Love: Still the Biggest Thrill

       

    
      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EjcwIVL3s8
  


         I love Katt Williams, the comedian.  He says, in so many words, you've got to take care of the star player, and you are the star player.  Managing to take care of body and soul has its own thrills, but it's not enough.  Love is still the biggest thrill.
     
      Here's another one of my guiding philosophies:  "If Mama ain't happy, ain't nobody happy."  And by "Mama" I mean me.   I don't make everyone around me miserable if I happen to be in a bad place.  If anything, I'm more inclined to hibernate and hide out while I work through the blues.  
    
      But keeping my own self happy is a big priority.
    
       That means my own wishes and whims come first, mostly. 
      
       It means I come and go when I want, spend how I want, vote how I want, eat what I want, sleep when I want, think what I want and work the way I want. It's not accidental; I've spent a long time crafting it to be just this way.

        It's a good life in a beautiful paradise of a city, but all alone it feels empty. Even if work is going well, everyone is healthy at home, and the world is clicking away on its axis in mostly predictable ways, unless I reach out for love, to give it and get it, there's something off.  I can feel it like a sunburn that's too far under the skin to soothe.

        So my biggest thrill is love.  That's it.  Love for all of it: family, my sisters, my friends, the Grove, the critters, small kids  at the library where I work and this whole astounding gift of a life. 
   

Rayette

          When I was a little girl, I fell in love with Rayette on the parade grounds at a war college in Norfolk, Virginia.  My dad was  at the school and we lived on the army base.  She lived there, too, but she was older by two years and my big sister knew her from school.

One day I was running around barefoot through the grass and I stepped on a yellow jacket bee.  It was like fire, and sudden, and I started screaming.  Rayette swooped down from out of nowhere, dried up my tears and carried me across the neighborhood like a baby, all the way to my door.

I fell for her right then.  She had a thick french braid of long blonde hair and her wrist, right where it met her hand, was thick, too, which I really liked.  I told her I could read her palm so I could hold her hand the next day, and she laughed while I pretended and gave goofy answers like a fortune teller.

The day after that I made a picture for her in first grade.  It was a horse because she reminded me of a cowgirl for some reason.  I was big on cowgirls at age 7.  I started following her all over the place and hanging around where she would be at the park and before long she invited me over to her house.

I threw down my school stuff and said, "Mom, I'm going to my friend's."
But it was Dad at the dinette set, not Mom.
"Whose house?  What friend?" he barked.
"Just my friend, Rayette."
"Naw, you aren't going over to that sergent's house."
"Dad?! Why?"
"You got no business over there."

And that was the end of my budding love affair with Rayette.

And Now It Can Be Told

       


          I’m 22, always hot to get Jeanne alone, and having a blast in North Carolina being her carpenter’s assistant. She had a swagger I loved, and real chops when it came to building stuff. God, I was so into her.


          The town where we lived, Burgaw, was full of good old boy rednecks and poor country folks but most everyone treated us like family.

          It was because Jeanne loved honky tonks and roadhouses and she could hang with the boys, plus we made no pretenses of being straight so they were intrigued.  Until they found out we weren’t into doing them. By then it was too late and they liked us anyway.

       But there were dark clouds on the horizon on the job site. George, our foreman, got furious when Captain Jack dragged a broken down trailer onto the lot and told us to use it or else.


        To get back at Jack, George ordered a crane and put the trailer up on top of the first floor of this mansion Jack had half built, then he walled it in with cinderblocks so there was no un-doing. I think the trailer came from a prison chain gang; it smelled like puke and man-pee, and it was caving in here and there. But Jack got what he wanted.

        George had already been wooing the Widow Bowen, a German lady from town who idolized him and had a bunch of money, so he proposed and quit the same day. It was an elegant and well-timed “fuck you” to a guy who deserved it, but it left Jeanne and me to take on the fall out.

         And the fall out came the very next weekend. We lived up a dirt road from Jack and from time to time his bulldog would get loose and trot down to fight with our pit bull, Halo.

      That Saturday at five in the morning we heard the dogs fighting outside. Jeanne grabbed Jack’s dog and brought it inside. She called Jack who mumbled something and hung up.

       Five minutes later he was pounding on the door, yelling, “Give me my Goddamned dog!”
       Jeanne foolishly opened the door with her hands full of bull dog and this fat bald prick punched her! Wham---knocked her right off her feet while I stood on the stairs in shock. Then he grabbed the dog and slammed the door behind him as he left.


      That was the beginning of the end of my experience in Burgaw. Shortly after that, I packed it in and came back home. My girlfriend followed in a few months.


     But five years later I dropped a dime on old Jack as payback. I heard he got Alzheimers in the federal pen and ended his days a drooling idiot. When they arrested him on the deck of his yacht he said, “I bet it was those fucking dykes.”

        No, just one, Jackie.

        Moral of the story: Don’t mess with me and mine.

 (See also: Rude security guards, Republican pages, lawyers who live on my street and the deaf/half blind.)

Outed by Kin

          When I was 19, I went to this Gay & Lesbian Expo downtown at the Wolfson campus. I got lost and started going the wrong way down a one way street off Flagler. Then a cop on a horse clomped up to help, but when he looked in the Gremlin, he saw a big roach on the end of this multicolored feather clip in the ashtray.

          He said, “What’s that?”
          I sat there with my mouth hanging open.
         Then he said, “OK, hand it over.” So I did.


         I told him I was going to the campus.  He dropped the roach onto the asphalt, made the horse’s hoof scuff it, then gave me good directions on where to park. He even gave back the roach clip I’d won at the Youth Fair.

       At the end of the day there was a group on the list called, “Lesbians, Etc.” It looked interesting so I signed up along with 55 others.


          One person after another talked about how there’s nothing to do for lesbians in Miami except for a couple of bars owned by gangsters. At the end we all decided to send around a phone sheet for anyone who wanted to have a regular weekly meeting.

        It was how this group called “ The Friday Night Women’s Group” got started. We met at different women’s houses every week, and at I met Jeanne at one of the meetings. It was an instant attraction when she lit a wood match off her boot heel to give light my Winston while we sat around a bonfire.


         I fell for Jeanne because she was hot, but then it deepened after we’d been together a few years and I got to know her on more levels. Then it was love/hate.  Or love/confusion... She had a way of refusing to see the dark clouds of chaos looming overhead and thought if she ignored them hard enough they would go away, magically.   She taught me that most bad situations almost never get to Worst Case Scenario but I also took away this lesson:  ignoring a problem makes it all more likely to flare up like a hemorrhoid.

        When we first got together, I was drunk with love. So drunk I let the world slide and unofficially moved into her place leaving my sister/ roommate Ann hanging.

       I came back to the apartment for the first time in days from U.M. one afternoon.  Some poor bastard had all his stuff on the curb, it looked like.   Clothes, boxes of books, the works. I laughed when I saw it. Then I went upstairs and saw my key didn’t fit the door. Shit! That must’ve been my stuff in the trash!

      I called Dad in a panic and said, “Ann went crazy! She changed the locks on our door and threw away everything I own!” and Dad said, “Come on over to the house, Janie. We’ll talk about it.”

       I drove over with my curb-rescued things and we sat down in the den. He said, “Ann tells me you’re in a homa-sexual affair or something with some old gal. What’s this about?”

     I was blindsided. I said, “Her name is Jeanne and she’s not some old gal. I love her.” We’d only been together a little while, but I really did love her already. I was pretty sure.

     Dad said, “Well, who is she? What does she do? Does she have any education”

      I said, “She manages a hardware store. And she’s a carpenter.”

      He said, “Are you thinking of dropping out of college?”

      I said no. It didn’t even occur to me. Then for a split second I thought he was going to tell me I was done with school since I could never afford U.M on my own.

        He said, “Good. It seems like one of you ought to have an education.”

        Then he told me that all he ever wanted as a father is for his kids to be happy. He told me he loved me. He also said he didn’t think it was a natural lifestyle. Also, he could understand women being together, but not men.

         He told me not to bring “that woman” around the house because he “didn’t want the girls exposed to it, they’re too young.” He said I shouldn’t say anything to my grandparents, either, but they lived in Georgia so that was no issue.

          As for the problem with Ann, it turns out I forgot/ blew off my half of the rent that month, went AWOL and worst of all, came one day and got the dining room table that had been Mom’s for my new girlfriend’s place without even asking. So that’s why she was pissed.

        We talked it out, I hauled her table back and pretty soon Jeanne was welcomed into my father’s house because his wife really liked her and insisted.   Dad never stopped calling her “that gal” but he was always cordial, if not friendly, with her for the next five years we were together.

         Looking back, it was a real gentle  coming-out. It was like wrapping a loose tooth in string then tying the string to a door knob and slamming the door shut. Not a real shock because everyone knew that tooth was coming out and not tense since it happened before I could worry and brood on it.

         I’m incredibly lucky to have the kind of father who would react so calmly and with that kind of grace.   It wasn’t perfect acceptance, but he’s come around even more in the thirty years since, and there was never any doubt he loves me.

Burying Becky

         

In second grade, the class gerbil had babies. There were five of them so the teacher sent home permission slips to see who might take one home. Seven of us signed on, and even though Mom wasn’t crazy about rodents, she said I could have one.



          It turned out 14 of us wanted the five that were there, and so we put names in a hat and I got to pick first. And it was me! The very first baby gerbil was mine. I had a cage with a wheel and an upside down water bottle for him, with cedar shavings to play in and hamster food.


        I took my gerbil home the very first night and when we came back the next morning to class, the mother gerbil had eaten all the rest of the babies. That’s what the teacher told us, and the other kids cried and generally flipped out about it, but that’s nature for you.


       No one’s parents got called, no grief counselors, nothing. It was just one of those “oh, well” situations kids were expected to roll with back then. If it happened today there’d be some hell of an outcry. Lawsuits. Channel 7’s Help Me Howard. It’d be an ongoing drama, but not in 1967 when I was seven.


        I named my gerbil Becky after my best friend, Becky Hayes, and she was very gentle with her bites. I gave her a lot of love and care in return. She wasn’t a cuddler, but I loved her. We all did.


        But after two years she died.
        The day she died, I felt it hard because I hadn’t gone through anything dying before. But the pain was tempered by the fact that she never really warmed up to humans, me included. I was always wary of her, too, because I knew what she was capable of doing.

       I mean, the moms eat the babies.

       I brought her into Mom and Dad’s bedroom the morning she turned up stiff. There was no thinking, “There’s something wrong with the gerbil.” I knew the score.


       Mom saw it in my hand and said, “Uh-oh. Bill?”

       Then Daddy said, “Come here, doll.” He kind of poked her, then he took her from me and looked at her teeth, for some reason. He said, “Welp. Yep. She’s gone.” Then he looked at me and back at the gerbil then back at me. I started getting borderline weepy, where the tears hang there but don’t come down.

          Becky got lost in the house  the week before and Ann said, “What if she gets into the baby food? Or my shoes? Or eats rat poison? These are all things rodents do, Janie, so you’d better find it.”

       Dad said, “Well, you better tell Laura to look out for her. If she doesn’t know it’s a pet she’s liable to throw it in the chili and feed it to y‘all for lunch..” Laura was our maid from Phenix City, across the Alabama line.

       Richard said, “I think I saw her do that last week.”

       We found her by following the trail of turds that led behind the refrigerator, but I was afraid she had eaten poison while she was loose. There’s no way Mom would leave poison around with all those children and toddlers, but kids worry like that.


       So it was guilt tears, too. Just then, Dad got teary eyed, too, and said, “She was a fine gerbil and a faithful pet. She served with honor. I guess we need to give her a decent funeral.” I nodded and then Mom and Dad each gave me hugs and Ann handed me aluminum foil, a plastic baggy and a paper towel wad.


         Then Ann said, “God would probably want you to do all that stuff on the back porch. Because it’s Sunday.” Mom agreed so I put Becky’s body in a watch box out back. After breakfast and KP chores, we got the casket and went by station wagon to Rigdon Field where Rich played Little League.


          It was me, Dad and Nancy in the funeral procession. We went into the woods behind the snack stand to find a peaceful place.

          Mom gave us cut lilies from her garden and Mrs. Cox gave us two red roses with the thorns broken off; one for each year Becky lived with us. We got a cross made out of popsicle sticks and glue from Ann and Mom. And at the gravesite Dad said the speech about how there is a season, turn, turn, turn. And more about how we stand before our maker and Becky could be proud.


         Then Dad brought out a folding GI spade shaped like a snake’s head and dug a hole in the muddy clay. We buried her there and we all said things we liked about her. Then we sang “Amazing Grace” but just the first part. No sense over-doing it.



        On the way back, we went to Circle Grocery and Dad got me five Big Buddy bubble gum whips. Each one was a full foot long. Laid end to end they were taller than me.

No wonder I always suspected I was his favorite.

Barney's Vagina

          It's my nephew Ben's third birthday and he's wild about barney the purple dinosaur and huge construction trucks.  I got him a dump truck and what's more,   we rented a Barney costume for the big party at his house later that afternoon.

      The costume was big with a huge, football-style helmet for his big purple head.  There were a lot of parts to that simple looking outfit, and no instructions.  I got into the thing, stepped into the special barney boots and put on the special barney gloves.   The last part of the costume was a nasty looking yellowed bed pillow.  The weather was hot so I decided to let my own flab do overtime and leave the bed pillow stuffing in the bottom of the costume box.

    When we got the pictures back, there I was as Barney.  And it turned out the pillow was a vital part of the appeal and without it I was sporting a big slit that looked for all the world like Barney with a vagina!

Random Quotes from My Friend Sam

Here are recent quotes from my friend Sam, age 5:


“My sister is in Chicago. Mommy left her there.  Or Kentucky.”   Sam is an only child.

“I have to do all the work. I make the bed, clean the house, do the wash and make the food.
Me: Wow.
Sam: Yeah. I had to make her breakfast today.
Me: “What did you make?
Sam: Tuna sandwich.


: “Janie, I’m scared. Rex is going to get killed and then what will happen to him? And who’s going to help the people? With their grenades?"    ...While playing an online Star Wars game.