My mom and dad take several walks around the block each day with their little mammal, Bootise. Occasionally a neighbor or two will wave and amble over for a little roadside chat. On one of our walks, just pulling up to a house around the corner from ours, in his black pickup, was the cutest little bear dude, who hollered, “Where y’all live?” I responded that my mom and dad lived around the corner, on Red Hollow Road, but that I was visiting from California. I denied my San Francisco home by omission, fearful that my homo status, too swiftly confirmed, would put a premature end to our discourse. In Pinson, everybody from San Francisco is gay. It’s a southern custom to embrace the general, and discard the specific if potentially uncomfortable. He introduced himself as Eugene, and said that he, his wife and “little boy” were living temporarily in his mom’s house since his own burned down a few months ago:
“I was making m’self some bacon ‘n eggs, and fell asleep, and when ‘ah woke up, the house wuz on fiar. Yep, we lost everythin’, ‘cept ourselves…”
I of course immediately fell in love, and imagined myself engaged in all sorts of intrigue to rebuild that house with me in it. He had the look of a Pinson man: easy going, slow talking, small beer-belly, sun-burned neck, round pink face, slight ever-present smile, baseball cap, t-shirt, jeans, unshaved–in other words, just dreamy. He’s what all of us queens try so hard to look like, he just does it by being. I suppose my attraction to his type mirrors the gun moll to the gangster–a dangerous attraction to the other and the extreme.
In junior high I had many many crushes on such guys. One such crush was on Pat & Paul, the Pauley twins. Already larger than life at 15, they totally idolized the Dukes of Hazzard–they even had the same car. They wore matching cowboy shirts and red handkerchiefs around their necks, and tettered around in big boots. They liked me because I talked different from them, and they would hoot and holler every time I addressed them as “you guys.” They formed the bulk of my early teen fantasies, me of course playing kissing-cousin Daisy to their Bo & Luke. There have to be gay versions of these beautiful creatures, I’ve yet to find them…