Short Circuits (40 page)

Whether he aged out of the system or ran away is not clear, but he wound up basically on the streets. No real education, no idea of how to behave in the society to which most of us belong and take totally for granted, he drifted. His few friends tended to be other lost souls like himself who simply existed in any way they could.

He was, not surprisingly, frequently in trouble with the law.

I was living in northern Wisconsin when I met Nick through a friend from Milwaukee, who had picked Nick up one evening while hitchhiking. Nick was living with a fellow lost soul he referred to as his “brother,” and the “brother's” girlfriend. They spent their time smoking pot and dreaming the dreams of the lost.

He did whatever it took to survive, and worked at menial jobs wherever and whenever he could, but never for very long at any one place. And of course when each job ended, it was never his responsibility. Responsibility was not a word in Nick's vocabulary.

My friend took Nick under his wing and asked if Nick might stay with me for a while, to try to break him free of those chains to his past, and I agreed.

Nick was around 23 at the time; a tall, handsome, and basically good young man who, like an abused animal, trusted no one, and his entire life experience had proven him correct. But of all the things that had been denied him, from the day he was born, the greatest by far was the feeling of being loved for anything but his body. He revealed himself only through his drawings, which he kept in a tattered notebook. He carried a sheathed knife in his belt and it was with him everywhere. When I arranged for him to apply for a job at a local supermarket, he wore the knife. He did not get the job.

Even in a small area like the one in which I lived, he managed to find others like those he had left behind in Milwaukee and soon got into the pot habit—it was, after all, a form of escape from a world he simply could not relate to and did not understand.

On the verge of being arrested yet again, Nick returned to Milwaukee…where he subsequently was jailed yet again. With absolutely no other realistic options, and without far more help than is available, Nick defines the term “lost soul.” He is so deep into the dark forest that I fear he will never find his way out.

When I think of Nick, and of what he could have been had someone…anyone…taken the time to care for him, to love him as any child should be loved…my heart truly aches.

I wrote a poem about Nick, called “The Broken Child.” If you might be interested in seeing it, just drop me a note.

So why have I told you about Nick? Simply because those of us blessed with all the things of which Nick was deprived simply do not comprehend just how fortunate we are. We too often are so consumed with our own petty problems that we cannot appreciate what we have.

Nick is the candle I hold up in the darkness of my own self-absorption. I hope he can somehow, someday, find his own light.

* * *

REQUIEM FOR UNCLE BOB, PART I

When I received word that Bob Combs, my “Uncle Bob,” had died May 19, on his 92nd birthday…a birthday I never remembered, though he never failed to remember mine…I felt nothing, like the song from
A Chorus Line
.

Bob wasn't my blood uncle, of course. He became “Uncle” only when, as my parents were leaving for home after visiting me in Los Angeles, where I was sharing a large home in the Hollywood hills with Uncle Bob, my dad gave him the instruction to “look out for Roge,” which Bob took to heart and exercised diligently for nearly 40 years.

I'd met Bob through his roommate, a beautiful young man named Skip who exuded the joy of life from every flawless pore, and both Bob and I were enthralled with him.

I didn't feel anything when I got the news because I didn't
want
to feel anything. I've felt the loss of loved ones too often in the past. I did not want to start thinking of him; of our ability to make one another laugh at the most inappropriate times, or our bickering or my frequent irritation with him for being unrelentingly cantankerous. However, he was also one of the most intelligent people I have ever met; it seemed he knew everything and everyone and had read every book ever written. He wasn't boastful about it: it was simply a fact.

I did not want to think of the house on Tareco Drive, or my parents' visit, or to be reminded of Skip, who died with incredible bravery only recently after a several years' long battle with cancer. Uncle Bob had cancer, too…of the larynx. He endured it without a word of complaint for about as long as Skip did. I don't think it was the cancer that killed Bob: he'd fought it too long and too hard. I think he went when he did because he was simply ready to go.

To think of Uncle Bob would be to think of all the people I associate with him, many of whom I met through him: Jimmy Stone and Ron Crawford and Bill Weed, and Jason Peugh, and John Pitt, and George Little. Reacting to Uncle Bob's death would inevitably mean I would have to once again feel something for each of them. Uncle Bob's death dropped a huge boulder into the quiet sea of the past, sending unwelcome waves of memory through my mind and heart.

When Mom moved to L.A. to be near me after Dad died, Uncle Bob took her under his wing and they became fast friends. They would go out to a Marie Callender's restaurant often for coffee and pie, and to talk and laugh. Uncle Bob bought a Toyota my dad had had at the time of his death, and still had it on the day he died.

How can 40 years of friendship be crammed into one short blog entry? It can't, of course, so I won't even try. And even though the next entry will also be about Uncle Bob and his last message to the world, it only underscores how much more there is to say about him.

Uncle Bob is dead, and I'm trying so very hard not to feel anything. It isn't working.

* * *

REQUIEM FOR UNCLE BOB, PART II

Uncle Bob took great pride in being a curmudgeon, in expressing total contempt for everything that might even smack of sentimentality. He was on occasion too good at it, and his unwillingness to suffer what he saw as stupidity could often border on hurtfulness. Yet his capacity for love and goodness for those close to him was boundless.

For many years, he wrote a column for his local newspaper, the
Atascadero (California) News
, which totally belied the face he liked to present to the world. It was called “The Sunny Side,” and I am sure the paper will not mind if I present his final column below:

The time has come to say farewell—while it is still possible.

It's been such fun these past 13 or 14 years, since Lori got me started on this every-Friday essay, or column, or whatever-you may call it, in an attempt to balance out the Letters page—that is, to point out all the wonderful, beautiful, happy-making things around us “On the Sunny Side of the Street.”

Stevenson wrote: “The world is full of such a number of things. I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings!” Well, as Kipling wrote, “The captains and the king depart,” but we are still here—until our time runs out. There will always be spring flowers out by Steel Creek, and the beautiful, winding, climbing roads of our county, and Black Mountain out past Pozo, lifting its lordly beauty, with its calm and silence.

There will always be an annual crop of children, full of curiosity and joy—sharing all their exciting discoveries with us, as we once shared with our grandparents. What delights they are, and we must strive to see that the world they grow up in will be even better than the one our parents built for us.

In due season will come the breezes and the winds, the black clouds or the fleecy clouds of purest white. The trees and bushes will bud and leaf out and blossom, and flowers will pop out of the ground, seemingly overnight. The birds will come back and my favorite mockingbird, Moxie, will sing his heart out under the moons of spring and there'll be Moxie XVIII before we can blink!

In its season will come rain, but nothing, in our part of the world, will rule us as will the sun—and its “Cooker Days.” And so the grapes ripen, “to make glad the hearts of man.” And this old earth turns and our solar system does, too, and our galaxy goes spinning through space—a tiny dot in the vastness of the unknown.

So let's do the best we can, while we can, and smile oftener than we groan, and chuckle more than we sigh, and look on the sunny side…and so, goodbye.

Goodbye, Uncle Bob.

* * *

LOST FRIENDS

For reasons totally unknown to me, I found myself thinking of Matt Rushton. Matt and I were never more than acquaintances, but he was both charming and charmed. Chest-achingly good looking, he had everything going for him. He was a P.R. man for Studio One, the hottest predominantly-gay dance bar in Los Angeles. Studio One also had a show lounge featuring mostly high-end B-list entertainers, and as editor of a major gay men's magazine, I was invited to every opening. Matt was always right there, effortlessly efficient, and giving me the definite impression each time that I was the most important person on the guest list.

Beautiful. Charming. Young. Friendly. A truly nice human being. And dead of AIDS within three years after I met him.

I met Mike at a San Francisco bar during Gay Pride week. We got together on a Friday night and spent the weekend together. We became friends, exchanging frequent visits between L.A. and San Francisco. When he met his partner, we remained friends, and thru Mike, I met his best friend, Tim, who was cute and funny and about as promiscuous as they come. Rick and Mike brought him down with them from San Francisco for a visit, and he and I established the same sort of back-and-forth visiting that Mike and I had enjoyed before Mike met Rick. It wasn't long, however, that Tim phoned to say that he had just been diagnosed with AIDS, and did not think it wise for us to see one another again. He did not want me to come up to visit him. We talked often on the phone, though, and within two months he was dead.

When I moved to Northern Wisconsin, Mike and Rick came to visit. Within months after their visit, I received a note from Rick saying that Mike was dead. They'd both known that Mike was dying (and in the early years of AIDS a diagnosis was a death sentence) when they visited, but didn't want to upset me. Friendship sometimes makes me cry.

My next-door neighbors, Bill and Larry were among my best friends in Los Angeles. Larry was an entrepreneur, always busy with one business venture or another. Bill was what some might call “ditzy”…totally irrepressible, totally spontaneous, always with grand schemes which never came to fruition. Larry and Bill had been together well over 10 years when I met them, and they had an “open relationship.” Well, Bill had the open relationship; Larry didn't like it, but he loved Bill too much to give him an ultimatum.

Bill developed AIDS just before I moved to Wisconsin. I was devastated for both him and Larry, but they both took it with amazing calm. The last time I called to check on how Bill was doing, I talked to him briefly. “I had a dream about my grandmother,” he said, casually. “I'll be seeing her soon.” And then he was dead.

Ed was one of my oldest friends in L.A. He was unique among them in that we were what is now known as “friends with benefits” (our relationship was similar to that of Dick and Jared in the Dick Hardesty Mystery series). When either of us was dating someone, the “benefits” were put on hold, to resume again when neither one of us was involved. Ed was a children's dentist and had a very lucrative practice. He bought a beautiful home on a hilltop overlooking the city. However, he grew tired of being a dentist and gave up his practice to move to San Francisco to become a psychologist specializing in gerontology. I moved to Northern Wisconsin about the same time and we lost touch. And then one day a rabbi from San Francisco, traveling cross country, stopped overnight at my B&B. I asked him if by any chance he might know Ed, who was Jewish. “Yes,” he said. “He was a member of my congregation.” “Was?” I asked. He looked at me and said, “You didn't know?” And in that instant, I did. “I was with him when he died,” he said.

And then there's Ray, about whom I've already talked and will undoubtedly talk again.

These stories are not unique to me. Every gay man who survived the early years of AIDS has similar tales of loss. So many friends. So many decent, kind, warm, loving men snuffed out like so many candles in a windstorm. We cannot forget them. We must not.

* * *

ROBERT

I met Robert through a roommate shortly after I bought my first house in Los Angeles. I always got home from work before Paul, and one evening, the instant I stepped in the front door, I knew I was not alone. I didn't just know it, I KNEW it. Afraid that the house was being burglarized, and calling out “who's there?” several times, I cautiously made my way from room to room. The feeling was almost overpowering as I approached the front bedroom, but when I finally gathered the courage to enter, no one was there.

As soon as Paul came home, I told him of the incident. He laughed and said: “Don't worry about it: it's just Robert.” Robert, he told me, was a ghost who had lived at Paul's former apartment with him and three of
his
roommates. He was totally harmless but had a habit of playing tricks, his most favorite being hiding things. And he was, I learned over time particularly fond of bedrooms and classical music. Though I was frequently aware of his presence, it was never the least bit frightening. In fact, I grew to be very fond of him.

Paul told me of the time one of his roommates had come home from grocery shopping with a carton of cigarettes. Setting the bags on the kitchen table, he made a quick trip to the restroom, and when he returned, the carton of cigarettes was gone from the bag. He was the only one in the apartment at the time. Three weeks later, when another of the roommates set out to do some minor repair on his car, the carton of cigarettes showed up at the bottom of his tool chest.

Though I never learned Robert's history, he did travel back and forth between my house and Paul's former apartment. When one of Paul's former roommates came for a visit, Robert would go home with him and return on the next roommate visit.