I've been thinking a lot lately about getting older. Probably because it seems to be happening to me at an alarming rate over the past few years. At the moment I am standing, immobile, fixed squarely in the headlights of my 53rd birthday, which is barreling at top speed down the highway towards me with no intention of applying the brakes. And it's weird, because as far as I'm concerned, I am always the same age. I am always one day older than I was yesterday.
I remember way back in the 1983, when Joan Collins turned 50. She played mega-bitch Alexis Morell-Carrington-Colby-Dexter-Carrington on "Dynasty", and was viewed as nothing less than a goddess at the time by gay men aged 18-25, which was precisely my demographic. She did a spread in Playboy, and the buzz the whole time was "Joan Collins: still Fabulous at Fifty!" That may be all well and fine, although almost anyone could manage to be fabulous with Bob Mackie and professional lighting. But what they are really implying, though, is that by age fifty, just about everyone else should hang it up because your days of fabulosity are over. And I think to myself, I am 53.
That's not to say that I don't have moments when I still feel fabulous. I still get compliments on my pretty shirts, and once in a while, people on the street will smile at Mark and me as we walk along together, or tell us that we look good together. Then I wonder for a moment whether they're saying that because they're thinking, "Look at those two old guys- it's so cute! They still hold hands!"; or smiling at us the way you smile when Grandma and Grandpa slow dance at a wedding.
The thing is, I don't feel old. To be honest, I don't feel any older than I did when I was, say, 25, at least not on the inside. Of course, back then I used to drink and do drugs and carouse all night, and nowadays I'm all tucked in safe and sound by 10:30, but I still wake up with bad breath and a coffee jones, and I still spend much of the day wishing I could lie down. So it seems that nothing much has changed.
I am fortunate that I don't feel old physically. My teeth were a mess, but I had those taken care of back in my forties. Years of waiting tables, tending bar, running around in size 10 women's heels from Payless, and general abuse have left my poor feet hideous and looking like they belong to two different people. But they still work and I've never really been one for open toes anyway. My eyesight sucks and I'm stuck behind coke-bottle glasses, but that's been the case since kindergarten. I have spots on the back of my hands which make me look like the "before" picture in a Porcelana ad, but other than those few minor complaints, I'm still pretty much intact, physically.
But the main thing is that I don't feel "old" mentally, either. I haven't resigned myself to a long, boring future of falling asleep in front of the TV. I still think, I think, the way I thought when I was 25. I don't see myself as "old me", I'm just me.
We've all had those moments: someone is getting out of a car, for example, or standing up from a sofa. Perhaps unconsciously, they moan and groan with the effort. "Gettin' old..." they'll say. Someone responds, "Well, consider the alternative!" Well, I've been considering the alternative, but the alternative I've been considering is one where I get to keep my 32 year-old body, with its not-too-shabby biceps and fairly smooth face, for as long as I want, and still maintain that 20 years' worth of sweet lifetime.
Unfortunately, no such alternative exists.
The other day, I was probably grabbing my crotch or raising my eyebrows suggestively, or some other such charade which a husband will do which is intended to mean, "Any chance of...?" Mark just looked at me and rolled his eyes at the same time, if such a thing is possible, and said in the sweetest way, "I'm glad you still think you're a stud." Just a little joke, a little repartée between spouses, but ouch, baby. It might have been better without the word "still".
Then there's always the mirror. Much of the morning routine, for me, is actually spent without my glasses on. My face is really just a Paulie-shaped blob in the mirror. 99% of the rest of the time, when I can actually see myself, is spent under the dysmorphic delusion that most of us have, that the face we are seeing today is the same face we saw yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that, and so on, so that we never really notice the ravages of time as they happen. But then there is that other 1%, those moments when you regard your own reflection and you suddenly realize that all those birthdays, all those cigarettes, all those sunburns, have really taken their toll. I'll usually try to laugh it off and say something like, "Jesus, when did that happen?" And it may be shallow, but sometimes it makes me a little bit sad to admit and accept that the days when I can walk down Commercial Street with my shirt off and actually get cruised are long over. I have to get used to the idea that at this point in life, when people do say nice things about your looks, they usually have to qualify it. They don't just say, "He's got a nice ass." They say, "He's got a nice ass for a guy his age."
Of course, there are the two gifts that came with every one of those birthdays: experience and wisdom. This is what we're given when we surrender the perks of youth.
I'm just waiting for that hot summer day, when I am walking down Commercial Street. A hot beefy farmboy-type stops dead in his tracks in front of me, lowers his Ray Bans, giving me the once-over, and says, "Man, look at the wisdom on him!"
Then I'll feel a lot better about the whole thing.
Friday, October 23, 2015
Friday, September 11, 2015
Four years ago, September 10, 2011, was a typical late-summer Cape Cod afternoon, balmy, still, blue skies, the sunflowers and morning glories clinging to the last weeks of summer sun. He was nearly 15 years old at the time, somewhat frail, a little feeble, but my beautiful dog Buster was waiting in the front yard for me to come home from work. He greeted me as always, a wag of the tail, sloppy dog-kisses, sniffing my hands to get an idea of where I'd been and what I'd been doing. A few minutes later, Mark and I watched as he lay down on the grass and drew his last breath.
My heart broke that afternoon, and it has never really been the same since.
So, all these years later, here is my struggle: I can do a roll-call in my head of all the souls I've known who have moved on before me. I have lost both my parents, all my grandparents, most of my aunts and uncles, a few cousins and one beautiful young nephew who was taken long before his time. I've lost best friends, roommates, and countless buddies and pals along the way. I miss them all. I miss the way my mom used to gently stroke my skin when I was sick. I miss watching my nephew grow from a little boy into a man. I miss sharing memories with the one person on earth who made them with me. And I miss all the laughs and all the brilliant deeds they all could have done. But what I miss the most is Buster.
He never once held my hand. He never uttered a single word to me, took me to lunch, or cried in front of me. But if a genie from a bottle appeared to me today and told me that I could bring one soul back, the name I would give would be his.
That sort of freaks me out a little, though. I mean, shouldn't I want my mom, or give my young nephew a second chance at life? I probably should. But when I finally do join that big party of the Dead, and they're all coming to greet me with their white robes and harps, the face I'm going to be looking for is going to be at knee-level.
I guess that's love, huh?
Miss you so much, buddy.
My heart broke that afternoon, and it has never really been the same since.
So, all these years later, here is my struggle: I can do a roll-call in my head of all the souls I've known who have moved on before me. I have lost both my parents, all my grandparents, most of my aunts and uncles, a few cousins and one beautiful young nephew who was taken long before his time. I've lost best friends, roommates, and countless buddies and pals along the way. I miss them all. I miss the way my mom used to gently stroke my skin when I was sick. I miss watching my nephew grow from a little boy into a man. I miss sharing memories with the one person on earth who made them with me. And I miss all the laughs and all the brilliant deeds they all could have done. But what I miss the most is Buster.
He never once held my hand. He never uttered a single word to me, took me to lunch, or cried in front of me. But if a genie from a bottle appeared to me today and told me that I could bring one soul back, the name I would give would be his.
That sort of freaks me out a little, though. I mean, shouldn't I want my mom, or give my young nephew a second chance at life? I probably should. But when I finally do join that big party of the Dead, and they're all coming to greet me with their white robes and harps, the face I'm going to be looking for is going to be at knee-level.
I guess that's love, huh?
Miss you so much, buddy.
Tuesday, August 18, 2015
THE GAY AGENDA
It's possible that many straight people have overheard a conversation between gay folks and may have heard us mention our "gay card". More than likely, it was in the context of having it revoked, probably as a result of having admitted that we have no talent at flower arranging, or incorrectly identifying Barbara Stanwyck as one of the stars of "Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte". You may be confused as to what our "gay card" is. Allow me to explain.
Over the years, you may have heard the Religious Right and other opponents of equality for sexual minorities refer to the "Gay Agenda". Gay people have always vigorously denied the existence of such a thing, much as Jewish people have always denied the existence of the immense "Zionist Conspiracy" proclaimed by anti-Semites and Fascists over the centuries.
The thing is, we've been lying about it. There is indeed a vast underground network of gay people all over the world, and membership is mandatory, sort of like joining the Union when you get a job at Stop & Shop. The very first time a gay person has sex with someone of the same gender, they are issued a temporary I.D. card, usually by their partner, until a more permanent one can be issued at one of the compulsory meetings. Or, people who are gay but don't have access to an actual partner or gay friend, or folks who live in rural or remote areas, have for years been able to apply for a card by mail by returning a subscription card from an issue of "GQ" magazine.
For centuries, we have been meeting in secret, determining our "Agenda" and crafting devious yet amusing ways to implement it. Unfortunately, for many years, gay people were just as illiterate and uneducated as everyone else. That meant that we were filled with self-loathing, and our "Agenda" seems to have been to get ourselves beat up, ostracized, and murdered, and we were pretty darn successful at it.
With the Age of Enlightenment, we became enlightened along with everyone else. We began to realize that we could get out from under the oppressive thumb of the Church and began to think about ways to actually improve our lives. Of course, there was always a great deal of in-fighting, mostly from the many priests, bishops, cardinals, popes, and so forth, who were actually gay themselves. Rome had provided them with big hats and pretty dresses and comfortable lives and they saw no reason to change the status quo. These are battles which have continued to this very day.
The years, the decades, and the centuries passed. All the while, we worked tirelessly to further our Agenda. The big issues, things like acceptance and equality, were hard won, but nevertheless the fights were continuously being fought through the years, behind the scenes, and without fanfare.
But the Agenda also encompassed the frivolous, the trivial, the purely aesthetic. We have had many successes in this regard: we've kept women's hemlines rising and falling arbitrarily since the Renaissance, strictly for amusement; and we managed to keep wigs for men around for over three centuries. We had our share of failures, as well, such as late 18th-century France, when despite all of our efforts, it was somehow decided that high heels were actually going to be for women.
Things really started moving for us in the last quarter of the 1800s, though. We elected Oscar Wilde as Queen of the World at our annual meeting in 1890. We partnered with our Lesbian sisters to eliminate the corset before World War I. Gay people actually took over Hollywood in 1939. We got Eleanor Roosevelt into the White House. We began to make ourselves visible to the masses, with Liberace in the 1950s; "Lost in Space's" Dr. Zachary Smith in the 1960s; and finally, with Billy Crystal's character on "Soap" in the 1970s, a gay character who was neither closeted, a drag queen, or a sociopath.
Contrary to popular belief, the Gay Agenda has never included "converting", or "recruiting" new members. Not that we're above such things, actually, but to be honest we've never had any trouble filling out the ranks. So, even if there is a "Gay Agenda", it still does not justify any argument against gay people teaching, preaching, adopting, showering in the same room, or leading a den of Cub Scouts.
In recent years, of course, we have made tremendous strides in advancing the Agenda. In America, the Supreme Court's recent decision to recognize gay marriage across the country concludes one of our longest and most difficult efforts. We've managed to make ourselves normal, almost unremarkable. We are as common a sight in America's suburbs as gazing balls and lawn jockeys, and nowadays a movie or television show is remarkable only if it doesn't feature a gay character. Many, although certainly not all, of our most pressing items on the Agenda have actually been achieved, and that has left a great deal of time for us to once again concern ourselves with the trivial. The framework for the upcoming meeting in January is largely concerned with exactly how long this whole beard thing is going to be allowed to continue.
Which brings me back to the "gay card". This year, before the big meeting in January, we are all required to renew our cards. Never before in history have we had to concern ourselves with people who are not actually gay, who for some reason want to apply for a card. Who would want to join a group whose membership meant discrimination, derision, and possibly execution? It is a sign of how far we've come that some imposters now see membership as a ticket to beautiful women, great parties and even political clout. So, in an effort to weed out poseurs, for the first time, this year's official Gay Card Renewal Application will include three questions which must be answered correctly, much like the Bridge Keeper in Monty Python's "Holy Grail". Here they are, along with the acceptable responses, according to documents found on WikiLeaks:
1) What is the gayest song ever released?
(A: "It's Raining Men" by the Weather Girls)
2) Who made the better Auntie Mame: Lucille Ball or Rosalind Russell?
(A: Anyone who answers "Lucille Ball" is automatically banned for life)
3) Have you slept with Michele Bachmann's husband?
(A: I would rather eat glass.)
See you all in January.
Over the years, you may have heard the Religious Right and other opponents of equality for sexual minorities refer to the "Gay Agenda". Gay people have always vigorously denied the existence of such a thing, much as Jewish people have always denied the existence of the immense "Zionist Conspiracy" proclaimed by anti-Semites and Fascists over the centuries.
The thing is, we've been lying about it. There is indeed a vast underground network of gay people all over the world, and membership is mandatory, sort of like joining the Union when you get a job at Stop & Shop. The very first time a gay person has sex with someone of the same gender, they are issued a temporary I.D. card, usually by their partner, until a more permanent one can be issued at one of the compulsory meetings. Or, people who are gay but don't have access to an actual partner or gay friend, or folks who live in rural or remote areas, have for years been able to apply for a card by mail by returning a subscription card from an issue of "GQ" magazine.
For centuries, we have been meeting in secret, determining our "Agenda" and crafting devious yet amusing ways to implement it. Unfortunately, for many years, gay people were just as illiterate and uneducated as everyone else. That meant that we were filled with self-loathing, and our "Agenda" seems to have been to get ourselves beat up, ostracized, and murdered, and we were pretty darn successful at it.
With the Age of Enlightenment, we became enlightened along with everyone else. We began to realize that we could get out from under the oppressive thumb of the Church and began to think about ways to actually improve our lives. Of course, there was always a great deal of in-fighting, mostly from the many priests, bishops, cardinals, popes, and so forth, who were actually gay themselves. Rome had provided them with big hats and pretty dresses and comfortable lives and they saw no reason to change the status quo. These are battles which have continued to this very day.
The years, the decades, and the centuries passed. All the while, we worked tirelessly to further our Agenda. The big issues, things like acceptance and equality, were hard won, but nevertheless the fights were continuously being fought through the years, behind the scenes, and without fanfare.
But the Agenda also encompassed the frivolous, the trivial, the purely aesthetic. We have had many successes in this regard: we've kept women's hemlines rising and falling arbitrarily since the Renaissance, strictly for amusement; and we managed to keep wigs for men around for over three centuries. We had our share of failures, as well, such as late 18th-century France, when despite all of our efforts, it was somehow decided that high heels were actually going to be for women.
Things really started moving for us in the last quarter of the 1800s, though. We elected Oscar Wilde as Queen of the World at our annual meeting in 1890. We partnered with our Lesbian sisters to eliminate the corset before World War I. Gay people actually took over Hollywood in 1939. We got Eleanor Roosevelt into the White House. We began to make ourselves visible to the masses, with Liberace in the 1950s; "Lost in Space's" Dr. Zachary Smith in the 1960s; and finally, with Billy Crystal's character on "Soap" in the 1970s, a gay character who was neither closeted, a drag queen, or a sociopath.
Contrary to popular belief, the Gay Agenda has never included "converting", or "recruiting" new members. Not that we're above such things, actually, but to be honest we've never had any trouble filling out the ranks. So, even if there is a "Gay Agenda", it still does not justify any argument against gay people teaching, preaching, adopting, showering in the same room, or leading a den of Cub Scouts.
In recent years, of course, we have made tremendous strides in advancing the Agenda. In America, the Supreme Court's recent decision to recognize gay marriage across the country concludes one of our longest and most difficult efforts. We've managed to make ourselves normal, almost unremarkable. We are as common a sight in America's suburbs as gazing balls and lawn jockeys, and nowadays a movie or television show is remarkable only if it doesn't feature a gay character. Many, although certainly not all, of our most pressing items on the Agenda have actually been achieved, and that has left a great deal of time for us to once again concern ourselves with the trivial. The framework for the upcoming meeting in January is largely concerned with exactly how long this whole beard thing is going to be allowed to continue.
Which brings me back to the "gay card". This year, before the big meeting in January, we are all required to renew our cards. Never before in history have we had to concern ourselves with people who are not actually gay, who for some reason want to apply for a card. Who would want to join a group whose membership meant discrimination, derision, and possibly execution? It is a sign of how far we've come that some imposters now see membership as a ticket to beautiful women, great parties and even political clout. So, in an effort to weed out poseurs, for the first time, this year's official Gay Card Renewal Application will include three questions which must be answered correctly, much like the Bridge Keeper in Monty Python's "Holy Grail". Here they are, along with the acceptable responses, according to documents found on WikiLeaks:
1) What is the gayest song ever released?
(A: "It's Raining Men" by the Weather Girls)
2) Who made the better Auntie Mame: Lucille Ball or Rosalind Russell?
(A: Anyone who answers "Lucille Ball" is automatically banned for life)
3) Have you slept with Michele Bachmann's husband?
(A: I would rather eat glass.)
See you all in January.
Tuesday, July 28, 2015
I never felt like a soldier, but now, after watching this little video, I do. I realize now that I was fighting, in my own small way. And now, "Gay Pride" doesn't only mean to me that we are proud of what we are, but that we are proud of what we have done.
I'm sure this is the one and only time I'll ever post a politician's speech.
But this one, well, this one moves me.
"We are people who believe every child is entitled to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness. There is so much more work to be done to extend the full promise of America to every American. But today, we can say in no uncertain terms that we’ve made our union a little more perfect.
That’s the consequence of a decision from the Supreme Court, but more importantly, it is a consequence of the countless small acts of courage of millions of people across decades who stood up, who came out, talked to parents, parents who loved their children no matter what, folks who were willing to endure bullying and taunts, and stayed strong, and came to believe in themselves and who they were.
And slowly made an entire country realize that love is love.
What an extraordinary achievement, but what a vindication of the belief that ordinary people can do extraordinary things; what a reminder of what Bobby Kennedy once said about how small actions can be like pebbles being thrown into a still lake, and ripples of hope cascade outwards and change the world.
Those countless, often anonymous heroes, they deserve our thanks. They should be very proud. America should be very proud."
Wednesday, July 22, 2015
ON THE OCCASION OF MY 20TH ANNIVERSARY
You'd think it would be easy, for someone like me, to write about something as real and as personal as the love of my life, or the love in my life. But to be honest, it's easier sometimes to write fiction, to make stuff up rather than look long and unblinkingly enough at something like that to actually write about it. Where does one begin?
Chronologies are tedious: how we met, our first kiss, the first person to blurt out, "I love you," all that sort of twaddle which interests no one but the parties involved. It's like a slideshow of tedious vacation photos: "Here's Margaret at the Grand Canyon." "Here's Margaret in front of the Econo Lodge." "There's Margaret eating a sandwich." Very nice, but get me the hell out of here.
I certainly can't start going on about The Nature of Love. My experience here on this earth is no different than anyone else's and I don't feel qualified to start spouting aphorisms about two souls completing one another or anything remotely Kahlil Gibran-esque. I mean, I could throw some real Hallmark-worthy gems out there if I wanted to, but I wouldn't want anyone to actually take it seriously. I can't claim to know any more about The Nature of Love than the next guy, but I could B.S. my way through it if I had to. I am Irish.
I don't really want to wax maudlin about how blessed I am, either, how it is not lost on me that I have been given a rare and desirable gift. Despite the fact that it's true, acknowledging it can sometimes lead to resentment from others. Someone who never found the real thing, for example, or someone who had it but let it get away, perhaps, might read such a thing, and their honest reaction might be to think, "Yeah, well, how nice for you. Now shut the hell up, bitch."
I guess what I can do is write about my own experience, this twenty year pilgrimage I've been on. I am qualified to talk about that. How unlikely our love is. How it has changed over the years, and how it hasn't changed at all. Those moments, unscripted and unexpected, when I find my heart overflowing with affection and gratitude and relief and so many other things. Moments like that still happen.
As humans, we are always struggling with questions like, "Was this fate, or was it chance?" Were we just bouncing along like marbles on a roulette wheel, and just happened to land on double-zero? Or were we placed where we were by some greater force, by some unseen Universal Chess Master? I've given it some thought, quite a bit over the years, actually, and I am leaning a bit towards the "Chess Master" theory. Here's why:
It's ridiculous how opposite Mark and I are in so many ways. Some of them are superficial: he's meat-and-potatoes, I'm fish-and-rice. He likes TV, I well, would prefer music. He likes things neatly planned, I am more of a "we'll see what happens" type of guy. We share very few interests: he finds history and literature to be mind-numbingly boring, and after about ten minutes, I find HGTV to be like watching paint dry.
Mark has dyslexia. He has overcome it, thanks to his mother, who forced him to keep reading. He can chew through books like a maniac when he's got the time. But for him, the written word is still an effort, it's still something he has to work at. In other words, it's not the best method of communication for him. Then you have me: a crazy reading addict and lover of language. I sometimes find myself tongue-tied when speaking aloud, and sometimes I find that I'm not able to really say what I want to say; and sometimes I say nothing at all. But when I'm writing it down, it's different. I can think, and I can choose my words carefully and deliberately, and it's much easier for me to get my points across. So "Fate" or "Chance" has seen fit to pair up someone for whom the written word is the best way to communicate with someone for whom it is the worst; someone who loves Mexican food with someone who craves Yankee Pot Roast; The History Channel with Food Network. Why? I think it's because we both needed some improving. I needed to improve my verbal communication skills and Mark needed to learn to hear my voice in my writing. I needed to eat more broccoli, Mark needed to eat more jalapeños. It's not so much that we complete one another, but that we encourage one another to become more complete. That, to me, sounds like Fate.
After twenty years, the love that Mark and I share constantly shifts its shapes, sort of like a lava lamp. The white-hot passion of the first couple of years hasn't so much cooled as morphed into something else. Just don't ask me to define exactly what that is. It's a sense that with this other soul beside me, this person, this partner, I will be able to face whatever life throws at me. I can act like an idiot, I can cry, I can cut the world's most toxic farts; in other words, I can let all the masks and all the pretense just fall away, and at the end of the day, he will still be there. Well, maybe after he leaves the room for a few minutes to let it air out.
I do remember the first moment that I fell in love with Mark Taatjes. I will not share it here. I would rather keep that one to myself, like a secret little portrait inside a locket. But I have those moments even now. When I turn to catch him at just that angle, that jawline and those blue eyes can take my breath away. When he talks to animals. When he's singing in the shower and mangles the lyrics to some song, and every time he does it I smile to myself. When he thinks of me first, which is, like, all the time. I fall in love with him all over again, and the edges of my vision go all soft-focus, and I think to myself, "You are a lucky man, Paul Halley." Because I am.
Chronologies are tedious: how we met, our first kiss, the first person to blurt out, "I love you," all that sort of twaddle which interests no one but the parties involved. It's like a slideshow of tedious vacation photos: "Here's Margaret at the Grand Canyon." "Here's Margaret in front of the Econo Lodge." "There's Margaret eating a sandwich." Very nice, but get me the hell out of here.
I certainly can't start going on about The Nature of Love. My experience here on this earth is no different than anyone else's and I don't feel qualified to start spouting aphorisms about two souls completing one another or anything remotely Kahlil Gibran-esque. I mean, I could throw some real Hallmark-worthy gems out there if I wanted to, but I wouldn't want anyone to actually take it seriously. I can't claim to know any more about The Nature of Love than the next guy, but I could B.S. my way through it if I had to. I am Irish.
I don't really want to wax maudlin about how blessed I am, either, how it is not lost on me that I have been given a rare and desirable gift. Despite the fact that it's true, acknowledging it can sometimes lead to resentment from others. Someone who never found the real thing, for example, or someone who had it but let it get away, perhaps, might read such a thing, and their honest reaction might be to think, "Yeah, well, how nice for you. Now shut the hell up, bitch."
I guess what I can do is write about my own experience, this twenty year pilgrimage I've been on. I am qualified to talk about that. How unlikely our love is. How it has changed over the years, and how it hasn't changed at all. Those moments, unscripted and unexpected, when I find my heart overflowing with affection and gratitude and relief and so many other things. Moments like that still happen.
As humans, we are always struggling with questions like, "Was this fate, or was it chance?" Were we just bouncing along like marbles on a roulette wheel, and just happened to land on double-zero? Or were we placed where we were by some greater force, by some unseen Universal Chess Master? I've given it some thought, quite a bit over the years, actually, and I am leaning a bit towards the "Chess Master" theory. Here's why:
It's ridiculous how opposite Mark and I are in so many ways. Some of them are superficial: he's meat-and-potatoes, I'm fish-and-rice. He likes TV, I well, would prefer music. He likes things neatly planned, I am more of a "we'll see what happens" type of guy. We share very few interests: he finds history and literature to be mind-numbingly boring, and after about ten minutes, I find HGTV to be like watching paint dry.
Mark has dyslexia. He has overcome it, thanks to his mother, who forced him to keep reading. He can chew through books like a maniac when he's got the time. But for him, the written word is still an effort, it's still something he has to work at. In other words, it's not the best method of communication for him. Then you have me: a crazy reading addict and lover of language. I sometimes find myself tongue-tied when speaking aloud, and sometimes I find that I'm not able to really say what I want to say; and sometimes I say nothing at all. But when I'm writing it down, it's different. I can think, and I can choose my words carefully and deliberately, and it's much easier for me to get my points across. So "Fate" or "Chance" has seen fit to pair up someone for whom the written word is the best way to communicate with someone for whom it is the worst; someone who loves Mexican food with someone who craves Yankee Pot Roast; The History Channel with Food Network. Why? I think it's because we both needed some improving. I needed to improve my verbal communication skills and Mark needed to learn to hear my voice in my writing. I needed to eat more broccoli, Mark needed to eat more jalapeños. It's not so much that we complete one another, but that we encourage one another to become more complete. That, to me, sounds like Fate.
After twenty years, the love that Mark and I share constantly shifts its shapes, sort of like a lava lamp. The white-hot passion of the first couple of years hasn't so much cooled as morphed into something else. Just don't ask me to define exactly what that is. It's a sense that with this other soul beside me, this person, this partner, I will be able to face whatever life throws at me. I can act like an idiot, I can cry, I can cut the world's most toxic farts; in other words, I can let all the masks and all the pretense just fall away, and at the end of the day, he will still be there. Well, maybe after he leaves the room for a few minutes to let it air out.
I do remember the first moment that I fell in love with Mark Taatjes. I will not share it here. I would rather keep that one to myself, like a secret little portrait inside a locket. But I have those moments even now. When I turn to catch him at just that angle, that jawline and those blue eyes can take my breath away. When he talks to animals. When he's singing in the shower and mangles the lyrics to some song, and every time he does it I smile to myself. When he thinks of me first, which is, like, all the time. I fall in love with him all over again, and the edges of my vision go all soft-focus, and I think to myself, "You are a lucky man, Paul Halley." Because I am.
Wednesday, July 15, 2015
ROMANIAN HOLIDAY
The city of Bucharest, Romania, had not always been bleak. At one time, during the late 19th century, its streets were lined with opulent, Art Nouveau apartment buildings, punctuated by remnants of its past going back to the Crusades. Byzantine chapels, medieval castles, neoclassical arches glistened on the city's wide boulevards like diamond earrings on a Kenyan princess. But by this day, this damp, dull April day in 1968, much of its jewelry had been stripped away by the regime in Moscow, bulldozed to make way for mile after mile of square, dull, utilitarian Soviet apartment blocs. The city had the look of an old Kodachrome photo, left out in the sun too long until all the color had been drained away, leaving nothing behind but greys and browns and anemic reds.
One of the few remaining gems from the not-so-Communist past was the Hotel Paris, a sensuous, sinewy six-story hotel built in 1898 by a young architect, a protégé of the great Antonio Gaudà himself.
Ironically, the Hotel Paris owed much of its preservation to the Party itself, who decided that rather than being stripped of its fine furnishings and decadent western amenities, the hotel would be preserved as a showplace for distinguished visitors from Moscow and from abroad. Such surroundings would be powerful evidence of the prosperity of Romania's people, either thanks to the Glorious Party, or in spite of it, depending on the intended audience.
On this day, only one room at the Hotel Paris was occupied: the Presidential Suite, which the People's Committee for Pointless Semantics had incongruously renamed the "Suită pentru Muncitori", which loosely translated means "Suite for Laborers". There we find Stella, seated on the bench of a pristine white 1896 Steinway & Sons baby grand piano. She is wearing a made-to-order olive tweed Evan Picone suit and a smart pillbox, looking slightly rumpled after a fifteen hour flight from New York on some inept East German airline. She is frantically trying, in vain, to get a live phone line, rattling the receiver and squawking, "Hello? Hello? What's the goddam Romanian word for hello?" She gives up eventually, extracting a Belair 100 from her sequined cigarette case, lighting it, and taking the sort of long, deep drag which alone could no doubt erase a week from her overall lifespan.
"Shit."
She exhaled. The smoke lingered near the ceiling, swirling in tendrils around the crystals of the chandelier.
"It was an honest mistake, 'Stelle," said a voice from the bathroom. Lila had been in there for the last twenty minutes. It was the same in every hotel they checked into. "QMT!" she would claim, which meant 'Quality Mirror Time', and in she would go to acquaint herself with every silvery square inch of her new best friend. "Anyone could have done it."
The fact was, Stella hadn't even realized her own mistake until they had already gotten off the plane in Bucharest. No limousine, no adoring fans, no paparazzi, very unusual for a ScreamGirls world appearance. She fished the crumpled telegram from the bottom of her voluminous Italian handbag. Shit! It wasn't Bucharest, it was Budapest. And it wasn't Budapest, it was Paris.
"Hotel Paris in Bucharest, Hotel Budapest in Paris, yeah, it's almost the same thing. Close but no cigar!" said Stella.
"Have no fear, darlings, vodka is here!" came the voice of Svetlana, kicking the door open with one exquisite pump, holding a frozen bottle of fine Russian vodka in one hand and three glasses in the other. Her long, platinum blond tresses billowed effortlessly behind her, as did the blood red folds of her lustrous silk Dior travelling ensemble.
"Finally, Queen! What took you so long?" said, Lila, emerging at last from the bathroom, enticed by the thought of a syrupy, frozen Stolichnaya. Behind her, on the bathroom vanity, she left an astounding debris field of eyebrow pencils, lipsticks, powders, potions, lotions, and strange implements. She looked absolutely no different than she had when she had gone in. The ringlets of hair falling around her face were just as red, her skin just as porcelain, and the lipstick on her full, heavy lips was just as whorish. "Well, at least the show's not scheduled until tomorrow night."
"There's not going to be a show if I can't get a line out and book a flight to Paris!" said Stella, checking to be sure that the phone was plugged in to the wall.
Svetlana poured three glasses of the viscous, frozen vodka. Handing one to Stella, she and Lila both made themselves comfortable on one of the 1840 Empire-style sofas which dotted the enormous suite. Lila admired the amazing, mirror-like finish of the exquisite 18th-century Catherine the Great mahogany table in front of her. "Perfect!" she said, reaching into her purse and pulling out a gram of nearly-pink Peruvian cocaine, a one hundred dollar bill, and a gold American Express card embossed with the name Stefano DiPullyanack III.
Sensing the stares of the other girls, she looked up, innocently. "What?" she said. "Does this Empire sofa make my butt look big?"
Just then, Stella's eyes lit up. "Hello? Hello?" The line had finally come alive.
"Hello, yes, American Embassy please. A-mer-i-can.... No, I don't speak Romanian. A-mer-i-can-Em-bass-see! Please!"
Stella, like all Americans, believed that people who don't speak English will somehow understand if it is spoken very slowly and very loudly.
"I said A!-Mer!-I!-Can! Yes! U! S! A! Bay of fucking Pigs Godammit!"
She stopped screaming and covered the mouthpiece for a moment. "Well," she said to the other girls, "that seems to have worked!"
Svetlana was not so much sitting on the sumptuous mauve upholstery as she was displayed upon it. At the moment, she was straightening the seam in her stocking which ran up the back of her leg. Lila was spelling out dirty words in cocaine.
After a slight pause, Stella chirped into the telephone. "Helloo-oo! Monty! Montgomery Reynolds! Of course you are, darling, of course you are! It's 'Stelle, darling. Stella? Stella Estelle-Steenburg-Steinberg-Steinsteen-Bloom? That's right! Remember that weekend in Milwaukee- what was that, '63? '64?" She laughed the laugh of a pregnant debutante at the Spring Cotillion. "That's right, Monty, darling, that weekend in Milwaukee!"
A slight pause.
"Don't be ridiculous, darling. Of course I still have the pictures! Now, listen, darling, I do need just the littlest favor..."
"How the fuck does she do it?" Lila asked Svetlana, snorting up the entire word "boobs" in one go. "Has she slept with the entire diplomatic corps?"
"Only the ones you haven't slept with, darling," said Svetlana. She took the rolled up hundred-dollar bill, looking down at the beautifully inlaid tabletop, where Lila had written "tittys' in white powder. She snorted up the letter "i", daintily dabbing the dot with her forefinger and rubbing it on her gums.
Lila eyed her suspiciously. "Where did you find that bottle of Stoli, Svetlana?" she asked.
"Svetlana knows people, darling! All over the world!"
This was true. She had spent fully half her life on this side of the Iron Curtain, that is to say, the wrong side. Over the years, the girls had learned her life story in dribs and drabs, during long taxi rides home when Svetlana had had one or twelve too many scotches. Something about being born to poor dirt farmers in the Russian steppes, where as a young girl she had to push a plow to help feed the family. From those humble beginnings, there were other hints about careers as an international fashion model,a medalist for the Hungarian Women's Synchronized Swim team, and/or a hired assassin for the East German Secret Police, the Stasi. Nothing about Svetlana surprised them at this point.
"Well, pour me another shot, will ya?" said Lila. "And make sure to thank whoever he was, Missy. Frozen and everything... It's almost as if they knew you were coming."
" 'Poop' has two "o"s, darling," said Svetlana, glancing at the table.
Stella was wrapping things up on the telephone. "Marvelous! Thank you so much, Monty darling. And do give my warmest regards to your lovely wife, won't you? Margaret, isn't it? Yes, well..."
A brief pause.
"No, no, you've done quite enough already! Lovely chatting with you! Ta-Ta!" She hung up the phone, her voice oozing sincerity like a mall Santa on Black Friday. "Pompous asshole," she muttered.
Stella turned to the other girls. "OK, we're all set for tomorrow. Non-stop for Paris, departs from Vlad the Impaler International at 8:30am."
"Eight-thirty?" moaned Svetlana, downing another glass of Stolichnaya.
"We can stay here, in Babushkaville, Svetlana, and put on a show for the huddled masses, the non-paying huddled masses," Stella admonished, "or we can get up early and go to Paris. Paris, France! Jean-Claude is in Paris!"
Svetlana's face brightened. "8:30 it is, then! Remind me to get dressed before I go to bed, will you? That way all I have to do is put lipstick on."
"What about tonight, ladies?" said Lila. "What are we going to do for fun in this berg?"
"Well, Monty did mention a nightclub..." said Stella.
"What are we wearing?" shrieked Lila, running back into the bathroom.
Several hours later, the sun had set over Bucharest. With the darkness, a kind of Iron Curtain gloom settled over the city, an odd blend of paranoia, boredom, and resignation that seemed to suck all the mystery and promise out of the night until it was just, well, dark. The lobby of the Hotel Paris was empty, save for one desk clerk, one bellman, and one elaborately uniformed bartender, swaying unsteadily behind the bar, waiting for customers who would never come.
The elevator doors slid open slowly. The Hotel Paris being what it was, the elevator was a bit, well, slow, to say the least, and the trip down from the sixth floor had taken fully eight minutes. The bellman and the desk clerk turned to see Lila fanning herself furiously with a powdery one hundred dollar bill. "Jesus Christ!" she was saying, "Don't they have air conditioning in Russia?"
"Romania, darling, we are in Romania," said Svetlana. She was holding the dregs of the once-frozen Stoli bottle to the nape of her neck.
"Ladies! Please!" said Stella, heading off any further hysterics. "We have arrived!"
The three queens gathered themselves and stepped out of the elevator as if they had just arrived at Buckingham Palace. From sheer habit, or perhaps training, they stopped to strike an impromptu but nonetheless fabulous pose just after exiting the elevator, stopping just long enough for any flashbulbs to go off. None did. The desk clerk was speaking quietly into his telephone and the bellman was trying to hide an erection. The bartender still swayed unsteadily, dreaming of retirement and a cottage by a lake.
"God, this place is worse than Atlantic City," said Stella as they crossed the lobby. Svetlana had apparently noticed the bellman's predicament and was whispering something to him in Russian while she squeezed his crotch with one hand.
"Come on, Missy," said Lila, leading Svetlana away by the wrist. Without turning around, she raised her other hand in a wave as they walked out of the lobby. "Goodnight, boys!" she said. "Don't wait up!"
The ladies stepped out into the somber Bucharest night. "Taxi!" shrieked Lila as they looked up the street, and down the street in unison. Nothing. The only car on the street was a broken down Trabant with three tires and no windscreen.
"How far is this place?" said Svetlana.
"Not far, ladies," said Stella, heading off confidently towards the city's east side.
"Alright, then," said Lila, fishing through her smart evening bag for a Xanax.
"Off we go," said Svetlana, draining the last of the Stoli and throwing the empty bottle high over their heads. It fell back down to the street with a thunderous crash and shattered into a million pieces. Not a soul was around to notice.
For a while, the only sound to be heard was the telltale sound of three queens, doggedly making their way through the cobblestone streets of the old city. Click - click - scrape! Click - click - click - scrape!
After a few minutes, the girls began to notice a change in the light of the street around them. Soon they realized that it was the headlights of a car, and as it grew closer they began to hear the rather rheumatic sound of an Eastern Bloc engine bearing down on them.
Something in them knew. Some sixth sense, some intuition told them this could mean nothing but trouble. But, a spotlight is a spotlight, so as the headlights grew brighter, the girls threw their handbags to the ground and did what they did best. They struck a pose.
The car stopped in front of them. Both the doors on the car's left side opened, and two men in identical, ill-fitting Romanian suits stepped out. One was holding a gun. The other was applauding.
"Very nice, ladies, very nice," the man said. His thick mustachioed Russian accent spoke of beets, Bolsheviks, and Beluga. "I would ask for an autograph, but I find myself without a pen."
"I've got a pen!" said Lila, making a move for her purse, which was still on the ground.
"I wouldn't do that, if I were you, Miss Jewels," the man said. They heard the sound of the other man, cocking his gun.
"How do you know my name?" said Lila.
"Oh, we know all about you, Miss Jewels. All three of you, in fact," said the man. "But all we are really interested in, 'ladies'," he said, looking directly at Svetlana, "is the jewels."
"Jewels?" said Stella.
"I know we're in Russia, honey-" Lila's speech was beginning to slur just a little bit.
"-Romania!" Svetlana interjected.
"-Romania," said Lila, "but honestly, darling, all this could be yours for $3.98 at Woolworth's!" She was trying to remove her necklace over her head without messing her coif.
"Not those jewels, Miss Jewels!" snarled the man. "I think Miss Falana knows what we are looking for."
Stella and Lila turned. "Svetlana?" said Stella. "What are they after?"
Svetlana shrugged and rolled her eyes. "Oh, alright," she said, bending over to pick up her handbag. "It's the diamonds they want."
Stella regarded her sideways. "What diamonds?"
"Well, these diamonds," answered Svetlana, taking a small velvet pouch from her purse.
"Oh, those diamonds!" said Stella.
"Where the hell did those come from?" asked Lila, looking a bit wobbly. She seemed to have forgotten that there was a gun pointed at her and had already picked her purse up off the ground. "Who's got a cigarette? I've got a lighter in here goddam somewhere..."
"Well, I figured since we were here in Bucharest..." started Svetlana. "My friend, Pavel, he always needed a little, well, assistance, you see. Moving things around."
"Smuggling, Svetlana? Really?" said Stella. "At what point were you going to let us in on your little scheme?" She had also retrieved her handbag and was handing a Belair to Lila.
"Menthol? No thanks," said Lila.
The man with the gun was beginning to look a little confused. He glanced apprehensively towards the other man.
"Well, sometimes, you know, the less you know about something, the better off you are," offered Svetlana. "Besides, I was going to tell you all about it, afterwards, when we were spending all of the lovely money I was supposed to be making."
"Here, Miss Jewels, a real cigarette," said the man with the mustache.
Lila took the cigarette without looking, still rooting around in her purse for a lighter. "Aha!" she said, "Here it is!"
She put the cigarette between her lips. She then pulled from her purse a Luger model 1908 pistol, and within half a second had shot both men right between their eyes.
"Ladies," she said, returning the pistol to her purse. Stella lit the cigarette which still dangled from her lower lip. "I got us a ride to the club."
"I'm driving," said Svetlana, discreetly dropping the velvet pouch back into her evening bag.
They stepped over the bodies of the two men and drove off into the inky gloom of Bucharest.
Twenty four hours later, and the lights of Paris' famed Moulin Rouge were going up, as was the curtain. The crowd, decked out in their finest Parisian fashions, was frenzied with anticipation. The orchestra began to play and a thousand hearts skipped a beat when at last the spotlights came on, and there they were: The ScreamGirls themselves, legends of stage, screen and gin joint. Their hair- so big! Their eye shadow- so blue! Their heels- so high! And those dresses - oh, the dresses! So very, very sparkly!
One of the few remaining gems from the not-so-Communist past was the Hotel Paris, a sensuous, sinewy six-story hotel built in 1898 by a young architect, a protégé of the great Antonio Gaudà himself.
Ironically, the Hotel Paris owed much of its preservation to the Party itself, who decided that rather than being stripped of its fine furnishings and decadent western amenities, the hotel would be preserved as a showplace for distinguished visitors from Moscow and from abroad. Such surroundings would be powerful evidence of the prosperity of Romania's people, either thanks to the Glorious Party, or in spite of it, depending on the intended audience.
On this day, only one room at the Hotel Paris was occupied: the Presidential Suite, which the People's Committee for Pointless Semantics had incongruously renamed the "Suită pentru Muncitori", which loosely translated means "Suite for Laborers". There we find Stella, seated on the bench of a pristine white 1896 Steinway & Sons baby grand piano. She is wearing a made-to-order olive tweed Evan Picone suit and a smart pillbox, looking slightly rumpled after a fifteen hour flight from New York on some inept East German airline. She is frantically trying, in vain, to get a live phone line, rattling the receiver and squawking, "Hello? Hello? What's the goddam Romanian word for hello?" She gives up eventually, extracting a Belair 100 from her sequined cigarette case, lighting it, and taking the sort of long, deep drag which alone could no doubt erase a week from her overall lifespan.
"Shit."
She exhaled. The smoke lingered near the ceiling, swirling in tendrils around the crystals of the chandelier.
"It was an honest mistake, 'Stelle," said a voice from the bathroom. Lila had been in there for the last twenty minutes. It was the same in every hotel they checked into. "QMT!" she would claim, which meant 'Quality Mirror Time', and in she would go to acquaint herself with every silvery square inch of her new best friend. "Anyone could have done it."
The fact was, Stella hadn't even realized her own mistake until they had already gotten off the plane in Bucharest. No limousine, no adoring fans, no paparazzi, very unusual for a ScreamGirls world appearance. She fished the crumpled telegram from the bottom of her voluminous Italian handbag. Shit! It wasn't Bucharest, it was Budapest. And it wasn't Budapest, it was Paris.
"Hotel Paris in Bucharest, Hotel Budapest in Paris, yeah, it's almost the same thing. Close but no cigar!" said Stella.
"Have no fear, darlings, vodka is here!" came the voice of Svetlana, kicking the door open with one exquisite pump, holding a frozen bottle of fine Russian vodka in one hand and three glasses in the other. Her long, platinum blond tresses billowed effortlessly behind her, as did the blood red folds of her lustrous silk Dior travelling ensemble.
"Finally, Queen! What took you so long?" said, Lila, emerging at last from the bathroom, enticed by the thought of a syrupy, frozen Stolichnaya. Behind her, on the bathroom vanity, she left an astounding debris field of eyebrow pencils, lipsticks, powders, potions, lotions, and strange implements. She looked absolutely no different than she had when she had gone in. The ringlets of hair falling around her face were just as red, her skin just as porcelain, and the lipstick on her full, heavy lips was just as whorish. "Well, at least the show's not scheduled until tomorrow night."
"There's not going to be a show if I can't get a line out and book a flight to Paris!" said Stella, checking to be sure that the phone was plugged in to the wall.
Svetlana poured three glasses of the viscous, frozen vodka. Handing one to Stella, she and Lila both made themselves comfortable on one of the 1840 Empire-style sofas which dotted the enormous suite. Lila admired the amazing, mirror-like finish of the exquisite 18th-century Catherine the Great mahogany table in front of her. "Perfect!" she said, reaching into her purse and pulling out a gram of nearly-pink Peruvian cocaine, a one hundred dollar bill, and a gold American Express card embossed with the name Stefano DiPullyanack III.
Sensing the stares of the other girls, she looked up, innocently. "What?" she said. "Does this Empire sofa make my butt look big?"
Just then, Stella's eyes lit up. "Hello? Hello?" The line had finally come alive.
"Hello, yes, American Embassy please. A-mer-i-can.... No, I don't speak Romanian. A-mer-i-can-Em-bass-see! Please!"
Stella, like all Americans, believed that people who don't speak English will somehow understand if it is spoken very slowly and very loudly.
"I said A!-Mer!-I!-Can! Yes! U! S! A! Bay of fucking Pigs Godammit!"
She stopped screaming and covered the mouthpiece for a moment. "Well," she said to the other girls, "that seems to have worked!"
Svetlana was not so much sitting on the sumptuous mauve upholstery as she was displayed upon it. At the moment, she was straightening the seam in her stocking which ran up the back of her leg. Lila was spelling out dirty words in cocaine.
After a slight pause, Stella chirped into the telephone. "Helloo-oo! Monty! Montgomery Reynolds! Of course you are, darling, of course you are! It's 'Stelle, darling. Stella? Stella Estelle-Steenburg-Steinberg-Steinsteen-Bloom? That's right! Remember that weekend in Milwaukee- what was that, '63? '64?" She laughed the laugh of a pregnant debutante at the Spring Cotillion. "That's right, Monty, darling, that weekend in Milwaukee!"
A slight pause.
"Don't be ridiculous, darling. Of course I still have the pictures! Now, listen, darling, I do need just the littlest favor..."
"How the fuck does she do it?" Lila asked Svetlana, snorting up the entire word "boobs" in one go. "Has she slept with the entire diplomatic corps?"
"Only the ones you haven't slept with, darling," said Svetlana. She took the rolled up hundred-dollar bill, looking down at the beautifully inlaid tabletop, where Lila had written "tittys' in white powder. She snorted up the letter "i", daintily dabbing the dot with her forefinger and rubbing it on her gums.
Lila eyed her suspiciously. "Where did you find that bottle of Stoli, Svetlana?" she asked.
"Svetlana knows people, darling! All over the world!"
This was true. She had spent fully half her life on this side of the Iron Curtain, that is to say, the wrong side. Over the years, the girls had learned her life story in dribs and drabs, during long taxi rides home when Svetlana had had one or twelve too many scotches. Something about being born to poor dirt farmers in the Russian steppes, where as a young girl she had to push a plow to help feed the family. From those humble beginnings, there were other hints about careers as an international fashion model,a medalist for the Hungarian Women's Synchronized Swim team, and/or a hired assassin for the East German Secret Police, the Stasi. Nothing about Svetlana surprised them at this point.
"Well, pour me another shot, will ya?" said Lila. "And make sure to thank whoever he was, Missy. Frozen and everything... It's almost as if they knew you were coming."
" 'Poop' has two "o"s, darling," said Svetlana, glancing at the table.
Stella was wrapping things up on the telephone. "Marvelous! Thank you so much, Monty darling. And do give my warmest regards to your lovely wife, won't you? Margaret, isn't it? Yes, well..."
A brief pause.
"No, no, you've done quite enough already! Lovely chatting with you! Ta-Ta!" She hung up the phone, her voice oozing sincerity like a mall Santa on Black Friday. "Pompous asshole," she muttered.
Stella turned to the other girls. "OK, we're all set for tomorrow. Non-stop for Paris, departs from Vlad the Impaler International at 8:30am."
"Eight-thirty?" moaned Svetlana, downing another glass of Stolichnaya.
"We can stay here, in Babushkaville, Svetlana, and put on a show for the huddled masses, the non-paying huddled masses," Stella admonished, "or we can get up early and go to Paris. Paris, France! Jean-Claude is in Paris!"
Svetlana's face brightened. "8:30 it is, then! Remind me to get dressed before I go to bed, will you? That way all I have to do is put lipstick on."
"What about tonight, ladies?" said Lila. "What are we going to do for fun in this berg?"
"Well, Monty did mention a nightclub..." said Stella.
"What are we wearing?" shrieked Lila, running back into the bathroom.
Several hours later, the sun had set over Bucharest. With the darkness, a kind of Iron Curtain gloom settled over the city, an odd blend of paranoia, boredom, and resignation that seemed to suck all the mystery and promise out of the night until it was just, well, dark. The lobby of the Hotel Paris was empty, save for one desk clerk, one bellman, and one elaborately uniformed bartender, swaying unsteadily behind the bar, waiting for customers who would never come.
The elevator doors slid open slowly. The Hotel Paris being what it was, the elevator was a bit, well, slow, to say the least, and the trip down from the sixth floor had taken fully eight minutes. The bellman and the desk clerk turned to see Lila fanning herself furiously with a powdery one hundred dollar bill. "Jesus Christ!" she was saying, "Don't they have air conditioning in Russia?"
"Romania, darling, we are in Romania," said Svetlana. She was holding the dregs of the once-frozen Stoli bottle to the nape of her neck.
"Ladies! Please!" said Stella, heading off any further hysterics. "We have arrived!"
The three queens gathered themselves and stepped out of the elevator as if they had just arrived at Buckingham Palace. From sheer habit, or perhaps training, they stopped to strike an impromptu but nonetheless fabulous pose just after exiting the elevator, stopping just long enough for any flashbulbs to go off. None did. The desk clerk was speaking quietly into his telephone and the bellman was trying to hide an erection. The bartender still swayed unsteadily, dreaming of retirement and a cottage by a lake.
"God, this place is worse than Atlantic City," said Stella as they crossed the lobby. Svetlana had apparently noticed the bellman's predicament and was whispering something to him in Russian while she squeezed his crotch with one hand.
"Come on, Missy," said Lila, leading Svetlana away by the wrist. Without turning around, she raised her other hand in a wave as they walked out of the lobby. "Goodnight, boys!" she said. "Don't wait up!"
The ladies stepped out into the somber Bucharest night. "Taxi!" shrieked Lila as they looked up the street, and down the street in unison. Nothing. The only car on the street was a broken down Trabant with three tires and no windscreen.
"How far is this place?" said Svetlana.
"Not far, ladies," said Stella, heading off confidently towards the city's east side.
"Alright, then," said Lila, fishing through her smart evening bag for a Xanax.
"Off we go," said Svetlana, draining the last of the Stoli and throwing the empty bottle high over their heads. It fell back down to the street with a thunderous crash and shattered into a million pieces. Not a soul was around to notice.
For a while, the only sound to be heard was the telltale sound of three queens, doggedly making their way through the cobblestone streets of the old city. Click - click - scrape! Click - click - click - scrape!
After a few minutes, the girls began to notice a change in the light of the street around them. Soon they realized that it was the headlights of a car, and as it grew closer they began to hear the rather rheumatic sound of an Eastern Bloc engine bearing down on them.
Something in them knew. Some sixth sense, some intuition told them this could mean nothing but trouble. But, a spotlight is a spotlight, so as the headlights grew brighter, the girls threw their handbags to the ground and did what they did best. They struck a pose.
The car stopped in front of them. Both the doors on the car's left side opened, and two men in identical, ill-fitting Romanian suits stepped out. One was holding a gun. The other was applauding.
"Very nice, ladies, very nice," the man said. His thick mustachioed Russian accent spoke of beets, Bolsheviks, and Beluga. "I would ask for an autograph, but I find myself without a pen."
"I've got a pen!" said Lila, making a move for her purse, which was still on the ground.
"I wouldn't do that, if I were you, Miss Jewels," the man said. They heard the sound of the other man, cocking his gun.
"How do you know my name?" said Lila.
"Oh, we know all about you, Miss Jewels. All three of you, in fact," said the man. "But all we are really interested in, 'ladies'," he said, looking directly at Svetlana, "is the jewels."
"Jewels?" said Stella.
"I know we're in Russia, honey-" Lila's speech was beginning to slur just a little bit.
"-Romania!" Svetlana interjected.
"-Romania," said Lila, "but honestly, darling, all this could be yours for $3.98 at Woolworth's!" She was trying to remove her necklace over her head without messing her coif.
"Not those jewels, Miss Jewels!" snarled the man. "I think Miss Falana knows what we are looking for."
Stella and Lila turned. "Svetlana?" said Stella. "What are they after?"
Svetlana shrugged and rolled her eyes. "Oh, alright," she said, bending over to pick up her handbag. "It's the diamonds they want."
Stella regarded her sideways. "What diamonds?"
"Well, these diamonds," answered Svetlana, taking a small velvet pouch from her purse.
"Oh, those diamonds!" said Stella.
"Where the hell did those come from?" asked Lila, looking a bit wobbly. She seemed to have forgotten that there was a gun pointed at her and had already picked her purse up off the ground. "Who's got a cigarette? I've got a lighter in here goddam somewhere..."
"Well, I figured since we were here in Bucharest..." started Svetlana. "My friend, Pavel, he always needed a little, well, assistance, you see. Moving things around."
"Smuggling, Svetlana? Really?" said Stella. "At what point were you going to let us in on your little scheme?" She had also retrieved her handbag and was handing a Belair to Lila.
"Menthol? No thanks," said Lila.
The man with the gun was beginning to look a little confused. He glanced apprehensively towards the other man.
"Well, sometimes, you know, the less you know about something, the better off you are," offered Svetlana. "Besides, I was going to tell you all about it, afterwards, when we were spending all of the lovely money I was supposed to be making."
"Here, Miss Jewels, a real cigarette," said the man with the mustache.
Lila took the cigarette without looking, still rooting around in her purse for a lighter. "Aha!" she said, "Here it is!"
She put the cigarette between her lips. She then pulled from her purse a Luger model 1908 pistol, and within half a second had shot both men right between their eyes.
"Ladies," she said, returning the pistol to her purse. Stella lit the cigarette which still dangled from her lower lip. "I got us a ride to the club."
"I'm driving," said Svetlana, discreetly dropping the velvet pouch back into her evening bag.
They stepped over the bodies of the two men and drove off into the inky gloom of Bucharest.
Twenty four hours later, and the lights of Paris' famed Moulin Rouge were going up, as was the curtain. The crowd, decked out in their finest Parisian fashions, was frenzied with anticipation. The orchestra began to play and a thousand hearts skipped a beat when at last the spotlights came on, and there they were: The ScreamGirls themselves, legends of stage, screen and gin joint. Their hair- so big! Their eye shadow- so blue! Their heels- so high! And those dresses - oh, the dresses! So very, very sparkly!
Monday, July 13, 2015
GIVE ME AN AMISH FARMER
If you didn't know already, it's "Bear Week" here in Provincetown. I've always felt like a fish out of water during Bear Week to begin with, what with having a BMI under 30 and a hairless chest, but now it's even worse, because I'm clean shaven. Just took a walk through town with the husband, and by the looks of things, they might as well add a "D" and call it, "Beard Week". Combine the current fashion trend for beards in general with a group who already favored the furry, and it seems the beards have gotten bigger and flouncier than ever, like petticoats at a square dance jamboree. As we strolled up and down Commercial Street, it seemed to my over-analytical mind that the old descriptions we've given to beards, like "VanDyke" or "Goatee", are simply no longer adequate.
Below are the names which I have assigned to just a few of the popular beard styles we are seeing in the streets of Provincetown. I think they speak for themselves.
Below are the names which I have assigned to just a few of the popular beard styles we are seeing in the streets of Provincetown. I think they speak for themselves.
"The ZZ Top"
"The Amish Farmer"
"The Hagrid"
"The Gabby Hayes" a/k/a "The Prospector"
"The GI Joe"
"The Rasputin"
"The Garden Gnome"
"The Burger King"
"The Bald Pirate"
"The BinLaden"
.. and many many more.
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