Living In A 55+ Community

Some frowned skeptically when we said we were building a home in a 55+ community in Rancho Mirage, CA called Del Webb, especially after they got a glimpse of the website. The Lifestyle Director. The planned activities. Pickleball. Home models that had a dedicated garage room for a golf cart. Would we be content in such an artificially-created and controlled environment?

Citing a minimum age requirement, to our minds, meant a discerning demographic. These were the folks who had outgrown the shallow pursuits of youth — the chasing of status, the desperation to gain the affirmation of others.

“No, no, no,” we corrected our friends. “You misunderstand. We won’t be actually participating in any of that nonsense. But we ARE over 55, and it will be nice to be in a neighborhood free of unsupervised kids and bikes and prams.”

But we actually began to think of it as an endless loop of a drive-in horror film: Dawn of the Del Webb Dead.

Let me say this upfront: this isn’t the fault of Del Webb. The blame is as much with us, that we bought into the marketing’s veneer and didn’t look enough beneath the surface to find a whole shit ton of wrinkles and unrealized need.

Del Webb wasn’t 55+. It was 70+. We were never inconvenienced by strollers. That much was true. No, we were blinded by the chrome of walkers. LIFE ALERT was the jewelry of choice. A lot of plaid shorts, dark socks collapsed around the ankle, hard dress shoes…and that was just on the ladies. We met more Karens and Gladys Kravitzes than you can shake an assistive device at, most of them wearing leopard print, with bright white veneers as big as playing cards. The Senior Moments of Del Webb would warrant a truckload of stopwatches.

And, BTW, there were children: we didn’t count on the grandkids and great-grandkids who come to visit every weekend and populate the community pool, dashing around and splashing everyone as their chaperone’s jaws go slack during their afternoon nap.

Del Webb has a large LGBTQ+ percentage. It even boasted a Rainbow Club…rendered meaningless when so many straight “allies” eagerly joined that they outnumbered the gays and it turned into something as benign as the Wine Appreciation Society. At one point, I half-seriously suggested starting a club entitled ‘Gay Men Who Like Cock’ just to exclude the wizened fag hags. It seemed to be more about “walking” women, for whom Kotex was a distant memory, who were thrilled to have a gay male friend to tell them how pretty they were even though they weren’t.

Most of the gay men groomed as though it were still 1983. I cannot begin to count the sweaters loosely knotted around shoulders, stickpins, popped collars and feathered silver (with unflattering mustard undertones) hair. Many seemed to cling to Lisa Birnbach’s ‘The Official Preppy Handbook’ as their style guide.

What we also discovered: many of The Eldergay, in their “former lives”, had been married and had grandkids. I don’t have much patience for that. This isn’t 1812. Sorry you had no courage to be your Authentic Self until you were 68, but I’m not interested in hearing the torments of your closet. By marring, you grabbed the low-hanging fruit — so to speak — and hurt a ton of people in the process. Telling us how you “snuck out” to frolic with men doesn’t make you sly and mischievous. It makes you a deceptive adulterer.

Along those lines, we also intuited many of the men here in traditional heterosexual unions were on the “downlow”. Within a week of move-in, a graying gentleman in the community married an especially-precious, Madras-loving nymph, greeted me via Facebook Messenger, then began asking a series of increasingly-intimate questions. When did I know was gay? Had I been with women? Were Greg and I monogamous? I replied as blandly as possible, thinking I would have preferred a green bean casserole from the Welcome Wagon.

Another couple, in our one and only evening in their company, candidly offered they had a “very open” relationship. This was over our first drink, so this was clearly setting the stage for something more. Who I was meant to pair off with: the one with enough sun damage to fill the appointment books of a dozen dermatologists or the bitter, sarcastic partner whose jeans were belted near his tits? There must’ve been some misunderstanding: we were looking to share interest, not spouses.

And cliques! Oh! the cliques! Utterly convinced they were tastemakers and arbiters of all that was good in Del Webb. Full-disclosure: I am very wary of clubs and groups. I never really had one as a kid, and in adulthood came to regard them as allied conformity, a smug unanimity, freed from thinking on their own.

Unluckily for us, we lived quite close to one especially precious specimen. I’ll call her Missy. She essentially wears a sandwich board begging the community to ‘Notice Me,’ since her husband — a disagreeable fellow with a beard that looks more like a patch of wiry whisker he missed shaving — doesn’t. They clearly loved their wine, brought in by trunkload. I don’t begrudge anyone a fondness for grape; I only wish they could have helpfully broken said boxes for recycling, rather than allowing them, along with CHEWY.com boxes, to bounce around their walkways.

They didn’t much like staying home together. That Missy, she needed affirmation, so they’d turn up at every block party, fundraiser, clubhouse brainstorming session, garage gathering or housewarming with lawn chairs and matching flasks.

Missy especially cherished plastering her Facebook page with a series of personal pleas. No problems there…until, dissatisifed with the responses (there were often none), she aggressively invaded and destroyed the official Del Webb FB Groups.

Where might I buy an outdoor clock?

Help me choose the right tile for our spa.

She needed advice on upholstery wallpaper, outdoor furnishings, a window washer…”but nothing too pricey”. She always stressed affordability.

And the photographs! She would memorialize and post nearly every meal, usually involving a form of eggplant smothered in a red sauce and resembling roadkill, then tease us with “And what’s your favorite Eye-talian recipe?”

To break up the dinner pics, she’d often update her profile photo with something snapped way too close, exposing crooked lipstick or powder caked around one nostril. When those didn’t yield the attention she craved, she’d unearth her high school Senior photograph and encourage others to do the same with a “cute caption”.

As someone who had common sense noted wryly to me “She doesn’t even realize she’s the joke of the community.”

Add in two yipping dogs no larger than rodents she’d drag into Gelson’s for “support”, dyed black hair that didn’t quite disguise a bald spot and a cement rabbit figurine in the front yard whose tail had broken off and you get the picture.

And what serves as the ironic twist ending to this rant is that Missy markets herself as a life coach, the woman who requires an informal committee to decide when she should wipe her own butt.

The conflicts of interest ran rampant. A member of the HOA, a dull man with a slow look, had an insincere husband who advertised himself as a “concierge” to the community, which I took to mean he pinched off full catheters and changed light bulbs for old people afraid of stepstools. So when an issue comes before the Board that intersects with the husband’s little concierge checklist, to whom do we defer? And who do we reward? “Sure, I can rent your home for a week to a tourist, but sssssshhhhhhh, keep it quiet, it’s against the HOA rules and my husband is kinda on the Board.” But give them dubious credit: they had their heads up so many asses I don’t know how they could see to drive. They just couldn’t get it together enough to have much of a relationship with the children they adopted and raised. It was little wonder they became quite close with Missy.

Achieving seven decades with not a single interest is an achievement unto itself. I still cannot quite understand how someone accumulates so many birthdays yet have no hobbies, proactive or reactive. I have more than I have hours. I could have loaned them some. How many times did I hear “I don’t have anything to do” and “All the days look the same”. Maybe retirement wasn’t for you, dipshit, if you got that much validation from you did for a wage. Venturing to the clubhouse in pursuit of bad coffee, companionship and conversation seems not only lonely, but vaguely narcissistic. Maybe no one wants to hear endless anecdotes about your Midwestern funeral home and how you did it up “all Victorian”.

I think the final straw — as if the excruciating sock hops at The Westin ballroom across the street, comedy nights with comics no one had ever heard of, overpriced food truck get-togethers weren’t enough — was a smug vanity musical production about Del Webb itself. Besides the obvious, built-in exclusionary component of it, what could possibly be said about an overly-zealous HOA and a speed limit of 25? How does one parody something that IS a parody? Well, you rip off lyrics and music from famous Broadway songs and call rehearsals that are more about getting on-and-off the stage without a hip fracture, then times its premiere so it doesn’t interfere with the Blue Plate Special. The subsequent reviews were predictable, that so-and-so “stopped the show”. So did unexpected fires and, in the case of Del Webb, a choking fit in the audience. Before this self-absorption trickled into our own psyches — I’ve sadly seen several folks drink the Del Webb cult Kool-aid that should know better — we KNEW it was time to vamoose this big, yet very small, community of people terrified they were no longer relevant.

We also acknowledged some gratitude, that the move had confirmed that our pre-move editing had been prudent…unlike 99% of the residents we met. We went into homes still crammed with damask upholstered sofas that sagged worse than the owner’s jowls, coffee-brown armoires that scraped the ceiling and, in one case, a dining room table that could have comfortably seated Jesus and his disciples. Our own people were the worst, forcing a dusty pew rescued from a German church and wall lights that suggested Dracula’s castle into what could’ve been a nice guest bedroom. Now: did we probably overdo the mid-century modern stuff in compensation? Maybe. But I was hellbent that we be not trapped in furniture and accessories from our glory days.

So we planned our escape with a realtor well-versed in Del Webb, efficient but arrogant, the type who favors cordovan loafers with no socks (and skinny pants just a tad too high on a pale ankle). During our initial pre-sale meetings, he was usually accompanied by his husband? life partner? lapdog? and we never quite knew why. The plus-one mostly hung out on the periphery and rarely spoke (maybe his disproportionate dentures made him self-conscious). We reasoned it was either some form of mistrust or rabid codependence whenever he reliably turned up like an accessory. Subsequent paperwork was riddled with errors — our actual street name was spelled wrong on one and, on another, the actual sales price of the house! — and our realtor raced to blame others, sometimes even us, or would text “My bad” without apology. He wasn’t used to clients who were alert enough to ask questions, follow-up or challenge some of his suppositions; he much preferred the docile and the anesthetized, the ‘On Golden Pond’ theme gently playing on the Victrola. That wasn’t us. The house sold quickly, so I suppose one could chime in that “the ends justified the means”. It wouldn’ve been more pleasant if he hadn’t been such a prick.

Perhaps other 55+ communities are not like being thrust back into Junior High School…but I doubt it. It’s the nature of it. One foot’s on the banana peel, the other is in the vestibule of a nursing home. A few we spoke to even admitted moving here was a mistake, but they didn’t have the damn energy to move.

Well, we did, and I must say, it’s nice to see people with their own pre-schoolers, tending their own front yards and curbing their dogs. It’s even nicer to not have a single person monitoring our comings and goings, why we sometimes hand-watered when we had an irrigation system (it’s called Miracl-Gro, dumbass) or coolly commenting that “you boys don’t socialize much”.

I may yet write an essay, or a fiction, for publication. Call me Grace Metalious.

Predictable Bullies and Unexpected Enablers

My own PTSD from public education certainly comes up far short as small children are being riddled with bullets at their desks, but fear is fear, and I recall an especially-traumatic chapter in my life when I, 15, a high school freshman, was terrorized by an upperclassman who, for months, made my existence a holy hell.

I had no one to tell. I came from a family that, while not especially “rough”, had a fearsome chip on their shoulder about being perceived by others as weak or, God forbid, a “sissy”. Where this mindset came from, I can only assume, was their own upbringing or peer osmosis. I can only laugh when I see television dramas in which parents counsel their taunted or vilified kid to “turn the other cheek” and “fighting never settles anything”. My parents expected, encouraged, a fight. You weren’t supposed to necessarily initiate one — but you should, if another boy called you an SOB, which implied your mother was a bitch, or cast aspersions on your family — but if one came looking for you, you’d better plant your feet and put up them thar dukes. They’d better cry. They’d better regret ever having come up against you. (The exception was a girl. You did not hit a girl, even if she kicked you in the balls. ) Compromise, bargaining, even apologizing for a slight you didn’t know you had even committed…those were revolting white flags of surrender, and I’d either be subjected to a practice boxing match with my sometimes-inebriated father or maybe grounded to my room for my cowardice.

So, if someone provoked you, this is what you did: you made a fist, you drew it back, you took aim and it landed where it landed. If you came home bloodied and bowed, well, by God, maybe next time you’d dodge better or become a better fighter. My parents didn’t want to raise no fairy.

Guess what? They already were.

This is no way to instill trust and safety and confidence in a child — to know that their own parents would not support them. It’s actually the antithesis of how you should raise kids. My parents were working class and we lived in a small, narrow-minded Midwestern town full of secrets and disappointment. This isn’t to shame or blame. There was no handbook, no Internet, no forums or chatrooms or support groups for two people, both still under 20, who had a baby boy named Rodney. They didn’t know better. And they would have been the first to defy the inertia of the police and rush into that Uvalde school, unarmed, without protection, to save any of their three children.

My hope is they would, now, but I somehow doubt it. I so admire the brave, sometimes-uncomfortable activism of teenagers today. I recall my own Dad pointedly telling me “Your voice is MINE until you are 18” when I wanted to write a Letter to the Editor to our local newspaper about censorship and was warned not to. My parents, scared of societal stigma, were not very big on taking a public stand nor its ramifications.

He — I’ll call him Bob — was from a family of boys of varying ages, most of them redheads, although he had jet-black hair. In old yearbook photographs, he always seems to have a third, chapped lip. The brothers were poor, shabbily-dressed and lived in a shingled something that looked it might collapse inward. Their mother always appeared exhausted and stooped and I think their father may have abandoned them. Life behind their front door was probably not so easy.

So maybe he wanted to make sure mine wasn’t either. Or maybe he just believed that my weakness was his strength.

Bob began to hit me in the arm every time we passed in a school hallway. Hard. I rarely saw him approaching. He would stealthily emerge from a cluster of chattering students going to and from the next class and punch my upper arm, then smirk at my shock and registered pain. I can still remember it: it was very similar to that self-satisifed smirk of Bruce Willis, pre-aphasia.

What I didn’t realize was that Bob also rode the same school bus I did every morning. Because of where he lived, he boarded before I, and was usually in the back. I think it occurred to both of us at about the same time that victim and victimizer were on the same vehicle for about 30 minutes. He would badger whoever was seated behind me to relocate and he would slap me. Sometimes he’d reach around and deliver the blow directly across the face, sometimes he’d squeeze the back of my neck, often in the presence of others who laughed or, fearful they’d be next, pretended they witnessed nothing. The bus driver had to have seen it.

I could not tell my parents. They would just encourage me to hit back and not only was it not in my nature, I was afraid of him and what a real thrashing would constitute.

I also knew better than to report the harrassment to school authorities. Any disciplinary action taken would be perfunctory and short-term and only accelerate the behavior.

I also knew that by going to a school official I would infuriate my parents. A true “man” did not meekly seek out others to fight or even mediate his battles.

So what are your options when the people who feed, clothe and house you won’t intervene?

My short-term remedy was the path of least resistance: I stopped taking the bus. I left the house early and walked a very long walk to school, usually alone. When colder and snowy weather made this impractical, I concocted another workaround; I caught a different bus on a different route several blocks away. Bob still magically found me in school hallways and the punishment now extended to grabs/pinches, twisting my skin clockwise until the hallway traffic pulled me away. The purplish welts took days to fade. More than once, he tripped me, and I fell to the hard terrazzo floor, humiliated.

I stopped going to the school bathrooms, waiting until P.E. or band (where they was a designated bathroom) to relieve myself. I would nervously scan the lunch cafeteria for signs of him; the last thing I needed was my tray of food upended for the entire student and staff body to witness.

The depression and anxiety I felt 24/7 crawls out from wherever it’s been hidden for 45 years as I type this. To not have a single advocate, absolutely no adult defense, is a hopeless feeling. I am not aware that it affected my grades, but I am sure it shattered my attention-span and academic productivity. When you are sure you’re going to be assaulted soon, you tend to back-burner reading assignments and homework.

Let me interject here that it never occurred to me shoot up my classmates; kidnap and torture Bob; torch the school to the ground; or otherwise avenge this wrong by injuring another. As much as, many mornings as I readied for school with my stomach churning, I didn’t want to exist, harming myself was also never an option. I would never leave a dark legacy of suicide for my parents to grapple with.

I was on the curb, after school, waiting for a bus when he approached. He crouched down and slapped me so hard my ear rang. It was loud enough that friends gasped as they backed away. He drew his hand back and slapped me again. I know my eyes filled with tears. Whose would not, if only in physical reaction? I continued to sit. He challenged me with disgust. “Ain’t you going to do anything?”

No, I wasn’t going to do anything. No one was going to do anything.

He ambled away with his own friends, who I am surprised in hindsight did not also hit, kick or spit on me, as my own shaken friends silently rejoined me and we worked very hard to ignore what just happened. I rode the bus home with new shame and a handprint on my face.

Then, one day, he stopped. He drew his arm back in the hall and I stiffened, readying myself for the hard thwack! to my arm, when he dropped it to his side, grinned and said, “I’ve just been kidding around!”

And so it ended abruptly. Had he found an easier mark? Did he intuit that he’d gone far enough, that repercussions of some sort were inevitable if he pushed much further? I sure wasn’t going to ask. My upper arm was grateful. I didn’t trust this pause but, as weeks passed and I found myself in his proximity, Bob had for his own reasons given up on harassing me.

He’s still alive. I found him on, of course, Facebook, where we all go to stalk old loves and determine if our colleagues are more successful than we are. We share mutual Friends, which made me queasy. He’s still in my hometown of Frankfort, Indiana, which comes as no surprise, since most of my classmates were ambitionless. He’s old and paunchy and hairless, with big yellow teeth. In a photo of a “fam” vacation at King’s Island, I see at least one grandson who bears enough of a resemblance to him that it made me shudder. From the tenor of his Posts, he’s clearly a Republican and probably, given that party’s inclination, still a bully. I was a little sorry he hadn’t died early on, I admit, of something slow-moving and painful, but it’s never that way for the most odious, is it?

Lifesaver

Everyone’s saying “gay” right now, because of Florida’s alarming march toward utter intolerance.

All I know is being gay saved my life.

Now, that’s a declaration you don’t hear often. More, it’s that being gay was a burden, an unfair handicap, a religious/political/familial torment. All of which I honor. Everyone’s path is different.

Yet I know that my difference gave me the moxie to prevail, the savvy to overcome bullshit, the drive to succeed.

Mockery destroys some. It made me stronger. I’m unsure why. I didn’t come from a family so sure and steady. In fact, some of my family were the chief perpetrators...cousins who kicked me and called me ‘Fruit Loop”, an aunt, within my earshot, who mentioned more than once that I was effeminate…even parents who didn’t quite grasp why I refused to roughhouse with other boys, why I detested the outdoors and who would occasionally lock me out to “make some goddamn friends”.

What all of this did was harden a vein within me that, frankly, some might say left me a little chilly, detached. I do not count on others too awfully much. I remember the sting of betrayal. I do not suspect a kindness, but I am cautious. I avoid large groups, for it was those where the catcalls were the loudest: on the playground in PE, the schoolbus.

Yet I say it saved my life. And it did. It compelled me to look beyond the confines of the little Indiana town that could barely manage a yawn. I craved any mention of a big city. My self-imposed isolation allowed creativity to marinate. Once at college — a liberal school, Butler University, full of fraternities and sororities but also full of dance and theatre majors, musicians, writers — I could begin to shape my own future out of the modeling clay of advanced education. I suppose I was genetically fortunate; my infrastructure had some built-in vein of survival.

I understand well the dark chasm of hopeless depression you can fall into when stigmatized, shunned, silenced. I watched friends opt for sham marriages that ultimately brought shame and sadness on everyone in its radius. Others hit the bottle a little too often, or retreated into substance abuse. A few spent too much, stayed out too late, quarreled with friends with whom they had no real quarrel. Some thought embracing promiscuity was the best defiance, and it killed them. (Remember: I graduated from college in 1983.) I saw and watched and just put one foot in front of the other, in lockstep with my life partner (now husband) Greg. We danced around family and career landmines, sometimes not so courageously. More than once I was probably my own worst enemy, making hated rivals out of people who were just, like me, trying to compete. But mostly Greg and I kept a laser-like focus on the endgame, and that was happiness and fulfillment, comfort and joy.

Being gay saved my life.

On June 25th: 'Diversionary Fires'

You can pre-order your KINDLE edition now: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0971NXZGM?ref_=pe_3052080_276849420

Tara Atwater holds the right combination of numbers to the record-breaking state lottery.

But what to do about the boyfriend, stabbed to death, on the kitchen floor?

It was, after all, his ticket.

A diversionary fire might be the answer. Left in her grandparents’ care as her reckless mother worked the Ohio carnival circuit, Tara learned about sleight-of-hand flame, purposely created to distract from something far bigger, at age nine. As decades flicker past, from the 1970s until the beginning of a global pandemic, the diversionary fire is a strange art that will touch her and those she loves. From the most marginal of means to unimagined wealth and power, Tara learns that good luck and bad luck, no matter how dense the inferno, can look a lot alike.

For a video preview, access https://youtu.be/W4Az0SCICT8

An Excerpt: The First Chapter of 'Diversionary Fires'

Chapter 1: The Reflecting Ball

By age nine, Teryl Lyn Atwater had learned about abandonment, negotiation and how to pluck suckers off a tomato plant, all helpful for what lay ahead. The lesson that would serve her best, however, was her indoctrination into the art of the diversionary fire by Grandmother Beryl, her mentor in flame.

* * * *

Teryl hated the Sturdivant man from the get-go, even before he moved in across the street.

That’s my house.

She’d had the run of the vacant property since she came to live with her grandparents. It was her playground. Hopscotch was still faintly chalked on the driveway. Hidden somewhere was a box of Lemonheads. She’d even buried a pair of her drawers after accidentally soiling them.

It was the nicest house on the block, although repairs were needed. The door of the attached garage had been only nine-tenths closed for over a year; a lush poison-something cloaked the chimney; and the front steps had chipped into little slate piles. Because it also featured a large barn-like shed independent of the house, it always commanded a higher rent.

Her ownership came to its end when a bundle of Mr. Sturdivant’s redirected mail to Hobart, Ohio, had been inadvertently left by the postman with her grandmother. With her lower lip tucked under, Beryl announced, “Boyohboyohboyohboy, how can you trust a man with a turd in his name?”

From the change-of-address affixed to the bundled envelopes, he was moving from a town called Niles in Kentucky.

“And what attracts all these Kentuckians here?”

To Beryl, the only thing worse than dealing with a Kentuckian was being one. Teryl remembered a little about Kentucky. Kentucky was goldfish in plastic baggies, rolling over railroad tracks into the next town and a Ferris wheel in a parking lot. Those were the days when she, her mother Cheryl and a man named Grover worked the fairs, living in a trailer with Monticello Attractions painted on both sides, one of a caravan that quickly set up carnivals, monster truck rallies and demolition derbies. Then Monticello Attractions said they couldn’t live in the trailer anymore. She was brought to Hobart to her grandmother Beryl, who she called Grandma Ber like bear, and Grandpa Merrill, who she called DewDad.

“Quit your spying out the screen door, Teryl Lyn.”

With her teeth out, Grandma Ber was almost unintelligible. In the three years that Teryl had resided at 912 O’Leary, she had watched Ber lose teeth to a dinner roll and corn on the cob (two on the same ear). When she broke one of her canines while eating cantaloupe, she had them all pulled. DewDad had dentures too. A can of Mountain Dew was always at-hand and the high sugar content had dissolved DewDad’s tooth enamel, then every tooth, which was why the nickname and the dentures. He wore the same black sunglasses as his singing hero, Roy Orbison, and the same dyed black hair, the color of a new tire. Most interpreted his nickname as DoDad, like he made things happen, but he was really a Don’tDad. Even what he did for a wage was a throwaway; he worked for a firm that manufactured paint stir sticks. Mostly, he sat outside their back door in a folding chair with his Mountain Dew, eating tablespoons of A1 Steak Sauce or watching UFOs seen only by him.

Mr. Sturdivant climbed out his Chevrolet C10 pickup and disappeared into the mouth of the moving truck.

Her grandmother put in her teeth. “He lives there now. Keep away.”

The biggest worry for Teryl was what already lived there. Ber had forgotten about the family in the garage.

Teryl had been skating on the driveway after supper, scissor-turning to dodge the cracks, when something colorless lumbered by. Its sagging belly barely managed to squeeze under the garage door. Teryl peered under. Pink eyes on a sooty pointed face stared back.

Teryl started transporting over remainders from supper, whatever Ber couldn’t repurpose. Tapping the plate forward to the far right side of the garage door was best. She knew when it neared from its very bad breath. Fingernails that looked like long, sharp grains of rice, the color of pencil lead, would snatch the paper plate inside.

One evening, after watching from afar, Ber wanted an explanation. When told, she suggested, “Let’s look up your pet.”

They went to a ragged animal book bought for a quarter at a rummage sale. Teryl flipped through pages the color of a used teabag until she recognized what Ber called a possum. Without a raccoon’s bandit mask to redeem them, they “sure are butt-ugly.” Ber tried to pronounce marsupial. “Just don’t get close to it. It’s got ticks and maybe rabies.”

“It’s as fat as Mrs. Zimmer’s Himalayan.”

“Your possum might be knocked up, then.”

“Knocked up” was a term Teryl understood to mean baby, like when DewDad had men over for cards and they’d laugh about the horse-faced woman at Star Cafeteria “left in a predicament.”

When the babies came, Teryl knew, the boys were jacks, the girls jills, and that they would attach to a teat within mama’s pouch. The possum hid her new passel behind a wheel barrel in the corner. Once, she saw the rubbery tail of a baby clinging to its mother’s back. Teryl would lay very still to watch the mother measure out bites from the paper plate with the same efficiency that Ber doled out a frugal dinner the night before DewDad picked up his salary check.

“Sometimes she squawks at me,” Teryl reported.

“Fear turns to rage, especially if she’s protecting her babies. Mamas are unpredictable,” Beryl replied.

Like mine, thought Teryl. They drop you off with the vow to retrieve you, then they don’t.

* * * *

Beryl didn’t consider herself better than anyone, but to take up with a Snodgrass was worse than befriending a Kentuckian. Even those without a dime or a principle disdained the Snodgrass clan. Some called them Crabgrass: spreading everywhere, impossible to vanquish. When they weren’t being felonious, they propagated, and that is what Grover Snodgrass did: he knocked up their daughter Cheryl. When he found work with Monticello Attractions, Cheryl came to them with news that she and her new baby Teryl Lyn would be accompanying him.

“He’ll be Chief Amusement Attractions Engineer,” she proudly told them.

Beryl and Merrill were appalled. Their only child and their new grandchild would be vagabonds, keeping company with a bearded woman and Crocodile Boy as Grover pounded stakes into the ground.

When the stakes didn’t quite get pounded, a Crazy Dipper ride went awry and killed three children from the same family. Cheryl brought the tragic story and a seven-year-old Teryl back to her parents.

“We’d took pot earlier that day,” Cheryl tearily confessed, “but Grover swears he double-checked all the ride fasteners. I just need to stash Teryl Lyn here until the fuzz lays off and things cool down.”

“When do you suppose that cooling-down will be?” Beryl demanded. “Parents don’t up and forget three dead children.”

Cheryl nodded toward Teryl, sitting cross-legged on a footstool. “Can we talk private, just me and you, Mom?” Their conference in the next room took so long Teryl’s legs went numb and she had to uncross them. She didn’t hear the terms but she did hear her grandmother’s voice dismiss Cheryl: “I hope you take this time to get a hold of yourself!”

After Cheryl drove away, Teryl cried for days.

Restorative work was needed. Teryl had chigger bites and scabs encircling her lower legs, which were the color of wax paper. Ber discovered the little girl was actually more blonde than brunette after a bottle of Prell. Scrub as she might, the child’s hands still smelled as though she been holding filthy nickels. Cheryl had brought little for her daughter—roller skates, a wide-toothed comb—and all of it in a ratty clothing hamper, but Teryl became violent when, as Beryl continued scrubbing, the plastic Monticello Attractions wrist bracelet that let her ride free came apart. Beryl placed it in a baggie so Teryl could look at it when she wanted to.

Teryl was neither outgoing nor sullen. Being shuttled from town to town, absent formal education, had fostered an ability to avoid detection. Ambiguity would wash over her face if asked a direct question. What she’d learned and what she hadn’t broke Beryl’s heart. Thinking of this knock-kneed girl munching on Cheetos and grape soda was pitiful. Little wonder the child suffered so much indigestion.

To show Teryl that all food did not come from concessionaires, she taught what the earth gives by creating a garden. They planted beefsteak and cherry tomatoes.

“Little girl, you’ve got a green thumb,” Ber congratulated.

Teryl looked at one thumb, then the other.

An occasional letter from Cheryl would hold a ten-dollar bill, or a birthday card for Teryl, three days late, with a five-dollar bill, then shorter letters with no money and no return address, then nothing, not even at Christmas. Eventually, Ber thought it best that Teryl know about the Crazy Dipper and why she was in their care. She spoke of lug nuts spinning off, the car skimming treetops until a power line tripped it, flinging three children onto a supermarket’s tar roof.

Ber delivered the morning newspaper six days weekly. Teryl would rise with her to rubber band the papers, then ride in the car as Ber flung each out the cranked-down window. After that, Ber walked Teryl to elementary school. Teryl didn’t mind. At forty-four, Ber was younger than other women who answered to Grandma, and her shag and lipstick were both frosted. But few parents accompanied their children, certainly not by 4th grade. Teryl heard Ber say to Principal Gibson that Teryl, because of some legal guardianship issues, was to be released to no one but Beryl, not even to DewDad.

* * * *

Teryl pushed open the screen door for a better look.

“Don’t go no farther than your yardball.”

Ber was referring to the red gazing ball in their front yard. Teryl was fond of staring into the mirrored world, curved and crimson. Sometimes she pretended she had a lookalike, trapped within.

Mr. Sturdivant’s thickly muscled arms strained his shirt and sleeves. The long sideburns that bent like an L toward the corners of his mouth made him especially unapproachable. The two movers were transporting a rolling cart with several filled aquariums. Water sloshed out.

Teryl dashed across O’Leary behind the truck as a pool table clattered down the ramp. She peered in the back. A lawnmower and a stepladder had been brought forward. They were next off, bound for the garage.

Nothing would dislodge the possums during daylight hours, Teryl knew, but she hurried to skim white rock from the foundation plantings under the garage door into its dark recesses. She listened for stirring.

Mr. Sturdivant signed forms and waivers. The empty moving truck rumbled away. He pushed the lawn mower toward the garage.

Teryl ran.

By the time Mr. Sturdivant took the garage door above his broad shoulders, he was shouting, “Holy smokes, what a stink!”

Teryl heard the gnashing sounds of distress that intuited imminent death.

“Goddamn tree rats!” he howled.

She watched him lift high a two-by-four. The small possum didn’t know where to go. Mr. Sturdivant went into blood sport mode. He brought down the plank, flattening it to gristle. Still, it quivered. The passel dispersed in a frenzy. Mr. Sturdivant ground his foot down on the tiniest one, the runt Teryl had named NeNe. NeNe’s eyes spit themselves out.

Teryl clamped her hand over her mouth to suppress a scream.

Mr. Sturdivant almost fell on a tail separated from a plump little body as he shook a severed paw from the beam.

His crimson thrashing scared the literal shit out of another possum as it ran out into the daylight into a bank of arborvitae.

Mr. Sturdivant whirled. The mother eluded him by skittering behind the wheelbarrow.

Play possum, act dead.

He grabbed a hoe and, in one precise down stroke, detached the head from the body. Goopy red strings danced at the stump. Mr. Sturdivant, surveying the floor of this slaughterhouse, grabbed a snow shovel to scrape up the carnage. Occasionally, he cracked a carcass with the blade if he detected a twitch.

Gagging at the stench of feces and urine mingling with the sweetness of the offal and blood, Teryl ran.

* * * *

“He beat and cut up the pasel and the mom didn’t protect them!”

Ber gritted her teeth. “That doesn’t make her bad, just scared.”

“One got away. How will it live?!”

“Jack or jill went on a great adventure, and it will grow up to have babies who won’t trust human beings.”

“It’s an orphan, like me,” she cried.

Ber rose from crouching. “Your mama is saving up money with your daddy out there somewhere, plus you got us. You are a long road away from being an orphan.” It was already too late to shield Teryl from the hurt Cheryl had infected her with. But she could equip her with the skills to break, if not a heart, something else in retribution. “Dry your tears, sweet potato. You said Mr. Sturdivant had fish tanks? Let’s go kill something he loves” was her dark suggestion. “It’ll be our secret.”

* * * *

Teryl knew all about secrets.

She harbored one that could never be told, how she took off her underpanties and danced for DewDad in her bedroom when Ber was away.

She had inherited Cheryl’s portable record player with a closeable hood. She treasured her mom’s 45s. Her favorite was the one with the black-and-silver label, “The Loco-Motion” by Little Eva. It was DewDad’s, too. Once her bedroom blinds were drawn and the harlequin desk lamp turned off, DewDad would place the knob of his dinky between the cheeks of her heinie and she’d dance to “The Loco-Motion.” When she felt warm, thick fluid, they were done. He would clean her with tissues, which he flushed while she redressed her bottom half. Once, she reached around. It felt like DewDad had sneezed on her rumpie.

“Did my mom ever dance for you?”

“Sure did.” DewDad’s jaw tightened as he put on his sunglasses. “She was a good girl, too.”

While Teryl knew better than to ask for anything brand-new, she wanted the Click Clacks everyone else had—two plastic orbs attached by a string that, when worked up-and-down, collided loudly at the top and bottom. Once she had her own set, the racket drove Ber crazy but DewDad was assured silence.

* * * *

“We’re going to fix his wagon.”

Teryl recognized when her grandmother was worked up because she would jiggle her false teeth with her tongue and lips until they clicked like Yahtzee! dice in a cup.

Just because her own daughter had no sense didn’t mean Ber couldn’t instill some gumption in her granddaughter. “He can’t come in on us, though. We need to move his eyes so he’s not paying attention.”

“How do we move somebody’s eyes?”

“Give them something more important to worry about.”

What Teryl understood about misdirection involved a magician. Cheryl had explained how the man with the black hat and drawn-on eyebrows fooled his audience with sleight-of-hand. The fifth or sixth time they watched his show, Cheryl said in a low voice, “See how he made us look somewhere else? That’s when he switched the rings to make them link.”

Ber found matches.

Teryl’s face screwed up. “You’ve did this before, Grandma?”

* * * *

Ber had secrets, too. A summer camp accident was her first diversionary fire. She would never have coined such a phrase, nor comprehended it, but the result was the same.

The three days of recreation had been a Red Cross initiative to benefit World War II and to free parents for weekend volunteerism. Four girls were assigned to a tent, two older to watch over two younger. Supervised co-mingling between boys and girls occurred once in an afternoon of outdoor games, nothing too roughhouse.

Beryl was hopeful that after the hayride she would be the girl chosen to perform a round of “Frere Jacques” with a boy. She had every expectation, since she knew the lyrics. When Nils was selected, her heart leapt. He was sixteen and had walked her home several times. When Evangeline was chosen to sing with him, Beryl’s heart fell. Why the girl, breasts already mounding and cheekbones emerging from baby fat, who shared her tent? Evangeline sounded like the beginning of a poem. Beryl was something that was rolled out for a polka.

Afterward, their chaperone turned the kerosene lamp to a soft glow so the younger ones wouldn’t be scared by shadows on the tent. Beryl plotted. How to humiliate Evangeline? Ants in her pants? Give her a hot foot? Beryl had heard about this in a W.C. Fields movie but didn’t know what it involved except someone hopping.

She decided on a sleepover fallback: the warm rag. Evangeline would hold it as she slept and release her bladder’s contents. She’d awaken with her nightgown soaked.

A kettle had been left outside for the leaders’ coffee. Beryl quietly tilted the spout, holding the cloth under the water until it was saturated. She enclosed it in Evangeline’s hand. But she didn’t sigh, relax and pee. Her hand spasmed and knocked over the kerosene lamp, alighting the tent in flames.

Beryl bleated “Fire!” then rushed out the two terrified little girls and helped her nemesis to her feet. She grabbed the washcloth before the tent collapsed in flames while other campers screamed.

At breakfast assembly, Beryl was scared she’d be uncovered as the instigator, but she was publicly praised for her quick thinking and got a roll of Lifesavers. She also learned that confusion can make bad look good through the power of a diversionary fire.

* * * *

In the storm shelter, Teryl reached around half-empty paint cans DewDad refused to discard and returned to Ber shaking the lighter fluid. “It’s almost empty.”

“We only need a dab. Take this Clorox.”

Teryl watched Ber grab their rattan picnic basket, lay in the bleach, lighter fluid and matches, then clap it shut. Like everyone, they occasionally spent a sunny afternoon with the basket on land just beyond town known as The Manor. Most of its fences were easily scaled and the No Trespassing signs easily ignored. The Manor was owned by a wealthy Catholic family Ber called The Richeys, the name pinned to anyone of affluence who knew the difference between French dressing and Catalina.

Teryl and her grandmother took a walk to the end of O’Leary, then around the block. They passed Mrs. Mechem, pulling a wagon of glass bottles.

“Where y’all picnicking?” she inquired.

“We’re taking a casserole to a sick friend over on Kyger,” Ber said.

They strolled down an alley, onto Mr. Sturdivant’s property, to what Ber called the outbuilding. Several windows had been smashed by kids. The door had a latch for a padlock, but no padlock. Inside, the contents looked a lot like DewDad’s workshop: vises, a table saw, scraps of latticework and wood pegboard.

Ber placed a single drop of lighter fluid, no bigger than a thumbtack, on piled wood scraps. The young fire, a pale orange, was impregnated by piles of sawdust and birthed by a sudden breeze that tucked under the door.

They walked swiftly to the corner of the block. In a disguised voice that sounded a little like Tony the Tiger, Grandma Ber yelled, “Mister! Mister! It’s on fire! Fire!”

Mr. Sturdivant came running out of the house and saw the smoke and that some spots of dry grass had ignited, too. “Someone call the fire department!” He didn’t know that the hub was across town and that the battle would be his alone for several minutes. He soared across yards. “Do any of you hillbillies own a goddamn hose?!”

This was clandestine, thrill and trepidation. They flattened themselves against houses, then raced, suddenly over the threshold and into Mr. Sturdivant’s house. They scuttled through a maze of boxes. Her grandmother peered around the corner into what had clearly been designated the game room.

Teryl stared, transfixed, at a deer head on the wall. “He prob’ly killed it, too, right, Ber?”

“And what we’re standing on.”

Teryl realized it was a bearskin rug and jumped off.

Ber was standing at the aquariums, bubbling and active. Ber unscrewed the cap from the bleach. Mesmerized by a group that looked like Skittles skimming languidly on the bottom among plastic coral, Teryl suggested, “These down here are a family. I think they’re babies. Maybe we don’t need to hurt his fishies.”

“He has to pay, Teryl Lyn.”

“Please, Ber, not the fishies,” Teryl asked.

Ber heard the fire sirens and quickly recalibrated today’s lesson. She flung the bleach on the deer head. A section of its neck dissolved onto the floor. They worked quickly, until their eyes teared. The green pool table felt turned pink, then white. Ber sloshed bleach into the pockets, onto the rich mahogany finish.

Teryl popped up the flaps of an opened box. “What’s this?”

She withdrew a cardigan bearing the letter of scholastic sports. Beneath were ribbons, blue green and red, touchstones of sports superiority.

“We’ll soak his glory days, too!”

Quickly, they were all the color of Band-Aids.

Parachute silk with military patches was draped over a small round table. Ber hit that. The color of Mr. Turd’s proud memorabilia was now a runny orange/pink.

Ber pushed the back of Teryl’s head. “Out we go!”

They patted their way along converging angles of the house. Neighbors emerged from the smoke to watch the firemen redirect hoses toward an untamed thicket. Briefly separated, Teryl and her grandmother reunited at the red gazing ball to watch Mr. Sturdivant go into his house then, eyes bulging out, race back out.

“Who did it?! You set a fire then break into my house??!!! Is this your fucking idea of hospitality?!” he raged.

“Let’s wash up real good,” Ber suggested. “Don’t look back. Hearing Mr. Turd’s screams are enough.”

DewDad appeared to be napping in his chair. “Merrill Atwater can sleep through anything. Sirens … yelling … his own life,” Ber said. The pink jelly of tomatoes and seeds lay in his chest hair. A strand of spittle stretched from his mouth to his sternum, catching the twilight, bouncing with his intake of breath. “He’s probably dreaming up his own movie. Roy Orbison Versus The Martians.”

Teryl reminded her grandmother, “We still have Mr. Sturdivant’s mail.”

“We’ll pop over tomorrow and say howdy-do,” Ber answered, “and tell him how clean his house smells.”

* * * *

It was Teryl Lyn Atwater’s first diversionary fire and her grandmother’s last.

Unless one counted how, six years later, on the nation’s Bicentennial celebration, Ber and DewDad’s car soared off a highway overpass and exploded, burning them both to death.

Where In The Hell Has Rodney Ross Been?

Asks approximately no one.

When you don’t maintain a blog, much less promote your own website, you can’t expect villagers with torches storming the castle to protest that you have neglected your Internet presence.

But, with the imminent publication of ’Diversionary Fires’, and another novel in the final stages (‘Smoking With Didi’), it’s probably important I at least maintain appearances.

I predicted, when I first obtained this domain, that I would be negligent. I didn’t bank on my absence extending for months, however. I assumed I’d pop in, toss off a few clever observations, vague insults, something politically inflammatory and conclude with self-promotion pimpery, but it didn’t happen.

The excuses are plentiful and all equally paltry, so rather than tick down my old To-Do List as evidence of how distracted I’ve been, I thought I’d walk to the edge of the diving board, tuck under my knees and do a belly flop back into the dark and deep waters of self-promotion and, in doing so, self-exposure.

Re: paragraph #2 above. My novel ‘Diversionary Fires’ will be arriving this Summer from Amazon Select, as both an exclusive download and paperback. It is not the wide platform I had hoped for, but the publication industry has morphed into something difficult to navigate, and even my literary agent Mira has noted with frustration the new parameters and expectations. The “big” publishers continue to swallow one another up; even with distinct imprints within a publishing house, the odds of successfully putting a finished manuscript into a living person’s mitt has decreased. COVID-19 didn’t help. Many editors were furloughed or terminated. Book signings were canceled as the few brick-and-mortar bookstores closed (temporarily or for good). Escapist fantasy books, or self-help books, proliferated as readers sought an escape from quarantine, anxiety and the hubris of our then-President’s regin of terror.

Amazon IS the fallback. The distribution of reading material in this country yields to them, and then to impulse-buying outlets like Costco or Wal-Mart. Stop and study the endcap of the TARGET book section. Between the celebrity confessionals, cookbooks (another category that enjoyed a surge, since everyone was dining at home), bodice-ripper historical romances that constitute a series and the latest 138-chapter mystery from James Patterson (and each chapter is about 2 1/2-pages long), I’m not sure anything of literary aspiration has a place. This isn’t snobbism; it’s fact. I as much as anyone relish a good tell-all, and Ina Garten could open a ‘Barefoot Contessa’ outlet in my home, as every book of hers lines a sagging pantry shelf. Even the most captivating synopsis, glamorous author photo or hyperbolic blurbs will go ignored in the short-attention span world in which we reside. (Rack “jobbers” also populate those endcaps, as they do the front tables in big-box bookstores, so there’s a lot of money involved in ensuring placement and refreshing that inventory.)

I have no objection to my novel keeping company with a head of lettuce, a plunger or baby’s first shoes in a shopping cart, but the competition is fierce to become that product.

So I will be Tweeting. And Facebooking. Offering sample chapters or excerpts. Even doing giveaways on social media. This is the game now. Authors are expected to aggressively generate their own hustle. The more-celebrated ones have staff. I do not, unless three middle-aged cats count. There will be ads on Amazon, on Facebook, in select print publications…but Rodney Ross will be the ringleader. It’s not a role I relish — I’d rather be writing, or addressing that nonstop To-Do List — but you do what you gotta do.

The Necessary Recap And Settling Scores

It’s been a looooooong time.

What is it my grandmother always lamented?

“I don’t know where the time goes”.

Well, she was more than a little nuts, so I don’t know if she could read a calendar.

Well, I kinda do know where the time went, and where my energy was expended.

• We sold our house in Southern Florida and, in doing so, finally escaped possibly the worst, most disagreeable and confrontational neighbor ever charted in historical documents. Everyone has, or had, a crappy person or family living next door. Their yard is especially unkempt…they throw parties late into the night…they park rusty, unlicensed heaps with three wheels at the curb…unsupervised children routinely wander on to your property. We’ve not been exempt. We’ve dealt with inconsiderate, loud and disrepectful folks.

Backstory is warranted. After relocating to Fort Lauderdale, we were greeted by this female neighbor with “I hope your realtor told you that the former owner blew her brains out in the guest bathroom”. Yes, we knew. Every house has tragedy, and this was one especially sad: she actually rented a portion of the house, worked as a server at a nearby buffet and had been notified of deportation. She chose suicide. But our grinning neighbor, in a terry tank top that did nothing for her pendulous bosom, chose the most reductive way to summarize it and it also stunk of “Gotcha!!” as in “Oh, did your realtor NOT disclose that?”

Within weeks, the first complaint came. Our pool filter was “too loud” and was keeping her up at night. Could we lower its volume? We replied that pool equipment has no such control. It was brand-new, not malfunctioning and well within noise volume levels permitted by the city *yes, we took multiple readings). After that, they were reliable and swift. Motion-detector lights, mounted for security and specifically directional toward OUR home, were disorienting her; a voice mail told us she felt as though “aliens were landing” in her yard. On and on it went. We just wanted it, like a blender full of stones, to stop. I told her to quit addressing me, that I would not engage, so she turned to Greg, texting him in the dead of night to tell him people were on our roof…that someone had played the theme from ‘Halloween’ into her cat door…that an inspector had found piles of human feces and decapitated iguanas on her own roof.

You kinda get it, right? Hers was a toxic salad of of abject loneliness, isolation, mental health issues and what we think might have been excessive use of alcohol/prescription medication, heavily dressed with envy and resentment. Putting the FOR SALE sign up filled me with glee, yet knowing the new owners are probably the target of her venom bring me no joy.

• We ventured to New York for theatregoing, catching up with friends,not knowing that this little thing called COVID-19 would happen, upending Broadway until at least early 2021. We regard this trip with great melancholy. Isn’t hindsight always so perfect? The places we would have visited, cafes we would have lingered in, the simple act of walking down 44th…we would have savored every step.

• We — and three confused and pissy cats — moved across the country over almost 6 days to Southern California, to Rancho Miragem, CA. My general takeaway: Texas is very large and yet offers nothing of visual interest…Alabama and Mississippi were precisely what I thought they’d be, with one gas station even bearing front door signage declaring that masks WERE NOT welcome inside, FORBIDDEN…New Orleans is the only interesting part of Louisiana…and Arizona needed a good moisturizer.

• All of the rights of my literary works were finally wrestled away from the thieves known as Dreamspinner Press and a new publisher, JMS Books, embraced my catalog. It was quite gratifying to have one's work found to have enough value for 2nd editions…especially after the ongoing drama at Dreamspinner Press.

For those who don’t know, Dreamspinner — an LGBTQ+ publisher — has been swamped by financial difficulties and startling management missteps, which include delaying or non-payment of royalties to dozens of their stable of authors. Because of this financial quagmire, authors rapidly left the imprint — authors with far larger fan bases than mine, like Rick Reed and Tj Klune — and rightfully demanded their rights back due to breach of contract. I am horrified for those wronged authors literally in danger of losing their home, or missing another car payment, or going without prescribed medication, because they are owed thousands of dollars. It’s a complicated chronology and would bore the shit out of most people, but the bottom-line is this: any royalties due an author should have been escrowed and untouchable, then fully distributed per the contract. It should NOT, as they explain, have been used to “grow” the business, to broaden distribution, to explore new digital avenues. That is what THEIR profit is for, not the money due authors, nor did they ask permission to use “our money” to invest in “their company”. What they did amounts to creative theft and their contrition, from weekly E-mails to authors that contain false or vague detail, seems non-existent. I am thrilled I was able to soar beyond this revolting mess and that my work is not in any way encumbered by the intricate legal implications of some of this.

• Black Lives seemed to matter less, and then they mattered More. A fractured country began to break completely apart into irreperable shards.

• COVID-19 strengthened its python-like grasp.

• I discovered a Snapchat app of a genderless, wizened face and became obsessed with it.

• I continued work on ‘Silver’, my proposed TV series for a network unfettered by conventional broadcast standards (think Netflix, Amazon). I generated query letters for ‘Silver’, only to discover that most production companies and even agents are terrified of plagiarism charges and refuse to even read a pitch (that’s what a one-or-two sentence summary is called by the industry).

And now it’s mid-Summer. It was over 120 degrees in Palm Springs this weekend. I have it on good authority that people spontaneously catch on fire if they step outdoors, so I have largely remained behind pulled shades, beneath ceiling fans and under shower heads splashing lukewarm water,

I truly believe that an author’s blog should, within reason, be a politics-free zone. There are so many rant outlets — Twitter, FB, Instagram, Message Boards — that it just struck me as tired to also splash anti-Trump invective on this space.

But, with all that’s happened and how it worsens in huge increments every day, that self-imposed dictate has pretty much shit the bed.

None of us knows how this will all conclude. I hope that the monster currently squatting in the White House with the homunculi he calls children and the pudgy, white grifters he calls advisors are given the hook in November, but voter repression/suppression, technology tampering, foreign influence and general deception don’t generate a ton of confidence. I want to install one of those steel security bars on our front door, plant a mean-looking, hand-lettered CLOSED sign in the front yard (or sand) and ignore all of it.

Fuck those self-impressed gym photos I see posted daily by gay men desperate to do battle with age so they can compete in bars no longer open and on hook-up apps that reek of danger.

This is what being 59 looks, and it’s mostly exhausted, afraid and compliant.

The Anti-Heroes

I am very big on mentoring. Learning at the hands of masters imparts something no textbook, seminar or dubious online course willl EVER truly teach. At every opportunity I applied for internships in college. Learning on-the-job gave me insight that was beyond compare.

Early on, I was fortunate to have two: Connie Timmons, in elementary school….Loren Myer, from 9th grade through my Senior Year, and beyond.

My last year, 6th grade, at Lincoln Elementary was presided over by Constance Timmons, and I thank the Gods she was sent to encourage me. It wasn’t as much how she negotiated a clearcut curriculum, but it was her energy and her style — some might call it eccentric — that I found madcap and unexpected. Quick to anger when it came to classroom foolishness — her admonitions could topple a brick chimney — she slid just as easily into soliloquies about theater, literature, the art of cursive writing, table manners or party attire. By example, I saw that one could carve out an identity that did not precisely conform to the prim standards of a small, stifling community. And she was young, so young, when I reflect on it, probably also finding her way in academia. She became friends with my mother and family and it’s a relationship that has endured 45 years. She inspired me then, and now, as she negotiated widowhood with grace and humor.

Loren was the groovy high school English teacher with long blonde-ish hair (it covered his ears and shirt collar) who recognized my writing ability and observatiional skills and took action. He knew I didn’t belong in a conventional classroom and so arranged for me to have private study time — in the library, or in private rooms probably intended for detention, in which I kept a daily journal and filed book reports on ANYTHING I chose to read, which included: ‘The Exorcist, ‘ Roots’, The Fan Club’, ‘Summer of ‘42’ and ‘Zelda’. He championed my writing and thought I had “what it takes”. He never spoke to me as a teenager, but as a fully-formed adult, which i was not, but I appreciated his confidence in me. Our friendship post-high school has spanned the decades. I met his fiancee, then wife, Dee, as erudite, witty and warm as he, and I have watched them raise three children to adulthood. Being assigned to his class was a gift. I began to practice my craftsmanship and I had an advocate.

With good fortune inevitably comes bad. Some are dead; some should be.

Mary Lou Goar: a useless, embittered divorceee who fuled her fury about life’s injustices upon her students. Everyone knew her realtor husband had left her for a much-younger woman, that she subsequently suffered a nervous collapse, that her return to teaching was tenuous. She favored pantsuits that appeared homemade, had a slight palsy and was cursed with a horse-like face that could not even be charitably be described as handsome. I never quite knew what her qualifications were, since the administration slid her around from the English department into History, then into our high school’s so-called Journalism courses, where she also governed the student newspaper. She is a textbook example of why tenure is a cruel joke of the educational system; her scant knowledge was rewarded with eternal opportunity to rob and or dishearten generations. She didn’t stand by the paper’s editors, often running to the schools principal — hinmself a poker-faced bully who later died at the hands of his put-upon wife — with columns or opinions she thought controversial and would plunge her into trouble or controversy. When she died, I literally applauded.

Art Levin, who was head of the Journalism department at Butler University during my attendance, 1979-1983. An arrogant, pock-marked windbag who closed his office door when the blonde Thetas of campus came to “visit”, he’s the poster child for the #MeToo movement. His credentials seemed to be based upon a short-lived position with ‘Stars and Stripes’ when in the military; none of us could ever discern much more about his actual resume as a working journalist, much less one employed to educate others. His classes were insufferable, his commentary cruel and his stewardship of the ‘Collegian’, our campus weekly newspaper, was a litany of no-shows, lest they disturb his Monday night carousing. I learned absolutely nothing from him that a $29.95 text wouldn’t have imparted, with far less bullying. So it is puzzling that one of his most devoted “older, returning Mom” students — the ones who always raised their hands when the class was essentially over to ask one more irritating question and took copiosu notes — turned out to be my first employer:

The woman was editor of ‘Indianpolis Monthly’ for way, way too long. In assigning feature stories to her editorial staff, which included me, she was more keen on currying favor with Indianapolis elite than actual profiles. She desperately wanted to move in a better social circle and the magazine, she seemed to think, could be her margic carpet into the private suites and salons and outdoor cocktail parties. This was the Indianapolis she wanted to reign in, not the one regular folks paid bills and raised kids in. Her monthly column was a me me me confessional about her sons and her lawyer husband that, while occasionally entertaining — she could turn a nifty phrase — rang as self-absorbed, yet also tinged with low self-esteem based upon some of her physical characteristics. She manipulated the position to elevate herself and had little regard for her correspondents, often rewriting what they submitted to be more favorable and charitable to her friends or people she wanted to know. I learned some very bad habits in aiming for the lowest common denominator — glib, smug, self-referential filler, which ironically served me well as I entered the 7 circles of Hell a/k/a advertising.

Marty Lave: my chief employer in the arena of advertising, an utter pig with the Ernest Borgnine smile who recounted his poor Brooklyn upbringinge as motivation to be as nasty as possible. He asked vendors to falsify invoices so he could squeeze more from billing than the traditional 15%; he paid shockingly less than the local standard to incoming employees and wondered why attrition was so high and why every employee was on an inevitable “learning curve”; he openly belittled his wispy, nasal wife, a half-assed fill-in secretary with a wedge cut whom he called “Cookie”; he watched competitors’ commercials and stole complete dialogue and thematics shamelessly; he requested that I procure a particular actress, used in a commercial, for the hot-to-trot President of our biggest client, a vocational school based in New Jersey (which I refused to do); he advised I and the other partner to not hire “fat people, because they’re hard on furniture and call in sick a lot…or Indians, because they are a drunken people…or blacks, because they steal”. This, from a Jewish man who bemoaned the prejudices hurled against him. Why did I stay? I wanted, if I could, to better the lives of employees, and I did. When he refused to dole out raises, I gave them extra vacation time. I defied him at every turn. When he one year inexplicably forbade a Christmas tree or the purchase of decor for the lobby, I went out and bought what I called a Hanukkah bush and the staff made ornaments. Yet I wasn’t always so heroic or altruistic. I sat silently as he sexually belittled Agency females, openly asking “when are you going to a hotel with me?” Someone should have said this was unacceptable. And it should have been me. Time passed and I basically outlasted everyone by blithely ignoring most of his demands, arguing furiously, screaming until my face reddened, walking out, staging sick-ins…because someone who pushes as hard as he did only understands being shoved back. His whining half-apologies were always inevitable and I would leave them on the answering machine so my partner Greg could hear his wheedling, “Bubeleh, things got outta hand, let’s put it behind us, you come back in tomorrow and we start over, okay?” I also, with great glee, got every dime I asked for upon every review. A Google search indicates he still living. I am grateful I have never had to cross paths with him again.

This blog entry reads like a settling of scores. Maybe it is. But with every hero comes villains. In every plot, victory is balanced with defeat. Everyone has the misfortune of being placed under the gresy thumb of someone who is clearly inadequate. You learn from everything, and the lesson today, and ongoing, is that you learn as much from the morally bankrupt as you take from the most bountiful buffet. What I learned from them all was what NOT to be and, for that, I am thankful. I have never been one to forgive and forget, I do not suffer fools gladly and I believe that, when you burn a bridge, you need to fill that fucking river with ash.

Fears, Confirmed

I predicted, upon the launch of this website, that I would prove myself an inattentive, if not terrible, blogger. And that has been realized.

The mumbled excuses are many. My last entry was from early December, a busy month for the biggest humbugs among us. I had one prepared, about a lousy neighbor. Everyone has a crappy person or family living nearby. Their yard is especially unkempt…they throw parties late into the night…they park rusty, unlicensed heaps with three wheels at the curb…unsupervised children routinely wander on to your property. We’ve not been exempt. We’ve dealt with inconsiderate, loud and disrepectful folks since we bought our first home, in 1986. But what we deal with now makes all others pale, because this situation also involves abject loneliness, isolation, mental health issues and what we think might be excessive use of alcohol/prescription medication. Then I decided its scope would only further exacerbate this individual’s paranoia and wretched behavior, so I decided to pour the emnity into a future short story when we are far, far away from Fort Lauderdale.

I considered writing an update on my limited-run TV series I am in the midst of, but it seemed a little vanglorious to provide a documentary look into somthing not complete, much less produced. Suffice to say it is going well. My commitment was to fully complete four episodes before submission to agents or influential people within the industry (and elaboration on what the subsequent four episodes would contain), and that goal is in sight by April 1. Its title: ‘Silver’. And, if anyone reading this should have a REMOTE contact to expedite it getting into the hands of people who actually count in the cable/streaming/premium network arena, e-mail me at RRossSS@aol.com. This is beyond the purview of my literary agent at WORDLINK, Mira Perrizo (who is shopping my novel ‘Diversionary Fires’), so it’s essentially a new foray into a new business. The constant reinvention of oneself is tiresome yet, as a writer, I embrace my own willingness to switch genres.

Then I was blindsided by a notice from Dreamspinner Press that my first novel, ‘The Cool Part of His Pillow’ (and a smaller fiction, ‘Bended Knee’) was going out-of-print at the end of March 2019. To an author this means, essentially, the death of your child. No new copies will be produced. The Amazon and B&N listings will vanish. New reviews? Unlikely, unless someone on goodreads discovers it. Its slide over the horizon is contractual, though, and not unexpected, but ends seven years of hawking, promoting, commenting and tweeting to re-boot sales of what becomes known as a “backlist” book (it’s among a poublisher’s output, but no longer new or current). Has it really been seven years? Yes. Its publication brought me great delight, awards, lovely comments. It did not make me rich. It did not propel me onto Jimmy Fallon, or NPR, or even a throwaway review in any major publication. But I know that, when I too have gone out-of-print, its spine will remain on someone’s bookshelf, some library or LGBTQ center, somewhere, and that brings me a measure of contentment. I don’t always think Dreamspinner did an exemplary job of promotion or marketing but they, too, were younger and finding their way in a niche industry, and they have grown so much since, in terms of social media and bringing their authors forward. One thing I DID learn: man, many authors in the M/M LGBTQ world are women. (For that matter, an astounding percentage of readers of gay male fiction are women. ) They write under pseudonyms, or initials that shroud gender. There is no author picture, for to do so would betray their identity. They are coy in interviews about personal detail. None of this is bad. Women should write about men as we should be equally free to write about women (although, frankly, I find it unlikely lesbian-specific publishers, who seem very contentious and antagonistic in their guidelines, would favor a man writing for their demographic). That I, as a male, stepped forward and spoke openly, makes me happy.

And now, we come to the end of March, with personal calamities, big decisions and other file folders taking center-stage: the ongoing illness of my husband’s mother; the deterioration of his father’s mental acuity; concern when my own mother cannot shake a bad cold; and looming decisions about our own future as we reach a “certain age” and where we want to spend those. Another Summer of anxious Hurricane warnings isn’t cheery but, then again, a single day in Trump’s alternate universe is angst-making. California? Maybe. Indiana? Never.

Which takes me to the final topic: a class reunion. A significant one looms and its significance has left me waffling. My graduating class has not been especially attentive in decades past. (Our 20th reunion featured impromptu gospel on a guitar and many people disgruntled or boycotting because alcohol was served, if that tells you anything about the general temperature of the small town I grew up in.) There were no five-year incremental get-togethers and, given this, the next reunion probably won’t be for another decade. It’s again being staged in that little, even smaller, town now as progress and interstates allow you to bypass it completely, a small-minded community that holds few good memories but plenty of sad and suffocating ones. Its late June announcement is marked with an attire suggestion of “business dress casual’ and already one attendee has publicly replied that jeans and a Harley T-shirt is as far as he will go. I’m not being a snot; I like my sweatpants and my bowling shirts and anyone who thinks I look homeless can kiss my formidable ass. It’s more the defiant declaration and the slightest whiff of confrontation that set off alarms in my head: “I can’t be bothered and maybe ‘ya want to fight about it?” Maybe I’m wrong. Travel plans for us at that same exact time are set, so it really isn’t on my radar. I would have to reschedule. Yet…yet…I feel a pang. People I DO want to see, I console myself, I WILL see, somehow. Why we cling to these artificial, self-created rites of passage, I do not know, but I also know that, on that night, when what remains of my class gathers and someone praises the Lord as someone else pukes his 32nd PBR into a trashcan, I will have regrets I didn’t make the effort.

Icky

I suppose I thought age would make me more tolerant, if not sympathetic, to the visual of a doddering old gay man squiring someone half, or 3/4 his age, on his atrophied arm, but it hasn’t.

Here, in Fort Lauderdale, where the average age of the gay male seems to be 72, it is so prelavent it seeems suddenly epidemic. If this bears the stink of self-righteous judgment, you should probably reach for a clothespin because, yeah, I AM judging.

In fairness, I find myself recoiling when I see an old, leathery West Palm Beach geezer in a plaid jacket kidding himself that his young, cosmetically-enhanced blonde in leopard print loves him. I mean: really? I know introspection is currently out of fashion — look at the bloated, orange imbecile that sits in the White House — but how can you not privately admit your companion is interested more in your money sack than your ball sack (which probably resembles a circa 1942 baseball mitt, run over repeatedly by a car)? Do you really, truly, believe that your new “friend” really wants to lay under or on you, that they won’t note the baggy elbows, the skin tags, the weird rashes, the blood thinner bruising and the nose hair? Do you want to be the butt of her private jokes when she does girl’s night with her other like-minded golddiggers?

But I am gay, not straight, and how the other half chooses to comport themselves is their folly. I cannot help but wince when I see someone dressed far too young — by young, I mean tight, and by tight, I mean high-waisted and low-breasted — barely lifting his sandals and snapping his dry fingers on a dance floor with his 28 year-old “protege”. I assume it’s the fingers snapping; maybe it’s a bum hip or a trick knee or a DEPEND unlatching itself.

The desperation to keep up makes me want to cry out. I watch hustlers, most of whom fall into the category of “rough trade”, latch onto the elderly at places like The Grille or Listeen (formerly known as Progress/Chardees) on Wilton Drive, and I want to go separate them with a crowbar. I understand loneliness. I get that men don’t want to surrender the idea of a sex life to the passage of time. No one wants to feel archaic, obsolete. To see them fall prey to a vampire makes me sad. To see them urged to visit an ATM outrages me.

People of a certain age are vulnerable. The phone scams, the home invasions, the recurrent funerals of friends, frightening medical crises…isn’t that enough? This melancholy is made even moreso when they might’ve lived their professional and personal life in the shadows, closeted by stigma or self-shaming, until they finally outlived their parents or siblings, moved elsewhere or retired from a factory and found the courage to come out. That we, as a society, worship youth is no surprise; I admire poreless skin and a 30” waist as much as the next leering, over-served patron. But to try and reclaim one’s past by financially supporting one as you fumble to make relevant conversation strikes me as self-defeating. You won’t feel younger; you’ll probably feel even older, and defeated, as you explain who Archie Bunker was, or why Stonewall mattered, what a diagnosis of AIDS meant or when phones were rotary.

Exposure to “younger” thinking has its merits. One of my continual complaints about where my Mother resides — a Senior community — is that she’s no longer around forward-thinking people, inquisitive minds, a hunger to learn or evolve. It has clearly affected her. Her rigidity, her intractable beliefs (some of it due to living alone and answering to no one) are being reinforced by the mumblings and discontentment of depressed, housebound, financially-insolvent individuals who find little to live for in a world they don’t understand. (They are also, mostly, frightened and angry Republicans who want a wall.) Someone twenty years my junior has walked a different journey and, if they’ve genuinely processed those passages, can broaden my own vista about life in 2018. I LIKE talking to intelligent people who were born after 1990. I Just don’t necessarily want to fuck them. And, even if I DID, I wouldn’t want to provide them lunch money.

Do I believe May-September romances exist? Yes. I’ve seen moving examples, where respect and dignity are conjoined with love and care. I also think they are the rare exception, just as I am convinced threesomes are the inevitable road to a breakup and that casual drug use leads to addiction. I just hope I never kid myself. And, as my own personal call-out to the young who target the old…I hope you come to some variant of respect for your older companion…I hope you work out your Daddy issues without decimating the final stretch of someone’s life.