E-Ticket
We first talked on the phone. Don worked in a sales office, where things were intense, hours were long, tempers often frayed. I worked in the home office, where hours were mostly regular and tempers required to be even. Don would call for help, sounding just a little desperate. “I really need this. They’re going to be coming back at 2, and we have to have an answer.”
I told him, “It’s ok. I’ll get you something by then.”
“We have to get this to Don right away,” I told everyone. “Every hour after noon, they cut off one of his fingers.”
An exaggeration, of course. We share a love of hyperbole. Everyone understands, and the answers are found, and Don’s fingers are spared.
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Then one day, there he was in the office. One of my colleagues had hired him. We were introduced. I noticed that he was tall and slim, with intense blue eyes and short curly hair. And gay. But none of that mattered.
What mattered was how smart he was. The questions he asked in his first days on the job. It was clear that he was special, and that his skills were wasted in his new job. I knew he needed to come work for me, where he wouldn’t be wasted. It took a few weeks to convince my boss to transfer him, but before long I had a new teammate and he had new challenges.
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We weren’t an obvious match as friends. I was dieting, he could eat anything. I grew up in a prosperous home, his family had struggled to keep a foot in the middle class. I had been married forever and experienced nothing. He had been single forever and had tested everything. I had children, he had none. I had walked the straight and narrow path, wondering if it was really the right one. He had walked several paths, and found none that was quite right. I had been born and raised in religion. He had longed for God, but God’s people had always rejected him. I was quiet, logical, reticent. He was voluble, passionate, and impulsive.
Despite all that, sitting just 10 feet apart like that, we quickly became friends. It seems now like it happened within the first few days. We could talk for hours, about anything. I didn’t realize then that Don can talk to anyone about anything. Still, the connection was surprising and instant and undeniable.
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Sometimes, I was jealous. He was so very smart, so good at the things I thought I was was good at. I feared he would make me unnecessary, or at least less special. There were moments when I wished he would go away. But that small, sad part of me was excised quickly, thanks to some wise words from my boss. I learned, finally, that being the best at something didn’t matter, no matter what my mother had said. I was a supervisor now. and my job was to find the best people out there. It was my first lesson in being a leader.
Still today, when I talk to a star performer about to move into management, I tell them, One of your toughest days will be the day you hire someone who is better at this job than you ever were. When that day comes — and if you’re a good supervisor, it shouldn’t take too long — you have to remember that this is your greatest accomplishment.
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One day, he was hungry and asked if I had any food. He was always looking for food.
Luckily, I almost always have food. I handed over a carton of yogurt.
“Oh,” he said, wrinkling his nose. “It’s blueberry.”
“You don’t like blueberry?”
“Not in yogurt,” he answered. I looked at him quizzically. “You can’t have a slime and another slime,” he said, as if pointing out the plainest of truths.
It made sense now. “Ah, you’re a Virgo, aren’t you.”
He had to admit that he was.
That explained a lot. Most of my best friends are Virgos. In fact, almost every time I meet someone and feel and instant and deep connection with them, it turns out they are Virgos. I don’t say that I believe in astrology. It’s just an observation.
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I was on a diet — one of those plans with pre-packaged foods. Lots of vegetables and fruit. Miniature portions of everything else.
One day I opened a pre-packaged styrofoam bowl containing a couple tablespoons of Chicken Noodle … casserole? stew? … anyway, it was chickens and noodles in a fragrant broth. Lots of fragrance to make up for the lack of actual food.
Don came over, sniffing. “Oooooh what is that? It smells sooo good!” He ducked his head down close to the tiny lunch dish.
“Stop!” I practically yelled at him, covering the dish with my hand. I’m sure I seemed rather irrational about it, but as I explained, every sniff was taking up precious molecules of my lunch. He laughed at me, but not too much, because he wanted to support my goals.
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One time, early on, we had made plans to do something in an evening, and I was meeting Don at his apartment. He lived in a very large complex – one of those places with six or eight huge identical buildings. I had directions, and followed them as carefully as I am ever able to follow directions. I found myself in front of an apartment that had the right number, and the door was open, as if company was expected. Maybe he just ran down to the laundry?
I stood tentatively in the doorway, looking around. Part of me said, go on in! After all, he’s expecting you! But I’m a cautious person, so I called out a hesitant “hello.” No answer, but I thought I heard some movement in the bathroom. What is the correct behavior with a new acquaintance, of the opposite sex, who might still be getting showered or dressed or something? After a long pause, I took a step in. No more sounds from the bathroom — I must have imagined that.
It was a pretty generic apartment. A worn couch, and a cheap dinette set. Over the couch…a poster. Of a girl in a bikini. Leaning on a motorcycle.
That just doesn’t seem right, I thought. Don seemed like the kind of guy who would have classy stuff, or no stuff. But not cheesy stuff.
Also, it was a girl in a bikini. Next to a motorcycle. Two things I was pretty sure Don wasn’t interested in.
Maybe it’s supposed to be ironic?
There’s another sound in the bathroom — or maybe it’s the bedroom. He’ll think it’s weird that I’m just standing out here. Surely he left the door open so I could come in. I take another step or two inside.
And look into the kitchen. Where there is a coffeepot.
Didn’t Don say that he didn’t have a coffeepot?
I dash out, anxious to be far away when who ever it was — the sort of guy who has a motorcycle chick poster – gets out of the bathroom. I call Don. Right apartment, wrong building. Of course.
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Somewhere early on, I took a business trip, with a weekend stay to see friends while I was in their area.
I arrived in Minneapolis on a Friday night, and woke up Saturday morning at my friend’s house. I was looking through my travel papers, and realized that I had completely forgotten to bring the address of the office I was going to visit on Monday morning. I knew it was in West Des Moines, which is not a huge community, but it’s a little too large to just drive around hoping to stumble upon the right address. (This was before people had cell phones and GPS.)
I realized that I had left this information on my desk at the office. Of course, now it was Saturday, and nobody was at the office, and of course, by the time anyone got there on Monday morning, because of the time difference I would already be quite late to my meeting (notice that in this thought process, I correctly analyzed the impact of the time zone.) After worrying over this for a half hour or so, I finally came up with the perfect solution. I could call Don! He had given me his home number, he lived close to the office, and I knew he wouldn’t think me a particularly demanding boss if I asked him to stop by work on a weekend for a simple errand like this.
Don is not an early riser, so I didn’t want to call too soon — but it was already nine am! That’s 11 am in California. He would surely be up. In fact I would be lucky to catch him still at home.
Of course, I had it backwards. It was 7 am in California. I realized my error as soon as I heard the groggy “hello?” Don gave the requisite “no, I was up” while I offered repeated apologies for being such an airhead (I’m sure he had already figured that out by then). And of course, before too long, I had the needed information, and the rest of my itinerary was faxed to me in due order on Monday morning.
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Like most single moms, I was usually not the vacation parent. I was the homework, chores, and dentist appointment parent. Which was fine, I’m better at that stuff anyway.
But just this once, my boys and I were taking a vacation together. They were about 10 and 13, and I had to go to the Midwest on business, so they came with me to visit friends and family along the way. One problem — we had just gotten two kittens. One for each boy. Bonnie and York. They were only a few months old — too little to be left alone for two weeks. So Don agreed to have them as houseguests while we are away.
Cats don’t really like new locations — they bond with a home as much as with the people in it. But these cats were still babies, and they had a good time visiting Don. They played together, hiding their heads under the couch and thinking he couldn’t see them.
Not long after we returned home, he got a cat of his own. Her name is Sidney.
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Sidney was a stray. Skinny, not quite full grown. She has an oddly vacant look in her eyes, but she is friendly and seemed delighted to be allowed into Don’s apartment. But one day she slipped out the door and ran off. Later, he saw her looking down at him from the balcony of a different apartment. He felt a little jealous. “Forget that little tramp!” I teased.
She doesn’t stay away though. After trying out other homes, she liked Don’s the best, and eventually he got her to stay. Forever.
One day, Don says she seems to be gaining weight. I stop by, and the truth is immediately apparent to me. I’m a mother myself — I know the signs.
After a couple of months, the kittens arrive, six or eight of them. It’s not often city folk get to see newborn animals, so I pick up my twelve year old, and we go over to visit. The kittens don’t do anything, of course. Sidney stays with them in the box, tolerating our closeness but not encouraging any further liberties. It is the only time I have ever seen her look purposeful.
As the kittens grow up, Don finds homes for all of them. Sidney goes to the vet to be spayed, since Don has run out of friends who might want a cat. Spaying is pretty big surgery, and Don is worried about his girl. She was always thin, too young to be a mom, and now as she lays on her side, her belly caves inward. Don is almost teary worrying about her. I’ve seen freshly spayed animals before, and they often look this way. I say, very seriously, “You know, I think they too, out too many guts.”
Don didn’t respond to teasing very well, he was too sincere and sympathetic. But this time, he looked at me doubtfully for a second, and then we both laugh.
Sidney is fine, and she lived with Don for many more years. She moved with him several times, but never seemed to know the difference. Every time she walks into a room she looks around as if she has never seen it before. She is not a very clever cat, but she never wavered in her affection.
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Don and I were both single back then, and he was the best confidante and advisor a single lady could ask for. We often talked about my dates, or more often about my lack of them. Don talked about some of his experiences, too, although he usually was vague in his descriptions of prior partners. It was actually several months before he was comfortable talking about his orientation. He had once lived with a woman for a few months, and he did talk about her, still with affection. Marian was a big, vibrant woman, demanding but also affectionate. She sounded a lot like Don’s mom, and I’ve often thought that his attraction to Marian was related to the difficult relationship he had with his mother, especially in his early adult life.
Don had so many stories and sayings and wisdom, and much of it was quite quotable. I remember visiting my family, probably on the trip where Don was kitten-sitting. At one point my sister asked if I was seeing anyone. I think I wasn’t at the time, and said as much. She said knowingly, “so then who’s this Don we keep hearing about.” She wasn’t quite convinced I said he was just a friend from work. In a way she was right, he was always more than that, although not in the way she thought.
It’s funny that now, when I try to think of the stories and sayings, I can’t. It’s not that I’ve forgotten, it’s just that they are so much a part of me now, I can’t separate them out from my own thoughts. About a week before Don called to tell me about his cancer, I had sent him a New Yorker cartoon.
A middle-aged couple are talking over dinner and one of them says “I’ve learned so much from you, you remind me of me.” He told me it had made him cry. These days it has the same effect on me.
Ron
I think it was about a year after Don and I started working together that he first met Ron. He lived a couple of hours away, so they mostly saw each other on weekends at first. As they progressed from casual dating to serious dating to commitment to living together, Don would say at every turn that he was discouraging this progress, that it was too soon, that here he was going to draw the line, because he liked being single. But a couple of weeks later they would have passed another milestone, and as each one went by Don never really looked back.
Ron brought a lot of new things to Don’s life — order, peace, a coffee maker, laughter, and kids. The two boys were about 8 and 11. An awkward age, in a way — past adorable but not nearly grown. Don loved them, even though they tried his patience. (Most people remember being such well-behaved children!) Don had parents, and a brother, but Ron’s family was larger, closer, and more “normal.”
They had a wonderful synergy. Without Don, Ron’s life would have been quieter, less interesting, less varied, probably less prosperous, and certainly less challenging. Ron has grown with Don in ways he would never have on his own. But Ron brought a lot to the relationship too. Don made it possible to buy series of increasingly expensive homes, but Ron was the one who made those homes both elegant and welcoming. It’s always hard to say what “would have happened” — one turn left instead of right can start you down a long road with infinite other possibilities. But it’s hard to imagine either of them having found someone better than what they found in each other.
I didn’t meet Ron right away, but I was impressed with him before I ever saw him. When they met — or soon after, I don’t remember now — Don was diagnosed with chronic hepatitis B and C. The doctor started him on a course of interferon, a drug that was supposed to suppress the levels of virus in his system. It did that, but it also made him quite ill most of the time. Most people would have taken time off work, but of course Don never liked to take time off work, so he was at the job nearly every day, even when the flu-like symptoms were at their worst. Since he didn’t really slow down at work, his weekends were spent mostly resting and recovering. Many people would be reluctant to start a relationship with someone who was ill, but Ron was there every weekend, even when Don wasn’t able to do much.
While Ron looked after Don on the weekends, I had charge of him during the week. Not that Don needed much supervision in the usual sense — but our jobs involved talking on the phone with insurance salespeople. Many of the salesmen I’ve worked with over the years are terrific people, but even the best of them can be aggravating. It’s in their nature (and a requirement of their jobs) that they be aggressive, creative, and a bit manipulative. They can try anyone’s patience, and here was Don, a tempermental guy on medication that gave him a 24 hour flu every day. There were moments when he could be pushed no farther. There were times it was best if he didn’t take calls.
Most of the time he did fine, though. His intelligence and natural empathy made him able to handle things better than most people would. I just had to remind him, once in a while, to be nice, even to the people who didn’t seem to deserve being treated nicely. I think this was the only other time I kidded him a bit. One time I picked up the phone, pretending to be him. “Klingon marketing,” I said to the fake caller, in a Worf-like growl. “You are without honor! I must disembowel you now!” We laughed, and that made things a little better.
When Don was first diagnosed, he talked with me about the typical course of his illness. The interferon was supposed to reduce the viral load, and consequently reduce the strain on his liver, which already had sustained some damage from his heavy drinking days (at this time he had been sober for nearly a decade). Still, we have a lot more liver than we really need to get by, and it seemed possible that things would be fine in the long run. “Although,” Don told me, “there’s a pretty good chance that by the time I’m 50 I’ll have liver cancer. Or I might need a liver transplant.”
Fifty! We were in our mid-thirties then, old enough to realize how little time that was. I asked him, tentatively, how he felt about knowing that his life might be cut short at such an early age. He just smiled at me, and said with a bit of a shrug, “I can’t complain. It’s been an e-ticket ride.”
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In my late 30′s I had two significant accomplishments that would not have occurred without Don, because he did them first.
One was finishing college. Both of us had started college at the usual age, and picked away at the general education courses over time, but adult life and responsibilities had kept us from finishing. Now, time and money seemed too limited to me to pursue finishing my degree. But Don enrolled in the University of Phoenix, and after he completed a few courses in the first few months, I decided maybe it was possible after all. Within two more years we were both official college graduates.
The other thing was buying a house. I don’t remember now what triggered that decision, but Don and Ron looked around and found a nice little place in a new development in southern Orange County. It was a nice, new, two bedroom townhouse. There are a million places in South Orange County just like it — but it was a big step and we were all very excited about it. The first night they moved in, I came over and we sat on the floor and ate pizza and drank Diet Coke and celebrated this new phase of real adult life. Ron took a picture of me that night, reclining on the floor, leaning on one elbow. I never liked it, but Don always did. Later on, it was the picture that led me to my new husband. But that was years later.
One time, not long after Don and Ron had moved in, I visited them with my son Dan, who must have been about 13 by then. On our way home, Dan said to me, “Aren’t you Don’s boss?”
“Well, yes, more or less,” I said. I didn’t usually think of it that way anymore.
“So…how come he can buy a house and we still have an apartment?” Dan asked. I muttered something about a two income household, but the fact was that it started me thinking that maybe there would be a way that I could own a home as well.
And, within about a year, with a little help from student loans, I did own a house. Not a new house, like theirs — that’s never been my style — but a pleasant little house not far from work and not far from the boys’ schools and with a huge added-on room that became my home-within-a-home. It was a pretty ordinary older house (just like their pretty ordinary newer house) but it was very exciting. Even after five years there, I often came home and felt amazed and grateful that I was able to live in such a place of my very own.
One night, just before the house closed, I met the realtor there to discuss a few things. Don and Ron and Dan came with me, to see the new place and measure some of the rooms so I could figure out where all the furniture would go. After a while, the three of them emerged from the bedroom giggling. Don announced, “Dan got to see Ron come out of the closet!”
“It was much easier this time,” Ron added. We all laughed hilariously, and the realtor chuckled a little, while giving me a nervous look. In retrospect, I think it may have bothered him that I would let my adolescent son hang out with gay guys, and even joke about it.
A couple of weeks later we continued a new tradition, and sat on the carpeted floor of my new house, eating pizza, drinking diet coke, and talking about how our lives were moving along. It was a great night.
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Although we’ve worked together for years, and both taken many business trips, we’ve only taken one business trip together. I think it was lucky that this trip happened to be to Denver, the city where Don grew up. This particular trip was a two or three day training session, and there were several of us who were coworkers and also pretty good friends.
The training was challenging and yet dull, something about Visual Basic and Life Insurance and … see, you’re dozing off already, aren’t you! Anyway, on one evening four or five of us decided to head out to experience Denver night life. I don’t remember where we had dinner, but I remember that Don and I had plenty of chances to mock our California native friends, who found 40 degrees to be so cold as to be almost unsurvivable. After dinner we walked around a bit in some part of downtown Denver. It was brisk, and the city lights twinkling off the snow and the sight of real stars in the sky felt a lot like home to me. We ended up at a little bar or club of some sort where there was a piano player — or were there two? I don’t remember. I must have had a drink, and in those days one drink was enough to blur an evening’s events. There was singing, a piano player or something, and of course lots of laughter. You’ve heard people called “the life of the party” but Don at a party was something more and better than that. He brought life and laughter to the party, and not just the dizzy hilarity of intoxication. I often invited him to social events at my house just because I knew that if he was there nobody would be bored and nobody would feel left out.
Nothing in particular happened that night, really. But there is nothing better than an evening of moments both serious and silly with real friends. The kind of friends who will still be there when party time is over.
On our way home, we were at the airport together, riding up a long escalator. Like most escalators, there was a rubber handrail (if that’s what you call it) supported by a series of clear panels made of glass or acrylic or something. As we were going up there was a little boy, about four years old, going down on the opposite side of this clear divider. His parents were busy, or exhausted, as one is when traveling with children, so they didn’t notice that the boy was going down the escalator with the inside of his his lower lip dragging along the glass. There was a faint smear all the way along.
Of course we were adults, and as we looked at each other our first thought was, “ewwww..” But our second thought was, I wish I was a little kid, who didn’t know about boring adult stuff like germs and dignity. Because that probably feels really cool. Especially when your lip would pass over one of the seams in the glass. We were both, actually, kind of jealous.
Two small and not particularly important moments, but I think of them often.
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Another night, we were out — I think it was just the three of us, Don and Ron and me. We went for dinner to some pasta place where you order your food and then wait for them to call out your number, so you can retrieve your dinner from the kitchen. It was probably a Friday night — it seems to me we were going to a movie afterwards — and we had to wait for a while. Finally, our number was called, and Don let out one of his famous “Woo Hoo”s. There is no way in writing to quite simulate the effect of this, but Ron and I both laughed as the other diners turned to look. And again, I was secretly jealous, of someone who could so freely express his happiness at one of life’s mundane joys.
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One time the three of us planned a weekend trip to Big Bear. It was wintertime and perhaps I was feeling nostalgic for a little snow and cold — I don’t quite remember now. I do recall that at the last minute Ron wasn’t able to get away from work (this was in the bad old days when he worked in retail) so it ended up being just me and Don. We had a great couple of days. I had rented a two bedroom cabin, and it had a cozy living room and kitchen with an old wooden kitchen table to eat at. We had brought some food and supplies, but we still picked up a few things at a corner store where the cashier was a wizened old lady with only a smattering of teeth. We went horseback riding one day — I recall that I was the one who really wanted to do that, but Don was much calmer and managed not to fall on his ass, as I did at least once. We walked around the little town, and drove around the area on Sunday morning looking at some cabins that were for sale.
After the fantasy cabin shopping, we stopped for lunch at one of those odd little places that you find in small towns — someone had turned an old Dairy Queen into a sort of rustic and sort of modern sandwich shop. There weren’t many customers. There wasn’t room for many customers. While we ate, Don regaled me with some story or other from his younger days in San Francisco. I don’t remember the story now, although it seems to me that drag queens figured prominently. It was about at that point that Don stopped, and quietly said “I’ll tell you the rest of that story later.” He glanced across the shop at two men in camouflage, apparently just in from a morning of hunting. They were eavesdropping, not very subtly, and not very approvingly either. They looked like the sort of guys who didn’t have any stories about drag queens, unless the drag queens got beat up at the end.
In the years I’ve known Don, we’ve lived in and visited places where tolerance was the norm. It was easy to forget that it wasn’t always safe for Don – or thousands like him — to just be himself.
The San Francisco Years
Don was ambitious, always needing to grow and change and make progress. He got a new job, in a small sales office in San Francisco. So he and Ron left. It was sad, but it was right for them, and it was ok.
Not long after they moved, a milestone was looming for me. A big milestone. A mile boulder. My fortieth birthday. I wanted to spend the day with my best friends, but I didn’t want to think about turning forty. It should be an event, but also a non-event.
I figured that they wouldn’t remember the date — even gay men are still men, after all. So I called. “I’m free that weekend in the middle of March, how about if I come up for a visit?” Their schedule was open, and no questions were asked.
Don and Ron had a beautiful apartment. Well, an ordinary apartment with a beautiful view. I slept in the guest bedroom, where there was a bed, and a … refrigerator. They apologized for the refrigerator, which was wrapped in a blanked that I dubbed the “refrigerator cozy.” They were only there a couple of months before moving to a very large and elegant home.
Friday was the big day, but I was still keeping my secret. We ended up eating at the Olive Garden, which is one of my least favorite places — but this was Oakland and the choices were limited. We had salad and wine and pasta and a good time. Waiters kept coming in with candles in little desserts, singing about Happy Birthdays, but thankfully none of them were for me. And yes, I picked up the check. It was really my turn. And when a woman is forty, and single, she should be able to pick up a check once in a while.
So, that made Saturday my first full day of being forty. Whatever we did all day, I don’t remember now. But in the evening, we met downtown, at Saks Fifth Avenue, where Ron was working. We walked around the city, ending up in the Castro district, and stopped off in a bar. We sat in a horseshoe shaped booth, and ordered drinks. Diet Coke for Don, a martini each for Ron and me. The waitress was a woman who seemed like she might be almost forty herself. She was nice. It was only later I realized maybe the waitress was flirting with me a little. Or maybe there was no flirting. Maybe that’s just the way I want to remember it.
An entire (and rather large) martini was an unprecedented amount of liquor for me back then By the time we left the bar, it seemed that the Castro district was one giant, lovely tilt-a-whirl.
We wandered here and there. One of the stops was an adult bookstore or something — I don’t quite remember except there was some kind of giant mushroom-like thing in one part of the floor. Maybe it was supposed to be a bench, but it sure looked like something else. I wandered further toward the back of the store, but Don stopped me about halfway in. “I can’t let you go back there,” he said. Because he is a gentleman. Because I was a single mom and this was my time to be irresponsible and he was taking care of me.
After a while we ate, a Thai wrap, which at the time was totally trendy. By the time I finished eating, the Tilt-a-Whirl ride was over, and the Castro was just a part of downtown, where men and women are paired off in unusual ways, but otherwise it is like anyplace that men and women hang out, socialize, and hook up after a long week’s work. And I felt safe and happy because I knew I had the best friends in the world.
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A couple of weeks later, Don called, and he was just a little cranky. They had figured out that it had been my birthday, and they hadn’t known, and hadn’t made it into the special event they would have liked. I suppose it wasn’t quite fair to them. They felt guilty and a bit deprived of the chance to make a fuss over me. But it was perfect for me, and although they have never forgotten this, I think they have forgiven me.
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A couple of years later, there is another milestone, this one for everybody. The world was moving on, from one century to the next. I flew up to San Francisco, to the lovely new house. Ron’s sons are there too, and we are all going… camping.
Not the regular sort of camping. This is a campground for the well-to-do. The cheap lodgings are large tents, big enough for three or four cots, with cement floors and state-of-the-art space heaters. The better lodgings are in a small cabin — still no running water but at least there is a fireplace, and real beds, and solid walls with windows and proper furniture. No matter what lodgings you chose, there was a big common building for games and socializing, and a “canteen” where we could buy porcini mushrooms to cook on our campfire and simmer in artisanal wine sauce.
One night we ate at a small diner that was also a combination of San Francisco chic and down home plain. There wood paneled walls and plastic furniture, but the salads are made with a real variety of green, weird stuff like arugula. Elliot and Geoff are just teenagers. The salads sound good to them, but Don protests. He knows that teenage boys won’t eat arugula. Ron and I prevail, though, and the boys order what they want. Sure enough, when the salads arrived they turned up their noses at the bitter, earthy flavors. Ron and I ate the salads, but Don spent the evening in that odd mood that is a sort of combination of gloating over being right and grousing over having to pick up the tab for it.
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On New Year’s Day it was cold and windy. Not Minnesota cold, or Denver cold, but Northern California by the ocean cold — which is cold enough. We packed sandwiches and other things in the cooler (not sure why we bothered with that) and took off for a drive. By chance, I think, we came across an area that seemed perfect for a picnic lunch — on a bluff looking over the ocean. A classic Edward Hopper lighthouse sort of view, without the actual lighthouse. We toted the cooler to a picnic table, and managed to serve up the food without everything blowing away in the stiff ocean wind. We huddled around the picnic table eating our sandwiches in our California winter jackets — which aren’t really warm enough for this situation.
I remember looking around the table as we all ate in silence, each person scrunched over, head down against the wind, focused on not shivering so hard that the food would slip from our stiffened fingers. It was the saddest picnic in history. Which made me laugh, which made everyone else laugh. And that warmed us up a bit.
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Don has always had a hard time being content. For better or worse, he is always looking at the next opportunity for learning or experience or growth. So it was only a couple of years after the move to San Francisco that he and Ron moved back to Southern California, and Don and I were working together again. Soon after that, we were able to help Ron to get a job at the same company, which got him out of the demanding and usually low-paying retail business and into a job with more regular hours.
Before the San Francisco move, Don had never really come out at work. People guessed, and when I was asked I would generally say that I supposed he might be gay, but we didn’t really talk about it. (For a while, that was true.) But he didn’t really want to go back into the closet at work, and having Ron working at the same company would make that pretty impossible anyway.
As a way of dipping a toe in the water, they came to visit and I invited one of our other good friends over to dinner. Everyone knew, and everyone knew everyone knew, but everyone was still also very careful what they said, or didn’t say, lest anyone be offended, or think anyone else was offended, or think that they should be offended even if they weren’t — or something. For four open-minded adults in Southern California, there was an oddly awkward vibe in the air.
After we ate, we decided to watch some TV. This required insisting (with some small argument) that my son Dan give up the Nintendo game he was playing. He did, and we sat down to watch the Simpsons, hoping for a new and non-dangerous topic to talk and laugh about.
But, we were doomed. In this episode of the Simpsons, the family befriends John Waters (playing himself), the very avant garde and very gay movie director. We sat in stunned and hideously awkward silence. Finally, after a scene in which Bart and Homer visit a steel mill which turns out to be staffed entirely by gay men who disco through lunch hour, we all broke down laughing. Nobody laughed harder than my son, as he said that perhaps next time we would just let him play Nintendo.
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The move back to Southern California took a few months. Don worked from his home in San Francisco at first, and came down for a few days here and there to house hunt. I had my new house, too, so one day he and I went out shopping at a home remodeling fair of some sort. These things aren’t as useful as they sound — there are about 50 companies that specialize in redoing your kitchen cabinets, 25 companies that want to put in a pool or hot tub (or both), a bunch of roofers, and the requisite “as seen on TV” type products that will magically clean your house and cook your dinner while you sit on the couch eating bon bons.
But, as it happened, I was thinking of remodeling my kitchen, and Don wanted his next house to have a pool, so off we went.
I suppose that if a man and a woman are hanging out at a home show together, its not unreasonable to assume that they are a couple. Until, after you tell them that you are not a couple. At some point, they should just take your word for it. Apparently it’s really hard for people to deal with this.
There was one booth just inside the door where a fellow was offering chances on a trip to Mexico — probably in exchange for getting an estimate on your new roof. Anyway, in my usual anti-social manner, I looked straight ahead and kept walking. Don, in his usual gregarious “everyone has a chance with Don” manner, stopped briefly, and turned to the fellow. But since I wasn’t stopping, Don just looked at the man, pointed to me and said, “Aw, she won’t let me go to Mexico.” The man gave Don a sympathetic nod, as if to say, “I’ve got a woman at home like that too.”
That time it was funny. After a while it got a little annoying. We would stop at a booth to check out cabinet remodeling. The salesman would talk to me a little bit, but he just couldn’t keep himself from making most of his pitch to Don. After all, surely it’s the man who would appreciate the fine craftsmanship and reasonable prices, right? Rather the opposite happened when we got to the booths for swimming pool installers. Apparently it’s supposed to be the woman’s job to want a pool, and to insist on the prettiest tiles, no matter the cost. When we tried to tell the salesmen that we weren’t a couple, and didn’t live together, they looked at us as if we had said that we wanted cabinets made from orange peels and a pool filled with rabbits.
This happened again later, when I went with Don and Ron to shop for blinds. I know nothing about blinds except that they are a nuisance to dust, and tend to break, and I don’t like them. I was just along for the company and probably a free dinner. But the lady who was selling the blinds just didn’t know what to make of two men and a woman. The one thing she did know was that she would never make a sale if the wife wasn’t convinced, so she not only made her pitch to me, she was visibly agitated that she couldn’t get me to take the slightest interest in her wares.
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There was one other time that I recall someone being quite confused by the three of us being out together. Actually it was more than three. Friends from San Francisco, Todd and Keith, were down for a visit with their young son. So there were five of us, plus a baby in a high chair, at a diner for lunch. I sat on the inside of the booth, with Don and Ron next to me, and Todd and Keith sat across. The baby, of course, was at the end in a high chair.
When it came time to order dessert, Todd and Keith ordered a dessert to share, Don and Ron did the same, and I ordered a dessert of my own. The waitress suddenly smiled and nodded and said something like “ah ha!” We realized that she had been wondering all along exactly what the story was with four guys and a woman having lunch together. But, two straight guys would almost never share a dessert, so apparently that part of our order solved the puzzle for her.
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One of the biggest adventures that Don led me into was scuba diving. Scuba diving requires that you be comfortable in the water, which I am, but also that you be somewhat athletic, which I am not. It’s even more demanding in the water off the Southern California coast, which tends to be cold, with unexpected currents and not much visibility. But Don had his heart set on learning to dive, and Ron and I were inevitably talked into going along.
But, join them I did. There were a couple of lessons in the pool, which was interesting because even when you are actually breathing through a regulator under water, there is some very deeply rooted instinct to panic. It took a while before I was ok with it, even in the shallow end of the pool. But our first lesson in the ocean was the big challenge — and not just for me.
If you’ve been diving in non-tropical water, you may know that it is necessary to wear a full and rather heavy wetsuit, which tends to constrict your movements and breathing just a bit. With the suit, tank, weights and other gear, it is pretty easily 50 to 75 pounds of equipment to carry — not much in the water but a heck of a lot of weight to carry around on land. Our parking spaces were at the top of a rather steep hill, so there was a long stairway down to the actual beach, which made me even tireder thinking about climbing back up again when we were done. It was a chilly, gray day — the sort of weather I usually like but it didn’t feel much like a beach day.
Getting into the water from the beach is much more difficult than from a boat. You have to wade out into the surf (backwards, as I recall) with your heavy gear on and your fins in your hands. When the water is somewhere above your knees so you can float, you have to start paddling out, still holding your fins, until you are out far enough to slip the fins on your feet. After that you are home free, so to speak. It probably would be easy if there was no surf.
But there was surf, and it was was plenty strong enough to knock me down to my hands and knees when the first wave slammed into my back. I wasn’t strong enough to stand up with that damn tank on my back, so I just crawled back up the beach feeling a bit like a turtle hauling its home along with it.
I tried to just wait on the beach for the hour to be up, but nobody would let me do that, so I had to walk back out into the surf where one of the instructors towed me out. Once I was in deeper water and floating, I got my fins on and managed to join the group without embarrassing myself any further.
Meanwhile, Don and Ron managed to get out through the surf on their own (Don’s surfing experience no doubt helped) but they had their own problems. Ron had a bit of a panic attack due to the cold water, and Don had trouble getting his equipment fastened correctly. The instructors looked at us with barely concealed disdain. I’m sure they felt like kindergarten teachers — we’re lucky they didn’t just drown us. I’m sure it would have been easy enough.
We got through that lesson, though, and the next one, which was a boat dive near Catalina. After we were certified we took another dive out near Catalina (we hired one of our instructors, Carl, to come with us and babysit.) For this drive there weren’t any specific requirements, so it was more relaxed. Still, we managed to try the Carl’s patience more than once. I jumped into the water and promptly lost my face mask, which Carl had to dive down a ways to retrieve. (You would think they would float!) Meanwhile, the guys were swimming along and Don sank down below 60 feet or so before he realized he was sinking. Carl had to go and retrieve him so that he could properly pace his ascent to a safer depth.
One of my favorite parts of that dive was when, at about 30 feet in a calm area, I was able to complete one of the exercises that the book had described. I lay (more or less) on the ocean floor, on my stomach, with the tips of my fins pressed lightly into the sand. I balanced the inflation of my gear to the exact point where I would rise slightly with each inhalation, and sink back down as I exhaled. I did this for probably a minute. It was a very soothing, zen-like sort of feeling, concentrating on my breathing and the exact amount that my body rose and fell. My reverie was interrupted by the sudden loud clank of metal on metal as Don, who again was having trouble staying at the right depth, crashed upside down into me. It was a very rude end to my only truly peaceful underwater moment.
After that, I didn’t go diving again. It’s a lot of work to dive in California, and tropical vacations don’t interest me much (you can’t be diving the whole time.) Don and Ron, however, dove next in Florida, and later in a number of places around the world. It was one of Don’s favorite thing to do.
The last time I saw Don, when he knew he was only a few weeks from death, he allowed himself a rare moment of self-pity. He could only put together a few words at a time by then. “There are so many things I still want to do,” he said as we both cried quietly. “No more scuba.”
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Don moved to Boston in February of 2008. He rarely came to Southern California after that and when he did his schedule was tight and I didn’t get a chance to see him. Ron was able to sell the house and joined Don in the summer of that year, so we hadn’t seen him for a few months either. We exchanged emails, but not often, and we talked by phone even less because of the time difference. So when they said they were coming out the week before Thanksgiving for a visit I was especially pleased.
A couple of days before they were due to arrive, I was a bit surprised when my phone rang at work and it was Don. We chatted a bit, and then he said, “I have something to tell you and I really need you to not freak out.”
I laughed and pointed out that “freaking out” was not something I am particularly known for. “Well,” he continued, “over the last couple of weeks I’ve … I’ve been finding out that I have liver cancer.”
This was a call I had been dreading ever since Don’s hepatitis was diagnosed all those years ago. But as time went on, it had got easier to think that maybe the axe would never fall.
He gave me more details, the tumor wasn’t too big and didn’t seem to have spread, so there was a good chance he would be able to get a transplant, but they had to do more tests first. There were treatments that might slow the tumor’s growth until a transplant would be available. He felt fine, still. He said, “I want to have a normal visit. I don’t want our whole time together to be about this.” I promised that I would talk it over with my husband and that over the weekend we could talk about it or not, whatever he wanted.
We had a nice visit, but it was the last time I saw him when he was really well.
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A week or so later it as Thanksgiving and my husband and I took off for England. While we were gone, Don had the procedure that was supposed to choke off the tumor’s blood supply and stop its growth. At first Ron kept in touch by phone and email, but when the messages stopped I got worried, and wrote from London insisting that he tell me what was going on. He wrote back to say he had been reluctant to send bad news while we were on vacation, which was exactly what I had feared. In fact, he said, another test had shown that the cancer had spread to Don’s lungs. The lung tumors were still quite small, but any metastasis at all took Don off the list for a transplant. That meant there would be no cure, just attempts to slow things down. Don went on a new drug that had slowed liver cancer growth in many patients. It was a while before we knew that it wasn’t going to do him any good.
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In January, the doctors estimated that he had a year, maybe longer if the drug worked well. In March, I flew out to Boston to spend my birthday with the two guys. This time, unlike my secret birthday eleven years earlier, they were well prepared for a celebration. We saw a play, and had a great dinner together, and generally had a lovely long weekend together. Don tired easily, but otherwise was quite his usual self.
One morning while Ron was at the gym, Don and I were having an amazing breakfast at a tiny hole-in-the-wall cafe. “I just hope,” he said quietly, “that people won’t have any reason to say that I’ve been a pussy about this.”
I assured him that nobody could possibly think that. For many reasons, not least of which that he was continuing to work and to press on with life as much as possible. In fact, most of the time we were together over the weekend, little was said about the dark clouds on the horizon.
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A few weeks later, my husband and I flew out for another visit. By this time, Don was off the experimental medication, and although we hadn’t been given any new estimates of his life expectancy, it was pretty clear that he didn’t have a year. He had difficulty concentrating — he could read a little, but talking was difficult and writing and typing had become impossible. Apparently this was a result of a build-up of toxins in his system as his liver function began to weaken. He was also weak on his feet, and nearly toppled over several times when he stood up from a chair. He slept a great deal of the time, and when he was awake he was mostly quiet, listening or perhaps just lost in his own thoughts. Occasionally it was painfully clear how disorienting it was for him to be housebound and sick. He had always been driven in his career — and in fact had only started a disability leave a week or two before this. Several times he went looking for his Blackberry, or insisting he had an appointment at two p.m.
When he did talk, though, he was still himself. My husband had a business appointment at one point, and Don offered advice. “When I go to an office, I always ask them what their biggest problem is. Then I ask them to turn that over to me, and I find a solution.” This seems so simple, and yet it is exactly why the offices that Don had been working with for a quarter of a century so admired and trusted him. And in fact, Jon followed that advice, in his own way, and the appointment was quite successful.
It was on this visit that Don and I shared a quiet moment on the couch. He asked me to watch out for Ron. “I want him to be happy,” he said. Then we cried a little about everything. But just a little. After a minute or two, Don said, “OK, that’s enough.” He stood up, wobbly but determined, and we went back to living in the moment.
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I had only been home a week or so, when on a Sunday night I again had to prod Ron for news. Finally, he admitted that Don was “transitioning” and his body was beginning to shut down. He had stopped eating and drinking on Friday, and slept nearly all the time. The hospice staff had said he might have 10 days. Once again, though, those estimates were optimistic. I immediately made plans to fly out on Tuesday night. When I told my staff on Monday morning, they encouraged me to leave sooner. Thankfully, I took their advice and flew out Monday night instead.
The flight was a red-eye, so when I arrived at the condo with Ron it was around 8 am. I braced myself momentarily, and then walked into the living room where Don was lying in a hospital bed. Ron went in a moment ahead of me and said “Julie’s here.” Don was no longer speaking, but he tried to move his hands out from under the blanket and with a loud “unnnhhhh.” I realized later that he was trying to hug me. I took his hands and talked to him, doing my best not to cry. For the next 30 hours, I sat next to him as much of the time as I could, holding his hand, talking to him when I could control the tears, and at night giving him occasional doses of morphine and other medicines through a syringe that we put under his tongue.
If you had asked me whether that was something I could do I would have said no way. I have a tendency to feel dizzy and nauseated when I’m with someone who is very ill, but this time I had no problem with that. Don was weak, and emaciated, but I could only see the face of my dearest friend. Much of the time his eyes were half-closed and unfocused, but when I talked to him he would look at me and his expressions would vary in a way that showed me he knew what I was saying.
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Don left us on Wednesday in the early afternoon. He was not in much pain, but the last few hours his lungs had become congested, which is common when the body is shutting itself down. His breathing was very labored, which must have been exhausting. Ron and I sat by him most of the morning, doing what little we could to help him.
At one pm, a chaplain came by from the hospice. He sat with us, and asked questions about Don, how we had all met, what sort of person Don was. We showed him a picture from a year or two ago, and he commented on Don’s piercing gaze, even in a casual photo. This was true — photos often revealed something of his intensity, as if his desire to connect with people was being captured even through the camera.
We talked for fifteen minutes or so, about the three of us, and our kids and my husband and others close to us. The chaplain said, “It sounds like you all are a family.” I said, “It’s true, we really are family.”
At that moment, Don’s noisy breathing stopped. He turned slightly to look at Ron, his eyes suddenly open wide. Ron held his head and I held his hand. There were a few small movements that may have just been reflexes, but he didn’t breathe again. It seemed that he was still looking at us for a little while. Maybe he was.
It was a while before the mortician could get there. As we were waiting, I told Ron, “I still feel him here.” I added, pointing to the body. “But not there.” Ron told me he had been sensing the same thing.
I don’t have quite the same sense now. I’m sure he has other places to go and lots of old friends to see. But I can often here his laughter in the back of my mind, and when some small good thing happens, I have taken to letting out just the quietest “woo hoo.”
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