Memorizing You (37 page)

The resolve came with a heavy price. The detectives I’d hired year after year over the decades to find a trace of him, and hadn’t. With the advent of computers and then search engines, there wasn’t a week I didn’t try to track him down. I’d do it diligently. I’d do it drunkenly. He had truly vanished.

Life plodded forward. I filled my waking moments with work as Rosemary went off to college in New Orleans. Connor got his scholarship and played for Mizzou. I went with dad a few times to watch the games. We had dinner with my friend afterward.

The business grew over time to one of the top two in the city. When I turned twenty-one I bought my own house not far from my folks. It was a nice ranch-style with a good yard, some sturdy shade trees, and nice neighbors. I would never move from there.

Five years later Ryan’s house was torn down and a new subdivision of family-styled houses went up. Asphalt covered his garden. Frank the sparrow’s grave was sealed beneath it. The road ran thru where the barn had been. A house stood square over our campsite. All had been erased. That seemed to be the symbol that finalized my grief.$?Imy

Dad had been right about Nixon being a crook after all. The first president who resigned the presidency. My dad celebrated all day. He was also right that there would be no more moon landings after Nixon was gone. There have been none. I’ve always wondered about that.

Rosemary got married to a nice young man she met at school. He was athletic and blond. He was an accountant like her. Their wedding was big, and she tried to introduce me to every gay man there. I wasn’t ready. When you compare everyone to your first true love, they’ll never have even the minimum qualifications. In 1980 they had their son, Stefan David. His dad’s and my first names. I became his godfather.

Connor got married to a beautiful, petite southern girl he met while playing for the Dallas Cowboys. I was his best man. He told everyone the story of our kiss that confirmed his “straightness”, and then tried to introduce me to every gay man at the wedding. He further confirmed his straightness the next five years by having five sons right in a row. I’ve always been invited to his Super Bowl parties since he retired from football and he became an executive of promotions for Anheuser-Busch. Rosemary and Stefan were always guests as well. Our group still clung together. Just in a different way as we grew older and life changed us.

In 1988 we lost Judy. A taxi accident in Paris. She was flown home and cremated. The only ones I knew at the memorial were Marybeth and Donna. Most of her entourage had faded away years ago, although I had stayed in touch with Judy by phone. She loved to talk. I had the time to listen. She had called me from Paris two days before she died to tell me about the beautiful men she had seen at a restaurant there. Detailed descriptions.

Donna was in chemotherapy for ovarian cancer and looked frail. It was delegated to Marybeth and me to carry out Judy’s last wishes. To spread her ashes on the road to Max Yasgur’s farm at Woodstock.

Marybeth had found one of the old original albums of the Woodstock concert. Big brown thing. A box, in fact. Inside there was a series of deteriorating pages of black and white photos of the event. She searched for, found, and pointed to one in particular. It was a blurry photograph of a naked woman running with arms outstretched and covered in mud toward a dirty pond filled with more nude people.

“That’s Judy,” she said, finger tracing the picture. Her nails had been visibly chewed to the nub. “She was as high as Mount Everest but having the time of her life. She was one crazy old broad!”

“I loved her because of that,” I admitted. It was the truth. What others thought was crazy I simply saw as liberated.

Marybeth nodded in agreement. “We should all have her spirit. But it was one of a kind.”

“I hope in the end they can say that about all of us.”

On a weekend that summer we drove to the farm road in the Catskills with her urn of ashes, playing the Woodstock soundtrack in memory of her. I didn’t think it was the best music, or the best recording, but I hadn’t been there. Those who had been…it wouldn’t have mattered. It was “their experience”.

It was a beautiful dusk when we found a spot on the road to the farm that had a memorial plaque for the event. We thought it was the perfect place and we’d always be able to find it again. Marybeth opened the ornate urn and looked inside. I saw two tears spill inside and dissolve in the gray dust. It was hard to believe we were looking at anything that remotely had to do with the gaudy, loud, boisterous, larger-than-life Judy.

“They forgot her bullhorn!” Marybeth laughed just before a fresh set of tears consumed her.

I grinned at the recollection of her introduction of me and Ryan at the party with the bullhorn.

“Good-bye, old girl. Gonna miss your ass big time,” she whispered, gently turning the urn over and pouring it into the white buds of a patch a clover by the plaque.

I choked out a painful, “Good-bye,” and quickly looked off into the pink and blue sunset. It was hard to fight the waves of memories and emotions. They refreshed the pain of Ryan for me like it had never departed.

On the ride back, Marybeth felt vulnerable and confident enough to confess to me that doctor’s didn’t give Donna much of a chance. It made me sad for her. It seemed they’d been together eternally. It explained her nails.

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Through her handkerchief, she sighed, heavily. “I will be utterly lost. She’s my little flower girl.”

Three weeks later, I attended Donna’s funeral. It was crammed to the rafters with gay folk. I had never seen such a large funeral. I held Marybeth through the entire service. She was strong. She maintained. She made me proud.

Oh, and flowers were everywhere. I have never ever seen so many.

“I just have to try to deal with all the empty spaces she left me with,” Marybeth said as I dropped her off at her house.

I understood her completely. “I know.”

She turned back, bent low, and looked at me through the passenger window. “You need to find someone, David. It’s been long enough. Find someone who will give you a lifetime of the wonderful shit. We never know how much time we have. Waiting just makes sure those empty spaces don’t have memories in them. Let go. Live!”

I smiled, nodded, said nothing.

She blew a pale-lipped kiss and was gone.

Her words must have had an effect on me because after more than a decade of being a solitary man, I allowed myself to contemplate having another relationship.

Initially, most of the dates were not successful. I knew it was primarily my fault and my impeccable ability to dissect people using their words and actions. My criteria never involved their appearance. I was searching for the words from a Romeo window.

But love of one kind will never duplicate itself. Love has its variety…which possibly makes it as great as all the songs and stories and poems.

Reluctantly, I accepted a blind date arranged by Rosemary. His name was Tony. He was an ad man for the $?ImyPost-Dispatch.

We had dinner at Milo’s restaurant downtown. Posh and pricey. My pick.

He was a handsome man some years younger than me. An ethnic mix of black and Asian which gave his skin a beautiful hue between light chocolate and honey. Strangely, but strikingly, his eyes were blue.

The dinner was elegant, expensive but enjoyable. I picked up the bill. We shook hands and said, “Goodnight.”

That would have been the end of that if some weeks later, by sheer coincidence, we hadn’t found ourselves standing in the same line at a McDonald’s for lunch. We greeted each other. We ate lunch together in a booth and shared an amiable chat with no pressure, and he invited me to a home-cooked meal. It seemed like a harmless idea since I rarely cooked, living on takeout mostly, since moving away from home.

His Southside apartment was spotless, stylish, and cozy. He was a phenomenal cook. He loved classical music and science fiction movies.
Star Wars
,
Alien
and lots of b-films unknown to me.

He kissed me that night. My first since Ryan and I realized it was a sensation I missed.

We became a couple by sheer gravitational pull. The more he invited me to do things—go to movies, bowling, bike riding—the more we simply found ourselves spending the bulk of our private time together.

He shared my bed permanently after the fifth month.

I’ll admit it wasn’t a relationship of fireworks, wild young passion or vivid romance as it had been with Ryan. Those days and emotions had been replaced with cautious maturity. But it was a relationship of comfort and trust. It was good to feel another human being again.

The house changed with his introduction. He chose new furniture, changed the colors, kept it clean, and cooked the meals.

We had parties. I met his friends. He met mine. They all got along is killing me.”

He was always calm and easy going. Never any drama. He was playful and thoughtful in bed. He was always affectionate. He could make me laugh, and provided me an invaluable education in classical music and international cuisine. We were a good couple.

We vacationed every year. Hawaii, Cancun, Florida, California. Anywhere warm. Europe was on the horizon but sounded cold, so we changed our plans. We had enough cold where we lived.

My parents loved him. He loved them back.

For a while, it seemed some normalcy had returned to my life. I believed in love and life again. And it was glorious, purposeful, and full of promise.

But in 1990 my world crashed with black thunder.

My dad had been out supervising one of our jobs at an industrial complex when he fell ill and collapsed in the office of our client. Thankfully, he was only a couple of blocks from Saint John’s Mercy Hospital. They rushed him there.

He couldn’t be resuscitated. He had died on the spot. Nothing could have been done. My mom and I sat in shock for over an hour after the doctor made the pronouncement. I held her the entire time. I was clueless what to say or do.

It had happened so unexpectedly to a man who had just turned sixty-five, who was rarely sick.

My mind could not deal with the lack of balance and I spun into a month-long depression. I drank and cried. And then drank some more. I was not a pleasant person. Tony babysat me. Unhappily, most of the time.

I extended an invitation for Mom to move in with us so she wouldn’t be alone. I was drunk when I did it on the phone. She declined. She loved her home. Her memories were there.

What I didn’t know is that the invitation had angered Tony because I hadn’t consulted him. He would never mention it though.

Tony showed his anger with silence. C$2Py fy onversations consisted of me asking a question which he answered with one word before refreshing the silence. His anger manifested itself in body language. Rigid postures, quick deliberate movements, and avoiding any contact with my person.

When I figured out what I’d done, I apologized. He accepted it with typical graciousness and things seemed to go back to normal. But I don’t believe he ever forgave me. I’d made him feel like a boarder in my house rather than it being our shared home.

The relationship lasted four more years, but the drift between us from that particular conflict onward was gradual and progressive.

A month before my fortieth birthday, he blandly announced that he’d taken a job in Tokyo, working for a firm that specialized in building websites for advertisers. He was wiping down dishes from the dishwasher and putting them in their place in the cabinets when he made it. His back was to me the entire time. That’s a sign. The setting was so normal, so ordinary for someone to make a roundabout declaration that the relationship was over. I’ve never figured out if it was passive-aggressive or just clever. It was typical him. No conflict.

I went numb. Shocked, but not surprised. Wordless. He never joined me in our bed again, choosing to sleep on the sofa.

I came home from work two weeks later to find his personal belongings gone. The place was spotless. There was a dinner on the stove. A note was under the R2-D2 magnet on the refrigerator.

David,

Thanks for everything. I wish you all the best.

Tony.

I wanted to bawl my eyes out, but couldn’t. I sat there, ate my dinner, and then called mom to give her the news. She consoled me with sympathetic tones and said what mom’s say.

Mom arrived for my fortieth birthday party that Rosemary had planned at my house with a dozen or so friends. She had her own special gift for me. A baby black toy poodle. I named him Yak because it sounded like his bark. Mom and Rosemary hated the name and so constructed a story that it was a short variation of Cognac. But he never came when they called him that. He took Tony’s spot in the bed. He was worth a million smiles a day.

I began taking him with me to mom’s several times a week for dinner. She kept a bowl of water and a bag of food for him.

Life moved along. And I dated and made a lot more friends than lovers. That was just how it worked out.

In 2000, Mom told me she was going to retire from doing our company’s accounting and spend more time on her painting. I understood.

Rosemary stepped in to take the job. Stefan was in college and the extra money would be handy for them. It felt like a natural transition. I was glad to have her around again on a regular basis. She was always cheery and upbeat.

I elected to clear out a room in my house used for storage and convert it into an office for her. We chose a Sunday to tackle the chore. Make a pitcher of margaritas and dig into the stacks of boxes that populated every square foot of the room, some since the very day I moved in.

Apparently I’d kept every sneaker I’d ever worn if they still had a sole and good shoelaces. Two boxes of them. Rosemary found three boxes of shirts. When she opened them I heard her laugh.

“Oh my word, a vintage shop would pay some good cash for these!” She looked at each one and giggled. “What on earth would make you keep something you couldn’t possibly ever wear again?”