cars

When I was 18 years old I was a freshman in a Southern California College. I did not have a car.

Being a California college student without a car is like being a Sherpa without a mountain. It's like being Benihana without a knife.

I bought my first car from the guy across the hall in the dorm for $200. I guess I should have been a little suspicious of the deal. He smoked so much marijuana it leaked around the edges of his doorway into the hall. He smoked so much, he liked the food in the dining hall. He said the car was a classic. In fact, it was an old Corvair. Corvairs were Chevrolet’s experiment in the compact car market. It had a rear engine that was air cooled and used about as much motor oil as it did gasoline. I drove it for six months and then sold it for $50. I figured I got out cheap, without having to buy a controlling interest in Pennzoil. And without having to prove that Ralph Nader was right and it was unsafe at any speed.

My second car was an AMC Gremlin. Automobile industry rumors claim that AMC was desperate to enter the small car market quickly. So they chopped the back off of the Rambler and voila… they had a Gremlin. Although it looked a little funny, mine was orange with black stripes, it had plenty of power and drove me everywhere I wanted to go for two years. In 1974 while driving back to college with my friend John, I felt a little sleepy and asked him if he would drive. He was eager. Maybe a little too eager. We got back on the freeway with a bit more energy than necessary. Rather than merging into the right-hand lane, we slid like a skater on the ice, through the first lane into the second and third and fourth. We were hit once and spun, then twice and spun again, then three times…and by then I stopped counting. The miracle was nobody was killed. Nobody was even seriously injured. I banged up my right knee, said goodbye to the Gremlin and counted my blessings.

The third car in my trifecta of disasters, was a Ford Pinto. I know what you’re thinking: he had a death wish. No I just didn’t have any money and these were the cars Americans were eager to unload. Oddly enough I drove the Pinto for five years. No explosions; no fiery deaths. Once again I consider myself blessed. By the time that Pinto and I were finished with each other, it refused to climb hills going forward. Do you know how embarrassing it can be to say to your date, “we need to turn around here so I can back up the hill”?

I’m grateful to have survived my first three cars. My brother teases me saying ‘when it comes to Ron and his cars, the color is more important than what's under the hood’. Can you blame me? Who wants to die in an unattractive car?

From Death to Pride

In the early 1980s, I was a very inexperienced and untested gay man. My work as a hospital chaplain led me to conduct funeral services for a number of families that I didn't know very well. So I came to be familiar with funeral homes and funeral home directors. My favorite funeral home director was a man, originally from Oklahoma, who dressed well and spoke very nicely. Darryl was about 10 years older than I and came from poor beginnings. He was not the first Oklahoman to come to California seeking a better life. My grandmother had done the same thing 60 years earlier. Darryl was good at his job, and knew what information I needed to do mine. So, we got along well and I respected his professional assistance.
One day in the middle of June, Daryl asked me if I would like to come to the Los Angeles Gay Pride Parade with him and his partner. I’d never been to a gay pride parade before. I wondered how he knew I was gay. Obviously, I’d never heard of gaydar. With some trepidation I said, “sure”.

It was a bright, warm June day when I showed up at his three-bedroom home in North Hollywood. His partner, Bob, was a tidy looking brown-haired man, also from Oklahoma. I learned they had been together for 15 years and had built a community of friends in the San Fernando Valley. Their small home was tastefully appointed, (wouldn’t you know), and their yard was carefully trimmed and verdant. I don’t know what I was expecting, but I was surprised to discover their scene was so domestic and middle-class.
We made our way to the parade site in West Hollywood, merging with hundreds of men and women, to stand along the sidewalk four and five deep. On this warm, sunny day I smiled to discover I was surrounded by scores of gorgeous, shirtless men. Had the parade never happened; I still would have been happy.

But the parade did happen, and it was great! The Gay men’s chorus singing. The Hollywood cheerleaders cheering. And floats with scantily clad men and women, dancing with abandon. I’d been to a lot of parades in my life, but never one like that.
Today, as I look back 25 years, I'm grateful to Daryl and Bob for gently introducing me to the larger gay community. In retrospect, I'm aware how innocent and gleeful that parade was. There was no awareness of AIDS; there was no specter of death hanging over the revelry- aside from the fact that I was standing next to a mortician.

Friends Indeed

A neighborhood can be something like cracker jacks: some sweetness, some crunch, and a surprise in every box. Our realtor called us from our new neighborhood on a Friday evening.
“Can you hear that?” he asked out of nowhere. I heard nothing but the breeze on the other end of the line. “I don’t hear anything Steve.”
“Exactly! You asked for a quiet neighborhood and I’ve found it for you. Can you come tonight and look at a house that goes on the market tomorrow?”
Unfortunately, we’d found it necessary to move during one of California’s hot real estate markets. We searched every neighborhood that might have anything we could afford. We made offers on two places, only to be out-bid at the last moment. We had the uncomfortable feeling that the market was rapidly outpacing our ability to buy anything at all. We almost made an offer on a tiny house with no closets and a bathroom out back, like the Clampetts might have. And we seriously considered a nice ranch style house that was clinging to the edge of a canyon rim.
During the five months we were looking for a house, we lived in a small one bedroom apartment, Tom and I and our dog, Skip, a 13 lb terrier-mix full of vigor. Clearly Skip was the one who got the short end of the stick with that drab little apartment. Although Tom and I slept on the floor and sat on boxes to eat, we did get to go to work every day, but Skip stayed in the apartment without a yard, just staring at the same four walls. I guess a little acting out on his part was to be expected. So he tore holes in the bedroom carpet, thinking, I suppose as most dogs do, when all else fails, dig. Then he chewed off the molding around the front door. Since we were poor, and all our tools were in a moving company warehouse somewhere, we had to improvise the repairs. The carpet required that we say uncle and pay for the damage. But for the door, I bought a tub of spackle and used a plastic table knife to apply it in place of the molding. When I was finished it looked more like wedding cake than molding, but a coat of paint can cover a multitude of sins. All three of us were past ready to move when Steve finally came through.
As Tom and I discovered the evening Steve called, the house was a 1947 Cape Cod style home on a third of an acre. Tastefully redone by the handsome young couple that was selling, it was the best thing we had seen in our price range in three months of our excruciating search. Our offer was accepted, and at their request, we agreed to a three-month escrow, so they would have time to pack up and move across the country. We must have been crazy, or desperate. Another three months in that little apartment with Skip would push us to our limit. The only way we survived was to pack up the pooch every evening after work and park across the street from our new home. Where we sat in the car, it was as dark as devil’s food cake with fudge frosting. Fortunately our new neighbors never called the police to report two peepers and their dog casing the neighborhood in an old Honda.
On move-in day, our friend Richard came to help. Richard is one of those very handsome Connecticut Gays, who knows how to look good sitting around, smoking and drinking. I really wasn’t sure how hard he would work on a moving job but we were new in town and didn’t have many options. As it turned out he was fabulous. In four hours the three of us and the moving van guys had the truck completely unloaded, dishes unpacked and put away, beds made, and cocktails prepared.
Tom wants to know what this fetish I have with books is all about. We moved out of our former house before Christmas and put all our possessions in storage. We packed up 58 boxes of books. 52 boxes were mine. I find it difficult to rid myself of books. I had children’s books from my early days, the Hardy Boys and Babar the Elephant. I had college textbooks in economics and the history of theatre. I had 16 different Bibles. I always figured owning a bible was the next best thing to actually reading one. I had books of instructions for operating electronics, the same electronic components I’d thrown out years before. I had books on the psychology of hording. We found places in the new house for 25 boxes of the books. The rest we donated to various libraries and bookstores. For what we spent to purchase, move and store each book, we’d been more generous than the Carnegies.
This new house was on an immense corner lot. Someone in the past forty years had cultivated an orchard in the huge backyard. Now, many years later, there was one naval orange tree still standing and nine stumps scattered around. We heard stories from the neighbors that it had once been a beautiful grove wih a giant walnut tree, a fig tree, a lime tree, and various others, now represented only by their stumps and volunteer shoots coming from some. We learned from neighbors that one of the previous owners of our new house had petitioned the city to subdivide the property. Neighbors reportedly objected to the loss of this grove from their neighborhood, so the city rejected the homeowner’s petition. In the throes of his bitter disappointment, and to spite these neighbors who stood in the way of his plans, he cut down all the trees.
A couple of mornings after moving in, I was examining the ancient wire fence separating our new property from the neighbor’s. It was an overcast morning; ‘May gray’ was how it was described in coastal Southern California. The morning was absolutely quiet, except for the sound of a faraway lawn mower and some Mocking Birds high on the phone lines overhead. I nearly jumped out of my shoes when a nearby voice cut the quiet with a “Good Morning!”
Soon enough I identified the source of the voice as an elderly little woman, about 5 feet tall, standing inside a lath structure in the yard next door
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you,” she added.
She reminded me of my grandmother right away, a little blue haired dynamo in a house dress and work boots.
“Did you just move into the Lambroso house?”
“Um..yeah…we just moved in here but I don’t think they were named Lamb...what did you call them?” I leaned gingerly against a most unreliable looking fence post in front of me.
“Oh of course, the Lambroso’s lived here years ago. My name’s Ruth, Harry and I have lived here since 1939.”
Wow. Over fifty years in the same house. “Pleased to meet you, I’m Ron, my partner’s Tom.”
“Welcome to the neighborhood. Harry was a City Planner when this neighborhood was laid out. It’s not common to find lots this big within the city limits, and the soil here is much better than you’ll find in most of San Diego.”
In the months that followed, Ruth proved to be a sweetheart who brought us persimmons from her tree, and Harry turned out to be a 300-pound curmudgeon who drank a lot and then yelled at his diminutive wife. Harry had been an award-winning horticulturist, and at one time the long lath buildings had been filled with exotic plants. But years of cardiac disease and diabetes made it impossible for him to pursue his passion. His disappointment appeared to be of tragic proportions.
Our little Skip was ecstatic to have a yard again, finally, and such a big yard, he thought he’d died and gone to heaven. Unfortunately this version of heaven was infested with fleas. The fleas presented only a minor distraction for him. He’d bark at the side gate and then run at breakneck speed to the other side of the house and bark some more, stopping from time to time to scratch furiously and then continue his circuit. Since our new house was on a corner, the front and the side of the property were facing streets, so Skip could bark at cars and pedestrians on both streets, giving him ample opportunity to demonstrate his worth as a vital link in the security chain protecting our corner of heaven.
Across the street to the south lived a single woman of some indeterminate age over sixty who was fond of leaning out her back door and calling for her cat by singing at the top of her lungs “oh where oh where has my pussy gone, oh where oh where can she be?” About twice a month a plumber’s truck would park at the curb of the house of the singing cat-lady and remain there over night. The plumber was a skinny man who was well past his prime and smoked too many cigarettes. While the two of them seemed to be an unlikely match, we could make a pretty good guess that he was not there to get her cat un-stuck from the toilet.
Across the street to the east lived another male couple, Jim and Henry. They had moved from Chicago several years previously and had a swimming pool in their back yard. They told stories of grand pool parties with lots of nearly naked nubile young men; picture Rock Hudson’s place on a smaller scale. For some reason they stopped throwing those parties soon after we moved to the neighborhood. I tried not to take it personally. Next to them and directly across from us lived the Sinclair family, a Mom and Dad with four kids ranging in age from 8 to 17. They were known for their shouting matches, which could be heard all over the neighborhood. And, as they say, the fruit didn’t fall far from the tree in this regard. Mom shouted at Dad, Dad shouted at the kids, Sis shouted at her brothers, and the boys shouted at the dog.
Life settled into a happy rhythm for us on our little estate. We worked at our chosen fields of endeavor for long hours during the week and spent much of the weekend doing yard work and maintenance projects and improvements around the house. We had casual conversations with our neighbors on the sidewalk; we had some of the neighbors over for dinner on Christmas Eve. We were quite pleased to have found such a friendly, albeit quirky neighborhood. Or so we believed.
After our tenure in the neighborhood had passed the one-year mark, I woke up one Saturday morning anticipating a cup of French roast from our new coffee maker. But while opening the front door to pick up the newspaper, I noticed a broken raw egg on the front step, and some lettering in a white foam or cream of some sort. I had to step over the mess on the top step in order to face the house and read the lettering. To my horror, the white cream spelled out: “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. Die Fags!”
Needless to say, I was shocked, and a little scared. I looked up and down the street but saw no one out this early.
“What’s going on?” Tom joined me at the front door in his bathrobe.
“Someone…” I couldn’t say any more. I just pointed to the desecration of our sanctuary.
Tom stepped over the mess and looked up and down the street as I had. He looked at me, looked back down at the damage, then stepped over it again on his way back into the house. “I’m calling the police, don’t let anyone touch it.”
My mind thinks unusual things under stress. I wondered who he thought might touch it. Oh, he was afraid I might hose it off in a sudden and uncharacteristic burst of cleanliness. No, not I. I was mesmerized; by the way the egg was drying, and the way the shaving cream (which is what I had come to believe the white foam to be) was developing a crust.
Tom returned dressed and with a camera. He snapped a half dozen photos from different angles. “They’re sending a patrol car.”
Within a few minutes they arrived, two police cars, not just one. The officers dismounted and joined us on the front walk. They listened to our story and viewed the scene of the crime.
“I understand how alarming it is, to have your property defiled. In 99% of these cases the damage is done by kids who think they’re being smart and pose no serious threat”. The officer was in his early twenties and handsome in his crisp, clean uniform. I had to focus to absorb what he was saying rather than wonder how he kept that neat, straight crease down the front of his pant legs. The other officer was female and excused herself to get a camera out of the trunk of her patrol car. They were in the process of creating a photographic record of the crime, when neighbors began gathering to find out what was happening. Jim and Henry came over and were as upset as we to discover the nature of the offense. Henry is a very expressive person, and the advantage of having such a friend on an occasion such as this is he will act out the feelings that a repressed type like I am won’t uncover for hours, sometimes days. When he saw the writing on our step, Henry gasped and put both hands over his mouth, murmuring something in French like: “Mon Dieu! Horrible!”
Ruth came over from next-door and just shook her head sadly. Mr. Sinclair came over from across the street and looked at the writing on our step. Then he began a conversation with one of the officers.
I must have looked even worse than I felt. I had thrown on an old t-shirt and paint spattered sweat pants. I was unshaven, which makes me look homeless, and still had pillow hair from a night’s sleep. Henry came over and put his arm around my shoulders.
“I just want you to know we won’t sit still for this.”
“Thanks Henry.”
I didn’t know what he meant by it, but I was comforted. “Do you think Skip is in danger from someone who would do this kind of thing?” Jim and Henry had two cocker spaniels who were members of the family to them like Skip was to us. I knew he would understand my protective concern.
“You’re always home when he’s in the yard, right?” I nodded in assent.
“I think he’s safe, and he knows how to fend for himself pretty well.”
Several other neighbors came by, and learned the particulars of the shaving cream threat. All were aghast and troubled it could happen in our quiet, friendly neighborhood.
The officers came back to our yard to speak with us. “We’ve discovered that the perpetrator was the 12 year old who lives across the street. His father found the empty shaving cream can in the trash and the kid admitted it right away when confronted.”
“What kind of sentence will he get?” I wondered out loud, enjoying an image of him in my mind’s eye living out the rest of his days in a cell at Alcatraz.
“It’s a misdemeanor for a minor. He and a parent will be required to attend a class at police headquarters. I’ve also given him a strong warning.”
Tom responded, “Thank you officer, you’ve been very thorough and we appreciate it.” Reluctantly, I said goodbye to the handsome officer and closed the door.
Tom went out and hosed down the scene of the crime. Some of the paint came off where the egg had been but aside from that spot there was no lingering damage. Except for the spot in my memory occupied by the hurtful words,
Twenty minutes later the doorbell rang. When we answered we found, standing on the step just recently rinsed clean, the father from across the street, Mr. Sinclair, and his 12-year-old boy, trying to shrink into his own shoes.
The father spoke first. “Seth has something he wants to say to you.”
After a tense moment of silence, he nudged the kid who spoke while looking down, “ImsoryI ploddydoddymumbledumbledop.”
The father nudged him again, “You can do better than that”.
The boy finally looked up and we saw his face. “I’m sorry I messed up your property.”
He looked so pitiful. I wondered, fleetingly, if he’d been practicing that look in the mirror before walking over.
“Thanks for apologizing. Those words you wrote were very hurtful to us.” I know I was sounding like I was talking to a six-year-old, but it was the best I could do on short notice. “I hope we can say hello to each other when we pass on the sidewalk.” By this time I was hoping someone would end this uncomfortable conversation and save me from any more insipid platitudes.
“We’ll go home now. Sorry again.” The boy’s father saved us all from any further conversation.
They went back across the street and we closed the door. We looked at each other as if to say “Could this day get any more odd?”
Of course, the answer was ‘yes’. Within a few minutes the doorbell rang again. When I answered this time it was the boy’s mother, Mrs. Sinclair, standing alone at our door. It was clear she had been crying, and she started crying again as soon as she spoke. “I’m so, so sorry for Seth’s behavior. I don’t know where he got such a hateful idea.” By this point it was becoming difficult to understand what she was saying as she continued to sob and dab at her eyes and nose with a tissue. I’m glad Tom joined me at the door because I never could have described this.
She continued, “My parents were labor leaders, very liberal people, Seth’s behavior is so far from what our family values. I’m flabbergasted, I’m humiliated. If you want us to move from this neighborhood we will.”
I considered her suggestion for a second. Fortunately Tom spoke up, “That won’t be necessary. Just get your boy some help.”
“Oh thank you, we will, and I’m so sorry.” She backed down the steps as we saw Henry coming toward us from across the street.
“Wasn’t that the mother of the little felon?” Henry had a sheet of daffodil yellow paper in his hand. “
“What have you got there?” I inquired in my own nosy style.
“I want to get your permission to distribute these around the neighborhood”.
Henry showed us a flyer he’d made on his computer that said: “A hate crime has been perpetrated in our neighborhood. If you will stand with all of us against hate, please turn on your porch light and let it shine through the night.”
“Oh Henry, that’s very kind of you.” And I hugged him. We learned later that he printed and distributed 300 copies to houses in the neighborhood.
We also learned later that, after Mr. Sinclair read one of the flyers, he turned on his porch light and it popped and burned out. Weird. He brought a stepladder out and replaced the bulb.
At about 9 that night, Tom suggested we go for a walk to see if any porch lights were on. We started out, arm in arm, and noticed the lights on along our street, at the homes of Jim and Henry, the Sinclairs, the cat-lady, and Ruth and Harry. As we walked further through the dark, we saw the porch light was on at every house in our block, as well as every house in the next block. For forty minutes we walked, and never saw a house without the porch light on. We walked along in silence, arm in arm, with tears in our eyes. What had begun the day as a bad dream was ending in an unexpected embrace by these neighbors, these friends.