Whatever happened to....

 I believe most of us wonder at times whatever happened to some thing or some one who spent time in our lives, perhaps even for the briefest of moments, and then were ushered out.  They leave an ache of longing, to know, to provide us with an answer.

I'm not talking about cosmic questions of why are we here and what ought we to accomplish with our time on Earth.

No, I just mean some thing or some one who impacted our lives with curiosity, and we'd really like to know what eventually happened.

Of course, when my dad told me that I could not take my cat, Tiger, with us when we moved in with my stepmother and her two children, he said he was going to be passing by some remote area where he could, essentially, dump Tiger out--to fend for himself.  I am almost certain that it was our looming and future stepmother who forced dad to bring about this change.  She would always be a bitch in the years ahead.  In fact, that demand should have informed him, and us (though I did not at the time figure out that she was probably the one who demanded he do something about Tiger before we all moved in together) about what kind of person she really was. 

Regardless, dad said that the following day he would be passing that blissful cat paradise and it would be best for Tiger if he were dumped there rather than some other, less hospitable, locale.  

Making that decision was almost akin to the one that dad presented me with a couple of years before when he asked, one afternoon out of the blue, "If you had to choose, would you want to live with your mother or with me."  What kind of a question, and dilemma, is that to put upon a kid who isn't even 10 years old? 

But now I was faced with losing my beloved cat for good.  I had no choice.  That morning dad took Tiger in his company car and I never saw him again.

Oh, dad claimed a week later that as he was driving by those same Elysian Fields, he saw Tiger with a mouse in his mouth, trotting blissfully along with his prize, looking as well fed as when he lived with us.  I was at the time too naive or stupid to know dad was lying to me--he never saw Tiger again either.  But still I hoped Tiger was OK.

But what I have always wanted to know was whatever befell Tiger eventually?  How long had he survived?  Did he ever try to make it back to our apartment building in Orange, long after we had moved?  How and when did he die?  Did he ever remember me in those final days or did he find some other loving family who took him in and cared for him as I, ultimately, could not?  It makes me teary eyed even today as I think of him, especially since I never even had a picture of Tiger, except in my unreliable mind and foggy memory of oh so long ago.

Once, when I was still at the Academy or having just left, I visited Dan Stratford and Dick Tuttle in Denver.  Dan and I hiked over to Cheesman Park where the gay guys hung out at the South end.  I saw a lanky, handsome man who drove one of those fancy van conversions that hardly anybody drives any more.  He had long, finely toned and tanned legs and brown hair.  I did not have the nerve to walk up and speak to him.  Eventually, Dan had to go back to their townhouse, so we ran those several blocks from Cheeman Park to Pennsylvania Street, along 9th.  I asked a few guys, and Dan also asked for me, who that might have been.  Did anyone know him?  As far as anyone else knew, he was someone just passing through Denver, never to be seen again.  This was 1980 or 1981.  Before the AIDS Pandemic would cut a deadly swath through so gay men all over the nation and the world.  I used to think about that guy over the succeeding years and wonder if he had survived or died.   Like so many men I saw in this bar or that, so many guys I was friends or acquaintances with at one time or another during that tragic decade and more who did not make it.

I do not know, and likely do not suspect, that the universe is so constructed that we get tidy answers to our simpler questions.   Those that we would not really be asking much to get the answers to.

Marine OCS Part 5

 The first few days of Marine OCS were a whirlwind of activity.  We had to get our green fatigue OCS uniforms fitted, as well as our boots.  I kept stumbling in front of Lt. Nichols as I tried to climb the three step stand so he could get a good look at the fit of the uniform.  (I was not used to wearing boots--my previous pair back in the mid-1950's caused me to trip and fall onto the corner of a coffee table in our living room on Foxley Drive in Whittier, requiring three stiches.  I still bear that scar though these days it's very faint at the left base of my nose.)  He asked me if I were unable to walk and chew gum at the same time?  I was not capable of that in boots, apparently.

BTW, I kept one pair of those two sets of boots we were issued that day.  The other pair I left out the day I departed OCS and someone that they fit in the platoon snapped them up.  I think we were required to turn in our fatigues.  

Once we got our three pairs of fatigue shirts and trousers, we were advised to allow the Platoon Sergeant's and Sergeant Instructor's wives to sew on our white cloth name plates on the back of the shirts and above one of the shirt pockets.  It earned them extra money and it kept us in the good graces of our platoon staff for a short time anyway.

We had ridden over to the uniform issue building and back in what was generously referred to as "cattle cars"--trucks that pulled enclosed trailers that looked very much like those you would see on any highway hauling cattle to market.  The metal benches were hard and uncomfortable, as well as difficult to stay atop.  We kept sliding off when the trucks turned.

On the second or third day, we each also had a one-on-one meeting with Lt. Nichols in his office off of the platoon bay.  I had already decided that Marine OCS was not for me even though we were required to remain there for 9 weeks and the 10th week of out processing.  I would be there for most of the 12-week duration, regardless of my imagining it a waste of tax-payer dollars and my time.  I sat in an overstuffed chair in his office and responded to questions as he asked them.  The chair sat at an angle, pointing slightly away from where he sat.  I did not know if I was supposed to look directly at him by turning my head when he or I spoke.  So I just sat there and stared straight ahead the whole time, never once looking in his direction.  He must have thought I was screwy.

We also had the first of our platoon runs.  While I had run often in the neighborhood, and up at Mark Lombardo's house in Palos Verdes, and was pretty much ready, these were interesting in that we ran sometimes as a platoon in formation, keeping the unit's pace.  Along one of the dirt paths were small rocks jutting up which a few of us confessed to hoping they would jump up, bite one of our feet and cause us to fall in a heap, letting everyone else to pass us by.  It almost never happened, but we kept hoping. 

We also had the first of our calisthenics exercises on the grass near the parade grounds.  Everything was fine except, at one point, one of the guys screamed out in pain.  Not sure if he pulled a muscle with sit ups or not but he appeared to be in some pain.  A few of the guys thought he might be faking.  He was also the one who joined because he wanted to be in the Marine band.  However, the band was made up entirely of Marine enlisted men, so nobody was quite sure why he thought he, as an new officer, would be able to join. I believe he was one of the few who left the program at the six-week point where you were essentially kicked out early.  That never happened to some of us because we were pulling our own weight and were not causing trouble, so they kept us for the full 9 weeks before we could officially resign.

Our first weekend, four of us drove into downtown DC and stayed in a high-rise hotel there.  Not sure which one at this point.  I believe John Robertson was one of the guys.  Later, Dennis Zito, John and I would become buddies and would either stay at the barracks as a trio or go to DC and stay instead at the Crystal City Marriott that had the best military rates.  Years later, Dennis told me that his first weekend with a few other guys was spent uncomfortably waiting in the hallway outside their hotel room.  The other 2-3 guys he was with had hired a couple of prostitutes, and he had no desire to join them.   

   

Marine OCS Part 4

Somehow, someone must have collected us from the out-processing barracks and marched us to the barracks photographed in January 1973 above.  (I've looked at aerial images of Marine OCS, Quantico, today and these barracks are gone.  Marine OCS barracks now are modern and are located adjacent to the parade grounds on the other side of the tracks.  When I taught community college history, humanities, English, communications, English and literature classes for Pikes Peak Community College at Fort Carson, CO, in the 1980's, the classrooms were in somewhat similar barracks that were built for WWII all over the country as the nation mobilized on a massive scale.)

It might have been this first day that we were also marched to a barbershop where we were freed from our civilian hair and haircuts.  Like shorn sheep, this effort also freed us of having to care for our hair while we were in training.  We never had enough time to "shit, shower and shave" as it was.  Washing and combing hair was one less effort to contend with.  (A few weeks later, Dennis Zito, whom I mentioned before, had become a friend, along with John Robertson.  Dennis had a fine, short-toothed comb that could create a part in our slowly lengthening hair.  He returned from the latrine one weekend morning, coughed, pointed to his new part, barely noticeable and beamed with pride.  We all laughed.  Then I thought for a moment, borrowed his comb and went to the latrine to see what I could accomplish.  My hair always grew fast--it still does, just not in as many places as it once did, unfortunately.  I returned with an even more impressive part much to Dennis's chagrin.)

What happened the rest of that first day is a blank--we might have been given temporary military clothes to wear until we got our fatigues a few days later.  All I do remember is that we finally went to bed in our bunks late that night.  I got a top bunk which would cause me trouble the next morning.  We were already given duties, the first being as a fire guard for the barracks, which also housed two other platoons in our Company.  (Again, I don't remember exactly how, but every officer candidate was assigned to one of the three platoons in the Company.  What criteria they used, I do not recall, but Bruce Culp and I were assigned to the same platoon, as indicated in that earlier photo of the platoon:  Bravo Company, 1st Platoon.  Alpha Company was housed in the barracks above on the right in that photo.  We inhabited the front wing of the barracks on the left in the photo above.)

Most of us slept fitfully that first night.  First, because we were all nervous about what the next days would present.  Second, because one guy who was assigned fire watch that first night marched up and down the bay and then up the stairs to the other bays of Bravo Company.  His marching kept us awake, as well.  Fortunately, everyone soon learned that his marching was not necessary to be on the lookout for fires in these ancient fire traps.  You quietly patrolled the bays in a slow walk so as to let everyone else get much-needed sleep.  The third reason we slept fitfully was that beyond the barracks pictured above, there were railroad tracks.  Trains running north-south barreled past the barracks at high speed, often in the middle of the night.  They were always sudden and they were always loud.  Their passage rattled the whole structure as if it might fall apart above our heads.

At some point I finally did drift off to sleep.  But suddenly, I heard a loud metallic CRASH!  I and most of the others were now fully awake, adrenaline flowing.  And there was yelling.  Lots of yelling followed, demanding that we get out of our bunks.  I flew down to the floor, but the bunk slid across the waxed floor.  The front of my right leg slammed against the side of the frame below my bunk and cut the skin.  Not deeply but enough to draw blood which would not stop.  As I tried to stand at attention by the bunk after my bunkmate and I had pushed it back into place, I was definitely favoring the leg because it hurt like hell.  Just then Gunnery Sargant Williams walked past me and growled to know what was the matter.  I pointed to my leg and explained what had happened.  His demeanor softened and he told me to head to the latrine and try to get the bleeding stopped.  I hobbled off to find some toilet paper.  But it didn't help much.  I quickly rejoined the others in bay.

What had awakened those of us asleep had been a large metal trash can hurled down the middle of the bay.  A couple of the other candidates later explained, who had been awake before the melee began, they had seen Sgt. Williams bring the large metal trash can in the bay while Sgt. Blazer positioned himself at the light switch.  It was a coordinated assault on our senses, and it did the trick.  We were fully wired for the next several minutes.

After we got ready, we formed up outside the barracks and were marched to the chow hall.  This required marching along the paved road from the barracks, past the "slop shoot" and toward the railroad crossing where the chow hall sat on the other side, behind the out-processing barracks.

Obviously, these days, with the barracks beside the parade grounds and on the other side of the railroad tracks from the old barracks, some of our rituals no longer apply.  When the platoon marched and approached a cross street, the candidate marching the platoon was required to send out "road guards" to keep auto traffic from running into us.  Also, when crossing the railroad tracks, the platoon leader was required to send out two "track guards" to position themselves, one on either side of the tracks, facing the direction where any oncoming train might barrel into the platoon.  The road and track guards came from the second man from the front of each side of the two-column platoon.  'Track guards out!" and "Road guards out!" were the commands.  When the potential danger had passed, the commands became either "Track guards in!" or "Road guards in!"

Food in the chow hall wasn't bad at the beginning of each month when a new crew of enlisted Marines were assigned to that duty.  But as the month progressed, the quality and presentation of the food declined.  Noticeable.  Miraculously, when a new crew arrived at the start of the next month, it was obviously better.

One major difference between Marine OCS and Air Force OTS the following year was that during the entire Marine OCS experience, nobody bothered us while we ate.  Food was an important component of marching and hiking and navigating the various physical training courses we were required to endure.  We needed our energy and stamina.  During Air Force OTS, the first three weeks we had to sit silently at a table, no talking, no looking up.  The table had to sit down and get up together when you figured out that everyone else had finished.  It was a bit stressful.

Individual images

Marine OCS Part 3

Top Row:  Paul Fitzpatrick, Bruce Culp, Clayborne, Dan Hunter, Wright, Booher

Second Row:  Kramer, Jim Schloss, John Robertson, Wilson, Greg Sanchez, John Ormbreck, Jerry Moore, Ken Zebal, Olsen

Third Row:  Jim Mullen, Walczak, Laviglio, Smith, Stuart, Darwin Newlin, Raese, Kent Nix, Anderson, Fitzgerald, Langdon

Bottom Row:  Lt. Nickle, Tourek, Moffatt, Dennis Zito, Campomenosi, Hudnall, Unknown, Delacroce, Sgt. Blazer, Sgt. Williams

Not pictured:  Palms, Kelly Stage, and one unknown from California

B Company, 1st Platoon


Here we all are.  Dennis Zito helped me fill in some of the names.  For several of the guys, we did not remember their first names.  Unless you became buddies in some cases, you talked to them using their last names.

Marine Corps OCS Part 2

I was told by the OCS recruiter that at least two others (possibly three, my memory is no longer clear on our number) from Southern California would be in my OCS class at Quantico.  All three or four of us would be flying from LAX to Dulles airport on an American Airlines 707 where we would find government transportation to Quantico.

A few weeks before we left, I visited one of my potential platoon mates, Bruce Culp, who lived in Bell, CA, not far from South Gate.  Bruce was blond and 6'1", lithe with a swimmer's body since his parents had installed a pool and he kept in shape.  We spent a couple of hours chatting at his parents' house before I headed home.  Bruce and I would not become buddies at Marine OCS or elsewhere--I cannot fathom why--but our paths would cross more than once over the next few years.

We would both end up leaving Marine OCS at some point during the program.  We would both be at Air Force OTS in 1973.  Both of us would go through missile training at Vandenberg AFB in the Spring of 1974, and be housed in the same Bachelor Officer's building at Minot AFB in North Dakota for the next four years.  Bruce, however, did not take well to being a missile officer.  I believe at the time he deliberately did not do well at Vandenberg missile school.  Back at Minot, they had to find him another assignment.  Very quickly he found his calling as a Security Police officer and remained doing that for the rest of his time in Minot.  After that, I lost touch with him and where he went when I transferred to the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.  As I said, though, we really did not become buddies in any of these shared military assignments.

Fortunately, the transcontinental flight--my first--was not particularly full, especially in coach.  While we might have chatted with one another for awhile in our assigned seats, eventually we each found a separate, unoccupied row, after putting the arm wrests up, and tried to catch some sleep on this red-eye.  I know I was not the only one who was nervous about what lay ahead for the next several weeks and more, and I don't believe that any of us slept much.

After arriving at Dulles at dawn, we did not find any government transportation to Quantico.  The four of us decided our only alternative was to hire a cab and split the fare four ways (I suspect there were four of us at this point since I seem to recall that I was in the front seat with the cab driver, and the other three filled up the back seat.)

We drove through the Northern Virginia landscape that was not snow-covered but decidedly bleak and foreboding.  Growing up and spending most of my life in Southern California, or visiting a place like White Cloud, KS, only in the summer, I had never seen so many miles and miles of trees without leaves and leaf-covered grounds in the woods on either side of the highway.  The sky was also gray that morning.  I think most of us felt a sense of gloom and doom as the cab drew closer and closer to Quantico.

We finally arrived at the main gate.  Not knowing where to go from there, we went inside to speak to someone there who might know where we ought to go.  A sergeant came out from a back room bunk in his T-shirt and underwear, entirely out of sorts and berated us for not knowing where we ought to be.  We later realized he was a sergeant instructor for another platoon, not ours, fortunately.  Our early arrival must have cost him a few minutes of sleep, but he must have explained to the cab driver where we ought to go and we were off again, further into the bowels of the base.

He dropped us off at the correct barracks, we paid him, and went inside with our bags from the trunk.  Once inside, we advanced to a desk at the end of a squad bay where a guy was sitting who seemed to be in charge.  He had a list and checked off our names as we gave them to him.  Why he picked me out, I do not know, but he said, "Sanchez, I broke a bottle of shampoo in one of the showers.  Could you go clean up the pieces of glass?"  Two guys who had been sitting next to one another on a small couch seemed to chuckle at his command to me and perhaps at my obvious nervousness.  (These two characters would be John Ormbrek and Dennis Zito, who would become buddies and explain that the guy who was acting so officious was actually just a candidate as we were; but he had dropped out and was in that barracks, awaiting his out-processing paperwork to be completed.  He had no more authority to have me clean up his broken shampoo bottle than the lowliest civilian employee on the base.  But not knowing this, I cleaned up the broken glass and reported back to him that the shower stall was safe to use again.)

Bruce Culp and I ended up being assigned to the same platoon as were John Ormbrek and Dennis Zito.  But I think the other two in the cab with us from Dulles ended up in a different OCS platoon, and I never saw them much after that.  Such was the apparent randomness of military assignments.

Rainbow Arc of Fire team image, work in progress

I commissioned artist/writer Max Spragovsky to create a group image of my Rainbow Arc of Fire superhero team. Two of the newest characters, Kora (Mercuria) and Kalisto (Liquide/Liquid Lord), really did not have her own costume since they were created after I'd had the superhero name and costume design contest on the Gay League site. This gave him a chance to use his talents to enhance those two characters. The team drawing is not yet complete, but I thought people would enjoy the work in progress. Haunt (mostly wearing black) is in the background, Harvest (in shades of green) in the foreground, and Firefrost is on the far left. Mercuria is to the left of Harvest and Liquide/Liquid Lord is to the right of him as you view the image.  When you click on the image, you can view it much larger.

Marine OCS Part 1

Yesterday, I was loading music onto my Sony player when I realized that I had not created a Marine OCS folder for the music we listened to on personal radios in the barracks on weekends or on the Juke Box at the "slop shoot" down the road from our barracks.  Sunday mornings especially, guys tuned their radios, those who stayed behind and hadn't gone into DC, to Casey Kasem's American Top 40 countdown.  We all relaxed on our bunks, wrote letters home, and just took it easy, all the while dreading Sunday evening when the rest of the guys returned and we all had to start getting prepared for a new week of training.

But while we relaxed, Casey would introduce a song like Don McLean's "Vincent (Starry, Starry Night)" or America's "Horse With No Name" or Malo's "Suavecito", and I would look out at the gloriously green woods, well beyond our barrack's windows or look down at the brown Potomac River flowing by and be transported, if just for a few minutes or a few hours.  All these years later, now that I am 70, I still can sometimes remember where I was when I listened to a particular song on the radio.  

The first time I heard "Horse With No Name", I was accompanying Dennis Zito, who might have been driving John Ormbrek and I and John Robertson, using John Ormbrek's tan VW station wagon into D.C. on a Friday evening.  John was going to let us have his car for the weekend, so we were driving him to the train station where he intended to take the train into New York City for the weekend.  I remarked that I liked what I was hearing from the car radio, and the other guys told me the name of the group and the song title.  It was raining that night and the drops splashed on the side windows as I sat in the back seat and tried to catch glimpses of some of the D.C. landmarks.  I remember seeing the Capitol dome well down the avenue ahead, through the rain and the light of street lamps that night.  (An aside:  I did not listen to radio in those days.  I always had an 8-track player in my '66 Mustang convertible and a Roberts 8-track tape recorder attached to my stereo system at home, so I made my own music tapes and listened to them.)

I heard Bill Withers' "Ain't No Sunshine" on the slop shoot (the fast food joint) Juke Box for the first time.  It was still on the Juke Box but was no longer on the top of the charts.  However, if I heard a song there or on a car radio or a radio in the barracks, I forever associated it with Marine OCS.  This was the Spring of 1972, approximately mid March to mid May when, after I was forced to remain at OCS until I could voluntarily leave after 10 weeks (9 weeks with the course and 1 week to out-process).

I wasn't intending to be at Marine OCS at all.  

Richard Nixon was in the White House, the Watergate burglars were not going to be caught until June 17, 1972, well before the election in November.  But the Vietnam War was still raging strong.  Nixon had instituted a Draft Lottery which was held on December 1, 1969.  My number was 119, the same as Bruce Springsteen since we were both born on the same day back in 1949.  

I had been lucky enough to able to graduate from college in December of 1971.  Prior to that, I had decided to try to get into the Marine Corps Reserve as a clerk typist.  I'd been accepted and was going to be able to ship off to Marine boot camp in San Diego after I graduated.  I had already had my draft physical, a humiliating affair.  We were treated indifferently at best, contemptuously at worst, by the various staff members.  My blood pressure was judged high at one point so some officious barked, "What are you nervous about?"  I admitted, "The whole thing."  I was told to sit aside for a few minutes.  They tested me again and I passed.

Weeks later, in contrast, I had my Marine physical in the same building, processing through the same steps but the treatment was totally different.  Instead of being looked upon as some slacker who probably was trying to get out of serving his country (we were all treated like this, not just me), I remember feeling like royalty.  I was one of the Marine's own, I was volunteering, and I was doing my patriotic duty instead of trying to dodge military service.  Besides, potentially joining the Marine Reserves bought me enough time to graduate.

But that summer of 1971, a guy I had become friendly with at Cal State Dominguez Hills, Mark Lombardo, found out I was going to be just a Marine enlisted man when I was about to graduate college.  Why did I not want to attend Marine OCS in Quantico, Virginia, as he had just done that Spring of 1971, and be an officer instead?  His argument quickly made sense to me.  So, I saw the Marine OCS recruiter and I got switched.  The enlisted recruiter responded, "Go get those gold bars."
My entry into the service was delayed further until March of 1972, so I could easily graduate.  Most weekends, I would drive up to Mark's parent's house on Palos Verdes and go running with him to get prepared.  I had always been able to break into a run in the past.  But that had been a few years before and, while still slim, I was not in running shape.  That first run I believe I puked at the end.  I had a few months to prepare, so I was able to get in running shape for OCS by the Spring. 

While all of these Marine exercises were occurring, I had actually heard from an Air Force recruiter based in Huntington Park, CA.  But somehow my personal scores for becoming an Air Force Navigator were not high enough to get me into Air Force OTS, and they were also not high enough to become a pilot.  But that option was still out there and I had not heard the last from that particular recruiter.

   

Likely no Comic Cons this year

It appears that no Comic Cons remaining this year will be held.  We had a hotel room at the Hilton next to the Anaheim Convention Center where WonderCon is held each year.  But we were forced to cancel when we learned that WonderCon was postponed indefinitely.  I suppose there is a chance for the fall but unlikely.

Nothing has happened yet, but ComicCon San Diego will also be cancelled or postponed.  So I won't be able to give away or sell books this year at all.

I hope everyone stays safe.  Mark and I are hunkered down in the house and only go outside to walk to the mailbox or drive somewhere to get groceries or food once or twice a week.  We hope later this morning that Ralph's will have toilet paper and bottled water and food.

Cats in the Rainbow Arc of Fire series

Schnozz was something else.   Smart and sassy, she ruled the house at 6555 Palmer Park Blvd in Colorado Springs before I moved to Denver.  The drive to Denver when I moved, taking her to the small apartment on Humboldt St. in Denver, was traumatic for her.  The 1-bedroom apartment was so much less roomy than the 3-bedroom, 4-level house.  And when temporary roommate and not much of a BF Frank Massey brought to the apartment Sneezer from the Dumb Friends League, Schnozz was further distressed.  The two did not get along well but finally tolerated one another.

When I sent Frank packing back to Virginia but kept Sneezer, and we all moved to another small apartment in another building in the Humboldt apartment complex, relations were only marginally better.  They eased a bit when the three of us moved to a 2-bedroom apartment two doors down from the second small 1-bedroom, and each cat had his or her places to pass the time.  Sneezer took the spare bedroom and would sit atop a carpeted cat pedestal and watch the passersby on the sidewalk below.  Schnozz ruled the bedroom and the carpeted pedestal there.

It was the death of Schnozz that formed a centerpiece in the green book, Volume 4, Worlds Beneath Us.

Speaking of Sneezer:

I have never had a more lovable or loving cat.  He would curl up in my arms on that couch as I watched TV and fall asleep.  At one point he weighed 23.5 pounds, much too heavy.  I had to put him on a diet so that he returned to his regular weight of 17.5 pounds.  He was still a big, heavy cat, regardless.  When he was 20 years old, his kidneys had already been failing.  His weight had alarmingly dropped to barely above 6 pounds.  He would not eat solid food, so I drained cans of chicken and he would slurp up the juice.  But one morning, long after he'd confined himself to a spot between the toilet and cabinet in the carpeted bathroom, he came out to the kitchen one morning as if to eat as he had every morning at the condo on Franklin St prior to his extended illness.  While I was happy to see him, I was immediately shocked to see that he was walking on one of his front legs on the first joint instead of on his paw.  His paw was bent under, and it must have been painful for him to walk like that; but he seemed determined to get to the kitchen.  I was heartsick.  I believe he'd had a stroke and was reliving the past when he was younger and healthy and loved to have his morning meal before I left for work.  I had to call the vet and tearfully arrange to bring him in that afternoon.

He would always sound so mournful in the car on the way to the vet's office to get his regular checkups and shots.  He loved living in the condo and hated to leave.  But this morning he was silent.  I had wrapped him up in a favorite towel and he sat on the passenger seat, looking tired but determined.  After he drifted away on the table in the vet's office, I could not contain myself and cried like a baby all the way home and for hours after.  As with Schnozz before, I had him cremated and have his ashes still.

After Schnozz was gone, my friend Dino and his partner Larry were shedding their three cats in favor of dogs.  They gave me Miranda, the eldest.  Sneezer took quite some time to take to her in the 2-bedroom apartment on Humboldt after she arrived.  Miranda, like Schnozz, only lived to be about 12-13 years.  She had moved along with Sneezer and me to the condo on Franklin St.  At some point, she developed terrible tumors on the back of her neck from the rabies shots from the vet.  She then endured three separate surgeries, six months apart, to remove successive tumors as they aggressively developed, one set after another.  They would not stop.  I finally had to wrap a sock around her neck to keep her from scratching at the wound that the doctor no longer could find enough skin to close at the end of the third surgery.  Again, as with Schnozz, I had to contact the vet for a dreaded house call.  I let Miranda sit peacefully in the front garden amidst the foliage until the vet arrived in the early afternoon.  She left peacefully on that same living room couch pictured above.  Her death was mentioned in Olive Branch, the last volume in the series.

Strangely, a few nights later I awoke to a familiar sound from the kitchen.  I looked up and Sneezer was staring in the direction of the kitchen, around the corner from the bedroom.  A night light from the kitchen counter had put his curious head and pointed ears in silhouette.  We were both listening momentarily to the sound of Miranda, again scratching at the taped sock around her neck.  Of course, even though I checked the kitchen counter where she used to lay before she died, feeling the welcome heat from the back of the fridge, she was not there.  Take this haunting story as you like.  I have never seen a ghost before, but both Sneezer and I heard something from the kitchen that night that sounded remarkably like the sound of Miranda scratching.  

This was Calico Miranda in the Franklin St. condo before she started to develop the tumors.  She loved to sit atop the cable box for warmth:

After Miranda had gone, the sister of a woman I worked with had, with a coworker at Coors Brewery, rescued a few-weeks-old kitten at the site.  He needed a home.  Linda asked me and I said I would take him.  I named him Pudge because, when he would scrunch himself up, front to back, he'd look rather pudgy.  Again, Sneezer was not too keen on a new roommate.  But Pudge was smart and determined, even as a kitten.  Just as I was telling a friend on the phone that I did not see what I was going to do to help them get along, I looked down and Sneezer and Pudge were eating their breakfast together off the same small plate.  Pudge had figured out how to push open the folding bathroom door and was eating contentedly next to the much bigger Sneezer.

Pudge is with me still, as is Tabby, who replaced Sneezer.  Tabby was discovered going door to door in the sister's boyfriend's neighborhood in Denver, getting food wherever she could beg it.  She may have been owned by a family across the street from Linda's sister's boyfriend.  But when he saw Tabby sitting by a couple of the family members on the sidewalk and he asked if they owned her, they offered, "Yes, do you want her?"  One morning he catnapped her, put her in a cat carrier, took her to his girlfriend's house, and I picked her up there, where I had gathered up Pudge a couple of years earlier.  As with Pudge, I took her to the vet and got her fixed (that family had neglected to do what they were legally required to do regarding spaying a pet).  The vet told me that, even at six months old, she was fully ready to have kittens of her own.

Pudge and Tabby made their way on Mark's and my first long drive between Denver and Indio.  We drove non-stop to limit their suffering, only getting gas occasionally for the van we were using to transport the cats and our two TVs.

After such a small condo, only a bit more than 900 square feet, the 2100-square-foot house must have seemed  enormous.  I first found them curled up together in one of the litter boxes.  They seemed terrified of their new surroundings.  By our final night before Mark and I had to fly back to Denver, they'd entirely disappeared.  Numerous times I searched the whole house and the neighborhood (though how both had gotten out of doors was highly improbable).  We eventually had to leave for the airport, but I told my best friend and my sister, who would feed and look after them while we were gone, to keep laying out food and checking the litter boxes.  They confirmed that food was being eaten and litter boxes were being used, but no cats could be found anywhere in the house.

It was Mike a few days later who finally realized that they might have squeezed under the narrow opening in the back of a long, low chest in our new bedroom and would remain there until food had been left out and the unwanted strangers had departed the house.  He tilted the cabinet forward and found two surprised cats staring up at him.  They took off for the moment, but we were relieved after I got his call.

Here are Tabby (top) and Pudge in 2007 in the condo in Denver:

Category Six Books

I guess it's been well more than a decade ago--possibly two--when almost any city of any size had at least one gay bookstore.  For Denver it was Category Six Books.  They were first located on Capitol Hill on 10th Street.  Armistead Maupin drew crowds when he showed up for a book signing, most memorable was his signing for Significant Others, his breakout title.  The store was in the first floor of what had likely once been a large house and then, probably, an apartment building after it was cut up.  One guy who initially worked there in the 1980's recommended that I read Maupin's Tales of the City series and handed me the first four volumes, the only four that were then in print.  Eventually, the series ran to nine volumes, but the store had closed long before the final three appeared.  I would acquire Sure of You at Category Six Books' next location, along South Broadway.

At this point, James Dovali had purchased the store from the original owner not long after the move to the South Broadway location.  After my series began to be written, naturally the first owner and James were kind enough to carry the several volumes as they appeared.  And, even more fortunately, I was able to hold several book signings over the years, especially before Christmas when everyone was doing his holiday shopping.  (I say "his" because while Category Six carried current lesbian titles, they rarely sold because the store had few lesbian customers.  Eventually, a lesbian bookstore would open on 13th street, east of Josephine, making the segregation complete.  When I approached the manager of that store to carry my novels since there were prominent lesbian characters, I was flatly dismissed.)

The 1980's were the heyday of gay bookstores around the country.  That would continue into the 1990's.  But before that decade was over, the Internet was beginning to make serious inroads into sales.  James knew that the closing of the store he loved so much was going to occur, he just was not exactly sure when he would be forced to close it.  I knew that the closing would likely be the doom of my series, as well.  Independent book stores of all varieties were also closing.  As my series hit its stride, all over the country gay book stores were shutting down.  Stores that had been in existence for years were forced to face the reality of amazon.com especially and self-terminate.  Whereas I had once been able to send notices of the first volume to so many stores around the nation, I was getting more and more returns of notices sent to smaller towns and cities, and then bigger ones as well, when the subsequent novels were published.  My list of potential stores to carry my books was dwindling fast.

At Category Six Books, I had sold between 300 and 400 copies of all volumes in the series.  James was always very helpful; and the sales helped him, as well.   The seventh volume in the series even has the main characters visit Category Six Books as part of the plot.  

I used to visit the store most Saturday mornings after he'd opened the doors.  Since business was sometimes slow at that hour, we'd chat about everything:  music, book sales, whatever.  He admitted on several occasions that it was the porn section in back that was keeping the store afloat when regular sales began to slow.  Even as we would chat, a few customers would enter, stride through the interior of the store, and take up station in the very back, partitioned to keep the porn magazines separate from the rest of the store.  But, of course, as the Internet broadened, one could get his active porn there rather than just stare at a motionless photo on a page.  

Although he warned them not to, a gay couple badly wanted to own the store.  Despite repeated warnings, they finally bought him out for a tidy sum they really could ill afford, changed so much about the interior of the store that it looked like someone's grandmother's living room, and wasted money on such unnecessary purchases as a new cash register, among other items.  The sale of my books cratered--they were not at all as helpful as James had been.  Old customers who had hung on also seemed to disappear (though many had already abandoned buying books there).  

The other issue was that the original owner had believed that the South Broadway area was going to bloom as a new gay mecca in Denver.  And it appeared at first that it would.  There was a Heaven Sent Me novelty store a block or so away.  A pan-sexual café was a few doors down.  But even some of those places eventually died, and it really never became that gay area everyone would want to visit.  The rent at the original location was going up prohibitively, so he had to move somewhere; and this had seemed as good as any.  But the locale became not an oasis but a desert that was drying up after the relocation.

Unfortunately, for the newest, and last, owners, the landlord was redoing the front of the building a year or so later, which would have further discouraged the few remaining customers from entering the front door.  They simply sold out everything at a massive discount.  I got a call to pick up my remaining books that had always been on the shelves on consignment anyway.  They slipped away in the night and that was the end of a bookstore that had been around for likely more than 20 years.

A few months before they closed, they held a memorial for James Dovali.  He had drifted from one improbable occupation to another after he'd sold the store, but none seemed to suit him.  I had entirely lost touch.  Before he moved on, I had given him a spare carpeted cat tower since he'd acquired a stray he'd named Slim Shady.  This energetic cat that used to live at the bookstore, as well as the carpeted tower, were acquired by an older couple who had known James.  Rootless now with the store he had cherished gone for six months, James died of AIDS.  I saved his obituary from the newspaper for several years, but it may have gotten lost in my move to California.  I liked him, and I missed our morning conversations at the store.  He'd done what he could to push the sales of Rainbow Arc of Fire, and I appreciated that very much.

By the way, the title of the bookstore referred, if I am remembering correctly, to a category of books that were deemed gay, as well as controversial.  It was not a positive description but almost a clinical definition.  The first owner used to say that they probably should have changed the name at some point during its heyday but never got around to it.  Most customers had no idea what the name referred to even when they knew of the store itself.

Besides the gay bookstores closing, gay magazines and newspapers were also ending as the 1990's came to a close.  Gay novels and other titles were also either going mainstream or diminishing in number as major publishing houses were no longer making the kind of money they'd earned in the late 80's and early 90's promoting gay titles.  That's why my books did not get picked up by St. Martin's press, and I was eventually forced to self-publish.  And, of course, so many who likely supported gay stores and books and magazines and other gay-friendly businesses were dying off, of old age and AIDS, until the life-saving drug cocktails became available from 1995 on.  

But while the store still endured, as you can see by the Top Ten book shelf I photographed above, one week my first novel was #2 to Maupin's The Night Listener.  Especially after a signing, I might have two or three books on the Top Ten shelf.  But now that is becoming so many years ago.  

James and I would put out a coffee urn filled with hot cider, cloves and cinnamon, which gave the store a warm aroma, we'd lay out Christmas cookies and other sweet treats, and watch the numbers of customers increase as the days before the giving holiday dwindled to a precious few.  Usually, it was the weekend before Christmas that would be the most busy and I would do a signing both Saturday and Sunday.   

I think we lost something very precious and community-building when the gay bookstores closed.  Frankly, I wouldn't hear about new titles that I might be interested in reading, especially gay biographies and histories that I liked the most.  An owner like James who loved books and loved to read was always a good source for what was worth reading.  But those days are gone now and likely never will return. 

Merry Christmas everyone!

We went all out this year to decorate the house like crazy for Christmas.  

When we were kids, my sister and I, our dad would often before Christmas, drive us to either another part of town or a neighboring town to Whittier, CA, so we could see streets where the entire block would decorate their houses spectacularly for the holiday season.  Cars would be nearly bumper to bumper, viewing the spectacular light shows back then.  

So it was with pleasure and memories of past Christmases that we decorated the front and back of the house so specially this year.

"How terribly strange to be 70."

From April 1968, one of my all-time favorite albums.  The lyric above is from the song "Old Friends".

Difficult to imagine that as I listened to that album in the Spring of that year, 51 years later I would hear that lyric and realize it now applied to me.

Randy Shilts and his books

I am certain I have mentioned before that I am referred to (though not by name) in the late Randy Shilts's history of gays and lesbians in the military, Conduct Unbecoming, Chapter 34, page 327, in the subsection about Cadet Dan Stratford.  I am the unnamed instructor who was "cashiered".

Back in 1992 or, possibly, very early 1993, I spoke on the phone with Randy, at least twice, while he was researching his study.  Only in the recent biography of Shilts by Andrew Stoner pictured above have I learned that Randy was becoming quite ill with AIDS as the book was nearer to completion in 1993.  He had intended to interview me in person; however, when the time approached, I was told it would be an assistant who was coming to Denver and that I should meet with him.  I offered to drive the assistant to the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, and we set off.  But for whatever the reason, as I explained my story in more detail, it became clear that the assistant's time was short and, as we arrived at the Academy, he explained that he really had to get back to Denver.  So we never got to put place with incidents at the physical site of Dan's and my humiliations.  I am not certain, but it may have been that my own story was not going to make the cut and the assistant soon realized the fact as we drove South.

Ultimately, I also read in the biography that his editor at St. Martin's Press, Michael Denneny, and the assistants, were forced to help finish the book, even so far as Michael actually writing a few of the last chapters.  So that is why I never was able to meet with Randy in person.  Shilts was also too ill to go on a book tour or to attend in person interviews on most TV shows to promote the book after it was published in May of 1993.  Besides, Dan Stratford's story was likely the more compelling, reading in depth about a 21-year-old cadet's dismissal rather than a 29-year-old instructor more than a decade earlier.  

Because he had edited Randy Shilts's books, it was to Martin Denneny that I sent my own autobiography manuscript in the late 1980's.  While he kept the manuscript for several weeks, it was eventually returned to me, rejected for publication (while smelling heavily still of cigarette smoke).  St. Martin's Press was also where I got my friend at the time, Dino, to later call and get the first volume of Rainbow Arc of Fire: A Mile-High Saga reviewed with an eye to publishing it.  

I was later told by Dino that the editor was impressed with the book, an woman assistant was also impressed, and focus readers also gave high marks to the passages they read, enough to consider submitting it further up the St. Martin's Press chain of command.  However, eventually, we were disappointed to learn that publishing was contracting and that the other divisions of St. Martin's were in competition as to which books would be published and which were rejected.  If a gay novel were published, that would mean a book from another division would not be published.  Even though the editor wanted to publish my novel, it was rejected at a meeting of all of the divisions.  The editor, which I do not believe was Michael Denneny at the time, said not to worry, that my novel would be published by someone, just not by St. Martin's.  

Unfortunately, while gay publications had reached a fevered pitch not much earlier that decade and the 1980's, that, too, was now contracting and I would not find anyone willing to publish the novel.  Time had passed me by.  Had I finished and circulated the novel a year or two earlier, all the difference might have occurred.  Like so much else in our lives, timing can be everything.

October 12, 1979

It was forty years ago today

I was forced to leave the Academy

Certain significant days in one's life are lodged in the mind and remain stuck there indefinitely.  This was one day I will not forget.

The investigation had been going on since the Spring when corrupt Cadet Keith Bostic ignored an Air Force Chaplin's advice not to ruin a man's life.  Instead, he went to the Office of Special Investigations and laid out the personal events between himself and me.  He tailored his story to leave out the important part that he himself was gay, that I had never made physical advances toward him, and that his tale would be embellished many times over the coming weeks with lies.

Those lies would eventually get him expelled from the Academy, and he would leave a week before I would.  But nothing was going to happen to him until I was forced to submit my resignation.  Alternatively, I had been removed from teaching cadets for the English Department.  I was forced to provide the OSI with a set of my fingerprints.  I was required to provide the OSI with writing samples.  I was exiled from the Academic building.  I was no longer allowed to work out at the Academy athletic facilities but told I would have to work out at the enlisted athletic facilities along another ridge of the massive Academy complex.  I also could only eat lunch at the restaurant at the Academy golf course, nowhere near any cadets.

The entire experience was humiliating and degrading.

My first day of eating at that restaurant, a few other instructors joined me as a show of support.  Unfortunately, that day the two OSI agents who had come to me with the charges against me in the English Department conference room that first day in June, were eating at a nearby table.  I mentioned this to the others, and that was the last time anyone in the Department ate lunch with me at the golf course restaurant.  (A fellow instructor would stop by the house, looking for my help recording some favorite music on my cassette system.  I would learn a few years later that he had died of alcoholism, and that news saddened me.)

On that final day forty years ago, I was able to get the boxes with my possessions from my former cubicle in the English Department.  I carried them, one at a time, to the elevator which took me down to the parking garage beneath the Academic building where my '73 Camaro was waiting.  On my final trip up the elevator to get the last box, it slowed and then stopped.  The elevator door opened a crack so that I could see legs and shoes walking by, but I was several feet down from the office floor.  I was trapped.  Eventually, help came and I was freed.  (I have always believed that even the building was refusing to let me go.)

I stopped by the Officers' Club to close my account there and then drove away for the last time as an officer in the U.S. Air Force.  

For the previous months, when I was working out at the enlisted gym, I would stand outside the gym and watch the cadet tow planes that would pull the Academy cadet gliders aloft and release them to glide off on their own, using the Rampart Range thermals to remain aloft.  I would often see myself as the cut-loose glider, to soar away alone or float downward on my own.

I reluctantly drove home.  I parked my car in the garage and entered my house.  I slowly walked up the inside stairs to the top floor.  Standing before the mirror in the guest bathroom off the hall, I carefully removed my Air Force uniform shirt for the very last time.

The phone rang and my neighbor below my house, Gina Martin, who also worked at the English Department, was calling to take me to dinner at a local steak house with her mother who was visiting.  She was trying to divert my attention from this last day, but it only partly worked.  It merely delayed my mourning for a couple of hours.

  

Dan Stratford and Dick Tuttle, 1979

I had a dream this early morning.  I was visiting Dick Tuttle's mid-century modern glass house in Denver, with the pool and aspens in the courtyard.  A visitor had to climb steps and then descend them to reach the front door (those steps to scale a wall that surrounded the beautiful but isolated house).  The house was empty, however.  No one was home.

I have had this dream before but not since I have lived in California.

Of course, Dick Tuttle did not own a glass house.  He owned a townhouse, within a complex of a dozen or more townhouses, half facing the street, the other half facing the long, rectangular courtyard within that contained a small pool that no one ever seemed to use.  There are two such townhouse complexes on Pennsylvania Avenue in Denver, one on either side of the street in the block between 9th and 10th Streets.

In the top photo above, Dick Tuttle, 42, leans against the kitchen counter top.  In the top and bottom photos, former cadet Dan Stratford, 21, sits beside the dining room table.

I believe I took these photos one weekend when I was staying with them in Denver.  When I returned to Colorado Springs, the following day another officer and I drove to the Academy, I was speaking with a few other English Department instructors when Col. Shuttleworth entered the cubicle, asked me to accompany him, and I would meet the OSI, which effectively was going to end my career.

Dan and Dick had already formed the first gay relationship I had ever been aware of.  That morning when I took the photo, I was in awe of that relationship, hoping some day to find a similar love of my life.

Dan's story at the Academy is told in the late Randy Shilts's book, CONDUCT UNBECOMING, Chapter 14, pages 326-7.  (My situation was briefly mentioned in that chapter but I was unnamed.)

Dan and Dick's love affair began when Dan was in his junior year at the Air Force Academy.  He was a guest of an invitee to a party Dick was having in his brand new townhouse in Denver.  They met, sparks apparently flew, and Dick took him to an unsold townhouse in the complex and they made love on the carpeted floor.

Dick once told me another story about the time, also in Dan's junior year when cadets could not own a car, that he opened the front door on a Saturday morning only to find a freezing Dan, standing there in his Academy uniform.  He had hitchhiked all the way from the Academy to Denver on a very cold and snowy and windy day, just to spend the weekend with Dick.

Their surreptitious affair continued for months but blossomed when Dan, like so many other senior cadets, picked up his brand new Chevy Corvette at the factory.  He now had a car to drive himself back and forth from the Academy to Dick's townhouse.  Unfortunately, Dan did have outside affairs.  He was attracted to older men, and many older me over the years found this hunky, compact blond very attractive.

He had, in high school, once seduced his father's business partner in Scranton, PA, before he got to the Academy.  Somewhere along the way, he'd had a brief affair with a Canadian attache.   That affair resulted in a revealing letter to Dan from the attache, a letter Dan fatefully kept in a private drawer in his Academy room (a room he shared with a suspicious, homophobic and ultra-religious cadet).

Somewhere along the way, during Christmas and Spring breaks, Dan had traveled to New York and later to Dallas, among other cities, enjoying the bars and gay life there.  I even heard that Dan, in his Corvette, got picked up by a trucker on the highway to Dallas and had a hookup in the cab of that trucker's semi.

So Dan was not always fully faithful to Dick.  And Dick did not expect him to be.  Dick told me on at least one occasion that had he demanded total faithfulness, he would likely lose Dan for good.

Soon after Christmas, 1978, Dan Stratford came under investigation by the OSI (Office of Special Investigations) because of that attache letter and because his suspicious roommate thought that it had to be very gay to visit such cities as New York and Dallas on one's school breaks.

Dick Tuttle was even approached by the OSI at work about his relationship with Dan.  He indignantly refused to cooperate and ordered them out of his place of work, Stearns-Rogers Engineering.

Dan was still deeply in love with Dick, so they had to devise intricate ways to continue to spend weekends together in Denver.  Dan would drive his Corvette to the house of a friend in Denver, park the car in a garage.  Get into that man's Cadillac, scrunch down on the floor in the front seat, and be driven to Dick's garage.  Once the garage door was down, Dan would exit the Cadillac, go up the interior stairs to the townhouse above, and they would be reunited.

With the investigation in full force, and Dan's friends Bill Ryder and George Gordy also being question by the OSI, Dick got Dan a civilian (and gay) attorney, Richard Boomes (whom I would also use in my defense later that year).

The only thing that the OSI could pin on Dan was associating with a known homosexual, the Canadian attache, based upon the incriminating letter.  But that was enough.  Dan agreed to resign his commission upon graduation.  He would be able to get his diploma but that resignation would end his Air Force career.

When his fellow cadets were graduating, and I was in attendance at the Academy football stadium, Dan was moving in with Dick.  I would visit them on several occasions over the years, including wonderfully catered parties they would give in their townhouse.  Dan would take his annual Christmas vacations in Hawaii, without Dick, and he would have his brief affairs there; but he would always return to Dick and their townhouse.  (My mom and I actually stayed with Dan for a couple of nights in one of the condos he rented when he was on vacation because we could not find a hotel room and Dan was generous to allow us to stay with him--and he was island hoping for a couple of those nights anyway.)

Toward the end of the decade, however, Dan was being courted by an older man in San Francisco, where Dan had always wanted to live.  I remember Dick telling me that this man had brazenly called the townhouse once when he himself answered and Dick angrily told the man to stop calling Dan there.

(Dick, of course, had at least one notable affair that I knew of.  It was at one party where I saw the hot Air Force enlisted man whom Dick was infatuated with.  They sat on the couch with the two of them hugging and kissing noticeably as the party proceeded around them.  Dan was standing not far away but with his back to the comingling.  That affair eventually ended but not after several months.)

It was late in the decade when Dick began to get sick.  He told me, as he did everyone else, that he had liver cancer.  Even in 1989, he did not want to admit that he had AIDS.  Dan had the choice to leave for San Francisco or stay.  He stayed.  On a couple of occasions, I drove to Denver to remain with Dick on a Sunday afternoon while Dan went with friends to Denver Bronco football games at the original Mile High Stadium.

On those occasions, Dick and I would reminisce about the past.  Dick indignantly told me how he was going to write an angry letter to the Reagan Library, a regular donation he had been making, to say that he would no longer support that effort if Reagan did not increase funding for AIDS research.

I reminded him of the morning at the Governor's Park restaurant, on the patio out front in 1980, that he ought to be wary of voting for Reagan for President that year.  He opined that Carter had not been good for the economy and Reagan would do wonders.  Dick was going with his pocketbook not his political bent.  (When I told him that I believed the branches of the military would eventually allow gays to serve openly--I was wildly premature when I said 5-10 years would be the timetable--he was skeptical that it would ever happen in his lifetime.  He was right, of course.)

(BTW, it was during this time that Dick and other homeowners on the block decided to purchase the empty corner lot across the street and turn it into a beautiful mini park.)

I visited Dick at Porter Hospital one weekend.  That was the last time I saw him alive.  He didn't look nearly as bad as some men I would see in those terrible years.  But he told me he'd advised his sister that he was prepared to go.  The next time I stopped by the hospital to see him, his room was empty and I was told that he'd gone home to be visited by friends and family before he died.  He died in 1989, the same year Dan's cadet friend George Gordy died.  Dick, being a veteran, is buried at the Fort Logan Veterans Cemetery, in Fort Logan, CO.  I have never visited his grave, and I did not attend the funeral.

I did visit Dan at the townhouse where he was packing up everything for his move to San Francisco.  He had sold his investment condo in a high rise not far from the townhouse, and Dick had willed the townhouse to Dan, which Dan also sold.  Dan also got the beautiful Jaguar sedan Dick had recently bought.

I remember asking if there was something of Dick's that Dan would not mind parting with so I could remember him.  Dick looked around and found a small ceramic owl and gave it to me.  Someone had given it to Dick a few years before because Dick loved owls.  He'd even found a dead snow-white owl on a fence and had it stuffed.

At some point when my first two books were out, I had a reading and signing in San Francisco at A Different Light.  That weekend, my friend Wilfred Benitez and I had brunch with the man whom Dan had moved to the city to be with.  Dan had died in 1995, just before the cocktails became available.  His ashes were scattered on a favorite mountain pass in Colorado, a name I no longer remember.

Willie Benitez, a classmate of Dan's at the Academy, paid to have a memorial to Dan at the Air Force Academy; but he later told me it was a great deal of trouble and, last I heard, the memorial did not yet exist.  Willie at some point remade his life and jettisoned many of us friends, including his partner, from his life, so I cannot confirm other details of which Willie would have been aware.  I doubt if the older man, who was in his late 60's when I met him in the late 1990's, is still alive.

The character of Eleanor of Aquitaine in THE LION IN WINTER says, "There are no written records or survivors."  

The Captain in THE SAND PEBBLES says of the attempted mutiny, "It is not written down.  It is not history if it is not written down."

Of the two photos above, I think of Emily in OUR TOWN who says, "Just for a moment we're together.  Just for a moment we're happy."

No relationships are perfect.  No relationships are without their bumps and bruises.  But Dan and Dick's relationship was the first of its kind I had ever encountered in life.  They were there for one another when it mattered, for over a decade of time from 40 years ago.  It had lasted until Dick's death a decade after I had met them both.

I always have wondered, though, whatever happened to the framed Academy sword that Dan had given to Dick before graduation, whose inscription had read, "Dick, Thanks for Everything, Dan."














 

El Paso

A feral wind fetters through the valley
this early morn.
What does this portend?
Now that The Guns of August
has new meaning,
will the results predilect
a fierce or a tepid Autumn?
Will these renewed winds whirl against Washington?
Or will they die down,
as a gathering multitude have lain before the world's
astonishment, time and time and time again?
Once we proved safe passage to the North.
To the verdant acres of freedom.
Yet now all the grasses are parsed.
The trenches dug.
The factions settled.
Where will our true flowers grow now?
Now that the faithful ground is befouled
once again?