Mark took me to Fairway yesterday, the fabulous has-everything supermarket located in a huge pre-Civil War coffee and cotton warehouse in Red Hook, Brooklyn overlooking the Statue of Liberty. He didn’t need anything but took me because I wanted to go, he wanted to see what I raved about, and he had his boyfriend’s car. Actually, the car belongs to the parents of Mark’s boyfriend and it’s a Jeep festooned with Republican, America this-and-that and pro-war bumper stickers. When I see a car like that on the highway I glare with utter contempt, willing someone in the car to look at me. When they do glance my way I often get a blank stare since people are not thinking of their bumper stickers at all times. But still, I feel I’ve done my civic duty by being a miserable liberal staring down their buckaroo conservatism.
So here I am, a 53-year-old femme-who-looks-straight, in a car-of–the-enemy with my handsome shaven-head manly-read-as-straight former high school queer lover driving through Brooklyn looking like a retired Marine and his wife.
At Fairway, Mark held the door for me, pushed the cart, I gave the order at the deli counter, fretted over which cookies to buy. We laughed at a devilish red-haired toddler in a cart and his mother smiled at us. He unlocked the car door for me, put the bags in the back …
…wait ….
Everything about this scenario is so strange even as it appears so normal.
Let me tell you about Mark and me.
In the spring of ‘72 I was at my desk in Miss Patruski’s English class when I looked up to see Mark at the door gesturing wildly. Patruski let me go “to the bathroom” although she had to have known Mark was there.
The teachers loved Mark, and I was mystified because they hated me. He was a tall beautiful golden boy with great posture, a loud deep voice, a self-possessed easy laugh, and exquisite green eyes. He was queer, self-confident, high most of the time; completely campy but never queeny in his platform shoes, skin-tight ass- and cock-hugging high-waisted pants, and Hawaiian silk shirts. He was irreverent and disregarded rules, but maybe it was his intellect and charm that won over teachers. He’d greet the Spanish teacher in the hall in perfect Spanish, and she be thrilled even though he skipped class that morning; he told Miss Patruski that he and I call her “the dove” because of her beautiful skin; he’d smile and say hello to Louella Rebd, Principal Bitch Extraordinaire with her downturned mouth and upturned bob, and she wouldn’t ask for his hall pass, just mine.
We found one another amidst the 900 or so students -- in our grade alone -- at the San Fernando Valley high school overpopulated with privileged Jewish baby boom teenagers who had nose jobs and cars and realtor mothers and lawyer fathers. We were kindred spirits; outrageous clothes, queer, transfixed by beauty, decadent, smart, from completely fucked-up working-class Jewish families. In the afternoons we’d go to Mark’s house more often than mine because he had a single mother and she worked and we’d lie on his waterbed and listen to Joni Mitchell’s Blue album and fuck and draw pictures – we both loved the film Lady Sings the Blues and drew Diana Ross in various gowns – and fuck more and he smoked pot and I was into pills and often we’d hitchhike and get picked up by a guy and go to his house and I might fuck him for money or maybe Mark did or we would hitchhike to the beach or over the canyons meeting people who would take us to fancy homes where we could have fun. It was the 1970s, pre-AIDS, a hedonistic time.
I left Patruski’s class thinking we were going to smoke a joint or maybe hitchhike to the beach, but instead Mark grabbed me by the hand and pulled me, running, through the hallways, out the side of the high school, across the parking lot, and into the community college adjacent. We ran through the college, through the art department, into the women’s bathroom. We were panting and laughing and he said, “Take off your clothes; we’re going streaking.” It was his idea to put our underwear on our heads, which didn’t work because a crotch is wider than the space between your eyes – hopefully -- so it’s impossible to run and see out both leg holes at the same time.
A photo appeared the next day on the second page of the Los Angeles Times captioned, “A young couple streaks hand-in-hand through Valley College.” Oddly enough, I’m a very modest person when it comes to being naked. It doesn’t seem to go with my personality or aesthetic so you might be surprised to know that. I’m the flat-chested one with the bikini top on the topless beach, or a hospital gown with the opening in the front at the doctor’s office with every possible tie tied. Running naked through the college was one thing but being discovered as the streaker on page two of the Times was another. I was the object of awe, but so embarrassed.
Mark and I were called into Miss Rebd’s office and we were put on probation and they kept their eye on us. Within months, Mark was arrested and I was expelled because he was seen putting marijuana in my locker. We used one another’s lockers interchangeably. I watched as he was taken from the school in handcuffs and I remember feeling bereft. I was sent to a tough high school in a Chicano neighborhood where I met my first girlfriend. He was sent to a school in a nicer part of town.
That was the last I saw of Mark until my mid-20s when I moved to NYC. I worked for Island Records and he was an editor at Interview Magazine. We met at a lunch for Grace Jones. We had little in common. He was one of Andy Warhol’s denizens and I was determined to live a straight life -- hell-bent on finding a husband and having children. Several years later we ran into one another at a gym. He was HIV positive and I had two small children. He asked if they were from the same father and I was insulted.
It was in my late 30s after I came out that I wanted to find him. I wanted to make sure he was still alive. I learned that his long time boyfriend died but he was okay. He was publishing book after book – memoirs, biographies, spiritual books. It was through Facebook that I found him again.
We met in a Village coffee shop last year. And this time we had a lot in common. We’re both writers though he’s far more advanced in his career than I. He’s a butch man who goes for nelly men and I’m a nelly femme who goes for butch women. He’s still so incredibly handsome and we both admitted, in a way that was more poignant and funny than romantic, to having passing thoughts of what sex might be like together. At the time we were both getting out of our second crummy relationships with empty charmers and we formed a pact not to jump into another relationship but to listen to what we know is right and not just follow our loins (at least I stuck to the plan).
Then of all funny and wonderful things, on June 1st I sold my house in Northampton and moved to Brooklyn and he sold his apartment in the Village and moved to Brooklyn. We're about a mile apart. And now, 38 years later, we go to the movies in the afternoon and to the supermarket and to dinner, and to parties where we sit and talk while his adorable boyfriend wanders off to work the room. And age has softened us. We know without having to talk about it that our difficult and dangerous young lives formed patterns that still resonate within us, but at the same time we present to the world a very cohesive, very centered self. Sometimes, when we're together, we're both presenting the polished version of ourselves but I don't have to look too hard to find the golden boy beneath.
No comments:
Post a Comment