What is life about?

For some people, life is about twenty years too long.

For others, it is the difference between accepting or acknowledging the man (or woman, or koi or whatever gives you a reason to continue breathing), you expected would be with you is no longer there.

He isn’t in the strange glowing wing that passes by the Blink camera in the bedroom when you are out of town.

He isn’t in the sudden familiar scent of his shampoo that carpet bombs your senses as you’re bending over the bathroom sink to spit toothpaste and saliva.

But I can tell you where he is.

He is in photograph #26 taken at approximately 1115 a.m. on Wednesday, January 10, 2018 in the town of Sliven, Bulgaria by a military police investigator named Constantin Todorov.

In this photograph is the face of the only man I found worth being angry at. The only man who would lie to me about stupid little things- ‘Of course I mailed that letter when you asked me to!’- and I knew it was a lie. But exasperation is the currency we pay for love’s imperfections.

This book is not only about love. Or sex. Or rage. Or even the kind of warped, serrated info dump of personal information so popular today; real, imagined or prophesied on the bathroom wall at the old Cheers gay bar in South Miami. And don’t expect me to get the correct terms or acronyms or abbreviations. I’m a writer, not a politician (perish the thought) nor even a socially adept chameleon Giving the People What They’re Told They Want.

But stick around. I’ve got some stories to tell and I’ll bet even though you, too, have great and wonderful stories, this is mine and I’ve waited patiently and with cowardice before wiggling the Shoehorn of Emancipation up my literary ass to get to work.

THE BOY IN PHOTOGRAPH #26

Palmetto High School Bandroom, Palmetto, Florida. Early August 1975.

First week of school. The bandroom is a weirdly built structure like an albatross with wings outstretched; practice rooms and the Band Director’s Office in the level section fronting the covered sidewalk leading to the Chorus Room. (Boo Hiss).  Six huge steel tiered doors that were designed to be pushed to the sides for ventilation or an open-air concert stage. But low property taxes (we’re talking Florida in the 1960’s and 70’s) equal substandard school funding and maintenance which means the door tracks were never cleaned or lubricated and the doors were never sanded and painted. And so, everything rusted.

Occasionally they would try to open the doors a few feet, just enough to allow a doomed bird or two in. But the main flying menace in the bandroom, always and ever darting around and sometimes in our eyes, ears and mouths, their little feet probably freshly dipped in fetid puddles or feces, was flies. Battalions of flies, legions of flies, hordes of flies, great silent sleekit beasties of flies raucously invading renditions of Neil Diamond’s ‘Sweet Caroline’ or the barbershop quartet classic ‘Lida Rose’ from The Music Man.

The hotter the bandroom became, the more the flies zipped and dive-bombed us. There was no air conditioning, only a couple industrial standing fans on the top risers next to the drums and sousaphones.

It was as though the more we played, the more energized the flies became on the ketosis fumes of our pre-lunch exhalations. It was awful. And annoying. And hilarious.

The competition between Band and Chorus members was either hellish or half-assed. There was seepage between the two groups and their friends but not with members since 4^th Period was the music period.

I remember being turned down for a minor part in ‘1776’ by the Chorus Director, Bob Dittman, due to my inability to Sing from the Diaphragm. He did me a favor because I ran histrionically into the hyperbolic arms of the Divine Sara Marshall and her Drama Department. The no-talent guttersnipe became a qualified lighting director/prop manager/house manager under the very capable tutelage of Cilla Whisenant.

Cilla was the second-most envied individual in my high school life.

The first was Debbie Shields, of course. A beautiful, vivacious, joyously normal head cheerleader with no baggage or drama or failings. There were no high school dances at the Armory without Debbie, Pep Rallies hadn’t a peep of pep without Debbie. She brought a glowing perfumed energy into every classroom, every un-airconditioned school bus and every steamy locker room.

Debbie was, of course, dating the quarterback, Chuck Jacks and with her glossy raven hair and full red lips she was a living Harlequin Romance cover girl but with bodice intact. As far as anyone knew or cared.

She made lust and lusciousness wholesome and we begrudged her none of our admiration. The last I think I heard was that she was an elementary school teacher in New Orleans. I would believe that her students loved her forever.

But Cilla, she was all about organization and productivity and decency and responsibility. She was from a solid and respected farming family and the

I experienced two PHS Band Directors in my life: R. David Brown, a sincere and eternally frustrated man of average size and astigmatism frantically trying to direct, inspire, and organize half-hearted musicians while preventing Bobby Leonard from sneaking off to smoke weed. Bobby had a lot in common with John Lennon: the hair, the round metal granny glasses, the spiked intelligence. He just didn’t particularly care for structure or rules. I heard he majored in Chemistry and became something of an expert in municipal water treatment facilities. There is a lesson there for all of us.

But back to the Band as the many-headed hydra of emotions and hormones….

Consider the thousand petty jealousies of the Wind Section.

Flutes versus clarinets.

As if someone who sits around sucking reeds could ever approach the suave urbanity of those who channel the breath of the gods through a delicately controlled embouchure and send it flowing past and slightly into the rolled sterling silver mouthpiece of a Gemeinhardt French model with low Bb key.

French models, in flutes as in other species, are open-holed; only beginners are unable or unwilling to completely cover the keys with the pads of their fingers. Oo la la!

And you thought Band Geeks weren’t sexy.

Consider: the percussion section panting and flailing away behind everyone, woodwinds and brasses fixated on doubling the strength of their diaphragm, spit valves opening and siphoning off vital fluids just quickly enough to keep going.

You can’t comprehend the trembling ferocity of performance unless you’ve held a chord or a pattern until your fingertips are sore and your eyes popping.

Meanwhile, back in the Band Director’s Office before R. David’s tenure.

There was a true hero, a legendary figure of a man, a magician and a living recreation of Pan without the head ornaments. There was…Whit.

Carlton F. Whitman. He of the erect posture, the chiseled profile, the knavish but safe twinkle in the eye and because it was the late 1960’s, the erectly handsome crewcut. Very much a family man, Mr. Whitman lived a block away from us on 25^th Avenue, bordering Tenth Street. A solid concrete block three-bedroom house with white spraycrete covering the exterior. Do they even use that anymore? Some kind of opaque adhesive to attach millions of slices of gleaming mica, a rough but attractive surface that never needed painting, never faded or rusted and probably caused cancer in laboratory rats.

Mr. Whitman was married to his slightly dour Nancy who spent the long days superintending Lee, Jay, Del and Todd. She also had a sideline in piano lessons and every week my sister would walk a block to spend an hour with her in a little square room lined with cinderblock and plank bookshelves just off the hall to the bedrooms.

I’m not sure why my sister was taking lessons; she was First Chair Flute in Mr. Whitman’s Band. (Debbie, in case you needed to know her name, was my personal parrot with the ‘Everybody has Something’ phrase minimizing slice of compassion. This was her mature upgrade from ‘Don’t worry. It’s Just a Phase.’) She was also the first Junior to win the John Phillip Sousa band award, an honor full of sound and fury, signifying nothing for her future musical talents or endeavors. Such is the life of the Pushed to Overachieve Firstborn.

We had the absolute worst piano in the world to practice on. It was in The Big Bedroom and it was one of those tall wooden monsters that hadn’t been tuned since the first time Boris Karloff parked a half glass of Pernod on the top and requested just one more round of ‘Roll Me Over in the Clover.’

But you know what that piano was good for?

Banging. Banging out Moonlight Sonata.

Thumping out scales like a mad fishwife.

Jumping on the sustain pedal like the kickstart on a temperamental motorcycle.

And during times of emotion; slamming a fist repeatedly into the rough dark wood until something had to break. Fortunately, it was only me, into tears.

The piano was so large that when the elder brother of my best friends, Roy and Joy, bought the house, he couldn’t move it out of the bedroom without cutting it into pieces. (More about the twins later. You’ll like them. They are the anchors to my balsa wood dinghy.)

That three ton piano lifted me past decades of childhood depression through physical pain and the clear joy of creating music. When your father tries to commit suicide twice a year, you need an outlet.

Don’t worry: practice generally improves outcomes and he and I eventually succeeded.

I earned a flute scholarship from the Florida West Coast Symphony Orchestra (Youth Division) and Dad traded a vacuum cleaner hose attached to the exhaust of his 1967 Saab for a simple white plastic 13-gallon garbage bag. Depression is not the Giver of Artistic Genius for all of us: there are times when it taketh away.

I do miss him. More than I miss my mother who turned into a high functioning alcoholic harpy burnt out after watchfully waiting on Dad and ensuring that my older sister snagged all the local college scholarships she could locate.

Mom was a wasted talent in many areas: she was always the featured singer at Kiwanis and Rotary concerts and at Trinity Lutheran Church. During the few times she was happy, she sang around the house.

I learned from her to avoid holidays because she had hundreds of decorations for every occasion and she decorated the Circuit Judges’ Chambers where she ruled with an iron stapler and she decorated our house. Decorations included constant 33-1/3 records playing over and over and over and over. There were times when I wanted to grab one of The Little Drummer Boy’s sticks and take his temperature clumsily and rectally. And don’t get me started on Bing Crosby.

Mom wasn’t always problematic: the drinking started after Dad died and a few years later she began dating ‘Riley’, a soiled bit of retired Navy E5 slime who infested the Shriner’s and the Elks and the Moose Clubs.

Riley lived in an expensive double-wide lakeside mobile home with his elderly parents from Indiana. Ma Riley was suspicious, sour and brimming with the bile of human misanthropy. Pa Riley, bless his heart, loved his cigarettes almost as much as his oxygen machine and coin collection. A lovely man, small to begin with and shrinking daily into his blue polyester velvet La-Z-Boy recliner.

One day he disappeared, leaving me a counterfeit Chinese love coin, a complete uncirculated mint proof set from my birthday year and a stack of fifty silver Morgan dollars. Isn’t it worth mulling over that the ones who try to leave you with something important to them are the ones you’d hold closely forever if they had nothing to give?

But Mom used her contacts to get Riley (you can call him ‘Dick’) hired as a bailiff for the Sheriff’s Department. Mom could do things like that in a flash. When she was Judge Hensley’s secr, oops, Administrative Assistant, that woman knew everything, everyone, every peccadillo, every everything that was ever said, thought, written in the Manatee County Courthouse or about Florida civil and criminal law.

She was exactly right for Judge Hensley, another legend. Truly a man to heed and to believe in. He made Solomon’s decisions sound like the natterings and chatterings of a tipsy baboon.

Judge Hensley, Judge Willis, Judge Smith (Gilbert), Judge ‘Stick Up the Ass’ Parham; what a crew of Southern judges. The generation after them were political highbinders and carpet baggers and just not the same quality. Judge Smith’s son, the naif and genial Little Gilbert, took about seven times to pass the Bar, even with tutors! And of course, now he’s a judge. A nice guy but malleable rather than contemplative. I say these things from a position of distance and disdain and envy.

The important thing to know about The Judges is that they worked as a team. They hung out together, went hunting together, fishing together and drinking together. Sometimes all activities simultaneously.

And there were like-minded attorneys who were part of the natural crew. R.J. ‘Bob’ Marshall with his big ole fancy Buick Riviera, his indoor pool and gorgeous blonde twin daughters, Heidi and Lisa. There was something about Mr. Marshall that reminded me of Burt Reynolds at his best; he separated work time from play time but man, oh, man when it was play time, beware the boisterous gentlemanly rogue.

You know the type: rustic hunting lodges stocked with whisky and bourbon. The sound of some 30-year Florida Bar member making comments about green kindling that ought to start a conflagration on their own. A half dozen hunting dogs, Springer Spaniels, Blueticks, talented mutts swirling around like kids on a carousel waiting to fly off into the scrub. A chunky appellate court judge pushing his way out of the wooden latrine, still pulling his waders up and complaining they musta shrunk since last season.

When Judge Hensley retired, they threw a massive party at the Holiday Inn on Longboat Key. Four counties’ worth of legal glitterati were there. And so were my mom and I.

There were telegrams from President Reagan and Governors Askew and Chiles. There were Sheriffs and Police Chiefs. There were attorneys with hundred-million-dollar practices and court clerks making $15K per year.

Everyone loved Judge Hensley. But probably no one loved him more than his wife of several incarnations, Mavis. If ever an angel took the form of a truly Christian Southerner, a homemaker who cared for and about people and things she may never have been acquainted with, this angel would be the twin of Mavis.

The most soft-spoken person I ever met, but there was something in the way she spoke, and what the words were, that made them powerful without ever being loud or demanding. She merely said what you halfway knew to begin with. In her sweet cotton floral apron, you imagined her life was solely caught up in the spidersilk of housework, raising children, and slightly diluting Judge Hensley’s off-duty raucous Boys All Together impulses.

But you would be wrong. Mavis was the soul and the boiler room of her Baptist church. She could painlessly motivate and guide and organize and sell tickets and tame unruly Bible School monsters without disturbing the fluff on a dandelion. Everyone just wanted to please her. To do what made her happy. And what made her happy was taking care of people. Even when we knew we didn’t deserve it. Her soft, musical voice (I know it sounds like a cliché but I was there. You weren’t.) was a tender hand on your shoulder to reconsider what you were doing, an appeal to a better half (or on a good day, an eighth) of you so that you felt clean and shining and very possibly not at all related to the people who lived in your house with you.

Are there still people like this?

There must be. I hope so. I don’t know though. Has the poison found them, too? Were we all imagining Goodness and Camaraderie and Fairness?

Were there gay lawyers or judges? Damned if I know. It wasn’t talked about. It wasn’t what they were there for.

They were they to do their jobs. They were paid to adjudicate or defend or prosecute. They weren’t there to ogle or hunt for hookups or talk about their most recent squeezebag.

And when they were at play, they were hard at work playing. Same rules, different activities. They were more likely to sit around the campfire, a la Blazing Saddles or telling whoppers about fishing and hunting. Not the latest from New York Fashion Week or god forbid, who’s in charge of brunch?

They kept it uncomplicated. Maybe it was boring. Maybe some of them weren’t completely honest with themselves or fully actualized as a person, maybe they secretly had lascivious thoughts about one another or that big hunk of Quarterhorse in Mac Burnett’s field. But they didn’t allow it to interfere with what they knew and were comfortable with. They didn’t force anything on each other because they valued the degree of trust they had built with each other. And back then, trust meant no surprises.

Speaking of surprises, why was I the only one in high school who didn’t have a clue my best friend since nursery school, Keith, was as gay as a Capricorn? (‘HEY, I’M A CAPRICORN AND I’M NOT GAY!’)

Yeah, I know. Statistically that’s true. I just liked the way it sounded.

Keith and I met at the Wonderland Day Nursery in Palmetto. It was in the back of this huge two-story house owned by ‘Uncle’ Ernest and ‘Aunt’ Florence. There was a second concrete block building in back where the kitchen, craft room, nap room and bathrooms were. On either side of this building were playgrounds: toddlers on the right and bigger kids on the left. We walked every day after school the ten residential blocks to afterschool care.

On good days when one of us had money from an allowance, doing chores or employing sticky fingers at home, we would stop in at the fire station and after putting our quarter in, pull out six-ounce bottles of Coke or maybe Bubble Up, Grape Nehi or Fanta Orange. You could also spend 15 cents at the Tom’s machine next to the soda machine, pull a handle and get a long thin plastic package of salted peanuts, or crackers with a thin veneer of beige peanut butter inside or neon orange cheese crackers.

If you bought a Coke, you were legally required to pour the peanuts into your Coke and watch them bubble. It tasted nasty but it was the law.

Curiously, we never saw the firemen.

Two blocks past the fire station was the Thompson’s house. There were whispers that his father was ‘funny.’ He drove a Volvo (Exhibit A). He was in all the local dramatic productions, usually as the director (Exhibit B). And he dressed differently: he had been seen wearing a scarf and it was whispered that he may have had a dickey in his closet (Exhibit C. I rest my corset, Your Honor.)

We always slowed down when walking past Sean’s. His hedge had the sweetest honeysuckle flowers that we picked and supped from like oversized smelly bees.

Across from Sean’s house was the first duplex we had ever seen. The left half belonged to Miss Watkins, my first piano teacher. All the sweetest people in my life have been Katherines. The inside of her little house was dark and cool and somehow scented like clean river water.

She was a very patient teacher and I enjoyed learning to play. But she moved after a year and I was sad.

My next piano teacher was a strange, moody and fractious older woman named Rita who held lessons in her bright sunroom with three sides of long, thin jalousie windows that reluctantly cranked open and shut.  We lasted two sessions before I explained to my father that I thought she beat her dog and one of these days I might be next.

My third teacher was talented, mad, mercurial and sorely tested by the Fates. His wife, his love, had inherited a disease that ended in blindness and he was angry and bitter that nothing could be done, he couldn’t help her and she couldn’t help herself.

Mr. Dunn was the principal organist at the largest Baptist church in Bradenton. Sometimes I was allowed to sit with him while he practiced. It was like being in the center of a hurricane, being struck by pieces of leaves and flying birds and telephone poles so overwhelming it was easiest to shut my eyes and let the sounds scrub my brain clean.

Or if he was worn out from worrying or trying (and failing) to be kind and optimistic around his wife, he would fly to Bach and lose himself in those complicated cadences and maddening phrases that I just could not keep up with.

One day when he took a break at the water fountain, I snuck back to the huge pipe organ, slid onto the bench and played the two songs dearest to everyone. First, I played Kitten on the Keys and then followed it with a rousing rendition of Chopsticks.

Mr. Dunn came running back upstairs, stopped on the right side of the bench, stuck an index finger out toward the bottom keyboard and said, ‘No. Think of this as a harp. You just made an angel cry.’

Even as a nine-year-old, that got through. And it hurt.

I went home and punched my piano until my knuckles bled because I had disappointed him.

Speaking of disappointment, do you know the first time I doubted that God had time to listen to me?

When my sister finished packing her new 2-door Chevy Vega (a gift from our freshly deceased Dad’s insurance policy. After two years, they have to pay for suicides.) and was ready to drive to her first year at Newberry College in South Carolina.

I stood on my twin bed in my jammies, peering through the slanted glass jalousie windows and the black net screen. She was waving goodbye with a huge smile of excitement. I was yelling ‘Don’t go! Don’t go! I love you!’

And she left.

With apologies to Pythons Everywhere:

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT

I don’t know about you but it was becoming tiresome? difficult? doing the Ancient History Polka.

Let’s move on, shall we?

To Southern Law Enforcement. Well, Florida, in any case. Because Florida is and isn’t Southern.

Florida is a Bass-O-Matic mess of transmogrified Yankees and one-foot-in-the-water Canadians escaping property taxes, winter and traffic. Too late they discovered that all this and more caught up to them on both coasts. Plus hurricanes, mosquitoes the size of Governors (with or without stacked heels) and a schizophrenic body politic blood red in the counties bloated with state prisons and Bautista-era Cubans but opaline blue in the center of the state and around centers of higher learning. With the sorrowful exception of New College in Sarasota circa 2022.

Law enforcement. Thanks.

Palmetto, Florida.

Police Chief Hambacher. Thinnish, tallish in the way people believe Paul Newman and Tom Cruise are tall. Weathered as alligator jerky, just as tough and salty. But always honest and always a gentleman.

Yes, ma’am, Palmetto P.D. will sponsor you for the Police Academy but I have to tell you that we will not hire you afterward. This department and this city are not ready for a female in uniform. But I have no doubt you’ll find some place. Maybe try your luck over Miami way; they do things differently than we do.

Remember where Mom worked? Who’s going to cross her? Nobody who’s going to need something from a Circuit Judge. Besides, there was the valuable small-town sympathy of knowing what had happened to my Dad. And I was smart, well-spoken, quietly athletic. It was still possible to submerge my latent smartass tendencies in the service of becoming a Productive Member of Society. Plenty of time later to blossom into a high-functioning terror.