare them off, but when he shot at Jon and his buddy Jon shot back. His friend was found in three feet of water with five bullets in him and Jon was found in the boat with eight bullets in him. I know they dredged the water looking for Jon’s gun, but they never found it. I think the old man spent some time in the Big Spring mental facility, but I don’t know what ever happened to him. There was an article in the Midland paper that the motor cycle gang Jon belonged to was going to come in from Missouri to “avenge” his death, real classy, huh?

My second experience with Karma wasn’t quite as exciting, but it did come. I went back to work at the Cadillac dealership in October 1984 and enjoyed it almost as much as I did the first time. It was the second happiest day of my life. The office I got was the new one they’d built in 1980 right on the corner of the showroom for Jon. As I sat down in the chair and began putting my things in the desk I thought, “I won you son of a bitch, I made it back and I won!”

My sales started getting better and I felt as if I’d never left. I actually quit for three weeks in April 1985 to take a job at a Cadillac dealership in Arlington, but I hated it and they hired me right back. In fact Bennie said, “Get your ass back up here before Terry hires one of his softball buddies.” Most of my customers didn’t even know I’d gone and I even got my same office back. Sometime in 1986 Terry did hire one of his softball buddies, but Shane seemed likeable and he and I got along fine. He once told me, “You know the rest of the guys here aren’t worth a shit. You’re the only competition I have at this dealership.” I thought it was a compliment at the time. I didn’t realize his mind was working on something. I knew he’d worked there one summer while he was still in college and on his last day the guy he worked with told them he’d been getting new car gas tickets and putting it in his own car. Someone called Shane at home and he drove back down to the dealership and beat the shit out of the guy. The guy had been injured getting his hand caught in a fan a week earlier and he had one of his arms in a sling that was really a fair fight. Someone from the Midas Muffler shop saw it and called the switchboard and told them to get someone over there before he killed the guy.

After having my three open heart surgeries I was back at work within a week each time. Then on March 22nd, 1988 Shane got pissed off at me over a car deal and told me he was going to rip my wig off and beat the hell out of me. I wore an expensive hair piece at the time. The next morning on the 23rd he punched me through my open car window as I was parking my car and did just that. Here I was less than ninety days after three open heart surgeries, five foot eight inches tall, weighing one hundred and sixty pounds and a guy who was five foot eleven two hundred twenty pounds broke my nose, tried to pull my hair piece off and as I bent over to pick my pen up he shoved me in the middle of my back and made me fall flat on my face. I tried to fight back, but I wasn’t much of a match. I had blood in my eye that didn’t go away for almost three weeks and I spent four hours in the emergency room. When I got back to the dealership they fired me for fighting, nothing was done to Shane. They were just pissed because I called the police and filed assault charges against him. I heard later that some of the other employees were furious because they knew I’d never start a fight and they knew Shane’s reputation from before. I decided they weren’t going to get away with it this time and I found a lawyer that would take my case on a contingency bases. He told me if I’d been black, Hispanic, or a female, I could own the dealership I could own the dealership, but being a gay white male there wasn’t shit I could do, but he hated bullies. I think a year and a half later I finally netted eight hundred dollars from the lawsuit, but I just wanted to let them know I wasn’t going to slink off in a corner this time.

They seemed to go right on with their jobs and their careers while I had to move in with friends in Dallas to try and find a job. I loved Midland and wanted to live there the rest of my life. I had a few drinks and called Shane one night while I was visiting Todd and Shane told me they’d all gotten what they deserved. Terry had decided to divorce the owner’s daughter, so the owner fired him and brought his other son-in-law in to run the place. No one liked his style, so Bennie quit after twenty five years and Shane had quit and was moving to east Texas. So three years after firing me none of them were there anymore.

My third experience was the most dramatic of all, but it did take a while. When I first went to work in Dallas there was this manager at an Oldsmobile dealership that I developed a strong love, hate, relationship with and it went on for fourteen years. He was a heavy drinker, but so were most of us and we could have a ton of fun sometimes. Rob loved playing practical jokes and sometimes they got a little out of hand. One day I left on an errand and when I got back they’d wrapped my entire desk in duct tape. The desk cost about eight thousand dollars and the owner would have killed them if he’d seen it. It took me forever to get the residue off my phone and other items. I was really pissed, but you learned not to let it show, or next time it would be worse. We always said Rob was the only person we knew who got a DWI on the showroom floor. What happened was there was this little dive of a bar a couple of blocks from the dealership and Rob had gone there one night with some of the guys. When he came back to the dealership to get his brief case the off duty Dallas police officer wouldn’t let him drive. He made Rob call a cab and Rob lived in Fort Worth. We laughed about that for years. He would wait until someone was in the bathroom and slide a whole row of lit “Black Cat” fire crackers under the door while the poor salesman was sitting on the toilet. A bunch of us decided we’d get him one day and the guys went through this elaborate plan of drilling holes through the wall of the sales manager’s office into his office, and hiding the wires under the chair pad. One of them bought some kind of detonator that worked by touching two wires to a battery. When Rob came in sober he was mean as a snake. He would stand in the middle of the showroom and look at each salesman. God help you if you made eye contact with him because he would belittle you and rip you up one side and down the other. You could tell by the look on his face when he got out of his car. Whoever spotted him first would warn the others by saying “Rob’s tweaked.” When he came in with a hangover all he wanted to do was to be left alone. That day he showed up looking like death warmed over and went in his office and shut the door. Glass surrounded all the offices and I was working the finance office next to his, so I had a clear view right in his office. When he sat down and slid his chair under his desk I gave a nod and they touched the wires to the battery. Two entire rows of “Black Cats” exploded under his desk and his office filled with thick, acrid smoke. All he could do was sit there and grin because he knew he had it coming to him.

Rob suspected I was gay and was having an affair with the finance manager. What they didn’t know was that we’d already moved in together. Bill and I had been very careful, I had a separate phone line into the house and I had a P.O. Box, but my checks had our shared address on them and Rob was so nosey he looked at a check I was writing one day. He didn’t say anything, but I know he recognized the address. Then he and the sales manager would call me when Bill was home sometimes in bed right beside me and ask where Bill was. I would say, “I have no idea where he is.” I guess they thought it was funny as hell.

I worked for Rob twice there and then twice ten years later in Fort Worth. I quit each time because it seemed every time he treated me worse and worse. He would get me to quit another job to come back to work for him by telling me he loved me, or missed me, or “Come on back here where people love you.” And each time I’d fall for it and come back to work for him. The last time in 1999 was the final straw. His hateful mean ways were worse than ever, but once when he had me so upset I was in tears he followed me on my way to the restroom in the service department and put his arms around me in a full body hug and told me he loved me.

He treated his wife in much the same manor, so I don’t know what kind of demons he was wrestling with. Once his business partner told me he’d met Rob when he’d “picked him up” in the airport in Lubbock. I knew his partner was gay, so I asked, “You mean picked him up, like you gave him a ride, or picked him up, like you had sex?” He just smiled, and wouldn’t answer me. Rob had a brother who was gay and an uncle too, so I think there were some issues there.
Back in 1988 and again in 1999 Rob would do this thing while I was sitting at my desk writing up a car deal as he was giving me the numbers. He would put his crotch on my elbow. Back in 1988 I just moved my arm like I was writing another line and I’ll be damned he would step forward and place his crotch there again right in the middle of the showroom. In 1999 when he did it to me I moved my elbow up and down against his package and he jumped back. I looked up and asked, “Was it good for you?” He just laughed.

One night soon after I started working for him again we attended a party for his new business partner Joe who I liked a lot. He had worked for Rob since 1988 and they were in the process of opening up more dealerships of their own. I didn’t know anyone there, so I was uncomfortable and had too much to drink, so Rob offered to take me home, so I wouldn’t have to drive. We were gone a long time and I found out the next day he told everyone I was so drunk I couldn’t find my own apartment and we had to drive around and around. I guess that’s as good as “We ran out of gas”, or “Had a flat tire”, but a whole lot more than that happened when we got to my apartment. After that I was a marked man with Rob. I think he was so ashamed by what we did he couldn’t stand to have me around, so he just got meaner and meaner. Once he wanted me to type up a deal in some strange way, so I asked Paul to explain it to me and he couldn’t understand it either, so Paul called Rob at home as he was getting ready for a trip out of town. Rob told Paul to have me pick up the phone, and he began screaming at the top of his lungs, “THIS IS NOT FIRST GRADE! THIS IS NOT FIRST GRADE!” He proceeded to scream at me so loud and so long Paul could hear it through the phone. When he was through with his rant I just lost it. I had to get up and close the door because I began sobbing uncontrollably and couldn’t stop. One of the guys felt so bad for me he went out and brought me some lunch and told me I needed to eat something. Everyone kept wondering why Rob kept on treating me so badly. I think he felt he could get away with it because I’d filed bankruptcy and Rob talked me into selling my car because he’d given me a demo. He knew I couldn’t buy another car and he felt he had me right under his thumb where he wanted me. Once, I walked outside where he and Joe were talking to a friend of theirs and the guy had this little dog. Rob said, “You’d better watch out that dog bites queers.” I said, “Oh, has he been nipping at your heels?” Joe busted out laughing, but I could tell Rob was pissed.

It was about that time I began plotting his murder. I bought a set of serrated knives because I read that they caused more damage when you stabbed someone. I have a painting in my bathroom that I painted with those knives I bought, I call it “Angry Tears”. I even took his gun out of his desk one night when I knew his wife was out of town because I was thinking of shooting him and making it look like a suicide. He was left handed, so I had to remember to shoot him on the left side of his head.
When I told my mother my plan she and my father drove up in two cars the next day and she gave me my grandmother’s 1988 Cadillac, a credit card with a seven thousand five hundred dollar limit on it, and said, “Now you get away from that son of a bitch”. Rob didn’t like it one bit that I suddenly had a way to get out from under him.

Every time I’d go into work and he wasn’t there I’d ask Paul where he was and he’d say in Mexico, or Ruidoso, and I’d grin and cross my fingers and ask, “Did he fly?” If he said yes, I’d look up, and hold my hands in prayer and say “Oh Lord, please, please, please?” Paul would say, “Sam, if anything happened to him you’d feel terrible.” I’d just look at him and say, “No I wouldn’t.”

After I quit that summer and went to work for the Porsche dealership I didn’t see him very often, I didn’t want to. I was terribly happy at my new job and told him once I’d finally found a home. He’d call from time to time to check on me and once he came down to see about buying a new Jaguar for his wife. It was in a different department under a different manager, but he still insisted I wait on him. When I gave him the figures on the car he called back and cussed me out because the manager hadn’t told him about twelve hundred dollars of dealer money the car had on it. I thought “I don’t have to take his shit anymore why don’t I just tell him to go fuck himself?” I held my tongue because of all the years and things between us and because I figured I might need him someday. In fact a few months later I went with my parents to buy a new 2002 Dodge truck from the dealership he’d set up for Joe in Brownwood. Rob later called me in August to thank for the purchase. Little did I know it would be the last time I’d ever speak to him.
On a Friday night November 8th, 2002 my phone rang. The television was still on, but I was asleep. It was my mother and I could tell she was upset. She told me it was just on the local news that Rob and Joe had been killed in a plane crash in Flagstaff on their way to Midland. I couldn’t find anything about it on my local news channels, so I got up and searched for Paul’s cell phone number. I called Paul and sure enough Rob, Joe, another guy, and their pilot had flown to Las Vegas to a car show and were on their way home with a stop off in Midland for re fueling when the wings iced over and the plane spiraled to the ground from seventeen thousand feet. When I called and told mother she said, “Rob got what he deserved, Joe and the other guys didn’t, but that’s what happens when you shake hands with the devil.”

I’ve related these stories about Karma to others and their remark is usually, “Remind me never to piss you off!”

REVELATIONS

2010-04-26T10:49:00.000-07:00

Growing up, I never wanted to admit the thought in the back of my mind that Danny was my parent’s favorite. Yes, I wet the bed until I was about eleven, or twelve years old and every time I tried to play football in the backyard with my father and brother my heart would go into tachycardia and I would say, “I’m having a heart attack!” My father would reply, “Oh you’re just a sissy, a crybaby, kids don’t have heart attacks.” I was only about eight at the time what else did I know to tell them? I hate, loath, and despise, the sound of a football game on television even now because I knew as a kid if I paused for half a second to look at one my dad was watching on TV he’d have me out in the backyard in a football helmet and shoulder pads. Somewhere there is an old black and white Christmas photo of Danny and me in our new football gear. I remember being so disappointed when we opened our presents, I’d much rather have had a Barbie, or an Easy Bake oven.

I still thought that if I behaved and was a “good boy” and made good grades in school I could win out over Danny who never studied, got bad grades, and was even held back in the third grade. The very thought of failing a grade was just unthinkable to me. Looking back I realize that maybe the real reason I got good grades and could read on a ninth grade level when I was in the fifth grade was because I could get the attention and praise from my teachers that I never got at home. Danny got attention with his grades, but not the good kind. I remember once when he was about thirteen my father was screaming at him at the dinner table about his grades and Danny just sat there crying. This was about the third night in a row of my father’s bullying and I’d had enough. I screamed, “Why can’t you just leave him alone? You make him cry every night and he can’t even eat his dinner, just shut up!” You could hear a pin drop after I said it, but that was the last time I remember my little brother crying at the dinner table.

Danny and I were often each others only companions. We moved so much that we had to make new friends often and that wasn’t always easy. In the 1965-66 school years we changed schools three times. We fought constantly over anything and everything, crossing the imaginary line in the back seat of the car, or in our shared bed was enough to get us going, but if anyone ever touched my brother they had hell to pay coming from me. I was such a frady cat and frightened by the skeleton I thought was under our bed that I crowded him because I wanted to be out of reach of that ever threatening boney hand. When we saw a movie about Lon Chaney Jr. with a scar on his hand shaped like an X turning into a werewolf, he took a ball point pen and put an X on his palm and said, “You see this? If you crowd me in bed tonight I’m going to turn into a werewolf.” That night I watched him sleep being very careful not to touch him to see if I could see any hair growing on his face.

He witnessed the beatings I got from my mother some mornings when she’d wake me by ripping the covers off slapping and hitting me, while yelling, “You like sleeping in that warm piss, don’t you, don’t you?” I’d head to the bathroom for a bath, crying the whole time and walk to school feeling dirty and worthless. Years later we discovered what my parent’s already knew. My maternal grandfather was a bed wetter and so was my father. Why didn’t they tell me that? When Danny found out his son was a bed wetter too he told my mother, “I’ll never make him feel the way you made Sammy feel.” Mother told me about it and said, “I can’t believe he said something like that to me.” I said, “I’m glad he did, maybe now you understand just how much you hurt me.” Often when we played childhood make believe games Danny wanted to be a super hero like “Superman” or “Popeye” and since it was just the two of us I was glad to play “Lois Lane” or “Olive Oyl”. He never told my parents because he knew it would get me in trouble and cause them to call me names.

Danny knew just how to work my parents while I was cautioned about taking care of my clothes because we couldn’t afford any more. I caught him deliberately dragging the toe of his boots on the sidewalk when we lived in Germany. I said, “Danny stop doing that, you’ll ruin your boots.” “I don’t care, I hate these boots and I want to ruin them so I can get another pair.” he said. Every year we were over there my mother would order our clothes from the Sears, Montgomery Ward, or J.C. Penny catalogues. I guess he noticed that mother never sent anything back if it didn’t fit because each day he wore a new outfit to school he’d come home take his clothes off, throw them in a pile at the foot of his bed and say, “I’m not wearing those anymore cause they itch me.” After mother ordered him another entire wardrobe and when it arrived in the mail he suddenly picked up everything and hung it in his closet. He then had twice the amount of school clothes that I had. If mother asked him to do chores around the house he would fuck things up so badly she’d never ask him to do it again. Once she told him to start the dishwasher while she and I went to the store. When we walked in the front door there were soap suds three feet high spilling from the kitchen into the living room. We were out of Cascade, so he used Joy in the dishwasher instead. It took mother and me two hours to clean up the mess and the dishes all had to be washed by hand to get the soap crust off them. Yes, he was dumb alright, dumb like a Fox.

As we got older in our teens the fights were less frequent, but more intense when they did happen. I had to work after school to earn the money to pay for my school clothes, car, gas, and lunch, while he never worked because he had football practice. My parents bought their first movie camera and projector not to take film of my baby sister, but to take movies of his football games. He ate like a pig to put on weight and outweighed me by at least twenty pounds by the time I was sixteen. I would look at his clothes in a sweaty pile on the floor of our room only to discover he’d worn a new white pair of my briefs to football practice and now they were so dirty and stretched out, no amount of washing could ever get them clean again. One day mother and I were pulling up in front of our house, I saw him squatting down changing a tire on one of the cars wearing one of my favorite shirts. I got so mad I got out of the car, walked over, grabbed the shirt by the back of the collar and ripped it off him. It ruined the shirt of course, but I made my point. I’d worked hard for those fucking clothes and he had no right wearing and ruining them.

When mother told me I’d have to move out of the house at nineteen because they couldn’t afford me even though I was working full time for her for no pay, I was hurt to go back home once to discover one of Danny’s football buddies living with them and mother making breakfast for them both. When I confronted her about it she said, “Mike lives out in the country and it’s easier for him to live here and go to school than to make that long drive.” When I asked, “What about money? You said you couldn’t afford me.” She said, “Oh his mother gives me eggs from their farm to help.” Eggs? A fucking couple dozen eggs was enough to live under my parent’s roof. What the fuck was up with that?

Relatives made an occasional comment regarding my parent’s partiality to my brother. My aunt Agnes commented on a trip my mother was going to make out to Monahans and couldn’t come until Saturday, “Your mother and father can’t go anywhere because they live for Danny’s football games and he’s not really as good as they think he is.” My mother’s sister once said, “Yes, Danny is their little fair haired athlete.” My seventh grade girlfriend’s mother later told me, “You know I always resented the way your mother told you to have the house cleaned up before we got home from shopping, while Danny was out in the yard playing.” That was when I began to realize what I was trying to keep in the back of my mind all those years was really true and everyone seemed to know it even if I didn’t want to admit it myself.

While I was trying to scratch out a living in Odessa and having to rent a room in my cousin’s trailer house my great uncle said something about Danny totaling his Oldsmobile. I asked, “What Oldsmobile? Mother and Daddy haven’t owned an Oldsmobile since 1952.” He said something about a black 442 and I was so certain he was wrong I called mother and asked her about it. There was a long pause and she said, “I didn’t want to mention it because Danny was so upset about it, but we did buy him one and he wrecked it.” Turns out they had bought him a used one and he rolled it four times three days later and mother had forgotten to call her insurance company to have the car added to their policy. She only got around it by calling them and lying, telling them she’d traded her Mercury for it, so they would cover the replacement cost. I was livid because here I was struggling to make ends meet, but I was hurt too because they’d never done anything like that for me.

Danny wasn’t totally thoughtless. The Christmas I was home after my doomed stint in the Air Force he came home one day with a stack of albums. They were those awful acid rock groups that I hated. As I worked my way down expressing my disgust for each one at the bottom of the stack was the brand new album “Mahogany” by Diana Ross. I stopped because I was truly speechless and he said, “Merry Christmas! I had to chase some black girl around the store for it, but I managed to get it away from her.” It was the only Christmas present he ever bought me and I still have it.

By 1974 my parent’s five year old Mercury had cratered on them and despite money being tight they somehow managed to buy a new dark blue 1974 Plymouth Fury. Danny was without a car again, either because he’d wrecked his, or destroyed the engine I can’t remember. He was constantly drag racing the Plymouth even my mother could tell by the sound when he’d turn the top of the air cleaner over to make it run faster. After his friend Mike got drunk and threw up in it mother would still let him drive it. One night a girl at a dance backed into the right rear door and Danny refused to tell them who’d done it because the girl cried and he wanted to be a hero. He would have rather my financially strapped parents have to scrape together the money to have it fixed than to tell on the girl. Mother told him he wasn’t going to be allowed to drive the car anymore and he said, “Fine, then I won’t babysit Stacy anymore.” and he refused to back down. Mother said, “I just can’t believe your brother is acting this way.” She finally tricked one of his friends into telling her who hit the car, so she could call her parent’s and get their insurance to fix it.

As the years went by and I was busy making good money in Midland he joined the Coast Guard, married, then moved to Puerto Rico and later to New Orleans. I didn’t see him very often except maybe once or twice at my parents for Christmas. My heart problems became worse as I got older and I’d begun to have blackout spells and once I went completely blind while driving home from a wake for a friend. I decided to stop messing around and I insisted my cardiologist send me for more tests where they discovered I had WPW. Then in October, 1987 I was scheduled for open heart surgery in Houston to try and repair my Wolf Parkinson White syndrome. The first one was on the 30th, and it didn’t work, so they rolled me back into the operating room on the 31st, to do it again. The plan was for my mother to stay at my brother’s house in Conroe and drive her mother’s Cadillac while her mother stayed with her sister in Tomball. On the way there my grandmother made a left turn in front of an eighteen wheeler and was partially thrown out of her car and had a broken collar bone, so not only was the Cadillac destroyed, but she was in a hospital in Tomball. Needless to say there was a lot of stress on my mother. Danny came up to the hospital to wait for me to go into surgery and I kidded him about being an East Texas redneck because he was dipping snuff. Then he kept sitting there letting out long exasperating sighs like he wanted to be somewhere else. I said, “Will you please stop doing that? I’m nervous enough already.” I didn’t realize I’d pissed him off, but after I went into the operating room he told my mother she couldn’t use his car to drive back and forth from his house to visit my grandmother and me and he left. When the doctor came out and told my mother I was alright, she burst into tears. The doctor said, “Mrs. Fowler, your son is just fine.” Her sister had to tell him, “Oh, she’s just under a lot of stress right now. After my mother called my father at work, he was the captain of the Big Spring police department and told him what Danny had done. My father immediately took of work and drove to Conroe where he had every intention of whipping my brother’s ass. That night while my parent’s were at his house he didn’t come home until way after they’d gone to bed after he saw my father’s white 1988 GMC truck in the driveway. My father went back home the next day after one of my cousin’s drove down from Dallas and offered to drive mother anywhere she needed to go. Less than two months later in December mother and I had to fly to Toronto and then drive a rented Pontiac to London, Ontario where I had to have another open heart surgery at the University Hospital. When I picked mother up the night before at their home in Sand Springs, my father walked around to the back of the house instead of going back inside because my aunts Ruby and Agnes were there. He had his head down and was crying. Mother told me he’d said, “If that boy dies, I’m not calling his brother.” I was afraid of dying myself, but the first two surgeries hadn’t been that bad. That time I was in surgery for eleven and a half hours the others had only been two hours. The doctor wouldn’t come out and tell mother anything. We later found out that every time they tried to take me off the heart and lung machine my heart would stop and since I was only thirty two they wouldn’t give up on me. When I woke up that time I told mother, “God, I feel like I’m waking up after being dead.” She didn’t mention anything to me until a few days later. I had a huge sore on my mouth where they’d clamped the breathing tube and my throat was so sore that drinking Coke was like drinking battery acid. We flew back on December 23rd, and of course the flight was full. We were sitting in the very back of the plane and the cigarette smoke was killing me. When the flight attendant came around for our drink order I said, “I’d like a Sprite, or a Seven Up and could I have the can?” She told me curtly, “No, the flight is full and we may not have enough.” I turned and told mother in a whisper that I knew she could hear, “Then tell her I want two and if she says anything I’m going to get up and kick her ass!” We had to transfer in Dallas and by the time our flight arrived in Midland I was so glad to get home I said, “I’m not waiting for a damned wheelchair I can walk.” My father was waiting at the bottom of the ramp with a shocked look on his face. He didn’t say anything then, but he later told me, “In all my years in the Army, and on the police, force I’ve seen my share of dead people, but I’d never seen anyone look as bad as you still walking around.”

A month or two later my parent’s came to see me one evening and we went to “El Chico’s” for dinner. When the subject of Danny came up my father said, “Your brother is an asshole.” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing coming out of his mouth. He said, “You always had a job and worked for everything, your clothes, your car, your spending money, and Danny never worked for a damn thing. Your mother and I paid for every car he ever had and all he did was wreck them and tear them up. He never appreciated a Goddamn thing.” I could tell by the look on my mother’s face that she wanted the ground to open up and swallow her right there. Here my father was telling me things she’d denied for years and she’d have given anything if he hadn’t told me, but my father was disgusted with him. He got over it later, but it took a while.

At my grandmother’s funeral in 1989, Danny and I sat side by side and my mother later told me, “I’m so proud of you boys. You didn’t act up or get in an argument or anything.” I reminded her, “I was never mad, he was the one who got his panties in a wad.” She said, “Well, I guess that’s true.” I spent Christmas 1995 with my parent’s at Danny’s house. His wife shopped all year long for presents and hid them all over the house. The twin girls were sitting in the floor opening gifts so fast you’d have thought it was a contest. They’d tear into a package, look at it for a second, and then toss the present to one side while tossing the wrapping paper to the other side in a heap. Soon you almost couldn’t see them for the huge pile of wrappings. I happened to glance over at Danny he wasn’t aware I was looking and he was slowly shaking his head from side to side. It was a pitiful sight, like sharks in a feeding frenzy surrounded by blood. I wasn’t sure if he was thinking of the over indulgence or the fact that our Christmas’s never looked like that. I personally think it was the sheer volume of presents and the lack of appreciation on the children’s part. I didn’t stay long because it seemed the entire family screamed at each other constantly and it got on my nerves, but I did feel that when I left a fence had been somehow mended and we would see more of each other than we had in the past few years.

FUNERAL FLASHER

2010-04-21T09:40:00.001-07:00

My grandma Fowler died of a heart attack in July, 1989. She’d been a hypochondriac and complained about anything and everything as long as I could remember. She should be in the “Guinness Book of World Records” for surviving the most heart attacks, strokes, and blackouts, of anyone in recorded history. I guess she did it for attention, but it had the opposite effect. No one believed her, or took her seriously when she really was sick, but she lived to be eighty two, so I guess she did alright.

I was living in Dallas at the time and when my mother called me with the news she said, “Your grandfather is really taking this hard. I wouldn’t be surprised if he grieves himself to death. You know that happens sometimes with elderly couples. One dies and the other follows soon afterwards.” This shocked me since it had only been a month earlier that he’d gone over to my parent’s house crying because she’d threatened to stab him with a butcher knife while peeling potato’s to fry for his lunch. They’d had a strange relationship to say the least her screaming and yelling at him all the time and him ignoring her by singing silly little ditties he’d made up long ago to drown her out. “Oh, boogie, she rode the shugie!” Her death hadn’t been sudden and she’d been hospitalized for a couple of days before she finally succumbed. My mother said, “Your grandfather couldn’t even bring himself to walk into her hospital room. We’d try to take him, but he’d get as far as the door then he’d just fall to pieces. You’d better be prepared to attend his funeral here pretty soon.”

That was hard for me to imagine I always said if there was a God in Heaven that he would take my grandmother first and give that old man a few years of peace before he died. I’d seen it before though some old lady wouldn’t stop bitching and griping about her husband he couldn’t even eat his eggs to suit her and when he died he was the sweetest man who ever walked the face of the earth, a dear saint, and she the grieving widow.

I flew back to Midland to attend the funeral in Sand Springs, and the burial in Colorado City. Most of my grandmother’s people are buried there, so many years earlier my grandparent’s had bought burial plots in the little cemetery right off the interstate. The funeral home that took care of the arrangements had a seventeen year old Cadillac hearse and a limousine just about the same age, so my mother told them we wouldn’t need the limo we’d just use her mother’s new Cadillac instead. It was decided before I got there that I would drive my aunt Agnes’s Oldsmobile, and she and my aunt Ruby would go with me in the same car. Lots of my grandmother’s people showed up, so it was a nice little turn out. My grandmother looked very pretty in a new floral print dress my mother picked out and a pair of vintage earrings I’d given her. My brother Danny had driven up from Conroe and my mother told us, “You boy’s need to stay close to your father in case he needs help with your grandfather, he may pass out, or fall down, he’s so upset.”

After the church service and the rest of the family had walked by the coffin to pay their respects it was our turn to go. I walked up to the coffin at the same time my grandfather did. My grandfather placed his hands on the coffin and bent over as if to speak to her. He then let out an anguished “Oh,oh!”, and I had to get out of there. So far I hadn’t cried, but the sight of that old man breaking down might have pushed me over the edge. I walked out into the courtyard and was given a hug by my second cousin Linda. Soon my sister Stacy walked out with a tear in her eye and a funny look on her face. She looked straight at me, but before I could ask her anything Linda was hugging her too. Just then I looked up to see my father and my brother almost carrying my grandfather from the church. They were holding him under his arms and by the back of his pants and had him almost off the ground as they drug him to the waiting Cadillac. He stayed in the car as they carried the coffin to the hearse, and we finally got on the way for the forty mile drive to the grave site. On the way Agnes, Ruby, and I, talked about just how hard Sam was taking Arlena’s death. We couldn’t believe it after she’d always been so mean to him. They told me stories I’d never heard before like the time back in the fifties that he came home drunk and she knocked him in the floor and hog tied him until he sobered up and her saying things to him like, “Sam, if you don’t mow the yard I won’t make you any fried tater’s for supper!”

After the grave side service the preacher asked my grandfather, “Mr. Fowler, wouldn’t you like to visit with your guest?” He just mumbled “No, I just wanna go to the car.” It was nearby, so Danny started it up to get the air conditioner going and he and my father placed him in the back seat with the right rear door open, so people could stop by and give their condolences. On the way back to my parent’s house we again discussed his overwhelming grief and his inability to cope with her death.

We stopped by the motel room Ruby and Agnes had rented to change before going to my parent’s. I don’t remember how or why, but they got to the house earlier that I did and when I walked in the door my mother started laughing. I knew she wasn’t fond of my grandma, but I thought it was rude of her to be laughing at a time like this. I asked, “What’s so funny?” “She giggled, “Didn’t you see it?” “See what?” I asked. She responded with more giggles. About that time my grandmother Edna came around the corner and said, “I told them, but they wouldn’t listen.” “Told them what?” I asked. Mother was laughing out loud by then, and said, “I’m not saying anything, if you didn’t see it, you’ll have to go find your grandfather and get him to tell you.” It was obvious he wasn’t in the house, but I spotted him out the kitchen window sitting on the patio with Ruby and Agnes and they were all laughing. I couldn’t wait to get outside so I could find out what the big mystery was. I didn’t have to wait long just as I stepped out the back door my grandfather said, “Sammy, something happened to me today that wouldn’t happen again in a hunnered years!” “What?” I asked. “When I walked up to your grandma, I reached out and put my hands on the casket and my pants dropped to the floor. It’s a good thing I had my hands on that casket and not on her arm, or I’d jerked her outta there.” Agnes laughed, “I don’t think I’d tell that story on myself Sam.” He said, “I might as well, by tomorrow that preacher’s gonna tell everybody.” We all busted out laughing.

Later my mother asked me where I’d gone off to when it happened. I told her that I was afraid he was going to break down and I had to get out of there. Apparently the “Oh,oh!” I’d heard was the sound he’d made when his pants fell down. Mother said the preacher was trying to help him get his pants up when she had to tell my father to help him and she had to reach over and slap Danny on the shoulder to get his attention to go help them. That’s why they had their hands on the back of his pants when they carried him out to the car.

At the airport on the way home I had to use the pay phone to call my aunt Nell. When I told her we both laughed till we cried. She said, “Sammy, it’s a good thing you and I didn’t see that, your mother would have to have thrown us out of there!”
I know my grandma would have gotten a big laugh out of it, hell, I’m not so sure she didn’t do it. I think it helped that old man get over her passing. As I’d always wished, he lived another eight years after that.

CAR SENSE

2010-04-16T12:39:00.000-07:00

Having spent twenty eight years of my adult life selling cars for a living I’ve had many life experiences while working ten hours a day, six days a week, at my profession. Most of them have been good, but there have been some things that have even caught me off guard and being gay in the straight mans world of car sales isn’t easy either. Even if you don’t tell them they always whisper behind your back.

We’ve all heard the story about the old man in coveralls needing a shave who went into the Cadillac dealership in the 1950’s, 1960’s or 1970’s, in whatever city in the U.S. you want to make it and was turned away by an arrogant Cadillac salesman because he wasn’t dressed just right. So he went down the street to the Lincoln dealership and paid cash for a new Lincoln with money from an old brown paper bag. It’s what we now call an “Urban Legend” so it really doesn’t matter when it was, or what kind of car it was, I still hear that story today, although these days it’s always about a Mercedes, BMW, or Lexus dealership. Our status symbols may have changed, but the story remains the same all these many years later.

I’d like to say it really doesn’t matter how you dress, but that isn’t true. You don’t have to wear a three piece suit or designer dresses, but use a little common sense. While it’s nothing today to sell a Porsche so people wearing shorts, jeans, tennis shoes, or kakis, in fact it’s more common than someone dressed to the teeth. I’m always suspicious of over dressed people trying to purchase an expensive car. They’re either trying to impress you, or they’re trying to pretend to be something they’re not. People who actually have money never brag about having money. I know multi millionaires who dress in kakis and sport shirts who act just like you and me.

I had a man and his son get out of a truck in front of the Porsche dealership in Fort Worth and run right over to the used cars. When I greeted him he said, “Man these cars sure cost a lot of money.” I agreed, and told him they were all hand built and retained extremely good resale value. “Is there anything in particular you’re looking for?” I asked. He said, “Yeah, I want a new 911 Turbo Convertible with an X50 package.” I immediately took him to the only one we had, which had a sticker price of over one hundred and fifty four thousand dollars. He asked me, “Can I buy it for a hunerd forty eight thousand?” I said, “No Sir.” He then asked, “Can I buy it for a hunerd fifty thousand?” I said, “No sir.” He asked, “Well, What can I buy it for?” I looked at the window sticker, deducted fifteen hundred dollars and told him he could buy it for that plus tax, title, and license. He said, “Well how much is that?” I said, “Let’s go inside and I’ll figure it up for you.” Once inside I gave him the total and he asked to borrow my phone while he called his banker and had the money wired into the dealerships account. While he and his son went to lunch I got the car ready for delivery. It was funny because I knew he was just trying me with his poor mouth act just to see how I’d treat him.

He didn’t know that I’d started selling cars in Midland when I was twenty one years old and not being from Midland I didn’t know the moneyed names from any one else. So I never judged a book by its cover. The old rancher with cow manure on his boots was more likely to come in and write a check for a new Cadillac with an old folded check he’d been carrying around in his wallet for months than some fancy dresser.

My favorite story about Midland happened one afternoon in 1978 when I noticed a young couple with two little boys in front of the showroom looking at a new Seville the most expensive car we sold at the time. I looked at my watch and it was 4:30 PM we closed at 6:00 PM and it had been a slow day, so I decided I was going out and practice on this young couple. I was bored and had nothing better to do.
I greeted them and they seemed shy and somewhat stand offish. It took me a few minutes to get them to even agree to let me go back into the showroom and get the key to open it up for them. Once I opened the car I got them to sit inside to show them things like the stereo, the astro roof, the power seats, the climate control, etc. Then I used a trick I’d been taught even though they said they didn’t want to test drive the car I got them to shut the doors and I put the car in reverse and backed it out and onto the street before they could protest. Once we were on our way it wasn’t long until I had the man behind the wheel driving us back to the dealership. They liked the car and I got them into my office to discuss what they wanted. The man asked what the car would cost if it were ordered with just the standard equipment. The lady said, “What? You mean I can’t order anything extra on it? Then why bother?” It seemed they were about to have an argument, so they asked for a brochure. I got their information and they piled the kids in their car and drove off. After they left I looked at my watch and it was a quarter to six. I was pleased that I’d put my practice time to good use and it was almost time to go home. As I walked passed my manager’s office he asked, “Well, what did you have Sam?” I said, “Oh I don’t know, they were a nice young couple, but I don’t think they can really afford a Cadillac.” He asked, “What were their names?” I looked at the three by five cards in my pocket and said, “Mr. and Mrs. Carl Bain.” He just grinned and started to laugh. I asked, “What?” and he said, “Do you know that building downtown that has BSA on the side of it, with the heliport on top?” I said, “Yes.” He said. “Well the B stands for Bain and Carl Bain owns Ferrari’s.”
You could’ve knocked me over with a feather. Carl not only ordered a beautiful Basil Green Firemist 1979 Cadillac Seville from me for his wife, but he bought company cars from me for years to come. So I learned at an early age never to judge a book by its cover.

But some things have changed in the past thirty years, people now dress to a new low. I can honestly say I have never sold a car to a guy wearing a baseball cap backwards, nor have I ever taken one seriously. It makes them look like their about to give someone a blowjob. I once had a woman come in with a tight white tank top to apply for a job around 1980. She would bounce up and down and say, “My name is Peeper, my name is Peeper”, while her tits bounced up and down. All I could think of was taking a magic marker and drawing two eyes on her boobs. I’ve had over weight guys come in with their wife’s wearing tank tops, the men, not the women, with their nipples pierced, while the tank top kept getting stuck on their nipple ring right out there for the world to see, who wants to look at that shit? Once in 1988 a guy wearing a huge gold and diamond barbell on a chain around his neck that was some kind of body building award came in to look at a new Cadillac in Plano while wearing very tight sweat pants and sporting an erection the whole time and not a very impressive one at that. Once in 1979 I had a guy call me away from his wife who I was showing features to while she was sitting behind the steering wheel of a new Oldsmobile because he said he couldn’t figure out how to use the manual recliner on the passenger seat. I walked around to his side of the car he was wearing the kind of shorts that were popular at the time like the ones you see John Ritter wearing on reruns of “Threes Company” white, tight, and very short. He pretended to be having a hard time with the lever and had one leg in the car and the other on the ground as I walked around to the passenger side of the car and squatted down I looked up and his hairy nuts were hanging out of his shorts twelve inches from my face. Don’t tell me he didn’t know exactly what he was doing. I said, “If you’ll put both your feet in the car it’ll work easier.” Suddenly it worked like magic. When the new 1977 Oldsmobile’s came out in the fall of 1976 I opened the door of a beautiful elegant 1977 Oldsmobile Brougham Coupe with velour upholstery. This man looked me right in the eye and said, “Wow! How’d you like to get naked and go riding around in that?” I just grinned and said, “Well that might be fun, wouldn’t it?” I didn’t know if it was just a thought, or if he was asking me for a date. He was pretty hot, so I was willing to take him up on his offer if he’d been serious.

I had a married father of five children try to kiss me in the front seat a new Cadillac at an auto show. I could smell the vodka on his breath and as I turned away he licked on my right side of my face. In 1977 I had a well known Midland pediatrician rest his chin on my right shoulder on the showroom floor while I was behind the wheel of a new Desert Rose Firemist 1977 Cadillac Seville as I was telling him about the automatic headlights whose controls were to the left of the steering column. “Mmmm, you smell good. What kind of cologne are you wearing?” He asked. “Did I show you the trunk?” I asked, as I opened the door and got out. At least he brought his wife in and bought her the car the next day. One young guy insisted on holding my hand in the front seat while on a test driving a new Sedan De Ville while his wife was in the back seat holding a four week old baby.

Ladies looking at your cleavage may be nice for straight guys, but it’s not going to get you a better price, not with me anyway. I’ve had women pinch me on the ass as I was bending over to pull a hood release, cry on my shoulder, and I mean cry, scream, bawl, and claw their faces about their mean ex husbands who were screwing them out of their well earned fortunes on a test drive, rub my crotch, women and men, pinch my nipples and one married man who wanted to go on test drive in a car that was exactly like the one he had in the service department, but he didn’t want to drive it. I found out why when he crawled into the floorboard on the passenger side and started giving me a blow job as I drove slowly through a residential area. Imagine my horror when I got back and one of the salesmen pointed to the milky white stains around the zipper of my navy slacks and busted out laughing. “I’ll bet that was a fun test drive!” he said.

I guess my point is this. “What do you think you’re doing? Are sales people pieces of garbage that have to put up with whatever abuse you decide to deal out? I compared stories with a pretty female sales lady in her late twenties one time. She told me she had to put up with the same things, but whatever it took to sell a car including holding a seventy five year old man’s hand while his wife was waiting in the showroom, or playing with his limp marsh mallow dick just to make a sale, she was willing to do it. She just didn’t consider it a big deal. I suppose we could throw a fit and file charges against you, but what would happen? We’d be fired by our greedy dealers who’d believe you before they’d believe us especially if a ten cent profit were involved.

Here’s another thing I can’t understand about people these days that differs from thirty years ago. If you’re fat and it seems sixty five percent of women and men these days are, don’t try and wear it as a badge of pride, cover it up with a moo moo, or wear a girdle, no one wants to see that shit. Stretch pants, or jeans, don’t cut it when you’re a size twenty six. If your ass and thighs look like two pigs in a sack fighting to get out, or like cottage cheese, find a way to camouflage them. I don’t care if you’re “Large and in Charge”, or think you’re a “Sexy Mama”. Don’t try and squeeze your “Circus Maximus” fat, gelatinous, ass, into the seat of an Aston Martin, or a Porsche that you can’t possibly fit in, or afford.

I had a couple come in to the Aston Martin dealership in Dallas once and nice as they were, I could tell by what they were driving and how they acted that they couldn’t have afforded a tire on one of those cars. She had a huge ass, a huge one. I don’t even know how she found form fitting jeans to cover it. She had on a giant afro wig and three inch glittered eyelashes. I was being polite as I opened doors on cars for her to sit in and the manager was mad as hell with me because I’d even buzzed them into the showroom in the first place. I honestly don’t know how she was able to fit in the cars as I closed the doors. I hoped it would make her uncomfortable, or hurt her butt and she would want to get out immediately. Her boyfriend kept saying “Oh, baby you look good in dat, oh yea baby, you look good in dat.” “Nnnnot dat you don’t look good anyway baby, but you really look good in dat!” I thought the tires were going to explode. She wouldn’t have looked good in anything if we’d all been Ray Charles, or Stevie Wonder.
These days you have underage kids coming into the showroom wanting to test drive cars. Many of them are under twenty one, but they want to drive a one hundred and forty thousand dollar Porsche and get mad when you tell them they can’t. It isn’t “Six Flags” or “Disneyland” at least they have an admission charge. If you can’t afford something don’t ask to drive it. The cars aren’t there for your entertainment they are for legitimate customers to buy. For God’s sake and your own self respect treat sales people like human beings, God knows their managers and dealers don’t. Try not to be rude or condescending sales people are human beings just like you keep your hands to yourselves and if you can’t afford something don’t go pretending that you can. I’d much rather have someone look at a car and say, “Wow, that’s way out of my price range.” Than someone looking at a window sticker and saying, “That’s ridiculous! I would never pay that for a car!” What do you think that tells a sales person? You can’t afford it buddy.

I remember once getting a call in the early nineties at a Cadillac dealership in Dallas where the lady said she had been on the lot that Sunday and noticed that the new Sedan Deville’s were listing for around thirty thousand dollars. She wanted to know if it was unreasonable of her to think that she could buy one for fifteen thousand dollars. Well, this was one of those skanky dealerships where they recorded the phone calls and you never knew when they were going to set you up. More dealers do it now than ever before, for “quality control”. So, I decided to have a little fun with her. I asked her in my sweetest voice, “Oh, did you want to finance fifteen thousand dollars on a new Cadillac? That would really make your payments low.” She said “No.”, and explained herself again. I said,”Oh, you want to put down fifteen thousand dollars on the car, well that would still make your payments very low.” She said “No.”, and explained herself again. I then said, “Oh you must mean one of our pre owned cars, we do have some of those for around fifteen thousand dollars, which year were you looking for?” She said “No.”, and explained herself again. I then asked her to tell me exactly where the cars she’d seen were located? Which side of the street they were on? Which part of the lot, etc? When I explained to her that she was on the new car side, and all the cars had window stickers with the MSRP around thirty thousand dollars, she said, “Yes, yes, yes.” By this time, I’d drug the phone call out to about fifteen minutes and she must have thought she’s gotten a hold of the dumbest salesman on the face of the earth, even I was getting tired of the conversation. I finally said, “Let me see if I understand, what you’re asking me is if it is unreasonable of you to think that you can buy a brand new Cadillac that list for thirty thousand dollars for fifteen thousand dollars?” She sounded so relieved that she’d finally gotten through to me, “Yes, that’s what I’m asking”. I said “Yes mam that is unreasonable!” I wanted to say, “You stupid bitch, have you lost your fucking mind?”

I once went out to wait on two women in Midland looking at a new 1978 Coupe De Ville. The car probably listed for between twelve and thirteen thousand dollars at that time and one heifer tapped her fingernail on the glass at the price while digging at her teeth with a toothpick and said, “These cars are fifteen hundred dollars cheaper in New Orleans.” I said, “Mam, the window stickers come on the cars from the factory and if a car in Hawaii has the same equipment as a car in New York they’ll have the same MSRP.” She shook her head vigorously, tapped that lunch hook of hers on the window again and said, “No, these cars are fifteen hundred dollars cheaper in New Orleans.” I then said, “Maybe the car you saw in New Orleans had less equipment on it.” Again she said, “No, these cars are fifteen hundred dollars cheaper in New Orleans”. I said, “Well, I think I’d go buy it in New Orleans then.” and walked away. I learned years ago you can’t argue with drunks and fools.

Then there’s the “How much more will you come off if I pay cash?” I’ve had to grin and tell many people, “We don’t penalize you for paying cash, but we’d rather you financed it with us because we make a little money that way.” I can remember my grandfather in the 1960’s saying, “Yeah, I went down to the Buick house and paid cash for that Electra out there.” Most people aren’t actually paying cash anyway, they’re borrowing the money from their bank, or credit union.

I once worked for a dealer that was short on operating funds and about to close his doors. If someone paid cash for a car, he used the money to pay the employees and keep the lights on. The customer drove around for ninety days or longer without license plates because the car they’d paid cash for hadn’t been paid off at the bank. If they financed it then he registered it right away because that was the only way he could get his money from the lender. He was doing the same thing on extended warranties which in most cases will allow you up to a year to purchase one. When he finally closed his doors and lost his franchise he and his son were charged with fraud. Before it ever went to trial the dealership mysteriously burned to the ground. When TV reporters interviewed him for the local news he said, “There wasn’t anything in there but a bunch of papers.” Yeah, the paperwork that would have sent he and his son to prison for several years!

One of my favorites was a man who had always traded in his Porsche a few months before his lease was up. He was a doctor and he and his wife both thought way too much of themselves. He came into the dealership one day acting haughty and in a hurry and said, “I’m Dr. Stone, order me a new Targa in seal grey with a spoiler and call me when it comes in, my information is in your computers.” I noticed he was driving a two year old Targa, but he was so rude and hateful and in such a hurry I didn’t have the nerve to ask him if he was thinking of trading it in. When his new car arrived four months later he told me, “I’m leasing that Porsche and I always trade mine in early and get a new one.” I got it appraised and had to tell him “Well, I’ve got some bad news, and some good news. The bad news is that your payoff is twenty thousand dollars more than the car appraised for and you won’t be able to trade right now unless you want to put down a lot of money. The good news is that in eight months you won’t have to worry about it, and it it’ll be Porsche’s problem.” He got mad and threw a hissy fit and then his wife showed her ass and said, “My, this new showroom you built is certainly nice.” I said, “Well, thank you.” She said, “You’d better enjoy it, you won’t be here long!” I had to go into my sales manager’s office and shut the door because I was about to plant my fist in that cunt’s face! She’s the type who goes into jewelry stores and furriers before the holidays, buys items on credit, then takes them back after January all scratched up and cigarette burned after being worn to numerous parties and wants her money back because she decided they “weren’t suitable”. They went out and rolled all that negative equity into a new Mercedes Benz 550 SL. Boy, they sure showed me, fucking morons!

I remember back in the early 1980’s when GM started their roller coaster ride of interest rate incentives. I truly believe in my own heart that’s when GM started their downhill slide to bankruptcy. We would go ninety days with terrific interest rates and then ninety days with no incentives at all. When rates were low we were selling cars like crazy and couldn’t keep enough on the lots, but when rates went back up and inventory started to stack up the owner would run around screaming, “Don’t order any more cars, if another truck pulls up, I’m sending them back!”
That was when consumers learned if they waited long enough then GM would lower their interest rates once again. We sales people suffered because during the good times we thought we’d never have another poor day and when the sales stopped we couldn’t afford our dry cleaning. I had a lady who put a lot of time and thought into purchasing a new 1982 Buick Park Avenue from me. She picked out her car and gave me a deposit, but she wouldn’t take delivery because she was sure that GMAC was going to come up with lower interest rates any day. My dealer was having a fit because the car was just sitting there. I even called the GMAC office in Odessa and asked the manager if he’d heard any rumors of lower interest rates any time soon. This was early in the game and GM had gone longer than their ninety days without any special incentives. She drug it out for two weeks, but I finally got the lady to come in and take delivery on a Thursday afternoon. The next Monday while I was listening to the news on TV as I was shaving I heard, “GM announced today that it is lowering its interest rates.” I could have died. I was dreading that call when it came and of course she called me. To this very day I know that lady thinks I lied to her.

I once worked at a dealership where a salesman took a customer on a test drive in a brand new one hundred thirty eight thousand dollar 2004 Porsche Turbo convertible. I’d warned the salesman that I’d traded the car to a dealership in San Antonio and then he asked, “Where are the keys?” “In the manager’s office.” I said. When I saw him walking outside with the key, I asked, “What are you going to do with it?” “I’m going to move it around back” he said. I happened to look up just as the car was leaving the lot and I looked at the salesman standing in my office and asked, “Are they taking that car on a test drive?” He said, “Well that’s what it looks like.” I said, “I hope they total the son of a bitch. I’m so sick of Ray thinking he can do whatever he wants to around here!” We spent the next ten minutes discussing the “what if” scenario of the car being wrecked. About that time the customer and Ray walked in the side door. I figured they must have driven it around back while I was looking the other way. The customer must’ve thought I was the manager because he walked up to my desk and said, “I just totaled that car.” My heard raced as I wondered how they’d heard what we were talking about and I said, “Yeah right”, and laughed. He looked me straight in the eye and said, “No, I really did total it.” I looked at his face then at Ray’s and said something I would never normally say to a customer, “Your shittin me?” He said, “No, I really did.” I asked them where the car was and I told Ray he’d better try and get a hold of our manager who was on vacation in Florida as I grabbed the keys to a Cayenne. The other salesman and I drove over there. When we turned the corner and saw the car the salesman said, “Man, don’t you wish you’d saved that wish for the Lotto?” The customer had lost control of the car going around a traffic circle and drove it up and over a parking lot. It tore out the suspension, busted the engine block, deployed the air bags, roll bars, and bent the unibody. Thank God I wasn’t the salesman who took him on the test drive.

I worked for a “Pretend” luxury Japanese car dealership most recently. These are the cars where the Japanese place a new label on a cheaper car and stick on a little more “Goo Ga, Trash Flash and Disco Glitter” and then tack on thousands of dollars and dumb ass Americans eat it up. At the dealership the lot looked like a garbage dump, the black granite floors were worn down and dull, the cars on the showroom were filthy with dead batteries and the men’s restroom usually smelled like a three week old corpse was in there somewhere, even sales managers down wind from it had to get up and close their doors. A three hundred pound salesman was usually the culprit. His shit stunk so bad the smell would linger down the hall for hours. The tents outside to protect the cars from hail were rotten and collapsed. If you walked someone through the service department they might slip and fall in oil, transmission fluid, or grease and you could never tell what kind of language they might be subjected to by the mechanics. The new cars had door dings in them and warning lights were sometimes on in the instrument cluster. If I took the time to put the cars in the service department to have the problems corrected they usually disappeared into the “Twilight Zone” only to be discovered week’s later, sitting on the back lot uncorrected. As difficult as it was for me I got tired of hearing myself complain to the deaf ears of the sales managers and I finally gave up and developed the same attitude as every other person who worked there, who gives a shit, why bother? This dealer tried to come off as "Family First", which means their family who live in mansions, and on estates, not you, or your family, who they couldn’t care less about. They’d say things like, their customers are the most important people in the world to them. “Gag!” In real life they are out to screw you out of every last dollar you have while playing Christian music over the P.A. system. My recommendation is if you go into a dealership where they brag about their family values and play Christian music, or if your sales person has a bible or a cross on their desk run like hell! You are about to receive the fucking of your life. I worked for two dealerships that played the same Christian XM radio station over their P.A. systems and they were the most evil, heartless people, I’ve ever worked for. These people are exploiting Jesus Christ as a way to promote their own business and the only thing “Almighty” they care about is the dollar.

My last adventure there was a letter I wrote to the owner after I heard a salesman telling him in the break room how pleased he was with the guy who handled his cell phone service the day before. “If I had some kind of a service business I’d want that guy working for me” he said

“Really?” the owner said. “Yeah, he was a fag.” the salesman said. I asked, “How do you know Paul?” “Oh, I could tell by the way he talked” He said. That was the last straw for me.

Here’s the letter I send anonymously;

I feel it should be brought to your attention that you have an employee at your dealership Paul Smith, who appears to be against everything you stand for. Or perhaps it truly doesn’t matter if you are not indeed what you represent yourself to be. This is beginning to be the consensus of many of us. He seems impervious to any of the rules that pertain to the rest of your employees.
With the recent concerns about the dealerships policy regarding sexual harassment which we all know has been state and national law for several years now. He has been overheard by others to say many inappropriate things even to your office manager Diana.
Example;
“Me and my wife are gonna have another baby!”
“Oh really?”
“Well I’ve been practicing! Yuk, Yuk, Yuk!”
That’s just his way of talking dirty to the women who work for you. By tolerating such things she has opened herself up to litigation regarding the current policies of management being aware of sexual harassment, but she ignored it.
Using derogatory words and racial slurs for minorities, and women are things he does on a daily basis as if making over two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year makes it acceptable. He was even heard saying “I just love pussy.” in Jeb’s office one day.
Paul also likes to relate all kinds of sexual escapades, whether real, or fictitious, about going down to Juarez and fucking some Mexican whore in the mouth and blowing the back of her head off with his load of cum, or some Juarez “Madam” washing his dick and balls while he’s screaming “Too much soap, too much soap!” because he’s about to ejaculate all the while acting out his stories with lewd hip gyrations and pelvic thrust pulling up his pants to accentuate his genitals. Then he dares to inject something about God, or Jesus, after telling such stories as if he just brought the story around to its real purpose. That’s like telling a story about Jews who were exterminated in the Holocaust and then saying “They lived happily ever after.”
Managers have been known to express their opinions of him by saying that he has no morals and no scruples, but he sells a hell of a lot of cars. Like that makes everything alright?
These are just examples of the stories he tells on a daily basis to anyone within earshot. He talks in a similar manner to his customers as well. He can be heard all through the day relating vulgar and disgusting stories down the hall of the sales floor with his loud mouth. Whether it is of a sexual nature, or how he has put an ignorant customer in their place. To him he is “The King!”
Is this the kind of image you want to represent you and your family? Or do you just not care because of the money? People are thinking it’s all about the money.
The managers are afraid of him and don’t even bother to say anything to him when he shows up at least two days a week without a tie. He does it on Fridays when he’s supposed to be off even if he spends the majority of the day at the dealership and he never wears one on Saturdays. When he knows you are away from the dealership he removes his tie. He’s even been seen going into your office without a tie and speak to you in person as if he’s saying, “Look, I even went to talk to the big boss and even he didn’t say anything.” When he walks around with his tie thrown over his shoulder it’s not for “Good Luck” as he says it is, it’s his way of giving you the finger! No one likes wearing ties, so if he’s so important to you then why don’t you just do away with the rules that the rest of us have to abide by?
He’s even been heard to brag about the fact when the new car salesmen complained about him showing up on yet again another Saturday without a tie and he made degrading remarks about their sales abilities and their laziness.
“I’ve even walked into the owner’s office and he didn’t say anything to me about it, so why should they whine and bitch about it?” “I wish I had the time to piss and moan about something like that, but I’m too busy selling cars.” He said.
Do you really think he’s so talented that if he left he would take all his customers with him? He’s even flaunted such things right in front of you and the fact that no one of authority says anything to him makes him feel empowered to say anything he feels like. He makes fun of other employees who choose to dress per dealership policy even to making fun of a black salesman by pulling his handkerchief out of his coat pocket and pretending to blow his nose on it right in front of you an owner and officer of the company and you never said a word. I even heard him telling you about the great customer service he got on his new cell phone and he said he would hire the guy who helped him in a heartbeat. When you expressed how nice that was he said, “Yeah, he was a fag.” When I asked him how he knew? He said he could tell by the way he talked. All of this was right in front of you and you let him get away with it. How do you think I felt about that as a gay man?
What do you think this says to the rest of the staff?
(1). I don’t have to play by the rules!
(2). I’m better than all of you!
(3). Management is afraid of me!
(4). The owners are afraid of me!
(5). I make so much money I can get away with anything I want and there isn’t anything you can do about it!
(6). I’m invincible and can’t be fired because this dealership would be nothing without me!
With the economy and sales being what they are these days, this is not a good morale booster for the other employees. People are sick and tired of it. If he doesn’t have to abide by the rules than why should we?
This is the opinion of your employees who are afraid to say anything for fear of being fired in retaliation for reporting him.

Needless to say they suspected me of writing the letter, so I wasn’t there much longer it’s just as well, I hated selling that those ugly cars anyway.

BEACHES

2010-04-12T18:14:00.000-07:00

I seem to remember reading the jacket on a VHS copy of the movie “Beaches” that read something like, “Two friends who have nothing in common except a lifelong friendship.” That perfectly describes my relationship with Steve.

I met him at one of the worst times of my life just after coming out to my parents and being dumped by my first love. I’d turned seventeen in January and I met Steve right around the end of February 1972 just as he’d turned nineteen. He was with his boyfriend John Paul and I ran into them in the lobby of the Carolina Theater I worked after school, we hit it off right away. Like most people I’ve become friends with over the years, Steve liked me because he thought I had a great sense of humor and I wasn’t effeminate like a lot of the guys he’d met. Since he was in the Air Force stationed at Pope Air Force Base there in Fayetteville he couldn’t afford to have nellie friends. For some reason I’d been told of a strict rule back then that “sisters” didn’t have sex. I think we may have heard it from my friend Charlie, so at all times during our friendship, even when we shared the same bed, we never touched one another.
I began spending a lot of time with John Paul and Steve and soon met John Paul’s roommate Gordon. Gordon had been married and had a nine year old daughter. He didn’t look or act gay which I’m sure worked in his favor since he was a mechanic at the Buick dealership. It wasn’t long before Gordon and I pared up and began having sex. He wasn’t really my type, but the dirty fingernails and his ruggedly handsome face attracted me to this tough acting guy. He was kinky in bed and insisted that I open my eyes and look straight into his when he came while fucking me. I guess it was a power trip with him. He was the one who gave me my first case of crabs and I refused to have sex with him after that. It was the same time I suspect he gave the crabs to a pretty young girl who worked in Charlie’s father’s jewelry store. Charlie almost laughed in her face when she said, “Gordon’s the kind of guy that would give you crabs.” I guess we both had a thing for “Grease Monkeys”.

Within two months of meeting Steve he had to go out of town to spend a few days with his parent’s in Charlotte. John Paul and Gordon invited me to go out drinking with them one Saturday night. I guess John Paul was jealous of my friendship with Steve because when we got back to his mobile home that night he started some shit with me about my relationship with Steve. “You two are fucking aren’t you?” he wanted to know. I said, “No, we’re just friends. “Oh don’t hand me that shit. I know you two motherfuckers are sleeping together behind my back!” his voice suddenly growing louder. We went back and forth with him accusing me and me telling him nothing was going on between us. Then he said, “You know what? Not only do I not believe you, I don’t like you and I’m going to beat the shit out of you.” As I was trying to get out the sliding glass door at the front of the trailer he reached around me, locked it, and started punching me in the face. Gordon just stood there watching, but at one point John Paul told him to go and get the gun and he disappeared down the hall returning with a pistol in hand. John broke my nose and chipped a front tooth, so blood was pouring everywhere. I decided he might beat the hell out of me, or kill me, but I wasn't going to make it easy for him. I kicked the glass door until it shattered in a hundred pieces, then rushed out the door to my mothers car yelling at the top of my lungs, “Help, help, somebody help me!” At that point I’d opened the door and got behind the wheel, but he blocked me from shutting the door and held a piece of the glass to my throat. It was then that I realized he had the keys to my mother’s car because he'd driven us home. I started yelling louder and honking the horn so much that it broke the metal horn ring of the mother’s green 1969 Mercury Monterey. “Give me the fucking keys you bastard, give me the fucking keys!” I screamed. He slapped me across the face and my head jerked to the right slinging blood all over the inside of the windshield. By that time dogs were barking and lights were going on everywhere so he threw the car keys at me and threatened, “If call the police you little faggot I swear I’ll kill you.” I slammed his hand in the glass of the door and locked it, then as he was trying to pull his hand out, I got the keys in the ignition and stomped the accelerator causing the tires to squeal. I turned the car around and tried to run him over as I was leaving. I’d have done it too, but he stepped behind his ancient red Triumph before I could reach him. I’d always been taught that if someone threatens you with harm don’t go quietly, raise hell, scream, yell, do whatever it takes to get attention and get the hell out of there.

My parent's called the police and filed charges against him, but he always hid from them and didn't show up in court. He and Gordon went AWOL from his rented trailer and their jobs. He had prior charges and outstanding warrants, but as far as I know nothing ever happened to him at least while I still lived there. A few months later I saw Gordon and him at a light. I was in my dark blue 1965 Chevrolet Impala convertible and he was in some car I’d never seen before. They started cruising me, but as soon as they recognized me they hauled ass so fast I couldn't get their license number.

After that Steve and I became even closer and began spending every free moment together. By that summer I’d been promoted to projectionist and had Saturdays off while I worked the evening shift for three hundred dollars a month. We must’ve put five thousand miles on my old convertible “Samantha” that summer hitting the gay bars in every city in the state of North Carolina. Even though I was only seventeen I was only carded once in Charlotte and when I said, “I left my driver’s license in the car I’ll have to go back and get it,” The guy said, “Don’t worry about it, you look old enough.” I was actually standing in the “Pegasus” bar in Chapel Hill, when a troll of an ABC liquor control board agent pulled a college student out of the bar and arrested him. The guy had been standing right next to me. Back then people still harassed gays in any way, shape, or form, they could. On one of our trips the Loretta Lynn tour bus passed my car and honked as they pulled ahead. There were four of us in the car with the top down drinking beer and we waved and honked back. I’ll never know if the “Queen of Country Music” herself saw us or not.

I’m not sure when he did it, but Steve had put in a transfer to Taiwan, or Thailand, I can’t remember now which one it was, but I was heartbroken at the thought of loosing my best friend and we did everything we could that summer before he had to leave in November. When we were both broke, which was often, we would go around to car dealerships looking at the new cars when they were closed. Steve was certain he wanted a new Oldsmobile Toronado, while I was torn between a boat tailed Buick Riviera, or a Thunderbird. We had all kinds of dreams and plans and we decided that after high school I should enlist in the Air Force and get stationed at the same base. We even found our dream home by going around to all the mobile home dealerships in town that had their trailers open on Sundays, so people could walk through them. We found one called “The Bachelor II” it had a master suite at each end of the trailer and you shared the living room, dining room, and kitchen. We decided that would be the perfect home for us. Steve and I spoke often about our hopes and dreams for the future and we always saw ourselves as being best friends forever. We even decided that we’d go to the old queen’s home for the aged when we got too old to take care of each other and we’d laugh about sitting out on the front porch looking at all the young cute guys as they walked by. Steve always insisted he wanted to die before he turned thirty because by then he’d be too old to attract anyone. We often talked about what it would be like knowing someone for twenty years, it seemed like such a long time to us back then.

I cried when we hugged for the last time before he left to go overseas. He sold his car and only took some of his clothes. Whatever else he had went to his parent’s house in Charlotte. I always admired the relationship Steve had with his father, they were close and his father truly loved him, something I’d never had. The year he was over there we exchanged letters constantly. One of my biggest regrets was when in one of my many moves I decided to throw those old letters away. By that time they seemed silly with all that talk of him saving up to buy a big stereo and a TV to bring back with him and all the trials and tribulations of boyfriends I couldn’t even remember after all those years. We discussed the latest records of The Supremes, Diana Ross and Barbara Streisand, they sure seemed important to us at the time. I’d give anything if I still had them, it was a great timeline of my life back in 1973 and 1974.

When he came back he re enlisted and he got enough money to pay cash for a new butterscotch colored 1973 Cutlass Supreme with a black vinyl top and interior. He then transferred to Goodfellow AFB in San Angelo to be close to me in Texas. We got to visit on a few weekends, but by 1975 there was some over zealous officers at Goodfellow that were having men suspected of homosexual activity followed around town. That made Steve nervous because he’d been questioned on one occasion, so he transferred to Los Angeles. I didn’t see him again for four years.

In 1979 I flew out to L.A. twice to visit him, and we had a good time seeing the Queen Mary, Universal Studios, homes of the stars. On my last visit he had a lover and I had to pay for the three of us to go everywhere. I didn’t mind, but for some reason Steve and I had an argument and I ended up in the bathroom crying. He was angry with me because my attempt at joining the Air Force had failed and I think he resented it deep down. There was also the fact that I was selling cars and making enough money to afford Cadillac’s and Lincoln’s while he couldn’t. I lived in a beautifully furnished apartment and I was making the dreams we talked about as teenagers come true and renting Rolls Royce’s for us to drive while I visited him. He was living in cheap apartments and using public transportation when his car broke down. We were cordial when he took me to the airport, but I left with a heavy heart. I had no idea that it would be eleven years before I would see him again.

A year or two afterwards Steve decided not to re enlist. He sold his car for five hundred dollars and moved to San Francisco. He was sharing an apartment with several guys in the Castro District and got heavily involved in drugs. Any phone number I ever had for him was only good for a few weeks before being disconnected and the only way I had of reaching him was by calling his parent’s and getting his new number from them. Even after I went to considerable trouble to reach him he was usually so high he would cut the call short and promise to call back which never happened. He once admitted to me that he was shooting up with all kinds of stuff and would wake up at times and not know where he was, or who he was with.

I finally gave up trying and didn’t hear from him until he called me from Oklahoma in 1986 where he was staying with friends while making his way back to his parent’s in North Carolina. His lover in San Francisco had died and Steve drove his car to his parent’s somewhere in the Midwest and was now trying to get home. He sounded more like himself than he had in years and he would laugh in that deep baritone voice of his as we caught up on the past couple of years. I was hoping he’d come to visit me and stay for a while. He spoke more softly as he told me, “Sammy, I’m going home because I found out I’m HIV positive and I haven’t been well.” My heart stopped, I couldn’t believe my ears he was actually the first person I knew personally who had HIV. Back then there was nothing anyone could do it was a death sentence. In my heart I’d always known it would happen. Being a gay man and an IV drug user in San Francisco in the early eighties he was bound to get it. I held back tears as I asked, “Do your parent’s know?” “Yes, I told my mother a few months ago and I just told my father last week, he cried when I told him and he told me to come home.” he said.

Over the next few years we talked on the phone frequently, and he even found a new lover at his AA meetings who was also HIV positive. They moved in together and by 1990 they both had full blown AIDS. He once told me that when he saw the movie “Beaches” it reminded him of us. “Really, which one was I?” I asked. “Who do you think bitch!” he said, as I laughed. I couldn’t afford to go see him because it cost so much more to fly on Southwest Airlines to the east coast than it does to the west coast, I don’t know why. Then in June of 1990 we had a contest at the Cadillac dealership I was working for in Dallas selling Vogue Tyres. I didn’t win the contest which was a trip to tour the Kelly Springfield tire plant in Fayetteville, North Carolina, but when the girl who won it didn’t want to go. I went to her and told her I had a friend in N.C. who was dying of cancer and it might be my last chance to see him. She went to the managers and told them to give the trip to me. I have been eternally grateful to her for doing that and we still run into her from time to time. Steve agreed to drive from Charlotte to Fayetteville to spend the night with me. He had a choice of driving his car with air conditioning and no radio, or driving his lover’s car whose air was not working, but had a cassette player. Steve, being Steve, drove the one with no air so he could listen to his music. It was so hot and humid that he got sick after driving home and was in the hospital for three weeks.

Steve’s skin had taken on that sickly gray color that you saw so often then on people with AIDS back then and his once coal black, shiny hair was getting gray and dull. We tried to visit some of our old haunts in my rented white Pontiac, but we discovered that the downtown Hay Street area that we practically lived on had been raised to the ground. Virtually nothing was left but flat deserted blocks where formerly there were hotels, movie theaters, and department stores. It was depressing and sad. I bought rum and Coke, but Steve couldn’t drink any. That night in our hotel room we lay in bed together and Steve told me he had many regrets about how he’d lived his life. He said he never should have left the Air Force and stayed in L.A. He also said he regretted the fact that we’d never had sex. I held him and cuddled with him that night for the first time in our lives as we fell asleep. The next day he followed me to the airport and stayed with me until my flight was ready to leave. One of my co workers took a photo of us sitting together. As I walked to the plane, I kept looking back. He stood there watching me, we both knew it would be the last time we’d ever see each other. One Friday I woke up with Steve on my mind. I just felt I had to call and check on him, we hadn’t spoken since the fourth of July. I was ironing shirts that night as I watched the clock for the rates to go down to call him. Something told me when the phone was answered not to ask for him. When his mother answered I said, “Hi, this is Sammy, I was just calling to check on Steve.” There was a pause, and she said, “Oh honey, Steve passed away this morning. I’ve been meaning to call, but things have been so busy around here.” I choked back the tears and told her how much I loved him and admired her for taking care of him in his final months. She said, “I wouldn’t have had it any other way.” I don’t remember what else I said, but she promised to call me regarding his funeral arrangements. When we hung up I just stood there in the kitchen ironing those God damned shirts and sobbing. He died on July 23rd, 1991 at the age of thirty eight. We’d known each other for nineteen and a half years, we never made it to that twenty year milestone we’d always talked about.
I guess he was really right; we really were “Two friends who had nothing in common except a lifelong friendship.”

THE TWILIGHT ZONE

2010-04-06T17:47:00.001-07:00

“The Twilight Zone” was my favorite TV show as a child. Although I didn’t understand the meaning of many of the episodes like the one where Burgess Meredith was the last man left on earth after a nuclear war and he emerges from the ruins of a public library and is ecstatic because he has all the time left in the world to read all the books he wants only to drop and break his hopelessly thick glasses. The one that sticks out in my mind is “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” written by Richard Matheson.

It was early October 1963 when I was eight and my brother Danny was six that we watched the episode where William Schatner sees a “Gremlin” on the wing of the airplane he and his wife are on tampering with one of the engines.
All through the first half of the show he keeps trying to get others to see the man thing on the wing, but it always flies out of sight whenever anyone else look, until finally the stewardess gives him one of her sedatives to him to make him sleep in one of those cone shaped paper cups that folded out from being flat that airlines used in those days. It was the early sixties, so no doubt the sedative was Nembutal, Seconal, or something just as potent to make his crazy ass go to sleep. Isn’t that what killed Marylyn? A moment later, when no one is looking, he spits the pill into his hand and then throws back the curtain to reveal the hideous face of the “Gremlin” staring back at him. My brother and I jumped, screamed, and bumped our heads together, we almost peed ourselves. Schatner steals a gun from a sleeping security guard, throws open the emergency exit door by his seat and shoots the “Gremlin”, thereby saving everyone on the plane. As they remove his handsome young ass from the plane on a stretcher in a straight jacket to a waiting ambulance Rod Serling reveals that the next day they find evidence that one of the engines had actually been tampered with and maybe he wasn’t crazy after all. Then the camera pans back to reveal an engine cover that has been pulled back with blackened surroundings. That night my brother and I slept with the overhead light on and the bedroom curtains drawn shut.

To be fair my mother always told us we shouldn’t watch such things, but we always nagged her until she said, “OK, but don’t come crying to me when you can’t go to sleep tonight.” From the ages of six to twelve I don’t think I slept three hours a night.
My own “Twilight Zone” experience was when I was ten years old. We’d just moved from Odessa, Texas to Fayetteville, North Carolina and after living in a tiny rented trailer. We were happy to get to move into our beautiful, brand new, mobile home at the “Spring Lake Mobile Home Park”.
It was July 1965 and they were just finishing the streets at the trailer park many of them were still just beige North Carolina clay. One afternoon while my mother was making dinner she said, “Sammy, we’re out of tea and I need you boys to run up to the gas station and buy some Cokes for supper. Go get me my purse.” I went to my parent’s bedroom, got her purse and took it to her. After digging around in the bottom of it she said, “Here’s four dimes and take four empties from the pantry for the deposits.” As she started to hand me the money Danny was jumping up and down hollering, “Give me two, give me two, it’s not fair, it’s not fair.” She handed me two dimes, then reluctantly handed him two. “Don’t let him loose them.” She said in a stern voice looking at me. Oh great, now it would be my fault if the dumb little shit lost them. My brother couldn’t be trusted with anything. “That boy could tear up an anvil with a rubber hammer.” My grandpa used to say. The last thing she said before we left was, “You’re daddy will be home any minute, so hurry up and don’t fart around I don’t want supper to get cold.” We hurried to the gas station barefoot and after fighting over who would insert the money into the machine I finally gave in and let him insert his dimes, but I got to pull them out of the slots because if you didn’t pull them out in one long motion the machine would lock the slot and keep your money. I gave him two and while I was getting mine the little shit opened his with the opener on the front of the box. “Why did you open them stupid? We have to take them home and now you’ll spill them!” I said. “I won’t spill them!” He said, defiantly. We headed for home I carried two and he carried two, things had to be fair, so we wouldn’t fight. It had just rained for three solid days and the unfinished streets were muddy with huge pools of water. On the way home he said, “I’ve got mud on my feet and mama will be mad if I track it in the new house, so I’m gonna rinse off my feet in that puddle.” He headed toward a huge milky beige puddle of water. My patience with him was already thin, so I said, “Alright, but you’d better hurry up mother told us to be home before daddy gets home.” Our father often came home drunk so we couldn’t tell what mood he was going to be in. Just being late for supper could be reason enough for all hell to break loose and my brother seemed oblivious to all of it. I’d walked about fifteen feet when I turned around to yell “Hurry up!” He wasn’t there, he was gone. I stood there in total silence searching the area for any sign of him. I couldn’t see anyone and I had a good view of at least a hundred yards in any direction. I thought, “This is just like The Twilight Zone.” He disappeared, where did he go, what happened to him, how am I going to explain this to mother? Secretly I was delighted that he’d vanished into thin air, he was such a pain in the ass. But I knew I’d be held responsible for his disappearance. “Why did you let him walk through the puddle?” I could hear my mother scolding me. About that time two arms popped up out of the puddle a coke in each hand, then a head, then a torso. It reminded me of the movie “The Creature from the Black Lagoon” when the creature walks out of the water. He dropped the cokes as he pulled himself out and he was covered in muddy water. It was such a shock I’d never seen anything like this in my life. I couldn’t do anything but throw my head back and laugh. As we walked the rest of the way home with him crying and me laughing. My mother heard us and thought “Those Goddamn kids are fighting again!”
When we reached the front door I explained what had happened and she told him, “You’re not coming into my new house like that, you take all your clothes off right there on the porch.” His crying changed to a howl. Mother felt sorry for him and laid out towels inside the front door for him to undress on. He stripped naked and she brought extra towels and dry clothes for him. “Now just think of the extra laundry I’ll have to do.” She scolded.
We shared the two tall Cokes among the four of us for dinner, thank God they weren’t the small five cent ones.
We went back the next day to see if we could see where he disappeared, a manhole, a pit? But there was no evidence of any place that could have made him drop out of sight.
Only I knew he’d disappeared and come back from, “The Twilight Zone.”

CHRISTMAS WISHES

2010-04-03T18:55:00.001-07:00

December 16th, 2006

Dear Family and Friends,

Its seventy seven degrees in my condo as I write this and “It’s A Wonderful Life” is on the television somewhere in the back ground. I don’t know what is wrong with the air conditioning, but needless to say it doesn’t feel much like Christmas.

I’ve struggled with writing this Christmas letter for a while now. I finally figured if you can tell people about all the good things that have happened in the past year, you must be honest enough to tell the bad things too.
August, 18th, I lost the best job I’ve ever had after seven years.

I’ve since found a new job selling Porsche’s in Dallas, but it takes me an hour and a half to get to work each morning and almost an hour to get home. So now instead of the usual ten to eleven hours a day I have an extra two and a half hour commute added. I have to start from scratch and I’m not making anywhere near the money I was before. I’m going to have to refinance my condo just to pay off my credit cards, but you all know me. Last week I figured out a way to get out of the bland metallic beige Volkswagen Jetta I bought the day I was fired and I leased a red Mercedes Benz C230 Sport for almost the same payment. Yes, they can knock me down and try to destroy me, but they’re not going to lick me. Just like Scarlett O’Hara in “Gone with the Wind” as God as my witness I’ll make it through this. If I have to drive to the poor house it will be in a bright red Mercedes.

Just this week I’ve received two Christmas cards I never expected. One from a family I’ve known since 1966, when we first moved to Germany. It was fat with materiel, so I was expecting new family photos only to find the funeral program of their beautiful daughter, who died of Cancer March 1st, just sixteen days shy of her forty fifth birthday. Needless to say I was devastated, she was a little girl I baby sat when I was twelve and she was six, along with her older brother and younger sister. I cried so hard I could hardly call my mother to tell her what had happened. I still cry when I think about it.

I know people at work felt it was strange that they send such a message in a Christmas card, but I didn’t feel it was strange at all. After all, we all know how hard it is to talk about such terrible things. Every time we have to tell it, or talk about it, we relive it all over again. I wasn’t offended just heart broken for the sweet little girl I remembered and the fact that I would never get to reminisce old times with her as an adult. She’d grown from an awkward, chubby little girl, into a beautiful woman, who I would have loved to have known. She had finally met and married a loving husband. Her last years were spent in Hawaii, so at least I thank God for that.

Then just tonight I received a Christmas card from the father of a best friend who died in 1991. For the past several years I’ve sent Christmas cards to him and his wife, but I hadn’t received one from them in two years. I wondered if I should send one this year, or just stop? Suddenly there was this Christmas card in my mailbox with only his signature. His wife must be gone, but he’s still here and he remembered me just as I will remember his son for the rest of my life. That somehow made me feel a little better. My friend and I still have still have that single thread binding us together through his dad.

Three nights ago I got a call from my best friend of the past thirty years. He’s never had to work a single day in his life and he’ll soon be fifty five years old. His parents have always paid for everything, yes, I’m jealous. I was having a few solitary drinks pondering my future and feeling sorry for myself when he called me to get my spaghetti recipe. I blew up and went off on him like you wouldn’t believe. I swear I haven’t made my spaghetti sauce in over ten years and he makes it at least every three months, so why does he always call me to get the recipe? Can’t he remember it? Or is he just rubbing my nose in the fact that he has the time, the money, and the occasion to make it? I spent the next thirty minutes telling him how miserable I was, how close to financial devastation I was and how worried I was. Throughout the whole conversation he kept trying to get the secret ingredients out of me. I refused to tell him I just held my ground. He has no idea of what a hard time is in no way, shape, or form, and I doubt if he ever will. The next day when I called to apologize he wasn’t concerned about my tyrant. He was only concerned about the fact that that there was something off in his spaghetti sauce and it didn’t taste the same as mine. I made him recite every ingredient back to me and then I told him he’d forgotten one of the most important things, salt. He didn’t want to believe that something as simple as salt could make a difference, but once he’d added it all was well. Then yesterday he called me to tell me about the most horrible tragedy of his life. He sounded so upset I was prepared to hear both of his parent’s had died in a head on collision with an eighteen wheeler, although that would net him well over a million dollars, or one of his three precious Schnauzer’s had died. He then began the long story of how his maid had been vacuuming the entry way and had knocked the leg out from under an “Art Deco” bar filled with several thousand of dollars worth of antique cocktail shakers and Martini glasses. They fell to the floor and shattered. He tried to put it into perspective comparing the loss of his cocktail shakers to the loss of my job along with another lady who just lost her job who’d just bought a five hundred thousand dollar home to console him self and understand our pain. What the hell? He’d spent the last three days photographing the pieces and cataloguing them for the insurance company, but they wouldn’t pay for them unless he had opened the door and created a wind gust that caused the accident. The vacuum cleaner story wouldn’t work, so now the wind did it.

I guess my message this year is something we all know, or at least I hope so. Life is very precious. If you have someone in your life you love hold them tight and tell them, or call them on the phone now. You don’t know when, or if you’ll ever get another chance. Don’t spend so much time worrying about tomorrow there may not be a tomorrow.
Live each day in “Day Tight” compartments like a great ocean liner and enjoy the moment because that’s all we really have. I miss you all and love you very much!

601

2010-04-01T12:58:00.001-07:00

601 is an enigma I don’t know where to start with it, but there will never be anything like it again. It has a street name which I won’t mention since someone else lives there now, but we never used the street name anyway. Practically every gay man in Midland knew what you were talking about if you got an invitation to 601.

When I first laid eyes on it I wasn’t that impressed. It was 1978 and my friends Todd and Rick had just purchased it, or rather Rick’s grandmother had purchased it for them. It was simply a beige house built in 1938 with brown trim and a one car garage. It extended almost to the back of the lot since additions had been made to it over the years. I’m sure it started as a two bedroom one bath, but a master suite had been added to the back of the original house. It had a small kitchen with white tile countertops and the front bathroom was tiled in pink. It has central air and heat, but the back bedroom had a window unit in it.
It really wasn’t much to look at. The day they drove me over there it was in winter, so the grass was dead and there were still clothesline poles in the backyard. I pretended to be pleased for them as they told me of their plans for it, but I really couldn’t see much potential for it, boy was I wrong!

After a few months and several thousand dollars the place was transformed. Todd had a U shaped drive way put in the front, an eight foot privacy fence surrounded the entire front yard and even enclosed the front porch. He removed old trees and planted new ones, landscaped the yard, added an in ground hot tub, hauled in rocks, added lighting, statues, fountains, patio furniture and the place became a beautiful oasis. It was pretty during the day, but at night it was magical. The hot tub had a red light in it which seemed appropriate considering what went on in there most of the time. He even had speakers from the stereo inside the house disguised as rocks and hidden in the ceiling of the porch. They filled the house with beautiful furniture that was quite in vogue at the time. Oriental rugs on the hardwood floors, new appliances in the kitchen, oatmeal colored sofa with pillows covered in real fur, mink, opossum, fox, and beaver. There were wing back chairs, beautiful tables, lamps, a teak dining room set with a new chandelier, beautifully framed Japanese fans, Sarongs, and framed posters of the works of Marc Chagall, Monet, and Renoir. There was no television in the living room, but a huge Sony Trinitron in the bedroom with a VCR player and the entire house was wired with stereo speakers. I didn’t know it then, but the place would become legendary.

The glory years of 601 lasted from 1978 to 1983 and there will never be another time like that again. Disco music seemed to play continuously, liquor poured like water and sex was available any time you wanted it. There seemed to be a party going on all the time especially on weekends and you didn’t really have to have an invitation you could just stop by and Todd would make you a drink. The only rule was he’d make the first one then after that you had to make your own. He didn’t care how many you had, he just didn’t want to have to be getting up and down making drinks for people. Usually whoever was up would offer to make drinks for others, so you never really had to get up at all. Music played constantly on the stereo and often there was an old movie on television in the bedroom like “Rocky Horror Picture Show”, but more often than not a porno tape was playing on the VCR.

Usually there was just a small gathering of people in the living room in the winter and six could fit in the hot tub when the weather allowed. At larger parties you might walk through the house and someone would be having sex in one of the bedrooms, or there would be a pile of naked guys on the king size bed in the master bedroom. Rick was terribly jealous and would throw fits and tantrums whenever he thought Todd was about to be involved. A fight would ensue, or he’d get in his car and peel out in the driveway. Todd had silver 1976 Coupe De Ville they named “The Whale” and later traded it for a dark blue 1977 Cadillac Fleetwood limousine. Now that was a sight seeing “The Limo” parked in the front driveway of 601. You have to remember most of the years of 601 were pre AIDS and in those days you couldn’t catch anything a big shot of Penicillin couldn’t cure. I remember being in the hot tub and some guy would crawl in and be passed from lap to lap as we drank our cocktails and enjoyed him. Rick would get so jealous of Todd’s indiscretions that he took every opportunity he could to get back at him. When a group of us would be going somewhere in two cars Rick would always say, “I want to ride in Sam’s new Cadillac.”, or whatever I was driving at the moment. Then he would proceed to give me a blow job on the way there getting out and wiping his mouth as he smile at Todd. Once, when Todd went to get a bag of ice Rick wanted me to fuck him on the hall floor while telling me, “Hurry up, hurry up!” just so he could feel he’d gotten revenge for one of Todd’s escapades. Rick and I had dated before he met Todd and Todd didn’t care who did who he just wanted Rick to stop his jealousy and join in on the fun.

I remember one night in particular when there were just four of us at the house in the hot tub, Todd, Rick, Ken, and I. When Rick realized where things were heading he excused himself and went in the house. After quite some passed Todd got out to see what he was doing. Ken and I kept talking and touching one another and soon thirty minutes had gone by and no one came out of the house. I wanted to get up and see what was taking so long, but Ken kept telling me not to worry. Then the front door opened and there stood Todd fully dressed as he looked back into the living room and screamed “ASSHOLE!” then slammed the door. I swear he slammed the door so hard I don’t know how we ever got it open again. Ken and I looked at each other and I said, “We’d better go in and see what’s going on.” He said, “No, I’ll go, you stay here.” “I’m not letting you go in there alone.” I said, as we both got out and put on robes. When we walked into the house we could tell all hell was breaking loose in the kitchen. We rushed in and Todd was on top of Rick on the floor choking him. Rick was fighting back until he saw us then he pretended to faint. After dating Rick I knew what kind of anger he could arouse in a person and I honestly didn’t know whether to get Todd off him, or join in choking him. Ken ran over and got Todd off as I helped Rick to his feet. Ken and I had no idea what had happened in the thirty or forty five minutes since Todd had gotten out of the hot tub, but later Todd told us he’d found Rick dressing to leave. Todd got dressed too and Rick grabbed the keys to Todd’s car and started outside. Todd tried to stop him and ended up chasing him down the ally and tackling him. They both rolled around in the dirt and stickers. After Todd finally got the keys from him they went back inside the house, that’s when Ken and I saw Todd open the door.

The majority of the parties there were pleasant and without problems. People would show up who didn’t even know who owned the house. Once Todd walked out on the front porch, some young good looking guy asked, “Who are you?” Todd said, “I’m your host.” The kid said, “My, aren’t you the Gatsby type?” Todd took him by the hand and led him to the bedroom. Todd could talk the pants off anyone and he liked them young. He wasn’t a pedophile, but even in his mid twenty’s he liked guys who were barely legal, Rick was only eighteen when they met. I once asked him, “Just what in the hell do you say to these guys? Hello little boy, now pull down your pants?” It was like he hypnotized them, or something.

On New Years Eve 1980 Todd and I stayed at 601 while everyone else drove to the bar in Odessa to celebrate because he’d seduced a guy I’d been trying to get into bed for two years. Todd knew how I felt and asked my permission first. I said, “I don’t know how you did it, but I don’t care as long as you share.” So we took turns ringing in the New Year with him.

Often I would go over and make Jambalaya, or Spaghetti for a group of friends and we’d all have a nice dinner and an enjoyable evening. Once, Todd had an old boyfriend of his over for drinks. As usual Rick had to show his ass and excused himself to go to bed while they had a guest. Todd was sitting in the wingback and Steve was lying on the sofa talking quietly when after about an hour or so, Rick got up and tip toed to the mini blinds looking and see if they were in the hot tub. As Rick carefully pulled the blinds apart Todd said, “Yesssss?” from the behind him. It scared Rick so badly, he played those fucking mini blinds like a harp and turned and went back to bed without saying a word.

Once at a rather large party there were people all over the house in the yard and in the hot tub. Todd and I were inside and suddenly he noticed the music had changed from disco to something scratchy and horrible. “Go see what the hell’s in the stereo.” He said. I walked to the front of the house where the stereo was located. It could play LPs, eight tracks, or cassettes, but by that time Todd was using cassettes almost exclusively. There was a homemade eight track stuck in the player with “Andrew Sisters” written on it, so I removed it and started the cassette again. I opened the door to go outside and there stood Rick with his best friend Jim. They were in the middle of toasting each other with glasses of pink champagne. It suddenly dawned on me who’d changed the music and I said, “Oh I’m sorry, did you put that in there?” Without saying a word Jim threw his glass of pink champagne on me. I was wearing cowboy boots, jeans, and a white pearl snap western shirt with a western belt and buckle. Rick immediately rushed me to the bathroom and began trying to clean me up. When I caught sight of myself in the mirror I went berserk. I ripped my shirt completely off, since it now stank of cheap champagne and was stained pink. I charged for the front door and looked around, “Where’s James?” I yelled, as I stood there shirtless. Someone pointed to the garden area behind the hot tub and said, “Over there.” I ran for him and started beating the shit out of him. I had him flat on the ground and I was trying to shove his head in the hot tub. I was on top of him and he was face down. I was determined to drown his sorry ass, but every time I had his face within an inch of that water somehow he would pull his head up. Someone went and got Todd he came out and broke us up. Todd didn’t have a clue as to what had happened, but all of us were quite drunk by that time and I wanted Todd to make Jim leave. He wouldn’t do it, so I went in the house got my shirt and headed to my Cadillac. Todd was standing by the car trying to keep me from leaving while I screamed at him for not being loyal to me. Rick wandered outside and saw Jim sitting in his car, disheveled, and drunkenly asked, “Did you know Sam got in a fight with somebody?” Jim looked up at him in disbelief and said, “Hell yeah, it was me!”

There were quiet times there too. I can remember Todd calling me after Rick had moved out and saying, “Hey I’m doing some planting around the drive way. Why don’t you come over and keep me company?” I was restoring a green 1957 Cadillac Seville at the time so I drove it over there, and polished the chrome with chrome polish and steel wool while he planted “Monkey Grass” and “Dollar Plants”. I drank rum and Coke and he drank rum and Dr. Pepper while we talked about anything and everything that came to mind. I guess it’s the wild things that just stick in my mind.

In all the years I’ve known Todd I probably haven’t seen him visibly drunk more than four, or five times. Most people slur their words, or stagger, but the only way I can tell Todd is drunk is that he’ll start making obnoxious noises, bird calls, and start slapping his hands on furniture, shaking his foot, or twirling his ring. Not that he hasn’t been legally drunk hundreds of times he just doesn’t show it and it usually catches me by surprise.
One evening in 1982 we planned a dinner party and I was going to make Jambalaya. He’d invited eight people and we usually split the grocery bill three ways with another friend while I did all the shopping and cooking. By this time Rick had moved out and Todd’s elderly grandmother had bought the house next door, so he could help keep an eye on her. I was in the kitchen chopping and cooking while I sipped a rum and Coke. One of the guests was a friend named Andy, he was in the kitchen keeping me company as I prepared our meal. Everyone else was in the bedroom with their drinks watching a movie. It was hot as hell in the kitchen, so I opened the door so some air could come in through the old screen door. I had just enough to drink that I was getting a headache and I asked Andy to go turn the stereo down since no one was in the living room anyway. Apparently Todd walked in just as Andy was turning it down and confronted him. They both hated each other and only tolerated one another because of me. Todd went over and started shouting at Andy, “This is my house and I’ll decide when the music is too loud.” as he turned the volume back up. I started wiping my hands on a towel and went into the living room and stood between them. I told Todd, “He’s turning the music down because I asked him to. I don’t care if it is your house, I’m in the hot kitchen and no one’s in here listening to it anyway.” We got in a slight shoving match and I realized he was drunk, but I pushed him aside and turned down the volume then returned to the kitchen. He followed me and continued ranting about it being his house, etc. He started shoving me backward and every time he’d repeat himself as if trying to make his point. The kitchen was small, so it only took three shoves until my back was against the counter. I’d been trying to reason with him up until that point, but when he shoved me the forth time I quietly reached up took off my glasses and sat them on the counter. Later he would say that was when he knew he was in trouble. I tore into him and began beating the shit out of him. I knew from years of experience with my heart problems that I had to win a fight quickly before I went into tachycardia. He kept body slamming me into the wall, but I finally got his arms pinned behind him and had him on his knees in the floor. I begged him to stop, but he kept screaming at me to get out of his house. In the meantime, all the other queens made a mass exodus out the front door and screeched away. Andy was the only one who stayed. I told him if he’d calm down I’d leave and this would be the end of it. I made him promise, but as I helped him stand up he body slammed me into the wall while yelling, “Get out of my house!” I’d had it by then, grabbing him by the collar and the back of his pants, I said, “Not until you go first!” and threw him through the latched screen door. He landed on the back porch in a pile of dusty screen and broken wood, but he got up and started at me again. My heart was already in tachycardia and I was loosing my breath, so I knew I wouldn’t last long. I beat him to the floor and since I didn’t want to risk him getting up again I kicked him repeatedly until I split the side out of one of my expensive anaconda loafers. I turned off all the burners on the gas stove and Andy and I walked out to our cars just as it began to rain. I was living with Kate again by that time and he and I drove over there and went to my room. As I was in the floor doing everything I could think of to stop my tachycardia, Andy was in the bathroom drying his hair with my blow-dryer. I was upset and crying because Todd wasn’t moving when we left. I was afraid I’d killed him. I asked him, “If I drive you back over there will you go in and see if he’s OK?” “No!” he said. “Why not?” I asked. “Because if I go over there and find out he’s not dead I’m going to finish the job you started!” He screamed. “Why did you stay then?” I asked. He said, “To see if you were going to need any help and obviously you didn’t. I don’t give a shit, I hope you did kill him. I’ll testify it was in self defense.” After more begging and pleading he drove me over to a friend’s house who agreed to go back with us and check on Todd. Andy parked several feet away in case Todd decided to attack me again. The friend came back and said, “Todd is OK.” and we all went home.

The next day Todd called me and asked me if I wanted to come over for dinner. He’d put all the food in the refrigerator and saved it including the garlic bread I hadn’t baked yet. I went over and we had dinner and never mentioned the fight. Later we went to a movie and ran into a couple of our dinner guest. We could tell by the looks on their faces that they were shocked that we were there as if nothing had happened. Todd and I are like brothers and ten years later when he and I were having a huge screaming argument his lover at the time tried to step in and take Todd’s side. Todd stopped in mid sentence, turned to him and said, “Shut up, and keep out of it. Tomorrow we’ll be over it, and you’ll still be pissed, so just go back to bed.” Somehow we’ve just always accepted the fact that we will always be friends and no matter what happens we’ll get over it.

The next year Rick and his mother finally made Todd move out. Todd went to her house and tried to get his dog back, there was an ugly scene and he finally let her have the dog and moved out. He kept all the furniture since he’d done so much work landscaping the house he deserved it. There were many parties and fights, to come over the years, but there will never be another 601.

HANOI JANE

2010-03-28T09:10:00.000-07:00

Believe me there weren't many pieces of good advice my father ever gave me, but one thing I remember as a teenager was, "If you expect to get any action, don't go out with a group of your buddy's, go out by yourself."
Another thing was when I was eight, or nine and we lived in that house in Merced, California. My brother and I were only two years apart, he was younger and when we weren't fighting with one another it seems we were always getting into fights with our best friends, boys and girls alike.
Other parents would come up to our door knocking, and yelling, threatening, and making total horses asses of themselves over real or imagined slights against their children. My mother would get into it with other parents once in a while, she used to love a good fight, but my father never said much of anything. I once asked him why other parents took up for their kids, but he never took up for us? He said, "Because you kids will be over it by tomorrow, playing together and will be best friends again, the parents will still be mad at each other."
Once in 1970 when I asked him to drive a group of my fifteen year old friends to a place just outside the gates of Fort. Bragg, North Carolina to protest her for protesting the Viet Nam war he refused. At the time I was only fifteen, so I had to rely on my dad to drive my friends and me over there. And par for the course as any normal fifteen year old I accused him of being lazy. It was 1970 and he had a red 1969 Mustang and my mother had a green 1969 Mercury Monterey it was huge car that could have taken all of us. When I asked him why? He said something I'll never forget. "Son I may not agree with what that woman has to say, but I fought in two wars for her right to say it." I've always admired him for that.

As time has gone by, he turned 79 last January, he has said something he never would have said when he was in the Army. That America should not have been in Viet Nam. It was a "Conflict" that we withdrew from and didn't win.
He cried when he visited the Viet Nam Memorial, for all the men who lost their lives and he believes to this day that if JFK hadn't been killed America wouldn't have been so involved in a war we couldn't win. JFK was the reason he wanted to get into the Special Forces, he did it in 1965 at the age of thirty five something that is impossible today.

I worry that Iraq is the same thing. Thank God we haven't lost fifty eight thousand young people and I pray that it never comes to that. I also see the young men and women in uniform and I have the utmost respect for them and I pray for their safe return. I only hope this war isn't as pointless as Viet Nam and that one day we will look back on this as something necessary. Iraq and Saddam Hussein didn't destroy the Twin Towers. My heart goes out to the young people and all people who've died in this war.
Please God save them a special place in Heaven. And that they all return to their loved ones safe and sound.
As Christians, or any other religions I believe forgiveness is essential to life here after and as hard as it is sometimes we must forgive to be forgiven. And believe you me that's a hard pill for me to swallow I've got a lot of forgiving to do.

So if forgiving Jane Fonda is a small step let's remember she's human like the rest of us and sometimes we need people to forgive us for the stupid, thoughtless things we do. The Bible says all we have to do is ask for forgiveness and we shall be forgiven that isn't verbatim. God doesn't speak to me directly, but let's start by trying to forgive others and as hard as it is to do. Didn't she apologize? Sometimes you do stupid things and later realize you were wrong. I hated her at the time myself she appeared two doors down from the Carolina Theater where I worked when I was seventeen and I wouldn't go over there to see her then, but now I'd love to meet her.

“I would like to say something, not just to Vietnam veterans in New England, but to men who were in Vietnam, who I hurt, or whose pain I caused to deepen because of things that I said or did," Fonda said.
"I was trying to help end the killing and the war, but there were times when I was thoughtless and careless about it and I'm . . . very sorry that I hurt them. And I want to apologize to them and their families."
Jane Fonda

A miserable piece of human garbage, deranged man, spit tobacco in a ladies face! What a pig, how disgusting!
Only in this crazy O.J Simpson, Scott Peterson, kind of world we live in today that decent people wouldn't be shocked and appalled that a man in 2005 could do something that disgusting to a woman.
Tell me? What did you people think about the man who threw a pie in Anita Bryant's face in 1977 when she openly expressed her hatred of gays? Do you think he's a hero too? She was expressing her freedom of speech, however misguided it was, just because she decided she wanted to rid the world of homosexuals? Was what she did OK? Acceptable? No, it wasn't then and it isn't now, but
gentlemen don’t treat ladies like that.

I just finished watching the last 30 minutes of the interview between Tim Russard and Jane Fonda. I must tell you that even though I've taken up for her in recent years because of things I've read in print nothing I've read has ever made me believe from the bottom of my heart that she was really sorry for what she did during the Viet Nam War.
Seeing and hearing her tonight made a true believer out of me. She didn't back down from any questions, or make excuses for her self and admitted when she'd done something entirely stupid and wrong, including posing on the anti-aircraft guns. This woman has come clean to her wrong doings and apologized for what she did point blank without any excuses or beating around the bush. She has said that what she did was wrong, but it may have brought an end of the War in Viet Nam sooner and saved lives.
There's something about hearing her explanations coming from her own mouth and not the press that actually make me truly believe what she has to say with one hundred percent sincerity. She's not a young “Barbarella” bombshell any more, but she's still very pretty and very much a mature woman. I have no doubt that she's a "Born Again Christian" no matter what my own feelings are about such things.

I can't help but remember when the press interviewed the mother of one of Jeffery Dahmer's murder victims when he was killed in prison. They told her about his acceptance of the Christian faith and asked her if she thought the man who'd murdered her son had gone to Heaven? That little old lady said, "If he repented for his sins and accepted Jesus Christ as his Savior, then yes, I believe he is in Heaven.” I remember thinking what a true Christian that woman was. More of us need to be that way when it comes to forgiving others.

HEAVEN AND HELL

2010-03-24T07:51:00.000-07:00

Just being in love is wonderful. The euphoric feeling you feel even the little things in life take on a whole new meaning as you spend every waking hour thinking of that person and how much it hurts until you can be together again. The candle light dinners, the whispers of “I love you”, kissing so hard that your lips bleed and wanting to eat them up when you’re making wonderful, blissful, love. It isn’t just sex when you’re in love. Now take all that and think really, really hard and try and remember the first time it ever happened to you.

When I was sixteen in the summer of 1971 I got an after school job working at the concession stand of the “Carolina Theater” in Fayetteville, North Carolina for seventy five cents an hour. We used to occasionally steal a box of candy because it cost two hours wages and we couldn’t afford it. Apparently when the theater was built in 1926 it included retail space for rent and when I worked there we had a diner with a soda fountain on one side and a jewelry store on the other. I met some colorful characters there, but there was this guy named Charlie whose father owned the jewelry store next door. They had to use the restroom in the theater, so he’d come in a couple of times a day. He walked as if he were walking on air, I then realized where the term “light in the loafers” came from. He was twenty three, but it wasn’t long before he began striking up conversations with me. I told my father about him and snickered that I thought he was a queer and my father said, “Maybe he’s lonely and just needs a friend.”
Charlie soon began introducing me to some of his friends and then in October they asked me to go to Wilmington with them one Saturday night. I couldn’t figure out what to tell my parent’s, but with a few tips from Charlie I concocted a story about a party at Debbie’s house where the boys were going to go to another guy’s house to spend the night. My mother was working nights then, so I only had to tell the story to my father and he didn’t seem to think anything of it. They picked me up that night in Mark’s red 1970 Oldsmobile Cutlass and Mark, Lamont, Charlie, and I rode to Wilmington. I didn’t know it until I got in the car, but they’d decided I was going to be Mark’s date for the evening that was fine by me. Mark was twenty five, tall, blond, and handsome. I had a thing for blonds in my younger days and I got to ride in the front seat with him while he drove. I got my first real look at a gay bar that night and I couldn’t believe there were actually places out there where men could dance together and kiss right out in the open, I was dazzled by all of it. It was one of the most enlightening and exciting nights of my life, a whole new world had just opened up to me.

They rented a motel room with two double beds and Mark and I decided to stay there while Charlie and Lamont went off bar hopping in Mark’s car. I hadn’t been with another man in over a year, so I was thrilled to be in bed with someone as good looking as Mark. We had at least two hours to ourselves to make love before the other guys returned to the room. The next morning I put my briefs on under the covers and got up to take a piss. Charlie let out a groan and threw the covers over his head. I didn’t understand why he did that, but Mark later told me it was because when he saw my hairy chest he was upset that he’d let Mark have me instead of keeping me for him self. We drove back to Fayetteville and I was worried about making it home in time to get ready for work. They told me they would park down the street from our trailer and wait there while I changed and then take me to work. I walked in the door and the shit hit the fan!

Unbeknownst to me my mother had found a school directory and began calling my friends to see if they knew anything about the party at Debbie’s and the sleep over afterwards, of course none of them did. She was already at work, but my father was full of questions wanting to know where I’d been and who I was with. I told him I’d gone to Wilmington with some guys and they’re waiting to take me to work.” “What kind of guys and how old are they?” he asked. I got to thinking about what he’d said about Charlie needing a friend and the fact that he really didn’t care about me anyway because I didn’t play sports, all this while I was quickly changing clothes and brushing my teeth and hair. “Just some guys, they’re seniors.” I lied. My parent’s had to know I was gay, hell I knew I was different when I was three and walked around the house with my aunt Ruby’s purse wearing a pair of her clip on earrings. He insisted on driving me to the corner where they were waiting, so he could get a look at them, grilling me with questions all the way. I finally thought what the hell and said, “Daddy you know exactly what kind of guys I’m talking about.” He didn’t say one single word as I got out of his Mustang and got in the car with Mark and the others. As soon as I arrived at work the phone calls started coming in from my mother and I finally told her she would get me in trouble, so stop calling and I would talk to her when I got home. When I’m on my deathbed if God speaks to me and says I can live nine more months, but it would have to be those nine months, I will say, “Take me now Lord, no matter what awaits me, take me now.” If I thought the shit hit the fan with my dad it was a tiny turd compared to what my mother had in store for me. I hadn’t seen such screaming and carrying on since we lived in Germany, she begged, she pleaded, “Quit your job.” I said, “I’m not quitting my job, that’s the only way I have to buy school clothes and I’m saving up for a car.” “We’ll buy you a car, we’ll pay for your clothes.” she said. I knew money was tight, or she wouldn’t be working at a convenience store. What the hell kind of car could they afford to buy me? “No, I want to do it myself.” I said. She wanted to know, “Have ever even had sex with a girl, then how do you know you won’t like it?” “Because I just know.” I said. She got down on her knees in the living room floor and started swaying back and forth with her hands in the air clasped in prayer saying, “Oh Lord, Lord, Lord, why are you doing this to me? What did I ever do to deserve this?” I almost laughed out loud, if she could just see how crazy she looked down there swaying back and forth like some TV evangelist. The book “Carrie” by Stephen King hadn’t been published yet and it would be five more years before the movie came out, but I swear to God my mother acted just like Carrie White’s mother. It was all about her and how I was just doing it to hurt her. “Yes, I went out and sucked a dick just to get back at you mother.” was what I wanted to say, but I knew in her state of mind that it would generate a full fledged scratching, clawing, slapping attack. When she finally let me go to bed the tension in the house was so thick you could cut it with a knife.

I guess she decided if begging didn’t work she would just ignore me and for the next three weeks she didn’t say a word to me. She would come down the hall to the room I shared with my brother and flip the light on and say, “Get up!” Whenever I had a date with Mark she just couldn’t stand it, she finally told me that I couldn’t wait in her house, or in front of her house for him so I had to go down the street and wait in the dark alone for him. My brother Danny was always supportive of me even when my father told me I was worse than a dog licking another dog's dick. Danny said, “I don’t understand being gay, but I’m not going to be mean to you like mother and daddy.” as he sat with me in the dark to wait for my Mark to pick me up.
My evenings with Mark were wonderful, he listened to all my problems with my parents and said, “If things get too bad at home I’ll just take you up to Washington, D.C. and marry you, I’ll take care of you.” I was so ignorant I believed him, but hey when your sixteen and getting a blow job in a car parked out in the woods while Rod Stewart’s singing “Maggie May” on the radio you’ll believe anything. I was so in love with him I’d have done anything he asked me to. Some people act like they just can’t understand teen pregnancies, well I say those people have forgotten what it’s like to be a teenager in love.

My mother denies it to this very day, but I know she somehow got Mark’s number and called him. I’m sure she threatened him with statuary rape, or something, because after about a month Mark would make a date with me and then stand me up. He didn’t do it just once, he did it several times even when I pleaded with him to be sure and come get me. While I’d get dressed and sit and wait for him, mother would berate me the whole time, “See, this is the way men are, men do these kinds of things, a girl would love you and worship you not make a date with you and not show up.” It was bad enough Mark dropping me like a hot potato, but I didn’t need to hear all her shit pilled on top of my misery. When I could borrow a car I’d go and search for him and once found him playing pool at a bar. He had some sort of sorry excuse for being late, but still assured me he intended to come get me.

I did what every young gay guy did on TV and the movies in those days, I took an overdose of aspirin and all it did was make my ears ring. When that didn’t work I walked down to the drugstore, bought a bottle of Sominex, and took the whole thing. When I started acting goofy at work they called my mother who took me to the emergency room at Womack Medical Center. I wouldn’t tell anyone what I’d done and I don’t know how he missed my dilated pupils, but the doctor decided it was an allergic reaction to the penicillin I was taking for an impacted wisdom tooth and gave me a shot as an antidote. On the ride home I saw a spaceship land in the pine trees on the side of the road and a cartoon mouse sitting on the dash board talking to me.

The New Year came and went and I still couldn’t get used to the fact that Mark didn’t love me. I listened to the Diana Ross album “Surrender” over and over, and the song s like "I Can't Give Back the Love I Feel For You" and "Simple Thing Like Cry" just made me more depressed. To make matters worse Beverly Bremers released a song titled, “Don’t Say You Don’t Remember” and that one sent me into crying jags every time I heard it. Eight years ago I ordered a CD of it thinking I’d gotten over it years ago and after listening to it three times I put it away because of all the pain it brought back thirty years later. I’m glad to say I can now listen to it and sing along. I can now laugh about it, but the pain is still there way, way, in the back of my heart.
I went through phases where I bleached my hair blond, started drinking, wore a little makeup and started acting nellie, but when I realized that wasn’t what I was looking for in a date I soon changed my look and my ways.

Eventually my parents came to terms with my sexuality after sending me to a psychiatrist who simply told them I was gay and they were just going to have to accept it. By the next summer I could look myself in the mirror and see the guy I used to know and that was a relief. Although once on my way to work Mark and Lamont pulled up next to me at a stop light, I nodded hello, but when the light changed I was shaking so badly I almost couldn’t get the clutch in to get the car in gear. Hell yes love hurts, how can something so wonderful turn out to be so awful?

IF I DOOD IT I GET A WHIPPIN

2010-03-19T09:56:00.001-07:00

I think that was an old line from the Fannie Brice "Baby Snooks" radio show from the 1940's. Did you ever do anything as a child, or teen that you knew was going to get you in trouble, but you did it anyway?
I know I did it dozens of times, but the first time that sticks in my mind was when I was around five and I was sitting in the front seat of the car in between my parents. I have no idea where my brother was because we always sat in the back with me on the right and him on the left. He might have been asleep in the back and my parents had allowed me to sit in the front seat with them, I don’t remember. We were sailing through the Hill Country of Texas in our two tone, pale green and white, 1957 Mercury Monterey when I asked, “Daddy, what would happen if I turned the key off while we were driving?” In a very serious voice he said, as if trying to teach me a life lesson, “That would be a very bad thing to do son because the engine would shut off, then we’d loose the power steering and the power brakes it might cause us to have a wreck.” I grew silent and sat there watching that key chain swing back and forth, back and forth, back and forth in the dash. I was transfixed, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, the key chain with the “God Of Mercury’s Head”, went back and forth, back in forth, until I just couldn't help myself. I leaned forward and turned the ignition off, we must've been doing at least seventy.
My father was only thirty one, still young and quick, he shifted the car into neutral, restarted it, and shifted it back into drive, then he slapped me hard on my bare leg saying, “Sammy don’t ever to do that again! You could’ve caused us to have a wreck!” I was happy the slap didn’t hurt that much and it was worth it just to see what would happen. I knew I'd get in trouble, but I just had to see for myself and we didn’t wreck like people did in the movies. No tires squealing, brakes burning, no crash, hubcaps flying off, doors flying open. So I knew my father had been wrong. Why did your parent’s always warn you about things that never happened?
About that same year when I was five and Danny was three, my father planted these huge “Elephant Ear’s” on the side of the driveway going to our garage. Once they’d reached a pretty good size and height our best friends from next door, Ava and Alonzo Gonzales, convinced us they would make great umbrellas. I said, “But it’s not raining.” and they said, “We can use them for parasols like people in the movies while they were walking in the park to keep the sun off them.” Well, that sounded good enough to us, so we broke them off at ground level and walked around in the sun twirling them around like the people did in the old fashioned movies probably singing the “Easter Parade” song from a late night TV movie, until there were none left, just an empty flower bed. We’d pretty much forgotten about it by the time my father arrived home from work. He stepped out of the car and immediately looked at the flower bed along the drive way. “Boy’s, what happened to those Elephant Ears I planted?” We stood there silent wondering what to tell him. I think I muttered something about, “We didn’t know, or maybe space men had taken them during the day while we weren’t looking.” Hell, it happened in the movies didn’t it? Or something equally as unconvincing. He said, “If you tell me the truth you won’t be in nearly as much trouble, if you lie about it you’re going to be in a lot of trouble.” I stood there wondering what he meant. Was the truth going to get us a whipping and a lie a really big whipping? Did one mean a belt and the other a paddle? Did one mean pants on, or pants down?” Then after thinking about it I realized we’d never gotten a spanking with a paddle, or with our pants down like I’d heard other kids had received, so I said weakly, “We used them for umbrellas.” He than said, “Thank you for telling me the truth. You’re not going to get spanking’s this time because you didn’t lie, but don’t ever do that again. Do you understand?” “Yes, daddy we understand.” Wow, was it that easy being a kid, screwing up and then admitting it? No, but it’s seemed a good life lesson for my entire life. My father once reminded me when I was around eighteen that, “Not everyone tells everything that happens to them in their lives the way we do some people keep secrets.” I remember thinking that was strange because couldn’t everyone read your mind and know what you were hiding anyway, so why bother?”
It was one of the last times I remember him actually being fair before his drinking over took all our lives while we lived in Germany.

DEVISTATION

2010-03-16T19:18:00.000-07:00

August 18th, 2006

Friday I was fired at the Porsche dealership. Needless to say it came as a complete and total shock to me. Sales have been down for several months and as of Friday we had yet to sell a single new car for the month, just two pre owned. At the beginning of the month the owner wanted my boss to fire the other salesman, but the Volkswagen manager came to his rescue and offered him a position at Volkswagen although I'm sure he doesn't intend to stay.
The pressure has been terrible, but we just haven't had quality people coming in the door and they do very little advertising. Bill, my boss, has been about to loose his mind and has been very afraid of loosing his job for several months. When the deal with the other salesman went down Bill said the owner had told him he'd considered having Bill go on the sales floor as a selling sales manager. Bill told me that they'd decided that wouldn't work because he wanted him to concentrate on parts and service because they've tanked as well. He told the other salesman a slightly different version saying he told the owner it wouldn't work, because he and I knew all the same customers. The owner has even been talking about adding another line along with Porsche. He's considering Alfa Romero, although I don't know why. They don’t even import cars to the United States.

Thursday morning they had a managers meeting, and Bill said the owner had said he was going to have to go down and sit in Bill's office for a week to see if he couldn't sell some cars and give Bill the week off. After the meeting the owner had with the Volkswagen manager he stayed in his office for over an hour and then he called Bill up to his office for about the same amount of time. When Bill came back he sat outside in his demo on his cell phone for over thirty minutes and when he finally came inside he was visibly shaken. I asked him if everything was all right and he said yes, but I could tell it wasn't.

Then around two hours later Volkswagen manager came over and went in Bill's office and shut the door and stayed in there for about forty five minutes. After that Bill came out and gave us the key to his office, which he does on his day off and said he was leaving for the day and would see us Saturday. I knew something bad was going on because Bill had told me the day before he was going to work bell to bell Thursday and work Friday which is his usual day off. He said John had told him to take the day off. The salesman who had gone over to Volkswagen had taken Thursday off, but he called me at 4:15 PM to tell me that someone in Volkswagen had text messaged him that Bill and I had both been fired. He refused to tell me who it was. Of course I panicked and began calling other people at the dealership to see if they knew where that had come from. They all assured me that that would never happen. Every one knows, although I don't think the owner does, that I've pretty much been doing all Bill's work for years. I order the cars, stock them in, keep the internet site updated daily and if you look at every single hang tag or sticker in any pre owned car on the lot it's in my hand writing. I move the battery charger from car to car on the showroom, and even the service and parts people come to me when they need help. I haven't taken a day off in seven years, or a vacation except to take three days off each year for my sales award trips. I work ten to eleven hours a day six days a week. The monthly news letter had just come out announcing my seven year anniversary at the dealership and that I was the top Porsche sales advisor for the month of July. They fired me eight days shy of my seven year anniversary. I just hope they don't cheat me out of my vacation pay. Of course they're not going to give me my trip to Germany I won as top salesman for the year, they already told me that.
I called Bill at home and he sounded very angry and said he was going to call the owner at the ranch and get to the bottom of things, and call me back. He never did and when I called him that night and Friday morning he never answered his phone, the chicken shit.

I went into work Friday two hours early, and when I tried to log on to my computer I was locked out. Soon afterwards I saw the Volkswagen sales manager and the Volkswagen service manager walking over from Volkswagen and I knew what was about to happen. The Volkswagen manager told me he was now the new Porsche sales manager and I didn't fit in with his new plans and he was letting me go. I've seen many people over the years who haven't done one tenth of the job I've done been offered a position somewhere else at the dealership, but I was simply fired. I found out yesterday that Bill has been demoted to a salesman and I assume he told the owner the only way it would work for him was if I were gone. I'm sure he wanted my customer base. The sad thing is that no one really expects Bill to stay very long, I'm sure he's been looking for another job for several months now. It took me over two hours to pack up seven years of my stuff and almost everyone there came up to tell me how sorry they were, shake my hand and wish me luck. Luckily I've kept good records and have the names, address and phone numbers of all my customers.
I'm still in a state of shock and walking around in a daze. I've got to get on the ball and get a new resume typed up.
Here’s an e-mail I sent the owner;

Dear Chas,
I wanted to take this time to tell you how much I appreciate the chance you gave me to work at your dealership. The past seven years have been absolutely the best of my thirty year career. I have never been prouder to be associated with any organization in my entire life.
Special thanks for the sales award trips you've given me. They've allowed me to see places I probably wouldn't have seen otherwise and places I've always dreamed of.
I hope I will be able to use you as a reference in my pursuit of employment and I will always have fond memories of my time at your dealership.
Sincerely,
Sam Fowler

He promised to write me a letter of recommendation, but I never got it and it was only a few days before I got a letter from their attorney accusing me of theft of their property and threatening to file charges against me if I didn’t return my card files. I had to hire an attorney and it cost me over nineteen hundred dollars to have him call them off because I’d never signed anything stating that I couldn’t contact them. Apparently a few years after I was hired they had new employees sign a non compete agreement, but I never signed one. I got my vacation pay, but most of it went to the attorney and of course they still refused my trip I’d won to Germany. There’s gratitude for you! I can’t wait to see what kind of Karma comes back on these people.

THE PHAETON

2010-03-15T10:46:00.001-07:00

July 10th, 2005
A friend of mine once said, "You tell everything you know, just to have something to talk about." Friday I had the oil changed in my silver 2005 Volkswagen Phaeton paid a porter to wash it and filled it up with gas, so I was all set for the weekend.

I went to bed early Saturday night and got up early Sunday morning and did a few small chores around the condo. Then I went to the Braum's on White Settlement Road for breakfast and decided to run down to Lowe's to get a plant, potting soil, and a couple other items. I went home and tidied up all the plants on my front and back balcony's then decided I needed another plant just like the one I bought to hang on the light post in front. I went back to Braum's, got an iced tea to go, and went back to Lowe's then started for home, pretty boring huh?
I was driving down White Settlement Road and on my right is a park that runs along the Trinity River. There is a small paved parking lot for people to park, a paved bike trail, and a walking trail. Usually there are lots of people out there, but it was about 3:00PM and one hundred and three degrees and all I saw was this kid of about thirteen riding with his back to me on the grass along the side of the road. I remember thinking "Why isn't that idiot kid on the trail?" About that time he turned without looking and darted right in front of me! I really didn’t have time to hit the brakes I just jerked the car to the right and went in between two small trees which I was glad to have missed then I hit the brakes and the car wouldn’t stop it just slid right down the bank and into the river. The windshield broke from the force of the water and started to cave in. It was covered with water at first and I couldn’t see, but then it cleared and the car began to float and started turning around in the water. I tried the door, but I couldn’t open it and what little I did just caused more water come inside the car.
I opened the moonroof and climbed out through it, the car was still moving and I thought “Could you float a little closer to the bank?” But no, it floated right to the middle of the river, turned completely around and sank to the door handles. I was sitting there wondering what to do when I realized I had “On Star” I didn’t believe in cell phones then, I do now though. I wondered if it would even work, but I put one foot in the driver’s seat and one in the passenger’s seat, squatted down and pushed the button. I could still hear the CD playing and the air conditioner was still blowing. The lady came on and I asked her to call 911 and told her I’d run off the road and that my car was sinking in the river. She told me she would call the emergency crew and wanted to know if she could keep me on the line. I told her, “No, my car is filling with water and I’ve got to get out!” I got back up on the roof and just sat there. The car started doing all kinds of weird stuff as it filled with water. Bells and chimes started going off, the left rear window rolled down, the driver’s seat tilted up and moved forward and I could hear sizzling, popping and cracking, noises coming from the speakers. I was afraid the moonroof would close on my legs so I pulled them out and sat crossed legged on the roof. It was real quiet and I heard another strange noise and realized it was the horn honking under water.

Finally I heard sirens and some firemen with the water rescue team ran down and asked me if I was OK and if anyone was with me? I told them I was OK and I was the only one in the car. All I had were a couple of tiny cuts on my legs from shards of glass from the windshield.
They threw me a life vest and I put it on and then slid down the side of the car and into the murky, nasty smelling water. I felt like a dummy when I realized it was just above my waist, but I did need their help getting out of the water and on to the bank. Once I walked up the bank I couldn’t believe it, five police cars showed up, three fire trucks, a truck with a boat behind it and an underwater rescue unit truck. One of the underwater rescue divers was hot. He was a tiny little guy with a fantastic hard body and he looked great in his wet suit. Eventually two television news crews showed up, set up cameras and started rolling film. The police told me I didn’t have to speak to them if I didn’t want to and that they didn’t like them anyway.

When one of the guys came up to me and asked what happened? I told him the guy in the car told me that a kid on a bike ran out in front of him and when he swerved to miss him and ran into the water, he said “Oh, it wasn’t you?” I said, “No, I just helped.” It was obvious I was wet. He asked what happened to him and I said, “They took him away in an ambulance.” Then they took their stuff down and left. The fireman standing next to me smiled and said, “Good job!”

It took then almost two and a half hours and two tow trucks to get the car out of the water. It almost turned over in the water and the weight of it almost pulled one of the wreckers down into the water with it. It took two tow trucks to get it out. Finally the wrecker driver gave me a ride to the dealership, so I could get another car to get to work the next morning and he took my car to the body shop.

I’m just sick about it. The Phaeton was the most fantastic car I’ve ever owned and I loved it!
That’s how I spent my Sunday.

VIBRATING TESTICLES

2010-03-14T08:33:00.001-07:00

I just wondered if anyone else has this problem. Even though I'm Gay I occasionally find myself in a sexual relationship with a female, usually in a three way with the husband. I was hot and heavy in a sexual relationship with a couple in her thirties back in 2005. She said she was on the pill, but I wasn’t so sure myself. They made quite a fuss over the expensive new cars I drove and my condo. I can't stand condoms and she didn't like them either, so I decided to get a vasectomy the day before Thanksgiving in 2005. I was making a lot of money and I didn't want to be stuck with child support payments. A coworker who didn’t make half the money I did was paying something like six hundred and fifty dollars to his ex wife, so I didn’t want to imagine what I’d have to pay.

I never told them about it because I suspected she wanted to get pregnant. I was one of the lucky ones who didn't need ice packs, or have any pain or swelling and I went back to work the day after Thanksgiving, I just made sure I wore tight underwear. The doctor who performed the procedure used stainless steel clips to tie off the tubes, veins, whatever, so they wouldn't accidentally grow back together and I can't remember what he said. The doctor only made one tiny incision.

Well a few months after that I would feel a vibrating in my crotch. I always keep my cell phone on vibrate when I'm at work because I think it's rude to answer your phone when you have a customer, so I would always reach in my pocket to see if I'd missed a call and there weren't any calls.
It happened quite often and I began to realize it was happening even when my cell phone was on my desk, in my briefcase, or on the charger. It's still going on and it happened two days ago while I was on my computer sitting in my sleeping shorts while my cell phone was on my night stand. What is it? It is definitely a vibrating, humming feel that only last a few seconds and then goes away. I guess at my age I should be glad to have anything going on in my shorts, but this really bugs me. Sometimes I think it's a plane going overhead, or a truck going by, but I've been standing alone in my office when it happens. What else could cause a buzzing feeling in your groin? It's like someone put aluminum foil on my nuts and started humming "Dixie"!

I've often thought of an old story about Lucille Ball breaking up a Japanese spy ring in World War Two because one day when she was driving home from the studio she got a vibration in her teeth fillings. Apparently Lucy had very bad teeth from what I've read. She put her car in reverse and backed up to where the signal was the strongest it was Morse code and when she reported it to the police they discovered a Japanese spy ring right there in L.A.
It took a while before I noticed it and it’s quite random and unexpected. Usually when it happens I start looking at electrical equipment around me to see if something is going haywire. Seriously maybe if I moved to California it would be an early alert for earthquakes or something. It doesn't feel bad, or good, it's just always a shock when it happens. I've never noticed it at night and I'm sure they don't noticeably move, but it always seems to happen when I'm around computers, in the car, or near electrical stuff.
I’ve been told I should call my doctor and tell him. It was embarrassing enough having to take a sperm sample to the ladies in the office to be sure I was sterile. I don't think I could ever explain to a receptionist or a nurse unless we were naked together and then I know they’d laugh in my face. I don't feel any pain, or discomfort and he warned me that I might be able to feel the clips, but after much exploration I think I might have felt one at one time I'm not sure I was concentrating on something else. Now if there were a chance of a lawsuit with a large cash settlement I'd show my balls to a judge or jury and never give it a second thought.

Hey my primary physician is gay maybe I'll ask him. I've been going to him for twenty one years and he was freaked out when he found out I had a vasectomy. The dumb ass thought I had it done to prevent STDs which I have never had and made his nurse call me to ask me why I had it done. I just told her there was a female involved and he didn't know everything about me.

Someone suggested it might be tight jeans, I stopped wearing tight jeans about thirteen years ago. I've reached the age where I want everything to fit without hurting me. Loose pants, underwear, shirts, jackets, etc. I even try and have my shoes resoled because I don't like breaking in new ones. I just want to be comfortable these days. I guess I’ll just have to live with it unless I start getting terrorist messages through my nuts. Try explaining that to the FBI.

SOMEWHERE IN TIME

2010-03-12T06:08:00.000-08:00

October 11th, 2004
Christopher Reeve has died. Very sad news, my heart is broken, he was a hero to me. Every time I feel like I'm just working my behind off for nothing, or that life is just so much bullshit I try to think of Chris and how he fought so hard just to walk again.

I'm going to the "Somewhere in Time" weekend at the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island October from October, 29th through the 31st and I was actually hoping to meet him. Some members of the cast show up each year to this event. He has attended and so has Jane Seymour. I was really looking forward to telling him what an inspiration he is. Now when they show the movie, "Somewhere in Time" the ending will be even more bittersweet. We’re leaving next Friday morning and have a six hour layover at the Detroit airport. We will be lucky to catch the last ferry of the day to the island. I'm sure it will be very touching being so soon after his death. They show the movie on Thursday and Friday nights. It's the first time most people ever get to see it on the big screen since the movie didn't get promoted because of an actors strike and bombed at the box office back when it was released in 1980. Chris Reeve himself said, "It bombed so badly it left a crater on 42nd St."

I've got to go home tonight and get out my tux and white dinner jacket and see if they still fit, then find all the darned stuff that goes with them. Do you wear the same things with the white dinner jacket as you do with the tux? I've never worn it before. They'll still be talking about me next year as the idiot that bawled like a baby at the end of the movie.
The Grand Hotel
When we got there on Friday only some of the guest were in period costume and only a few on Saturday during the day. I thought it looked kind of silly at first, but on Saturday night, oh my God! At least ninety five percent of the people were in 1912 period outfits. Men were wearing white tie and tails, and top hats, some were in military uniforms from the era. Women were in grand dresses and huge hats. It was like an out of body experience actually being back in 1912. The next morning almost everyone was back in casual clothes and it was a bit of a let down. Some of the people actually had to ship their three hundred dollar hats back ahead of them. I wish I'd gotten photos of them, but our cameras were back in the room and they had a costume promenade in the lobby and it went right down the hall where our room was on the first floor. I couldn't get back to the room without going all the way down the front porch, the longest in the world according to the “Guinness Book of World Records” and it was too cold and windy. I didn't break down at the end of the movie on Friday night like I was afraid I would. I took Ron with me and he got quite drunk. I was so mad at him trying to keep him quiet, upright, and awake, that I didn't get too upset at the end. They had a memorial for Chris on Saturday afternoon at 4:00PM, but we took a carriage tour of the island instead, I couldn't have taken the memorial service.

We met a great lady at the hotel she flew in from Detroit with us. I couldn't stop looking at her. She had that Jackie Kennedy, Gloria Vanderbilt, Brook Astor look about her. Her name was Kay and she's Carleton Varney's "Carpet Lady". He’s the world renounced decorator who completely re decorated the Grand Hotel. She was there to measure some of the rooms Carleton was going to redo this season for the hotel. She had dinner with us on Friday and Saturday nights and went on the carriage tour with us as well. She was from Newark, New Jersey. Very classy, very elegant, and looked like east coast old money. She was a joy to be around.
I got a DVD of "Somewhere in Time" autographed by Jane Seymour. They only had twenty of them and they went to the highest bidders. I saw where someone had bid one hundred and twenty dollars, so I didn't think I had a chance because I bid forty dollars, but when I went back to the room Saturday night, there it was in a gift bag on the table and the next day it wasn't charged to my room? Kay had introduced us to the Hotel manager, so maybe she arranged it I don't know. There was talk of Jane Seymour attending next year as it is the twenty fifth anniversary of the films release.
Ron came over last night to pick up his photos, he and I both had cameras. I had them developed and he paid for half. We sat down and watched the movie so we could see scenes and places, while they were still fresh in our minds. He said it was only the second time he'd seen the movie. I had to remind him he saw it at the hotel and on the first night we met. The only thing I regret was not going on a group tour showing some key locations where scenes were filmed. Ron had a hangover and wanted to sleep in. They put up a plaque at the spot where Elise asks Richard, "Is it you?" and we looked for it, but couldn't find it. Although we found out later we were probably within twenty feet of it. I noticed forked trees that looked exactly like the movie, but a front was blowing in and it was getting windy and cold, so we went in for lunch.

I asked Ron if I won a trip from the dealership next year would he like to go again. He said no, he never goes to the same place twice, there are just too many places to see. Pretty picky for someone who just got a wonderful trip for free. I told him maybe next year he could stay sober and it would be like seeing it for the first time, he was not amused.

March 7th, 2006
This morning after checking my Lotto tickets as I do every morning realizing I'll probably have to work the rest of my life. I was making breakfast and making a salad to take for lunch. I was reminding myself as I try to do often of all the things I have to be thankful for like the fact that I'm not in a wheelchair like Christopher Reeve. I heard the news on television that Dana Reeve died of lung cancer. How unfair is that? A lady full of dignity and grace, who cared for Chris for ten years after his accident dies and now their young son is without a father and a mother. Tears are streaming down my face as I write this and it really tests my faith. I can only hope and pray that she and Chris are united again in Heaven, the way Richard and Elise were reunited in the movie “Somewhere in Time.”
God bless you Dana, may you and Chris share peace and happiness together "Somewhere in Time".

AND LOVE MOST SWEET

2010-03-10T05:32:00.001-08:00

Have you ever seen someone and thought? “Wow! I wish my life were just like that.” Well that’s how I felt when I first met Marty and Don in 1975. My friend Rusty was a stylist in their little beauty shop off Big Spring Street, in Midland. He introduced them to me one day when I stopped by to visit. They were gracious, charming, and impeccably dressed. They were in their mid thirties which seemed old to me at the time, but they had great hair and brilliant tooth paste commercial smiles. Rusty told me later that they’d been together for thirteen years and lived in a beautiful two bedroom in the exclusive “Riviera Apartments” just a couple of blocks from the salon. They owned a gorgeous gold boat tailed 1973 Buick Riviera because they went everywhere together one car was all they needed. Despite their small shop their client list included most of Midland’s elite females. That allowed them to take exotic vacations to Italy, Greece, and France. They had furs, and jewels, the latest designer clothes and the best in what cosmetic surgery and cosmetic dentistry had to offer. I told Rusty, “I can’t believe guys their age would already be having plastic surgery.” He said, “I think that it’s nice that they’re so in love that they want to stay attractive for each other.” Oh well, who was I to judge? All I knew is that I wanted to find a partner and be just like them, happy and successful. Boy did I have them pegged wrong.

It was December 1975 before I saw the first crack in their picture perfect façade. It was the day before I was to leave Midland and fly to San Antonio to start Air Force basic training. Rusty informed me that Marty and Don had expressed an interest in having a three way with me and wanted to know if I was interested. At first I was a little concerned because I certainly thought they were way out of my league and they might be disappointed. I also couldn’t imagine a couple that were supposedly so happy in their relationship wanting to bring someone else in for sex. Rusty said, “After thirteen years everyone gets bored, they only do it as a couple it brings more spice into their relationship.” Then he assured me they would be delighted with me and offered to drive me over there. I think he was more concerned with scoring points with his bosses than my real feelings in the matter because he simply wouldn’t take no for an answer. I was nervous as hell when I got there, but they were very friendly and made me feel welcome. After making me a rum and Coke they showed me around their apartment. I was quite impressed with all their crystal, marble, and silver. They had off white shag carpet with mirrored walls and beautiful furniture. I’d never seen anyone decorate an apartment like that before. I asked them, “Won’t management be upset when they see all the mirrors on the walls and the colors you’ve painted the place?” Don said, “Oh, we’ve lived here for over ten years, they’re thrilled that we’ve made so many improvements. We plan on buying a house soon and they know they won’t have any trouble renting the place after we’re gone.” When our little threesome moved to the bedroom I found out a few more things about them. For one, Marty was a top and Don was a bottom and that thoroughly shocked me because Marty was the more flamboyant and effeminate of the two, second, they had separate bedrooms and we were doing our partying in Don’s room, third, Marty already had stainless steel implants in his penis to make it stay erect. It wasn’t large in fact it was rather small, but it was in a perpetual state of erection. After things got going Marty excused himself and Don and I finished what we were doing. I called Rusty to come get me even though they offered to let me spend the night. I reminded them I had a flight to catch in the morning and Rusty was taking me to the airport. On the ride back to Rusty’s house I said, “I’m really disappointed, their life isn’t at all what I thought it would be like.” Rusty said, “You don’t know the half of it, I remember one night they were on their way back from the bar in Odessa and they stopped that Riviera under one of the over passes by the airport and started slugging it out right there on the side of the road.” Little did I realize I’d only seen the tip of the ice berg.

My little stint in the Air Force didn’t last long, I didn’t even finish basic training. I don't know what recruiters tell young people these days, but mine told me not to mention my heart problem unless it showed up on an EKG.
Needless to say about two weeks into basic training I was in a shot line sweating like a pig and white as a sheet and it was mid December. A doctor called me over and took my pulse he told me to go have a seat and that pretty much was the end of my military career. Luckily one of the doctors told me never to tell anyone I'd lied about my heart problem, or I would've gotten in a lot of trouble.
They wanted to put me through a battery of test and I couldn’t understand why they just couldn’t get my medical records from Brooks Army Medical Center right there in San Antonio from when I was thirteen. They said it might be several weeks before I got out. Christmas was coming up and I didn’t want to spend it there, so I told them I was gay. One physiatrist they sent me to wanted to know just why I thought I was gay and how I knew. He kept going on about it so much and repeating himself I started to say, “You’re pretty cute, why don’t you drop your pants right here and I’ll demonstrate for you?”, but I thought that might be crossing the line just a tad. I had to sit down with pencil and lined notebook paper to write about my homosexual experiences. The lady who gave it to me said, “Now don’t you worry, I’ve heard everything, you just write about what you’ve done with men.” I figured they’d get a kick out of it and snicker if I wrote down words like blow job, so I used all the correct terms such as anal sex, oral sex and told of my experiences at fifteen with George and even about the night before I left Midland with Marty and Don.

I received an Honorable discharge and was so relieved to be released on December 23rd, just in time to get home from San Antonio to Lampasas for Christmas. At the bus station I felt sorry for all the kids who had such a long way to go before they could get home, but all the Air Force would do was pay our way home on the bus. My mother pulled up to the bus station in my bayberry green 1970 Cadillac Fleetwood, honked the horn, yelled my name, popped the trunk and I threw my duffel bag in slid behind the wheel and drove off. There were a lot of shocked looks on that bus, but I was glad to be getting the hell out of there. The first thing we did was drive to a huge mall and my mother bought me a wig for Christmas. That was 1975 and having a three week old military "Buzz Cut" was not fashionable. Mother could be a hoot at times, we bought Bacardi Rum and Coke and drank it on the way home. There was this elegant looking white haired lady in a new white Lincoln Town Car that passed my Cadillac. There was a giant wrapped Christmas present in it that took up the entire back seat. My mother said, "I want to see what's in that package." I said, “Me too.” She and I had a great time laughing about how the lady would tell the police that this young guy in a wig and this lady in a Cadillac had run her off the road, thrown open her back door, ripped open the package, ran away laughing and sped off.

Later when I was selling Cadillac’s Marty and Don wanted to trade in the 1976 Oldsmobile Cutlass they’d bought for a new light blue metallic 1978 Coupe De Ville. At first was afraid to have those two show up at the dealership, but it turned out that they’d both worked in my boss’s wife’s beauty shop in the sixties and he knew all about them. Don later told me, “Bennie’s wife Mary, invented PMS. She’d go around swallowing B.C. Powder, smoking cigarettes and drinking Cokes all day, while being mean as a snake.”
One day Marty popped into my office unexpectedly and I gasped in horror, “What happened?” His face was all swollen and bruised and he had bandages wrapped around his head. My first thought was that he’d been in a terrible car wreck, and needed a new car. “Oh no I’m fine” he said. “I just got back from having a face lift in Dallas and I wanted to see if I could bring the Cadillac in for an oil change next week.” They weren’t even forty yet and they were having extensive surgeries that most people didn’t have until they’d reached their sixties. Don was the worse of the two his face was stretched so tight it was shinny and even though I don’t think they had collagen injections back then his lips pouched out like a fish and made his speech sound impaired. They ended up looking like someone in their sixties who’d had a lot of work done rather than someone who wasn’t even forty yet. They wore tons of pancake makeup, over sized gold jewelry, rings, chains, watches, bracelets, you name it. My friend Todd once pulled up beside their Cadillac at a light and thought to himself, “Those are two well dressed little old ladies.” only to realize it was Marty and Don. I saw a woman once who looked just like Don and I started to ask her if she were his sister when I realized she’d just had a lot of plastic surgery and the similarity in their appearances was just the result of bad surgery. I can’t imagine how much money they must’ve spent over the years, but it had to be a hundred thousand dollars or more. They traded their car the next year for a green 1979 Coupe De Ville. I didn’t see much of them after I moved to the Buick dealership down the street, but when I went back to Cadillac in 1984 I started seeing more of them again.

By that time they’d begun to change they’d built a big new salon in a brand new strip mall and advertised on radio and television. With the oil boom that was taking place in Midland at the time their business was thriving. You had to book an appointment three weeks in advance just to have them do your hair unless you wanted one of their new staff members working on you and the old guard of Midland wouldn’t hear of it. Don had always acted stuck up and aloof, while Marty, who was friendlier, often showed up rip roaring drunk at the dealership. They always turned down any invitation Todd and I ever extended to them, so we assumed they just thought they were above us. After a while we just stopped inviting them. Once, they did invite Todd and me over to their new house on Whitney Street, for Sunday brunch. When we arrived, Don was no where to be seen. By this time Marty was quite drunk and over the years he’d affected a way of moving and talking that was a combination of Gloria Swanson in “Sunset Boulevard”, and Bette Davis. We even invented a name for it, we called it “Swansoning”. We’d say, “Marty was Swansoning around the room drunk talking like Bette Davis”. His diction became so exaggerated that it sounded like he was finishing the last word of each sentence with a “ta”. “Where’s Don?” we asked. “He burnt his dick!” “What?” we asked. “That bastard, motherfucking, son of a bitch, burnt his dick and he’s at the hospital where I hope he dies. I hope they have to cut it off and his balls too!” We were alarmed, “Marty what happened? Do we need to go to the hospital to check on him? Is he up there alone? Did you drive him?” “No, the motherfucker drove himself there and I hope he dies.” he said. “He was pouring hot tea into a glass picture and it shattered and burnt his dick.” We insisted on calling the hospital emergency room to check on Don, but they told us he was in seeing the doctor and would be fine. We stayed for brunch, but Marty was so drunk and out of it we didn’t have much fun.

One Monday Marty called me from home and we made a deal over the phone to trade in their 1981 Cadillac Fleetwood Coupe on a new 1985 lavender metallic Fleetwood sedan. I could tell Marty was shitfaced and I kept asking him if Don knew what he was doing and was in agreement and he assured me he was. I had to go to all the trouble of getting a joint credit application over the phone, call and get the payoff to their current car and have all the papers drawn up and the new car detailed to deliver it to their house. Marty told me to drive it up to their garage door in the alley, so he could transfer some things from the old car to the new car. When I got there the door was up and I pulled up behind the older car, so I could do a proper delivery of the new car with the doors open. Marty came out first, then Don came out, I assumed to admire the new car. Instead he told me, “Sam I don’t mean to be rude but you’d better move that car unless you want it damaged, because I’m leaving, and if it’s in my way I’m going to knock it through the Goddamn fence.” I looked at Marty like, “What the hell?” and hurriedly moved it because Don was already in their car with the backup lights on. He practically burned rubber getting out of there. It turned out just as I’d suspected, Marty had gotten drunk and decided he was going to trade cars when Don wanted nothing to do with it. A few months later they did buy a new 1986 Sedan De Ville from me in the same lavender color slathered in gold. We didn’t know it yet, but there was a reason Marty had started acting so strangely, part of it was due to the fact that his alcoholism was spiraling out of control, but most of it was due to the fact that they’d discovered Don had AIDS. They both had a membership at a local gym and were sitting in the hot tub one evening with all their jewelry on when an employee walked over and dumped a large container of bleach into the water. Soon afterwards their membership was cancelled and they were told not to come back. Marty told me once that many of their trips were to New York City, or San Francisco, where Don insisted on spending a great deal of their time at the gay bath houses, he once found Don lying on his back with a pool of cum under his ass. He was quite against the open relationship thing and bitterly resented Don for it.

By 1986 the boom was over in Midland and we were in the mist of a deep recession, so virtually all of my friends had moved to Dallas and Todd and his partner had moved to Palm Springs. I was still getting by, so I stayed and tried to make due with long distance phone calls to ease my loneliness. Marty and Don began to ask me over more often and we would go out for lunch occasionally on Sundays. When Don was around Marty would pretty much behave him self. There were times he’d say inappropriate things too loud, and once he told Don, “I wish you’d just hurry up and die, you’re fucking up my life!” Don had tears in his eyes as he explained to me that Marty had always been the center of attention and he just couldn’t stand the fact that now that he was sick he was getting more attention than Marty. After Don started getting worse and his hair fell out from radiation to treat lesions on his brain, he would tell Marty and me just to go out without him and have a nice lunch. Marty’s behavior just got worse. He was always too drunk to drive and I didn’t want him having that much control over me, so we’d take my company Cadillac. The minute he’d get in my car his clothes would fly off like a “Chippendale” dancer and he’d be sitting there in nothing but a G string and sweat socks. Actually there were three socks because he would strategically place one in his G string with a rubber band around the end of it to make it appear like the head of his dick. Then he’d put his feet up on the sun visor, so people could see his bare ass with me screaming at him the whole time to put his clothes back on. This was all in broad daylight. Once we were having lunch at a very nice Chinese restaurant and he said quietly, “Do you know what I’d like to do to you?” I said, “No what?” “I WANT TO SUCK YOUR DICK!” He screamed. You could hear silverware dropping all over the restaurant. I told him, “If you ever embarrass me like that again, I’ll never go anywhere with you.” He apparently had been showing up at certain restaurants drunk and alone because you could see the look on the management’s faces when we walked in. It got so bad that we’d be seated in an empty room, or near the kitchen where it was the noisiest, so people couldn’t hear him.

The last straw for me came in early January 1988. I’d just had three open heart surgeries, back to back in late 1987 to try and correct a condition I was born with Wolf Parkinson White Syndrome and I was tired of being cooped up in my apartment. Marty called on a Sunday and since he’d missed my birthday on the fifth he wanted to take me to the Petroleum Club for dinner. I could tell he was in his usual state of inebriation and I said, “Marty the Petroleum Club is closed on Sunday. I’m not even a member and I know that.” He insisted that they were and he would call to make sure then he called back and said I was right and offered to take me to “Jorge’s” Mexican restaurant instead. He said, “Let’s wear our furs.” He had a huge red fox coat and a long beaver coat and I had a mink bomber jacket. I told him, “Marty it was fifty five degrees today and I’m not going out in Midland wearing a fur.” He argued with me a while longer and then said he was coming over to get me. There was a knock on the door and sure enough there he stood drunk as a skunk in his fur coat with full makeup and smelling like he was wearing an entire bottle of cologne, it made me gag. That’s when the battle began. I first made him take off his coat and told him we were going in my Oldsmobile demo because I was going to drive. He insisted he couldn’t be seen an anything but a Cadillac, so after much arguing and him spilling scotch and water on my carpet, I finally said,”Alright we’ll go in your car, but I’m driving and I’m keeping the keys because the very first time you act up or embarrass me I’m leaving and if you don’t want to walk you’d better be right behind me.” On the way over he kept pawing me and leering while laughing in a low voice like he knew something funny that no one else was privy to. As we pulled up in front of “Jorge’s”, I said, “Marty I mean it, if you act up just once, I’m gone.” When we got inside there was a line of people waiting to be seated. He kept on making that low laughing sound as I spotted a customer of mine with his family. The wife looked at me and smiled, I smiled back and nodded my head to her. At that very moment while our eyes were still locked on each other Marty reached down with the speed of lightening and grabbed my crotch so hard I swear I almost blacked out. Not so much from the pain in my balls but from the force. I doubled over in pain from my freshly cut sternum and when I straightened up the lady was looking at me with a look of disgust. “That’s it!” I said through clenched teeth and turned around and walked out. I opened Marty’s car, got behind the wheel and started the engine. He stood there at the driver’s door in a stupor asking me, “Are you just going to go off and leave me?” I said, “If you don’t get in this fucking car right now I will, now get your drunken ass in here or I’m leaving. You’ve embarrassed me for the last time!” All the way to my apartment he whined like a little boy while I hurled obscenities and insults at him. When I pulled into the parking lot and put the car in park. He said, “What am I supposed to do for dinner?” “I said you can eat shit for all I care just get behind the wheel and get your ass home before I call the police and report you for drunk driving.” I got out, slammed the door and walked into my apartment. I watched him out the front window and he sat there in the passenger seat for five minutes before he popped the trunk, got out, put on his fur and then drove off. I was through with his sorry ass and swore I’d never go anywhere with him again.

Three months after that I moved to Dallas and didn’t have a phone in my name for four months and I certainly didn’t bother calling him and sharing it with him. He started calling Todd in Palm Springs in the middle of the night. That’s how I found out Don passed away in November. He’d told Marty just to scatter his ashes around the tree in the back yard, but Marty by his own admission, buried them in the box they gave him at the funeral home and went out back and pissed on them every chance he got. In some ways I’d like to think it was just his misguided way of dealing with loosing his partner of twenty six years, but Marty related some of the things he screamed into Don’s ear at his moment of death. I picture scenes from “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane” going on in that house and I imagine Don was more than ready to die by then. You just don’t deal with grief in the nasty, hateful, cruel way Marty did. Don had told me before he died that Marty would be financially set for life because he has over three hundred seventy five thousand dollars in life insurance and it would be given to Marty in monthly installments for the rest of his life. With their successful business Marty would be able to make it even though the house and car weren’t paid for as long as Marty had the right friends. He looked at me when he said it like I would be moving in the minute they carried his body out the door. There wasn’t enough money in the entire world to make me ever want to move in with Marty by then and things just got worse through the years. In one of his 2:00 AM long distance calls to Todd, Julio Iglesias was blaring in the background and Marty told him he was dancing around the room naked wearing his full length mink with a bottle of champagne in his ass because he’d heard you would get high faster that way. Todd said the call lasted over an hour and he would just sit the phone on the pillow between him and his partner listening to Julio, while he supposed Marty was dancing around the room and every now and then he would come to the phone and say something. I don’t know why Todd didn’t just hang up, I guess he knew Marty would just call back.

I moved back to Midland briefly in 1991 and we found out that one of Marty’s clients had told him how he could go down and borrow money against Don’s life insurance policy and get a lump sum of cash even if it wasn’t the entire amount. I really wish she hadn’t told him that because he did it and the money was gone in less than two years. Marty who was in his early fifties by then found a new twenty year old boyfriend and lavished him with jewelry, clothes, trips, and a brand new red Mazda Miata. After the kid left him Marty drove his new Cadillac trough the chain link fence on the outskirts of Midland Community College and when he couldn’t find an exit he drove it through the fence again to get out. By that time I was back in Dallas and Todd was back in Midland. Todd said when he drove Marty over to get the car out of the police impound lot he said you could see the waffle pattern of that chain link fence in the hood of the Cadillac. Marty got a DWI then and there may have been others we didn’t know about that didn’t involve accidents. Marty was fond of going to physics and they took him for every dollar they could. One told him he was going to meet the next love of his life named Pierre, in Switzerland, so Marty took a six week trip there and left the salon to run itself. I told Todd, “I feel sorry for the first son of a bitch he runs into over there named Pierre.”

In one of his pitiful bids for attention he called Todd to his house one day threatening suicide. Todd was so concerned about him he called Marty’s doctor. After the doctor arrived he called the local mental hospital and had Marty committed, they took him by ambulance in a straight jacket, strapped to a gurney. Todd went there while he was being examined and said he was in a locked room screaming and growling like a tiger while he crawled around the room on all fours. This was one of their many attempts to dry him out and get him sober, but nothing worked for more than a few days. In May of 1995 I was visiting Todd. I’d driven down from Dallas because my Aunt Agnes wasn’t expected to live. We were sitting around having cocktails when Marty called. Todd really didn’t want him in the house anymore since catching him in the bathroom drinking cologne when there was perfectly good liquor available. After a few drinks and a couple of calls from Marty Todd’s partner James and I decided we didn’t think it was very nice that Marty was still pissing on Don’s ashes in the backyard, so we decided to fuck with him. James had a great idea he asked Todd, “Did Don have a pet name for Marty?” Todd thought for a minute and said, “Yes, monkey, because he’s so hairy.” That was news to me in all the years I’d known them and even I didn’t know that. James dialed Marty’s number, and in a deep low exorcist sounding voice said, “Monkey stop pissing on me!” and hung up. Marty called Todd, and said, “Oh my God! Don just called me from the bowels of hell.” Todd pretended to be ignorant of the prank, and assured Marty it couldn’t possibly be Don. “But he called me monkey, and no one else ever called me that. I know it was him.” We continued making calls while James was in the bathroom applying white and dark eye makeup, to make his face look like a corpse. Once we had Marty good and worked up, we told Todd to keep him on the phone while I drove James over there. I put the windows down and parked in front of the house, while James hopped the fence and ran around back to the kitchen door. He stood there a while looking in the window, but Marty had his back to him, so he tried the door knob and when he found it open he threw open the door and screamed. Marty screamed, jumped out of his clogs and dropped the phone. Todd said he could hear it all on the other end of the line. James and I drove home laughing so hard we were crying. Right after that Marty stopped drinking and he stayed sober for almost two years. His mother bailed him out financially by saving his home from foreclosure and buying him a new Cadillac after she made him drive her old beige 1978 Buick Electra for those two years to make sure he wasn’t drinking. James and I said we should start charging for our services, by scaring the shit out of him we did what Betty Ford couldn’t.

After two years he went off the wagon, began drinking again and was back to his old ways. The extravagant spending had stopped because all his money was gone. He soon got another DWI when he plowed his new Cadillac into a car full of people in Odessa one night coming home from the bar. No one was killed thank God, but he was arrested again and the people sued him. He lost everything, the house, the business, and the car. He had to move in with his mother who lived in a tiny town in central Texas. Todd and James had their phone blocked where he couldn’t wake them in the middle of the night with his drunken calls anymore. I looked him up on a website recently and saw where he’d gotten a couple more DWIs, I honestly don’t know how he’s still alive. He had so much going for him and he threw it all away.

ESP

2010-03-08T18:24:00.001-08:00

Car accidents in small towns are nothing new, but they do make local news. I remember one in particular in the small town of Lampasas in the early seventies. One was where a teenage boy had a fight with his girlfriend one night and on his way home to the town of Lometa crashed his car head on into a tree on the side of the road killing him instantly. He had a red Plymouth Duster and when it was towed to the local impound lot cars were lined up around the block to view the mangled wreckage through the chain link fence. There were rumors that he’d committed suicide because of the argument with the girl, some said he was drunk, some just said he must’ve fallen asleep at the wheel. None the less, it was sad and tragic for a young man to loose his life in such a manner.

Not long after that my brother Danny wrecked his car. We were barely scraping by and he only had liability insurance on it, so when my dad, who was the night sergeant on the Lampasas Police Department dropped him off at our little pizza place and told me to watch him in case he went into shock I was really pissed. He was in a residential area of town and had jumped the curb and driven the car across a vacant lot into a tree head on totaling his red 1966 Mustang.

We were living in our trailer on my grandparent’s farm and had to drive sixteen miles each way. This was during the first oil embargo and it was costing us a fortune just to get to work and back. I asked, “So, what are you going to drive now?” “I’ll drive mother’s Mercury.” he said. Then I was really pissed, I had to drive my old beat up 1967 Thunderbird and beg for gas money although I was working for my mother and he was going to get to drive a better car than I did. I was so furious that I reached for the phone to call mother to tell her what he’d done. Just as I did I realized we hadn’t had our phone connected yet and as I hung up the receiver I pictured myself walking down the hall to my parent’s bedroom flipping on the light and saying, “Danny wrecked his car.” My mother asking, “Is he alright?” “Yes, but his car is totaled.” I just knew she’d be as furious as I was he was constantly tearing things up, and since he was on the football team he didn’t have an after school job. Once he’d pissed someone off at school and they broke all the windows in his Mustang. I had to go around to the wrecking yards and find used glass to replace it with, my mother paid for it and a friend of his installed it, while he sat on the porch and watched. He always had some strange ability to get people to do things for him. He never had to lift a finger to get someone to do his bidding. While I was busy chewing his ass out he just sat and stared into space. I’d made him a Coke and he took a few sips and said, “Someone jerked the wheel out of my hand and drove that car into that tree.” “What do you mean someone jerked the wheel out of your hand, who was in the car with you?” I asked. “No one.” he said. “Well, if no one was with you, then how could someone jerk the wheel out of your hand?” I asked. “I’m telling you that’s what happened. I was just driving down the street and someone jerked the wheel out of my hand and drove the car into that tree.” he said. I told him, “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of, no one’s going to believe that crock of shit. Who was it, a ghost?” “Maybe.” he said. “You know that new girl I had the date with tonight?” I said, “Not really, why?” “Well she’s the girl that kid who got killed last month was dating the night he crashed his car into that tree on his way home.” He said. That gave me chills, my brother was pretty much a no nonsense kind of guy and wasn’t apt to make something like that up.

That wasn’t the only strange occurrence of the evening. When we drove home after I’d shut down the restaurant my mother was waiting up for us and said she knew about the wreck. I asked her, “How did you know what happened when the phone isn’t even connected?” She said, “Your grandfather drove down here and told me, but I already knew about it.” “How did you know?” I asked. “You came down the hall and told me.” she said. “What do you mean I came down the hall and told you?” I asked. “Just that, I was almost asleep and you walked into my room and told me that Danny had wrecked his car. I asked you if he was alright and you said yes, but his car was totaled. I couldn’t go to sleep after that and when I heard a car pull up and a door slam I thought it was one of you boys getting home, but there was a knock on the door and it was your grandfather who told me. I wasn’t upset at all because you’d already told me he was alright.” She said. I’ve asked her about that several times through the years, was it a dream and was she asleep? She’s always just said, “You came down the hall and told me.”

MONSTER IN THE CLOSET

2010-03-01T10:55:00.001-08:00

When I was a child I was afraid of everything. I believed that there was a skeleton under my bed. Therefore whenever I had to get up in the night it required that I stand up in my bed and leap as far away as I could, so the skeleton couldn’t reach its boney hand out and grab my ankle and pull me under the bed to some unforeseen, horrible doom.

Just as real was the monster in my closet, with fur and red glowing eyes and the vampires outside my bedroom window just waiting for me to let them in to suck the blood from my neck and make me one of them. This was way before the days of Ann Rice where being a vampire was a fashion statement.

To top it off were the cheap “B” movies of the era where spider like things from outer space could attach themselves to your spinal cord and although you appeared to be normal they’d taken over your life and things that looked like part of the rock mountain you were climbing, that would reach out and wrap their rock like arms around you while you were navigating a narrow uphill trail. I’d seen all these things while sitting in the back of our station wagon at the drive in movie during the previews on dollar night. Somehow it made them worse just catching those terrible glimpses of things rather than seeing the whole silly, stupid movie. “Frozen in terror! Paralyzed with fear!” were by words you always heard in the previews for those cheesy “B” type films, but I’d never experienced any of those feelings in reality.

I was sure that if Dracula or some other kind of horrible monster were chasing me I could run like the wind and get away from it. I wouldn’t be like those silly pointed breasted women with those cone shaped bras, who ran away from monsters in stiletto heels and pencil skirts pausing every twenty feet to look back and make sure the monster was still chasing them and then if they got too far ahead of the monster they’d fall down and allow it to catch up to them. I would be much smarter than they were.
Then there was that handsome and incredibly pretty Kevin McCarthy and those “Pod People” and God only knows “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” I worried about that one for years after seeing the broken doll face in a preview at the drive in movie along with the squeal of the tires and that shrill scream. “Mama what happened to baby Jane?” I asked. “Nothing, be quiet and go back to sleep.” she said. I knew something had happened to “Baby Jane” or there wouldn’t have been all that fuss, but I didn’t find out what happened to her until I was in my twenties.

Then there was “Physco” after the cartoons were over and the cartoon hot dogs, popcorn, candy and soft drinks, danced their way off the screen I was bored to tears, so I fell asleep, but for some reason when Vera Miles went into the basement to confront Norman’s mother and she spun that wheel chair around to see that empty eye socket mummy and screamed causing the single over head light bulb swing to back and forth accompanied by those shrieking violins. I was suddenly wide awake and upright in the back seat of our 1960 Corvair to see what happened. That scene has played over and over again in my mind a million times to this very day. Shit a Monkey! Therefore it became my nightly ritual before going to bed of making sure my closet doors were closed, the space underneath my bed was empty, and I always lay in bed on my back with the covers tucked underneath my chin and over my shoulders, I figured I had all the bases covered. The “rules” were that if the closet doors were closed no monsters could get out. If I slept on my back the spider things couldn’t attach themselves to my spinal cord and if the bedroom windows were closed a vampire couldn’t get in. Even if he did I would wake up as he tried to pull the covers from around my neck to suck my blood and I could run, or scream for help, so I was as safe as I could be.

In 1967 when we lived in Germany. I realized one night after I’d gone to bed that I had to have a permission slip signed and some money to go on a field trip the next day. It was one of the few times in our lives that my brother and I had separate bedrooms. Knowing that my mother wasn’t good at remembering such things. I got out of bed and walked into the living room where both my parents were reading to remind them that I not only needed money for the next day, but a signed permission slip as well. They told me to go back to bed and they would take care of it in the morning. I realized that my mother didn’t always have the money in her purse for such things and I was worried. I kept on making her promise me that she would have the money the next day. I didn’t want any embarrassing moments when I had to explain to the teacher that I didn’t have my money, or the signed permission slip. Such things didn’t seem to faze my mother they just weren’t important to her and when at the last minute before going to school I had to nag her I got a hate filled lecture while she was digging through her purse for change all the while telling me that she was having a hard time paying the rent, the car payment, or the electric bill. There were many mornings that I left for school crying and at the age of seven because I was sure that the thirty five cents I’d asked for was going to be the reason our car was repossessed, or it would be my fault because the electricity had been cut off. I had to be a horrible, selfish, little boy to ask for something as frivolous as lunch money. That night she told me, “Go back to bed and leave me alone, I’ll do it in the morning”. I didn’t like it, I didn’t believe her. It would be hell in the morning, another battle, another scene, and I dreaded it.

I went back to bed, crawled under the covers and tucked myself in with my nightly ritual of sheet tucking. It also included a ritual scan of the room every few minutes to make sure nothing had changed until I finally fell asleep. As I scanned the room I noticed that my closet door was slightly ajar. That just couldn’t be! The door was tightly closed when I’d made my nightly check of the room. Not only was it ajar, but it was open about an inch. This bothered me a lot, but I was too scared to get up and shut it again, so I decided I was just being silly and would just have to go to sleep with it open. After closing my eyes and trying to go to sleep I did my second scan of the room. This time the door was opened at least two inches. This couldn’t be happening! I was sure it had only been opened an inch seconds before, so my eyes were transfixed on that door and as I watched the opening grew even wider. Two inches, three inches, four inches, slowly it was opening before my terrified eyes as I watched in horror waiting to see the red glowing eyes looking at me from inside my closet. I wanted to scream, to run, to leap out of bed and get out of that room, but my body was made of lead. I was “Frozen in terror! Paralyzed with fear! “I couldn’t move, scream, or yell for help. After what seemed like an eternity it took every ounce of energy I could muster to get my body which felt like it weighed a thousand pounds out of that bed and into the living room. Even then all I could manage to do was stand there in my underwear and do a sort of jumping jack motion with no sound coming out of my mouth. My parents looked at me like I’d just landed from a space ship, lost my mind, or was having some kind of epileptic fit their mouths open and eyes wide. Just then my brother walked out of my room in his underwear laughing. Then my parent’s having realized something had happened involving him scaring the holy shit out of me started laughing too. I was so pissed off all I wanted to do was pulverize the little shit. Since everyone else in the house was laughing all I could do was pretend it was mildly amusing to me and go back to bed. I can assure it was visions of a long drawn out murder that danced in my head that night.
“Vision’s Of Sugar Plumbs” didn’t have a fucking thing to do with it.

FLINT CONCERN

2010-02-25T10:27:00.001-08:00

In early 1966, my father was transferred from Fort Bragg, North Carolina to Bad Tolz, Germany leaving my mother behind to sell our mobile home, car, and most of our belongings. We moved to my aunt Ruby’s house in Texas for three weeks until we had our travel orders for our trip to Germany. I was in the fifth grade, Danny was in the third and we had to go to school in Monahans during our short stay there. I honestly don’t remember much about it except that the father of one of the boys I became friends with owned the local Chevrolet dealership and his mother drove a beautiful red over white 1964 Cadillac Coupe De Ville which made me green with envy.

On my first day of school my teacher was wearing sunglasses in the classroom, she told my mother she ran into a cabinet and got a black eye. Later that day when my mother picked us up from school she said, “I’ll bet she ran into a cabinet, I’ve run into that cabinet a couple of times myself.” “What do you mean, she didn’t run into a cabinet?” I asked. “Hell no, I’m sure her husband punched her in the eye.” “The teacher had a fight with her husband?” I said. “Honey, every woman has fights with her husband from time to time. Only some husbands hit them, not all men do it though.” I couldn’t believe it the teachers I looked up to that were supposed to be so perfect actually had fights just like my mother and father. I grew silent because I didn’t want to stir up old memories and I couldn’t remember my parents having a really bad fight since I was seven and they came home from a party where my father ripped the buttons off my mother’s beautiful gold stripped dress and punched her to the floor of our dining room when we lived on base in San Antonio.

The time passed quickly and soon it was time for us to leave. “I don’t want to go to Germany,” I whined. “Why?” my aunt Agnes asked. “Because I can’t speak German and they eat funny food over there.” I said. I’d been reading a little bit about Germany and Bavaria where we were going to be living and I wasn’t too keen on living near “The Black Forest” where the trees grew so close together it appeared to be dark, hence the name. I figured that was where Hansel and Gretel had gotten lost and I sure as hell didn’t want to get lost in there. “Oh they’ll speak English over there and I’m sure you can find something to eat. You like German potato salad don’t you?” my mother said. “No they won’t” I pouted. “You need to look at this as an opportunity of a lifetime young man.” My aunt Agnes said. I always remembered her words and I tried to learn and see as much as I could while we were over there. Ruby and Agnes drove us to the airport in Midland in Agnes’s white 1965 Oldsmobile where we boarded a prop plane that took us to Love Field in Dallas. Then we transferred to a big jet that was to take us to JFK airport in New York City. Whoever booked our seats couldn’t get the three of us together, so there were two seats side by side and another several rows forward. Well my mother wasn’t about to let an eleven year old and a nine year old sit together, so she sat beside Danny while I had to take an isle seat beside two strangers, which I was none too happy about. I made my mother recite our travel plans to me over and over because I was afraid I’d get separated from them and I’d have to know what to tell people to get us reunited. The stewardess’s were so pretty one even looked like that German actress I liked, Elke Sommer. She walked down the isle with a basket of fruit and offered it to people as she went. I saw a beautiful pear that I wanted badly, but when she got to me I pretended to be asleep because I thought you had to pay for it and I didn’t have any money. Boy was I pissed when I looked back a few minutes later and saw that my brother not only had the pear I’d wanted, but an apple and a coke too. There were two slightly older boys wearing navy blazers that were carrying on with the stewardess trying to get her to give them cigarettes and drinks. They were thirteen and fourteen and told her the name of some school they attended in the city, I was very impressed by them.

When we arrived in New York City we took a cab from JFK to our overnight quarters at Fort Hamilton. The cab driver pointed out landmarks along the way like the Empire State building and the Chrysler building. After he helped us with our heavy luggage my mother handed him some bills and told him to keep the change. ”Keep the change, keep the change?” I couldn’t believe it, I’d only heard people say that in the movies not my mother. The next morning April 11th, we got on a bus with a lot of other people that took us to the dock to board our ship. I was so ignorant I thought I saw those two boys in their blue blazers on their way to school that morning. The USS Rose was only an old troop ship on its last Trans Atlantic voyage before reporting to duty in the Pacific for the war in Viet Nam, but it might as well have been the “Queen Mary” to me. I’ll admit that when I tell most people we took a ship to Germany I don’t usually tell them it was a troop ship. After finding our cabin and our luggage we went up on deck to wait for it to set sail. It was so exciting as the ship moved away from the dock. Mother was holding on tightly to Danny because he was trying to climb up on the railing and it would be just like him to topple over into the water. He and I were wearing the brand new beige Ban Lon shirts my grandmother had bought us for the trip. I loved new clothes and we didn’t get them often, so I was being very careful. Just then my mother pointed to the Statue of Liberty just ahead of us. I was shocked it was green! I knew it was made of copper we’d learned that in school, but all the photographs I’d seen of it were in black and white, so I just assumed it would be shinny like a penny. That bright flat green wasn’t anything I’d ever imagined in my mind. As we sailed past it my mother was holding Danny up to get a better look and I stood on a rung and leaned against the wooden railing in awe of its size and its greenness. After the excitement was over I got down and my mother said, “Sammy look at your shirt.” There was a huge black strip of grease right across the front. I was heartbroken my new shirt was ruined the very first time I wore it.

The trip across the Atlantic took seven days. Larger, faster ships could make it in four, but this wasn’t the SS United States, which we’d missed sailing on by about a week. The first day out we had a lifeboat drill. I didn’t like the fact that we were assigned to boat number thirteen and they kept on repeating the women and children first rule of the sea. I was big for my age and at eleven you’re stuck in between I was worried, but my mother assured me that if the ship sank she would see to it that I got in the lifeboat with her and Danny. When we first saw our little cabin it was pretty dismal. We had to share a bathroom with the cabin next door and it had one twin bed and a bunk bed. All Danny could do when he saw it was jump up and down and squeal, “I want the top bunk! I want the top bunk!” I wanted it because that was where the porthole was and you could look right out on the ocean, but mother said he could have it. It wasn’t long until he regretted his decision because April isn’t exactly a good time to sail the Atlantic and three days out we ran into some pretty rough storms. The ship bucked and pitched so much that some crazy military lady ran around the dining room pouring our glasses of water on the table cloths to keep our plates from sliding off. She threw open the door to our cabin one day and yelled at Danny to get off the ladder to his bunk. Mother said, “The next time she does that I’m going to throw my book at her and say, oh I’m sorry you scared me.” Mother gave us some of the sea sick medicine she’d brought along, but all it did was make us groggy and we had to get in our bed at times to ride out the storms because walking around was too dangerous. Danny lay on his top bunk with a green face and moaned, “Close the curtain. Close the curtain.” because he couldn’t stand seeing the ocean pitch and roll outside the port hole. One stormy night mother attended a party in the dining room and had to hire a babysitter because children under twelve weren’t allowed to stay in the cabins by themselves. We weren’t happy with the fact that the girl my mother found to baby sit was only twelve. Danny made that couple of hours pretty miserable for her by getting up on his bunk and letting a long slow stream of spit flow out of his mouth onto her hair. All I could do was set back and laugh while she read to us because the string of spit would sway with the ship on its slow journey to the top of her head and she wasn’t even aware of it. The ship jerked and seemed to turn suddenly and we were a little shaken by it. When mother returned, she said some people that were dancing actually fell down. Apparently one of the portholes near the waterline broke and they had to turn the ship away from the current to patch it up or something. She had a hard time making it back to our cabin in heels.

When the weather was nice the trip was actually an adventure. It was great having breakfast, lunch, and dinner, in a dining room and getting to choose what we wanted. Our waiter was foreign and made us laugh by calling milk “Cow Uuce”. There was another man that walked around the ship playing some sort of a hand held Xylophone when it was meal time. One day we heard a sound like he’d dropped it down some stairs, we turned around and he was letting Danny bang on it. People got a good laugh over that, but I was a little embarrassed by it. Danny seemed to know every inch of that ship if mother and I got turned around he could tell us exactly how to get where we wanted to go. Mother gave us some money to spend and he spent his on some kind of toy, but I bought her a beautiful strand of cultured pearls in a pink velvet box lined with pink satin from the ship’s gift shop. On our last day we sailed through the English Channel and got to see the White Cliffs of Dover and Danny actually spotted some dolphins frolicking in front of the ship, we docked in Bremerhaven although today mother insists it was Bremen. I guess it’s an easy mistake since Bremerhaven is in the state of Bremen, but Bremen is a city on a river thirty seven miles inland.

From Bremerhaven we took a train to Munich and actually our own private sleeping cars like people did in the old movies. I was glad to have one all to myself while Danny had to stay with my mother. I didn’t sleep much that night because I was afraid the vibration of the train would cause my suitcase to fall from its overhead storage shelf on my head and I just had to peek out the blind every time the train came to a stop so see the strange looking buildings with their steep sloped roofs. I was also shocked by the fact that when you flushed the toilet it opened up and you could see the train tracks below. My father met us at the train station in Munich, driving a borrowed Volkswagen Beetle with a buddy of his. What was he thinking, five people and all that luggage? I ended up having to sit on his buddy’s lap for the forty miles to Bad Tolz, while Danny sat on mother’s lap. I don’t know if I was embarrassed because I was almost as big as he was, or because he was so handsome. We stopped at a Gasthaus to get something to eat and I didn’t care for my first taste of German cuisine. Everyone else ate wurst and brochen, a bread roll with a hard crust, I just ate brochen with mustard on it.

We soon found out why daddy didn’t bring his own car. He’d purchased a 1951 Volkswagen Beetle. He’d paid all of one hundred fifty dollars for it which was about one hundred forty eight dollars more than it was worth. It was black with a light blue right door. The beige mohair upholstery was rotten and smelly, it had a huge slide back cloth sunroof with plenty of water stains and every time he pressed the accelerator the passenger seat fell backwards. My mother would squeal and holler and my brother and I would burst into laughter as we tried to help her back up.
If we still had that split rear window car today it would be worth a small fortune, but haven’t we all had those thoughts about a car we had in the past? At first we thought the Beetle was funny, but soon it became an embarrassment for both of us and we realized it was a sub standard piece of junk. The turn signals were metal flaps that came out of the “B” pillars and didn’t work, so we watched my father use hand signals to turn left, or right, which we’d never seen anyone do before and wondered where he’d learned such things which seemed so silly to us. He had to roll the window down even when it was snowing, or raining. We owned it throughout that spring and summer, the car always seemed cold, damp, and moldy, and it smelled that way too. Danny and I hated it while at the same time we thought it both silly and amusing. We missed our 1963 Plymouth Valiant convertible, it was black with a white top, red vinyl interior, with a heater, radio, and turn signals. Oh, for the simple American things in life.
In reality the Beetle was the closest thing to what Ferdinand Porsche had planned as the production as the 1936 “Peoples Car” for Hitler. As this was one of the first few years of production runs when the British had re opened the factory after World War II. The 1951 model was as close to anything Ferdinand Porsche might have planned for Hitler, the “People’s Car” became the hope for Germany’s future. You could actually buy something like “Green Stamps” to apply towards the purchase of a Volkswagen, but that plan never actually panned out. There were actually game pieces shaped like the cars so you could see how close you were to having your own Volkswagen. No one ever got one that way though. Try to buy one of those games on eBay today!

When we first moved to Germany it was fun like a new adventure to another planet. It all seemed so exciting. Our first apartment was on the fourth floor of the American housing and had seventeen bedrooms. We were forbidden by my mother to go into any of the bedrooms that weren’t our own only because this was temporary housing and she was responsible for cleaning the entire apartment before we left. We would peek into all the other bedrooms looking for something different, but they all looked the same. To tell the truth I really didn’t like the fact that fifteen of those rooms had to be kept shut, it gave me the creeps. God only knew what was lurking behind those doors at night. I suppose they were built for GI’s who when were first deployed to Germany, shared the same housing with one kitchen, dining room, and bathroom, until they were moved to other accommodations. I thought we were rich like “The Beverly Hillbilly’s” or something. Seventeen bedrooms, seventeen bedrooms! We had no idea all those happy memories would soon change and Germany would become the worst nightmare of our entire lives.

My father was a Green Beret, a paratrooper, and one of the 10th Special Forces group that was stationed at the Flint Kaserne which was built as a huge training facility for SS Officer Candidates in 1937. It was like a huge fortress built in a rectangle with turrets at the entry like a medieval castle at the main entrance and always seemed dark and verboten to me. It was pretty much self contained and had almost everything we could want, or need. A movie theater, library, Olympic size indoor swimming pool, commissary, cafeteria, bowling ally, doctors offices, dentist offices, a bookstore, and even a Sunday school. There was no American television, so we went to the movies which cost almost nothing, at least three times a week and since there was still snow until early June sometimes I’d walk through the snow to spend endless hours at the library. A man who lived in our apartment complex told my father once, “You must be proud of your son. I see him walking to the library in the snow by himself all the time. He must really be a smart kid.” My father told him, “I am proud of him” and related the story to me, which made me feel good. Little did he know that I would find any excuse to get the hell out of the house.

Germany could have been such a wonderful experience for us. We could’ve taken weekend trips to all the beautiful castles and towns, there’s so much history there. Even the little town of Bad Tolz is like something out of a story book. We did take a family trip to Garmisch once and I remember walking through the “General Walker Hotel” thinking it had only been a little over twenty years since Hitler had walked those same halls. We did take one camping trip to Lake Chiemsee where King Ludwig II castle Herrenchiemsee is. We pitched a tent and stayed there three days, but my father had to get pretty drunk at both places and Danny and I ended up sleeping in the car so we wouldn’t have to be near him. He forced my mother into having sex with him in the tent and we heard everything.

I don’t remember when my father’s drinking started getting out of control, but it began to consume our lives. By then we’d moved to our three bedroom apartment and he’d sold the Beetle and bought a dark blue 1958 Mercedes Benz 190 for five hundred dollars. What I remember most was my father coming home from work drunk and my mother attacking him as he came in the door. Curse words flying, fingernails flashing, hands slapping, and him trying to fend her off, which resulted in punches, hair pulling, furniture being broken, endless crying, black eyes, and embarrassing looks from the neighbors. We’d gone to an October Fest carnival at the Kaserne and mother took daddy home because he was getting too drunk. Before she left she said, “You keep an eye on your little brother and be home by eight o’clock.” When it was ten minutes of eight I found him and said, “Danny we need to go now, mother told us to be home by eight.” “I’m not ready to go home yet.” He said. “Danny, we have to go or we’ll get in trouble!” I pressed. “I wanna play some more games.” He said. We argued a while longer and then I went home by myself. When I got home daddy was still up drinking and mother sent me back to get him, he still refused to come with me, so when I arrived without him again she drove me over there in the car and waited while I searched for him. I ran into my sixth grade teacher and she said, “Why Sammy, it’s after nine o’clock, what are you doing out this late?” I said, “My mother told us to be home by eight, but Danny won’t leave.” She knew him because she tutored him after school and she said, “I’ll go with you and we’ll find him and make him go home.” When we found him she said, “Danny it’s too late for you boys to be out. You go with Sammy right now and go home like your mother told you to.” He walked with me a little way and said, “I’m not going home, she’s not the boss of me and I’m going back.” No matter how much I threatened and pleaded he wouldn’t listen and just kept on walking. I went back to the car and told mother and she said, “We’ll just have to go home and tell your father to go get him and he’ll give him a whipping.” When we drove down the street to our apartment my father was standing in the street beer bottle in hand screaming at us, “You’ve been out screwing somebody haven’t you, haven’t you? You bitch!” Mother drove off down the street and turned the car around keeping a safe distance between him and us. She drove forward slowly trying to reason with him, “Sonny we were just out looking for Danny and he won’t listen to Sammy and come home.” “No you weren’t! You went out to screw that guy didn’t you? You whore!” He screamed at the top of his lungs as he kicked in the driver’s door. You could hear his screaming echoing between the buildings, and since most people kept their windows open everyone could hear him. A man who lived downstairs from us had to come fend my father off with a baseball bat because he wouldn't let my mother and me park in our parking space, my dad started fighting back. Then some more neighbors got involved and mother parked the car and got out to intervene while she sent me once again to get Danny. Half way there I found the little shit walking home and I said, “You don’t know all the trouble you’ve caused,” and told him what happened. When we walked into the apartment it looked like a bomb had gone off, furniture was overturned, broken glass was everywhere and the living and dining room were in ruins. Daddy was already in bed and mother was sitting on the sofa crying with her hair all askew. She wore it in a “French Twist” and it was almost all down to her shoulders by then. I could see the beginning of a black eye through her running mascara. She looked up and said, “Danny why didn’t you just come home when I told you to?” He slinked off to bed and then mother went to bed and asked me to go get Judy to help me clean things up. She knew all the neighbors had witnessed and heard the whole brawl anyway. I went across the hall and asked mother's best friend Judy to please come and help me clean up our apartment. She and I spent thirty minutes up righting furniture, cleaning up broken plates, dishes, and knick knacks. Judy made a big pot of coffee, but I don't remember anyone drinking it that night except her and stayed with me until after midnight. Thank God for Judy, I was twelve years old at the time and I don't know what I would've done without her.

As a child trying to survive I had to do the best I could, so I learned a few tricks. The door to our apartment on the third floor must've been at least two and one half inches of thick, solid, wood. When I came home from school if my car was in our parking space I'd listen at the door to see if I could hear any noise before I opened it. Most of the time if it was quiet I knew it was safe to go inside, but there were a couple of times I opened the door and just missed being hit by flying objects that my mother was hurling at my father. Another time he was so drunk she had him bent over at the waist with one hand on the back of his shirt and the other full of hair as she slammed hid head into the door frame screaming, “You son of a bitch! You son of a bitch!” When she let go of him he stood up and staggered around in a drunken stupor with his hair sticking straight up. I had to back out of the apartment and shut the door because I busted out laughing and I was afraid that even as drunk as he was he’d get mad at me. If I came home and put my ear up to the door and heard screaming and yelling I'd go up to the top of the stairwell on the fourth floor, start my home work and wait for Danny to come home, so I could warn him not to go inside. I can't tell you the times that we sat up there waiting for my drunken father and my hysterical mother to calm down so we could go inside.

Once for some reason mother had needed the car to drive to Munich, probably to shop at the commissary there because they had a much larger store than the one at the Kaserne. We rode with her to pick daddy up in the small town of Lenggries about five miles away where he worked. He hadn’t called her to come get him until he was good and wasted. She was so angry with him she drove home at a high rate of speed with the tires on the Mercedes squealing as we wound our way through the mountainous roads screaming at him. Danny and I became scared because we’d heard stories of guys crashing their cars on that very same stretch of road. It was then that we realized for the first time in years that we were in a car with no seat belts, so we held onto each other. My father looked back and said, “Wanda slow down you’re scaring the kids, look at them.” She screamed, “What does it matter if we crash? They’ve got a drunk for a father. What in the hell do they have to live for?” I was then we were certain we were going to plunge off the cliff in a huge fire ball and that would be that.

My mother would blame herself for his drinking. She would think it was because she didn’t keep the apartment clean enough, or because she wasn’t pretty enough, or because she didn’t cook well enough, or because she wasn’t good enough in bed. She would sit in the front window of our apartment dressed like “June Cleaver” with a wonderful dinner on the stove and wail and cry because my father was out drinking. She even fell to the floor clasped her hands in prayer and swayed back and fourth in a shirt waist dress like some TV evangelist begging God to just make him stop drinking. Once, when she was in one of her “High Drama” episodes when I was twelve and crying like someone who’d just witnessed a great calamity with her head in her arms on the dining room table. I tried to comfort her by saying the only thing I’d ever heard in my entire life, “Why don’t you divorce him?” Her head spun around like Linda Blair’s in the “Exorcist”. “That’s what you kid’s want isn’t it, isn’t it? Well let me tell you something, if it comes down to choosing you kids or your father, I’ll pick your father every time!” At the age of twelve you can imagine just how that made me feel. People wonder to this day as to why I have no self confidence.

She decided she wanted a baby girl and they were going to adopt a German baby. I couldn’t imagine why she would want another baby when she was constantly threatening to leave my father anyway. I asked her about it and she hissed at me, “Maybe a baby is just what this family needs!” When I returned from one of my field trips in April, 1968 she greeted me with some left over home made tacos and the news that she was pregnant. Danny and I were both so embarrassed that my parent’s were still having sex that neither of us told any of our friends. My sister Stacy was born in November after we’d moved back to the U.S.

What little happiness I had came from the money I earned baby sitting for fifty cents an hour to buy Motor Trend Magazines, "Jo Han" Cadillac models, or "Diana Ross and the Supreme's" albums, which cost two dollars and ninety five cents, which equaled seven hours of baby sitting. The theater at the Kaserne was a nice escape from reality too. I spent many an hour there watching almost every American film made from 1962 to 1968. By the time I was thirteen I’d stay at home alone while my parents and brother went to the movies just so I could listen to my records on our fantastic new Grundig stereo without being bothered. I did find some measure of happiness at school my best pals were Vicky, Craig, and Jacque, and our German teachers would take us on field trips. Our regular teachers were American, but Frau Zerluth and Frau Schneider taught us to speak German and taught us about German culture and food. We got to go to nearby churches, towns, restaurants, and even took an over night trip to see some of King Ludwig II castles Linderhoff, Neuschwanstein, and Hoenschwangau. I was even awarded a little book of photos of Bad Tolz where the back page has “13 June 1967 A reward for outstanding work done on German culture folders, Frau Zerluth.”

There were occasional happy times at home, like our first Christmas there when we got new bikes. Even that was tainted by a late night conversation I overheard where my father was bitching about spending so much money on us. I remember my mother saying, “Sonny, do you know how much money we spent on the boys last Christmas? Eight dollars! I think they deserve a decent Christmas this year to make up for it.” He still wasn’t happy about it. When we went to bed Christmas Eve mother said, “I can’t believe here it is our first Christmas in Germany and we don’t even have snow.” The next morning when we awoke there was a foot of beautiful snow covering everything, it was magical. My parents bought us a poodle puppy from a lady who was knocking door to door with a basket full of all kinds of puppies Poodles, Dachshunds, and Schnauzers. We wanted the one she had, but apparently it was a “display model” and we had to place our order and wait. The day we picked him up at the train station there was this tiny black puppy in this big crate filled with excelsior. A German man at the train station brought out a crowbar and opened it for us. We both grabbed for him at the same time and Danny got him first of course. When we got him home we named him “Jocko” and mother discovered he was much too young to have been weaned, so she had to make a paste of “Gains Burgers” and milk to feed him until he got a little older. I loved that dog and he brought so much joy into our lives. We also got bought a black and white TV from someone who was going back to the states just before we moved and even though what little TV we could get was in German, I did get to see the Supreme’s perform in Berlin and that was a treat since I didn’t know who was actually singing lead on all those albums I’d bought.

One particular incident has always stuck in my mind, for some reason one day my friend Craig got mad at me and told me he was going to beat me up after school. I was scared shitless, I was no fighter and he started telling everyone in school to gather outside my apartment to watch him beat me up. I spoke with a teacher about it and he said, “Just tell him you’re more mature than that and you’re not going to fight him.” Craig looked like the “Pied Piper” on the way home from school with all the kids following him. He stopped me at the front door to the stairwell and we argued and exchanged insults. He said something derogatory to me and I said, "Shut up." He said, "Make me." Then I said, "I don't make trash, I burn it." and turned to walk inside. He shoved me in the middle of my back and all my books and my glasses went flying and kids started laughing, they didn’t laugh for long though. I went blind with rage and I turned around and beat the living shit out of him. As he lay on the ground bleeding from his nose, one of his friends looked down at him and said, “Cool fight Craig.” I got my books and went upstairs where I was absolutely giddy because I won the fight I’d dreaded all day. There was a knock on the door and a girl said, “Sammy here’s your glasses.” Then another knock and a boy said, “Craig’s waiting for your little brother.” I went downstairs and confronted Craig and said, “If you don’t leave Danny alone I’ll give you some more, now go home!” Years later when I saw the movie “A Christmas Story”, I felt as though they took the fight scene right out of that chapter of my life. I never realized the memory of that fight would lead to a reunion of Craig, Vicky, and me, forty years later in August, 2007. Craig said he’d always wanted to find me so he could apologise. We had a wonderful reunion and plan to get together again in the future.

We had to leave Germany early, because my maternal grandfather was dying of cancer and we flew back on a jet to JFK. Then after refueling the same plane took us to Charleston, South Carolina where we picked up Jocko and rented a white 1968 Dodge Monaco to drive back to Texas. We were so glad to be home where we could get good old American hamburgers and see the sights. That August my father left for Viet Nam for eleven months and life was blissfully peaceful. I used to secretly wish he would be killed over there and years later my mother admitted she was wishing the same thing.

When I went back to Germany for the first time in December, 2003 and the second time in September, 2005. The Flint Kaserne has been given back to the Germans and they’ve remodeled the entire complex into hotel, offices, a convention center, movie theater, and torn down the wall surrounding it and painted the buildings pastel colors. The quadrangle has two new chrome, and glass, buildings in it now, and wildflowers growing around them. The Germans don’t waste anything they reuse it. The façade of the hotel we stayed in when I went there in 2005 was built in 1640. We drove back to Ludwig’s castles again with the top down on the Porsche and had a wonderful time. I now have terrific memories of Bad Tolz and I wish I could live there year round. In 2003 I took a photograph of the 2004 red Porsche Carrera S convertible I picked up in Stuttgart in our old parking space in front of the apartments where I’d taken the photograph of the 1951 black beetle with the blue right door in 1966. I didn’t do it, but I wanted to put a caption under the photograph of the car saying “You’ve come a long way baby!” The car wasn’t really mine anyway, I was picking it up for the dealership. I just looked up at my bedroom window and thought of how much I wish I could’ve seen that scared, frightened, lonely, thirteen year old gay boy looking down at me and say, “It’s going to be alright kid, you’re gonna make it.” Something no one has ever told me in my entire life.

DORIS DAY

2010-02-25T10:24:00.001-08:00

I just got one of those silly "Room Ba" robot vacuum cleaners. They had them on sale at home Depot for ninety nine dollars, so I figured as much as I hate to clean house, even though I'm a neat freak, I'd try one. I find myself talking to the silly thing like it's a dog, or a cat. It did the kitchen twice while I was taking the dishes out of the dishwasher and I had to shoo it away.
It's actually pretty neat. I can fold clothes and do other things while it's vacuuming. I'm sure it would scare the hell out of cats they'd be under the bed, but it goes there too and most dogs would be chasing it around snapping at it, or hiding under the bed with the cat. I have two other vacuum cleaners a big Hoover and a little Hoover. The Room Ba is pretty much just a floor sweeper, but after an hour I stopped it and cleaned the filter it was full. Mostly, hair, lint, glitter from Christmas decorations and dust bunnies, but I think it's great. Now if they'd just invent something that flies around the house and dust for you.
Wasn't there some kind of crazy movie in the 60's where a family lived in a "High Tech" house and a robot vacuum cleaner came out of a wall every time something was dropped on the floor? I seem to remember Doris Day, or someone like her being in it. Of course everything went haywire and all hell broke loose when the darn thing took her shoe or something like that. I looked it up and it's "The Glass Bottom Boat".
Excerpt from movie description;
“Tashlin, who always used gimmicks in his pictures, has a field day with "Glass Bottom". Templeton's kitchen is state of the art and completely electronic with fun gadgets that to this day we still don't have. It did, however, have remote control and microwave, which is pretty standard in our time.” I always liked Doris Day.

Back in 1979 I was visiting my friend Steve in Los Angeles. We drove all over Hollywood, Beverly Hills, etc. I had to re load my camera right at the top of Benedict Canyon after taking pictures of Valentino's house, “Falcon Lair”. I was tired and wanted to go back to his place. He wanted to know if I wanted to drive by Doris Day's house. I said let's just go back to your apartment, but he insisted. I hadn't seen one single star all day and I was disappointed. When we got to her house there was a diesel Mercedes in the driveway with the engine running and the vanity plate was DIAS1. He wanted to drive off, but I told him to wait because that was her car. He said in Beverly Hills that could be the maid's car. I told him no I knew it was her car because I'd seen a “Tonight Show” where Johnny Carson held up star's personalized license plates and people tried to guess who's they were and I remembered they were her's for “Daisy”. Sure enough a man came out with a dog and was started taking pictures of the dog in the car. Then out walked Doris Day in a dark green velvet pant suit wearing a matching hat. He began taking pictures of her when she saw me through the gate hanging out the car window. I was afraid she'd ask us to leave, or call the police. Instead I said "Hi" and she said "Hi" and then posed for me several times waving for my shots. I told her "Thanks!", then we went home. I was so excited I couldn't wait to get home to have the photos developed. When I went to pick them up I'd loaded the camera wrong and that whole roll was nothing but a blank. So much for my seeing a real live movie star.

KENNETH ANN

2010-02-24T12:44:00.001-08:00

I’ve never seen any place that seemed to have more drag shows than Odessa, Texas and bad drag at that. I suppose because there was usually only one gay bar operating at any given time. In Dallas they have special nights for drag shows, or even certain bars that have a drag theme, but not Odessa. There were times they went on every single night at one bar called the “Misty Blue”. I remember once there was this guy standing at the microphone one afternoon in full drag miming the words to some Judy Garland song while a scratchy old LP played over the speakers. No one in the room was watching him and we were all going about our own business having a merry old time. Suddenly there was a commotion from the stage and I looked over my shoulder, the guy was throwing a fit. He kicked over the stool he was sitting on and stomped off the stage, high heels clicking all the way, cursing us for not paying attention to him. What did he want us to do? There was a drag show there twenty four seven and we were tired of that shit.

No drag queen was ever as famous as Kenneth Ann, at least in his mind. He had such a thick West Texas accent and he was the only person who could turn one syllable words like Ann and Sam into three syllables. When he said my name it always came out something like, “Saaaymmmnnn”. Someone told me years later that when he lived in Abilene Kenneth was given a shot glass of Crème De Menthe and he said, “Why that tayst jus like Haley’s MO.” If you’ve seen the character Beverly Lesley on “Will and Grace”, then you have some idea of the way he spoke. In fact, I’d almost swear whoever created that character based it on Kenneth Ann.

I first met Kenneth in 1975 when I was standing at the bar at the “Fisherman’s Warf” in Odessa. My old friend from fourth grade, Amazing Mazine walked over to me and said, “There’s someone who’d like to meet you.” I was feeling cocky at the time and asked, “How much do they weigh?” “Less than you honey.” He said. I asked, “Where are they?” and he pointed to a table with four or five guys sitting at it. He said, “The third guy from the left.” I looked and it was a tall good looking guy with black hair. I said, “I might come over there in a minute.” and he walked off. When I got my coke, it was a BYOB bar, I walked over and they made a place for me next to the black haired man. I introduced myself and he told me his name was Larry, but as luck would have it he wasn’t the one who wanted to meet me, it was the guy on the other side of me.
He held out his limp wristed hand and said, “Hi, my name is Kenneth.” I almost spit my drink all over him. Here he was this balding man with mascara, long nails with clear polish, a dozen bangle bracelets and he absolutely reeked of “Jungle Gardenia” perfume. I wanted to get up and run, but I didn’t want to be rude, so I sat there like an idiot until I got good and drunk. I did everything I could to ignore him and flirt with Larry who seemed pleased by my attention. I found out he and Larry were roommates and lived in a duplex in Midland. Later in the evening they asked me to go home with them I said “Yes.”, but I was pissed when Larry got in one car and Kenneth got in my Cadillac. We followed Larry the sixteen miles to Midland, while Kenneth ran his hands all over me and kept kissing my neck the whole way. When we got there and I realized there was only one bedroom I was hopeful that we could all get in the same bed, but Larry started making himself a bed on the sofa, so there I was drunk, tired, and stuck with Kenneth. Thank God it was late and I feigned drunkenness to keep from having to have sex with him. Kissing him was bad enough, I’ll never forget the awful taste of his perfume in my mouth.

When I woke up the next morning Barry Manilow was singing “I Write the Songs” on the radio and I wanted to chew my arm off to get the hell out of there. Luckily after rough housing with him I was able to coax Larry into bed with us, we rolled around together and had somewhat of a good time. I wouldn’t relive that night for anything, but it actually helped my reputation for years afterwards, because Kenneth Ann told everyone, “Sam is wild in bed.” Kenneth Ann was in love with me and we were an “item”, even though I didn’t know anything about it. He apparently told everyone he knew that we were boyfriends or lovers, or something, because when I began showing up at the bar alone he would sit in a corner in full drag without his wig and dab at his eyes with a hankie. A guy walked over to me and said, “You’re a son of a bitch!” I smiled at him and said, “You must know me.” I found out over the years he did this to lots of guys. One of the funniest things that ever happened was that years later after his circle of drag queen friends grew one of his loyal followers walked up to this guy and said, “This is from Kenneth Ann!”, and slapped him across the face. The guy sat down his drink, walked over to Kenneth Ann, and decked him. I didn’t see it, but they said Kenneth hit the floor like a ton of bricks. Another time Kenneth had ridden to the bar with my friend Andy and some others. There was some guy Andy had his eye on only to find out Kenneth was having one of his “things” with the guy. They fought about it on the way home and Andy screeched his Buick into the gravel driveway at Kenneth’s house, reached over, threw the passenger open, and yelled, “Why don’t you tell everyone who you’re in love with this week!”

Kenneth never missed a chance to say catty things to me. In 1977 I was doing laundry at the Laundromat down the street from where I lived and by some coincidence there were several gay guys there that evening. Kenneth made a big deal of telling everyone to come to his house when they got finished for a party. On his way out the door he stopped and said, “Oh, and Saaaymmmnnn, you cin come toooo.” In the mid eighties before I had my stomach stapled he would see me somewhere and say, “Oh my, you look so healthy.” Then when I lost almost fifty pounds he saw me in Furr’s Cafeteria one day and said loud enough for the whole dining room to hear, “Ever time I see you, you just get skinnier and skinnier are you seeick?” This was when people were so afraid of AIDS everyone turned to look at me. The final straw came one night in 1987 when I went to “Miss Lily’s” in Odessa with two friends of mine. It was my turn to buy a round of drinks, so I went up to the bar and stood in line. While I was standing there some guy wrapped his arms around me from behind, lifted me off the floor and said, “God, I haven’t seen you in so long.” When I turned around, he turned beet red and said, “Oh, I’m sorry, I thought you were someone else.” He was handsome so I asked him who he thought I was, but he wouldn’t tell me. Then a couple of minutes later these two girls walked up behind me and said, “Where’ve you been?” I turned around and they apologized and said they thought I was someone else. This time I wouldn’t let it go I kept pressuring them as to who it was, and they reluctantly said, “Kenneth Ann”. I looked across the room at my friends just knowing I was the victim of one of their pranks, but they weren’t even looking at me. I returned with the drinks thoroughly pissed off and told them what happened. They tried to console me by telling me, “You should be flattered, Kenneth Ann is skinny.” It didn’t make me feel one damn bit better and I soon was custom fitted for a hair piece and I wore one for eleven years after that.

The designated drag night at “Miss Lilly’s” was Sunday and God only knew what you might see. Those queens would do a Diana Ross song wearing a blond wig, or do a Marilyn Monroe number in a brunette wig. One Sunday they were having a drag contest and half the judges were from Amarillo. They voted for the best performance and that didn’t sit too well because everyone from Midland-Odessa knew that Kenneth Ann always won no matter what. After they announced the results and the guy got up on stage and accepted his trophy, I’ll be damned if the manager didn’t walk up to the microphone and announce that there’d been a mistake and Kenneth Ann was the actual winner. The other guy’s boyfriend could be heard yelling as Kenneth got up on stage and did his usual “squat and pee” acceptance dance with tears streaming down his face like he didn’t already know he was going to win.

I really regret missing the night “Rita Rhinestone” wiped out the meat rack. It was 1979 and the guy came out on roller skates in a leopard print leotard miming “Take Me Home” by Cher. He got to going a little too fast and couldn’t make the turn. They said he hit the side bar we called the meat rack, where all the single guys stood cruising and “Whomp!” guys and drinks flew everywhere as Rita hit the floor. Those drag queens were mean as hell, even to each other. One night some queen decided to do a World War II number and sang Kate Smith’s version of “God Bless America” wearing a vintage WAAC’s uniform. At the end of the number he was to pull a cord and unfurl a U.S. flag, but someone tied one corner in a knot and only half the flag would come down. I gotta tell ya the girl was pissed.

I moved back to Midland from Dallas briefly in 1991 and went to the bar with a friend visiting from San Antonio of course there was a drag show and the drinks were so watered down I couldn’t even get a buzz, so I switched to beer. After living in Dallas and seeing drag there I just knew Odessa was going to be more pathetic than ever. This guy walked out in a Madonna outfit from the days where she wore her underwear on the outside. His hair was done up in an “I Dream of Genie” style and he was wearing a sharp pointed silver lame bra with stiletto heels. Just as I was turning to my friend to criticize him the guy did flips head over heels from the stage to right in front of us. I looked at my friend and said, “I take back everything I just said.” It turned out he had a show in Vegas and he was just there visiting relatives. He was the best I’ve ever seen.

Todd heard sometime in 1992 that Kenneth had AIDS. He told the guy who told him, “You know, I’ve never really cared for Kenneth, but I hate to hear he has AIDS. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.” The next day Todd got a call from Kenneth chewing him out for spreading vicious rumors about him. In the summer of 1993 I went to visit Todd and we decided to have an impromptu party. We started calling everyone we knew Kenneth almost always got an invitation because he knew so many people. Once in 1981 at the annual Labor Day party we threw at Todd’s parent’s house on H Street I was opening a bottle of champagne for a friend. I said, “You want to see if I can hit Kenneth Ann with this?” He laughed and said, “Yes!” Kenneth was standing on the opposite side of the pool from where we were. The cork made a huge pop as I opened it and I’ll be damned if Kenneth didn’t turn and look right at me as the plastic cork sailed two inches above his head and landed in the grape arbor over the bar. I certainly didn’t score any points with him that night. As we made our calls we couldn’t get an answer at his house, so we called the furniture store where he worked. The girl there told Todd in a tearful voice that Kenneth was in Midland Memorial Hospital. We called his room and spoke with him. He suggested a couple of people we could call and said, “Here I aaam on my daythbed.” Todd said, “Now, now, that’s how rumors get started.” Kenneth died less than two months later. He was buried in a small town near Abilene and his parent’s didn’t put an obituary in the Midland paper until a month later because they were afraid his drag queen friends would show up and create a spectacle. His death was truly the end of an era.

SHADOW MAN

2010-02-22T16:58:00.001-08:00

In 1979, I rented a small guest house behind a larger house on West Illinois Street in Midland, Texas. It was small and quaint with a very nice yard, but I moved out in less than a year because I was bothered so much at night by dark shadow figures. Once I awoke with the feeling that someone was standing over me and when I opened my eyes a dark shadow figure was standing beside my bed bending down to look at me then it vanished. While in the house I constantly felt as if someone was standing behind me, or I'd see a shadow walk across an open door. Another night I awoke to find a shadow standing at the foot of my bed. This one backed into a corner and squatted down as if it were trying to hide from me. It was so solid looking I turned the on the lamp beside my bed to see who it was, but no one was there. My cat slept at the food of my bed in cold weather and one night she woke me up growling at something. They never did me any harm, but I did feel like they were getting stronger. I had only mentioned it to my mother who thought it was because I'd just started taking Valium. I had a dream one night that the sheets on my bed were billowing in the air and making flapping noises. I woke myself up holding out my left hand to make them stop only to realize they weren't moving.
I finally broke down and told a friend on the phone about them and before I could get to the part about the sheets he said, "Oh, don't worry about it. As long as you don't hear wings flapping in your room you'll be OK." I got chills, and asked him what he was talking about? He said, "Wings flapping in your room are signs of demons." I was speechless and a tear ran down my cheek. Two weeks earlier a guy at work walked into my office and handed me a book. His wife had asked him to give it to me because she was worried about me. I barely knew the woman, but the book was about demons trying to possess people. I moved out soon after that.

I had no idea other people had seen anything like that and once in the mid eighties I saw an episode of the "New Twilight Zone" about "The Shadow Man". It scared me so bad I almost passed out. I've never seen them again and I pray I never do.