Steve Golden (1957-1990)
Papago Park, Phoenix AZ, May 1983
Fascinating
I am not now, nor have I ever really considered myself a “gamer” or “gaymer,” if you insist. But for several months at the start of 1994, I was obsessed with a new game called Myst. Too many very late nights were spent attempting to solve those puzzles. I’d get drawn in, look up and realize it was 3 am. On a work night.
Prime Time (Part Two)
While the drama had been brewing with Emmett, I’d been in touch with a my longtime friend Michael in San Francisco. He and I had met on an inbound MUNI train years earlier, and after a couple romps in the hay we both came to the realization that we both carried too much baggage that didn’t match and we’d probably be better off as friends than lovers. When I’d made the decision it was time to return to Bagdad By The Bay, he suggested I move in with him until I found a place of my own. “I have big house all to myself. You’d have your own room downstairs and I’d be glad to have the company.”
Michael lived out in the Avenues. Not my first choice of where in the city I’d ever want to live, but his offer to crash there until I found work and got a place of my own was too good to pass up. So, the first weekend in December, Michael flew down (to drive my car while I drove the rental truck) to Tucson and helped me pack up, load the truck and get out of town.
As I recall, a job arrived pretty quickly, even though I wasn’t able to return to the firm I’d worked for the previous eight years. I still wasn’t able to transition into PC support, but a job’s a job and since I had the architectural and AutoCAD skillz, any port in a storm, y’know?
Unfortunately, instead of staying put at that prestigious national firm, when the opportunity arose for me to go elsewhere and actually get my foot in the door doing computer support work, I jumped on it.
While I prided myself on my PC knowledge, I soon found out I was in over my head. I knew the ins-and-outs of Microsoft Word, but not to the degree required by a Law Firm. Additionally it was a whole new world for me to be dealing with end users, many of whom were difficult at best and—being a Law Firm—hellspawn at worst. I got minimal support from the two other people on the Help Desk and next to none from my supervisor. I was miserable.
In one of those odd twists of fate, however, one day while returning from lunch, I ran into a guy I’d worked with in Phoenix twelve years earlier. I knew Fred had relocated to San Francisco, but lost touch with him shortly after he left the firm where we both worked.
Fred now had his own business. We chatted briefly and I told him of my employment woes. “I’m looking for people,” he said. “Here’s my card. Come by next week and we’ll see if we can come to a mutually beneficial agreement.”
And thus began two years of employment hell that was to send me back to Arizona again.
(To be continued…)
Aspire to Greatness
Another idol falls.
RIP Terry Jones, founding member of Monty Python, and (among many other things) director of Personal Services, my favorite film of all time.
To Absent Friends ?
October 1982
Stories – The College Years (Part 5)
Previously on Battlestar Galactica…
The Summer of High Strangeness
While my dad had arranged for he and my mom to be out of the house for the duration of my birthday party, they did stick around long enough to meet everyone who had accepted my invitation and made the drive up from Tucson.
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I remember very little of the party itself. There was food. There was cake. There was dancing. I recall someone shoving a bottle of poppers under my nose at one point. But mostly it was simply the jumping off point for my first steps into gay life in Phoenix. Phoenix was a very different place from Tucson and I’d been reluctant to go out on my own for two reasons: I was, until that night, still underage in the eyes of the law (and I’d been warned that the Phoenix clubs—unlike Jekyll’s in Tucson—carded religiously), and frankly I was still more than a little apprehensive about throwing myself into the environment unaccompanied.
I shouldn’t have been worried. Our destination that evening was a newly-opened/renovated club called Moon’s Truck and it was 3-F: fierce, fabulous and friendly.
The club was located in a nondescript concrete block building on the east side of 16th Street just south of Indian School Road, and despite its recent rechristening, the actual name was unimportant because I soon learned that regardless of what was on the sign over the entrance, everyone simply referred to it as Maggie’s. It changed names again about a year later to HisCo Disco before finally being forced to close by the neighbors’ continual complaints about noise and other goings-on in the area.
It was a cavernous, magical place, and at the time was known for playing the some of the best music in Phoenix. It had a slightly raised lighted dance floor and a sound system that would leave your ears ringing for hours. The clientele was as interesting as Jeckyll’s.
While outwardly an all-inclusive club (gays, straights, men, women, and people of indeterminate gender) were always welcome at Maggie’s, the one thing I remember most was Hubert, one of the DJs (who did not want women in the club) was how he’d always yell “Uterus!” when women arrived. I found it amusing at the time, even if it embarrasses the fuck out of me now.
I also have no real memories remaining of the club that night. I must’ve suffered sensory overload. All I know is that soon thereafter I began to call it home on Friday and Saturday nights.
At the time, Phoenix probably had a dozen or so gay bars, the vast majority of which I would never be caught dead in. The names that spring to mind beyond Maggies are The Forum (which became my second favorite hang-out, a place I would automatically head to if Maggies seemed too dull on any given night), The Ramrod, The 307, The Connection, and several more whose names completely elude me (I will amend this later if/when they pop into memory). Since I didn’t drink, I only went for the dancing—and the possibility of meeting someone for the evening, the non-dance establishments barely registered on my radar.
My other concern that summer was obviously finding a job. That arrived by way of my dad, who needed architectural drafting assistance at the office where he worked. Other than income it provided, our summer working together prompted the tag line for this post.
I don’t recall the exact moment Dad acknowledged that I played for the other team; whether he outright asked or I volunteered, but I do remember a conversation that followed shortly thereafter. We had obviously been discussing something regarding my lifestyle and he blurted out, “Yeah, when you and your mom and sister were back east during the summer, I’d head down to The Ramrod with Oscar from down the street…”
Oh. My. Fucking. God. The Ramrod?!? My dad had just come out to me and had outed our equally-married-to-a-woman neighbor two houses down!
Well, this certainly explained how he got the article he’d sent me the previous spring from the gay paper.
And the flood gates opened. I provided the open and appreciative listener he so desperately needed after a lifetime being forced to lead a double life; how he joined the Navy at 17 to escape an abusive relationship with his father, his long-term love affairs with several of the”friends” who’d come around the house while I was growing up, how my parents met and why he got married, and how he worried that he’d somehow failed me as a father after watching my budding gayness develop from an early age. I learned more about my dad that summer that I’d ever thought possible, and our relationship—best described as loving but distant until that summer—improved to such a degree that Dad became more than just my father; he became a trusted friend.
While Mom obviously knew a lot of his history, she didn’t know all of it, nor did she know the reasons or the underlying stories behind that history. Suddenly so much of why my dad did the things he did while I was growing up became clear to me.
I respected his desire for all this to remain solely between the two of us—at least for many, many years after their divorce. Dad’s closet became mine.
So I had a gay dad. I famously knew about his brother Edward thanks to my mom. This led me to wonder who else in the family tree was sprouting lavender leaves, because in some families it ran; in ours it apparently galloped.
Next time on Battlestar Galactica…
Another Sad Day
Not a household name—at least not in the U.S., but she was the inspiration for my favorite film of all time.
[pdf-embedder url=”https://voenixrising.com/pdf/cynthia-payne-madam-obituary-telegraph.pdf”]
Stories – The College Years (Part 4)
Previously on Battlestar Galactica…
A Mentor Arrives
After Ric disappeared and we’d gone our separate ways, I would be lying if I said the rest of the semester was filled with sweet romantic interludes—or at least hot monkey sex, because it most certainly was not. That’s not to say I didn’t fall in love—or at least lust—with two more individuals, both of whom occasionally popped in at Louie’s, but were far from regulars.
The first was a Hispanic boy named Jesse.
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Jesse and I were friendly, but he barely knew I existed. And yet, at 18 years old, I fawned over him. I remember sharing some writing I’d done about him with another friend at the table, James Uhrig. James, who was older and wiser than I was…kind…in his assesment of my musings, but suggested that perhaps I move on.
Kent Kelly
It was around that time that Kent Kelly and Peter Whitman entered my orbit. Kent was the catalyst that caused me to move on from Jesse. Peter and I immediately became best friends. I think Kent—also older and wiser by a couple years—sensed my fragile, newly-minted gay state, and very gently let me down when I confessed my feelings for him. It didn’t make it sting any less, but I respected him for it, and out of that grew a friendship which lasted until his death in 1987.
Kent became my mentor, my friend, and my dance partner; my Life Teacher if truth be told. After I quit school in 1978, Kent ended up in Phoenix with me, proclaiming that Tucson had simply gotten too small—or more likely as I suspected he’d simply slept with everyone he’d been interested in sleeping with there.
Shortly before the semester ended, I arrived at Louie’s one afternoon and found the table abuzz. Ric was apparently at Student Health with a case of Hepatitis and they’d advised everyone who’d had sexual relations with him during the previous few months to get a Gamma globulin shot.
Needless to say, I was more than a little surprised at the number of us who got up from the table and formed a little parade that headed over to Student Health. Not as surprised, I’m sure, as the staff at the center was…
Apparently Ric was the table’s resident Welcome Wagon.
I returned home at the end of the semester, leaving all my new friends behind and wondering what the hell I was going to do, not only for summer work but also with my new gay life in general. My 19th birthday was quickly approaching, so I decided to say fuck it and invite everyone up to my parents’ house for an impromptu party. Not exactly how I envisioned coming out, but if they figured things out, they figured things out.
I think—based on that article he’d sent months earlier—Dad knew what was up, and arranged for he and Mom to be out of the house that night. My sister was having a sleepover at a friend’s house.
Phil (the man who initially welcomed me into GSA) arrived on his motorcycle the afternoon prior to the party. Since no one else was showing up until the following day, he and I headed out (not on his motorcycle) to the local mall.
As we walked the mall, Phil freely ogling boys as they passed like a dog in heat and whispering salacious suggestions in my ears, by the time we got back to the house I was…aroused…to say the least. He tried to put the moves on me in my bedroom, but I rebuffed his advances. That was not the way I intended to come out to the family.
Phil was an expert at the art of seduction, and while it didn’t happen that weekend, he did eventually bed me. Or maybe it was the other way around. It doesn’t matter. He and I had many an overnight encounter until he moved to San Mateo in 1980.
As an aside, I briefly reconnected with Phil (not that way—although to be honest, prior to him actually showing up at my door that afternoon I’d fantasized about it) once in 1992 long after I’d moved to San Francisco. I didn’t pursue anything phyiscal or even reigniting the friendship because something just seemed off, and frankly it creeped me out.
Next time on Battlestar Galactica…
Stories – The College Years (Part 3)
Previously on Battlestar Galactica…
So THIS Is What It’s All About: Ric Hathaway
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.
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.”
Next time on Battlestar Galactica…
Stories – The College Years (Part 2)
Previously on Battlestar Galactica…
The Table
It was shortly after my second meeting with GSA that I was introduced to the table at Louie’s Lower Level.
Louie’s—located in the basement of the Student Union—was the funky laid-back alternative to the more traditional and sterile campus cafeteria upstairs and doubled as a great gathering place for students before and after class. Think lots of dark wood, Tiffany lighting, and plants in macrame slings. Kind of TGI Fridays on a budget. (It was 1977, after all.)
I’d been going there since I started at the university, but until my second GSA meeting and a group of us headed downstairs afterward to grab a bite to eat, I’d somehow been completely oblivious to the fact that one long table off to the east side of the dining room was home base for many of the campus homosexuals.
It was there where I met my tribe that spring: John Maguire, Ric Hathaway, Chas Dooley, Don Hines, Kent Kelly, John Marion, Abe Marquez, Tina, Marco, and many others who became friends, mentors, and yes, in a couple cases, even lovers over the coming months. I shall do my best to give each their proper due since so many of them are no longer with us.
Chas Dooley
I actually met Chas before GSA or Louie’s. He was a good friend of Andy’s and visited him a lot when I was in the old dorm. Chas was young, black, proud, flamboyant, and simply had no fucks to give. He intimidated me when I was still in the closet; once out I came to admire and adore him. In fact, there were times over the next couple years I wanted nothing more than to jump his bones, but while the interest seemed to be mutual, the timing was always off and it never happened.
I lost track of Chas sometime between 1978 and 1980. He’d moved home to Louisiana and while we’d continued to correspond eventually a letter was returned as undeliverable and the phone number I had for him was disconnected.
It was in 1991 or so that I was walking home from the Castro to my apartment off Church Street in San Francisco and I passed a handsome black man coming my way. We made eye contact, smiled, and after we’d passed almost immediately turned around. “Chas?” “Mark?” We rushed to each other and hugged. He was late to be somewhere, so we couldn’t catch up. We exchanged numbers (I guess everyone ends up in SF eventually), but not for lack of trying, we never did reconnect.
I have tried to track him down, both through normal channels as well as through the Social Security Death Index (you never know, and if he’s gone I’d like closure) but there are hundreds of Charles Dooleys listed online (but none in the SSDI), so I’ve given up hope of ever reconnecting with him.
The First Time: John Maguire
I wasn’t particularly attracted to John. We’d both become regulars at Louie’s and had gotten friendly, enjoying each other’s company, but while there were many tasty things on Louie’s menu, lust of John definitely wasn’t one of them. One Friday afternoon we were at the table talking and discovered we were both still virgins. He looked at me and asked, “Do you want to do something about that?” A thousand thoughts ran through my head in a flash, and I blurted out, “Sure!” It was one of those, “Oh fuck, why not?” moments.
We didn’t go out on a proper date beforehand and there was no romance; he simply showed up at my dorm room at the appointed time and we got naked. I won’t go into all the gruesome details, but let’s just say the experience was far from what I think either of us had hoped for. After he left I thought, “This is what has everyone in such an uproar?” John and I were still amicable after the encounter, but something had definitely changed and neither one of us really put any further effort into our friendship developing further.
I have no idea whatever happened to John. Upon returning to school for my sophomore year, many people had disappeared from GSA and the table, John being one of them. I heard he’d moved home to New Jersey.
And again, like Chas, there are hundreds of possible John Maguires online. So…yeah, tracking him down, living or dead…not going to happen.
Next time on Battlestar Galactica…
Stories – The College Years (Part 1)
Okay…remembering and writing about all this is fun!
Previously on Battlestar Galactica… (In case you’re wondering, I’m calling it this as a throwback to my original posting of these stories on the old blog, written at peak Battlestar Galactica popularity.)
While I suppose I could have come out publicly in High School, for a variety of mid-70s reasons I chose not to. I had consciously decided that I would announce to the world once I’d moved away from home and started college. Based on my mother’s earlier reactions to gay men—which was surprising considering she was an interior designer and had worked around them her entire career—I wasn’t entirely convinced it would be warmly received by the family and wanted to be as far away as possible when I dropped the proverbial bomb.
My first semester at the University of Arizona was—not surprisingly—a difficult one, if only for the usual problems of any first year college student. I had never lived away from home, and while I made friends easily, in the beginning I knew no one in Tucson.
My first dormitory roommate was a Japanese-American gymnast. I don’t remember his name or even what he looked like at this point other than he had a body that wouldn’t quit. He was a gymnast, after all. Might’ve been a fantasy come true if not for the fact he was virulently homophobic and made it known almost immediately. While I was still firmly in the closet, I knew this was not going to work as my plans for coming out slowly began to coalesce in my head. After a week or so I swapped rooms with a guy down the hall I’d gotten friendly with.
My new roommate was Karl Kilgore, a tall, blond, good-looking civil engineering (?) student from southern California.
Karl and I got along famously. We shared the same world view, liked the same music, and enjoyed each other’s company.
I still hadn’t come out yet, but the guy in the room adjacent to ours read me from the moment I arrived on the floor. Andy was…flamboyant…out and proud. He was one of the first gay men I met who was not. taking. shit. from. anyone.
In many ways he took me under his wing for those first couple months at the university, keeping my secret to himself. I remember one day toward the holidays we were chatting and he flat out asked, “When are you going to end this charade and just come out?”
I was quite taken aback, and at the same time relieved that he knew it was time as much as I did.
Along the same time this happened, I was over at the campus planetarium one night, when a series of events were set in motion that led to my tearing the door off that closet and bursting forth into the light. I was touring the exhibits when another boy caught my eye, one David Miller.
Another freshman, David was from the hills of West Virginia and frankly, turned out to be sweet as fuck. We struck up a conversation and a friendship soon formed. Was David gay? I didn’t get that sense about him at all, but I didn’t get “wholly straight” either. I remember that when I told Andy I’d made a friend outside the dorm he quipped, “So…Mark’s got a boyfriend.”
No, that wasn’t it at all, but when the opportunity presented itself for me to switch dorms and share a room with David, I jumped at it.
David accompanied me back to Phoenix for Thanksgiving that year and my family loved him.
The Christmas and New Year’s holidays came and went, and upon returning to campus for the spring semester I’d resolved that this was now the time to come out.
One evening in late January, after we’d gone to bed, I said to David, “I have something to tell you.”
“What is it?”
“You know that guy Adam I told you about? The one I met up with again at the library?”
(Adam was a guy from Phoenix whom I’d met and buddied up with during the Freshman Orientation weekend on campus the past August.)
“Yeah.”
“I like him.”
“Great! You made another friend. What’s he like?”
“No, I like him, David. I really like him.”
(It should be noted that nothing had ever actually happened between Adam and I at the library or anywhere else for that matter—but I was mightily infatuated with this now newly-minted frat boy I’d reconnected with.)
“What are you saying?”
“I’m gay, David.”
There was an extended silence. After several minutes he said, “I have a confession too.”
Was David about to tell me he was gay? I mean, that would be awesome.
“My uncle is Christine Jorgensen.”
Now while I hadn’t been officially out, I had done my gay history. I knew who Christine was.
“We don’t talk about uncle George much anymore,” he added.
Of course, this opened the conversational floodgates and for several days thereafter it seemed all was well in the world. David showed no signs of being freaked out, nor had his attitude toward me changed in any way.
HOWEVER, a little over a week later, David announced he was moving out of the room and in with—in his words several months later—”an Iranian who never bathed.”
I soon learned that shortly after my coming out to him, David—who never had a drink in his life—had gone out one night and had gotten absolutely shit-faced. He returned to the dorm at 2 am and basically went door to door telling everyone on the floor, “Mark is a fag!”
Well, I was now officially out. It also explains why there was no hurry to backfill that empty bed and how I ended up with a single room for the remainder of the semester without having to pay for it. Membership has its privileges.
The question remained, “What now?”
Andy suggested going to one of the GSA (Gay Student Organization) meetings on campus. After ignoring his suggestions and the adverts in the student paper for weeks, one chilly February night I decided to head over to the student union and check out this GSA.
Nervous doesn’t even begin to describe what I was feeling. Would I be accepted? Would they like me? Would I get raped by a group of sex-crazed homosexuals?
It turned out two of of three were correct and I left the meeting with my virginity intact.
When I first entered I was greeted by a guy named Phil Oliver. His first question—something no one had ever outright asked before—was “Are you gay?”
I answered in the affirmative.
The meeting was actually a bit of a bore, but I met a group of people who almost immediately became my tribe and ultimately confirmed two famous quotes from Richard Bach’s book Illusions:
All the people, all the events in your life are there because you have drawn them there. What you choose to do with them is up to you.
and
The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other’s life. Rarely do members of one family grow up under the same roof.
Next time on Battlestar Galactica…
Stories – The School Years
In the original incarnation of Voenix Rising—that I stupidly deleted in 2011 after realizing a link to it had been sent out in the signature line of emails I’d sent to recruiters—I’d written multiple posts documenting my coming out and first tentative steps into gay life. It was one of the few things I truly regret not having backed up.
More recently, I’ve been following Mike Balaban, a gay historian on Instagram who is doing much the same thing, this time with pictures. From what I’ve seen we’re about the same age, and considering how everything else in the world is fucking awful right now, it’s inspired me to relate my stories again, to do something positive.
Grade School
Like a lot of gay men, I’d known I liked boys instead of girls from an early age. When I first discovered masturbation in fourth grade, it was sex between men and women that captured my imagination. But then my focus turned more and more to the imaginary men in these imaginary encounters, and finally coalesced with my Phys Ed coaches and the men—not the women—in the Sears catalogs exclusively fueling my fantasies. Oh, how I eagerly anticipated the arrival of the Summer Catalogs because it meant shirtless guys in swim trunks!
Growing up, my exposure to men-who-love-men had been less-than-ideal. I don’t know if my mom already sensed my budding gayness or if she was just trying to—warn?—me, but I remember her coming into my room one evening in advance of a visit by my dad’s brother. She turned on the television (or changed the channel) to show me an interview happening with Truman Capote. “That is a homosexual,” she said, “And so is your Uncle Eddie. I don’t want you to be alone with him.” The old child molester trope…
My uncle was nothing like Truman Capote. He wasn’t a butch queen, but neither was he anything like the mincing, lisping example my mom was so keen to show me. Anyhow, I took some solace in knowing I wasn’t the only one in the world like that, and not the only one in the family. [Spoilers: If I only known the full extent!]
I remember my uncle (especially after I became an adult) as loving, generous, and very, very funny. As a child I always thought him so cosmopolitan for living in New York City. I mailed him my coming out letter in the late 1980s (because somehow he hadn’t gotten the news), telling him I was “living the life” in San Francisco and hoping we could connect over drinks sometime to share stories. After not hearing from him a couple years thereafter, one Christmas in the 90s a card arrived from him with a five hundred dollar check enclosed and a note that read, “I’m sure you’ll be able to put this to good use in ‘frisco.”
High School
My freshman year in high school was the first time I fell in love with another boy. His name was Tom Pleger.
It was odd how we initially met. I was crushing hard on his best friend, a guy named Jim Hurst, with whom we all shared a Freshman Communications class. Jim wouldn’t give me the time of day, but Tom and I soon discovered shared interests and we started hanging out together.
Tom’s family belonged to a neighborhood Lutheran church. I’d been raised Lutheran but my family was one of those Christmas and Easter churchgoing broods. That was, until I met Tom and convinced my mom that we needed to start attending—and more regularly than just twice a year. (Ulterior motives, of course.) She was initially reluctant since this church was Missouri synod and we were Wisconsin. (How that makes any difference is just one more reason when I came out I gave up on organized religion altogether. It’s all bullshit.)
Anyhow, we started attending on a regular basis and I found Jesus and developed a typical teenage religious streak that no doubt absolutely drove my dad (who was very non-religious) to absolute distraction.
Sadly, my romantic overtures to Tom were not reciprocated, and my confession of true love ended our budding friendship about a year after we met. Nothing more was said of it, and surprisingly, when we crossed paths at church he and his family were still cordial.
It was during my sophomore year that—perhaps because of my newfound churchgoing habits—my mom decided that I was well overdue for my Confirmation; a right-of-passage that would allow me to start taking communion. This led to classes led by the new, young, cute, and very liberal pastor who had just come on board. I remember the subject of homosexuality coming up during one of our question and answer sessions and he pointed out that Jesus never said anything about the subject…
Anyhow, these classes threw yet another boy into my life, Mike Knigge.
Mike was a year younger than me and a few inches taller. His family had recently moved to Phoenix from Lake Zurich, Illinois, a small suburb north of Chicago. From his description (he was terribly homesick) it sounded like a wonderful little hamlet, and I often fantasized moving there with him after we finished college and building a beautiful English Tudor home (my preferred architectural style at the time) with a huge swimming pool and cabana out back. I don’t remember much of our year or so together, but it must’ve been something special because I grew to love him as well.
Like Tom, it all fell apart after I confessed my feelings to him.
My junior year, after Mike, I took a break from romantic entanglements with boys, no doubt because no one had entered my life to pique such interest. I spent the year concentrating on existing friendships, including the one I shared with Jean Davis.
Jean and I were inseparable; partners-in-crime. People thought we were dating, and even though she was the first—and only—girl I’ve kissed and made out with (there was never any sex)—I only ever thought of her as my best bud. I think she viewed me as something more however, and when I ended up leaving Phoenix to go to the University of Arizona in Tucson, we both breathed a sigh of relief when she decided to stay behind. It was a breakup without any of the associated drama.
My senior year brought my unrequited love life new trouble in the form of Daniel Baxa.
Tom and Mike were just warm-up acts. I fell hard for Daniel. But sadly, like Tom and Mike, it was ultimately not meant to be.
His family had just moved to Phoenix from somewhere and I have no memory of how or where we met or why we even started hanging together. Why do teenage boys do anything?
Why did I keep falling in love with straight boys? Because at the time I knew of no other gay boys in high school—or at least none I was even remotely attracted to. The ones who were gay were so obviously gay that they were the subject or scorn and ridicule wherever they went. It was the mid 70s, after all. Despite Stonewall years earlier, was no gay marriage, no Love, Simon positivity swirling around gay relationships.
Daniel was a bad boy. He smoked. He drank. And yet he drove a pink 1968 Mustang and loved ABBA. He was…confusing. As our friendship grew, he wasn’t above physical contact, and many evenings while laying on my bed watching television, a spontaneous wrestling match would erupt, with one or the other of us getting pinned with obvious erections involved. But that was as far as it ever went, much to my disappointment. I often fantasized about just kissing him while pinned, yet never garnered enough courage to actually do it.
I was obsessed with Daniel, going so far as to climb up on the roof of our house to watch him arrive home at night from his job at Sirloin Stockade, telling my parents I was up there to “look at the stars.” I even got a job at the same Sirloin Stockade the final summer before I headed to college—ostensibly to earn money for college—and it showed me what an absolute jerk he could be when it wasn’t just the two of us together. It didn’t sour me to him, but I learned that great life lesson of people weren’t always what they seemed 100% of the time.
When I finally confessed my love, there was no big scene. I told him I loved him and he responded, “Oh, you mean like a friend?” “No,” I replied. The color kind of drained from his face as I recall and he said something to the effect, “Look Mark, I like you, but I’m not…”
Holding back tears, I left his house and went home. That fall I moved to Tucson.
I heard from a mutual friend sometime later (who, by that time, also knew I was gay) that our parting left Daniel hurt and confused. He hadn’t been ending our friendship; he was simply straight and didn’t want anything more.
After getting his address from the same mutual friend many years later, I wrote him a letter, apologizing for the misunderstanding and asking if he’d like to talk. I never heard back.
Next time on Battlestar Galactica…
I Remember You
This was playing when we walked into Starbucks this afternoon. I haven’t heard the song in years.
I always associated it with my life in San Francisco, especially in regard to my 1998 return to The City. It was pumping out of my car stereo as I first crossed the Bay Bridge that one particular afternoon, and is forever burned into memory in that context.
1980 West Hollywood
(h/t to Fearsome Beard)
Speaking of Memories…
I happened upon this at one of our satellite offices yesterday, and my first thought was, “OMG! I haven’t seen one of those in probably 25 years and I’d completely forgotten they even existed!”
I posted this on Instagram and a friend—who had actually been in the architectural profession longer that I had—wrote, “What’s that?”
Needless to say, I was incredulous that she didn’t remember it, or what it was used for, considering by the time the late 80s and early 90s had descended upon us I was convinced every architectural office in the country owned one.
For those who don’t know what a Kroytype 80 is…
Prior to the advent of CAD, the only way to get good-looking type on an architectural drawing was to use Letraset press-on letters, or the Leroy device. The Kroy made those all but obsolete.
The machine itself was ridiculously expensive, as were the tapes, but it was a godsend to architectural drafting.
Again, so many memories that put a smile on my face.
So Many Memories
I was wicked fast on these back in the 80s. Rapidograph pens. India Ink. Ultrasonic cleaners. Mylar drafting film. Good times.
And then along came AutoCAD and entire industries and skillsets were made irrelevant.
I think I still have the paraphernalia somewhere…maybe tossed in with my dad’s drafting equipment.
I really need to make an architectural shadow box. Or two.
Best to Leave the Past in the Past
I was going to write a short “Twenty Years Today” post because occasionally I find something worth sharing when looking back, but after actually reading a few of my Journal entries from March 1999—and then going down the rabbit hole of reading all the entries from 1999—I decided I really didn’t want to subject you to any of that.
There’s nothing lurking in the past that needs to be regurgitated now.
What stands out the most from twenty years ago is how profoundly unhappy and lost I was. While it wasn’t clear to me at the time (at least consciously) in hindsight, it screams off those pages. It’s no exaggeration to say (as I have many times) that the Mark prior to the cancer diagnosis was someone completely different from the Mark who emerged after treatment. When I think of the hundreds—no, thousands—of dollars I threw away on stuff, trying to fill the very obvious emotional hole in my life that leaps off those pages, well…I’m not here to judge that past self or anyone else, but damn gurl, I was a mess.
To Absent Friends ?
Visiting The Ghost
As I posted a week or so ago, after spotting the house on Zillow where I lived during high school and until I moved out on my own in 1980, my sister and I resolved to pay a visit to the old place to see it in person since we figured it would probably be our last opportunity to ever do it.
So this past Monday morning we headed over, made the arrangements to get it unlocked (ah, the wonders of technology), and figuratively stepped back in time 46 years.
As I wrote previously, naturally there had been many changes—and I can now report that really none of them were for the better. We joked it would take $50-75K just to get the place (including the rear/side yard wasteland) back to what it was when we lived there. The only real positive improvement I saw was the fact that at some point they’d removed all the popcorn ceilings…
But despite all the years and the numerous families who have passed through those walls, the energy of the place was still the same as I remember it. It felt calm. It felt safe.
The house seemed neither larger or smaller than I remembered. The infamous ghost chose not to acknowledge our presence; perhaps it had no interest, had been exorcised, or had simply moved on.
Naturally we took lots of photos, but none worth posting that really show anything more than what I’d put up previously from the listing itself, save this:
Same location, just a little closer in this time…
And this, the obligatory in-my-old-bathroom selfie:
Thirty Years Ago
Because right now, I ain’t got nothin’…
Journal
30 September 1988
It’s been a busy month. Shortly after my last journal entry, my phone was shut off because of a bounced check and some asshole smashed my car window just for the fun of it. If I had a baseball bat I’d love to beat the motherfucker’s head in.
The car is now being locked up at night, over in R&H Wholesale’s parking lot. It’s only $25.00 a month, so it’s a real bargain for the peace of mind and not having to hassle anymore with the midnight street cleaning.
I finally received money back from the IRS which I paid in for “self-employment tax” for my 1986 return. It amounted to just over $1000—and believe me, it came just in time. I have intentions of using it for new tires for the car and miscellaneous other expenses, but for the moment, it just got me caught up on several outstanding bills and a few that weren’t due until later in the month. So, for all intents and purposes it’s gone—for at least two weeks until I get paid again. I’m not too upset over the sudden income and loss thereof; it did get rid of those few pesky bills that I could just never seem to get around to paying (Time-Life Mozart and the Astronomy Book Club to name about $110 worth).
I arranged to get cable TV yesterday. They’ll be out next Friday to turn it on.
I went with John Trapp last night to the George Michael concert at the Shoreline Amphitheater. I’m still not that fond of G.M., but John doesn’t have a whole lot of friends [with cars] so I agreed to go. The light show was the best part of it, along with a hunky chunky lighting technician who I ended up paying more attention to than G.M. There was a straight south-bay Hispanic couple sitting next to us who were on the point of copulating by mid-show. It really ruined the rest of the performance for me.
And if I never hear another screaming 14-year old girl, that would be just fine.
I’ve been feeling pretty down lately. I can’t put my finger on any one thing, but I know I’m just not my perky sociable self. I’ve had my usual doses of hot impersonal sex, but I find what I’m really missing is being touched and caressed. When I got my haircut the other day, Patrick gave me a really good scalp and shoulders massage, which made me realize just how long it’s been since anyone has touched me.
The painting of the Magician still isn’t finished, although it’s a lot farther along than it was at my last entry. I’m still not feeling especially creative, and though I’ve got a refrigerator full of slowly-desiccating paint, I just can’t seem to get up the gumption to finish it. I’m not especially pleased with it (am I ever with any painting?), but his eyes are nice and I suppose I can always give it away.
Ron has decided to move to L.A. for real. I guess his love life is finally improving. And I’ve decided to stay put on Folsom until further notice. The thought of moving just makes me sick. I’m so settled in here I can’t imagine hauling it all out again. And anyway, I’ve got better things to do with my money than pay another security deposit to some new strange landlord. At least I know Trish and Ron.
I may move upstairs if #12 becomes available though. It’s got a view of Twin Peaks (from the Kitchen) and you can see up above the freeway.
I bought six CDs with some of that tax refund money: two by Yanni (replacing his album from last year which I sold), one by Suzanne Vega “Solitude Standing”, one by Sting “Blue Turtles”, two by Dead or Alive and one by Curiosity Killed the Cat. The Cat CD is going to Streetlight Records at the earliest opportunity.
I guess that’s enough for now.
It certainly is.
It’s 9 pm on a Friday Night
And I’m home. Not at all unusual for the last twenty-five years. Ben is out at the moment doing his Lyft thing to pay some bills. I don’t expect him back until around 3 am, by which time I will be deep asleep and probably won’t even hear him come in. I’m listening to some classic jazz on the radio while Bobo is sleeping in his bed and Sammy is running around the living room like a maniac.
Forty years ago however, at 9 pm on a Friday night I’d be heading out the door to go dancing. (We didn’t call it clubbing.) I’d most likely start out the evening by meeting my friend Kent at His Co. Disco because the cover charge between 9 and 10 was only a dollar. If the crowd got boring or if certain B-list DJs were spinning, we’d then head over to The Forum. But His Co. always seemed to play better music and have the new stuff sooner. It also had a slightly raised, lighted dance floor and a much better light show, so whatever else happened we’d always start out there. I can’t say I ever reliably got laid on a regular basis via either place (it wasn’t until many years later that I discovered The Connection and all that changed), but His Co. was where I met the great unrequited love of my life Steve Golden, and where I connected with Paul Bayfield and Ken Coyer, the two doormen—with whom I did have carnal relations on multiple occasions. Separately. (They couldn’t stand each other and were each aghast when they learned that I had slept with the other.)
Oh, and there was the boy who’d driven all the way into town from Gilbert (which was to hell and gone in relation to the club’s location back in the day and still is—just not out in the middle of nowhere like it was in 1978). My buddy Chas was up from Tucson that weekend and since I was still living at home he let me borrow his hotel room for a few hours to entertain Mr. Gilbert. “Don’t get anything on the sheets! I have to sleep on those!”
And come to think of it, His Co. also served up Craig—and his lover—whom I’d encountered at work as customers in the housewares department at Broadway Southwest just that afternoon. “You really should wear underwear with those Angel Flights,” Craig told me later that evening. “I could almost see veins!”
Good times.
Anyway, I bring this up because my previous post about Live and More triggered lots of memories of my wonderfully misspent youth.
And speaking of 3 am, forty years ago if neither none of us was busy getting laid, I’d probably be at breakfast with Kent and a drag queen or two before heading home…
Happy Birthday Steven Stucker
Comic actor Stephen Stucker would’ve turned 71 years old today. The man who played impish Johnny in Airplane! (1980) and Airplane II: The Sequel (1982)—a character who relished sales at Penney’s and who noticed Leon’s fluctuating largeness—became one of the first public figures to announce that he had AIDS. Stucker relied on metaphysical healing, vitamins, a positive outlook, and a healthy diet to combat the syndrome, which he suspected he had as early as 1979 and which he somewhat questionably attributed to past blood transfusions and intravenous drug use. He passed away in 1986 at 38.
A Disturbing Realization
As most of my readers already know, I lived in San Francisco for approximately sixteen years, encompassing my late 20s through early 40s.
The other morning, while laying awake at 4 am, memories of San Francisco started bubbling up. I don’t know if it was my age/hormone level at the time I lived there, or whether it is something about The City itself, but going over my memories of San Francisco I came to the disturbing realization that the vast majority of those memories—okay, pretty much all my memories of life in San Francisco—revolved around getting laid or trying to get laid…under the guise of looking for true love, of course.
Naturally, during my time there I worked. I made friends. I went to movies and plays. I took photos, made art, read books, acquired new skills, spent way too much money on way too much stuff, and explored the natural beauty of the Bay Area. But it seems all that was nothing more than background noise amid the unrelenting need to connect.
I would like to think that I fell into that lifestyle over the course of several years, but if I’m being totally honest, I have to admit it started almost the minute boots were on the ground.
While I did date and had several serial boyfriends, the smorgasbord of carnal delights and availability of potential sexual partners literally anywhere in the City is no doubt why so many refer to those 49 square miles as “Disneyland for Adults” and none of those relationships actually lasted. “Cruisin’ the Streets” is more than just an old Boys Town Gang song. You could connect with someone on the subway, waiting for the bus, on your lunch hour downtown, walking home after work—and either go right to your/their place, make plans to meet up later, or duck into an empty stairwell for a quickie; literally anywhere. Buena Vista Park, North Baker Beach, “the whispering bushes” and the southern convenience station at the polo field at the western end of Golden Gate Park, the Hyatt Embarcadero, the 1808 Club, the Shaklee building, the 11th Floor of the Russ Building, The Playground, the Sir Francis Drake, Mike’s Night Gallery, the Sheraton Palace…
You get the idea. There was a lot of action going on in The City. All. The. Time.
Inspired to start keeping a record of my life in San Francisco after seeing Prick Up Your Ears about a year after my arrival there, my journals read like an embarrassing, depressing erotic novel, full of saucy but ultimately empty encounters, littered with the names of men of whom I now have no conscious memory. (Oh, to have had cell phone cameras back then!)
I can’t help but think that in the wake of 9/11 and the added security everywhere that followed, most of those locales have long since been locked down, but I know how industrious and creative horny men can be, and despite the authorities’ best efforts, trysts will still happen somewhere.
Before I moved to San Francisco, when my friend Kent (who had arrived about six years earlier) once related how he stopped to have sex with some guy he met while on the way to a date with another, I was appalled. I could not understand how such a thing could happen, much less that anyone would actually partake. Note I said before I moved there…
While that particular scenario never happened to me, it was apparently not that uncommon, and I had plenty of other equally lascivious encounters during that decade and a half to make up for it. To this day I’m still amazed that I made it out alive, somehow remained STD/AIDS free, and didn’t end up with a police record.
To Absent Friends ?
Another One From The Vaults
Musing the Parade, Youth, and Growing Older in the Castro
26 June 1999
Once again the highest of holy days in the gay community is upon us tomorrow: Parade Day. And tonight is the infamous “Pink Party” in the ‘stro. I will not be attending either event.
Having recently passed into my 40s and—for all intents in the Castro “community”—now invisible, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, pondering how to adapt to several important changes that this number brings, most notably the fact that I’m no longer turning even the few heads I used to. Almost overnight I went from being, even with a few extra pounds—if not good looking, at least downright respectable—to completely invisible, and I have no idea how to redefine myself in the wake of this change. I know I’m not alone when I say that those of us hitting this age have no one to look to, absolutely no gay role models to emulate, and that’s making the whole transition doubly difficult. AIDS decimated my generation, and those of us who remain are charting unexplored territory. What exactly does it mean to be 40- or 50-something and gay in San Francisco at the end of the 20th century?
At the risk of sounding overly sorry for myself (and I’m really not), I am slowly coming to the conclusion that—at least in this particular community in this particular city, no one I might be interested in is going to look at—much less date—a 225 pound 41 year old guy whose life is as excruciatingly non-cosmopolitan (i.e. boring) as mine. I don’t travel, I don’t do drugs, I don’t drink, I’m allergic to cats, I can’t stand Barbra Streisand, I find the “bear” movement just as off-putting and attitude-ridden as gym-bunny culture, I don’t live for White Days at Macy’s Cellar, I don’t work out 5 days a week, I look even more ridiculous than most guys with a goatee, my sex life is almost strictly vanilla, and I’m a borderline, if not a full-fledged geek. And you know—after careful consideration—that’s okay.
The hardest part of this whole aging process is that I don’t feel any different than I did in my 20s or 30s. Okay, so I have a few more battle scars and several more pounds, I’m hopefully a bit more world-wise and mature than fifteen years ago, I have no desire to stay out all night and watch the sun rise, I have less patience for pretense, attitude and stupidity, but other than that, I still see myself as that wide-eyed young man who arrived on the strange shores of San Francisco thirteen years ago, and can’t quite figure out why the guys 27, 28, even 34 or 35—who I still see myself as—aren’t interested in even making eye contact with me any more.
Somewhat painfully, what I’ve come to realize since my return to Oz last year after a five month haitus is that The Castro is very much a place for the 20- to 30-something buff, steroid-assisted, “I want to be a model” chemically-stimulated crowd. And I am not at all surprised that carrying around a few extra pounds (which in the 80s indicated that you were healthy and almost had guys flocking to my doorstep) is viewed with such disdain by a generation that has not lost half it’s population to AIDS and defines beauty only in terms of porn-star pecs and six-pack abs. I will readily admit that I am totally amazed at what incredible shape most of these “kids” are in; I mean, even when I was 25, neither I nor my peers had bodies that looked like they were sculpted by Michaelangelo.
Anyhow, I’m slowly coming to terms all this, accepting it and at the same time realizing that in general I’m simply just pretty much over the whole gay “thing”. Yeah, yeah, I still love men, and I’d jump Ben Browder in a heartbeat, but I just feel this whole rainbow-bedecked-naked-men-dancing-on-floats followed by copious amounts of drugs and sex is getting so…tired…especially in San Francisco where being gay or bi or transsexual or sleeping with your neighbor’s iguana is so accepted and so well integrated into the fabric of life here it isn’t even an issue. C’mon folks…there are more interesting things about us, about me—even with my admittedly mundane lifestyle—than what I choose to do with my genitals. At least I would hope so.
Lest I rise the ire of the politically correct among us, I do have to admit that the parade and ensuing pre- and post-Bacchalian events do serve some purpose, and that is they’re tremendously thrilling and reassuring and exciting and yes, even fun for the newly-minted or newly-arrived gay boys and girls in our community. That’s a fact I’ve been trying to stress with a couple friends who recently moved here from the east coast since they apparently feel “bad” that I’m choosing not to participate in this weekend’s festivities. I’m certainly not trying to be a pariah, but c’mon—for us older or maybe perhaps more jaded souls, the parade lost its appeal after the fifth or sixth year (if even that long), and that’s not just my opinion. Ask anyone who’s been here any length of time and you’ll hear the same sentiments. At least I was able to convince myself to attend for a couple years after that usual cutoff point by telling myself there would be plenty of opportunities for photographing future painting subjects. Or rather, plenty of opportunities for taking pretty pictures of half-naked men…but how many pictures of sunlight accentuating chemically-sculpted pectorals does one really need anyway? Personally, just from the photos I took over the seven or eight years I attended the parade, I’ll have enough subjects to paint for the rest of my life.
Then there’s the whole other issue of the AIDS epidemic wiping out almost my entire generation of gay men. A month ago, while standing in line to buy tickets for The Phantom Menace, I realized that every one of my friends who might’ve been standing in line with me and interested in seeing this film were now dead. Everyone with whom I shared that special Star Wars magic from the very beginning was gone: Kent, Steve, Dennis—and no amount of big-budget special effects was going to bring them back. The same goes for my dance music collection. While I now certainly have friends who are familiar with a lot, if not most of the music I’ve managed to bring back into my life, they’re new friends who have totally different memories connected with the tunes; they aren’t shared memories, so the full depth of the music is somehow lost.
This has left me at times feeling very alone and very much out of place in the world, and this sudden “invisibility” in my own community hasn’t really helped things either. I thank God, or the Universe, or whatever you want to call the Is, for friends like Lei, who, after hearing essentially the same sentiments I’ve just voiced, have the uncanny ability to tell me exactly what I need to hear and put things in perspective.
From one of her recent e-mails:
“I like your lack of need to attend the damn parade to demonstrate—what? You know who you are and anyone who interests you will know who you are. Those in their 20 – 30’s are still growing into what they will be and need to make a lot of noise. That’s fine, too. It was something you went through in “old” San Francisco. We need to remember that we’ve been young before but young folk have never been old before. (Not that, from my vantage point, I consider 41 to be “old” by any means.)
“I am so glad that you realize you don’t like travel, drugs, booze, Barbra Streisand or Macy’s cellar. You can enjoy knowing folks who do, even if you consider them to be a bit nuts. Some of my best friends…
“Case in point: a friend of mine last Monday began rhapsodizing over his upcoming drive in a motor home to ALASKA where he will do his yearly fishing at some salmon spawning site. He recalls the year that he spent sixteen hours there, without eating or going to the bathroom, standing in one place wearing his waders in water up to his blue…. It was just SOOO wonderful. He caught his limit of three, weighing blank, blank and blank and then he got to clean and can them himself! Now how can you beat that for wonderful? (In my considered opinion, by going to Safeway and selecting a lovely pre-cut and boned fillet from the fish market.)
“I don’t feel the least bit sorry for you. I’m delighted you know yourself—as much as anyone ever can hope to—and in no way are you close to being a geek, so forget that! (I am in charge of the geek list.)
“What is sad to me is women/men who are so afraid of not being ‘with it’ that they torture themselves to look, act and think like those they consider to be the ideal. They try to replace their own pleasures with what they hope is the most current. Y’see, life is set to music. You find the music that fuels your soul. Why learn all the lyrics to the latest rap song that you don’t understand just to prove—what?”
“You can be sure that there are many men of your gentle age, who are going through the same wonderings you are. You’ll find him—or he will find you. ‘Just being you’ ain’t bad, y’know.”
Throwback Thursday
It’s amazing what you find when you go rummaging around in old hard drives…
August 2000, over a year before my cancer diagnosis and still thinking I understood how the world worked. Hell, I hadn’t even started going hoarse yet (that wouldn’t happen for another three or four months). Bill Clinton was closing out the last bit of his Presidency, the Twin Towers were still standing, things were relatively stable in the Middle East, and the world—or at least the United States—was still sane. And then everythting jumped the shark…
Hard To Believe It’s Been Thirty Years
1645 Folsom Street, #7. My first—non-shared—apartment in San Francisco. September/October 1987.
It wasn’t perfect, but it was one of those places I immediately think of when I hear the word “home.”
At the time, the area was still very much industrial/commercial in nature. The building was a half block from Hamburger Mary’s and just around the corner from the SF Eagle. At $745 a month, this one bedroom plus den stretched my budget but I loved it. #7 overlooked the extremely shallow paved back yard (that was never used by anyone). It had a good southern exposure, even though the equally tall buildings completely surrounding the yard sometimes made it feel like it was at the bottom of a light well. It also had an easily accessible roof deck where you could throw a lounge chair and catch some rays or the wonderful views at night.
About eighteen months after I moved in, #9 opened up on the top floor, and I jumped on it. It wasn’t quite as big as #7 (no separate den), but it was bright and airy, had a charming—if non working—fireplace, and a decent view of Twin Peaks if you stood in either of the bay windows.
The biggest adjustment moving upstairs to the opposite side of the building was the noise. Sleep was impossible with the windows open for the first few nights I was there because I was now facing Folsom, and even then it was a busy thoroughfare. But when the winter rains started sound of drops hitting the pavement and the woosh-woosh of cars passing on those wet nights more than made up for it. Parking (or lack thereof) continued to be a problem; I can’t even begin to tell you how many hundreds of dollars in $10 overnight street-cleaning parking tickets I racked up. But this was still home, and after I struck an arrangement with one of the business owners a few doors down to rent a parking space in their lot for $25 a month, the parking problem all but disappeared.
Then there was the stove in #9. It apparently hadn’t received a proper cleaning since it was originally put in place from the looks of it. I made the mistake one night of lifting up the range top, thinking I’d only have to wipe up a few spills under the burners, but I ended up spending the entire evening—with a putty knife—scarping off god knows how many years of accumulated gunk. But it shined thereafter!
This is where I was living when the Loma Prieta quake hit in 1989. The building came through with nary a scratch, but it pointed out the disadvantage of living in that particular area; probably because of its zoning and demographics, it was one of the last areas of The City to regain power. Even so, if I hadn’t made a very poor decision some months earlier and asked an even poorer decision of a romantic partner to move in with me, I might’ve stayed much longer. As it was, we transferred the lease into his name and I moved out in 1990.
Memories of San Francisco
Hogg & Mythen Architects, Part Four
LEARNING THE IMPORTANCE OF BACKUPS
I have a ready answer whenever I’m asked that infamous interview question, “What was the biggest mistake you ever made at work and how did you fix it?”
H&M did a variety of work, but our bread and butter income came from tenant improvement projects (a client leases space in an existing building and creates offices to their design specifications). Of these, the building at 30 Van Ness (at the corner of Market and Van Ness) was primary. One of the first CAD-intensive projects we undertook was to completely measure and draw up all four floors (plus underground parking garage) of the building since these shell drawings could be easily used again and again when it came time to build out any particular area.
I don’t remember the exact circumstances, but I must’ve been fucking around with something on my system (the one where all our drawings were stored) one day and all that work was gone. Might’ve reformatted the hard drive, or updated the OS or god knows what, but all I knew was that all that data was no longer there. I checked for copies on the other two machines where we had AutoCAD installed and came up empty handed. I was in a panic. After scouring every location I could think of, I put my tail between my legs and told Nick.
Surprisingly, he wasn’t angry. All he said was, “Well, you’d better get back to work and recreate them.” Wow.
Fortunately, we still had all the measured sketches we’d done, so it wouldn’t involve physically measuring the building again, but I was looking at a lot of work nonetheless. I sucked it up, went back to my desk and started drafting.
I happened to glance over at a stack of banker boxes against the wall and noticed the FedEx mailing envelope we used to take diskettes back and forth to the blueprinters (this was before we had own own plotter on site). I walked over, looked inside, and let out a yelp that was undoubtedly heard down the street. In that envelope were three diskettes containing all the plans of 30 Van Ness. They were several days out of date (we’d started a new TI project), but damn…a few days out of date was infinitely preferable to having to recreate months of work.
My ass was saved.
Immediately thereafter, we bought a tape backup for each of the PCs and began a thorough backup routine.
SEOUL
The biggest project H&M was ever involved in was the design and construction of a new school in Seoul, South Korea. I’ve long since forgotten how this particular project fell into our lap, but it was the one thing I am most proud of during my time at the firm. Jack and Nick were pretty much hands-off as far as design was concerned, giving Neill free reign and he definitely thought outside the box on this one. Very “post modern” (it was the mid 90s, after all) I remember the main multi-story facade being a diagonal black and white checkerboard with horizontal red brick accents. The client loved it.
I didn’t travel to South Korea with Nick, Jack, and Neill even though the invitation was extended because—reasons. I didn’t have a passport, dreaded the thought of a twelve hour flight over the open ocean, and frankly, simply didn’t want to be away from home for the two weeks this visit was projected to take. So along with Cerese, I stayed back and “held down the fort” until they returned.
I just emailed Nick, hoping that he has some photos of the project he can send me. If I hear back from him I’ll post them.
SAYING GOODBYE
August 1994. I’d reached the end of my rope with many aspects of life in San Francisco. Still smarting from the breakup with Rory a year earlier, it seemed life in The City had lost all the magic it once held. Two unplanned trips back to Phoenix to deal with parental health emergencies showed me that life in Arizona really wasn’t as bad as I’d remembered—although I still had no real desire to move back to Phoenix; if I returned to the Grand Canyon state I’d definitely head south to Tucson. After much thought a particularly nasty run-in with a meter maid downtown (the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back), I decided it was time to leave. I gave notice on my apartment and at work.
They were devastated.
During the following two weeks while boxing up my life (Annie Lennox’s Diva is forever burned into my mind as the soundtrack for those weeks), strange things started to happen. San Francisco was not going to give up her grip on me so easily. The magic started returning: a cool ocean breeze, fog spilling over Twin Peaks, friends all but begging me not to leave, more than one encounter with a handsome stranger after exchanging glances…and discovering the joys of a newly-opened sex club South of Market called The Playground. (Pet Shop Boys’ Relentless will forever associated in my mind with that place and its wonderful wanton memories.)
I suddenly found myself wondering why the hell I was leaving San Francisco. Was it really too late? My buddy Stan was fond of telling me it wasn’t. I wondered if he might be right.
One evening I sat down to write in my Journal, hoping to sort this all out, but I didn’t get more than a paragraph completed. I started writing about everything that had happened during the previous week; the men, the realization that I really did have friends there who didn’t want me to leave, the magic that had come back into my life in various forms—and I wrote, “I can’t leave!” I broke down and cried.
And then, at 12:15 a.m. that night, I made a decision. I wasn’t going to leave. No matter what it cost, I was not going to say good-bye to my beloved San Francisco. The only problem was the financial Catch-22 I found myself in. I had to leave Hogg & Mythen in order to remain in San Francisco; I needed the severance money they were going to be giving me in order to pay the two month’s rent I now required in order to stay in my apartment. I didn’t relish the thought of leaving the guys, but at the same time I knew from my conversation with Nick a week earlier that because of the however-misplaced sense of betrayal was feeling, staying on was probably not an option. No matter. It would force me to find a position doing more computer and less (much less) architecture, which was my ultimate goal.
What I was not prepared for when I told him of my decision to stay 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 coudn’t find in any workplace. Needless to say, I accepted.
Unfortunately—or fortunately, depending on your perspective, this magic didn’t last. It was all a ruse by San Francisco to get me to stay. Once I’d signed that dotted line, life returned to “normal.” A year later, I was packing again—and this time it was for real.
The folks at H&M at first didn’t believe me, but as the clock ticked town to the last couple days I think it finally sank in that this was goodbye. On my last day, we all went out to lunch and returned to the office where we had a very tearful goodbye. They even let me keep the infamous bright red desk chair that I’d picked out a year earlier…
Tucson lasted only six months (another story for another time), but when I found myself back in San Francisco again—and gone, and then to return again—I didn’t approach H&M other than to offer my services as an independent contractor. We’d all been through so much, and if I was ever going to make a clean break from architecture, this was the time to do it. As it turned out, I ended up at a major architectural firm for a few months following my first arrival back in The City out of necessity, but thankfully that gig was cut short by an opportunity to dip my toes into the then-exciting career of PC Support. By the time I’d left San Francisco and returned again three years later, my previous architectural career was already but a fading memory.
Would I go back and change anything if I could? Not a thing. Everything that’s happened in my life has brought me to the place where I am—and who I’m with—now, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Memories of San Francisco
Hogg & Mythen Architects, Part Three
REBUILDING
We found a new home for the office about a half mile southeast of our old location. It wasn’t the one of the several we looked at South of Market that I liked the best, but then, it wasn’t my firm. It was another older building—albeit one that passed its earthquake inspection, was entirely wood frame, and for the rent offered an incredible amount of space (we occupied the entire upper floor). It was kind of a lofty space, although not really a loft as strictly defined, even though the entire rear half the office had a structurally-exposed two story ceiling. We eventually added a bunch of color to the space—as well as painting the front door a bright canary yellow on which we overlaid the company logo in black. We also put up track lights (it was the 90s, after all) and bolted the shelving units to the wall. Lesson learned.
Our workload swelled—and then crashed—as the years passed following the move. After the infamous Black Wednesday of 1992, things got so bad Nick and Jack were forced with either laying us all off or asking that we voluntarily go to four day weeks. Since they had done so much for both Neill and I over the years and neither one of us particularly wanted to look for work in that kind of economy, the decision was a no-brainer. When everything snapped back, not only did our workload necessitate the hiring of two more drafters, but it also resulted in raises and bonuses, the likes of which we hadn’t ever seen. Neill and I even convinced the bosses that in addition to the already paid vacation and holidays, to stay competitive they also needed to provide health insurance. Done and done.
To say that we were like a family was an understatement. When the owners exchanged words, Neill and I would retreat to the kitchen, whispering to each other that it was like when our biological parents fought.
CELEBRATIONS
We always did something special for the holidays. The first year I worked for H&M, it was a ferry ride across the bay to Sausalito for lunch. The second year was much more exciting, and not necessarily in a good way. Nick decided that we needed to go fishing on the bay. He contacted a longtime friend with a boat and off we went—during some of the worst weather we’d ever seen in December.
As I wrote in those infamous Journals (and amended some time later):
Today we went out on San Pablo Bay to go fishing in lieu of having a regular Christmas Lunch. It was interesting, but not something I think I’d jump at again. I’m still very uncomfortable on small boats, and even though the water is supposedly only about thirty feet deep where we were, it was murky enough to make me uneasy.
The weather today was awful. It was bitterly cold, windy and raining. The bay calmed down for about an hour, but heading back to the marina (in Richmond), it was very choppy. Neill caught a 40 lb. sturgeon and we all ended up with sturgeon steaks. I threw mine out upon returning home (I wasn’t going to eat anything that came out of that bay), and after seeing Nick bludgeon the poor thing to death on the dock, it caused Neil to become a vegetarian.
Subsequent holiday lunches were either spent in The City or down the coast, anywhere from Pacifica to Santa Cruz. One memorable lunch was had at The Shore Bird in Half Moon Bay—where I had the most delicious halibut I have ever eaten. Sadly, the restaurant has long since closed. Another year we drove down to Capitola for dinner at a Shadowbrook, a restaurant that you entered via a small tramway. (Nick got very drunk that night and while I was designated driver and responsible for driving us back to The City, it was Nick’s minivan and we had to listen to the soundtrack from Twin Peaks on endless repeat all the way home.)
(to be continued)