Category Archives: Nonfiction

It was still September. I hadn’t been in L.A. a month and Cecil had only been in town a few weeks following our return from Vietnam. We had been bunkmates assigned to the 1^st Aviation Brigade and now, although assigned to different units, we shared an apartment in San Pedro overlooking Los Angeles Harbor. By all accounts we had it made. Everyone else we knew was being sent to large bases like Fort Hood, situated in the middle of nowhere but we had managed assignments at tiny Fort MacArthur in San Pedro, a stone’s throw from Los Angeles. We both had a little over a year to go on our enlistments before he would return to Alabama and I would go back to New York and we looked forward to soaking up as much of Southern California as we could.

But to do that we needed a car. A daytrip at the Dodger Stadium a week earlier had exhausted almost fifteen hours of which only three hours were at the actual ballgame, the rest consisting of bus rides and several miles of walking. The trip, which began early in the morning didn’t end until well past one o-clock in the morning. Los Angeles was simply too spread out for us to not have a car.

Ford had just come out with its newest model, the Pinto compact. It was heavily promoted that year and the $1995 sticker price made it very attractive. In a month I would be 25 years old and it was way past time for me to own my first car.

Cecil and I got up early on a Saturday morning, rented a Pinto down on Pacific Avenue, and drove into Hawthorne to a dealership where I would buy my own Pinto. After that, we reasoned, L.A. would be ours. For that matter Southern California would be ours—ball games, racetracks, concerts, golf, and all the beaches from Seal Beach to Santa Monica. Los Angeles was a world of opportunity and with a car it would be ours for the taking.

A salesman met us as we drove on the lot and I told him I was there to purchase a Pinto. Wanting to keep it simple, we passed on the test drive since we had done that on the way in and even chose a green one similar to the one we had rented. I just wanted to get the car, my car, on the road. We had thought out everything well in advance and while it might have seemed like we were moving too fast we really had everything under control. And then I made what for me was a rare,, impulsive decision.

He asked if I wanted a standard or automatic and although I had almost no experience with stick shifts I decided that with all the driving we would no doubt be doing, I should go with the better mileage standard transmission.

So that was it. I had a new car and the salesman had just made the easiest sale in his life. We went inside to do the paperwork, I wrote a check for the down payment and we were set to go—sort of.

Cecil got into the now old Pinto and I got behind the wheel of my brand new Pinto. The last stick shift I had driven was probably in the summer of ’68 when I was still in college. I knew the basics but the instincts weren’t really there. This became obvious when I tried to start it without engaging the clutch. The Pinto leaped forward while the salesman jumped back in fright and Cecil, staring at me from my rearview mirror, went nowhere.

“You going to be all right?” the salesman asked.

“Oh yeah,” I replied. “It’s just been a while. Every things okay.”

I started the engine again, this time engaging the clutch and firmly put her in first gear while slowly and deliberately attempting to make my right and left feet do what they knew they had to do but what they really hadn’t been called upon to do in a long time. To no one’s surprise it didn’t go well. I leaped forward again and again I stalled. But the good news was that I was getting ever closer to being out of the parking lot and into the street.

The man didn’t even say anything this time or maybe I just didn’t give him a chance. At any rate I started her up again and gave her a little more gas this time and again my brand new Pinto, acting more like a wild mustang, leaped forward only this time to my amazement she didn’t stall and I shot into the busy Saturday morning traffic of Hawthorne Boulevard to the sound of screeching brakes and screaming drivers. A quick glance in the mirror showed Cecil saying something to the salesman.

The good news is we were just about a block from the entrance to the Harbor Freeway that would bring us home to San Pedro. This would give me a good ten miles to figure out what I was doing wrong. The bad news is that ten miles doesn’t even take ten minutes on the freeway and before I knew it I was at the end of the Harbor Freeway and stopped at a red light with Gaffey Avenue staring at me.

The light turned green and I did what I was almost a hundred per cent sure I would do. I stalled out. The light turned red again giving me another minute to assess my situation. On the next green I did pretty much a repeat of the first green light. The line behind me was getting pretty long with cars that had just been going 60-plus miles per hour but now found themselves sitting through successive green lights and going nowhere.

The first car behind me was Cecil. I could see he was getting a little anxious. When the next green light came and went, Cecil got out of his Pinto and walked over to my driver’s side window and began talking in his unusually long drawn out Alabama drawl that, coming from New York, I found to be particularly appealing.

“Look aaah Phil—aaah buddy, aaah, this is the situation—these drivers behind us are getting pretty excited back there and aaah I’m getting a little frustrated myself. If you can’t get through the next green light, well, I’m probably just gonna have to kill you myself because it just wouldn’t be right for a stranger to do it.”

What I always liked about Cecil was that he was so even-tempered. He could say something like that with a smile on his face that said everything was gonna be all right but that if he had to he could do it.

“I think I’m getting the hang of it,” I told him, with a smile on my face that said I was pretty sure everything was going to work out but if it didn’t, I wouldn’t blame him for anything he did.

Well I did get through the next light along with about fifty other drivers who were passing me before I even got through the intersection and things did work out although living on 22^nd Street with its steep incline certainly presented difficulties for a few days. But in time I got the hang of it like everybody does and Cecil and I were going to our Dodgers games and the beaches and bars farther than five blocks away and at this point my story would come to the comfortable end that all fairy tales arrive at, namely, and they lived happily ever after. Except that the story of my brand new Pinto was not finished.

It was mid October and my 25^th birthday was coming up. The nice thing about being in the army during the Vietnam era was that if you weren’t serving in Vietnam they really didn’t need you. So when I approached my Sergeant Major about taking off for my birthday he said he had no objection under one condition. His niece was visiting from Japan and she wanted to see America and would I mind showing her around.

So early on the morning of October 22^nd I picked Hiroko up and we headed out to see America. The problem was that she had been visiting L.A. for over a month now and there really wasn’t that much that she hadn’t already seen. Short of driving to the Grand Canyon or Pike’s Peak or Mount Rushmore,, I really didn’t know where to take her. And then I remembered a trip we had taken just two weeks after I bought the Pinto and decided to take a chance.

“Would you like to go to Tijuana?” I asked. Now I know that technically, Tijuana isn’t part of America but on the other hand, it was practically a suburb of Los Angeles. Everybody went there and there was no denying the fact that it was designed with Americans in mind. If there were no Tijuana someone would have had to invent it so Southern Californians could go there.

I don’t know if she wanted to go or not or if she even knew what I was talking about. She spoke very broken English and the tendency in that situation is to just be agreeable so she said, “Sure, we go Teewanna.”

So we headed down the Pacific Coast Highway until we picked up Interstate 5 and soon crossed the border into Mexico. I parked the car and we walked the streets of Tijuana listening to the music and street chatter that was foreign to both of us. I bought her lunch from a street vendor and she bought desert for my birthday and I think, all in all, we both enjoyed the day.

I took her picture standing next to the donkey painted up to look like a zebra. “They’ll love this back in Japan,” I told her. By late afternoon we had seen enough and it was time to start heading home.

But before crossing the border, we decided to get something to eat. We weren’t five minutes from the border when it happened. A big old Pontiac that had probably migrated to Mexico back when I was still in grade school ran a red light and slammed into the side of my tiny new Pinto. All the kinetic energy from that behemoth hunk of steel and rubber dealt a lasting deathblow from which my Pinto would never recover. The momentum sent us across the intersection and over the curb but we weren’t done yet. We still had another 20 feet to go before we finally slammed into and came to rest against a billboard sign. This was where her tour of America ended; and realistically speaking, what is more American than a billboard. Now she could say she’d seen it all.

Miraculously neither of us was hurt; the police arrived at the scene and we completed the necessary paperwork. I didn’t think anything could be easier than when I had purchased the Pinto but it took all of 30 seconds for me to hand over the keys to my one month-old Pinto in exchange for the wrecker’s business card.

The cop was nice enough to drive us to the Greyhound bus station where we bought two tickets to Los Angeles and I made a call to the Sergeant major. He was glad we were both all right and assured us he would be at the bus station when we arrived but seemed a bit confused about why we were calling from Tijuana. I only remember that none of my explanations seemed to adequately satisfy his concerns.

Like I said, neither one of us was hurt although I did discover she knew more about America than she had let on. A few days after we returned to Los Angeles she visited a doctor who verified that, yes, she may have possibly, very likely, better-to-be-on-the-safe-side,, suffered some whiplash.

Apparently she felt she owed me something for the good fortune of being possibly but not probably injured and so at Christmas dinner at the Sergeant Major’s house she gave me a “traditional” Christmas gift of socks. This gave rise to an uncomely dig from the Sergeant major’s oldest son, Mike.

“Gee,” he said, as I unwrapped the socks, “Hiroko got $300 and Phil just got socks,” to which I replied, “Gee, you’ve got a driver’s license, why didn’t you take her to see America?”

As it turned out the socks were the best deal I was going to get out of the whole ordeal. My insurance company told me the car was a total loss. They would pay off the balance and I would just be out the depreciation, which was about equal to my down payment, which made sense they explained because the car wasn’t a new car anymore. Hell no, it wasn’t new anymore. It was all of a month old—well almost a month old—as old enough as it was going to get.

So that’s the story of my brand new Pinto and my not so brand new Pinto. A few weeks later for $200, I bought a ten-year old Buick that had power windows, power antennae and got about six miles to the gallon going down 22^nd Street on the way to work. It got a little less mpg at night going up the hill.

But one thing I knew for sure. If I hit another car with this one, I wouldn’t be taking no Greyhound bus home.

No other city in the world reinvents itself the way that Las Vegas does, razing and imploding and reshuffling its skyline like a tarot deck with a neon afterglow. I am old enough to have seen the last vestiges of the Rat Pack Las Vegas, but that stunted, mid-century skyline was supplanted by colossal towers, by water effects, by lions and tigers and…Barney. One of the city’s many iterations, was that of “family destination.” Back in the day (a brief, halcyon day), instead of huge parking ramps behind the hotels there would be amusement parks with Ferris wheels and go-kart tracks, with Muppet this Barney that. Casino potentates soon realized that the clientele they really wanted to attract, the high-rollers with an impulse disorder, did not want to be around kids, did not want to be reminded that they had kids while they were gambling and whoring and watching the Thunder Down Under.

So Las Vegas reverted; it did a collective 180° and returned to decadence, to doing what it did best. And it was during this transitional time that my wife, Anastasia, received a half-off coupon for a three-night stay at the Flamingo Hilton. Coupon in hand, we decided to pack up our two young sons, ages three and seven, and make a family vacation out of it. What we were thinking (What were we thinking?) was that we had no swimming pool at our home, and Las Vegas hotels have fabulous pools. Eating can be very cheap in Vegas, and there was still a couple of roller-coasters in town—So hey, what could possibly go wrong?

I don’t know it you have ever been solicited by a pimp while you’re walking with your wife and pushing a stroller, but I have. To be fair, however, the first 48 hours of our Las Vegas family vacation were (mostly) fun. We logged lots of pool time, lots of waterslide time, and of course we grazed like rogue bovines at the various buffets. We drove out to Lake Mead and toured the Hoover Dam. And our boys dropped my entire casino gaming stash at the video arcade, forcing me to recalibrate my craps table aspirations. I ended up moping around the keno pit, playing single games for $2 a throw. I also placed a $20 bet on the Stanley Cup championships, which would not resolve for another eight months—not exactly what the pit bosses would classify as “action”.

Forty-eight hours, however, seemed to mark our outside limit, the duration at which Las Vegas exhausted our recreational options. We simply ran out of things to occupy our boys. We were sunburned, bloated, and driving in aimless circles in the late afternoon when we happened to pass the Treasure Island Resort & Casino—called the “T.I.” by locals. This was a revelatory moment. The T.I. is distinguished by a very kid-friendly design feature, a huge lagoon with a full-masted pirate ship afloat in the center. And behind this lagoon the rooms are configured in a kind of Brothels-of-the-Barbary-Coast motif. So there was the ship in all of its shiver-me-timbers glory (plunging our older son, Anders, into paroxysms of delight) floating underneath a Jumbotron neon sign that said: FREE PIRATE SHOW NIGHTLY, 8 P.M.

A free pirate show! Talk about precisely what the doctor ordered: As soon as Anders digested this enticement, as soon as our three-year-old Tobias grasped its implications, there was talk of absolutely nothing else and no question that we were going. Anastasia and I were subject to that familiar Can-we-can-we-Oh-please-I’ll-do-anything-you-say beseechment, and like most beleaguered parents, we were powerless to resist. So we returned to our hotel and girded ourselves for the long two-block walk to the T.I. (And by a long walk, I mean that the blocks fronting Las Vegas Boulevard meander for about 16 kilometers each.)

We had not previously walked Las Vegas Boulevard at night, and thus had not been assailed by a uniquely Vegasan subspecies, the Pimp Troll. Pimp Trolls are not full-fledged pimps but rather, street-level operatives charged with distributing business cards for the out-call massage services, for the escort services, and for the city’s 264 strip clubs. Pimp Trolls occupy the very bottom of the prostitution food chain, but what they lack in stature they make up for in sheer chutzpah. I call them trolls because they lurk behind pillars, in alcoves and under bridges, the better to pounce upon unwary pedestrians who are—like me and my family—strolling the neon promenade.

The trolls attend some sort of Pimping Vo-Tech to learn how to snap business cards, to create a sharp, staccato Crack! like a rifle shot as they’re proffering the cards. So first they pounce, then you get the card in your face with a Crack!, and then comes the carny-like patter: Check-it-out-check-it-out-there-buddy-hot-chicks-all-nude-hot-Asian-babes-come-to-your-room-come-right-to-room-you-know-you-want-it-ditch-the-wife-man-give-‘em-a-call-give-‘em-a-call-give-‘em-a-call. And there is no discretion, no pass given to those men who are clearly attached, clearly in the company of a date, a spouse, or—in our case—two young and impressionable boys. Hot-chicks-all-nude-hot-Asian-babes-come-to-your-room-come-right-to-room- give-‘em-a-call-give-‘em-a-call…

Anastasia was at first mortified by this intrusion, by the gauntlet of pimp trolls. But after a half dozen confrontations she learned to take the lead, glowering at the card-crackers and serving as my blocker. If they still persisted, if any troll tried to do an end-around she would mutter something pithy under her breath, like: “Can’t you see we have children?”

Eventually, mercifully, we arrived at the T.I. and joined the clamoring spectators at the perimeter fence. This was indeed a festive bunch, brimming with anticipation. Beyond us, in the lagoon called Siren’s Cove, the Jolly Roger flapped on the spinnaker mast of a very authentic-looking frigate. We were so delighted to be there, so relieved to be shed of the pimp trolls that it took me a few moments to realize that ours was the only family in attendance. No other children, and precious few couples; nearly every other spectator at the T.I. was a guy. Some, wearing convention badges, looked like they had happened by on their way back from the Thomas and Mack Center. Others were collegiate-looking dudes sipping from those plastic “yard of margarita” goblets, the kind with a long straw that makes a sound nearly identical to a bong hit when you drink from it. Anders asked what the deal was with the long goblets, and when I explained it, he said. “Can I get a yard of margarita? I want a yard of margarita!”

I tried to explain to him what a margarita was, but before I could finish, the lights went down, followed by a swell of pulsing techno-pop that signaled the start of the show. I lifted Tobias out of the stroller and hoisted him onto my shoulders just as cannon boomed and the pirates began to appear from blow decks. The crowd cheered wildly at the unfolding spectacle. I could feel Toby bouncing on my shoulders to the thudding backbeat as more cannon fired and the smoke washed over us. When the smoke dissipated we saw the pirate crew fully assembled on deck, all clinging from the ladders and rigging.

Again, it took me a moment to do a quick inventory and I saw no peg-legged salty dogs with a parrot on the shoulder, no Errol Flynn look-alikes. These pirates were all women, pirate wenches as it were; scantily clad “Sirens of T.I.”—most wearing some combination of hot pants, thigh boots and a bustier, their hair piled and teased into slutty halos. The pirate sirens exploited that hair with lots of Whitesnake-style head-shaking. The choreography, such as it was, featured plenty of pole-dancing moves executed in the rigging, on the side rails and across the quarterdeck. The dancing had an urgency that suggested these particular sirens had been at sea a good long while, deprived of conditioner and male booty. But fear not, for men were quickly added to the mix, brought up from below and presented to the crowd not as pirates, not as hale-fellow buccaneers, but rather, prisoners; doomed sailors snatched from the siren’s most recent conquest.

These handsome, hapless captives seemed to be possessed of crucial information—a treasure map—that the sirens desired. So the introductory writhing was followed by an Interrogation Sequence; the tying up and the flogging of the captive sailors. Of course, the men had to be shirtless for this endeavor, the better to exploit their ripped and oiled torsos. The flogging and the interrogating was thirsty work, requiring an occasional rum break, and perhaps a swan-dive from the decks into the lagoon. These diving and swimming interludes were largely a contrivance to get everyone’s clothes really wet and really transparent. So we had the cannon firing, the rigging-writhing, the man-flogging, and the ongoing wet bustier contest that all served to reinforce a painful truth—that my wife and I were deplorable parents, that we had exposed our two sons to the kind of adults-only burlesque that cannot be unseen.

I glanced at Anastasia, noting her folded arms and her mouth drawn in a firm, horizontal line that radiated discontent. Anders looked mostly bewildered, for he was savvy enough to realize that we had long since departed the land of Robert Louis Stevenson and ventured into a much darker and less appropriate place. Tobias, however, seemed completely unfazed by the lewdness, the nudeness, or the violent pantomime. He was grinning and beating his fists in time with the techno. As far as Toby was concerned this was the coolest pirate show ever.

I signaled Anastasia with the throat-slit gesture; it was time to cut our losses and split. She folded up the stroller and grabbed Anders’ hand as I lugged Tobias out to the curb and commenced hailing a cab—hell, a limousine if I had to, for we would not be re-tracing our steps on Las Vegas Boulevard, would not be re-exposing ourselves to the pimp trolls’ gauntlet of smut.

Our cab ride back was, as you might imagine, silent, somber, funereal. Later, in a more placid moment I would take Anders aside and apologize for our breach, for our deplorable lack of good judgment. As for Tobias, he was still too young to carry the tale, to offer any lurid description to, say, his preschool teacher or his grandparents. But for now we would process the spectacle in a brooding, familial silence. And when we arrived at our hotel, when the bellman opened the cab doors, I scrambled to help Anastasia re-assemble Toby’s stroller. It was my act of contrition, but Anastasia was having none of it. She shooed me away, saying:

“I got this. Pay the driver.”

So I did. And when the driver handed me back my change, he also handed me a smutty little business card for an out-call massage service; I guess because I looked like I needed to relax. You-know-you-want-it-you-know-you-need-it-ditch-the-wife-man-give-‘em-a-call-give-‘em-a-call-give-‘em-a-call…

This is the place where donkeys are painted to look like zebras. This is the place where you and your siblings are dressed in ponchos and sombreros and then propped up on the zebra-like donkey to say “Cheese.” This is the place where you eat tacos and churros from street vendors, have a taxi drive you around the city, shop for souvenirs and buy a brightly colored piggy bank as you wait in line to drive back across the border. Tijuana was just this place in 1970. I was six years old. This was the place where I walked into the souvenir shop and met God; lots of them in varying colors and shapes. I caught the eye of a ceramic nun, her hands in prayer, head tilted and a rosary spilling out of her waist. “Do you want her?” my dad asked. I nodded in an exaggerated fashion. The clerk wrapped her up in tissue paper and a brown bag. I cradled her like a newborn baby and safely brought her home where she would live on my dresser for many years. I left Tijuana thinking that I had been to Jerusalem.

In the Spring of 1984 I was away from home for the first time and under my own, often misguided, tutelage. I met my new best friend, Brooke, at one of the first sorority functions at U.C. Irvine and immediately knew that our time together would be more social than academic. On weekends we would don preppy dress and drive around the city on mopeds in the rain, play bumper pool at dive bars on the Balboa Peninsula and take our Economics books down to the shore as we sat on beach chairs and read about Thurow’s “Zero Sum Society,” and later darker versions of ourselves in Ellis’ “Less Than Zero.” After she transferred to San Diego State, I moved into a shared duplex on Balboa Island with some school friends. It was fully furnished in wicker-style elements and decorated with flocked, red wallpaper, shag carpeting and a Marcia and Jan Brady style bedroom. We were steps from the beach where I kept my Windsurfer, and Sailing 101 was one of my classes. Life as a lifestyle has never been better.

Brooke invited me to join her and some friends from State to, “Party in T.J.,” on a Saturday night. “Are you sure it’s safe down there? I always hear of State students getting into trouble.” “Oh. We do this all the time. Nothing ever goes wrong.” she replied.

A quick trip to Tijuana would be the perfect complement to resort-style college living and a great reprieve from my studies and nearly full-time office job. Before I joined her in San Diego, I looked at the ceramic nun on my dresser; her hands together in prayer; her face exhibiting a sly grin. The statue was split in two and hollow, revealing a rosary when you lifted the nun’s torso from her skirt. A few years later my mother gave me a Star of David necklace from my Jewish grandfather and I kept it in the nun alongside the rosary. It was a bit cramped but I figured no one would steal from the nun although the over-crowding did tilt her torso – a nun with scoliosis one might guess.

It was light out when we left her apartment near State. We were in her Karmann Ghia convertible nicknamed “Gilly Ghia.” Her boyfriend Skye was with his friend Tad and other frat boys in a white Volkswagen Rabbit convertible and we took turns passing each other on the I-5 and waving in surprise as if we were strangers in the night.

We crossed into Tijuana and stopped first at Tijuana Tilly’s. Tad and Brooke were the designated drivers and agreed to remain sober during the course of what would become an eight-hour evening. We were being smart. The table was soon visited by the “Doctor” who had never seen the inside of a medical school, didn’t examine his patients and administered libations as a cure-all. His dress was in competition with his swashbuckling personality. The Doctor pushed a cart filled with a wide variety of medicinal spirits and would approach a bar patron and pour the tequila of choice right into his mouth. He rounded our table and we all partook in his curing antics. I laughed as the nun said, a table is prepared before you, your head is anointed; your cup overflows. I responded, “Dearest Mother of God, you must be joking. Tequila without its sweet and icy companions is horrible. Please no more anointing.”

We soon ordered food to subdue the Doctor’s effects and then went onto The Long Bar. We made new friends and the party expanded in every way. Jokes, teasing, dares and more alcohol fueled the situation and things began to look more like a circus than a night out. Guys started roughhousing one another and it looked as though a friendly arm around a neck could turn into a chokehold or a high-five into a skull crush.

Brooke and her boyfriend had developed their own sub-plot and were sitting in the corner playing the part of anguished lovers. Watching from afar, I couldn’t tell the content of their conversation only the nature of it. Mouths moved quickly, postures leaned forward and gestures were exaggerated. I wanted nothing more than to head home. Tad, the driver of the other car, seemed to be a voice of reason. He approached me and yelled over the auditory melee, “I think we should get out of here.” I nodded.

I found Brooke and Skye outside and said, “I hate to interrupt but it’s 1 a.m.” She and her boyfriend gave one another a look that said, “We’re not finished with this scene.” People were gathered around the bar’s entrance and Tad and his friends were now piling into the Rabbit. They had to maneuver one “Really Drunk Guy” into the back of the car. Brooke asked me, “Why don’t you go home with them?” I ping-ponged my gaze from the Rabbit to her. “To be honest, I’d rather drive with you. That car looks like a mess.” “Tad’s fine. He hasn’t been drinking.” “True. I don’t know. It just makes sense to drive back with you. I don’t want to leave you here alone.” “I’ll be fine. We’ll work it out.” It was obvious that she needed more time but I knew this was a bad place to stage a fight. All she knew was her passion.

“Don’t worry,” Tad told me, “Skye’s not a bad guy. He’ll take care of her and they’ll be right behind us.” I looked at him with arms crossed and eyes rolled. The nun’s hands were now fiercely in prayer and she looked skyward. I imagined that she would punish me with a ruler if she weren’t bound in ceramics. I sat in the passenger seat, Tad was driving and three guys were in the back. Brooke and Skye didn’t notice when we drove by, honking and waving. “She’s oblivious to her surroundings. I don’t feel great about this.” “We do this all the time and it’s perfectly safe. She hasn’t been drinking. Stop worrying.” I sighed.

We made our way through the labyrinth of T.J. streets. The city seemed to be at capacity, even in the early morning hours. We were weaving around for longer than what seemed necessary. I wondered why we hadn’t reached the border when it appeared to be so close and then suddenly the car spun around and I was nearly thrown into the driver’s seat. My heart accelerated and shoulder immediately stung. The car continued spinning and finally came to an abrupt stop when Tad applied the, turn into the spin driving technique. “Holy shit! Holy shit! Fuck! Fuck!” This repetition of slang resonated throughout the car from every seat with the exception of Really Drunk Guy who only muttered an, “Ohhh Man.” The immediate thoughts were, We’re in an accident in Mexico and we didn’t buy the border insurance because nothing ever happens. We do this all the time. Tad is staying sober. Nothing will happen. “Where did that guy come from? What the fuck! Who hit us? What the hell was that?” Tad screamed.

What happened next would be indelible. We became fugitives. Tad sped away and was going eighty mph within seconds, weaving in and out of cars through the thick and lumbering Tijuana traffic. Tad barely missing the edges of bumpers, seeing the back ends of cars fly across my face, other cars swerving out of our way and then the movie scene. A chorus of sirens, Federales on motorcycles chasing us all at once, and more yelling and profanity. You can have a designated driver but you can’t account for crazy. Tad was the crazy that turned nothing ever happens into a car of fugitives.

Tad then realized that we were headed south toward Ensenada and spun the car around in the other direction. The car twirled and came close to an embankment. It was one of those spins you see in movies where the car ends up on two wheels and then finds its equilibrium and adjusts. Back towards the border, faster and faster with the Federales on our tail and then a thud sound; many of them in succession and we realize they are bullets. Tad accelerates in response. We reach the border ahead of the Federales and Tad wedges his way into one of the long lines. We hear sirens in the distance and then within a minute the car is surrounded. The Federales tell Tad to back up, get out of line and make a u-turn. The real meaning of this was jail time, so we make other plans. And the nun reminds me, even though you walk through the darkest valley, fear no evil.

“Open the fucking door. Get us out, get us out.” The door was bashed in from the accident and we have to pile out of the passenger door that’s been t-boned. Quite literally like clowns coming out of a Volkswagen. The two sober guys bolt, weaving in and out of the lines of cars. I crouch and weave slowly between cars lined up ten deep and ten across, I knock on windows and gesture, “Can I have a ride?” because I think that standing would make me a target. The drivers and their passengers stoically lock their doors and stare straight ahead. I think that the last twenty minutes going a hundred miles per hour was just a movie scene and that the director just yelled, “Cut!” I look around at the cars and it seems that they are driven by mannequins; frozen in fear that I’m going to drag them into my mess. I feel a firm grip on my arm and adrenalin rushes through my system. I expect that handcuffs are next.

It’s one of my fellow passengers who had bolted. He pulls me away and we run and run and run and reach a spiral staircase where we are now running upstairs. We continue running and I am now heaving in spite of the fact that I run 10Ks at home. This is where the girl in the movie passes out but somehow I keep running right to a car that they’ve parked on the U.S. side. We pile in, gasping for air and squeal out of the lot onto the I-5 north. We lose perspective and think that Mexico is a state and not another country and drive ninety miles per hour as if we’re still being chased. The only thing chasing us now is undiluted fear. The nun whispers “The Lord is your shepherd, you shall not fear.” I am both grateful and in disbelief that I’m alive and the fear that is with me won’t leave me for years. It stays as a reminder that my life is a gift.

Within twenty minutes we are back in La Jolla at one of their homes where their parents are gone for the weekend. One of the guys calls Tad’s parents and is reticent to tell them where he is. He sounds apologetic and morose. “I don’t know exactly what happened. Accident, T-boned. We ran. We were chased.” I sit on the living room sofa. I sit there the same way that I’d sit in a doctor’s waiting room; not comfortably but with overly erect posture and waiting for my name to be called. Instead, I hear other names. “Oh my God. It’s Sky and Brooke……and…”

“What the hell. How the hell are you here?” Tad walks up the driveway and Brooke and Skye follow.

“I got out of line like they said and then I rammed my car into the border gate. It was like this, Ahhhhhh. Help me. Help me,” as he gestured with flailing arms. “I told them that we were in an accident. We were t-boned. They checked my breath, asked questions and let us go.”

After a few hours of re-hashing the night and wondering how we were able to escape a multitude of near-death experiences,we adjourned to the back patio, cocooned ourselves in green camouflage sleeping bags, lay down on lawn chairs and fell asleep – fugitives, in pods, under the moonlight. The nun whispers, “Lie down in green pastures.” I wonder if the grass is always greener; if her whisper is telling me to appreciate my already green grass.

I didn’t turn the radio on during the drive home late Sunday morning. I was in an adrenaline-depleted trance and simultaneously anxious to be back home in my Jan Brady bed. I told the story to my roommates who stood there aghast. I thanked both my lucky star and lucky nun that I had quite literally dodged a bullet. I thought about the Star of David and how it is there to protect me in each of the six directions that the star points. How my grandparents were protected as they crossed the border into Ellis Island and how I had nearly squandered their hard-won freedom through my own careless border dalliance. I was awoken mentally to this comparison and then physically fell asleep.

I never made it back to Tijuana, only through it. In my twenties I traveled quite a bit to Rosarito and Ensenada. In my thirties I could financially afford to travel deeper into Mexico and emotionally look deeper as well. Friends joked that I would need a disguise for my next trip down south, much like the painted donkey becoming a zebra. The irony is that black stripes were added to the naturally white donkey so that it could be seen in photos; so that it wouldn’t be over-exposed in the glaring sun.

I carried the fear from that night with me for several years. When going through intersections I always looked to the right, suspiciously waiting for some random person at a red to battle me for my rightful green. It was this experience and other dark moments that eventually brought me to a yoga retreat on the Yucatan Peninsula, near the Mayan Ruins. Prior to going I learned that the Aztec God Quetzalcoatl represents the morning and evening star, and was the symbol of death and resurrection. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that I sought out the same lands where I experienced hurt to help me heal.

For a week straight I would be eating vegan foods, doing yoga thrice daily and basking in the pristine area waters. One of the many holistic healing modalities that were offered to us was the participation in a Mayan Sweat Lodge or Temezcal. As compared to the activities on my Tijuana trip that were designed to numb my senses, this was supposed to heighten consciousness. In the sweat lodge we were huddled together much like in the V.W. Rabbit in Tijuana. However, the purpose of the sweat lodge was to remain in a heated space for approximately an hour so that we would sweat out toxins, cultivate mental toughness, and detoxify our transgressions. Several people crowded around a fire in something that resembled a clay igloo. The door was closed to contain the heat and maximize its effects. The intensity of the lodge was almost unbearable and a claustrophobic few exited early. An hour later we were all on the verge of tears or some greater breakdown and then finally released into the balmy evening air. I was back under the moonlight, not cocooned in a sleeping bag but completely exposed and swimming in the Caribbean Sea. I whispered to myself, lead me beside quiet waters, restore my soul.

After ten days of clean eating and sweating out my fears, the results weren’t a cure-all. A prominent yoga teacher speaks of the practice as a series of little shifts; that in order to avoid injury we slowly move into a place of stillness. This would be the beginning of many little shifts.

I still have my Lucky Nun. Occasionally she has fallen and I have glued her back together. She is externally fragile, missing an elbow and hand but still holds my cross and my star. She and the star remind me of my familial roots. The other statues that I have collected on my travels both keep her company and remind me of the journey, of the darkness and lightness that provide the necessary contrast to see the whole. I finally believe her words when she says that goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life.

Calais is the heavily fortified command post for German forces in the Pas-de-Calais/Flanders region. The Germans believed that any Allied invasion would take place there, but when the D-Day invasion took place in Normandy, Calais was vulnerable to a land attack from the west. Eight days ago the town was bombed and shelled, followed by an assault by the 7th and 8th brigades of the 3rd Canadian Division with British and Canadian tank support. The garrison of 7,500 defenders was overwhelmed and at 9 0′clock this morning, Calais, largely in ruins, surrendered.

She lies on the bed, naked from the waist down. Her knees are pushed up and wide open and a nurse stands either side of her. She rolls her head from side to side, her eyes are screwed tight, her teeth are gritted together and her face is covered in sweat.

‘Another deep breath,’ says the nurse. ‘And push. That’s good – keep pushing. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Push again. Harder.’

She wails and grips both of her knees as her head jerks backwards and forwards.

‘Okay, now take a rest.’

She puts her head back on the pillow, panting and puffing out her cheeks.

‘Right, another big push.’ The nurse starts counting again.

‘Aargh!’ she screams.

‘That’s good – it’s coming. Push long and hard.’

Another long scream.

‘It’s all done. All over.’

The Klever Reichswald, over 5,000 hectares in size, is the largest contiguous forest in the Lower Rhine. It lies southwest of Kleve in North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany between the Rivers Rhine and Maas at the Dutch/German border. Because the Reichswald is on a glacial ridge, it is not subjected to flooding, though the glacial gravel contains a lot of loam from the northern German plain and this causes the surface to become extremely muddy during a rainy period.

Walkie round the garden

Like a teddy bear.

One step, two step,

Tickle you under there!

He swings backwards and forwards on the squeaking metal gate at the end of his garden. He looks back at the house and when he sees that no one is watching he goes through the gate and wanders along the little gravel path that runs between the backs of the prefabs. When he kicks at the stones bits get in one of his sandals and he has to take it off, turn it upside down and put it back on again. Then he sees something lying on the ground which he picks up and rubs some of the dirt off it. That makes his fingers black so he throws the thing away, wipes his fingers on his t-shirt and continues along the path. Passing a privet hedge, he tries not to touch the cobwebs as he pulls off a leaf, bends it in half along the stalk, nibbles at the tip and spits out green juice.

The aluminium Type B2 has an entrance hall; two bedrooms; a living room; hallway; fitted kitchen with hot and cold running water, cooker and built-in refrigerator; and a fitted bathroom with a heated towel rail; a separate flushing toilet. The coal fire in the living room has a back boiler which heats water for the bathroom and kitchen and also provides ducted warm air to the bedrooms. Storage is provided by built-in wardrobes. It is decorated in magnolia, with gloss-green on all additional wood, including the door trimmings and skirting boards.

‘What are you doing?’ he asks.

‘We’re playing,’ says the girl.

‘Can I play with you?’

‘Yes,’ says the boy.

‘What are you playing?’

‘We’re going to play doctors and nurses,’ she says.

‘What’s that?’

‘We’ll show you in a minute. I’m the doctor.’ She points at the boy. ‘And you can be the nurse.’

‘That’s silly,’ says the boy. ‘Girls can’t be doctors and boys can’t be nurses.’

‘It’s my game and I say that I’m the doctor.’

‘What will I be?’ he asks.

‘You’re the patient and you must lie down and close your eyes because you’re sick,’ she says.

‘It’s too dirty to lie down.’

‘You can’t play if you don’t lie down.’

‘All right.’

He lies down and she pulls up his t-shirt. ‘We’ve got to examine you now.’ The boy picks up a stick and prods his bare stomach with it.

‘That tickles.’

‘You’re very sick and you must have an operation. Nurse, take all his clothes off.’

‘I’m not sick. I don’t want my clothes off.’

‘I’m the doctor and you’ve got to do what I tell you. I’ve found out you might die and the operation will save you.’

He looks at them both. ‘Then can I be the doctor?’

‘Perhaps.’

Regulations made by the Minister shall impose upon local Provision of education authorities the duty of providing milk, meals and other milk and refreshment for pupils in attendance at schools and county colleges maintained by them; and such regulations shall make provision as to the manner in which and the persons by whom the expense of providing such milk, meals or refreshment is to be defrayed, as to the facilities to be afforded (including any buildings or equipment to be provided) and as to the services to be rendered by managers governors and teachers with respect to the provision of such milk, meals or refreshment, and as to such other consequential matters as the Minister considers expedient, so, however, that such regulations shall not impose upon teachers at any school or college duties upon days on which the school or college is not open for instruction, or duties in respect of meals other than the supervision of pupils, and shall not require the managers or governors of a voluntary school to incur expenditure.

A loud bell rings outside the classroom. ‘It’s milk time,’ says his friend. ‘And when we’ve drunk our milk it’s playtime.’

‘All of you, one by one, come up and take your bottle of milk and straw,’ calls out the teacher. When it’s his turn, he goes to the front of the class and picks out one of the small bottles of milk from the metal crate and a straw from a metal jug and goes back to his desk where his friend shows him how to push out the little slotted hole in the cardboard top of the bottle and stick the straw through. He sucks up half of the milk and then starts blowing, filling up the bottle with bubbles. His friend laughs and copies him.

At the Ould Lammas Fair boys were you ever there

Were you ever at the Fair In Ballycastle-O!

Did you treat your Mary Ann

To some Dulse and Yellow Man

At the Ould Lammas Fair in Ballycastle-O!

In Flanders’ fields afar while resting from the War

We drank Bon Sante to the Flemish lassies O!

But the scene that haunts my memory is kissing Mary Ann

Her pouting lips all sticky from eating Yellow Man

As we passed the silver Margy and we strolled along the strand

From the Ould Lammas Fair in Ballycastle-O!

He tells her that the capital of Iceland is Reykjavik, but the nun canes him on the hand when he spells ‘their’ as ‘thier’.

Soul of Christ, sanctify me.

Body of Christ, heal me.

Blood of Christ, drench me.

Water from the side of Christ, wash me.

Passion of Christ, strengthen me.

Good Jesus, hear me.

In Your wounds shelter me.

From turning away keep me.

From the evil one protect me.

At the hour of my death call me.

Into Your presence lead me,

to praise You with all Your saints

for ever and ever. Amen.

He is dressed in short white trousers, a white shirt buttoned up to the neck, white ankle socks and brown sandals. His hair is brushed neatly to one side. He holds new rosary beads and a new prayer book with a shiny cream plastic cover.

I was sick.

And the gulls followed us

all the way to

Scotland wanting some

tit-bits.

I was sick.

There is a garden

fete.

Been to a procession on

Sunday.

I’ve seen willie’s moter-

-bike.

How is the wee fat

pig.

I get to school nice

and early

Kingy is a ball game in which those who are not ‘He’ have the ball thrown at them, without means of retaliation, and against ever-increasing odds. Anyone who is hit by the ball joins the He in trying to hit the rest of the players. Those who are throwing may not run with the ball in their hands but can pass the ball to each other. Those being thrown at may run and dodge as they like. The game continues until all but one have been hit and are ‘out’, and this player is declared ‘King’.

When I went to the circus.

I saw a funny old clown.

He went into the wall

and comed Jumping out

with a chair comeing out.

Whith him, I saw the loins

and the loin tamer.

And there was a wizard

on a tight rope

Prince Monolulu is a horse-racing tipster and celebrity of the British racing scene. He became well-known after picking out the horse Spion Kop in the 1920 Derby, which came in at the long odds of 100-6, and from which he personally made £8,000. He is celebrated for his brightly coloured robes and feathered headdress which helps punters spot him in the racetrack crowds and for his cry ‘I gotta horse!’ sometimes alternating with ‘Black man for luck!’. Although he claims to be a Jewish prince of the Falasha tribe of Abyssinia, his real name is Peter Carl Mackay, and he was born in the Caribbean island of St Croix in 1881. Monolulu frequently features in newsreel broadcasts, and he’s probably the best-known black man in Britain.

They have been waiting a long time and he is very bored. His mother gives him money to run across and get an ice cream. A tall black man with feathers on his head and a long white coat is walking down the middle of the street and he nearly bumps into him. The soldiers and sailors finally come and there are men wearing brass helmets and white gloves and riding horses.

The Irish priest, Father Patrick Peyton, also known as the Rosary Priest, is the promoter of the ‘Family Rosary Crusade’ which aims to bind families together through their daily recitation of the rosary. The movement utilizes radio, films, outdoor advertising and television, and has had the help of Hollywood celebrities such as Bing Crosby, Ronald Reagan and Natalie Wood. His famous slogan is ‘The family that prays together stays together’, and in a 1946 radio broadcast he proclaimed: ‘The rosary is the offensive weapon that will destroy Communism—the great evil that seeks to destroy the faith’. He has become best known for his series of mass rallies in major cities throughout the world and his visit to Britain this year has culminated in a rally at Wembley Stadium in London today, attended by 85,000 people.

NOBODY’S GOING TO CATCH ME TODAY!

HOI! MISTER! YOU’VE LOST A £5 NOTE!

HE HASN’T SEEN IT!

BANG PHUT

YOU LITTLE SCAMP!

GOT IT!

HA! HA! HA!

The first unrationed sweets went on sale today. Toffee apples were the biggest sellers, with sticks of nougat and liquorice strips also very popular. The Minister of Food has said that stocks are sufficient and he has ordered a one-off allocation of extra sugar to manufacturers to help them meet the anticipated surge in demand. Sugar itself, though, still remains rationed. The industry gave a warm welcome to the news. ‘We are very glad about it,’ said a spokesman for the Cocoa, Chocolate and Confectionery Alliance. ‘We will do all we can to make it work.’ Despite the heavy sales, there have been no signs of panic buying, even though there are already shortages of the most popular brands.

We are the boys and girls well known as

Minors of the ABC

And every Saturday all line up

To see the films we like and shout aloud with glee.

We like to laugh and have a singsong,

Such a happy crowd are we.

We’re all pals together,

We’re minors of the A – B – C!

They run into the corner shop and jostle in front of the sweet counter, discussing and deciding. He chooses two Flying Saucers, a Sherbet Fountain, two Black Jacks and a gobstopper and pushes some money across the counter. The man puts the sweets into a white paper bag which he hands to him with sixpence change, just enough for Saturday morning pictures.

Ten green bottles hanging on the wall,

Ten green bottles hanging on the wall,

And if one green bottle should accidentally fall,

There’ll be nine green bottles hanging on the wall.

He looks out the window at the houses and fields going past. He is happy and excited. The grown-up men are sitting at the back of the coach and they take dark brown bottles of beer out of the wooden crate and drink from them. His grandmother takes a bar of fruit and nut from her handbag and breaks off a square to give him. ‘When will the singing start?’ he asks her.

To touch the hearts of your students and to inspire them with the Christian spirit is the greatest miracle you could perform, and the one that God asks of you, since this is the purpose of your work.

The cream painted corridor has a high ceiling and gothic windows along one wall. His heart thumps, his stomach flutters and he feels as if he might wet himself. The door opens and a tall thin man in a black cassock and stiff white preaching bands stands there. ‘Come in,’ he says.

In each of the sets of words given below there is one word meaning something rather different from the other three. Find the different word in each line and write it down:

a) alike, same, similar, somewhat.

b) pigeon, duck, goose, swan.

c) bus, conductor, passenger, driver.

d) this, that, the, those.

e) firm, rough, solid, hard.

f) desk, book, cupboard, drawer.

g) spade, earth, sand, gravel.

h) pretty, nice, charm, lovely.

i) justice, merciful, pitying, forgiving.

j) tumbler, cup, mug, jug.

k) fishing, rowing, climbing, swimming.

l) scarlet, blue, red, pink.

m) sewing, cotton, needle, calico.

Belomorkanal is a cigarette made up of a hollow cardboard tube joined to a cigarette paper tube filled with tobacco. The hollow part of the tube is pinched to make two perpendicular flat surfaces, and this acts as a cigarette holder. Popular in the Soviet Bloc due to its low price, it is one of the strongest cigarettes available.

When progressive dementia made it impossible for my friend Amy’s father to remain in an assisted living community, she reluctantly moved him to the Memory Unit, an ironic euphemism for the 5th floor Alzheimer’s ward, in a nursing home. Not long ago, we spent a rainy Sunday afternoon visiting him to celebrate his 96th birthday.

Though patient care is superb, once past the elegant lobby and on the patient floors, the mingled odors of human waste and disinfectant permeate the air. The gaily decorated ceramic plaques bearing residents’ names written in dry-erase marker outside each door hardly compensated for the grimness of the institutional setting.

I spotted the name “Bambi,” and despite respect for her privacy, I couldn’t resist peering in to see what a nonagenarian named Bambi looked like. Far from the perky, doe-eyed ingénue the anachronistic name conjured up, she was as brown and desiccated as a raisin. Bambi perched on a boudoir chair close to the window; however, she was minuscule and couldn’t possibly have seen above the sill. She stared at the wall beneath the glass, seemingly oblivious to the rain slamming the pane above. Vivid lightning streaked the sky, followed by a jarring boom of thunder. Bambi didn’t flinch. Her nimble fingers kept moving, knitting with imaginary needles and yarn.

In another room we passed, a fragile-looking man in a wheelchair slumped toward the left, held upright only by a wide strap across his chest that tethered him to the chair. Beside him, a wilted aspidistra flaccidly dangled to the right. Framed by the doorway, they made an interesting composition, a study in vegetative symmetry.

A minor commotion a few rooms up the hall broke the stillness. A wild-eyed woman in a Geri-chair sat in her doorway and cried out in heavily accented English before lapsing into her native German, “Papa, don’t let them take me. Bitte … hilf mir!” She made eye contact with me and repeated her plea. Just as I noticed the numbers tattooed on her wrist, an attendant brushed past me and whispered, “Buchenwald.”

I patted her wizened arm gently. “You’re safe here,” I lied.

Sobered, we trudged off in search of Ike and found him in the day room. He sat in a wheelchair parked at a small table; another old man sat alone on a sofa. Nearby, a woman I’d guess to be a centenarian reclined in a Geri-chair pointed toward a muted TV showing a NASCAR race. The woman’s slack lower jaw rested on her chest, and she glared at the silent cars, circling, going nowhere fast. I wondered if she recognized the metaphor.

Amy and I took off our soggy coats and started unpacking goodies for the celebration. Ike, who was occasionally lucid but at other times didn’t recognize his daughter, was having a good day.

“Is this a party?” he asked as Amy bent down to get candles from a shopping bag on the floor. Ike eyed her with more than paternal interest. I know that elderly men can exhibit hypersexuality, but seeing him ogle his daughter’s derrière made me smile.

“It’s your birthday,” Amy said, poking token candles into his ice cream cake.

“I—bzzz-bzzz-whoop-whoop!” he said. His hands gesticulated frantically, but the gestures made no more sense than the words.

Amy whispered in my direction, “He makes noises when he forgets words.”

Recovering from his lapse, he asked, “How old am I?”

“How old do you think?” Amy countered.

“Two hundred?”

“Only 96.”

“How long can I live?”

“You’re in great shape, Daddy.”

True. Every doctor who examined him envied his constitution. He wasn’t wheelchair-bound because he couldn’t walk but because he didn’t recall how to put one leg in front of the other. I studied him; he was noticeably smaller than he’d been when I visited only weeks before. At the rate Ike was shrinking, I thought it more likely that he would disappear than die.

My friend then began her routine interrogation.

“Do you know who I am?” she asked.

“You’re familiar.” Ike smiled.

“But do you know who I am?”

“Don’t you know who you are?” He sounded annoyed.

“If you know, tell me.”

“Amy.”

“Good! Who am I to you?”

“You’re not my girlfriend.”

She laughed. “Why are you so sure?”

“Too fat. Those are big thighs you’ve got there.” He held up his hands up like wide-set goalposts to illustrate.

“Thanks,” she said sarcastically. “I hadn’t noticed.”

“Do you have a mother?” Ike asked.

“Not now.”

“She was my wife?”

“Yes, but she died 30 years ago.”

“Was I sad?”

“Yes. You loved her very much.”

“Was she fat, too?”

Amy winced at the word “too.”

“No,” she replied.

“I don’t remember her.” Then he abruptly added, “My Ruthie has red hair.”

He stated that as fact, not a question, and he was right. Ruth, his beloved wife, had a mop of titian curls.

Amy sighed. “ That’s how it is—flashes of clarity.” She wiped tears from her eyes, lit the candles, and started to sing. Several nurses came in, ostensibly to serenade Ike, but they arrived with appetites; they are especially attentive when a visitor brings food.

Amy blew out the candles and said, “Happy birthday, Daddy.” She closed her eyes and kissed the top of his balding head. “I love you.”

“I don’t blame you,” he said, reminding me of the funny younger Ike, a man I recalled with great affection.

Amy cut the cake, but Ike just stared at the wedge she placed on a paper plate.

“What do I do?”

“Take a bite.”

“My teeth…” He scowled, pointing to his dentures.

“It’s ice cream. It’ll melt in your mouth.”

Amy fed him. Chocolate froth ran from the corners of his mouth, and she dabbed at it with a napkin. The man originally on the sofa moseyed over and hovered until Amy offered him cake. I asked about the woman in the Geri-chair, but a nurse said she was diabetic. I glanced at her again; her eyes had a thousand-yard stare, and her toothless mouth still yawned open.

“Remember Linda?” Amy asked.

Ike stared at me. “Why aren’t you wearing…?” He patted his ears. It was more a challenge than a question. “You have…holes….” He paused, unable to retrieve the word, and he made a helpless hand gesture to indicate his frustration. “Whoop-whoop!”

“Pierced ears?” I asked. “Next time I visit, I’ll wear earrings for you.”

Quite unabashedly, he inspected me up and down.

“You’re a fine looking broad,” Ike said.

I thanked him, but he wasn’t done.

“Dating anyone?”

Amy looked horrified. “Daddy! Are you hitting on my friend?”

“Why not?”

“You don’t have anything to offer—”

He leaned my way. “I do,” he said. “I have something for you, here, in my pocket.” He patted the front of his trousers.

Before I could respond, the woman in the Geri-chair, who had until that moment looked comatose, piped up, “He got dem two naughty things in dat pocket!” She cackled, well pleased with herself.

Amy snickered, and I choked back a laugh. Grateful for the distraction that saved me from responding to Ike’s indelicate come-on, I asked if the Holocaust survivor had dietary restrictions.

When the nurse said, “no,” Amy nodded her approval, and I went off to spoon-feed melting ice cream into Gertrud Salzmann. She lit up when I entered her room, mistaking me for her long-lost sister, Gitte.

“Eiscreme!” she said in a conspiratorial whisper. Then she clapped her hands like an excited child.

Minutes later, Amy came to tell me that Ike had nodded off, and she was ready to leave. When I begged for a few more minutes, she offered to run a quick errand and come back for me.

“Storm’s still bad,” Amy said. “Wait in the vestibule.”

I anticipated spending the time with my new friend, but moments after Amy left, an attendant told me she needed to get Mrs. Salzmann ready for supper. I put on my raincoat and kissed Gertrud’s papery cheek goodbye.

The attendant, standing behind Gertrud, flashed her fingers—3, 2, 1—to remind me of the code for the digital lock. The exit from the unit was locked to keep residents from wandering.

At the end of the hall, I keyed in the numbers and opened the door, but before it closed, I heard rapidly approaching footsteps. Looking back, an attractive, 50-ish woman in a Burberry raincoat was rushing toward me. She was fussing with a tote bag and an umbrella, the J-shaped handle of which was tangled in the tote’s twisted straps. Both her hands were busy, so, I held the door for her, and then we shared the elevator to the lobby.

“I’m such a klutz,” she said, finally getting her hands unencumbered. “You have family the 5th floor?”

“A friend’s dad. It’s his birthday,” I answered.

We sat together in the vestibule while waiting for our rides.

“It’s a good time to leave,” she said. “They get loopy at night. There’s even a name for it—‘sundowning.’” She shuddered. “The Eskimos push their elderly out to sea on an ice floe. It’s gotta be better than ending one’s days here.”

“Maybe,” I said.

My parents died young. Some days, I wish I had a mother or father to visit in a nursing home, but when I see Amy’s profound grief on the days when Ike is out of reach, I rethink that. There’s neither a good time to lose people we love nor a clear demarcation between living long and living too long.

“I hope my mind and body call it quits together,” I said.

“Dementia’s ugly,” she said, “but it has its funny moments. There’s a Southern Belle upstairs named Caroline who wears a hat and sunglasses all day. She thinks she’s on a cruise. The aides pretend to slather her with suntan lotion. And the nurses titter about poor old Angus. He humps a pillow he calls ‘Mildred’—thinks it’s his wife.”

I chuckled and related the old woman’s comment about “dem two naughty things.”

“That’s Dorothy,” she said, giggling.

“I tried to suppress my laughter,” I told her; I felt guilty for finding humor in dementia because we’ve been socially conditioned to think it’s disrespectful. I also admitted to fantasizing about losing my inhibitions and saying whatever I pleased without considering repercussions. “Unfortunately, I’d like to break taboos and shock people well before I’m too senile to enjoy raising eyebrows and dropping jaws.”

“Me, too,” she said.

We then shared a cathartic laugh.

“Has your friend mentioned the 5^th floor’s infamous Alice Brookfield?” She rolled her eyes derisively.

Amy never discusses other residents with me. I shook my head no.

“Well,” she continued, “Alice wears a raincoat, 24/7, with nothing underneath it. She flashes other residents and visitors—always claims it’s accidental, of course. The attendants stopped trying to get the raincoat away from her. Even on anti-anxiety meds, she got too agitated, so they let her be.”

I smiled wearily, stood, and glanced up the street for Amy’s car.

It was dusk and, apparently, shift change. Tired-looking staff was straggling out, and a fresh crew was breezing past us on its way in. One of the departing nurses stopped to chat with me. I recognized her from the Memory Unit. She said many residents had no visitors at all, and she blessed me for giving Mrs. Salzmann attention.

Then I spotted Amy’s Volvo approaching. I hurriedly said goodbye, yanked up my hood, and opened the outer door. As I stepped into the downpour, I heard the nurse behind me address the Burberry Lady: “Shall we go back upstairs now, Alice?”

By the time the words registered and I spun around, I caught only a glimpse of Mrs. Brookfield’s retreat to the lobby—a vanishing hand and the raincoat dramatically trailing behind on the floor like a starlet’s mink.

Lobo’s wife Cassandra had taken Junior and their new Toyota Matrix over to San Antonio, leaving Lobo and I to cruise around Austin in his beloved “Miracle Blue,” the legendary heap of beaten parts and bolts that still motors from point A to point B through some form of divine intervention or mistake. It’s an 86’ Volvo that he bought off a craigslist ad, showing up to his meeting with the owner with 1000 bucks stuffed in his pocket and 200 more crammed in his sock. When the owner scoffed at his 1000-dollar offer, 500 below the asking price, Lobo miraculously found another 200 in his boot and polished off the deal with a crooked grin and a firm handshake. It may be the best 1200 bucks anyone’s ever spent. When he got a job building houses with our old landlord in Massachusetts he hauled that thing from Austin to Boston twice in one summer. The thing just keeps going. He’s been driving it now for six years without a problem. The old Volvo makes ungodly sounds when it shifts gears and has lost its front grill, but it still goes, the road’s own little miracle. The car was in worse shape than when I saw it a year ago and got progressively worse every year I did see it. It rested on four mismatched tires, one of which was a donut Lobo had been driving on for a solid two months. This donut was beyond worn down, completely tread-less and so smooth I thought it was made of porcelain. It threatened to burst at any moment.

“Volvo, engage!” Lobo demanded as he turned the ignition. His wide nose snarled as his eyes, that somehow always held at least a tinge of drunkenness, bulged in a pleading grimace. The motor grumbled and moaned then stalled out with a shiver, sending a tremor through the entire frame of the car. I rolled down my window to let some air in. It was dreadfully hot, and even though I had no doubt she would eventually start up, I knew we could be waiting a while. “Ha, ehhh?” He laughed as if he were embarrassed, then tensed over the wheel like the car just might jump into light speed and screamed “VOLVO, ENGAGE,” while turning the key. His wiry shoulders trembled and his dark eyes squinted under the weight of some psychic effort he exerted. The motor sputtered and wailed and sadly stalled out. I’ve never seen the Volvo start before at least three warm up runs. The third time proved to be the charm and the old motor rhythmically grumbled as we made our way to the store. We approached a red light and were surrounded by a group of nicer, newer cars; by newer cars I mean cars that weren’t cruising into their second decade on the road. “Quick, role up your window so people think we have AC,” Lobo blurted in a panic, frantically rolling up his window as we approached the light. We were out in the middle of a dreadfully hot Texas afternoon and I knew he was kidding; but I never know for sure. Perhaps he drove this old heap around by himself, sweltering with the windows closed, smiling out at his fellow commuters as sweat poured down his face.

“No,” I objected.

“Oh, Okay. You’re right,” he relented with a half wink. “Now let’s get some food for the ride, we’ve got a long trip tomorrow.” We were slated to leave for Mexico the next morning. The only thing that kept us was the arrival of our friend Dan and his girlfriend.

Dan and Linda were arriving by bus from Boston that night at an incredibly inconvenient time, right in the middle of a blues show Lobo and I were both excited to see. Around seven we sat at the bar listening to the warm up acts hoping we’d be back in time to catch some of the headliner after we returned with Dan and Linda. All week Lobo had been going out to shows with me with the understanding that he would “drink like a gentleman,” which meant refraining from boozing all his money away and ending up black out drunk. Requesting such restraint is a hard thing to ask of him, but one that was necessary because he’d already gone on his standard pre-vacation pawnshop run and there was no more money coming in until August. If we were to go to Mexico he couldn’t afford to squander what meager funds he had on a bar stool before we left. But enough was enough. Lobo was working on his fourth beer when he informed me in no uncertain terms that he would not be drinking like a gentleman on this evening.

“When I get drunk I like to steal shit,” Lobo told me with an emphatic, boisterous chuckle as we raced north on I-35 to the bus station. His Aztec face popped in and out of the shadows as the Volvo labored by street lamps at a lumbering 75 mph. “I don’t know why that is,” he continued, reflecting with a smile, “but I just wanna take shit when I get drunk. Like this one time, I was hanging out with this guy and his father, real Austin big shots. The dad was boys with Stevie Ray Vaughn and the son dated one of the Bush twins. We got wasted and ended up back at the father’s house and I went to take a piss in the backyard and the old man ended up getting’ all pissed at me and we ended up gettin’ into a fight right there. Nothing major, just a scuffle, you know, some pushing and shoving and rolling around. Some how the kid gets into it and I swiped his phone as they were throwing me out. In the morning I’d forgotten that I stole it, and the phone was ringing in my pants when I called him! He’s never wanted to hangout with me again!” Lobo concluded laughing with sick, heartfelt, glee as we pulled into the bus station.

As we drove away from the station Lobo squinted his eyes, darting quick glances around, muttering to himself, “this doesn’t look familiar. Are we sure we’re still on 35…yes, yes, yes, we’re still on 35, but this all looks unfamiliar.” Dan asked him if he’d been going north to get to the bus station because we were still heading north now. A goofy, embarrassed look swept over his face and we u-turned south. He pushed the motor to 80 mph to make up for lost time. Lobo was mad with excitement over our friend’s arrival and the show and the impending trip. He started frantically rattling off his own personal tour of interstate 35 as we sped through the night, towards Antone’s and the blues. “Right there, that’s where I worked for two months when I first moved down here. I got fired for doin’ whip-its in the kitchen. Me and my buddy Damon killed every can of whipped cream they had in the place. They were holding some promotion where they were spraying these bare-chested, contesting chicks with whipped cream and every can they grabbed was dead, and just leaked milk on the chicks on stage. One after the other, they kept trying cans and all of them were dead and the chicks were just holding their tits up on stage and didn’t know what to do.” He started laughing, but interrupted his laughter to continue. The motor roared up to 85 mph as the dashboard trembled. “Oh, right there is where I go to work out…” He spun around in his seat, whirling his meaty finger at what he wanted us to see, seemingly looking anywhere but straight ahead at the road, but the car kept right along. The mood in the car was joyous and relaxed. No one thought, hey this guy should be looking at the road instead of Dan in the back seat. “This is where Cassandra and I ate dinner once, it was okay, this is where I bought some pants, this is where I farted once two years ago, it smelled pretty bad….” No detail was spared. The tour continued into Austin until we arrived at Antone’s right after the first song. Dan and Linda had no idea the peril they were in- I just lost sight of it.

The next day, rolling up to a drive-thru, the long used and abused donut finally gave out, basically tearing in two as we idled to the window. The damn tire spilt open as if someone had taken a knife to it as we drifted up to the teller. Lobo popped open the trunk, pulled out the original, full sized wheel which had been flat for a couple of months, hoisted it onto his shoulder and sauntered down the street to a tire shop that just happened to be across the parking lot. He ambled along with that old full sized flat resting on his shoulder, as if he had waited for the most reasonable time to change the damn thing. As if everything had gone according to some detailed plan of his. I waited under the shade of a tree and it occurred to me the danger we must have been in as we raced up and down I-35 on that threadbare, old donut, which was defying physics by merely staying intact. Had we driven another mile at that speed the tire would have surely ripped open on the highway and who knows where the car would have ended up.

It didn’t occur to me how dangerous this was but I seem to lose sight of such precautions when I spend time with Lobo. It’s like he has the patron saint of recklessness watching over him, always one step ahead, preventing countless catastrophes from erupting on a daily basis. I start to feel that by being with him the saint will cover me too. The patron saint of recklessness has taken note of Lobo’s life, fallen in love with the way he lives it, and vowed to always protect it.

I hadn’t really expected to be going back to school. God knows my time at Lowell Tech had been long enough and the five years I spent there hadn’t kept me out of Vietnam or gotten me a job.

For sure it was a good experience but I think everyone, including myself, was hoping for more. I don’t mean that in a bad way. Hell, hoping for more is the driving force that pushes us all. And when the more isn’t what you expect it to be then you hope for something else.

This Teaching Credential Program at Cal State Long Beach was that something else. Things were finally coming together. This time I was majoring in something I actually believed in. And I was sure it would lead to a job and an opportunity to continue writing. At last, I would be able to look my father in the eye and we would both know that everything was going to be all right.

What he had said the morning I left for boot camp at Fort Dix was still fresh in my mind.

“I hope the army makes a man out of you,” he said, frustrated by my lack of direction. I have to admit, he had a point.

“I hope so, too,” was my understated response.

So I went to Vietnam, did some writing for a military magazine and did the soldier thing in the form of guard duty on the third security ring around the Bien Hoa Airfield. The general feeling was that if anyone got through the first two rings they’d have to be really good and we weren’t going to stop them no way, no how. Still they gave us M-16’s and the code word of the day.

By the time I got out of the army I was more than ready to get back on the road to my future—a journey I has first started in 1964 and detoured from so many times I was losing count. That’s why I was returning to school. Only this time the plan wasn’t to go to college. This time I was going to college with a plan.

So when I called home the night before I was to begin classes I think my dad felt as good about the whole situation as I did. I know he was proud of what I had down in Vietnam. I never came close to seeing the combat he saw and I know he was happy about that. He wasn’t the kind of man who saw the army as some sort of right of passage. He didn’t think things had to be hard just to be hard but he knew that there would always be plenty of hard times to overcome.

We never had the kind of father-son talk you hear about or read about. He never sat me down to “splain” things to me the way my army buddy Cecil’s dad had done with him. The best description of our relationship was that he pretty much let me figure things out for myself but everything I ever figured out I figured was the way he would have wanted me to. He taught by example and I learned by osmosis—and at times it seemed like we were both taking our sweet time.

That’s not to say we weren’t close. We both golfed and bowled and we both liked westerns and baseball’s game of the week. The way I thought was the way he thought, I think. Both of us tended to look at the big picture and go light on the details but we knew the details were there.

He was clearly frustrated with me that morning that I left on the train to Fort Dix. But he wasn’t worried. He hadn’t given up. If he was more than just frustrated I think we would have had that talk but I know that he knew everything would work out.

I think he knew this from his own life. There were no jobs when he graduated from high school in 1938. He went into the CCC’s but before he knew it we were in a war with Germany and he was in Tunisia—Tunisia! He was captured in Sicily and spent the rest of the war in a German POW Camp. I know every stop he made because I recently discovered a notebook where he had meticulously recorded every stop along with the names of fellow soldiers he met. Again, he was short with the details but I know there was a story behind every name and place.

There were about four pages of entries that read one line after another: Aug 2, 1942—left USA, Aug 7—arrived in England, Oct 26—left for Africa, Nov 8—invaded Africa…Jul 10—invaded Sicily…Jul 22—captured, Feb 3—evacuated Stalag III B, until finally he wrote May 31, 1945—boarded Liberty Ship John Lawson, sailed for America at 12:30.

Those five or six years were certainly a bigger burden to have plopped down in the middle of his life than the five years I spent floundering in college were to me but he never made an issue out of it. After the war he simply went back to school and during all that time there really wasn’t any advice anyone could have given him other than to hang in there. So when after school I went into the army and after the army I was returning to school I guess he figured he’d cut me the same slack.

I think he would be the first to tell you, win or lose; there are no good war stories. That’s probably why he never talked about the war. Like him I had done what I was trained to do. I wrote some decent stories. Both of us saw a side of me that if it was there before, it hadn’t been exposed. I think we were both expecting college to be a better experience this time.

Before I got off the phone that night, mom mentioned that dad was seeing a doctor the next day because his back was bothering him. Nothing serious she assured me—just something he wanted to have looked at.

I went to my classes the next few days and around the end of the week I got another call from my mother. Dad had inoperable cancer and the diagnosis was that he wouldn’t live long, which meant six months—maybe—at best.

So there you have it. The up part of the month, which lasted about a week and a half, was now behind me, and the down part had just begun.

I dropped out of school the next day and began making arrangements to return home. The following Monday, September 17, at 9:00 I left San Pedro heading back to Rochester, New York, my latest plan for getting on with my life detoured again after just one week.

There was a lot that I didn’t understand. I didn’t understand how this all could be happening so fast. I didn’t know how dad would take my returning home. Would he think something was wrong when I showed up? But didn’t he already know something was wrong? I wasn’t sure how much my mother said he knew or if he knew anything at all. What I knew for sure was that I had to get back home as fast as I could because there was nothing else I could do.

So I did the only thing I could do. I began knocking off as many miles as I could. The whole trip took up six pages in my little notebook that had previously only contained my bowling scores from various leagues. For the next few years I would record other road trips in this book and thus began my habit of writing down starting times and mileages, eating breaks, sleep breaks and anything else I felt the need to record.

I had lunch in Barstow at noon and dinner in Ashfork, Arizona at 7:00. Just west of Flagstaff I observed that the stars looked like clusters of starfish. A notebook like this can prove invaluable. At 10:15, just outside of Winslow, Arizona I pulled over to the side of the road and called it a day—13 hours of driving and 580 miles.

I woke up Tuesday morning at daybreak to discover I had spent the night at Sunset Crossing, the little known site of Beale’s Camel Crossing in 1858. The wagon trail he surveyed that year became the famous Route 66, which then became the Interstate 40 that made possible my being in the central plains by the end of my second day. I was in Texas by six, Oklahoma by nine, and somewhere around midnight I called it a day, having driven for almost 30 hours over the two days with 1300 miles behind me.

The next morning I awoke alongside a small meadow. It was cold and damp but the sun shining through the uneven morning mist that hovered above the grass and slowly melting into it, painted a picture in my mind that I have never forgotten. I was 27 years old and that may have been the first time I had ever awoken to such a pastoral scene. My notes tell me I was on the Will Rogers Turnpike somewhere south of Joplin, Missouri.

About 1400 miles into my journey I wrote down this opinion in my little bowling score travelogue book: “American ingenuity stops at roof building.” I probably should have written more so years later I wouldn’t have to guess at what my point was. I think I may have been commenting on the number of old buildings (mostly barns) that seemed to be somewhat intact except that the roofs were missing or had collapsed.

Another entry recorded that I pulled behind a diner to rest a bit but I couldn’t sleep because the flies were so bad and yet I couldn’t close the windows because it was so miserably hot. My notes tell me I didn’t stay there long.

I hit Indianapolis around midnight and stopped at the Sugar Daddy Lounge where Charlie and I used to go all the time when we were stationed at Fort Benjamin Harrison attending the Defense Department School of Journalism. I probably stayed there until closing and then went to sleep in the parking lot with another 812 miles behind me, still wondering what I was going to find when I got home.

I got a late start the next day—about 10—but knew it was going to be a short day. I planned on visiting my high school buddy, Joe, in Detroit, which wasn’t that far of a drive. I needed a little break from the driving and was excited about seeing Joe and Barbara again. And it would be good to talk to someone else about my father after spending a week talking to myself. And sleeping in a real bed wouldn’t be too bad either.

I got there late in the afternoon and we were in the living room relaxing when the phone rang. It was my sister, Casey, calling to say I’d better get home as quickly as possible. I wasn’t ready to hit the road again but lucky for me, Joe was.

“We better get started,” was all he said. “We can be there by morning if we leave right away.”

We did leave right away and we did get to Rochester early the next morning. I dropped him off at his parent’s home and he flew back to Detroit.

Mom was glad to see me when I got to the house and I realized instinctively that the question that had been on my mind the whole trip was of little consequence. I understood that my sudden appearance wasn’t going to shock my father—and that shocked me. I realized that I was no longer on route to a situation. Rather I was in the middle of a crisis that had come on way too fast with not nearly enough warning.

Dad was asleep and mom filled me in on the details. For the first time I was learning how hard the past few weeks had been on my whole family.

In the afternoon, dad woke up and I helped him eat some soup. What struck me most was how old and how weak he looked. He was not a big man but I remembered him as being a strong man. He tried to eat the soup but couldn’t do it.

“If I can just keep this soup down—” He didn’t finish the sentence that really didn’t need to be finished. That’s all I remember of the visit we had. He didn’t ask about school. Around mid-morning the next day he died with all of us around him telling how much we loved him and that everything was going to be all right.

The next few days went the way you would expect. We were all dazed and tired but everything is designed to keep the family moving along and that is what we did. Not everyone coped the same way. My mother and sisters were relieved because they knew too well how much pain he had been in. My grandmother, living just a few doors down the road, wasn’t nearly prepared for what happened and never really recovered from the shock. She spent the final 20 years of her life unable to cope with his death.

Joe flew back for the funeral and again flew right back to Detroit. I moved back into my old room for the winter until I returned to school the following year. In a sense, it was good to be back in familiar surroundings even if it wasn’t familiar territory. At least I was back home.

I didn’t see this as another detour. This was more like a rest stop on the road to that something more that I was still hoping for. And besides, I needed a rest.

September ended with my car at the garage. I had driven it 2900 miles in four days and then one morning it just wouldn’t turn over. I didn’t blame it. It needed a rest too.

I recall the events of that month often. I still keep records as I did then and my father did before me, but something is different. I feel almost duty-bound to take my obsession with information to the next level. I write stories because sometimes the isolated quotes and data that I have recorded in countless notepads scattered around my desk and throughout the house are not enough. Sometimes you need the details.

At the age of fifteen, begin a long distance relationship with Miles, the skinny son of one of your dad’s college friends. Visit him regularly and remain infatuated, even after he looks deep into your eyes and says, “I want to give you oral pleasures.”

On your third trip, he’ll ask, “Do you think you’re a lesbian?”

Your silence will allow him to launch into his fascinating theory on the feminine confusion: “Every girl I’ve met has been worried she’s a lesbian, and it’s all bullshit. Of course they’re not all lesbians—there’d be no straight women left!”

Back in your sleepy Somerset town for your sixteenth birthday, hold a party in your garden. Watch your ex-boyfriend, Peter, crawl into a tent with a girl from the sixth form, and finish the nearest bottle.

Position yourself in the exact centre of your lawn, so that tents surround you on all sides. Swallow the July air and growl from your lungs, “I’m a lesbian!”

The next day, listen to your best friend, Harriet, relate the details you can no longer remember. Exhibit appropriate amounts of shame as she recalls that you kissed Leah (Peter’s most recent ex-girlfriend), then Jenna (a not terribly attractive girl with a penchant for Lincoln Park hoodies), before pouncing upon Harriet herself and claiming to have loved her for years. Show suitable astonishment at the last part, despite your three-year infatuation with this elegant, acned Barbie-doll. Plead ignorance, apologize profusely, and blame the Bailey’s.

When the summer holidays end and you return to school, ignore any choking noises in the bathroom and whispers of, “That’s the nerdy girl who gets drunk and becomes a lesbian.”

However, take your responsibility to maintain this reputation seriously. Do not be discouraged by the popular girls who avoid you, and feel free to punch your male friends with whom conversations about your fantasies always end, “But you’re bi though.”

Develop a collection of witty responses behind which to hide your feelings of isolation. For example, when Cheat slouches beside you in the common room as you’re eating a granola bar and asks, “Is that a dyke bar?” respond quite simply, “Yes, I’m about to shove it up my cunt.” Although he’ll run out of the room in shocked disgust, his opinion of you as a lesbian will have risen.

Live on the glory of your birthday night for as long as possible, but when the opportunity arises, solidify your shaky sexuality in the minds of your peers. At a house party, whirl around the Lambrusco-littered living room in search of Leah. Kiss on the couch until she deserts you for a rugby player. Return Anna’s gaze from a corner and sidle up to her with what you think is a flirtatious line about getting another drink. When she admits that you are the first girl she has kissed, crack jokes about popping her lesbian cherry because this is the most that will ever mean in a small town in the South West.

When some months later you’ve become so disheartened by the heteronormativity of your small town surroundings that you decide lesbians are a myth, content yourself with reading Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit and writing imaginary love letters to Harriet. While your friends laugh that your latent lesbianism is a harmless quirk, privately lament the plight of the outcast in society as if it were still Victorian England. After watching Tipping the Velvet, come to the conclusion that it would actually have been easier to be gay then than it is now.

At a New Year’s Eve party, drink mysteriously mixed cocktails and team up with your friend Toby to form a terribly clever club called “Ibs.” With an air of superiority, peruse the party declaring yourselves Ibs until someone politely informs you that it’s pretty obvious what you mean and are you both aware that you’ve just announced your dubious desires to the entire sixth-form?

Arrive at university believing yourself at last free to be who you want amongst crowds of like-minded, academic students who will talk about books and art and sit around wearing berets and planning their great artistic futures.

Spend your first weeks in York going to Weatherspoons, drinking until you throw up and talking about what happened in Eastenders. Accept the compromise that you cannot have everything but at least you’ll no longer have to hide your sexuality.

However, in the queue for the Gallery nightclub your netball-playing neighbour, Hannah, will turn to exclaim, “There’s a lot of gays here, don’t you think?” Mumble that you hadn’t noticed and crawl back into your cheap Ikea closet.

At pubs and bars, always position yourself with your back to the wall. This way, while you friends chat about Championship Manager 4, your eyes can slip undetected from pert denim to impossible bosoms. Your 3am dreams are of breasts the size of navel oranges, tweaked from smooth torsos, but the girls you see have only the fake spheres of foam bras, so your gaze will rest more easily upon flat stomachs and sprayed-on jeans. You don’t mean to stare, but it’s impossible not to; girls have to know this when they dress like that. However, you’re no Tetley’s drinking, football playing lad who can buy them three drinks then force your tongue between their lips while you fumble for your keys, so you’ll learn to be subtle.

After a few months of being straight at university and accidentally sleeping with a boy in your seminar group, discover Gaydar.com.

Create a profile that describes your profound complexity as a human being. Sift through your inbox, deleting the sordid, the butch, the old, the couples and the frankly weird. You’ll be left with a petite girl with vociferous opinions about gay rights and a love for Ani DiFranco. Send a nervous email suggesting you meet. Go to bed dreaming of yellow days holding hands in parks and scarlet nights under silk sheets.

Wait at the corner of the Minster in a pool of lamplight, noting the atmosphere is so charged that this must be the night you’ll fall in love. Finally, while fiddling in your bag for something to make you feel less idiotic, hear your name. Look up and let your eyes settle on a person of about twelve.

Though you’re short yourself, no more than 5’1”, this girl is a good three inches smaller than you. Also, her arms somehow reach to her knees, making her look a little like a primate.

Feeling terrible for having such a shallow reaction to her appearance, follow her to a bar. Make excruciating small talk for as long as you possibly can without running out of the place screaming, “Monkeys are invading!”

Warily try Gaydar again. Arrange to meet HelenDalek23 in a pub by the river. Arrive to find that she is beautiful in a gothy sort of way. Over many pints, learn that she is a Trekkie but forgive this minor detail because of her cool nose-ring.

After last orders, stumble into Reflex, the club with the revolving dance-floor, and proceed to entertain the middle-aged men that make up the clientele by participating in a nothing-short-of-filmic rotating kiss.

Two days later, meet at The Terrier. After one pint and some suitably coy uncertainty, accept the invitation back to her house.

Sit on the floor of her cosy living room as she rolls a joint. Smoke self-consciously as you talk and flirt. Arrange yourself sexily on the floor with your head on a cushion gazing up at her, occasionally pinching yourself to check this is real.

Wake up. Realise it is 2am and you are still arranged sexily on the floor, with a blanket thrown over you. Creep around the house and detect Helen fast asleep high up in a cabin bed. Consider joining her, but sheepishly opt to curl into a foetal position alone on the couch.

In the morning, accept a cup of tea and mention nothing about the night before. Never hear from Helen again.

Give up on life and love and devote yourself to your studies and the drama society. Don’t check Gaydar until two weeks before the end of summer term. Find a series of emails from a girl desperate to meet you because you both live on campus. Think, what is there to lose?

Meet at Wentworth bar. Nadia will be Lebanese and beautiful, and an incredible flirt. Allow her to buy you a beer and lead you back to her room in the graduate block. One month and two days before your nineteenth birthday, peel a pink shirt from Nadia’s torso and hesitantly place your lips to her left nipple. Fall easily when she pushes you to her queen size bed, and hear, as through a dream: “This is it!”

*

Google “cunnilingus.”

Read a Wikipedia article about tracing A-Z with your tongue in order to stimulate the clitoris in a regular but unrepetitive way. Apply this new wisdom and enjoy the ecstatic gratitude of your first girlfriend.

In the morning, sip Nadia’s sweet black coffee and decide this is bliss.

However, the piping liquid will sour on your tongue as she murmurs: “I should tell you something. I have a fiancé back in Lebanon – Raef. I told him about you and he wants us to have a lot of fun. Is that okay with you baby?”

After Nadia’s fled to her fiancé, spend the summer of 2005 stage-managing a play in London. Every day for six weeks, travel by tube to Earl’s Court. Spend three hours a day bathing actors in light, then retire to the bar downstairs with your boisterously American co-Stage Manager, Becca.

On your third or fourth drink, lower your voices only slightly to discuss sex. Listen to your Amazonian friend’s debauched tales of sleeping with her professor, cheating on her boyfriend, sneaking girls past her homophobic parents, and currently attempting to seduce both the director and the sound designer. Offer moderated versions of your own exploits, painting Nadia as the tragically doomed love of your life.

At some indeterminate point after the final curtain of closing night, Becca will slur, “Everyone here knows I like you. Why haven’t you kissed me yet?”

It’s important here that you do not move silently towards Becca to grant her wish.

Instead, reply that you really have to leave because the last tube is in five minutes. Mutter you’re sorry and that you hope she has a good flight. Assure her you’ll still visit her in Philadelphia for New Year’s Eve and hug her goodbye.

Miss the last tube and get lost in Putney trying to figure out the night buses.

In September, board a British Airways Boeing 777 at Heathrow and begin an exchange year at a picturesque New England women’s college.

Initially, encounter only international students. Hang out with two sisters from Oman who arrived with thirteen suitcases, tell you they really want to pluck your eyebrows and regularly mention that they hope there aren’t a load of “lessies” living nearby.

Once the semester starts, sign up for the fall play. After two weeks of rehearsals, choke on your curly-fry as Jen asks, “So, are you gay or what?”

Gawp when she tells you the cast were placing bets because Mia had noticed your rainbow socks, bracelet and belt, but Liz had thought that meant something different in Europe.

Tell her no one has questioned your sexuality before. Conclude that you are pleased, though a little embarrassed, and write a mental note to throw away said socks, bracelet and belt.

Greedily consume the queer spectacles of your surroundings. Imagine yourself part of any one of the attractive fem couples you see. Dream of U-Haul clichés and a feline filled future.

In October, donate eleven inches of your hair to Locks Of Love. Two weeks later, crop the remaining bob into boyish spikes.

Meet Lizzie Stein.

Fall for Lizzie Stein because she listens to Aimee Mann, has handcuffs hanging on her wall and introduces you to But I’m A Cheerleader. Howl to Tori Amos in her SUV as she reaches sixty at midnight along 47^th Street with the windows open and her hand upon your thigh.

Learn too late that Lizzie Stein is in love with Lauren Cooper.

Over the coming months, accept your role as second best and willingly skip through the snow at midnight to hang out with Lizzie on the days Lauren snubs her. Write terrible poetry about this “cruel cat who wraps herself in leather and winds (you) on her claws,” and gleefully title the paper for your queer poetry class, “The Hermeneutics of Flirtation In (Gertrude) Stein’s Tender Buttons.”

When Lauren likes Lizzie, comfort yourself with Joanne. Joanne knits while watching House and has a dental dam taped to her door. Sleep in her bed three nights a week and own your own toothbrush in her dorm, but never kiss Joanne. Frustrated and confused, ruin the whole thing by sending an email that expresses something about enjoying spending nights with her but wishing you could do a little more than sleep.

She won’t reply.

When the semester ends, take Becca up on her offer to visit her for New Year’s and arrive in Philly unsure what to expect..

At 11.34 on your third evening, Becca will sway to Billie Holliday in her living room. When she asks you to dance, take her palm. Giggle about last summer, and place your arms around her waist so your hips touch. Act bashful when she says you’re beautiful, and, on tiptoes, initiate a kiss.

Spend the rest of your visit sneaking into her bedroom after her parents have gone to bed and stifling each other’s moans.

Watch Brokeback Mountain together and agree to—whatever happens and whoever you each marry—meet up every few years in exotic countries for forbidden affairs.

Leave Philadelphia, once again broken-hearted by circumstance, but determined to return in the summer.

Back at college, decide it’s time to purge Lizzie from your system. Date Alexandra, a Jewish coxswain from Connecticut who voted for Bush and moisturises three times a day. Enjoy making out on her bed every other afternoon, and listen patiently while she whines about her ex.

After three weeks of kissing Alex, realise, despite her incredible four-hours-in-the-gym-a-day-body, you never miss her when she cancels a date and you are still IM-ing Lizzie Stein about Baise-Moi and theories of bondage into the early hours of each morning.

Before you have a chance to raise this lack of chemistry with Alex yourself, find her at your door wanting “to talk.” She has come to inform you that she really likes you, but she’s getting back with Cassandra.

Wish her luck.

Recommence making out with Lizzie on the occasions Lauren rejects her.

Become agonizingly aware that everyone on the campus except you is having hot lesbian sex and develop consecutive crushes on Caitlin, Althea, Eliza, Julie and Jen. Act painfully self-conscious around them all, but ask none of them out.

Wear you new vintage velvet jacket to a dorm party and dance with Andi. She’ll get your attention by flashing one pancake breast and you’ll develop an immediate infatuation with this mohawked Twiglet.

However, agree to walk back to your dorm with Christine Butler to pick up more alcohol. Sleep with Christine, who wears sweatpants to class, plays Apples To Apples and doesn’t trim her fingernails.

Travel over the summer, allowing for a three-day stop in Philly.

Smile politely at the unknown boy who answers the door and ask for Rebecca.

Watch happily as Becca emerges from the kitchen. Respond enthusiastically to her hug and imperceptibly replace your real smile with a forced one when she gushes, “This is Tom. Remember I told you about my ex? We got back together.”

Back in York for your final year of university, muster the courage to attend an LGBT party. This won’t be the flamboyant and proud experience you have come to expect, but a limp gathering in a campus bar of the few dozen students who do not quite blend into the gap-year bronzed, public school kids who dominate York’s population. Talk only to funny-looking Freshers who walk like boys. Remain on the mailing list but fail to attend another event.

*

Kiss solely boys, and only them accidentally, but talk openly about the women you dated in America and revel in your status as the one lesbian in the Drama Society.

After a performance in May, bump into a guy wearing an identical shirt to your own. Laugh when Ellie runs up to you and cries, “You guys are York’s Posh & Becks!” Plan with this boy a fake “hot date” to stir up gossip amongst your friends.

Have an enormous amount of fun on this and other hot dates, safe in the knowledge that Sam doesn’t see the point in dating (he told you so on the first hot date), and, anyway, he knows you’re a lesbian.

Three weeks before you turn twenty-one and four days before graduation, invite Sam to the Leaver’s Ball. At 4am, loitering outside the fancy racecourse building, he’ll pluck up the courage to kiss you. Instead of reverting to your natural scorn of all things heterosexual, delicately lift your heeled foot onto the step behind it. Instead of thinking about the satin-gowned girls beside you, steady yourself with a hand upon Sam’s shoulder. Instead of worrying you’ll never be respected as a queer artist if you kiss white, middle-class boys with English degrees, softly glance from his mildly pretentious cravat to his neatly shaved jaw. Instead of remembering your ambition to have a civil partnership and six cats, imagine being held in Sam’s arms. Fantasize about spending the summer together before making a long distance relationship work while you get your MA in Chicago, then moving in together upon your return. Finally, press your X chromosomes to his offered Ys and kiss him back.

“I’m too young to be a grandmother,” I told Paul, over the phone. Puberty had come to my fledgling lady killer. He was taller now and his body was filling out. I didn’t have to force him into the shower or remind him to brush his teeth. Satin sheets were on his bed. Every waking hour, after school, was spent with Ellen. Once there even came a call—could he sleep over?

“Have you spoken to him about precautions?” Paul asked, kind of chuckling, although I knew the thought of sex sent him spiraling. Paul’s women were legend and kept surfacing, in Filene’s Basement, once, among the racks and harried shoppers, a striking older woman, titian-haired, make-up artfully applied, obviously well off. Me, in grubby tennis sneakers. Tra la! And once, in Florida, when I’d been playing bridge, a blonde who’d known him in Vegas. They both remembered him as a natty charmer and seemed surprised that we were still together. Maybe I seemed a real come-down for someone that Ava Gardner stood up Frank Sinatra to be with, but he was my go-to guy, when circumstances warranted. More than a significant other he was like that pencil-thin mustache guy who would always rescue Pauline off the railroad tracks in the silent movies. He had a mustache and the name on my birth certificate was Pauline, but I lied when I first met him, and the name I pulled out of thin air was his mother’s. Not a coincidence. Fate!

“Precautions? Are you kidding?” I answered. “ He’s got enough condoms stashed away in his room to start a drugstore. He must have bought a gross.”

Sean’s closet space where he slept was off limits though I’d stick my arm in every now and then to hang up his clothes. One Saturday, my customary day off to do the laundry and other nesting duties, I opened the door a crack, without knocking, so that I wouldn’t wake him if he were still asleep. “Got any quarters?” I asked, when I saw his open eyes leering at me.

“Get OUT of my room. Get your own quarters. I don’t have any.” The light of my life, my raison de tre. How had I failed? The walls were covered with enough signs to convict me of what? Danger Keep Out, in three languages, MBTA No Trespassing, the entire map of the Transit Authority, with its orange, green and red routes, spreading like capillaries across the city, even an orange sign: Danger Men Working Ahead. Here and there were evidences of his artistic temperament:cannisters of spray paint neatly aligned on a shelf, illegibly intertwined graffiti signatures on the walls, and a portrait of a Hawaiian dancer with exposed, lush breasts gracing the inside of his door. Michael Jackson’s poster reigned supreme.

My arms were filled with a basket of dirty laundry and I had to manipulate the lock in the front door knob so I wouldn’t get locked out. “Your father’s coming. You better get up,” I said, which elicited a muffled groan. I had a hard time saying the word “father.” I usually said: “You know who.” Now that Sean was a teenager, my ex was taking an interest, calling every other day or so and harassing me, saying I should take away the television, as if he knew how to raise a child better than I did. Cut off Sean’s television? I’d be the first person to admit that he watched entirely too much TV, but cut him off completely, and he’d have me up on child abuse.

Except for this fetish for the MBTA, and a penchant for turning concrete walls into psychedelic masterpieces, Sean seemed to be a normal, cantankerous teenager. What with my crazy family, the odds had been against it. Ellen’s family, on the other hand, seemed normal: a apron-wearing mother who didn’t have to work and baked, a father who worked as a salesman in a department store, and two other children, a boy and a girl. No wonder Sean enjoyed being there. It gave him a chance to feel as if he were part of a real family, play Monopoly, for example, which isn’t as much fun when there’s only two.

I took the laundry to the basement and walked to the corner store to get some quarters. There was a sign in front of the register We Do Not Give Out Change, but I was a regular, and had no problem. While the clothes were washing, I whisked through my housekeeping. The small apartment didn’t take long to clean. My predictable Ex would hit the bathroom the minute he came in to check out the toilet.

When he did come, Sean was in the shower and I was doing last night’s dishes. Letting them pile up in the sink was one of the perks of being unattached. At night I never had the urge to do more than shove a little Haagen Daz down my gullet, a pleasure I consistently felt I deserved after a long, lonely day in the trenches,driving taxi, babbling my head off to one customer after another.

When I finished the dishes, I came out of the kitchen, wiping my hands on my hips. I knew the first thing out of his mouth would be a complaint and I knew that one reason he refused to give me more money for child support was because he was itching to be a full time father, bored ,perhaps, with his BMW, his Apple computer, his regulation-sized pool table, his woofers and tweeters. Who knows? He’d never shown much interest when there were diapers to be changed, swings to be pushed, irate teachers to be faced.

“Why isn’t he ready? You knew I was coming for him today.” I hated to hear a grown man whine.

“He’s a big boy, now. He keeps track of his own appointments.”

He opened the closet door to peek in at all the contraband. His baby fine hair was beginning to grey at the temples. The jeans he wore had a just-bought look and so did the shiny new cowboy boots. Had he taken great pains so I’d think what a catch I’d missed? A smile played around the corners of his mouth in what I guessed was a nervous smirk. Sean was probably the only bank president’s kid in the country who slept in a closet. A jolt of remorse coursed through my body nearly knocking me off my feet. Maybe I should have stayed in Florida where Sean had his own bedroom and bath, everything color coordinated. “It’s not funny,” I said. “He doesn’t get enough fresh air in there.”

When Sean entertained, up to six kids at a time could fit in this closet, all sweating, with clothes hanging in their faces. They didn’t seem to mind, but I did. The only ventilation came from a small square hole leading to the outside hall. Some night a city rat might find its way to this vent. Many was the time my headlights had picked up the sight of a nocturnal rat crossing the street in search of food. Twice a week in front of my building the trash was piled for the collectors, barely a hop, skip and a jump up to our second floor apartment.

My yuppie Ex shrugged his shoulders. “Lots of people live worse,” he said. “Quit complaining.”

We could hear the sound of the running shower and loud and clear, “Jeremiah Was a Bull Frog,” coming through the bathroom door. Sean was singing along with the tape player he kept on the clothes hamper next to his hair dryer. It had taken awhile, but Paul’s neat-freak influence had taken hold on my son, and I knew he’d be in there primping without any concept of time.

I caught the faint whiff of my Ex’s Aqua Velva aftershave. If I hadn’t felt so fat and ugly I might have dragged him into my bedroom for a quick shtup, soften him up a bit before I approached the touchy subject of more child support. The law had changed in Massachusetts and if a child was going on to college, the custodial parent was entitled to child support until the child reached twenty-one. The bathroom door opened, and Sean, wrapped in a towel, scooted past us.

I didn’t like to talk about finances within Sean’s hearing, although the niggardly dispersal of the contents of my mother-in-law’s house left no doubt in anyone’s mind that my Ex was a tightwad. We needed everything when we first moved here and we were glad to get the things he’d brought over: a few hand towels, a standing lamp with a ripped lamp shade that had been in the living room, and a blanket that might have been a family heirloom, for all I knew, ripping down the middle the first time I washed it. The day I splurged and brought home a colander and a potato peeler, we celebrated.

“You don’t know how lucky you are that he has the time for you. He’s got a girlfriend now.”

“I know. She’s coming with us, today.”

“Where are you taking them?”

“I don’t know,” he said, with another shrug. “Probably McDonald’s.”

“Bless you,” I said. “You’ve got a better stomach than I do. Sean would eat there all the time if I let him.”

“I don’t mind it. Once in a while.”

As we stood there in awkward silence, sizing each other up, seeing him there all spiffed up, I had the sense of time slipping away and the emptiness of lost passion. We were both younger than Sean was now when we’d first met, hanging around with a bunch of kids in schoolyard shadows, listening to someone’s portable radio, singing along with The Platters, Johnny Mathis, The Four Lads, Bill Haley and the Comets, memorizing every line, every shoe-bop shoe-bop. How innocent the first kiss. Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen. How bold we’d become, even after he’d bought his first car, making love on my mother’s couch within feet of her bedroom door, every Saturday night, turning the couch cushions, when we were done, to hide the semen stains.

“You’d better speak to him about this new love business,” I said, gruffly. Instead of dating other boys in college, I had braved the snowy, winding roads, a distance of a hundred and fifty miles each way, with something of the determination of a lemming. In all those weekends, my mother never once got up to get a drink of water. When I grew older, I came to the realization, with all her talk about my precious virginity, she hadn’t cared enough to interrupt. Now it was my turn, to lie sleeping with God knows what going on in the living room, sleeping the sleep of the dead, but never too tired to try to keep them honest, getting up for drinks of water from the kitchen, when I’d rather be sleeping. Paybacks are hell!

Sean came into the room, hair spiked up with gel, tail in the back, in a slight curl from the heat of the shower. He wore half a dozen silver chains, with a Playboy bunny medal that Ellen had given him, resting in the hollow of his neck. I’d put an end to that hickey business, right away. “Are you ready?” he asked his father.

“Is that what you are going to wear?” It didn’t matter what Sean wore, the question was always the same. When my son was younger and going for an extended visit, I’d have to rescue certain pairs of pants that seemed as if he were going begging. The pants he was wearing today were shredded at the cuffs and both knees showed through. Sean had used a razor blade.

“Yes, that’s what I’m wearing,” said Sean, testily. “It’s the style.”

He turned and went for the door. “Bye, Mom.”

My Ex followed meekly, his broad shoulders swaying from side to side in his leather jacket. How little concern Sean seemed to have for his father’s feelings. Served him right. If he had any feelings of desperation, he kept them well-hidden. My boy had grown up without him ever since we’d moved to Florida. In all that time, he’d only come to visit once, on a trip to Disneyland with his girlfriend. The precious childhood years had passed. The connection they should have made earlier was missing. Sean was almost as tall as he was.

“See you,” my Ex said, brusquely. “Get a job. Get a real job.”

“I do have a real job,” I countered. “What do you think I do all day, sit around and eat chocolates?”

Sean, eager to be off, reached around the door, and grabbed the leather jacket by one shoulder. “Come on Dad.” My husband’s face, so dear to me in my youth, looked back at me blankly.

I could have suggested a lot of things to lessen the tension between them, a real knock-down drag out encounter session, for example, to clear the air. But I managed to restrain myself. They would go on in this love/hate relationship which was so closely related to the subject of money, and figure it out themselves. It was safer to stay out of it and hire a lawyer if I could find one that would take me on without a retainer.

It had taken me years to resolve my own love/hate relationships. Perhaps, in figuring it out Sean would become stronger. Whenever they spoke on the phone, Sean would lock himself in the bathroom. Perhaps my husband was satisfied the way things were, a little together time, always buffeted by one of Sean’s friends. For all I knew, they could be having a great time the minute they left my door. Shoe-bop, shoe-bop, Life Could be a Dream, Sweetheart!