It's All Relative (10 page)

We knew lots of gays who go on holiday, fleeing St. Louis or Chicago or Michigan for Fort Lauderdale, Palm Springs, the Carolinas, Costa Rica. But we weren't the jet-set gays. And we certainly weren't retired. We had two dogs, including a new puppy, Mabel, a labradoodle-beagle mix we adopted at the shelter who was a gene short of being absolutely nuts. And we had to work in order to do the little things in life, like eat and have shelter and heat.

Still, for the very first time in our lives, Gary and I had total flexibility. We had restructured our lives in order to be unstructured. We no longer had a daily nine-to-five routine to hold us back, no corporate overseer to dispense ten days of vacation and seven holidays a year.

I could write
anywhere
. And winter was slow season from Gary's work as an innkeeper.

As I raked, I realized that I hadn't been on a real spring break
since college, when I went to Daytona Beach and vomited for seven days straight, sleeping on the floor on top of a float raft lined with nacho-cheese Doritos and Domino's boxes. My fellow fraternity brothers and I had stacked empty beer cans in the window of our motel room—like a holiday display at Macy's—and when the windows were fully covered, we threw the beer cans under the twin beds until our room began to rattle every time someone snored. The highlight of that last spring-break trip, however, was being accused by one of my best friends, for reasons still unknown to me, of jacking off while eating his Baby Ruth candy bars while everyone else was passed out.

More than anything, however, I remember being a young man trapped in an old soul's body, a hideously overweight closeted college gay boy who could only hide his secret and his fears by drinking until nothing made sense. I went to strip clubs and felt boobs, or so I was told, and, thankfully, remember very little, except when I would fight off my hangover and rise early—before my friends or other college spring breakers had taken over the beach—and walk, watching the ocean, watching old couples hold hands as they walked along the beaches at Daytona.

I longed to fast-forward my life. I wanted clarity. I wanted to be with someone I loved. I no longer wanted to be young.

I had all of that now.

I looked over at Gary and said, “Let's do it!”

So Gary and I researched Southern cities and rental homes that took pets. And, after the recommendation of several older friends whom we trusted implicitly, we settled on Sarasota, specifically a narrow residential key south of Sarasota and an adorable little salmon-colored Florida-style bungalow sandwiched between the bay and the Gulf of Mexico.

We booked it for nearly two months. I'd never been on vacation longer than ten days.

But this was
holiday
, I reminded myself.

We left, two neurotic dogs and two neurotic men, all panting excitedly, for Florida at four
A.M
. in February during a complete Michigan whiteout, our SUV packed to its gills with luggage, dog crates, food, laptops, books, beach chairs, and more skin-care products than the downtown Chicago Sephora. The trip was supposed to take roughly twenty hours total; it took us nearly three hours, in the whiteout, to drive a hundred miles.

Slowly, the farther south we drove, the snow stopped, the highways cleared, the weather warmed, and things turned this bizarre color known as green. I stopped at nearly every Starbucks on the highway, ingesting enough caffeine to power the car, if needed, with my blood.

Exhausted after driving thirteen hours, we passed out at a Best Western in southern Georgia that accepted pets, rising early to eat grits and waffles in a sad-looking lobby overlooking the highway with a gaggle of snowbirds who had trouble opening their cartons of milk with knobby, gnarled fingers. While Gary stole boxes of cereal from the buffet, cramming them down his shorts and into his jacket so we could snack on them while we drove, I was checked out by ConnieSue, a desk clerk who was entranced by the silver-and-diamond ring Gary had designed for me for my fortieth birthday.

“Is your wife's the exact same?” asked ConnieSue, an older woman with an accent thicker than the sausage gravy on the buffet.

“No, it's different,” I said. I had lived in Georgia for a brief time. I knew how to play the game.

“I notice a lot more men are wearin' their weddin' bands on their right hands. It must be the newest thang. Call me old-fashioned, but I like it on the left hand, where it belongs. Anyhoo, it's eggsquisite! My fuckin' daughter-in-law—excuse my French, young man—would never do such a thoughtful thing for my son. You must have a wonderful wife.”

“I do.”

“Well, she shore must be somethin' special.”

“She is,” I replied, just as Gary waddled up with roughly fifty dollars' worth of tiny cereals on his person.

“We are set, sugar pie!” he said to me, crunching with every step. “I gotta go unload our loot!”

I said so long to a bewildered ConnieSue, and we bloated ourselves on Sugar Pops, Frosted Flakes, and Fiber One for the last leg of our trip down the long finger of Florida.

Finally, hours later, Gary and I crossed an old swing bridge and onto a tiny key no wider than a flattened snake. It was like traveling back in time into one of those old paperback mysteries or 1960s beach movies, a world filled with palms and sultry breezes and turquoise waters on both sides of the key, a road filled with sand and coconuts and wind-blown fronds. Ancient, low-slung stucco motels drenched in turquoise and aqua and sea-foam green snuggled against the sand, places with names like Sun Tan Terraces, Palmetto Arms, Gulf Breeze, Sandy Shores, The Place to Be, and Gulf Winds. Old-timers were drinking beer and sunning on lounge chairs, their faces leathery and turned toward the sun like the bloom on a flower.

And then—Bam!—the landscape changed into an episode of MTV
Cribs
. On the left was a big home, then, on the right, a giant home, then the Taj Mahal, then the Kennedy compound, and then gated Spanish-style mansions with land stretching from bay to ocean.

We searched house numbers, wondering if perhaps we had won the lottery and would be staying in one of these mansions for a few hundred dollars a week. And suddenly, there, sitting amidst these mansions like a zit on the nose of Jessica Alba, was our little bungalow, cute as a button but dwarfed in size, grandeur, and sheer shimmery, dripping opulence by homes we were to later find out ranged in the upper millions.

“We're the Clampetts,” I said to Gary, as we stepped out of our SUV into eighty-degree weather, palms dancing in the wind, a Bentley whizzing by us while Marge and Mabel relieved themselves on the crushed shells that served as a lawn.

Gary spent the first forty-eight hours of his holiday bleaching like one of the Merry Maids. Since the house was a rental, it had—obviously—been previously lived in, a mystical fact that seemed to bypass Gary until he actually walked into the house.

“People have lived here?” he said, horrified, wide-eyed, as though he had happened upon a mass murder. “And there's carpet. I thought it was tile. Carpet
hides
things.”

So we immediately got back in the car and went to the grocery to buy carpet cleaner and 409 antiseptic spray and Purel and more bleach than the Mayo Clinic would use in a year. We scrubbed until the house smelled like an ICU and the skin on out hands burned.

Only when Gary is close to cartilage and bone does he stop cleaning.

And then Gary, the ultimate nester, began his
Extreme Home Makeover
, covering
Three's Company
floral couches with shell-covered king and queen sheet sets he found in an old chest, transforming the furniture into clean, beachy sofas that would turn Vern Yip's head.

Satisfied that he could finally sleep and shower without getting dysentery, Gary led me again to the store, this time for food. It was then that, finally paying attention to our surroundings, we realized we were in an updated version of
Cocoon
.

It took us roughly three hours that day to make our way through Publix, considering we were the only ones flexible enough to bend over and pick up a loaf of bread without breaking a bone, the only ones not fresh out of cataract surgery, the only ones young enough and willing to help, considering the grocery-store shelvers ran when anyone said, “Excuse me, young man …?”

Gary spent twenty minutes helping an old Jewish woman with
a heavy New York accent pick out soft cheeses, while I assisted two old men in Cincinnati Reds hats—one of whom was on oxygen—search for the cheapest vitamins.

I looked in our cart. We had been in the store an hour and had one gallon of fat-free milk, which was beginning to curdle.

“I didn't realize Sarasota was like this,” I said to one old man, a regular Jonas Brother who was probably only pushing seventy-five, as I handed him three canisters of Metamucil. He was sporting a Yankees hat, shorts, dress socks, and tennis shoes. The only items he had in his cart were enough bags of bagels to plug his colon for at least a month, enough Metamucil to get his pipes clean, and enough toilet paper to be ready when the dam burst.

“You didn't know Sarasota was old? Are you joshin' me, kid?” he said, scratching his groin. “Locals call this Heaven's Waiting Room.”

This couldn't be, I thought.

The first real “holiday” of our lives, and we picked the Island of Assisted Living? We could've gone to Palm Springs or Key West or Puerto Vallarta, a resort town where people wore chokers instead of emergency lifeline buzzers around their necks.

Gary and I drove around Sarasota. We are what I call “immersion tourists,” and we pride ourselves on delving headfirst into any community. We discovered there were more walk-in clinics and hip-replacement specialists than Starbucks.

Gary and I have a rule of thumb: If there is not a quality coffeehouse every one hundred feet, you're either driving in rural America or visiting a place you need to get the hell out of.

“We didn't follow our coffeehouse rule,” Gary yelled. “It's too hot here for coffee, and old people only like Folgers. Buying a latte seems frivolous to them. We're screwed for two months!”

Still, we decided to make the most of our holiday by dedicating ourselves to working and laying out, self-obsessed goals we knew we could attain. But our fitness center was a virtual Geritol Gym filled
with men in walkers and specializing in chairbound workout classes and no- to low-impact exercise.

The Geritol Gym, however, was literally crawling with cougars, older women with tight faces, tight bodies, and their late husbands' inheritances, who were looking to pull younger prey into their lairs.

While I was doing pull-ups, I watched a woman who looked a lot like Loni Anderson's mother eye Gary's crotch as he was doing bench presses, and when he sat up, she licked her collagen-injected lips hungrily before flashing picture-perfect dentures.

“How do you get soooo … 
big
?” she purred at Gary.

It was like watching a porn version of
The Golden Girls
.

“Lots of protein,” Gary lisped, his hands on his hips.

The cougar tilted her head, her stiff blonde hair moving as one with it, finally realizing, instinctually, that she was hunting the wrong meat.

“You're wearing the bulge shorts,” I said to Gary after I had dismounted. “You know, the ones with the pouch that make your penis look like a kielbasa.”

“It's a compliment,” he said. “No harm, no foul.”

Just then, yet another cougar—think Ann Miller—stopped by Gary's bench, lifted her fabulously old and vein-free leg onto it, and asked for “some pointers.”

“I'll give you one,” I said. “He's a big 'mo.”

“In Sarasota?” she answered, flabbergasted.

With no excitement to lure us, our days dwindled to nothingness and centered on taking the dogs for long walks on the beach.

We laid out for hours, tanning until we looked like that old woman in
There's Something About Mary
.

We became so bored and out of touch with any semblance of a routine or schedule that we began eating at five
P.M
., hitting early-bird buffets for $8.95, gorging ourselves on all-we-could-eat smorgasbords of mashed potatoes and roast beef and iceberg lettuce and Thousand Island dressing.

I spent inordinate amounts of time in the grocery, agonizing over whether the paper towels with gardening implements or the ones with dancing teacups would complement our kitchen best.

“How often do you see teacups dance?” a woman who looked like she birthed Abraham Lincoln said to me.

And I considered that sage advice.

I stopped desiring lattes from Starbucks and became quite satisfied with Folgers every morning. I stopped exercising and found myself exhausted just putting bread in the toaster. Gary and I took naps and watched
America's Funniest Home Videos
. We began snacking on Saltines and juice before bed, often choking on the dry crackers if we didn't have something with which to wash them down.

I began waking early, creepy early—when infomercials were still airing—to eat a breakfast of oatmeal, a banana, and three cups of coffee (I preferred foods that could be gummed), and then go for a walk on the beach, where I could comb the Gulf shoreline for shark's teeth.

Searching for shark's teeth among the surf and sand in the early-morning hours—as the clouds gave way to blue sky, as the mist cleared from the beach—became my obsession. Typically, after the tide would roll back out, fossilized fangs of black and brown that had fallen out of the maws of sand sharks and nurse sharks would dot the shoreline, and the search would commence, a search I equated to panning for gold. It took hours to find a small pocketful, but the hunt—me standing on the sandy shore in front of a vast ocean, the sky enveloping me, looking for bits of beasts—grounded me, made me feel whole.

I was stooped over the shore early one morning, sifting shells and sand through my fingers, when an old couple approached.