Category: Remembering

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He Would’ve Been 66 Today

Steve Golden

I first became aware of Steve’s presence one night while my friend Kent and I were dancing at a bar called Maggie’s (or Moon’s Truck or His Co. Disco, depending upon what year it was and who you talked to) in Phoenix, one Friday or Saturday night in late 1978 or early 1979. I glanced up to the DJ booth and caught the eye of a handsome stranger, someone whom I’d never seen there before, and someone who elicited the strangest feelings from me. I seem to remember Steve smiling at me and thinking, “Do I know this man? He certainly looks familiar. It must be someone from Tucson.” But it was more than that. There was a familiarity, an affection, a feeling that I knew this man on a level unlike any other I’d felt to that time that washed over me. That feeling, though having been mimicked in subsequent years by other men in my life, has never been equaled in intensity to that first time Steve Golden and I locked eyes.

While we were dancing, I asked Kent to check the guy out and tell me if it was indeed, someone from Tucson since he had lived in Tucson far longer than I had. Kent looked up to the booth and said he’d never seen him in Maggie’s before, and most certainly never in Tucson.

And so began the saga.

It wasn’t until March of 1979 that I actually met Steve. I think it was a Saturday, and for some reason the 10th comes to mind, but don’t hold me to that.

It was a fairly lazy afternoon, and Kent and I decided to head to Metrocenter (one of the first mega-malls in Phoenix, now closed and scheduled for demolition). We were walking past an athletic shoe store (I believe it was called “Jox”), and we both saw Steve, who was hard at work helping customers. Needless to say, we walked into the store. Steve immediately recognized us—especially Kent—who’d spent much more time at the bar than I had. Kent introduced me and we shook hands. I don’t remember any of the conversation, but I do remember that during the following week, I headed down to Maggie’s Tuesday night because Steve had mentioned that he was working that evening.

Time has shrouded the facts surrounding our first evening together at the bar; eleven-some years (when I initially wrote this in my Journal) and now forty four (!) has done a lot to erase the details, but I remember arriving early and chatting at length with him before he started work. It’s embarrassing to admit at this point in my life, but in my 20s I was basically living my life (or at least, living my relationships) by astrology and I asked Steve if he’d ever had his chart done. He was a little skeptical at first, but I explained that it was something I did, and that I’d be interested in doing it for him. He gave me his birth information which I quickly scribbled on a scrap of paper from my wallet.

By this point it was time for him to start work, so he said goodbye and headed up to the booth. Not really having any reason to remain at Maggie’s further (I must have gone there with the sole intention of talking to Steve), I headed home to start work on his horoscope.

I remember that Mercury was retrograde at the time and Kent chided me no end for attempting to cast a chart under those conditions—never mind beginning a relationship, because that’s what it was. I remember it took me at least two tries to get the calculations correct.

I returned to the bar a week later with the chart in hand.

Upon my arrival, I met Steve and gave him the typed reading. I remember being taken up into the booth (the first of what was to be many times over the following years), and the rush I felt when I was invited into the inner sanctum. He asked me what the chart said. (It’s odd, but people generally do that, even when handing them a written printout.) I mentioned that among other things, that he was very uncomfortable in large crowds. He said that was true; that’s why he enjoyed being up in the booth so much, above it all. A bit later when we’d gotten off the subject of astrology and onto the subject of music, I mentioned to Steve that I’d been having a very hard time finding the version of Let Them Dance by an artist called D.C. LaRue that I’d heard played in the bar. I must have told him I’d bought the album and the version it contained was decidedly different, because he immediately pulled out a 12″ single and handed it to me, telling me I could have it in thanks for the work I’d done for him.

It was shortly thereafter that he said I’d have to leave the booth; Jack (the head DJ) was due in at any moment or some such, and he frowned upon people being in the booth. Considering the amount of drug use that routinely occurred in that—and subsequent booths where Steve and Jack were jointly employed—it is quite understandable.

Over the next several weeks our friendship started to grow. I was taken up to  the booth on several more occasions and remember one time in particular I gave Steve a pair of earplugs. He asked if these were to wear at home so he wouldn’t have to listen to his partner Tom’s rantings. I told him no, that they were to protect his hearing while at work. (I’d discovered, quite by accident, that I could understand the lyrics to most of the songs while at the bar if I wore earplugs — not to mention saving myself from that awful ringing in my ears that would often last till the next morning!) He laughed it off but thanked me anyway.

As time went by, I became increasingly aware of the tensions between Steve and his lover. Being the naive twenty-year-old that I was (Steve was 21), I thought I would be able to whisk Steve away from all that and give him something more. What I didn’t understand at the time was that Steve actually seemed to enjoy that kind of interaction with Tom. They’d been together three years at the point that I met him—and were together an additional four years before finally breaking up.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I started work at Hallcraft Homes during 1979. They had an older gentleman working there as a courier who would go to the various job sites and make pickups and deliveries. Something happened—I think he went into the hospital—and Hallcraft needed a new delivery person in a hurry. Steve had just been laid off from Jox (the store was closing), so I told him of the opening. He came down, interviewed, and was hired. That’s when the chemistry really started between us—and apparently Tom started viewing me as a major threat to their relationship.

I was in love with Steve. There are no bones about it. I adored the man. There was a bond between us that seemed to transverse space and time. Many months earlier I had told him that I felt I had known him from another life. He admitted feeling a certain familiarity when we first met that he couldn’t explain. Not a believer in metaphysical things, he wouldn’t go so far as to agree to a past-life collaboration, but then again, he couldn’t come up with any other explanation.

My record collection was steadily growing with the help of Mr. Golden. And I was responding by giving him paintings. During the one-and-only time he was in my house, he mentioned how much he liked the painting I had hanging over my bed (“Not Even Death Shall Part Us”). Remembering that, I did a variation of that theme and gave it to him sometime later. I gave him one other, but unfortunately, because of Tom’s innate jealousy, Steve kept the paintings in the basement of the Hallcraft building where he worked and when he left their employ, he forgot they were there. By the time that I’d questioned him as to their whereabouts it was far too late to retrieve them. God only knows where they are now, and I can’t help but wonder if they will eventually find their way to the bottom of a public landfill or into the hands of an esoteric art collector — and eventually onto the walls of some hallowed museum long after I’ve left this planet.

Anyway, by way of Steve’s generosity, I now had dozens of “Not for Resale” 12-inch singles and albums (a good many of which were impossible to purchase commercially, and an equal number which would never make it commercially). There was one evening in particular I remember because he gave me an album that turned out to be quite a surprise.

I had been pestering Steve for weeks to get me a copy of Heaven Must Have Sent You by Bonnie Pointer. What he inadvertently gave me instead was a copy of Hott City, a record and group I’d never heard of (one of the very few records that survived my massive vinyl purge in 1988, a story for another time). I took it out to the car, slid it out of the jacket and discovered it was pressed on white vinyl. While it wasn’t what I’d asked for, the fact that it was pressed on white vinyl more than made up for it. I went back inside and told Steve that it wasn’t Bonnie Pointer that he’d given me and that apparently he’d gotten my request confused with someone else’s. It was probably the only time I can honestly say that Steve was pissed off at me—and rightly so for being so ungrateful. Adding insult to injury, I mentioned that the album was white vinyl.  Since not even his copy was white, he wanted me to bring it back. Childishly I refused, saying something like, “No, I think I’ll keep it.”

It’s amazing that he even spoke to me again after that incident, but at the same time it was really no surprise after I discovered the depth of Steve’s compassion and forgiveness during a rather unpleasant incident at Hallcraft several months later. This particular incident came about because of my own insecurities, pure and simple. I loved the man, and though he may have felt the same way (at that time I didn’t know for sure) he wasn’t showing me in a way that registered and I felt it had to be put to the test.

What a dolt I was—the man was giving me at least 25% of the recordings he himself received from the record companies, and yet I couldn’t see that was his way of telling me how much he cared for me. I suppose that’s why they say hindsight is always 20/20.

Anyway, one afternoon Steve came into my office with a whole box of new records that he’d received and wanted me to have. I’d reached the end of my rope with him for never uttering a single “I love you Mark” and decided the only way I could show him that I was upset was to return the entire box to him and not speak to him for a while. It was difficult, to say the least, to maintain this silence, and looking back on it now, it was probably a stupid thing to do, but for better or worse, it elicited the kind of response I wanted. After a week of not speaking, I delivered a letter to him down in the basement of the building. We agreed to meet for lunch later that week to discuss things.

Our lunch was at Café Casino, a small French chain restaurant near to work. My stomach was doing somersaults all morning, so it came as a great relief when lunchtime finally arrived and we walked over to the restaurant.

In the letter I’d told Steve that I loved him. He told me over lunch that he loved me as well, but that Tom was number one in his life. And while their relationship wasn’t ideal, Tom was helping him with so many things he needed to work on, that there was no way he was going to leave him.

Just to hear Steve say that yes, he did love me, was enough. We both shed a few tears at our new found understanding. And, smiling, I asked if I could still have that box of records.

The winds of change hit Hallcraft. My dad (who hired me) and I both found ourselves out of work. I took a couple weeks to lay out in the sun and relax before hitting the pavement again. It was during this time I decided I was going to try and find something else to do besides architecture (since architectural drafting jobs were few and far between at the time). I eventually started working as a legal messenger for Lewis & Roca, Attorneys at Law.

To sum up, it was shortly after I started working there that the other messenger I worked with was promoted to some other position in the company, and again, a firm I worked for was in dire need of a messenger. At some point between the time I started to work for L&R and the time this need arose, Steve was fired from Hallcraft. (Supposedly he was caught with his pants down at a public toilet in Papago Park. Oops.)

Anyway, I called him and told him another job was available if he wanted it. And so our relationship continued, albeit much different than at Hallcraft. For starters, our supervisor, Bette Jones, was a lesbian—and she had us clocked from the beginning. Let’s just say we all had a wonderful “understanding.” (It was 1980 after all.) My relationship with Steve deepened, and while Steve still wasn’t getting along well with Tom, I had pretty much abandoned all hope of snatching him away.

By August of that year, I was headed back to Tucson. I’d met a boy there at the end of June, and while it ultimately didn’t last more than a couple months, it was the impetus that finally got me moved out of my parents’ house and on my own. Steve stayed on at L&R for three more years.

My relocation to Tucson did nothing to lessen my feelings for Mr. Golden, but being a hundred miles away and becoming involved in my own newfound adventures, it was impractical to do anything save write an occasional letter. At first I didn’t get many responses from Steve, save for an occasional list of his “Top 10” songs from the bar and a hastily scribbled “everything’s great” note. But it was sometime in 1981 or 1982, long after I’d met Dennis (my first partner) and we’d moved in together that the letters from Steve started arriving.

I tried to track down those cards and letters when I originally wrote this in 1990, but was unsuccessful. I’d hoped to be able to quote extended passages here instead of trying to pluck them from memory. I’d removed them from their repository several months prior, and remember putting them somewhere when I’d finished with them, certainly not to their normal place among my others cards and letters—knowing full well that I’d never remember where I put them. True to form, I couldn’t seem to lay my hands on them. I know eventually I did find them and put them somewhere safe, but god only knows where they are now after the fire. (Reasonably sure they’re in our storage unit, but I’m not going to go to the effort of trying to find them.)

To sum up the thrust of those cards and letters in one sentence as Steve so aptly did, was to say, “I love you. You’re special in my life and no one can ever change that.”

Dennis and I drove up to Phoenix several Friday or Saturday nights during our time together. We both were in dire need of new music, and I wanted to see Steve, so the four-hour round trip seemed justified. Even now some of my fondest memories of Dennis surround our late night/early morning trips back to Tucson in driving rain or bitter cold.

Dennis and I had discussed at length the subject of soulmates, and Dennis had felt that Steve and I—not he and I—shared that dubious distinction. How would I know? Dennis wasn’t sure, other than to say that sooner or later I’d get a sign.

The moment that sign appeared obviously stands out in my memory. Dennis and I had driven to Phoenix one Friday night, arriving at Steve’s new venue, Hotbods. It was the “replacement” for Maggie’s, opened several months after the neighbors surrounding Maggie’s succeeded in having it shut down. Anyway, that night, I’d given Steve several blank cassettes so he could tape for me during the evening. It was my first exposure to the music of Patrick Cowley, and I was in heaven. Later on that evening, Steve came over the P.A. and said, “Mark, this is for you.” He then proceeded to play We are One by Paradise Express. I looked up at him and the tears started streaming from my eyes. It was the sign. He just stood there with that inscrutable smile on his face, looking down at me. It was shortly thereafter that Dennis and I decided to drive back to Tucson. We caught Steve’s attention and after putting another song on, came down to wish us goodbye. He handed me the tapes he’d made, kissed me, and said that he loved me.

Needless to say, I was flying all the way home and for several weeks afterward.

It was sometime after this that Dennis and I went through our trial separation, with him heading off to Texas to find himself, and me remaining in Tucson to get back in touch with my own self. It was during this time that my relationship with Steve reached a level of intensity and sharing that I would have found unbelievable even two years earlier.

We started a regular correspondence, and I made that trip to Phoenix more and more frequently, staying overnight with my grandparents in Sun City. Steve made many more tapes of new music for me, but none meant as much to me as the one containing the Paradise Express song (even though his dedication did not show up on the tape). Funny thing is, I no longer have any of those tapes he made, and have no idea what happened to them. Anyway, things between Steve and Tom had reached a new level of disharmony, and we both expected divorce to be imminent. It was during the spring of 1983 that Steve and I actually started discussing the possibility of becoming lovers after he made the split with Tom. It made my heart go pitter-patter, and I convinced myself of the inevitability of this course of action. Unfortunately, I was proven wrong. (And looking back over the course of events in my life since that time, I can only say, “Thank God!”) The following summer Steve and Tom resolved their differences, Dennis came back from Dallas (at my urging), and he and I relocated from Tucson back to Phoenix so he could attend ASU.

It seemed that upon my return to Phoenix, however, that Steve became…distant. His first love (who was not Tom as I’d always assumed) had re-entered his life, breezing in from San Francisco one day and as they say, sucked all the oxygen out of the room. I suppose I’ll never know the details of what happened, but in November of 1983, only three short months after my return to Phoenix, Steve told me that he’d broken up with Tom, had gotten back together with his ex, and was moving to San Francisco.

I was devistated. Had I been led along the primrose path all those years? I don’t think so. What I think happened was that Steve was feeling too much pressure—from Tom, from work, from his situation at Hotbods, and not least of all, from me—and his ex represented an escape; a return to simpler times. I really can’t blame him. Faced with the same situation, I would have undoubtedly   done the same.

It was that telephone conversation in November that I last heard from Mr. Golden. I managed to track him down in San Francisco shortly after he’d arrived (he was listed in the phone book), and sent a few letters, but never received a reply. In 1985 I sent him a birthday card with “Address Correction Requested” imprinted on the envelope. It returned to me several weeks later with an address in Thousand Oaks. Again, I sent several letters, and still received only silence.

It was rather ironic learning that during his brief tenure in The City, Steve had lived just up the street from where I lived at the time, in the 800-block of 14th Street. It was an absolute wonder we never ran into each other.

Despite that prolonged silence, he still crept into my dreams now and then, and without fail I’d see his face, feel the love radiating and awake with a smile. I was finally able to get in touch with Tom (his last partner in Phoenix) sometime in the late 90s and learned that Steve had died from AIDS-related complications in January of ’91.

Do I regret the fact that Steve and I never became lovers? I can unequivocally say no, I don’t. Because the Steve saga—along with everything else that happened in my life prior to 2008—all happened to bring me to Ben. And I wouldn’t change that for anything.

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I Do Not

…but I do remember eating at a similar lunch counter at a local Phoenix apothecary—McCrary’s—in the mid 1960s with my mom.

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Buried Treasure

The other day we made a run to our rented storage unit to leave stuff we can’t have at the new domicile (mainly things we kept in the garage at the old place— because we no longer have a garage).

While there, I noticed a box that I knew contained the large framed portraits of the material great-grandparents; something that had hung over the sofa in our family’s living room for as long as I can remember. After my mom’s passing a decade and a half ago I acquired them with hopes of having them reframed and hung somewhere in my house. That never happened, so at some point there were thrown in that box along with a couple of my paintings and a rather graphic AIDS awareness poster from San Francisco…not touched again in the last decade. I elected to drag the box back to the house with us with the intention of giving them to my sister who I knew would appreciate having them far more than I (even without reframing) and find a place to display them in her home.

After she’d come by and picked them up, I was about to haul the box out to the trash, but it seemed heavy for just a box of it size. I reached down into the box and squealed. There was a roll of 18″ x 24″ architectural drawings at the bottom.

Carefully unrolling them on the coffee table, they brought out a curious mix of emotions. I remembered making each and every one of them, but I’d assumed that they were long gone; lost years ago during one move or another.

Once upon a time I knew how to draw by hand—without a computer—a complete set of plans to build a house, a testament to just how much skill and knowledge I’ve lost since abandoning the architectural profession. I knew how the framing went together, the thicknesses, heights, and widths of various building materials, as well as how a window or door were set and anchored into a wall and what kind of flashing and weatherstripping was required. I knew how to draw a wiring schematic, laying out switches, lights, and outlets. I knew how plumbing worked.

Although I’m sure all that knowledge is still locked away somewhere in the recesses of my mind, it’s definitely in cold storage and even if I were to take up the profession again tomorrow, I seriously doubt I’d be able to hit the ground running. (Plus, technology has changed a bit since the 90s.)

I almost want to get the lot of the drawings digitized for easy access; I may have to look into that once things settle down here. (In the meantime however, I will post some photographs in the next few days as a teaser of what all I found at the bottom of that box. Stay tuned.)

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Conga!

This has been my commute soundtrack for the past couple days. And like it always does, it took me back some 36 years.

Picture this: Tucson Arizona, 1986…

I was young, dumb, and full of…optimism…in a time of great upheaval.

Bernie—my partner of the previous two years—and I had split up. I’d just moved out of an apartment we’d been sharing with a friend, and into my own place.

A year earlier, Bernie and I had flown to San Francisco for a weekend. He had miles that needed to be used, but at the time we were on a shoestring budget and couldn’t afford for me to accompany him. When my friend Kekku heard this she said, “But you must see San Francisco!” and promptly wrote me a check.

We came back from The City infected. (No, not with that; with the city itself.) San Francisco had charmed us, seduced us, and planted the seeds of our eventual relocation. Suddenly Tucson had become black and white, while SF remained glorious technicolor.

At the time I was working as a senior architectural draftsman at the firm of Kim Acorn Associates for a little over a year. My partners in crime there were another Mark, Jerry, and most fascinating of the bunch, Kate.

Jerry being Jerry, and Mark

I lusted after Mark in the worst way. I imagined all manner of depraved (although looking back, not having lived in San Francisco yet, my definition of depravity was entirely too vanilla) things I could do to/with him. But sadly, he was straight, married, and unobtainable.

Kate—whom I sadly have no photos of—and I had each other clocked the moment I first walked into that workroom. She reminded me way too much of Large Marge from PeeWee’s Big Adventure. She smoked. She walked with a swagger. She drove a truck. For chrissake, she wore more flannel than I did.

She had a keen interest in astronomy, and owned a beautiful telescope that she would take out into the dark desert nights—and also carried a gun “for protection” during those forays into the wilderness. (“Javalina, y’know…”) She loved the same music I did and I helped her buy her first hi-fi stereo system.

Her grandmother had been a Sioux medicine woman and had taught her “the ways.” Our shared interest in all things otherworldly (both physical and otherwise)—not to mention our mutual overpowering dislike of several members of the firm we worked at—immediately bonded us.

I believe if I could’ve used today’s parlance back then, I would’ve called her my work wife…

It was at this time I bought my first portable CD player. Imagine! Portable! It was ridiculously expensive, bought on credit, and went pretty much everywhere with me. One of the first CDs I remember buying was Primitive Love. It became a big part of the soundtrack of my life that summer.

Though Bernie and I had separated by that point, our plans to move to San Francisco together remained in place. It was an amicable parting, so there was no reason to change them; to this day we remain good friends.

Things were slowing down at work. Kate and I both noticed that the amount of clients coming into the office was drastically declining. Since he knew of my eventual plans to relocate to SF, coupled with the downturn in business, it came as no surprise when I was called into my boss’s office around the first of July and was told that along with Kate and two other employees, they were letting me go. I remember starting to giggle and the guy looked at me and said, “That’s the strangest reaction I’ve ever gotten to telling someone they’re being laid off.” I shrugged my shoulders and replied, “The Universe is telling me to go to San Francisco now.”

And so I did. It took a couple weeks to make arrangements, but I left Bernie to house sit for the month or so I anticipated it would take me to find work, and loaded up my car and headed northwest. Our mutual friend Lee was already in SF; he’d accompanied us on a visit to The City the previous December and came back as smitten as we’d been. I’d be crashing with him at the home of a couple of his friends. It would be an adventure!

And quite an adventure it was. Another story for another time. “The City will chew you up and spit you out!” But suffice to say that nearly our whole gang had become San Francisco residents by October of that year.

I saw Kate briefly when I flew back to Tucson for Christmas. She had been having trouble finding work and wasn’t in the best head space. In January or February I got a strange phone call from her. She was in good spirits; decidedly better than she had been in when I saw her. She told me that she (in her own words, just to make it clear) had made a breakthrough; she “had decided she was a man trapped in a woman’s body” and was ready to do something about it. She had adopted the name Hawk, and asked if I knew of any place in San Francisco that could help her physically transition. After regaining my composure (where had this come from?) I told her I didn’t, but I knew enough even back then that before she went under the knife she’d have to go through months—if not years—of counseling, hormone therapy, and actually living the life of a man, and told her so.  Perhaps she could check with the Gay Students Organization at the University of Arizona? She said she would, and that was the last I heard from her. Subsequent attempts at reaching my work wife were unsuccessful. Her phone had been disconnected and mail went unanswered.

Every time I play Primitive Love think of Kate/Hawk and wonder if they had been successful in finding the inner peace and happiness they were seeking.

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So I’m WFH Today…

…and I have our local classical/NPR station playing in the other room.

The fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony came on, and I caught myself unconsciously singing along:

Freude, schöner Götterfunken,
Tochter aus Elysium,
Wir betreten feuertrunken,
Himmlische, dein Heiligtum,
Deine Zauber binden wieder,
Was die Mode streng geteilt;
Alle Menschen werden Brüder,
Wo dein sanfter Flügel weilt…

I “discovered” Beethoven’s Ninth in my sophomore (maybe Junior) year in High School, about the time I was getting good in German, and I was blown away. Until that point I’d never heard German sung, and here it was in all of Beethoven’s beautiful, bombastic beauty. I poured over those lyrics and committed them to memory; one of the few things from high school that remain to this day as clear as if they’d happened yesterday.

Shortly thereafter I discovered a German language recording of Handel’s Messiah during a trip to Circles Records downtown in the early 70s. Did I mention that at the same time I was hip deep in the German language I was also in the throes of teenage religious fervor?

I don’t remember how I obtained the recording; what I do remember was the three disk set was $30—a fortune at the time—meaning it was probably a Christmas gift from my parents. After my abandonment of any pretext of Christianity post Star Wars and my great vinyl purge of the early 90s, I’d completely forgotten about it.

But then one day about fifteen years ago or so, it popped into my head and I tracked down a CD reissue online somewhere and purchased it for old times’ sake. Much like Beethoven’s Ninth and its Ode to Joy, I’d listened to my vinyl copy so many times the German lyrics were forever burned into my memory, and my father once said if he “heard that infernal piece of music one more time his head would explode!” (Little did he know disco would invade our home just a couple years later!) The difference when I received the CD reissue was that the music prompted none of the religious ecstasy it did when I was in my teens and I could appreciate it simply for being the musical masterpiece it was.

I ripped Der Messias into iTunes before getting rid of most of my CD collection but I can honestly say I’ve not listened to it since.

(I may have to rectify that later today.)

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World AIDS Day

As is my tradition every December 1st, I remember…


Kent Kelly


Ken Cohen


Steve Golden


Dennis Shelpman


Jim Hagen


Chuck Krahe


Marty Kamner


Michael Nelson


Jim Nye


Kevin Ohm


Rick King


Ron Aiazzi


Grant Neilsen


Ric Hathaway


David Koston


Kim Holstein


Russ Alvarez

Ben Walzer
Ken Borg
Harold Gates
Jim Girard
Keith Roseberry
Tom Farrel
Peter Whitman
Chuck Mayer
Richard Gulliver
Scott Woods
Bobby Farina
Brian Lea
Fred Sibinic
Steve McCollom
John Trapp
Philip Ruckdeschel
Jerry Straughn

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Memories of a Family Road Trip

I ran across this photo online, and it brought back a lot of memories.

It took me back to late summer 1970, reminding me of my dad’s truck and a little camping trip my family made up north.

Obviously the picture above wasn’t the exact same vehicle, but it was similar:

I don’t actually remember where we went, but I have pictures the family took at Montezuma Castle, Sunset Crater, and the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. At this point I have no memories of any of that, other than all the places we went  seemed very distant from Phoenix. It’s funny because nowadays Ben and I think nothing of making that kind of road trip in a single day.

But I digress.

There are a couple things I remember from the trip. The first and foremost is the one evening I ventured outside to pee after we’d parked for the night and I saw the stars. This night sky was nothing like my backyard in suburban Phoenix. The sky was alive with dots of light. My mom did the same thing after I returned inside and she asked if I knew what the little dipper shaped constellation was called. (Keep in mind I had just gotten into astronomy and was learning the constellations; I hadn’t even gotten my first telescope yet.) “Uh, The Little Dipper?” I asked.

“No,” she replied. “I know that’s in the north. This is tiny. And it’s in the east.”

I argued with her like any pre-teen would, and finally grabbed my dad’s binoculars went back outside to prove her wrong. Shivering my ass off, I scanned the eastern sky and spotted it. She wasn’t crazy after all. I brought the binoculars to my eyes and was blown away by what I saw. I had “discovered” the Pleiades.

My love of astronomy was cemented.

The second thing I remember was riding in the camper as we were heading to our destinations—on the sleeper portion over the cab of the truck—without any sort of seatbelts! Ah…it was a different time, for sure.

And lastly, while riding up there, I remember pouring over Radio Shack catalogs. I was fascinated by all the electronic bits and pieces you could buy and although I never (and by never, I mean to this day) grasped the how and why of how it all worked, it held me in its grip.

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The Day Everything Changed

Today marks 59 years of people accepting that 1 bullet caused 7 wounds on 2 men.” – John Fugelsang


John F. Kennedy was assassinated 59 years ago today.
This is a wonderful picture of him, his smile showing his love of the open water.

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My Tales of the City – Very Relentless

It was August 1994. The previous two years had taken an emotional toll on me, first with Rory, then with Ron, and it seemed The City had lost much of the magic that had enchanted me upon my arrival nearly ten years earlier. I ached for a change and after returning from a trip to Tucson earlier that summer I started wondering if moving back to Arizona might be what the doctor ordered to cure this ongoing malaise.

After I returned from Tucson and the summer drew on, my dissatisfaction with The City increased. It seemed every aspect of daily life—from the panhandlers to the urine-soaked doorways to the daily commute from hell to the cost of everything—had become an annoyance, so it was a relatively easy decision to cast it all aside and return to the desert southwest.

Once I decided on that course of action, I gave a month’s notice at work and on my apartment with every intention of moving back to Arizona the second week of September, but ultimately it was not to be. At least not this time.

I’ve often said that The City is a very jealous mistress, and my attempts to leave during the next eight years only confirmed it. She does not easily let go of her lovers. And deep down, despite everything, I truly loved The City.

The Playground

The Saturday before I was scheduled to move, I needed a break from packing, so that evening I decided to head out one last time and get into trouble. Young, hung, and full of cum…or something like that. (Well, two outta three ain’t bad, right?)

I learned about The Playground from my friend Rick (or Miss K.C. Dare as he went by when on stage). With the demise of the 1808 Club a few years previous and not being one who cared for the tubs, I’d been missing the kind of wanton abandon a good old fashioned sex club provided. From Rick’s description, The Playground sounded perfect.

It was. There was something primal about the place, something that was very much liked to our deepest (and yes, I suppose darkest) sexual fantasies. I knew from the moment I stepped into the place that the owners had a gold mine on their hands if the only knew how to keep the ambience alive.

It was a converted warehouse, located on the north side of 17th Street between Folsom and Harrison. The building itself was at the far end of a large parking lot, all grey corrugated metal with yellow painted trim. At night there were two rotating yellow beacons located at the entrance, which was also a loading dock.

When you first entered, to the right was the admission area. When you passed  through that, you first entered the television and refreshment area. There were several sofas clustered about a lone TV. If continue toward the back and slightly to the left, the next area you encountered was the gloryhole space. It was a series of black painted cubicles surrounding a raised platform. Naturally, there were more than an ample number of holes drilled between the cubicles and the platform.

Immediately to the right of that area is what I referred to as “the Drive-In.” There was an English taxi of unknown vintage parked there that faced a large projection television that showed the same porn videos that were playing in the television area. Continuing back toward the rear of the building, you entered another area separated by separate separate cubicles. These cubicles had small holes drilled at eye level and surrounded another, smaller room, allowing you to look in and see what’s going on.

Continuing on toward the back of the building, you passed the dungeon on the left that contained a sling and other accountrements. On your right were the restrooms (and yes, they were used for play as well as for their intended function). Continuing down a set of stairs, there were three more spaces: the jail (four cells complete with bunks and stainless steel toilets), the “infirmary”, and a small room with a bed and a single lone light bulb. I remembered there was something very eerie and uncomfortable bout being in those two rear rooms, even if you were totally alone. I never lingered there.

And the soundtrack to this debauchery? It was The Pet Shop Boys‘ recently released Relentless half of Very/Relentless.

And as far as what exactly happened that night, let’s just say I came home a very satisfied man.

Melancholy Sets In

During what was ostensibly my last week in San Francisco, I took Wednesday off and ran errands that morning, noticing the fog spilling over Twin Peaks as I drove down Dolores Street. As I got out onto the 280 Freeway (I was heading to Target to get a cooler in which to transport my tropical fish), I realized that this was probably going to be the last time I was on that highway.

A certain melancholy descended upon me as my continued my errands, picking up items I knew I wouldn’t be able to find once I left Oz. By the time I returned home, I was severely depressed. I was just about ready to call it all quits and bail out of the move, but I realized I couldn’t. It was too late. I had to go through with it.

The next night I hooked up with an especially handsome man whom I’d met the prior Sunday while I was out washing my car in front of my building as one is wont to do in San Francisco. He was walking down the sidewalk. We locked eyes, and to my utter surprise he’d paused and started up a conversation. We had dinner and ended up in my bed. What was I doing? I was leaving the fucking city in less than a week, and here I was going on a date with an impossibly good looking man who seemed quite enchanted with me and expressed great disappointment that this was only going to be a one-night thing.

After he left, coupled with the doubts that reared themselves the day before, I found myself wondering why the hell I was leaving San Francisco. Was it really too late? During the weeks that led up to all of this, my friend Stan was fond of telling me it was never too late to change my mind. I wondered if he might be right.

I sat down to write in my journal later that evening, but didn’t get more than a paragraph completed. I’d started writing about everything that had happened that week: the unabashed lure of The Playground, meeting Peter, the realization that I really did have friends there who didn’t want me to leave,  the magic that continued to come into my life in various forms—and I wrote, “I can’t leave!” I broke down and cried.

And then, at a little past midnight, I made a decision. I wasn’t going anywhere. No matter what it cost, I was not going to say goodbye to my beloved San Francisco. The only problem was I was caught in a financial Catch-22. I had to leave my job in order to remain in San Francisco. I needed the severance money they were giving me in order to pay the two months rent I needed to stay in my apartment. I didn’t relish the idea of leaving the firm that had become my family over the previous eight years, but I also knew from my conversation with my boss a week earlier that staying on was probably not an option. No matter. It would force me to find a position doing more computer and less (hopefully much less) architecture.

What I wasn’t prepared for when I told him of my decision the next day was the fact that he wanted to keep me on—and would be willing to loan me the money to pay my rent so I could stay. Now that is something you just don’t find in today’s workplace.

I accepted.

Friday afternoon we closed the office early and I came home and started putting my apartment back together. IT was no easy talk, although the unpacking did go much more quickly than the packing had. By that evening the living room had pretty much been returned to normal. By dinner time on Saturday, the rest of the place was put away. Instead of driving down I-5 heading toward Los Angeles, I was busy putting my track lights (it was the 90s, after all) back up and reinstalling all the flat switches and electrical outlets I’d swapped out only days earlier.

Of course, it seemed like the moment I got resettled, all that magic disappeared like the fog burning off each morning.

Peter—who seemed at first so disappointed that I was leaving San Francisco—became cagey. After telling him I’d decided to stay, I tried several times to set up a second date but his excuse was always “too busy at the moment” to get together. I finally wrote him off. If there was one thing I learned through that whole transformative process of leaving and then at the last minute stepping back from the brink is that I no longer had time to waste with bullshit like that.

And the magic that was The Playground? It too dried up, although not as quickly. While I had one more magical night at the venue, it seemed with each subsequent visit, the quality of the clientele and the encounters themselves dropped precipitously until I reached the point where it was more satisfying to simply stay home and jerk off by myself.

And that is why I say San Francisco is a jealous mistress…

 

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What Was Yours?

Jekyll & Hyde’s, Tucson AZ, January 1977.

Advertised in the University of Arizona’s student newspaper The Daily Wildcat, as Tucson’s Newest and Gayest Bar—seemingly from the moment I first set foot on campus in the fall of 1976—it wasn’t until the following semester (after coming out) I finally made it to the place.

As previously related for those who are new to the blog and have not heard this story before:

Ric was another Louie’s regular, although I don’t remember him ever showing up at a GSA meeting. A couple years older (I believe he was 20 or maybe 21 when we met), I was enraptured. On yet another Friday afternoon at the table plans were being made for the evening. Ric turned to me and asked what my plans were. “Just going back to the dorm and watching some television,” I said.

“Posh! Come out with us!”

And by out, he meant Jekyll’s, which billed itself as Tucson’s newest and gayest disco,

“I dunno,” I said. “I’m not much of a going-out kind of person.”

“Well, if you change your mind, here’s my address,” he said, handing me a slip of paper. Tina’s driving and we’re leaving around 9. If you want to come with us, be there and we’ll all go together.”

I walked back to the dorm, butterflies dancing in my stomach. On one hand I was being honest when I’d said I wasn’t much for going out; on the other hand, I desperately wanted to get to know Ric better and yes—I wanted to see what gay life was really like.

The butterflies didn’t dissipate, even when, several hours later I was walking down 4th Street (or maybe it was 5th Street—I honestly don’t remember) to the house he and Tina shared. I knocked on the door and Ric answered, giving me a big hug as I walked in. “Welcome! I’m so glad you decided to go with us. This will be fun tonight!”

I seem to remember one more person joining us—it was probably Don Hines—before we headed out. We all piled in Tina’s big yellow sedan and drove to Oracle & Drachman, where Jekyll’s was located.

Jeckyll & Hyde’s, May 1977

At this point, some 42 years later, memories of that evening are little more than a blur, but some things do stand out. I remember paying a three dollar cover charge to get in, but I also remember I was not carded. (At the time legal drinking age in Arizona was 19, and I was still 18.) In fact, I was never carded, except at Maggie’s in Phoenix years later—and then only because the bouncer wanted to know my name. (But that is a story for a future installment.)

Looking back, I’m sure Jeckyll’s would be judged a dive by anyone’s standards then and now, but for me it was absolute magic. I’d never been to a disco before, and here I was in a gay disco. There were men dancing with men, women dancing with women, and lots of people of—as we politely say today—people of indeterminate gender being their own fierce selves.

A wraparound bar greeted you as you walked in. To the right there was a sunken wooden dance floor and DJ booth. To the left was an elevated area with booths and tables.

And the music…I’d never been exposed to music like that before and I was entranced. It was here I first heard Giorgio Moroder’s From Here to Eternity, Themla Houston’s Don’t Leave Me This Way and Cerrone’s Love in C-Minor to name just a few. Disco wasn’t something that had been on my musical radar at all, but it became something that I love to this very day.

Not apologizing.

We stayed until the bar closed that night, and afterward walked down the street to grab an early breakfast at Denny’s. It seemed to be the place to go after the club shut down. Drag queens mingled with leathermen, and we were in the middle of it all. When we were finished eating, Tina and Ric drove me back to my dorm room, my head absolutely spinning.

I don’t remember exactly what happened after that first night out together, but at some point Ric showed up at my door and didn’t leave for a week thereafter. If my encounter with John had left me scratching my head, wondering what all the hoopla was about gay sex, Ric showed me. OMG…Ric took me places I didn’t know existed and left me begging for more.

Ah, youth.

An obvious romance was brewing—at least in my eyes. We spent nights wrapped in each other’s arms, sleeping on blankets in front of the fireplace at this house when we weren’t at my dorm. When he’d left his beat-up army surplus jacket in my room one day, I brought it with me to Louie’s that afternoon to return it and he said, “You like it? Keep it.”

I wore it like a second skin.

But then something happened, and I was left wondering what precipitated it, other than what I now know to be the uncontrollable hormones of young gay men. Ric stopped coming around. We weren’t doing anything together any more. He’d become very hard to get hold of, and when I did he was distant. And then the answer arrived. I was told by someone at the table that he’d been seeing some other boy; someone who was not from GSA or the table. I was crushed. When we finally connected, there were tears. At the time I just didn’t understand. I thought we were something special…

Within weeks after the breakup, I became very ill. My tonsils and under-jaw glands swelled up. I went to Student Health and was diagnosed with mono. (I’d gone all through high school without coming down with the scourge, for obvious reasons, so it came as no surprise it finally hit when it did.)

I’d let my folks know what was going on and they expressed parental concern. I assured them I was in good hands with Student Health and basically spent an entire week in bed, missing every class. (Yeah, I felt that bad.) Shortly after my recovery, I received a very strange missive from my dad. It was an article about upper respiratory gonorrhea that had been clipped from the Phoenix gay paper. On the bottom he’d written in big block letters, “Don’t give him anything but love.”

Now keep in mind this was months before I finally came out to the family, and this left me confused as hell. How did he know? Where and how did he get this article?

The student mailboxes were adjacent to Louie’s, so I didn’t actually open the mail or read it until I was already sitting at the table. I guess my jaw must’ve dropped to the floor because they asked what was going on. “I just got this from my dad,” I said, passing it around the table.

They all agreed: “He knows.”

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I Had This…

…or some variation thereof, on my bedroom wall all through grade school. I took to drawing my own version of the planets—no doubt as fanciful as these representations, never dreaming that during the course of my life we’d actually see each one up close via robotic probes!

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World AIDS Day

As is my tradition every December 1st, I remember…


Kent Kelly


Ken Cohen


Steve Golden


Dennis Shelpman


Jim Hagen


Chuck Krahe


Marty Kamner


Michael Nelson


Jim Nye


Kevin Ohm


Rick King


Ron Aiazzi


Grant Neilsen


Ric Hathaway


David Koston


Kim Holstein


Russ Alvarez

Ben Walzer
Ken Borg
Harold Gates
Jim Girard
Keith Roseberry
Tom Farrel
Peter Whitman
Chuck Mayer
Richard Gulliver
Scott Woods
Bobby Farina
Brian Lea
Fred Sibinic
Steve McCollom
John Trapp
Philip Ruckdeschel

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Flashback Friday

March 1985, Tanque Verde Falls, Tucson AZ

I remember there was still a definite chill in the air that March morning. I believe this was the third time Bernie and I had come to the falls, and while he had no trouble stripping down completely, I was still far too reserved to go flashing my bits to the world (even though everyone else in the canyon was buck naked).

Of course all that changed over the summer, and despite the treacherous trails to get deep into the canyon, it was worth it.

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The Earth Shook, The Sky Burned

(With apologies to William Bronson)

October 17, 1989

Jack and Nick (my bosses, and co-owners of the four-person architectural firm where I had been working for the previous two and a half years) had left the office earlier that afternoon to “discuss business” at the pub a few doors down the street. I wasn’t feeling particularly inspired to do any work, and since the only other member of our little professional family, Neill, was absent for some reason, I made the executive decision to close up shop at 4:30 and head home. I had received the repaired video card from my computer in the mail that day and was anxious to get it put back in so I could enjoy the newly purchased NEC “Multisync” monitor I’d picked up at a computer show that previous weekend.

It was a typically balmy autumn afternoon in San Francisco, and I enjoyed the two block walk up 2nd Street to Market, where I went downstairs to MUNI and caught one of the K, L, or M cars outbound which would deposit me at the Van Ness Station for my four block walk home to 12th & Folsom. (Yes, I lived “right around the corner” from the SF Eagle and yet I had only ventured in a handful of times over my tenure at that location.)

After getting off at Van Ness and walking down 12th just past Mission, one of my contact lenses decided to ride up on the top of my eye. As I paused to try and dislodge it, the ground started moving. Having been on the earthquake simulator platform at the Academy of Sciences numerous times, I knew exactly what this was and struggled to keep my balance. At the same time, my contact lens slid back down and I looked across the street to see the billboard above the parking lot at the corner—one of those cantilevered things that was supported on only one end—start bounding up and down. I heard glass breaking, a few people screaming and then, as soon as everything started, it ended.

The stop lights at Howard and at Folsom were both out. When I got home, I quickly saw that power was out there as well. My housemate Frank—who had moved in with me several weeks earlier and whose constant presence (he had just lost his job) was already putting a strain on our relationship (another story for another time), seemed nonchalant about the whole thing and was busy mopping up water that had spilled out of the aquarium.

Remembering what I’d been told about things to do after an earthquake, I grabbed my pipe wrench and headed down to the basement to turn off the gas. I initially turned our’s off, but after a couple hours, with no one in the building smelling any gas, I went back downstairs and turned it back on so we could at least cook dinner.

Obviously the power didn’t come back on, so I didn’t get to enjoy my new monitor, but we had candles, and Frank had a battery-powered radio so we were at least able to stay abreast of what was happening and counted ourselves very lucky as the spotty reports of the damage starting coming in: the Bay Bridge, the Marina (we could see the smoke rising from our living room windows), and the Cypress Freeway in the east Bay. I thought back to all the times I’d driven that freeway that had pancaked…

I phoned my mom to let her know I was okay within minutes of arriving home. After I hung up with her, I phoned my dad to make sure he was okay (he was also living in San Francisco at the time). He was fine as well—a little shaken but okay. I was glad I called Mom when I did, because when I tried to call again about fifteen minutes later, I got the perpetual “All circuits are busy. Please try your call again later,” message each time I tried.

As night fell over the city, it was indeed very dark. The only lights seen on Twin Peaks was the dim flickering of thousands of candles. By 10 pm, they were mostly all extinguished and the light of the just-past-full moon was illuminating the city in an eerie glow I’d never seen before.

Neither Frank or I were overly concerned. We and the cats had plenty of food in the house and we stayed out of the refrigerator and freezer to conserve the cold until the power came back on. It was a little odd sleeping without the constant din of the traffic on Folsom or the quiet whirring of the bedroom fan, but I managed.

The next morning there was still no power. I held out hope it would be on sometime that day since Dad told me his—and in fact, much of the city’s—electricity had been restored sometime during the night. I was able to get hold of everyone from work, and they were also okay. I was told to not attempt to come downtown. Jack and Nick had returned to the office right after the rumbling stopped and discovered the office was a mess. They couldn’t get the security gate at the entrance to our suite open, but they were able to go through the entrance of the structural engineering office next door.  They peeked over the partitions and saw that all the not-fastened-to-the-wall bookcases which had lined the entire south wall of our space had toppled, and while the building itself was not (yet) red-tagged, they didn’t want to risk having anyone in there; the cleanup could wait.

Frank was in a pouty mood because of the power still being out, and since I didn’t want to deal with it, I ignored my employers’ recommendations to just stay home and I headed out to explore.

Hoping to find an open restaurant to grab a bite to eat, I walked up to Market Street hoping to catch a train to the Castro. Surprisingly, the underground MUNI was running—albeit with only limited service between the Embarcadero and Van Ness stations, so riding a train to the Castro wasn’t an option. I hopped on a bus, and while not unexpected based on what Dad had told me about the rest of the city, power was on in the Castro,  but every restaurant that was open was mobbed.  And quite unexpectedly, there was a strong, bizarre sexual electricity in the air; it seemed like every beautiful man in the city was out cruising and looking to get laid. I finally gave up hope of getting something to eat, and left went back home, stopping to grab a sandwich at Ted’s Market on Howard Street.  

By the time I arrived home Frank was gone, also out exploring.

The next day—with the power still unrestored—and myself now caught up in that weird sexual energy and horny as fuck, I went downtown looking for trouble and was surprised to discover that most of my usual haunts were open, and let me tell ya…they were hopping.

I can quite honestly say that I wasn’t frightened during the ordeal.  It was more exciting than anything else.  And despite the inconvenience of being without power for what turned into 36 hours, I can say it was quite a break in the day-to-day monotony of my life.  Granted, it wasn’t quite as big a break as if giant UFOs had appeared over the world’s cities, but it came damn close.

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Believe It Or Not…

Believe it or not, I once dated a porn star. Okay…a “male adult model.” He wasn’t a top-tier or well-known by any means. He didn’t do any films (that I know of), and only appeared in one issue of Advocate Men, but from the moment I first saw him on the cover of that magazine in June 1986, I knew our paths would eventually cross—even though at the time I had no idea where or when that might happen. The bio in the magazine said “Justin Banks” was a landscape architect who lived in San Francisco. I was still living in Tucson, and while the cogs were definitely in motion for my eventual relation to SF, nothing was yet firmly in place.

Of course all that changed in the blink of an eye and I found myself a resident of The City two months later…and not six weeks after that “Justin” and I passed on the street as he and some friends were leaving the Midnight Sun. Our eyes locked. I smiled. He smiled back. I stopped and glanced back over my shoulder, but he kept walking down the street with his buddies. And that was the end of it.

Or so I thought.

The following February a friend and I were at a toy store in Corta Madera called The Imaginarium, where we spotted “Justin” working behind the counter. So much for being a landscape architect…

His eyes lit up when he saw me and immeidately came over. He definitely remembered our two-ships-passing moment, telling me that after he’d dropped his friends at their car that night he came back to try and find me, but I’d already disappeared into the night. He introduced himself with his real name (Michael Rose) and gave me his phone number. “Call me.”

The rest is now ancient history, but we ended up dating for a few months. And all I can say about that is Michael taught me a valuable life lesson: NEVER date porn stars—excuse me, “male adult models”—not even the B-Listers.