SHAVINGS FROM MY HEAD

everything is a consideration for the recycle bin….

…I have nothing to say right now…

…..just shop talk.

Why I love southern California……

The world is a Disco Ball.

Turning,

catching,

then rearranging,

light.

Manipulating it into fractions of life,

our geometry lesson

on perspective and movement.

Bopping days,

Boogie nights,

rehearsing a lifetime of numbers

we comprehend flexibility,

become bendable.

Dancing,

repeating our steps,

we follow the light

hoping for the perfect moves,

the right song,

the ideal partner:

Someone pliable.

Not just a poser.

…..Hilary Swank to Arnold Schwarzenegger

Henry Moore to Marcia (Christine Taylor- Marcia from the Brady Bunch)

Lisa Kudrow to Delta Burke

Vivica A Fox to Anita Hill

Kate Bush to Paul Anka

Peter Bogdanovich to Emily Bronte’….

….what more could I ask for as “company” at my birthday party?

“Now come on you two”, coaxed Wade’s mother. “Move in closer! And smile!” she choreographed from across the lawn.

Her directive made the boys uneasy.

Throughout the years, to conceal their mutual desire, they’d carefully concocted a studied manner; a style for appearing disconnected in public—especially around their parents. With high school graduation only a month away, they were more determined than ever to hide their covert affection. No one could discover the affair. Or their plan: to escape to Manhattan once summer arrived and diplomas had been dispensed.

“If she only knew,” Wade quipped like a ventriloquist, through his forced smile. “And take your hand off your hip! You look like you’re posing for Seventeen magazine.”

“Fuck you!” AJ sputtered back through clinched teeth.

“You wish!” Wade countered.

“What was that boys?” Wade’s mother queried from behind her instamatic camera.

“Nothing mother” said Wade, while pinching his elbow to keep from laughing out loud.

**************************************

Since the age of eleven, in public Wade and AJ were seen as best friends.

In private they were lovers.

Introduced through their mothers’ at the start of the summer between sixth and seventh grade, the boys first met while having tea.

“I had a feeling you two might like each other”, announced Wade’s mother while selecting finger sandwiches and a napoleon from the teacart.

The women had met several months earlier after AJ’s family had been accepted at the club, and after his mother Louise was invited onto the women’s tennis team; once, of course, they’d passed all the requirements—or restrictions, depending on how you saw it—for admittance to the Stony Ridge Country Club.

Subsequently, Gloria Pastor and Louise Holden became doubles through the women’s tennis team at the club, before building on their budding friendship—eventually folding their adolescent sons to the mix. Between sets one day, they made a plan to meet for lunch at The Bird Cage restaurant inside the Lord and Taylor department store downtown.

“Oh Gloria! You must try it!” gushed Louise. “I hardly ever go into Washington anymore! But honestly, the dress department at Lord and Taylor…it’s perfection! Besides…it’s become a sort of ritual with Wade and me. He just loves to have tea and help me shop! And he has such an wonderful eye for finding what looks good on me!” she boasted, accentuating her waifish figure with a wave of her tennis racket.

****************************************

“Tell the waitress what you’d like from the cart,” instructed Wade’s mother, stubbing out her complimentary cigarette before turning to AJ.

“Go ahead dear!  Select whatever you’d like. Wade just loves the egg salad sandwiches here! He says they taste better with the crusts cut off the bread” she bragged, before turning to Wade.

“Honestly Wade!” she mock-scolded, “I don’t know how you got to be so particular!”

Wade smiled back, bits of cucumber sandwich glued to the roof of his mouth.

“AJ eyed Wade’s plate to decipher the appropriate amount of finger sandwiches and pastries. His assessment became both comforting and unsettling. While he’d coveted all the same things Wade had already chosen—which brought a certain calm—as he raised his gaze from Wade’s plate, their eyes locked from across the connected tray tables and something odd began to happen: a confusing feeling that stole his appetite; a sort of excited queasiness he’d not felt before.

“I…I…I’ll have the same” AJ sputtered, pointing to Wade’s dish.

The colored waitress gave the boys a knowing look, then smiled, before lowering the delicate plate of sandwiches and pastries onto the daisy printed placemat before AJ.

“There! These should sweeten your day together boys. You’ve both made wonderful choices!”

When AJ’s eyes followed the warm voice—scaling her gray uniform; past the white apron, over the little pocket with the folded lace hanky, and beyond the name, embroidered in black script that read Rita—he eventually landed at her eyes: coffee-colored coins that seemed to envelop his odd, unexplainable feelings, as if coating them, in warm, lovely chocolate—like an éclair. Her smile expanded, further accentuating the warm feeling—as if to say, I understand, don’t be frightened.

While Gloria Pastor and Louise Holden gossiped about tennis and a rumored affair between two married members from club, the boys ate in silence; simultaneously devouring the identical items off their plates while drinking in their undeclared magnetism. Between delicate bites, the boys smiled at each other from across the tray-tables. It was a new smile: a smile that on the surface, bore perfect white conformity, while from behind, just beside the tongue, a vivid hunger had ignited their taste buds.

Along with that first unexplained encounter, there was only one person who understood their love, and that was Rita. Because she too was confined to a world of conformity, a world of white bread—where the brown crusts were removed for a more appealing presentation, for better digestion.

*******************************************

Everything and everyone in their suburban neighborhood was white.

White was right.

It was the element everyone held desirable. Straight, white smiles from behind white picket fences. White patio furniture sprinkled around kidney-shaped pools, bordered by bleached flagstone patios, surrounded by perfectly manicured lawns, that lined identical streets, engulfed by precisely planned communities that served sandwiches on white bread.

“Color(ed)” was bad.

Except when it came time to clean their pools and patios and yards and streets. And especially when it came time to cart away their trash or make the sandwiches—removing the brown crusts—while cooking in their big, white kitchens and ironing their white shirts to wear to their white-collar jobs.

In 1968, boys who liked pink was akin to whites that liked black.

Knowing this, Wade and AJ hid their pink beneath their white. But in secret, like their pink, they loved black; it brought them comfort. They loved Rita the waitress who pushed the teacart at Lord and Taylor, and they loved the maids that cleaned their houses and made their favorite cookies. They especially loved the mostly-black neighborhood downtown, where the closest gay bar stood—a raggedy establishment that smelled of stale beer and musty men.

On Saturday nights when escape was possible, as they drove the old Dodge Swinger through the dilapidated Washington neighborhood—to dance and drink and kiss freely among their people, the capital’s majestic dome illuminated against the sky, they would pass the elderly black men who sat on the stoops of their row houses and smoked. They would occasionally wave to the hookers—clad in sausage skin-tight tube dresses—who flirted with the slow moving cars and played with their synthetic wigs. They felt akin with the gangs of teens who danced in the street and drank from paper bags. Because like the residents of that neighborhood, neither Wade nor AJ knew what their pink-colored future might hold. Would they get through college once each set of parents discovered their love? Would someone hire them if they knew of their secret, their gayness, their pink? Or would their future need to exist as a bigger world of white? And, although they felt disdain for their colorless cage, they too felt comforted by their option, their disguise of white; it held a certain hue of freedom. Both boys understood that, unlike the streets of black, their color, their pink, could pass for white.

************************************************

“So I guess you must be the butch one!” slurred the drunken Tom Jones lookalike. “Trying to be all James Dean…all, all, tough in your teeeee-shirt! Huh?”

“And you!” he continued, turning away from Ward toward AJ. “You must be the bitch-boy… all clad in your oxford cloth!”

The startling proclamation came with a woozy arm gesture accentuated by the sloshing and clinking of ice cubes against a glass.

After only a few minutes at The Stonewall Bar the boys were stunned by the assessment, the narrow-mindedness of the decree. How could someone find fault with their white while safely swathed in a world of pink? How could another gay man so effortlessly box them up into a sexual preference, a category…. a shirt?

Not the cocktail party they’d expected, the boys left the bar and made their way back home—through the beatnik vibe of New York’s Greenwich Village; the humid summer air permeating through their shirts like an arduous coat of oppression.

As they strolled home in silence, Wade thought of the photo he’d taped to the refrigerator—the one his mother had taken on the lawn a few weeks earlier; of them wearing the same shirts.

When they turned off Christopher street and made their way west toward Washington Square Park, toward their cozy studio apartment on McDougal Street, toward home, he wondered: Would they ever really feel free? Would it always about the white—only more labeled, further dividing them by their shirts, their preferences further scrutinized instead of protected?

“Well, I happen to think you’re sexier than James Dean” AJ boasted, breaking their silence.

“Well,..I…I think you…look like a Seventeen magazine covergirl!” Wade countered, grabbing AJ’s hand and kissing him on the cheek.

“Fuck you!”

“When we get home”

**********************************

“What can I get for you gentlemen?” queried the waitress, her arm fanning the teacart of finger sandwiches and pastries.

The question, although they’d heard it for years, seemed different this time. Their hunger had been altered; their taste buds enriched by experience. Their choices had conviction—even the simplest ones.

For their anniversary (the first day they’d met) the boys returned to Lord and Taylor, to The Bird Cage—only this time on New York’s Fifth Avenue, a bigger, seemingly freerer city; a refined tea of emancipation and finger sandwiches.

Seated at the signature tray tables, each chose a multitude of pastries and sandwiches; their tea plates piled into an elaborate confectionary mound.

Once the waitress disappeared, the boys began devouring their sandwiches.

“You know”, said Wade, in between bites. “This egg salad taste different. It tastes weird now. Like it’s missing something without the crusts.”

AJ nodded in agreement, before biting into his éclair.

While savoring that first bite, he began to beam—causing a smile to emerge.

“You’ve got chocolate on your teeth” said Wade.

“Really? Good!”

His smile broadened as he thought of Rita.

As he licked the chocolate frosting from his teeth, he thought about how much he loved Wade. Then he thought about the man from the bar, looked across the table and into Wade’s eyes and smiled again. He finally understood: everyone has their just desserts, only some taste better than others.

* Lord & Taylor’s Bird Cage restaurant and tearoom was opened in the late 1930s. It continued on the fifth floor of the Fifth Avenue New York City store until the 1980s when it was updated and renamed Café American Style. Until the mid-1970s the Bird Cage was outfitted with armchairs with trays connected to them. In the early years each tray was supplied with a complimentary cigarette. Diners selected sandwiches, salads, and desserts from rolling carts modeled on Italian racing cars. As Lord & Taylor branches were opened after World War II in locations such as Westchester NY, Millburn NJ, Hartford CT, and Washington DC, they too were furnished with their own Bird Cages.

….and I can tell you

my love for you will still be strong

after the toys of summer have gone.

As of late he’d been sad, and creatively hurtin’….

…..as if trapped underneath, a gloomy black curtain.

Then he entered the halls, of a place they call LACMAaaa….

….when that feeling first swirled, to bring him back aaagh.

First the darkness got darker, but the figures grew bright….

….as the sketches gave his darkness, a feeling of might.

At first he was scared, but his mind began flirtin’….

….cuz’ the shadows felt right, as he drew in Tim Burton.

From the man who drew darkness, back into the light….

….the swirling went faster felt, his creative took flight.

“I’m in love with this man, and of what I am seeing”….

….”there are others like me, who question their being!”

Still he worried that his thoughts, might no longer be grand….

…then a view of the glove, with the scissors on hand.

“Has my sentence in life, made creative a dead word?”…

…but he cut out such thoughts, as he looked to Edward.

Such a showing of dark, killed his feeling of wary….

…he’d found life could be perfect, and a little bit scary!

Though still scared of the darkness, he knew one thing for certain….

….that his darkness drew life, off a visit with Burton!

Go see it! Amazing!

The Dead-End!

Big wheel keep on turnin’….

….proud “fairy” keep on burnin’….

….rollin’….rollin’, rollin like a giver…..

Happy Pride!

For many a year, came a memorial haze…

…before don’t ask, don’t tell, became the craze.

Now out are we, us military gays…

…as God and country, begin a new phase…

…marking harmonious change, in our military ways.

The silent are gone, but remembering their days…

…as we proudly march forward, us military gays.