Category: Family

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Birmingham: The Men of Pinson–Eugene, Pat & Paul

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…

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Birmingham Day 1: Home

I arrived in Birmingham around 3:30 yesterday afternoon. Dad picked me up at the airport and drove me home. I’ve lived in San Francisco for 21 years and I still call this place home. I’ve always envied people who are really of a particular city, who can say, “I’m from Rome,” or “I’m a New Yorker,” because they were born there and inherited an identity specific to place. I was born in South Bend, Indiana, but moved to Alabama when I was 2, and to Birmingham when I was 14, then to San Francisco at 18. So really, I lived here for only 6 years, but the years from 13-18, pretty big ones. While I lived here, I could only think of finding a community that had never voted for George Wallace and recycled. It’s only been in coming back every few years that I’ve come to filter an appreciation of the culture and environment through my relation to it as someone neither fully inside nor outside of it.

Over the next few days, in addition to my parents, I’ll be spending time with three very dear old friends–Susan, James, and April–each with deep roots in southern soil. I had wanted to visit Lisa, the vivacious owner of the “Cuttin’ Up!” hair salon, but she just burned herself a few days ago after heatin’ up some hair-removal wax in the microwave, spilling the concoction all over her hand and arm, the main tools of her trade. Actually the main tools of her success have been her flirtatious wit and stunning looks, so I don’t think her business is going to suffer.

Mom and Dad are like the Loud Family, not of Lance fame, just in terms of volume. My mom told my dad last night not to wake me up in the morning and let me sleep in, as we did a lot of yard work, and then stayed up late watching Giant, but at 7 they were yelling affectionately at each other and their dog, Bootsie, the morlock, rattling windows, slamming doors. It’s relatively quiet now, and I’m looking out their front window at the lovely hickory, redbud, pine, and oak trees, and the thriving dogwood which sprouted out of the crotch of a particular oak shortly after we moved in. There’s also a big hickory that was struck by lightning the weekend that we moved in, shearing off half of the tree and leaving a semicircular shell of a lower trunk supporting the great mass of the remaining crown. I keep telling my dad to take the tree down, that it’s going to fall onto their bedroom in the next storm, but I think he sees it as mirroring their own struggle in this environment, and thus it stands as an ever-leaning monument to their fragile triumph.

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Back in Town for a Bit

The scenes from New Orleans are out of a post-apocalyptic film, people firing on helicopters, bodies floating down the street–while our president eats cake. I read yesterday that it was going to take 4 days for certain supply ships to arrive. 4 days. We could capture a foreign capital in that time. I watched Laurent Cantet’s Les Sanguinaires last night, a tiny gem of a film about a group of friends trying to get away from all the pre-Millenium hysteria by spending the week on a remote island, only to discover that they can’t get away from each other, or human nature. D and I saw Junebug earlier in the day, a totally delightful film about what binds a family together and how oblivious people can be to what’s in front of them. It’s a very complex film with amazing little details and perfomances, presented in a very simple narrative. I think that I prefer to lose myself in films these days. They end.

I had a wonderful time in Florida. The hurricane made it a bit windier, and there were actual waves at the beach, but the Tampa Bay area remained just out of Katrina’s path. Karl, my dad’s cousin from the old country, came down from his adopted home of Canada for the week. He had recently visited the town in Slovenia that my dad’s side of the family is from, and shared pictures of people who all looked like my brothers and sisters, as well as photos that my grandmother took when she returned to the family home in the 50’s (she emigrated to the US while in her late teens), and pictures of my great great grandmother and her family. I also discovered that another of my dad’s cousins was part of the naval team that captured the German submarine that led to the solving of the German “enigma” by Alan Turing and hastened the end of WWII–an actual war hero in the family. I thought we were all active pacifists. And I also learned that our hero’s family is from East Moline, as the name would suggest, a town just east of Moline, the town where my boyfriend Big Chrissy’s family lives, and where I visit all the time! I’m sure that the next thing I’m going to discover is that Chris and I are cousins and that our love is rooted in a genetic twist of Freud’s ideas about narcissism.

I’m leaving for Alabama next Wednesday to spend some time with Mom and Dad and my sweeter than sweet tea southern buddies.

Pictures and stories ahead…

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When Coco-co-co Goes Bob-bob-bobbin’ Along…

Monday morning I’ll be flying to Tampa, to visit my sisters, as well as my other siblings and parental units who are flying in for our semi-annual Komater convergence. My sister in law, Keith, is bringing along her mom, Joe (Joe Momma), and various siblings from her branch of the family tree, so it promises to be a pretty rowdy fun-filled event. I’m going to try to leave my laptop at home, so that I won’t be diverted away from my intent to get some reading done. Expect a full report on my return. Until then, you San Franciscans in your summer coats, imagine bobbing with me among the jellyfish on my innertube in that big warm bathtub that is the Gulf…

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Birthdays and Poodles

A big happy birthday to my big bunny warmer, Big Chrissy.  I’m making dinner for him and Reese, who turned 12 last week, but was out of town with his moms, so that we could celebrate their births and the combined inflexibility and roller coaster ride of the Scorpio/Leo/Leo mix together. BC and I are going to try to find something for Reese’s clubhouse today, which he’s constructing in his basement for his Lipstick Club. BC suggested a poster of the Man Ray lips in the sky. Reese has already confiscated my disco ball, and now wants my 3D poddle photo after seeing it in the living room of one of the suburban houses in Edward Scissorhands. I’m reluctant to part with my poodle, so I have to find something even grander on the kitsch scale.

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Kids News and Sunday Brunch Chez Coco

So Reese attended a summer theater camp over the past few weeks, culminating in a performance Friday afternoon of various improv pieces, a few musical numbers, and “Kids’ News.” For Kids’ News, the kids wrote and delivered various snippets of news pertinent and appealing to the average 12 year old. The show began with Reese singing the theme song, which he, of course, wrote and composed. The little dude belted out his little ditty like it was a Broadway show tune, as if the news should always be preceded by a histrionic Sam Harris/Star Search jingle. For his bit of news, Reese played Karl Lagerfeld, announcing that Victoria (“call me Vicky”)’s Secret was out: bras lined with gummy bears. Reese clings gleefully and stubbornly to his pre-pubescence, but the developing Liza Minelli can not be suppressed.

This morning BC, Philip, Dean & Doug, and the charming new(to me)comer Davey stopped by for brunch in the garden. Happily, the heat of yesterday gave way to typical cooling San Francisco summer breezes, the fog caressing the slopes of Twin Peaks but never wandering over our part of the sky. Philip brought over some scones–ginger and almond–designed as vehicles for my 2005 Proprietor’s Reserve Italian Prune Plum Jam, but totally upstaging it with their light and buttery deliciousness. If only Philip belonged to me and not the rest of Culinaria… Anyway, I made a virtually fat-free fritatta to balance Philip’s butter-rich baked goods, and served some salad, bacon, and watermelon to round out our taste bud stimulation. I think I forgot the umami bud, but came close by oversalting the fritatta. I had such a swell time, and really enjoyed meeting our new friend.

The videotaping this week has gone really well. My project is veering into completely different terrain, different from what I had planned and expected, but I’m going with the flow, and feeling excited following the currents. I hope to wrap up shooting this week and get to editing next week, but who knows which way I’ll drift this week, so don’t count on seeing or hearing anything concrete just yet.

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Carol, Bruce, Megan, BC and the Goat

My sister Carol, her husband Bruce, and their daughter Megan have been visiting. Carol’s branch of the family tree is the calmest and most stable. She married an even calmer person than she, and they produced this really calm daughter. I love it when they visit–they’re interested in everything, and are engaging and warm.

Saturday I took them and BC to see Edward Albee’s The Goat, or Who is Silvia? at ACT. It’s an amazing play, about a man who falls in love with a goat. Martin is happily married, has a teenage gay son, and has just won the Pritzker Prize. Everything seems perfect. But during a taped interview with his best friend, he reveals that he’s in love with a goat. The play is a contemporary classical tragedy, with a suitably tragic and horrific ending. Most of the play consists of him explaining to his wife about his other love, while the wife breaks large vases and overturns furniture, the house physically falling apart around them. Martin doesn’t understand why people can’t see beyond their moral boundaries. Yet he’s always correcting people’s spoken english, refusing to let them deviate from proper grammatical usage. His son’s a mess–Billy, as in Billy the “kid,” Billy Goat. Billy’s like a little undeveloped version of his dad. His sense of morality becomes confused by his father’s transgression: an embrace between father and son turns into an erotic kiss, emphasizing the son’s confusion about sex and love. It was clever to have the son be gay, with homosexuality so recently thought of as a pathology, leading us to think that there is something wrong with us in not understanding a love that’s foreign to our experience. I wish I could talk about the ending, but for those of you going to see it, I won’t spoil it for you–although halfway through I leaned to Megan and said, “Blank-ety has to blank Blank.” It’s the only way it could have ended, and when Blank-ety does blank Blank, the tension that has been building is tossed onto center stage and pops like an aneurism.

Okay, off to BC’s to watch Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolfe to round out the Edward Albee experience.

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Visitors From the South

Tthe other night we all went over to my brother Mark’s house for dinner. Mark’s mother-in-law, Joe Mamma, was in town, so everyone was asked to bring at least two bottles of white wine to keep her in her cups. As I arrived Mark announced that Jackie, his high school–one of his high school–girlfriends was coming with her current husband, Johnny, the older brother of one our best childhood buddies. My palms immediately started sweating. I had been very fond of Jackie back then, but remember a wild breakup and lots of sparks and drama, even by high school standards. Jackie and Johnny arrived and swept me off my feet back to Dixie and southern fried repartee. There is something so endearing and sweet about southerners, I want to rub them all over me. I didn’t want to leave either, and after being kicked out with my other Super Bears, actually invited myself along with them the next day for a visit to the wine country in Johnny’s brother’s vintage convertible Cutlass Supreme. Jackie is the daughter of the mayor of a small town in Alabama, who has been in and out office for as long as I’ve known Jackie (24 years). Jackie is still a wild one, but her temperament is matched by that of her husband, who is mellow and easy. Jackie does the talking. They are partners in a law firm called “Wesson and Wesson.” When asked, “..like the oil?” Jackie replies, “No, like the gun.” Jackie handles all the confrontational cases, and Johnny the ones that don’t involve betrayal or blackmail. She has found her perfect mate. 14 or so years together and they still hold hands in the backseat of the car. Jackie and Johnny’s relationship is like the way the scales of justice should be, perfectly balanced.

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Bethless and Full of Pope

BC’s charming big sis, Beth, was in town for too few days, and has already flown back to the heartland. Between Beth-related activities and gardening (this is one of the months that I actually work), I haven’t had much time, but Reese is working on his homework, so I’m taking a break to click across my keyboard.

On Saturday I took BC and Beth to an amazing performance of The Voysey Inheritance, an early 20th century play by Harley Granville-Barker, adapted by David Mamet, and presented at ACT. The play explores the possibility of an ethical life within a corrupt society. Imagine that. A young man, Edward, discovers that his dad has been using his clients’ properties to raise money to quench his family’s thirst for luxury–for years, his dad confesses–continuing a tradition started by his dad’s dad, and which the young man will soon enough have to deal with as he inherits the family business and the challenge of maintaining the appearance of solvency. Everybody’s out for himself, except Edward, who wants to set the books straight and is reluctantly–in a tilt from his solid moral center–forced to continue his dad’s thievery to save the family from disgrace. Just an amazing piece of theater.

I plucked the remaining Meyer lemons from my tree on Sunday, peeled them, and plunged the tender fragrant skins into a Vodka bath, where they will soak for the next month or so in my closet, and hopefully not explode. I’ll then add some sugar syrup, wait another month or so, and hope that I’ve made enough Limoncello to get me through the winter–if it lasts through summer.

The 99th anniversary of the 1906 quake zipped by without much celebration–next year’s the biggy, I suppose. I did stay over at BC’s, if that counts.

My plum tree, the focus of my garden, has developed rot that has descended into the heart of the main trunk, and I fear that the tree will have to be replaced within the next few years. I’ve lovingly sculpted its form for close to two decades, and am not ready to chop it down just yet, so I’ve filled the hole with an expanding styrofoam insulation, which will hopefully prevent more moisture from getting in, and lightened the limbs so that there’s less stress on the crotch, but once the heartwood is gone, there’s no way to replace it. I’m looking at it outside my window, the styrofoam oozing out of it like a weird polyp. My roses are in outrageous bloom right now, though, and a quarter of my garden is pink.

The client that I worked for today looks just like Janet Reno. She’s one of several beloved clients that I see just twice a year. I love her garden, and its magical contrast of form, texture and color. Because I work there so infrequently, everything gets cut back pretty hard. I leave this tight crew-cut of a garden and return in six months to the Summer of Love flowers in your hair exploding organic inevitability. Janet gave me an $80 tip once, which was great at the time, but makes me a bit uneasy whenever I see her, like does she thinks that I expect another $80 tip? I don’t know if Emily Post mentions it, but it’s not necessary to tip the gardener.

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The Universe Within

So my sister Sue has been visiting. Sue is 50 and looks like she’s 29, with a matching disposition and complexion. Last week we went to see the exhibition, The Universe Within at the Masonic Hall. It consists of 100 or so actual bodies that have been preserved with a process called “plastination,” a kind of plastic petrification. The exhibit was a bit more visual than scientific, and offered several really stunning visuals, like a flayed man holding a hanger with his skin draped over it, an Asian-looking St. Bartholomew, and a guy sliced in half, the two halves turned to consider the other. There was also a cool exhibit of a person sliced horizontally into pieces about an inch thick, the slices spaced about an inch apart in a 15 foot case. Most of the guys were not terribly well endowed, but it was hard to tell since most of them had their entire skins pulled off. Only one particular specimen stood out, surrounded by giggling art students sketching his musculature. The bodies reminded me of the wax replicas of the various systems of the body made in the late 18th century in Tuscany, but lacking the scientific and even artistic qualities of those exquisite studies. The current models weren’t abstracted by the notion of an approximation, they were actual bodies, and maybe that’s what made it strange. All of those organs worked once. Instead of experiencing a sense of wonder at humankind’s scientific advancement, I felt like a steak by the end of the show.

Speaking of steak, Philip came over for dinner tonight. A salade niçoise, topped with a sliced rare tuna steak. I wanted to make him dinner so that he could relax, but instead he brought the dinner and cooked it, too. I look at all my friends now as if I can see their insides. I just can’t believe it all works. We’re all steaks.

I’m still in the midst of my continuing-mid-life crisis, although it looks like I’m going to be making a ton of art in the coming months, so thank you Cosmos, for the timing.