Second Park Humboldt Apartment, Second floor, front corner
Fourth Park Humboldt Apartment, Second floor, back corner
Before I met Frank Massey and we eventually moved from the first unit in Park Humboldt Apartments to the second, I met Wayne Hibner. He lived two doors down from my unit and was friends with Ramsey Hammond. Wayne oozed sexuality in some ways. He was cute, brown-haired, with a nice body that he really did not work out. He once shared an amateur video with me of him having sex with two of his buddies. He and I actually had safe sex once in his apartment. He went through a period of being troubled. He had to spend a night in a facility when the staff worried that he might harm himself. He had been depressed. Afterwards, he gave me the following card since he knew I cared about him personally.
Not long after he handed me that sweet card, he was in an elevator with a friend. He started speaking incoherently. The friend was so concerned that he immediately took Wayne to the emergency room. Wayne was quickly hospitalized. I had to leave for California and could not see him in the hospital until I got back after the weekend. Ramsey warned that Wayne might not still be with us. When I returned, Ramsey confirmed that Wayne had died over the weekend of a brain tumor. We attended a memorial service for Wayne with family and friends at a chapel off of the Boulder Turnpike.
After I took Frank Massey to the airport and sent him away, I had to clear out our former apartment. I had been living in the third unit, a small one-bedroom like the one I lived in first, in the North building of the trio of apartment buildings in the complex. It was in the back of the building, also on the second floor. I had no room for the dining table and chairs and sold them to the gay maintenance guy who lived in one of the two-bedroom units around the corner from my unit and one floor up.
Likely in Spring 1994, I did buy a 45-inch Pioneer rear-projection TV and a Sony video camera on sale from an electronics store on Colorado Blvd. From this point forward, and for a decade, I would take many videos and far fewer still photographs over that time. Here are a couple of pictures of Sneezer on the couch in that small unit.
Trying to reintegrate Sneezer and Schnozz into the latest small unit was tough. They fought constantly. I finally tried to place him with a gay guy who lived upstairs, but the fellow found he was allergic. I gave Sneezer to Ramsey's brother, but he had a dog and Sneezer stayed isolated in the basement, afraid of the dog. I soon took him back. Sneezer ended up becoming the best, most lovable cat I ever had. But I soon had to put him on a diet. He was normally 17 pounds; but with the feeder allowing him to graze at will all day, he ballooned to 23 pounds. I put him on that diet and got his weight back down to normal.
I got a telephone call from Frank's mom. after I'd moved to that small 1-bedroom unit. I explained to her where he was then living. She wondered if I wanted a reconciliation. I confirmed that I did not want that. She admitted that Frank actually was blind in one eye. Years later, I would learn from a future roommate that he had lived with Frank in West Virginia a few years later. Steve was not happy and felt unwelcome after he arrived. Frank was cold and distant. Steve Keil would come up with an excuse to move back to Canada and never return. He told me that Frank became infected with HIV after he left Colorado. Later, he seems to have disappeared off of the Internet, and we presumed that Frank had died.
I got a telephone call from Frank's mom. after I'd moved to that small 1-bedroom unit. I explained to her where he was then living. She wondered if I wanted a reconciliation. I confirmed that I did not want that. She admitted that Frank actually was blind in one eye. Years later, I would learn from a future roommate that he had lived with Frank in West Virginia a few years later. Steve was not happy and felt unwelcome after he arrived. Frank was cold and distant. Steve Keil would come up with an excuse to move back to Canada and never return. He told me that Frank became infected with HIV after he left Colorado. Later, he seems to have disappeared off of the Internet, and we presumed that Frank had died.
That little apartment became a refuge, and a place to heal, for a time. For Thanksgiving that first year, I made a full meal with turkey, gravy, stuffing, mashed potatoes and everything else by myself for myself. For Christmas, I bought a very small artificial tree, decorating it with a couple of strands of bubble lights. I also started buying ceramic Coca Cola village buildings from Target, usually those on sale right after Christmas. All of this to try and recapture those Christmases that never entirely existed for our family from the 1950's, before Mom moved out. Before dad moved us from Whittier to Orange and life became so disappointing with Willene.
When a two-bedroom apartment opened up two doors down from my small one-bedroom apartment, I moved the three of us out. Sneezer, finally feeling he'd had a permanent home, kept returning to the small one-bedroom as Don Nolan (from our Cap Fed days of working together) and a friend of his helped me move. (Don also lived in the Park Humboldt apartments at that point.) I would find Sneezer laying on the bedroom floor even after the bed had been moved out. Even after we were totally out of that apartment, I would see him sitting in front of the one-bedroom apartment, staring up at the closed door. Whenever I had to move Sneezer, he would disappear under the bed for a few days before finally emerging, likely hungry. He wasn't big on change.
Not long after I moved to the two-bedroom corner apartment, I was driving toward the IBM site near Boulder, Colorado, 6300 Diagonal Highway. That morning, the sun was only then coming up behind me as I turned West on Highway 52. The imagery of those sparkling houses on the hillsides beyond would begin the first chapter and volume in the Rainbow Arc of Fire series, A Mile-High Saga.
This year, 2023, IBM fully divested itself of that site that used to manufacture printers and other computer equipment, including tape drives early on, at the site after it first opened. (IBM bought the land in 1957 and broke ground in 1965.) I would later find that the I-25, to the Boulder Turnpike, to the Diagonal Highway through Boulder was slightly shorter, to reach the IBM site. But for the first several years, I often took the simpler route of I-25 to Highway 52, directly into the IBM site.
In that larger apartment, I also bought an IBM Aptiva personal computer and installed it in the extra bedroom. The IBM word processor and printer that I got from ASI (after Kaman sold off the Radiation Monitoring Division) had given up the ghost at that point and nobody fixed them in the early 1990's. Hence, the Aptiva purchase. I would replace that computer later, when it died, with another IBM desktop computer while they still built and sold personal computer desktops and laptops. Through working on the Sales Manual, I would finally witness when IBM sold their personal computer division to the Chinese company, Lenovo. We would process their hardware sales manual files for the Internet for a couple of years.
Amendment 2, 1992
Republicans have often touted States Rights and local control. However, the voters in Denver, Aspen and Vail had all passed protective ordinances for LGBTQ workers/citizens. Colorado Springs had become a hotbed of extreme right-wing, pseudo-Christian, anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and activities. Nobody was attempting to pass similar protective ordinances in Colorado Springs, but they did not like that these protective ordinances existed in other Colorado cities and towns, with more to potentially follow in the years ahead. These fanatics set out to create what would be known as Amendment 2 and got it on the state ballot for the 1992 presidential election. Now, voters all over the state could tell Denver, Aspen and Vail, and any other towns and cities that might consider such ordinances, that they could not have local control, could not have anti-discriminatory ordinances to protect LGBTQ citizens even if those ordinances were passed by the voters of those cities and towns. So much for local control.
The polls showed that the voters of Colorado were going to defeat that Amendment to the State constitution. But on the morning of my first walk to a Denver polling place in the church below, a guy I knew was standing outside and asking voters to defeat Amendment 2 on the ballot. He told me he was worried about the outcome of the election. The morning was chilly, but he would remain there all day.
He had every right to be concerned. Despite what the polls said, the state voted 52% to 48%, to pass Amendment 2. Were that to stand, the anti-discriminatory ordinances would be nullified in Denver, Aspen and Vail. By a simple majority vote, several critical protections were wiped away. LGBTQ citizens could be fired from any jobs we held. We could be denied services from businesses who wanted to discriminate. We could be evicted from apartments if the landlords so chose to kick us out simply because we were LGBTQ. That hateful Amendment was immediately challenged in the courts. The appeals would take time to wind their way through those courts and to the Supreme Court, if necessary. That would be necessary.
In the meantime, locals and our national supporters began to create a Boycott Colorado movement. I would even write as my return address, Boycott Colorado, on all of my outgoing correspondence with friends and family. Armistead Maupin--whom I had briefly met along with dozens of other fans when he had a popular signing for Sure of You at Category Six Books on 10th Street--cancelled the book signing for his novel Maybe the Moon in 1993 at all Colorado Bookstores. Other celebrities refused to visit Colorado. Conventions were cancelled. Colorado was deeply hurt financially for being so openly discriminatory. This resulted all because these fanatical religious cults centered in Colorado Springs could not abide protections for LGBTQ citizens in other cities not their own. A fanatically religious bigot who owned a auto dealership in Colorado Springs, whose ads I would see over and over again on TV when I lived there, was also behind Amendment 2. He is the car dealer whom I mention getting "converted" in A Mile-High Saga.
So, the passage of Amendment 2 was another motivation for me to begin to think about writing my Rainbow Arc of Fire series of novels. And, eventually, the defeat of Amendment 2 in the Supreme Court a couple of years later was the cause for celebration by the main characters after they saved the planet from destruction in Harmony of Spheres. After that initial passage of Amendment 2, the Denver Pride Parade, which was not nearly the event it would quickly become in 1993, turned into the most massive gathering of LGBTQ people and our supporters. We were angry. We were even more committed than we had been before. We had been activated by the AIDS crisis in the 80's. We in Colorado were even more motivated then. I believe that 1993 was the first year that I marched in the parade. The route out of Cheesman Park, along Franklin St, and down Colfax Blvd. to Civic Center Park, was a sea of humanity flowing along in numbers not seen before in any previous Pride Parade. From then on, no Pride Parade in Denver was ever again taken lightly. Businesses, politicians, groups like the Dykes on Bikes or The Denver Gay Men's Chorus would join together in unity every year. The Parade would take a couple of hours and more to complete each year after Amendment 2 was passed.
If the bigots in Colorado Springs and elsewhere thought they could suppress our movement, they achieved quite the opposite.
The election morning of 1992, I got up early. I had read that Democratic Candidate Bill Clinton and his wife were to make a final campaign stop at Stapleton Airport, in a United airlines hangar, arranged by Union members. I had to be there. I drove the Honda Civic to the dirt parking spaces where dozens of other cars had parked behind the hangar. Bill Clinton spoke, then pressed the flesh with the crowd. He shook the hands of people on either side of me. I reached up and brushed the back of my hand to the back of his hand, just to say to myself that I had touched him. Hillary immediately followed behind Bill as the crowd surged toward him. Hillary seemed that morning to be a bit like a deer in headlights, but she was smiling. The two then boarded their campaign jet and flew back to Arkansas to await the returns that night. I was proud to see when the returns started coming in that Clinton had won, with Colorado voting for him. (My friend Chuck Gover would find that West Virginia also voted for the Democratic candidate for President, the last time that would happen in my lifetime, so far. That state turned to the right and has not turned back.)
Don't Ask; Don't Tell
In his first year in office, President Clinton intended to allow LGB personnel to serve openly in the military. However, bigots in and out of the military came out of the closet to prevent that from happening. (Even though Senator Barry Goldwater, as conservative as they came in those days, had written that pro-LGB military-service editorial several years before, he was in the minority.) Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia and General Colin Powell, a black man who should have known better, were two of the strongest voices against our serving openly. President Clinton was criticized for caving on the issue when "Don't Ask; Don't Tell" became the alternative to our serving openly. To me, however, as someone for whom no exceptions were allowed in 1979, "Don't Ask; Don't Tell" was a start toward equality. Yes, the numbers of men and women discharged under this policy were still far too high every year. But it got people in and out of the service to realize that we were serving, even if in a kind of less-than-tolerable silent service. That is why I was in favor in Harmony of Spheres of supporting legalizing domestic partnerships first if we could not get marriage equality right away. It would be a start, a gradualism that would certainly be unacceptable to people on both sides but a start, nonetheless.
Without some sort of legalization, relatives could swoop in, take everything from the surviving partner of a deceased LGBTQ individual, and the surviving partner would have no legal recourse, no rights. That would soon happen to someone I knew.
Tales of the City miniseries, 1993
The year 1993 was also a heady time when Tales of the City, the first volume in Maupin's beloved series, came to PBS. The production company filmed the entire book. The only quirky situation occurred when some PBS stations aired an uncensored version and others aired a censored version where certain images especially were pixelated out. Even a poster of a half-naked woman on Brian's fridge was pixelated out. Certainly Mona's naked breasts as she got dressed for work were obscured. I had both versions taped when I realized there was a difference. That broadcast to that point was the most watched PBS special ever. However, some right-wing bigot who oversaw PBS, was shocked and outraged that public money was being spent on what he considered filth. He cancelled any further books in the series from being filmed and underwritten by PBS. Showtime would underwrite the next two volumes, but that was it until Netflix paid for a production that was not exactly based upon one of Maupin's novels.
The time to have filmed the entire series was the 1990's. We have since lost Olympia Dukakis, as well as the actor who first played Michael Toliver. The second two Tales were not the same without him. Any future films would be different without Ms. Dukakis. And with this Netflix original out there, the other volumes in the series have been, in a way, outflanked. We know the future. We know how the series ends, so to speak.
As a side note, when Maupin appeared at the new Denver Public Library for a signing in the early 2000's, I handed him a set of the first six volumes of my series, that had been somewhat inspired by his series. He seemed taken aback by my gesture, not really knowing how to respond to something so unexpected. But the short chapters with cliffhanger endings were what I took from his books, as well as setting the series in a specific city, Denver though instead of San Francisco. Obviously, Maupin had nothing to do with the super-hero themes and adventures. Those concepts I took from comic books from my own past.
Cars to IBM
The maroon 4-door Honda Civic survived the move to Denver, bringing Schnozz to the 1-bedroom apartment, hauling many cases of record albums and books and CDs to Denver, driving several times back and forth to Fort Carson when I taught a final class for PPCC in 1991, and many trips back and forth to the IBM Boulder site. I still owned it when I first moved to the 2-bedroom unit in the North building. One morning, however, I had a medical appointment, so I slept late. When I looked out of the living room window to the street parking space where I had left it the night before, the 1988 Honda Civic was not there. It had been stolen.
It would be several weeks before it was found. The police had hauled it off to a large city impound lot because of stacks of unpaid parking tickets found on the windshield. It had been sitting on a street only a few blocks away from my apartment for some time. The reason it had not been moved for quite some time and accumulated the several tickets was because the thief, or thieves, had blown out the engine. As I went to the impound lot, I saw that they had wrenched the back seat forward to get into the trunk, lacking a key. Nothing of value was in there. I retrieved a couple of remaining items from the trunk, a Civil War book and a pair of athletic shoes. The car had been trashed--cigarette burns and ashes were all over the seats--and actual trash was everywhere in the interior. The car would eventually be declared totaled by my insurance company, USAA.
I drove my 1973 Camero to the Honda dealership, to see what they had available. (Ramsey had replaced the engine; but the replacement engine, too, was not a good fit. The car also used way too much gas driving back and forth to Boulder.) I needed something far more efficient. I was fortunate that when I walked to the back of their new-car lot, there was a 2-door, maroon, Honda Accord stick shift, the only one left from the 1994 model year. I bought it for $15K. I appear to not have a still photograph of the Accord, just videos.
When Dino forced me into bankruptcy, I had to make a decision. The Accord had well over 100K miles on it at that point. I would have had to pay even more money to keep it since it was paid off, so I visited the VW dealership on Colorado Blvd., to trade the Accord in on a leased Jetta. Here is that vehicle, the only time I ever owned a green car, mentioned in Rainbow Arc of Fire: Shattered Dawn.
When the green Jetta's lease was up, I leased a violet Passat. This car seemed cursed. It left me stranded on I-25 on the way to work one dark morning when the fuel pump gave out. Another time, I drove over a chuck on loose blacktop on I-25 and tore up the brake line underneath the vehicle. I tore up the right wheel well when a battery suddenly appeared as the car in front of me veer at the last moment to miss that battery. Unfortunately, I was unable to miss it. I have no photo of that car either. The following is my next Passat when I traded in the violet Passat that also had well over 100K.
The Passat above has a story for later. I traded it in for the following Jetta.
Another story exists as to why I had to trade that beloved car in for the following vehicle, another Passat.
Eventually, I sold the '73 Camero to Dino. He never fully paid me for it and resold it shortly thereafter, making a profit but never paying me what he owed me. I could not afford to maintain two vehicles which is why I sold it.
Unfortunately, the Camero got me into slight trouble because someone who saw it parked in the Park Humboldt Apartments lot was a moron. An underaged girl who had run away from home was seen being dropped off in front of the entire complex, reportedly climbing out of an "older" vehicle. The police were looking for her. Someone later reported that they saw her entering the middle building. I was living in the North building. But the idiot who reported to the police identified my Camero as the older vehicle dropping off the girl when it was not even close to looking like the actual vehicle the runaway girl arrived in.
In the middle of the night, I heard a loud, persistent knocking on my apartment door. A bit disoriented, I reluctantly crawled out of bed and answered the knock. Two police officers, one male and one female, related the story of this wayward girl--the first I'd heard about it--and how someone had identified my Camero as the vehicle that had dropped her off. At the time, the car was not even drivable. I told them so. I also told them that I was gay. Why would I be harboring a young girl whom I did not even know in my apartment? Still, they asked if they could search my unit. I allowed them to enter because I had nothing to hide. But I warned them that my cat Sneezer was in my bedroom, and he might be spooked by the two of them suddenly barging into my tiny bedroom. They searched and searched and finally left, not altogether satisfied that I was telling them the truth. The next day, I was told by another renter the true story of what had happened. The girl never entered the building I lived in, and the "older" car that she was seen exiting from looked nothing like my Camero.
Rainbow Arc of Fire series
Greg occasionally wonders if he might ever have the opportunity to lift
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
The British Museum
Michael would buy a postcard at the Museum and address it to a really handsome guy he knew back in Denver, saying only, "Wish You Were Here". Great.
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
In a gay London Pub
Dino and me 
Me and Michael 
Michael and Joey
On the Eurostar for Paris
I bought the four of us first class tickets (they were not that much more). Food and service were great. I ought to have guessed when I tried to kiss Michael and he pulled away as Dino took the photograph that my grand, expensive gesture was not working, was never going to work.
Disneyland Paris
.jpg)
The scene of my character weeping by a stream happened. We'd returned to our Disney Wild West hotel room (Dino and Joey got the bunk bed) where I was hoping to make love to Michael. He took that exact moment to tell me that he was not in love with me. I thought of all of the money I had spent, the grand gestures to show my affection on this trip and before, and here we were in a room with cowboys on horseback along the walls surrounding us, but he now tells me he's not in love with me. He would leave the room and join Dino and Joey where he would weep openly in Dino's arms (Dino said the whole public display of emotion was embarrassing), while I would walk away alone, to weep silently by myself and the babbling brook. Dino and Joey were having their own drama. They'd spend several days in Greece and Berlin, but Joey ended up heading back to Paris by himself and back to Denver, also flying solo. (Their affair would get patched up, but Michael's and mine would struggle along for a while before dying completely in total acrimony.)
I'd even bought Michael an expensive jacket from Disneyland Paris, but that did nothing to change his feelings for me. I kept giving; he kept taking.
Paris
Sadly, one should never see Paris when one is in love with someone who does not love him back. It's pathetic. We would meet a friend of Michael's who shared an apartment with a guy who went after Michael even while he showed us Paris on extended walking tours. I was often the third wheel in this deplorable mess of a relationship. I know it sounds like sour grapes, but I thought the guy was a short troll of a jerk. I could never see why Michael showed any interest toward him. But then who flirts with another guy when the one paying for the lavish adventure, the boyfriend, loves him and is right there the whole time? One evening I headed back to our hotel room, only to keep looking back and not finding Michael behind me. I bought a beautiful bunch of roses for Michael from a sidewalk vendor on our last night. He would give them to the troll. Fortunately, I gave the sweet woman desk clerk a single rose, which she seemed thrilled to get, thanking me and mentioning the flower to a coworker.
I don't find any photos of our visit to the Louvre. The highlighted cover photo of Slight of Mind I took myself. Anita would accentuate it for the cover of the novel.
Alexander bridge
Eiffel Tower
Fountain and more
Me with the Alexander Bridge behind 
Notre Dame
Michael & Me and Michael & the troll
Obelisk
The Seine at night
We flew back to the U.S. aboard another Delta L-1011. I had diarrhea much of the flight from ordering bottled water at a sidewalk cafe with our sandwiches (I believe they just refilled an empty bottle with tap water). I'd left most of my Pepto tablets in my checked bag and only had two to get me home. By Cincinnati, the bout was finally over.
After our return, I had stupidly helped Michael with his Jeep truck expenses and his credit card debt. Neither helped our relationship one bit. Michael was supposed to pay me back but did not. I was stuck with his debt because I had foolishly cosigned the loan to help him out. I finally was forced to take him to court. He engaged a lawyer whom he did not pay. So, while my lawyer and I and his lawyer showed up outside the Denver courtroom, Michael was nowhere to be found. (He was in Philadelphia, I told his lawyer, who was not being paid and knew this court visit was going to be pro bono.) The judge denied his attorney's attempt to get off the case because he was not going to be paid. Someone had to represent the absent Michael. I had to get on the witness stand and present my case. His lawyer tried to say I lied on the stand when he misunderstood a statement I made regarding my not fully updating the list of what Michael owed me. Both the judge and my attorney also did not get the point the guy was fruitlessly trying to make.
Schnozz, of course, was put to sleep in the bedroom of that two-bedroom apartment on Humbolt, as chronicled in Worlds Beneath Us. She was so sick with cancer and was merely suffering. Dino subsequently gave me Miranda, their calico, when they were divesting themselves of their four cats and shifting to dogs. (Miranda, as a kitten, tormented me when I was trying to sleep on the couch in Dino and Larry's apartment when I worked for Cap Fed in the Tech Center and was visiting one weekend.)
So, Miranda, Sneezer and I were the ones to move out of the apartment together. (Sneezer did not easily take to Miranda in the beginning. When he saw her imperiously sitting high above on the stereo shelf unit in the living room, he furiously yowled but could not get at her. Eventually, they would get along; but that took some time.)
The maroon 4-door Honda Civic survived the move to Denver, bringing Schnozz to the 1-bedroom apartment, hauling many cases of record albums and books and CDs to Denver, driving several times back and forth to Fort Carson when I taught a final class for PPCC in 1991, and many trips back and forth to the IBM Boulder site. I still owned it when I first moved to the 2-bedroom unit in the North building. One morning, however, I had a medical appointment, so I slept late. When I looked out of the living room window to the street parking space where I had left it the night before, the 1988 Honda Civic was not there. It had been stolen.
It would be several weeks before it was found. The police had hauled it off to a large city impound lot because of stacks of unpaid parking tickets found on the windshield. It had been sitting on a street only a few blocks away from my apartment for some time. The reason it had not been moved for quite some time and accumulated the several tickets was because the thief, or thieves, had blown out the engine. As I went to the impound lot, I saw that they had wrenched the back seat forward to get into the trunk, lacking a key. Nothing of value was in there. I retrieved a couple of remaining items from the trunk, a Civil War book and a pair of athletic shoes. The car had been trashed--cigarette burns and ashes were all over the seats--and actual trash was everywhere in the interior. The car would eventually be declared totaled by my insurance company, USAA.
I drove my 1973 Camero to the Honda dealership, to see what they had available. (Ramsey had replaced the engine; but the replacement engine, too, was not a good fit. The car also used way too much gas driving back and forth to Boulder.) I needed something far more efficient. I was fortunate that when I walked to the back of their new-car lot, there was a 2-door, maroon, Honda Accord stick shift, the only one left from the 1994 model year. I bought it for $15K. I appear to not have a still photograph of the Accord, just videos.
When Dino forced me into bankruptcy, I had to make a decision. The Accord had well over 100K miles on it at that point. I would have had to pay even more money to keep it since it was paid off, so I visited the VW dealership on Colorado Blvd., to trade the Accord in on a leased Jetta. Here is that vehicle, the only time I ever owned a green car, mentioned in Rainbow Arc of Fire: Shattered Dawn.
When the green Jetta's lease was up, I leased a violet Passat. This car seemed cursed. It left me stranded on I-25 on the way to work one dark morning when the fuel pump gave out. Another time, I drove over a chuck on loose blacktop on I-25 and tore up the brake line underneath the vehicle. I tore up the right wheel well when a battery suddenly appeared as the car in front of me veer at the last moment to miss that battery. Unfortunately, I was unable to miss it. I have no photo of that car either. The following is my next Passat when I traded in the violet Passat that also had well over 100K.
The Passat above has a story for later. I traded it in for the following Jetta.
Another story exists as to why I had to trade that beloved car in for the following vehicle, another Passat.
Eventually, I sold the '73 Camero to Dino. He never fully paid me for it and resold it shortly thereafter, making a profit but never paying me what he owed me. I could not afford to maintain two vehicles which is why I sold it.
Unfortunately, the Camero got me into slight trouble because someone who saw it parked in the Park Humboldt Apartments lot was a moron. An underaged girl who had run away from home was seen being dropped off in front of the entire complex, reportedly climbing out of an "older" vehicle. The police were looking for her. Someone later reported that they saw her entering the middle building. I was living in the North building. But the idiot who reported to the police identified my Camero as the older vehicle dropping off the girl when it was not even close to looking like the actual vehicle the runaway girl arrived in.
In the middle of the night, I heard a loud, persistent knocking on my apartment door. A bit disoriented, I reluctantly crawled out of bed and answered the knock. Two police officers, one male and one female, related the story of this wayward girl--the first I'd heard about it--and how someone had identified my Camero as the vehicle that had dropped her off. At the time, the car was not even drivable. I told them so. I also told them that I was gay. Why would I be harboring a young girl whom I did not even know in my apartment? Still, they asked if they could search my unit. I allowed them to enter because I had nothing to hide. But I warned them that my cat Sneezer was in my bedroom, and he might be spooked by the two of them suddenly barging into my tiny bedroom. They searched and searched and finally left, not altogether satisfied that I was telling them the truth. The next day, I was told by another renter the true story of what had happened. The girl never entered the building I lived in, and the "older" car that she was seen exiting from looked nothing like my Camero.
Rainbow Arc of Fire series
Greg occasionally wonders if he might ever have the opportunity to lift
himself up above his existence and look at the entire span of his life.
I wrote that sentence, likely in 1994 or 1995 in the two-bedroom apartment, after I had begun to write the first volume in the series. I was in my early 40's. So much of my working life was still ahead of me. When one reaches the age of 74, as I have now in the Fall of 2023, I can actually look back at a substantial portion of my life and now make sense of much of it. All of the houses and BOQ rooms and apartments where I have lived; all of the friends I have made and/or lost; all of the places I have visited; all of the jobs I have held and lost; all of the times I have been unemployed, wondering where I was headed next; all of the words I have written; all of the family members I have lost; all of the concerns I have had regarding how many years I have left; all of the cars I have owned; all of the electronics I have bought and the music I have listened to; all of the books I have read; all of that has come into greater focus now as my years begin to dwindle down to a precious few.
Someone once asked Bob Dylan how his songs came to him. His response was that the songs come "through" him. As if he were merely a conduit rather than a creator. So often, all of the volumes in my series have come into existence as if I were only a conduit rather than a creator. It was as if the novels demanded to exist, and I was forced to write and publish them all. This is not to say that my talent or books can compare in any way to what Bob Dylan has produced over a lifetime of creative genius. I am merely admitting what I have felt while I produced the ten volumes. At all times, I felt compelled to write.
When A Mile-High Saga emerged into existence, having a vanity publisher oversee the production of the approximate 1000 copies, the minimum required number for printing, that was costly in those days. I believe I spent at least $10K. Volumes 2 and 3 cost me $17K combined. I used the retirement money that was taken out of my many paychecks from Pikes Peak Community College for retirement over those 11 years of teaching. I could access those funds only if I had stopped teaching for PPCC which happened after 1991. The distance was too great for me to continue to teach for them indefinitely in Colorado Springs. Digital download books would not exist until several years later. Print-on-demand paperback copies would not exist until a few years after that.
Anita Mohr/Kocourek, who would eventually die of cancer, organized the cover artwork after the first volume. Treva Looney, a professional Lesbian photographer whom I met at one of the annual Denver Pride Fests at her booth in Civic Center Park prior to publication, would take most of the back-cover B&W photographs, first in her garage studio, later in her full studio west of Denver. Clive Tyler would take several of the front cover photos after volume one. He also took the back cover color photo when the books began to appear as print-on-demand versions on amazon.
Most novels are written in the past tense. "Greg left the house." I decided to write the series in present tense. "Greg leaves the house." That may have been a mistake. All 1000 plus copies of the first printing of the first book in the series are gone, with the Palm Springs Comic Con of 2017. Many were sold; several were later given away to generate interest in the series. After I wrote the first manuscript, I shared it with two straight women in my department at IBM, Jill and Nancy D. Jill cursed me that next morning because she had stayed up all night to finish reading it because she felt it was compelling and could not put it down. She only intended to read a few chapters that first night but kept reading just one more chapter. The other straight woman also liked it and wondered how much of the events were autobiographical.
Eventually, Dino would get the gay editor of St. Martin's Press to accept the manuscript to read. He liked it enough that, according to Dino, they took chapters of the novel and tested reactions by readers chosen at random. The opinions were uniformly positive, I was told. Encouraged, the gay editor at St. Martin's submitted it to the board for publishing. However, the several divisions of St. Martin's could not all publish all of the manuscripts each group forwarded for publication in those days. The other groups outvoted the gay division, and my manuscript was not accepted for publication. The editor was certain that I would find another publisher eventually. This was all relayed to me by Dino, but I have no reason at that time to believe he was lying to me. I never found another publisher willing to take a chance, unfortunately. As what happened with all of my several previous autobiographical manuscripts, Rainbow Arc of Fire, not a series at that point with the first book, never got professionally published. But I believed in the novel enough to publish it myself with Peanut Butter Publishing in Seattle
At the very end of that Palm Springs Comic Con in 2017, a fellow, who knew a man who was in TV-show development and had gotten the rights to several novels at the previous San Diego Comic Con, took A Separate Peace to show to his friend. I never heard anything further from him. The writer of several Xena, Warrior Princess episodes took the entire series of books at that same Con. I never heard back from him, either. But for a few days, I felt optimistic that the series would finally amount to something significant.
Regardless of its fame, or lack thereof, I continued to write and self-publish the series, from volume one through eight. Nine and ten would first get published as kindle editions and then, finally, as paperback editions as print-on-demand copies on amazon.
I wrote that sentence, likely in 1994 or 1995 in the two-bedroom apartment, after I had begun to write the first volume in the series. I was in my early 40's. So much of my working life was still ahead of me. When one reaches the age of 74, as I have now in the Fall of 2023, I can actually look back at a substantial portion of my life and now make sense of much of it. All of the houses and BOQ rooms and apartments where I have lived; all of the friends I have made and/or lost; all of the places I have visited; all of the jobs I have held and lost; all of the times I have been unemployed, wondering where I was headed next; all of the words I have written; all of the family members I have lost; all of the concerns I have had regarding how many years I have left; all of the cars I have owned; all of the electronics I have bought and the music I have listened to; all of the books I have read; all of that has come into greater focus now as my years begin to dwindle down to a precious few.
Someone once asked Bob Dylan how his songs came to him. His response was that the songs come "through" him. As if he were merely a conduit rather than a creator. So often, all of the volumes in my series have come into existence as if I were only a conduit rather than a creator. It was as if the novels demanded to exist, and I was forced to write and publish them all. This is not to say that my talent or books can compare in any way to what Bob Dylan has produced over a lifetime of creative genius. I am merely admitting what I have felt while I produced the ten volumes. At all times, I felt compelled to write.
When A Mile-High Saga emerged into existence, having a vanity publisher oversee the production of the approximate 1000 copies, the minimum required number for printing, that was costly in those days. I believe I spent at least $10K. Volumes 2 and 3 cost me $17K combined. I used the retirement money that was taken out of my many paychecks from Pikes Peak Community College for retirement over those 11 years of teaching. I could access those funds only if I had stopped teaching for PPCC which happened after 1991. The distance was too great for me to continue to teach for them indefinitely in Colorado Springs. Digital download books would not exist until several years later. Print-on-demand paperback copies would not exist until a few years after that.
Anita Mohr/Kocourek, who would eventually die of cancer, organized the cover artwork after the first volume. Treva Looney, a professional Lesbian photographer whom I met at one of the annual Denver Pride Fests at her booth in Civic Center Park prior to publication, would take most of the back-cover B&W photographs, first in her garage studio, later in her full studio west of Denver. Clive Tyler would take several of the front cover photos after volume one. He also took the back cover color photo when the books began to appear as print-on-demand versions on amazon.
Most novels are written in the past tense. "Greg left the house." I decided to write the series in present tense. "Greg leaves the house." That may have been a mistake. All 1000 plus copies of the first printing of the first book in the series are gone, with the Palm Springs Comic Con of 2017. Many were sold; several were later given away to generate interest in the series. After I wrote the first manuscript, I shared it with two straight women in my department at IBM, Jill and Nancy D. Jill cursed me that next morning because she had stayed up all night to finish reading it because she felt it was compelling and could not put it down. She only intended to read a few chapters that first night but kept reading just one more chapter. The other straight woman also liked it and wondered how much of the events were autobiographical.
Eventually, Dino would get the gay editor of St. Martin's Press to accept the manuscript to read. He liked it enough that, according to Dino, they took chapters of the novel and tested reactions by readers chosen at random. The opinions were uniformly positive, I was told. Encouraged, the gay editor at St. Martin's submitted it to the board for publishing. However, the several divisions of St. Martin's could not all publish all of the manuscripts each group forwarded for publication in those days. The other groups outvoted the gay division, and my manuscript was not accepted for publication. The editor was certain that I would find another publisher eventually. This was all relayed to me by Dino, but I have no reason at that time to believe he was lying to me. I never found another publisher willing to take a chance, unfortunately. As what happened with all of my several previous autobiographical manuscripts, Rainbow Arc of Fire, not a series at that point with the first book, never got professionally published. But I believed in the novel enough to publish it myself with Peanut Butter Publishing in Seattle
At the very end of that Palm Springs Comic Con in 2017, a fellow, who knew a man who was in TV-show development and had gotten the rights to several novels at the previous San Diego Comic Con, took A Separate Peace to show to his friend. I never heard anything further from him. The writer of several Xena, Warrior Princess episodes took the entire series of books at that same Con. I never heard back from him, either. But for a few days, I felt optimistic that the series would finally amount to something significant.
Regardless of its fame, or lack thereof, I continued to write and self-publish the series, from volume one through eight. Nine and ten would first get published as kindle editions and then, finally, as paperback editions as print-on-demand copies on amazon.
My next-door neighbor in the North building, Larry Wegner, wrote a column for Out Front Colorado, the Denver gay monthly newspaper. He steered me to a woman who wrote the following article/interview for the March 12. 1997, issue. I had published A Mile-High Saga in 1996. Category Six Books, the Denver gay bookstore that had moved from 10th Street on Capitol Hill to South Broadway, started carrying the series. So, this article by Susan Ramsey helped a bit with sales. (I never would get a cover article, unfortunately.)
Ramsey at Cheesman Park
Here are a few 1995 photos of Ramsey in front of the Park Humboldt Apartments and in Cheesman Park, including the Pavilion featured in Autumn Saga.
Michael Ferrier
I wasted more time, energy, feelings, emotions, affection, love and especially financial resources on Michael Ferrier than any man previously in my entire life. Ours was a no-win relationship almost from the very beginning. Approximately six months of my life were invested in Michael. I kept believing against any real evidence that if I showed him just one more grand gesture, just one more extravagant effort, he would love me as I came to feel so deeply about him. Any decent human being would have stopped me at some early point and said, "No more. No matter what you do for me, no matter how much you spend on me, no matter how much you care about me, I won't love you." Michael was not a decent human being. I gave. He took.
Michael was like that spoiled child whom parents indulge constantly; and while he feels that everything coming his way is deserved, he does not give much back, at least nothing emotional. I am not sure that he was truly capable of love. Our relationship was entirely out of balance and decidedly one sided.
His roommate, Hank, once told me that when he finally met Michael's parents and spent an evening dinner with the family, he realized immediately why Michael was the way he was. His dad was stern and distant, a retired military officer. His mom was smothering and matronly. I only met them once, and at a benefit, so I was not able to get to know them at all.
I had seen him a few times at the Metro Express before we actually met. He was cute in a nerdy, wearing glasses, kind of way. One of the types of guys I find myself attracted to. Like Tim Veasey, Michael's body was pleasing but had nothing distinctive or remarkable about its features. But Micheal was a bottom in those days when I was a top. The sex was really good. He sometimes used to grip me inside himself but also put his feet on my chest as if to push me away. That position rather defined our situation.
He came home with me the night we met. He left in the morning. We dated after that. He would sometimes come to my two-bedroom apartment, I would make dinner, we would watch some TV, we'd have sex, and then he would leave. He worked part time at a consignment store on Broadway, south of I-25. I bought a green and blue glass bowl from the section where he worked. I believe he had another part-time job, but I do not recall what it was.
Michael's parent lived in Boulder, so they were financially comfortable. Just past the IBM Boulder site, on the opposite side of the Diagonal Highway was the small town of Niwot. Michael soon asked me if I would look at a vintage Mercedes in a small used car lot in that town. I believe he wanted me to help him buy it. I looked at the car on my way to work one morning, but I was not going to buy him a car, even if it was used and several years old, so not too pricey. I bought him a Franklin Mint diecast Mercedes instead. (He seemed a bit let down.)
I would eventually learn that Michael had briefly dated someone whom I had briefly dated before he did, Frank Archibeque. Frank was a wonderful guy and was HIV positive, a gift from his jerk of an ex-lover who cheated on him on occasion and then broke up with him. Frank mentioned that Michael was not the best person to date, especially since he never seemed to have any money. I should have listened. Frank became sick and was hospitalized. Michael and I would visit him almost daily at St. Francis until he told us we could come every other day rather than daily. Continuous visitors were exhausting for him. One day we entered his room and Frank looked fantastic. He was sitting up in bed. He seemed fully recovered. But when we were about to leave, and Michael leaned over to give him a hug, Frank told Michael that he was going to die quite soon. (I would later hear that some AIDS patients would rally one last time but then die shortly thereafter. They instinctively knew their time was short.) Frank's new boyfriend, Ty, called me the next day to tell me that Frank had died that morning.
When I called Michael later in the day, he burst out crying on the phone and could not stop. I do not believe that I have ever heard someone who cried so significantly and so sustained. I offered to pick him up later and take him for a drive, just to help him recover. We drove to City Park and toured the museum. I was asked by Frank's mom to give a eulogy during the service at the Catholic church downtown. The priest tried to talk me out of doing that. He said that those who tried to give a eulogy usually ended up going on far too long or became too emotional to finish. It was better to leave it solely to him, a professional at these sorts of things.
I would not be dissuaded, especially since I had promised Frank's mom that I would do it. When the time came, I got up and gave a brief but heartfelt eulogy for Frank. When I finished, I wanted to turn to the priest and say, "See, I knew I could do it." I stepped down from the altar and handed my typed eulogy to Frank's mom. She seemed extremely grateful for the kind things I had said about her only son.
Michael needed new glasses. He had not renewed his prescription for far too long. We stopped at the Aurora Mall at an eye clinic there before heading to the reception afterward where there would be tons of food. I told him I would buy the glasses for him.
Michael picked out an expensive pair of Polo frames. I ended up paying for the entire order, including the eye test and prescription lenses. This was the first time I really overdid my financial help. It would not be the last. We got to the reception late, but the food was wonderful. Before he died, Frank's mom had assured Frank that they had made his life insurance out to his father, in hopes that that would satisfy his father's greed. It was not enough. The domineering parent determined to have anything he could get his hands on from his late son's estate. Ty, the boyfriend, was left with virtually nothing after caring for Frank for many months and spending every waking moment at the hospital. He had missed being there when Frank died because Frank had asked him to go to their house and pick something up for Frank. (I suspected that Frank did not want Ty to be in the room when he passed, knowing how grief-stricken Ty would be.)
Before Frank died, he was visited by an old friend in the hospital. Frank had often DJ'd at a couple of the Denver dance bars. He knew a number of guys over the years as friends. As this friend was leaving Frank's hospital room, I realized that he was the same flight attendant who, while volunteering at Category Six Books on Capitol Hill in the 1980's, had handed me Armistead Maupin's first four Tales of the City novels and told me to do myself a favor and buy them. As I watched the fellow slowly make his way down the hall of St. Francis to the elevator after he left Frank's room, I knew immediately that he was also terribly sick from AIDS. He would actually die before Frank passed.
Europe with Michael, Dino and Joey on my credit cards
Dino and Joey were hot and heavy at this point. He wanted to use the credit card that I had loaned to him for the refurbishing of the large house two doors down from the post office on North Marion. I foolishly agreed. We even talked of meeting up in London. Michael and I would join the two of them there for a couple of days, take the Eurostar to Paris, then on to Disneyland Paris for a couple of days before returning to Paris. Perhaps I thought that this grandest of all gestures would win Michael's heart, still not realizing that Michael had no heart to win. He did not love himself, so he certainly was unable to love someone else, even one who loved him.
We took Delta Airlines from Denver to Cincinnati on a 757. After a short layover, we flew on a Delta L-1011 from Cincinnati to London. Segments of our trip are catalogued in Slight of Mind, the blue book. I took the three of them to see The Mouse Trap. We went to the Tower of London and the British Museum, among other sites. Our first night was spent at a pub Dino found, The Rat and The Parrot.
Tower Bridge and the Tower of London
Ramsey at Cheesman Park
Here are a few 1995 photos of Ramsey in front of the Park Humboldt Apartments and in Cheesman Park, including the Pavilion featured in Autumn Saga.
Michael Ferrier
I wasted more time, energy, feelings, emotions, affection, love and especially financial resources on Michael Ferrier than any man previously in my entire life. Ours was a no-win relationship almost from the very beginning. Approximately six months of my life were invested in Michael. I kept believing against any real evidence that if I showed him just one more grand gesture, just one more extravagant effort, he would love me as I came to feel so deeply about him. Any decent human being would have stopped me at some early point and said, "No more. No matter what you do for me, no matter how much you spend on me, no matter how much you care about me, I won't love you." Michael was not a decent human being. I gave. He took.
Michael was like that spoiled child whom parents indulge constantly; and while he feels that everything coming his way is deserved, he does not give much back, at least nothing emotional. I am not sure that he was truly capable of love. Our relationship was entirely out of balance and decidedly one sided.
His roommate, Hank, once told me that when he finally met Michael's parents and spent an evening dinner with the family, he realized immediately why Michael was the way he was. His dad was stern and distant, a retired military officer. His mom was smothering and matronly. I only met them once, and at a benefit, so I was not able to get to know them at all.
I had seen him a few times at the Metro Express before we actually met. He was cute in a nerdy, wearing glasses, kind of way. One of the types of guys I find myself attracted to. Like Tim Veasey, Michael's body was pleasing but had nothing distinctive or remarkable about its features. But Micheal was a bottom in those days when I was a top. The sex was really good. He sometimes used to grip me inside himself but also put his feet on my chest as if to push me away. That position rather defined our situation.
He came home with me the night we met. He left in the morning. We dated after that. He would sometimes come to my two-bedroom apartment, I would make dinner, we would watch some TV, we'd have sex, and then he would leave. He worked part time at a consignment store on Broadway, south of I-25. I bought a green and blue glass bowl from the section where he worked. I believe he had another part-time job, but I do not recall what it was.
Michael's parent lived in Boulder, so they were financially comfortable. Just past the IBM Boulder site, on the opposite side of the Diagonal Highway was the small town of Niwot. Michael soon asked me if I would look at a vintage Mercedes in a small used car lot in that town. I believe he wanted me to help him buy it. I looked at the car on my way to work one morning, but I was not going to buy him a car, even if it was used and several years old, so not too pricey. I bought him a Franklin Mint diecast Mercedes instead. (He seemed a bit let down.)
I would eventually learn that Michael had briefly dated someone whom I had briefly dated before he did, Frank Archibeque. Frank was a wonderful guy and was HIV positive, a gift from his jerk of an ex-lover who cheated on him on occasion and then broke up with him. Frank mentioned that Michael was not the best person to date, especially since he never seemed to have any money. I should have listened. Frank became sick and was hospitalized. Michael and I would visit him almost daily at St. Francis until he told us we could come every other day rather than daily. Continuous visitors were exhausting for him. One day we entered his room and Frank looked fantastic. He was sitting up in bed. He seemed fully recovered. But when we were about to leave, and Michael leaned over to give him a hug, Frank told Michael that he was going to die quite soon. (I would later hear that some AIDS patients would rally one last time but then die shortly thereafter. They instinctively knew their time was short.) Frank's new boyfriend, Ty, called me the next day to tell me that Frank had died that morning.
When I called Michael later in the day, he burst out crying on the phone and could not stop. I do not believe that I have ever heard someone who cried so significantly and so sustained. I offered to pick him up later and take him for a drive, just to help him recover. We drove to City Park and toured the museum. I was asked by Frank's mom to give a eulogy during the service at the Catholic church downtown. The priest tried to talk me out of doing that. He said that those who tried to give a eulogy usually ended up going on far too long or became too emotional to finish. It was better to leave it solely to him, a professional at these sorts of things.
I would not be dissuaded, especially since I had promised Frank's mom that I would do it. When the time came, I got up and gave a brief but heartfelt eulogy for Frank. When I finished, I wanted to turn to the priest and say, "See, I knew I could do it." I stepped down from the altar and handed my typed eulogy to Frank's mom. She seemed extremely grateful for the kind things I had said about her only son.
Michael needed new glasses. He had not renewed his prescription for far too long. We stopped at the Aurora Mall at an eye clinic there before heading to the reception afterward where there would be tons of food. I told him I would buy the glasses for him.
Michael picked out an expensive pair of Polo frames. I ended up paying for the entire order, including the eye test and prescription lenses. This was the first time I really overdid my financial help. It would not be the last. We got to the reception late, but the food was wonderful. Before he died, Frank's mom had assured Frank that they had made his life insurance out to his father, in hopes that that would satisfy his father's greed. It was not enough. The domineering parent determined to have anything he could get his hands on from his late son's estate. Ty, the boyfriend, was left with virtually nothing after caring for Frank for many months and spending every waking moment at the hospital. He had missed being there when Frank died because Frank had asked him to go to their house and pick something up for Frank. (I suspected that Frank did not want Ty to be in the room when he passed, knowing how grief-stricken Ty would be.)
Before Frank died, he was visited by an old friend in the hospital. Frank had often DJ'd at a couple of the Denver dance bars. He knew a number of guys over the years as friends. As this friend was leaving Frank's hospital room, I realized that he was the same flight attendant who, while volunteering at Category Six Books on Capitol Hill in the 1980's, had handed me Armistead Maupin's first four Tales of the City novels and told me to do myself a favor and buy them. As I watched the fellow slowly make his way down the hall of St. Francis to the elevator after he left Frank's room, I knew immediately that he was also terribly sick from AIDS. He would actually die before Frank passed.
Europe with Michael, Dino and Joey on my credit cards
Dino and Joey were hot and heavy at this point. He wanted to use the credit card that I had loaned to him for the refurbishing of the large house two doors down from the post office on North Marion. I foolishly agreed. We even talked of meeting up in London. Michael and I would join the two of them there for a couple of days, take the Eurostar to Paris, then on to Disneyland Paris for a couple of days before returning to Paris. Perhaps I thought that this grandest of all gestures would win Michael's heart, still not realizing that Michael had no heart to win. He did not love himself, so he certainly was unable to love someone else, even one who loved him.
We took Delta Airlines from Denver to Cincinnati on a 757. After a short layover, we flew on a Delta L-1011 from Cincinnati to London. Segments of our trip are catalogued in Slight of Mind, the blue book. I took the three of them to see The Mouse Trap. We went to the Tower of London and the British Museum, among other sites. Our first night was spent at a pub Dino found, The Rat and The Parrot.
Tower Bridge and the Tower of London
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
The British Museum
Michael would buy a postcard at the Museum and address it to a really handsome guy he knew back in Denver, saying only, "Wish You Were Here". Great.
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
In a gay London Pub
On the Eurostar for Paris
I bought the four of us first class tickets (they were not that much more). Food and service were great. I ought to have guessed when I tried to kiss Michael and he pulled away as Dino took the photograph that my grand, expensive gesture was not working, was never going to work.
Disneyland Paris
.jpg)
The scene of my character weeping by a stream happened. We'd returned to our Disney Wild West hotel room (Dino and Joey got the bunk bed) where I was hoping to make love to Michael. He took that exact moment to tell me that he was not in love with me. I thought of all of the money I had spent, the grand gestures to show my affection on this trip and before, and here we were in a room with cowboys on horseback along the walls surrounding us, but he now tells me he's not in love with me. He would leave the room and join Dino and Joey where he would weep openly in Dino's arms (Dino said the whole public display of emotion was embarrassing), while I would walk away alone, to weep silently by myself and the babbling brook. Dino and Joey were having their own drama. They'd spend several days in Greece and Berlin, but Joey ended up heading back to Paris by himself and back to Denver, also flying solo. (Their affair would get patched up, but Michael's and mine would struggle along for a while before dying completely in total acrimony.)
I'd even bought Michael an expensive jacket from Disneyland Paris, but that did nothing to change his feelings for me. I kept giving; he kept taking.
Paris
Sadly, one should never see Paris when one is in love with someone who does not love him back. It's pathetic. We would meet a friend of Michael's who shared an apartment with a guy who went after Michael even while he showed us Paris on extended walking tours. I was often the third wheel in this deplorable mess of a relationship. I know it sounds like sour grapes, but I thought the guy was a short troll of a jerk. I could never see why Michael showed any interest toward him. But then who flirts with another guy when the one paying for the lavish adventure, the boyfriend, loves him and is right there the whole time? One evening I headed back to our hotel room, only to keep looking back and not finding Michael behind me. I bought a beautiful bunch of roses for Michael from a sidewalk vendor on our last night. He would give them to the troll. Fortunately, I gave the sweet woman desk clerk a single rose, which she seemed thrilled to get, thanking me and mentioning the flower to a coworker.
I don't find any photos of our visit to the Louvre. The highlighted cover photo of Slight of Mind I took myself. Anita would accentuate it for the cover of the novel.
Alexander bridge
Eiffel Tower
Fountain and more
Me with the Alexander Bridge behind
Michael & Me and Michael & the troll
Obelisk
The Seine at night
We flew back to the U.S. aboard another Delta L-1011. I had diarrhea much of the flight from ordering bottled water at a sidewalk cafe with our sandwiches (I believe they just refilled an empty bottle with tap water). I'd left most of my Pepto tablets in my checked bag and only had two to get me home. By Cincinnati, the bout was finally over.
After our return, I had stupidly helped Michael with his Jeep truck expenses and his credit card debt. Neither helped our relationship one bit. Michael was supposed to pay me back but did not. I was stuck with his debt because I had foolishly cosigned the loan to help him out. I finally was forced to take him to court. He engaged a lawyer whom he did not pay. So, while my lawyer and I and his lawyer showed up outside the Denver courtroom, Michael was nowhere to be found. (He was in Philadelphia, I told his lawyer, who was not being paid and knew this court visit was going to be pro bono.) The judge denied his attorney's attempt to get off the case because he was not going to be paid. Someone had to represent the absent Michael. I had to get on the witness stand and present my case. His lawyer tried to say I lied on the stand when he misunderstood a statement I made regarding my not fully updating the list of what Michael owed me. Both the judge and my attorney also did not get the point the guy was fruitlessly trying to make.
The judge retired to his chambers for a short recess. He returned to find Michael fully liable for what he owed. His snarky lawyer outside the courtroom warned that Michael would likely not repay me. I got a Sherriff to hand Michael the collection notice. However, Michael immediately declared bankruptcy through yet another gullible lawyer. I was out of luck. I had been legally and financially naive. I had not been aware that as a cosigner, I was stuck if Michael decided not to repay the loan. I did not realize that even with a court judgement against him, he could declare bankruptcy and I would be stuck, never getting repaid.
All the while I was so distracted by Michael, I was not aware that Dino was methodically turning against me. He had gotten me to visit a lovely condo in a house on Franklin Street that had been a single-family home when it was constructed in 1896 but was converted into three apartments in the 1970's and finally into three condos in the 1980's. Dino Attardo was the realtor/owner whom Dino Gagliasso had met in a Denver bar. While I would pay $119K for the condo, I would later learn that Attardo had offered it to someone else for only $85K a few weeks before. Dino Gagliasso must have told him that I was someone who easily could be fleeced.
Dino Attardo would get more than his due one afternoon when he was parked in his car in Cheesman Park, taking in the views and likely cruising. A young man who got up that morning and decided to go on a spree with a gun tried to rob Attardo in his car in the park. When Attardo resisted handing over the keys to his car, he was shot. As the young gunman fled, he encountered a Jeep and stole it. During the subsequent high-speed chase, he wrecked the stolen Jeep in someone's front yard and was quickly apprehended by the police as he failed to flee on foot. Fortunately, Dino Attardo was not fatally injured and was able to testify at the young man's trial. But I heard that doctors could not remove the bullet because of where and how it was lodged in his chest.
Istanbul, Turkey, 1997
With another pair of passes, Michael and I were going on another trip before the legal conflict ruined what was left of our tenuous relationship. Even I was not stupid enough to go on yet another trip with someone who only took and never gave. So, though Michael had chosen the destination for the passes, I made it clear that he was no longer a friend and was not going with me. Willie Benitez reimbursed me for the cost of that one pass. and he and I met up at JFK for the Delta 767 flight to Istanbul. I never took any still photographs. The entire trip is on video tape and now DVD instead.
We extensively toured the city, Haja Sofia most prominently, as well as the marketplace. We took a ferry to the Princes' Islands. We spent the better part of a day at the Topkapi Palace and then at the Dolmabahce Palace. Our tour guide to Gallipoli and elsewhere, who worshiped Elvis, drove us in his compact station wagon to Gallipoli, stopping at the hillside turret of the Goben, the German battleship handed over to the Turks after the British Navy had chased it around the Mediterranean in WWI and bottled it up in the Dardanelles. We crossed over on a car ferry to see the ruins of Troy in Asia Minor.
Though Willie would drop me, along with several of his other former friends several years later, we had a pleasant trip. I bought a lovely Turkish carpet that a later cat would claw and damage.
Some of this Turkish vacation would be featured in Rainbow Arc of Fire: Who Has Dominion?
Leaving Park Humboldt Apartments
The sorry affair with Michael was over, but it took me a few years to get over the feelings I had for him and to reconcile myself with the mistakes I had made. He had shown himself not to be a nice person after all. Sometimes the man of one's dreams turns into the nightmare of one's dreams. I would see him now and again in the bars in Denver but would always attempt to avoid him. Eventually, I would hear that he had moved to Connecticut and bought an old house there after his parents had left Boulder for The Nutmeg State. I was just glad he was gone, and I could more easily move on.
All the while I was so distracted by Michael, I was not aware that Dino was methodically turning against me. He had gotten me to visit a lovely condo in a house on Franklin Street that had been a single-family home when it was constructed in 1896 but was converted into three apartments in the 1970's and finally into three condos in the 1980's. Dino Attardo was the realtor/owner whom Dino Gagliasso had met in a Denver bar. While I would pay $119K for the condo, I would later learn that Attardo had offered it to someone else for only $85K a few weeks before. Dino Gagliasso must have told him that I was someone who easily could be fleeced.
Dino Attardo would get more than his due one afternoon when he was parked in his car in Cheesman Park, taking in the views and likely cruising. A young man who got up that morning and decided to go on a spree with a gun tried to rob Attardo in his car in the park. When Attardo resisted handing over the keys to his car, he was shot. As the young gunman fled, he encountered a Jeep and stole it. During the subsequent high-speed chase, he wrecked the stolen Jeep in someone's front yard and was quickly apprehended by the police as he failed to flee on foot. Fortunately, Dino Attardo was not fatally injured and was able to testify at the young man's trial. But I heard that doctors could not remove the bullet because of where and how it was lodged in his chest.
Istanbul, Turkey, 1997
With another pair of passes, Michael and I were going on another trip before the legal conflict ruined what was left of our tenuous relationship. Even I was not stupid enough to go on yet another trip with someone who only took and never gave. So, though Michael had chosen the destination for the passes, I made it clear that he was no longer a friend and was not going with me. Willie Benitez reimbursed me for the cost of that one pass. and he and I met up at JFK for the Delta 767 flight to Istanbul. I never took any still photographs. The entire trip is on video tape and now DVD instead.
We extensively toured the city, Haja Sofia most prominently, as well as the marketplace. We took a ferry to the Princes' Islands. We spent the better part of a day at the Topkapi Palace and then at the Dolmabahce Palace. Our tour guide to Gallipoli and elsewhere, who worshiped Elvis, drove us in his compact station wagon to Gallipoli, stopping at the hillside turret of the Goben, the German battleship handed over to the Turks after the British Navy had chased it around the Mediterranean in WWI and bottled it up in the Dardanelles. We crossed over on a car ferry to see the ruins of Troy in Asia Minor.
Though Willie would drop me, along with several of his other former friends several years later, we had a pleasant trip. I bought a lovely Turkish carpet that a later cat would claw and damage.
Some of this Turkish vacation would be featured in Rainbow Arc of Fire: Who Has Dominion?
Leaving Park Humboldt Apartments
The sorry affair with Michael was over, but it took me a few years to get over the feelings I had for him and to reconcile myself with the mistakes I had made. He had shown himself not to be a nice person after all. Sometimes the man of one's dreams turns into the nightmare of one's dreams. I would see him now and again in the bars in Denver but would always attempt to avoid him. Eventually, I would hear that he had moved to Connecticut and bought an old house there after his parents had left Boulder for The Nutmeg State. I was just glad he was gone, and I could more easily move on.
Schnozz, of course, was put to sleep in the bedroom of that two-bedroom apartment on Humbolt, as chronicled in Worlds Beneath Us. She was so sick with cancer and was merely suffering. Dino subsequently gave me Miranda, their calico, when they were divesting themselves of their four cats and shifting to dogs. (Miranda, as a kitten, tormented me when I was trying to sleep on the couch in Dino and Larry's apartment when I worked for Cap Fed in the Tech Center and was visiting one weekend.)
So, Miranda, Sneezer and I were the ones to move out of the apartment together. (Sneezer did not easily take to Miranda in the beginning. When he saw her imperiously sitting high above on the stereo shelf unit in the living room, he furiously yowled but could not get at her. Eventually, they would get along; but that took some time.)
No comments:
Post a Comment