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Day 4: Crystal Bridges

After hearing praise from John, we knew we had one last stop to make before leaving Arkansas.

So, after bidding adieu to our little home away from home…

…and grabbing breakfast, we were on our way.

No, not there, although Ben did get a great cut from Robert.

I’m talking about Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

I mean seriously, who knew such a fabulous place would be found in rural northwestern Arkansas?

We met up with JP ‘n Earl and were joined by Erik shortly after arriving, who took our picture…

Of course, while waiting I couldn’t help myself but take a couple sneaky pics.

Several 18th and 19th century pieces caught my eye:

But I really liked the 20th century pieces…

I also got some shots of the man I love…

And someone tried to molest me…

I could’ve spent way more than the 2 or so hours we were there. We didn’t even get to explore the grounds surrounding the museum; something I’d definitely like to do.

After saying our goodbyes and grabbing some lunch, we started our journey home.

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Day 3: The Main Reason for Going to Arkansas

Today was the day for which we came to Arkansas: I was getting inked by Erik!

But that wasn’t scheduled until after noon, so John, Ben, and I grabbed a quick breakfast at McDonalds and headed to beautiful downtown Bentonville to wander and catch a bit of the local ambiance:

If the store had been open, I so would’ve thrown my credit card balance to the wind and bought this…

We also went through the Walmart Visitor Center. (Hey it’s a small town and there wasn’t much else to do to kill a couple hours.)

Walmart has a visitor center, you ask? Indeed. From the website:

Visitors can look, touch and explore through a series of family-friendly, interactive displays. All the exhibits are designed as giant scrapbooks that tell the story of Walmart through words, images, artifacts and interactive displays like our virtual tour of Sam Walton’s old office and our map featuring information on customers, stores, suppliers and associates from around the world. We’ve even got Mr. Sam’s trusty old Ford F-150 parked in the gallery.

In other words, it’s a veritable warehouse of pro-Walmart propaganda.

The funniest things I saw were two items in the “returned merchandise” exhibit. Both pretty much sum up the entire stereotype of Walmart shoppers:

It was still way too early to head over to Erik’s studio, so we killed some time at Grounds for Thought and did what geeks do: we got coffee and brooded over our laptops.

We grabbed lunch at Gusano’s Pizza and then headed over to Odyssey Tattoo, Erik’s salon. John left early because his appointment was first, and he was already in the chair by the time we arrived:

Soon Calvin & Hobbes were frolicking on his arm:

I was next.

John had his return flight to catch, so shortly after I sat down in the chair, he was off. It was a great visit and Ben and I can’t wait until we see him again. Maybe next year a trip to the east coast is in order.

The good Doctor and his Tardis were a bit more involved, so it took a while longer…

Three hours later, it was finished!

It was everything I’d hoped it would be. Thank you, Mr. Rubright. I can never say that enough. It is amazing.

From there, Ben and I went back to the hotel room for a bit and then met Erik at Grub’s. Added bonus: JP and Earl were in town as well and joined us shortly after we arrived!

A great vacation got a little bit better!

I’d never met either of the guys, but had been following JP’s blog for some time. Like Erik, he’s exactly the same in person as online and we had a great time. Unfortunately, after three hours of getting poked, I was beat, and shortly after dinner Ben and I bid our adieus and headed back to the hotel.

We did make one stop on the way first, however. Andy’s Frozen Custard…

…and bug watching.

Yikes! Are you supposed to put a saddle on and ride that thing? It looks like something that crawled out of The Mist. (Mmm…Thomas Jane.)

But I digress.

 

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Day 2: No Respect for Historic Sites

Day 2 took us from Wichita to Rogers via Oklahoma.

You may be wondering why we took the “back roads” route instead of taking the much faster I-70 route direct from Denver.  This is why:

Yes, these two fat kids planned their trip around a hamburger joint. If you don’t have Whataburger in your location, I feel sorry for you. We had them in Phoenix, but we don’t have them in Denver, and while I got to partake when I was in Arizona earlier this year, Ben had no such opportunity. So naturally we had to go.

We arrived in Rogers mid-afternoon and immediately met up with John, who had booked a room at the same Microtel we did. None of us had stayed in one before, and I was very pleasantly surprised at how nice it was—and I have to say that of the three places we overnighted on this trip, the Microtel was the best. (Avoid the Days Inn in Lawrence Kansas!).

One of the things we’d wanted to see on our trip was the Pea Ridge Military Park; not necessarily because of any great interest in the Civil War, but rather simply to get our Park Service Book stamped!

I’ll say this: it was beautiful. Arkansas is green. Erik told us it was very unusual for this time of year, but it was still amazing. In fact, that’s the one thing I noticed the most after we got off the highway and out of the brown fields of Oklahoma. And the green here was different than the kind of green we have in Denver. Deciduous versus coniferous forests, maybe?

Anyhow, we made our way through the park and stopped along the way to grab some photos…

Even though John and I had never met in person prior to that day, I felt an immediate kinship. Some people have no respect for historic sites:

Absolutely no respect:

(Although I’m sure it’s not the first time any of this had been done…)

And sometimes I happen to snap a few photos where everything just seems to come together:

Later, after heading back to the hotel to freshen up, the three of us joined  Erik and his husbear Robert at Frank’s Hickory Inn for dinner. Afterward, we headed over to the infamous JJ’s for some adult beveraging.


The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Okay, maybe just one. You pick.



This One Turned Everyone’s Heads

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Day 1: Golf Balls

The most interesting thing about the start of our journey was seeing the radar installations east of Denver.

Day 1 was punctuated by lunch at Taco John’s in Lamar. We’d never been to the chain before. I liked it. It reminded me of how Taco Bell tasted before it was swallowed up by KFC. Ben wasn’t as impressed.

The afternoon was full of endless fields, wind generator turbines, threatening skies, and one roadside warning found when we stopped to get gas…

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Road Trip!

Back in 2007, shortly after I’d celebrated my five-years-cancer-free anniversary, I got my first tattoo. I anguished for months over the design, and finally decided on a simple black tribal design consisting of two geckos head to tail, curving around a roman numeral 5. The design was perfect. The execution was a disaster. The artist I’d chosen in Phoenix decided to “improve” the design—without asking, and as he was in the process of inking me—by adding shadows and highlights. By the time I realized what he was doing it was too late, and my perfect design was ruined. (If it sounds like I’m still bitter after all this time, it’s because I am.)

There wasn’t much that could be done about the abomination that now resided on my left bicep, but I swore that from that point forward the only person who would ever ink me again was Erik Rubright. How or when this would happen had always been a question since we lived about a thousand miles apart, but if it was meant to be, somehow, somewhere it would happen. And if it didn’t and it meant  I would never get another tattoo as long as I lived, so be it. It was better to live with that than risk ending up with another indelible piece of crap as a permanent part of my body.

Ben and I had the pleasure of meeting Erik and his partner, Robert, in person about nine months ago, and it cemented in my mind the fact that no one would put ink to my skin again unless it was Erik.

As my ten year anniversary began to loom large, I started thinking about what I wanted to do to mark its passing. Five years ago—prior to actually getting that rotten ink—I had anticipated adding to the original piece as the years ticked by, but now that I was approaching that ten-year mark, it no longer appealed to me. On the other hand, I couldn’t come up with any viable alternatives either—or at least nothing that appealed to me to such a degree that I would want to make it permanent.

Shortly after Erik and Robert were in Denver I ran across a piece of Doctor Who art that really spoke to me. It was an almost cartoonish picture of the Tenth Doctor (David Tenant) standing in front of a semi-stylized Tardis against a pale blue, star-studded background. It was the tenth doctor. It was my tenth anniversary. I’d found my next tattoo! I sent it to Erik and asked if he’d be able to do it. He responded that he could, and that he would file it away for such time that he would be able to personally apply it.

This has been percolating at the back of my mind for some time now, and when Ben and I started discussing possible vacation plans this year, a trip to Erik’s studio in Arkansas naturally came up. I ran the idea past John, an internet friend I’ve known for close to a decade but had never met—asking if he would be willing to join us in Bentonville. He jumped at the idea.

So last Sunday, John hopped on a plane heading south; Ben and I loaded up his new Kia, and headed east…

(to be continued)

 

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Life Teacher

My first Life Teacher—and unrequited love—arrived the spring of 1977 in the form of Kent Kelly. Like Ric, Kent was a couple years older than me. He was tall, ginger-haired, out, proud, and not willing to take crap from anyone—and I was immediately smitten. I don’t remember if I met Kent through GSO or at Jekyll’s, but I do remember he had no time for or interest in The Table.

Kent readily admitted that he liked me, but wasn’t interested in me—or for that matter, anyone—romantically. He enjoyed being single and reveled in the freedom it allowed. Those were harsh words for a starry-eyed 18-year old, but to this day I appreciate his honesty because it allowed us to dispense with the bullshit and grow a platonic friendship that far outlasted anything sexual that might have come about at that point in my life. Kent knew he wasn’t ready to settle down and also knew that I, as a “baby queen” (his words) had a lot of learning and exploring to do before even thinking about trying to settle down with just one other guy.

In simpler terms—and I say this with love—Kent was a self-professed slut and reveled in it.

After we both found ourselves living in Phoenix a couple years later, Kent became my ongoing dance partner and one of the best friends I’ve ever had. Even my mom—who constantly feared for my safety after I finally came out to the entire family—liked Kent and confided that she stopped worrying about me when I was out because she knew Kent was with me.

If she only knew…

During those first couple years after coming out, all my belief systems were in flux. I had been raised as a Lutheran, and like a lot of kids at the time, in high school I became devoutly religious. This was after all, the age of Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell. It was only after I came out and actually started learning about the atrocities committed in the name of Christianity that I flat our rejected it—at least the organized, brainwashing aspect of church itself. For years I skirted the issue by saying while I no longer considered myself a Christian, I still followed Christian principles.

Yeah, whatever.  As I said, everything was in flux.

During this period of change, Kent opened my eyes to other belief systems, and encouraged me to explore all of them. He—like my dad (who was not at all religious and only begrudgingly attended church when he absolutely had to)—was very much into astrology, and it immediately appealed to me. It was so much simpler to put people in twelve little boxes than to deal with the fact that people are fucking impossible to fully understand and totally random acts that come out of nowhere can sometimes send your life careening off in totally different directions. I soon learned to calculate a birth chart by hand (amazing, considering how horrible I am at math), discern the meanings of Houses and Signs and Cusps and Aspects and became obsessed with trying to figure people out through the position of the planets in the sky the day they were born.

This interest in astrology naturally led me down other metaphysical paths, and after seeing the double sunset in Star Wars for the first time—and dealing with the overwhelming sense of deja vu that accompanied it—I began researching reincarnation. Of all the belief systems out there, reincarnation made the most sense to me, and I adopted that as the foundation for my personal belief system for many, many years. Even now, as an admitted Atheist there’s still a tiny part of me that hopes—against all scientific evidence—that this is still what happens after we die. I guess it’s just hard wired in the human psyche to refuse to accept the inevitable.

Kent shared these views, and as our friendship deepened, we simply accepted as fact that we had known each other in some previous existence. I remember one dream in which we were sitting by a lake in the mountains. Overhead three large moons moved lazily across an early morning sky. In this dream, Kent was telling me that he would soon be leaving, but not to be upset because we would be reunited again. The sense of loss was incredible, and I woke up crying. That day I asked him what he thought it meant. “Probably just a past life fragment sneaking through.”

Later that summer he announced that Phoenix had grown too small and that he was moving to San Francisco. This sent me reeling, as it had come out of nowhere. (Did relating my dream to him months earlier plant the seed?) No matter what I said, nothing could convince him to stay. So, a week later, with tears welling up in my eyes after helping him pack up his battered orange VW Beetle, I watched him drive off, disco blaring from his open windows, as he started his new life.

The day he left, I gave him a card in which I’d copied a quote from Richard Bach’s Illusions, a book that became my “Bible” for many years afterward:

Do not be dismayed at goodbyes.
A farewell is necessary before you can meet again.
And meeting again, after moments or lifetimes,
Is certain for those who are friends.

The dream proved prophetic. Kent and I did in fact, reconnect after I’d moved to San Francisco in 1986, but he passed from AIDS complications about eight months later. “It’s better to have lived six years in San Francisco than sixty  in Arizona,” was one of the last things he said to me; an idea that influenced my attitudes for years afterward.

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Learning My Way Around

Shortly after my first night at Jekyll’s, Ric and I started dating. I don’t remember exactly how it began, but I have many fond memories of sleeping either at his place in front of the fire or in my dorm room—having pushed the two twin beds together after David moved out to make a single king bed. While I intellectually understood the mechanics of sex with another man, Ric was the guy who put all that theoretical knowledge into practice and showed me in no uncertain terms that what John and I had been trying to do that first time was definitely not how it was done.

Ric was a tender, passionate lover, and possessed all of the physical attributes I found so attractive in a man. He was also a lot of fun to be around. I have no recollection of what his major was or what he did when not at school because the only surviving memories I have of him are of spending time together at the gay table in Louie’s Lower Level (hereafter simply referred to as “The Table”) or of being in some state of undress. Ric gave me many tokens of his affection, but the one item that stands out was the second-hand army jacket that he always wore.

This fairy tale first romance came to an abrupt end when I came down with mono. A late bloomer, I guess this was something I should’ve contracted in high school, but since I wasn’t busy kissing anyone in high school (as much as I had crushes on guys all the way back to my freshman year), I had never been exposed to it. Needless to say, it hit me hard and knocked me on my ass for several weeks. Ric stayed away—not wanting to catch it himself even though he was the one who gave it to me in the first place—and I missed all my classes during this period, thus beginning the inexorable downward slide that was to mar the rest of my short-lived academic career.

When I finally recovered, Ric had become distant, not returning phone calls and appearing at Louie’s only infrequently. I soon learned he had started seeing someone else and I was understandably heartbroken. He never asked me to return any of the things he’d given me, and I kept that damn jacket for years afterward.

It was shortly after I’d returned to full health that I received a strange clipping in the mail from my dad. It was an article obviously clipped from one of the Phoenix gay rags about the epidemic of oral gonorrhea that was then sweeping the gay community. At the bottom he’d written, “Don’t give him anything but love.”

I hadn’t yet come out to the family, but after passing this clipping around The Table and receiving a unanimous, “Your dad knows,” it was obvious my that at least my dad knew what was going on and this was his roundabout way of saying he was cool with it. Why he was so cool with it only, pardon the expression—came out—later that summer.

Don, Phil, Chas, Kent, and James at my birthday party, 1977

By this time, the folks who gathered at The Table at Louie’s had become like an adopted second family. James Uhrig was a bookish geek with whom I shared a common love of writing and later became a librarian. There was also Jesse, on whom I developed an intense crush, and “Big John” Marion, a bearish black guy with an unabashed fondness for campus tea rooms and expertly deep-throating chocolate covered frozen bananas in the most public venues possible. There was also Brian Lea, with whom I shared a newfound love of disco and who just happened to live in the same dorm on the same floor I did. There was also Chas Dooley, a flamboyant black boy who was friends with Andy at Navajo Hall and who, along with Don Hines, became one of my dearest friends over the next few years.  Abe Marquez was one of the older (with older being late 20s) students at the table, who became a mentor of sorts and was the voice of reason among our rowdy little band.

One amusing memory is from about a month after Ric and I stopped seeing each other. I arrived at The Table one afternoon and it was abuzz with news that Ric had come down with hepatitis (I may be wrong, but I don’t think hepatitis had an alphabet soup trailing at that time) and was currently in a room over at Student Health. He had been told that anyone who had been in intimate contact with him—even as minor as sharing a plate of food or drink—needed to go right over and get a shot of gamma globulin. Since pretty much everyone at The Table had at one time shared something with Ric (cough, cough), we dutifully lined up and marched over to Student Health en masse and patiently waited as each of went in for our injection.

(L-R) Big John, Tommy (“Spider Lady”), and Jesse, 1977

Where are they now? Ric was claimed by the plague in the early 90s. (I found his panel in the AIDS Quilt.) I lost contact with James after his trip to San Francisco in 1989 although an internet search a few years back showed he was still alive and well. I don’t remember Jesse’s last name, so his whereabouts are unknown. I also have no idea what happened to John Marion, but I hope he’s still among the living. Brian was taken by the plague in the early 1990s. I ran into Chas in San Francisco in 1990 or thereabouts, with both of us promising to get back in touch. It never happened, and with such a common name, internet searches have been inconclusive. Thankfully there are no Charles Dooleys showing up on the Social Security Death Index with his birthdate or panels in the AIDS quilt with his name on them, so I take some solace in that. Abe is also among us, still in Tucson and doing well. We reconnected over dinner a few years back and even though thirty years had passed, it was like being right back at The Table in Louie’s Lower Level…

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Fasten Your Seat Belts

Amazing video of the Space Shuttle during launch, taken with cameras and mics mounted on the solid rocket boosters that propelled the shuttles into space. All the sound is from the actual camera microphones and has not been faked or replaced with foley artist sound.

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Amen!

And on a semi-related note, I tweeted earlier today, “I’m so tired of coddling stupidity because someone might be offended if you speak the truth and call them an idiot.”

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