On Saturdays, Shopping and Masculinity in the Fifties.

Daddy, Mom and my brother and I would all pile in the ’57 Chevy on Saturday afternoons to shop at Sears. Dad minded my brother and I as Mom spent what seemed to be an eternity poring over bolts of fabric.  We would wait on the periphery of the fabric and notions department, each hanging on to each of Dad’s index fingers, shuffling our keds on the floor. After hours of standing and waiting (it was probably more like fifteen minutes), we began to tug on Dad’s fingers, begging him to please, please PLEEEEEZ take us to the toy department. He would stand fast (was he holding Mom’s purse?), not wanting to desert Mom who was intently looking for the exact perfect couple of yards she would use to make my brother and I matching shirts. Maybe he knew better than take us to the toy department, knowing we would eventually be in tears if we didn’t get to buy some toy we’d found and just had to have. We’d let go of his fingers to wander, not too far away, in neighboring departments. We would make up our own fun, hide and seek in the round racks or some such. We were probably just annoying enough to annoy other shoppers within earshot.

The hosiery department was next to the fabric department. Once my brother, fascinated by the feel of the hosiery on the ankle of a plastic leg he could barely reach, popped it out of its toe-stand to bounce and tumble across the sales floor. He busted out bawlin’. Dad tried to stifle laughs as he swept him up in his arms. A sales lady picked up the leg and tried to console my brother by showing him it wasn’t damaged.

You know, I was telling this story over lunch with our management team the other day, and I mentioned Dad holding Mom’s purse. Somebody made the comment, “Maybe his balls were in [the purse].” But you know? Dad’s balls were exactly where they were supposed to be and he was not less masculine holding Mom’s purse and hanging out by the fabric and hosiery departments of a Sears corralling a couple of bored little boys. He looked confidently like what he was, a good husband and a good Dad doing what good men do.

 

On Nicknames

I’ve never really carried a nickname, save “faggot” or “queer” for any length of time, save Rickroy. My first week (in 1986) at Saks, there was an event, at the store, called “Riding High with SFA.” It was a Western themed, anniversary event. (Marking the fifth anniversary of Saks on the Plaza.) Our visual merchandising team, Michael, John and I instantly dubbed each other with nicknames for the week. There was Michael-Bob, John-Earl, and when we came to me, Michael said, “Rickroy.” We set all the mannequins in the store in Western-ish attire (there was a fashion spasm in that direction at the time). We set piles of televisions stacked on top of each other with mannequins sitting on top of the piles in the windows. There were speakers installed in the canopies over the windows on the sidewalk. The TVs were threaded together to a VCR where we had John Wayne in The Cowboys playing 24-7. I remember, when we went outside to look at the “finished product” we were out there at the exact time in the movie where (was it John Wayne? or maybe one of the cohort of lost boys he had cobbled together to make the cattle-run from someplace south to someplace north.) Whomever it was, the scene was “Say it, say it.” The poor stuttering member of the lost group said, “F-f-f-f-f-FUCK!” to cheers all ’round from his compadres.

I think I said to Michael, “You know this idn’t gon’ fly.” Michael shrugged. We let it stand. I don’t remember anyone complaining.

Rickroy, it came to be a nickname my later Boss, Dennis (god rest his soul) got wind of. He called me that ever after. Danny came along about that time. He picked up on it too. He may well be the only one who calls me by that name now. When he does, I’m flooded with memories. Sometimes I can hardly stand the flow.

 

Talmadge: Whistled home

There were evenings in summer, when we kids in the neighborhood, after supper, would gather in someone’s backyard to play kids’ games-Red Rover comes to mind. We stood in two teams, holding hands in a line opposite each other. In memory there must have been a dozen kids in each team facing. “Red Rover, Red Rover, send [someone called by name] right over!”

A war! The person called had to cross the distance between us and break the line of the other team holding hands. If the person called couldn’t, they became part of the team they tried to break. If they did break the line, the team holding had to surrender a team-member to the other side. It went back-and-forth, the calling, the holding. The break. Surrender sometimes. I could hold a hold even if it hurt.

As sun set and dusk ensued, there would come a loud thweet from our front porch, from Dad. An undeniable whistle piercing…what? The universe? My brother and I knew instantly we were called. We left the game where it stood. Going home with things unsettled, the war not won. Left to settle-up another day.

 

Christmas Memory: bb guns

One Christmas, my brother and I got Daisy bb guns. We wanted them bad. We couldn’t wait to shoot them, but it was mid-winter in Rockford. Daddy set us up a stack of boxes packed with newspaper in the basement with a target stapled to the side. It wasn’t long before we bored of straight shootin’ and opted up for tricks. We went upstairs, stole Mom’s hand-mirror off her vanity, and commenced fancy-shootin’ backwards Annie Oakley style. My brother’s first shot riccocheted off the blocks of the basement wall and hit my brother in the back of his head. Didn’t hurt him. Didn’t break the skin. But how he howled. It stung! We could have put an eye out!

 

Talmadge: You Are There

My brother and I spent our earliest years, for me, my first twelve years, on a dead-end street named Talmadge Avenue in North Park, a section of Rockford, Illinois–some eighty or ninety miles west of Chicago, some dozen miles south of Wisconsin’s border. Maybe a dozen houses were on the street. Maybe a couple-dozen kids in four or five families.

There were a couple of vacant lots across from our house and a little more toward the dead end of the street. Every summer these grew to prairie because no one cared for them. They grew waist-high in grass and wild-flowers, burrs and snakeweed.

All we kids in the neighborhood built elaborate forts in the grass by lying down and rolling out circular rooms of flattened grass. Over a course of days, we’d roll out a wild-west of circles, we flattened paths between them. We spent hours playing in this maze we created. We played “cowboys and indians” We were informed by the television shows we watched in the evenings with our families. We had a trading post. We would have great wars with murderous raids, then pretend-smoke the peace-pipe. When we sat “indian style” in our circles, the grass was higher than our heads.

I don’t recall how it came to be, whether everyone had been called to lunch by their Moms, or whether we had merely grown tired of each other and wandered off to do other things. I don’t know where my brother might have gotten off to, but occasionally I would find myself alone in the fort, lying on my back, encircled, the wall of grass gently moved by small breezes. Me, shading my face from a bright, warm sun with one of a series of books I had. “You Are There with Winston Churchill….with Thomas Alva Edison….with Charles Lindburgh,” reading outside, hidden in the high grass on a quiet summer afternoon, holding a book framed by a sky-blue sky.

 

On The Walk Home Tonight

I remembered a walk home years ago. I once worked on the Plaza at Saks Fifth Avenue as a visual merchandiser. I lived in and managed (for free rent!) a small apartment complex (12 units) about a mile north and a couple blocks east of Main Street–the main drag I walked down to the Plaza and back every day. I remembered one evening, cold, after Thanksgiving. The Plaza Lights were on. We were well into the season of “good cheer.” It was dusk, nearly dark.

I was wearing my prized camel-hair Christian Dior coat–wide lapels, back-belted, double-breasted, the skirt of the coat hit me below my calves. I am tallish. It was a long coat. I was also wearing a black beret and black calf-skin gloves. Because it was slushy (we’d had a snow the week before that had not yet melted away) I was also wearing waterproof workboots, my pant-cuffs stuffed into the tops, “buck” in color, long-since scuffed and dirty. I’d been carrying these boots around, move-to-move with me since my days in college where they’d seen lots of wear in my stint working for the Physical Plant at Arkansas State University some years before. I couldn’t let them go, thinking I might need them again. In my walks at that time, they’d been resurrected. I carried my “day-shoes” in a “gift-with-purchase” Adolfo gym bag. Oh how I wander-on–so much, too much–about attire.

I crossed the Plaza, that evening, from the west, where Saks once sat, east to Main Street, then walked up the long, steep hill coming up from the Plaza (47th Street) north to 43rd street. There I turned the corner for the jog east to my street. As I turned north again on Magee, an old van (vintage: mid-sixties?) was stopped on the corner, the passenger side window, half rolled down. I rounded the corner as the van started on down the street from the stop. I distinctly heard a deep voice say “Faggot.” Not loud. Not threatening. A conversational tone. I did not look up from my walk, intent as I was on just completing the last two blocks of my walk to my “safe” apartment where I could divest myself of my attire and still be warm.

I like to think I’m nearly invisible in such situations. When I’m alone on my walk, as I was this evening, coming home from work, I like to think no one really sees me. God knows, when I’m on such a walk, my head is not about “what could happen?” I am lost in thought. Thoughts.

When I am noticed, as I was that evening, I realize I am not invisible. The possibility of happening onto danger lurks all around. But I want no part of it and I walk and live as if it isn’t there.

 

On Frogs

Three years ago, Danny and I went to the East Coast. Partly to visit friends, partly to celebrate my 50th, and partly for Danny’s work. (Philly, NYC, DC). In Philly, we stayed with a friends in the city but on the outskirts who had a place like a cross between a farm and the Garden of Eden. A couple acres, maybe? Chickens walked the lawn. Near the back of the property was an oval pool built decades ago as a swimming pool. It caught the water of a creek on one end and let it out at the other. It had “gone back to nature,” except for the concrete lip around the edge of it. I was sitting with coffee out on the second-story deck overlooking this misty garden the first morning. An enormous “Braaaaaawrupt-upt” erupted from the pond then repeated a few times. Practically rattled the windows. A little while later, Margot came out to join me on the deck. Once more, the eruption. I raised an eyebrow. “Ah,” she said. Called him by a name I don’t remember. “He’s a bullfrog who has probably lived down at the pond since the turn of the century.” I imagined a frog big enough to eat chihuahuas, with a bull-horn, squatting beneath a low-hanging leafy bough, calling for someone to join him.

 

On Ponds

We once built a dam at the foot of a giant culvert beneath a railroad track on a little creek maybe a quarter-mile beyond the back edge of our property in a little village on the Southeast edge of Rockford. My brother, our neighbor–a boy–and I. We were all in the neighborhood of fourteen years old. Can’t remember why we decided to build it. The thought just came to us and we did it by bringing brush from around the site, scooping up mud. We did it much like beavers might have done to build a dam and stop the flowing water to create a stillness and in the center of it to make a haven where we could be. The pond we created might have been thirty feet long by twelve feet wide, four or five feet at its deepest. Once it filled, a day or so later, we took off our all our clothes and swam–such as swimming might be accomplished in such a small space. We splashed mostly. Threw water up on each other, laughed and yelled. We brought an innertube with us. The neighbor, naked, just past puberty, centered himself in the innertube and floating said, “Here, sit on me.” I, not yet pubescent, straddled facing him, floated with him for some time. I don’t know where my brother went. Somewhere. Honestly, it was as innocent as puppies playing. Yet I felt a vague yearning. Had I had a name for that yearning then, I might have saved myself some pain in later life. All I knew at the time was it seemed like haven. Heaven. A place where I longed to be.

 

Rememberies Will Come

I don’t know if I can really do this, write about it I mean. Tonight, for the first time, Danny and I are staying overnight next door with our friend of just a few years, whose name also happens to be Dan. Dan is retired, moved here from Seattle, was diagnosed with lung cancer a couple of years ago. Did the radiation and chemo thing for the past couple of years. Last October, he decided to forego further chemo, made him feel too sick. Decided to live the rest of his days, what he had left, feeling better than the treatments made him feel. When he did it, he didn’t know if he had a month, two months or six. He asked us to cater a Christmas party for his family in December. Even if he wasn’t still around. We did and he was “around.” He’s still around, but it seems time may be short. But who could really say?

Danny and I are staying over because we live next door.We’ve offered to stay Sunday through Thursday nights. It really isn’t that different to stay here. We’ll only sleep here, we can trot next door to get ready for work. We’ll be around if Dan needs something. We’ll help give his family a little break so they’ll have strength to stand when the graying days grow darker. Dan is still able to move about. He is frail however.

What rememberies will come for me, if we find ourselves staying until the bitter end, will be memories of the few days and nights over a length of time when I stayed with my good friend Dennis, who, if you’ve read previous posts here, you might remember him as my mentor at Saks. Danny stayed many more days and nights with Dennis than I over that course, Danny’s story, though not less loving, is different from mine.

 

August 7, 1995

I’ve tried to post something like the following many times, but never found the will to complete it or edit it or post it. But this evening I’ll try again. I intended to post this on the date.

On the morning of August 7, 1995, around 5:00 am, the phone rang. On the other end, Danny. “Den died just a little while ago,” he said. “They just picked up his body to take to the funeral home.” We exchanged some transactional comments…”Are you doing OK?” “Yeah.” I love you,” I said. I said, “Is Jules there?” “Yeah.” “I’ll be up this afternoon.” He said, “You know what to do? “Yeah,” I said. Then we said other things I don’t really remember before we hung up. My head full of events of the past few weeks, the past few years.

Danny had just been home that weekend to celebrate our eighth anniversary, me taking him that Sunday night, the night before, to catch a flight back to Minneapolis to continue to take care of Den, our good friend, my mentor at Saks Fifth Avenue, the person to whom I would attribute a large part (most maybe?) of what I can now articulate about fashion, art, architecture…an appreciation for beauty, sometimes in its most unseemly appearances.

I had a list of folks to call to let them know what happened. Before I did that, I went into the TV room of our apartment, I lit a cigarette, somewhere along about the sixth or seventh puff, I caught myself saying aloud, “Oh, Den,” over and over.

A couple weeks before, Danny had called, he missed me, asked if I would come up and maybe stay with Den for a couple of nights over the weekend so he could have a break and so we could see each other. He got me a cheap flight. When Danny picked me up at the airport, as we were walking the concourse toward baggage claim, Danny suddenly gasped and bent over, “Oh, sweetie! You want to sit down?” I said. “I’m OK.” he said. He straightenend up. A few minutes later, I was sitting in Den’s living room with Den and Danny. The evening sun slanting in the windows. Danny had made me a pallet in the floor of the spare room (Den’s “dressing room.”) A Hospice Aide that had been coming in for overnight arrived and Danny left to stay a few blocks away at our friend Jules’.

Den was much frailer than last I’d seen him. He’d started his morphine drip a week or so before. We sat up until midnight or 1:00 catching up, reminiscing about Saks, him telling me about shows he’d watched on The History Channel, one of his favorites. The Aide sat quietly at the table, reading, but would interrupt if it were time for a pill. When Den started to fade for the evening, I excused myself to my pallet. As I fell asleep, feeling like a little kid, my head on the floor, looking up at the ceiling, I heard the Aide, help Den go to the bathroom in the commode chair by his bed.

A couple hours later I woke up, he and the Aide were having a quiet conversation. I got up just to see if everything was alright, it was. I asked Den if he needed anything and he said, “You know what would be good right now? A good cup of coffee.”

And the rest of the weekend went sort of like that, doze a couple hours, get up, talk. Danny came back on Saturday morning, took me to breakfast.

The second night a different Aide. In the midst of a conversation, Den “went” somewhere. He looked up at the door to the living room, said, “Oh, Zshovanca! So nice of you to drop in. Here! Come sit by me, tell me everything!” He skootched over on his bed to make room. The aide said, “You know you’re talking to no one don’t you?” “No,” I interjected, “He doesn’t.” Dennis shot me a look that was half confusion and half rage. A sort of “Shut the fuck up, who are you?”

That night Den had many visitors, he talked for hours. I watched, fascinated. In memory, I believe he really had visits with all those folks that night. I imagine them in their homes asleep, visiting Den in their dreams, each one after the other, coming to say Goodbye.

Sunday came and time for me to say my own Goodbye. Den skootched over on the bed to make room for me. For all my internal rehearsals of that moment, I said little of what I meant to say. I said, “When I get to heaven, you’ll have to take me all around, show me the architecture.” He nodded, “I’ll be waiting,” he said. I touched his face. “You’re my person.” I said, “I’ll miss you.” He nodded.

Then a quick hug and I got up and felt my way into the sunlight outside the front door. Danny took my elbow, walked me the rest of the way to the car.