19-Freedom!

Zipping down the highway in a stranger’s car made me giddy with joy. The mountains loomed in the distance, cuddled up on the passes, and waved goodbye in the rearview mirror. I’d never flat-out taken to the road before, and I absa-fucking-tively adored it. If I didn’t make it in New York, maybe I’d turn to long-haul trucking. True freedom, that’s what it was—extrication, liberty, blessed solitude with no chance of being called, confined, or reined in.

I promised myself I’d never give it up again! Never!

A dumbasfuck pledge of the naïvely young. But I believed me, another intoxicating first. Even now my heart bursts into slightly-offkey melody as I relive those first delicious draughts of autonomy.

And fearless! My spirit brimmed with confidence, exhilarating beyond all articulation. Where had it come from? Why did I lose it over the decades? Don’t know, don’t care—I’m taking it back, right now!

Truckers waved and beeped at me, raising worried warnings in my mother’s voice that flew out the open windows on all sides. Nobody tried to stop me, nobody tried to molest me when I pulled into a rest stop or stopped at a diner or made my way into and out of motel parkades. All I got were smiles and encouragement and the occasional bit of advice about heavy traffic or speed traps ahead. I was part of a cross-country caravan, and I loved it more than chocolate, sex, or even the combination thereof. And though I had no vernacular for my assorted blossoming sensations at the time, I retrospectively see how my boyosity exploited my girl-falsity to reap the fruits of my non-detachable duality.

As for Bear—she was having the time of her big-eyed, GUND®-stuffed, felt-flowered young life. My father had gotten her for me the previous Chanukmas season after seeing us fall in love with each other in a now-defunct department store.

Living under my mother’s eye, I had no license to spend money on such a silly, frivolous item, so he made what turned out to be a grand, at-that-time non-recognized gesture of paternal love. I never properly thanked him while he was alive, but he accepted my gratitude and dismissed my concerns during our spiritual reconnection, when I embraced his regret and released his guilt.

To those psyches constrained by deity-based religions or other fear-dominated mandates or philosophies: I realize non-corporeal soul-to-soul communication flies in the face of all you’ve been told and hold dear, and while I mean no offense… I’m sorry for your spiritual disability.

It was just Bear and me, an unbeatable team. We drove together, we ate together, we slept together, we sang together. She didn’t care that I forgot some of the words. Her smile never changed when I couldn’t hit the right note. She went right along with every pit stop I made and never yelped when I rolled over on her in bed. The perfect traveling companion. She watches over me to this day, snuggled up to her own BFF, Rabbit. Yeah, a mixed-species marriage. The rabbis ask, “A bird may love a fish, but where would they make a home?”

On the top of my bookshelf, that’s where.

With Bear at my side, the wind quite literally in my hair, and my truck-driver escort along the endless road ahead, I felt more alive, more optimistic, more self-assured than at probably any other time in my life, past or (then) future. The farther I got from my mother, the better, stronger, alive-r I grew. If’n I'm non-mistaken, it was on those highways and byways that I first began to suspect my mother’s presence might possibly have had something of a deleterious effect on me….

Driving across the Midwest tugged me back toward reality. The landscape was pleasant but boring, the sky grew dirtier with every mile, and by the time I announced, “We’re crossing the Mississippi!” Bear wanted to turn around and go home. Her fresh-out-of-box fur was getting dingy. But I had to deliver the drive-away car to its owner to retrieve the hundred bucks I’d had to put down to take this joy ride, so we slowed down, watched for street signs, and found a perfect parking spot at the guard rail of the Sheridan, the Roger’s Park lake-front apartment building where Tom lived, all of maybe a mile-and-a-half from my own previous apartment.

Scene: April 26, 1978. Tom had just turned twenty-six twelve days earlier. I would turn twenty-five in a month and a day. It was a Wednesday, his little brother’s fourteenth birthday. I’d reveal his mother’s age, since her natal day had been exactly three weeks earlier, but I can’t see how it’s germane to the story other than to demonstrate how the grouping always made April/May an expensive slice of year.

I sat in the car, staring at Lake Michigan and trying to gather my thoughts/feelings/anticipations/trepidations. Bear was non-plussed, as usual. I said, “Are you ready?”

She said, “I’m not white anymore.”

So we got out of the car and made the long twenty-foot journey into the building, up the elevator, and down the hall another seven feet to the right door. Knocked. The door opened.

Life changed.

I wish it didn’t sound so pedantically dramatic, but it was. There I was, face-to-face with the man I’d spend the rest of my life with—or at least the rest of his life with—having to face-down one or the other of my internal psyches. Do I girl and marry, or do I boy and go to New York?

Bear voted for the East Coast.  Our spiritual connection stood firm. Tom showed me around his one-bedroom flat, which took nearly half-a-nanosecond. In semi-manic mode, he nattered on about ragging on his roommate, GB, who left hairs in the sink after he, Tom, had spent the morning scrubbing it clean, and how he and GB split the rent and I-non-remember-what-else. Tom was a talker from a family of talkers. Once started, he didn’t stop until interrupted—and sometimes not even then.

The more he talked, the more his nervousness caught me up. Looking around his natural habitat, it began to dawn on me that although we’d slept together numerous times—he’d moved to California for a truncated period to get married, we’d split instead, he’d gone home—had blown hours-amounting-to-weeks-if-not-months in phone bills, and had written boxfuls of letters to each other, neither of us actually knew who the other one was.

Except we did, because we were undeniably us, and as much as we were both committed on that fateful day to ending the relationship conclusively, permanently, and forevermore, neither one of us had half a clue how to pull that off.

So we had sex. No kissing, no hugging… just sex. That was our modus operandi. He’d broken a front tooth at some point so was reluctant to smooch. I had a thing about my mouth being clean, and his coffee breath was overlaid with cannabis (which we, in our 1970s innocence, called “dope,” aka “pot”) so I was just as happy to keep it below the neck. Everyone relaxed after our carnal knowledge except for Bear, who’d previously witnessed our coitus but felt herself getting grimier with every salty breeze that wafted through the alley-facing window and wanted to get back in the car and keep driving.

Tom hadn’t met Bear before, and he didn’t make a great impression on her that first day. They eventually became friends because she liked the way he played with her, and because he had the good sense to get her permission before introducing her to Rabbit. The two GUNDs would dance with each other and moon all-and-sundry together.

Our play came naturally, part of our perpetuity-of-connection weave. Years later, one of my husband’s horn players would say, “There’s only one other person in the world like Tom S.—and he married her.”

But I digress...

By the time we were finished, GB was in the kitchen, talking on the wall phone about, “Going for some café at the café.” Very clever. Bear may have been disappointed with Tom at first sight, but GB met me with undisguised, preconceived animosity. He said—

Oh, hell, he spouted a glittery stream of hell-fire gibberish about Satan and demons disguised-as-whatever swooping in to bedevil the unsuspecting and shanghai them to places where they’d already failed miserably and from which they’d had to drag their tail home.

It was a hellova lecture and it went on for some time, replete with gestures and pacing and vocal theatrics worthy of a televangelist. He pitched it to the gallery, even though I was the only one there at the time, sitting on a straight-back chair, listening wholeheartedly, if not whole-retentively, and munching on mushrooms and radishes. That took him aback until he realized he could throw something in about California fruits-and-nuts to square the deal.

And I got it. He was Christian, he was worried about Tom’s immortal soul, and he was pissed that I’d shown up out of nowhere to steal his lover back to California. Made perfect sense

.

But understand, Tom never copped to his and GB’s affair, although even in those don’t-think/don’t-ask days it was pretty hard to non-recognize. To hear tell, my husband was adamantly, fervently non-gay, as evidenced by all the women he’d slept with. Many women. Lots and lots of women. He couldn’t count, much less name them all. Not the one I’d called insipid, of course, despite dating her well into their college days. And he’d never proposed to her, either ‘cause… onaccounta. Due to the fact.

Maybe because she mighta said yes.

But she preyed on his mind, she did. The one that got away. The one he shoulda coulda been with, if only he weren’t who he was. And, yeah, I grokked that big time! I’ve always said if I were only someone other than who I am, my life would be so different.

Perpetuity of connection strikes again.

Ergo, we’d talk about how all the guys he’d hung around with back in the day turned out to be gay—every single, solitary one—but conspiratorially agreed it was immaterial. He liked women. He loved having sex with women. Maybe not so much with me, but that was okay, ‘cause the feeling was mutual. To scarf a Cole Porter quote that actually made it into De-Lovely, “The sex was pleasant enough. But the intimacy was stunning.”

I envied how Maestro Porter and wife Linda Lee Thomas were able to be so much more open about their conflicting sexualities than Tom and me. Likely had something to do with growing up a mere fifteen blocks apart in the same repressed, fear-ridden, Ashkenazic shtetl-in-America, where all cultural, moral, and religious conversations were kept close within synagogue walls and overlaid with Holocaust anguish.

And while some of those suburban families might have quickly (or eventually) overcome their homophobia for the love of their child, neither he nor I sprung from such a clan. Broaching the mere idea, much less the fact of our dysphoria (a term coined only a few years earlier) was completely, utterly, and in all other ways inconceivable. His mother stoutly denied her lesbian leanings until the day she died. His father—who’d had to be father to his five younger siblings when his father turned criminal and all but deserted his wife and family—lacked the liberty to be non-rigid.

As did my mother.

My closed-book father, on the other hand, was non-naturally yet bureaucratically mum on sex, among a plethora of other sensitive subjects. If viewed closely from afar, he appeared quite liberal and inclusive, but his face never turned against my mother.

So while Tom and I read the same books, liked the same foods, watched each other’s movies, and talked about everything under the sun—including the full range of sexuality—we non-owned up to the obvious misalignment in ourselves or each other. We mutually accepted our past-lives history, that this was my first life as non-boy, that he was far-and-away the more sensitive, sentimental, and nurturing one. And yet we complicitly disregarded those realities from day one. Crazy making!

By Friday, I’d had enough of Tom and his faux bohemia and inert lifestyle, and he’d had more than enough of my pragmatism and early rising. We actually played out a full, final-curtain scene.

Me: “I’m leaving! I’m going to New York and have my own damn life!”

Him: “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out!”

But I couldn’t get a drive-away until the following Monday, when we went for blood tests so we could get married at City Hall that coming Friday.

Perpetuity of connection.