R.P. Andrews's Blog, page 16

My Life As A Gay Man – The Series: 1969, My Days in L.A. and Jordan, Part 2

My Life As A Gay Man – The Series: 1969, My Days in L.A. and Jordan, Part 2

One afternoon, I had taken a piss just after my last class and was ready to hike back to the boarding house when I noticed the big wet piss spot right on the crack of my crouch. I pulled down my T-shirt and tried to hide the spot with my books but it just didn’t cut it. Just then, Mr. Crutches’ blonde companion pulled up on the campus roadway in her little white Fiat convertible.

Staring straight at my crouch, she said with a sly smile, “I think you could use a ride.”

Up close she wasn’t just pretty – she was beautiful, perfect features, and not a trace of make-up, perfect complexion, blue eyes, thin lips, double dimples, just about the perfect face. She said her name was Reese, that she was from Detroit, wanted to break into theater, and lived in the Hollywood Hills, I, in turn, told her I was a Jersey boy out here to get some sun and then, why I don’t know, I began complaining about my boarding house mistress who had been giving me a hard time lately about my increasing number of overnight “guests.”

“Well, we may just have a little symbiotic relationship going here,” she said as we made the second traffic light before my place. “I run a roommate service on the side. I think I can help you get out from under her clutches.”

“And what about you?” I asked as I got out in front of the boarding house. ”I was an English major. I know what symbiotic means. Getting something in return.”

“I know that,” she nodded, and pulled out into the sun.

I got to know the bus route to Hollywood pretty good and began hitting the Boulevard and the bars at least two, three times a week.  At first I found only a few, tight standup places, Christ, one was a piano bar – they were ancient and leering – then I saw an ad for Gino’s in the Press. It was a slight hike from the Boulevard to Melrose but it was worth the walk. An open, outdoorsy patio kind of place with a wrap-around bar and huge dance area. And everyone was young – just like me. Today, every time I hear the Jackson Five’s “I Want You Back,” popular at that time, I think back to those nights at Gino’s.

A short, little leprechaun of a guy, not well proportioned with short legs and a big torso, a wave of blonde/brown hair and impish features, asked me to dance. I was immediately struck by his country boy accent. He said he had been a beautician back in West Virginia but was here now for good, and up to just last week had been working in  a wig factory that supplied stuff to the studios but had lost his job. It was late – after 2 – and his offer to put me up at his place, a short walk away, sounded a much better option than hiking it back that night on the bus.

Tommie lived in an older garden apartment off Western. Covering a complete wall in his bedroom were match covers from every bar, restaurant and motel – gay, straight, and in between – he had been in on his ride out from WV before his 1961 VW Bug died on him. On his bureau on stands were three or four wigs, and he sloppily put on one as he handed me a drink.

“This is the shit I made from quality Asian hair – no genuine vinyl here – til the bastards decided they could do with one less. Hope the next bitch that wears their stuff goes bald,” he said as he threw the slightly alive thing back on his bureau and took off his clothes.

Performing after all that booze was problematic and in the end we jerked off and went to sleep. Next morning, I had a quick cup of caffeine, obligatorily took Tommie’s number, and grabbed the bus back. All I wanted to do was get back to my room and sleep. Yet, in the end Tommie gradually became my tour guide to gay Hollywood.

It was our third Friday night out on the town and we decided to have a “night cap,” breakfast at 3 a.m. at Arthur J’s. The place was packed, with a line outside to get in – drags, clothes queens, leather boys, crew cut lezzies – an X rated version of Disneyland, minus the rides. And there in one of the back booths was that broody guy from Aesthetics Theater class and Reese. By then she had spotted us.

“So where have you guys been slumming tonight?”

Tommie recited our party night litany. So everything was out on the table – or so I thought.

“What about The Stables?” she asked. “It just opened up on Santa Monica and it’s sucking up all the crowds. We’re hitting it tomorrow. I’ll pick you guys up.”

“Whose we?” said Tom eyeing Crutches, a bit pissed Reese knew about a place he didn’t.

“Oh, some boys I know.” She glanced back. “No, not Jordan, he’s not the party boy type.”

Tommie and I were in the middle of our scrambled eggs and waffles when she popped up to leave. Jordan, on the other hand, who had been in the inner part of the booth closest to the wall, rose up slowly, grabbing a pair of crutches that had been hidden by his long trench coat. Their hard click on the vinyl floor as he staggered out like a mechanical soldier whose batteries were running low almost competed for attention with the music blaring out of Arthur J’s ceiling speakers. And whether it was pity or sudden infatuation, I felt something for this guy in my gut, and that night I jerked off fantasizing about him lying naked beside me.

The Stables had the stereotypical country western motif with the cattle skulls and wagon wheels on the walls and sawdust on the dance floor, though they played Motown and James Brown, not Patsy Kline. Ah, but the guys, those rough and ready guys, bearded, mustached, tousled hair with their broken-in levis and T-shirts that hung just right on their bodies, they – they were the draw. They were the drug. And when I played budding exhibitionist and took off my T, I could see my fur and tight muscular body suddenly made me a Hollywood star. To this day, decades later, I rarely walk in a gay bar or are in one for long with my shirt on unless the prudish management thinks otherwise.

Was this lifelong compulsion to bare flesh borne out of the deep and intense feelings of inadequacy and insecurity of my teens and an insatiable need for acceptance and admiration?

Probably.

Monday morning’s Drama and the Critic class seemed a little easier to take with the memories of the weekend still fresh. But it took two quick “rum” and cokes that I made with whiskey, the only shit I had in my boarding house room, before I got up the nerve to open the envelope marked, “Official Government Business – Selective Service.”

I didn’t call Moms or Dad who would only carry on like I had already come back in a body bag.

I didn’t call Tommie, who, being a career fag, wouldn’t understand why I just didn’t declare myself a gay boy.

No, I called Reese.

“Don’t worry, baby, Momma has an answer.” And her answer, Dr. Harvey Weinstein, a Timothy Leary look-a-like and as Left wing as you could get, did his magic and morphed my chronic stomach aches into a duodenal ulcer that got me a 4-F exemption.

It was the best eight hundred bucks I ever spent in my life.

Suddenly I felt up again about this Halloween party Reese had invited me and Tommie to at her place in the Hills.

I’d actually have something to celebrate.

Friday -: Jordan: Part 3

My Life As A Gay Man – The Series: 1969, My Days in L.A. and Jordan, Part 1

My Life As A Gay Man – The Series: 1969, My Days in L.A. and Jordan, Part 1

They say you never forget your first but I had many guys before I met Jordan, hairy and otherwise. But he was the first furry man who stuck in my mind. It was also a time that witnessed the seeds of future behaviors that have lasted or haunted me my entire existence as a gay man.

Most people look back on their high school years with grand nostalgia; mine, spent in suburban blue collar North Jersey, were a horror show. It was not that I was branded the class queer, but I was nerdy, self-conscious about my short stature, bewildered about that fur starting to sprout up all over me, and depressed about being unathletic in an era when all most schools had were competitive sports, not gymnastics or wrestling where I probably would have excelled. If I wasn’t picked on, I was ignored. Today, I would have Columbined or Carried my whole fucken class and have a twisted affinity to kids who blow their bullies away with a shotgun.

I didn’t have a label for it yet, and I wasn’t like the effeminate boys the jocks made fun of, but I knew my disinterest in girls and attraction to good looking guys and male teen pop idols set me apart from everyone else.

My days as an undergraduate at a state commuter college (I was accepted to Rutgers University but didn’t go to save my folks money) weren’t much better. Coming from a family of factory workers, and the first in my family to go to college, the only professionals I had ever been exposed to were my teachers, so I op-ed to become a high school English teacher.  As an English major, I was surrounded by a lot of artsy-craftsy types who I just knew had to be like me, queer I mean, or what my college psych textbook labeled as “homosexual.” But when I approached one of them, Robbie, who at the time I had a crush on but today I wouldn’t look at twice, and confided in him one night late when we’re working on a joint class project and were both slightly drunk on Buds that I was gay, he snickered, then apologized, but made it a point to deny he was anything like that.

His moving in with the class queen two months later told me differently, but by then, my boss at the department store I worked at part-time, a double for Jackie Gleason, a Jackie Gleason with a fem bend that is, who apparently knew how to read a fellow fag, had taken me to my first gay bar in the City’s West Village, the Stonewall a year before the Riots. For the first time I was accepted, yes, desired by what guys saw. In fact, that first night in a gay bar, I met an older guy – probably all of 25 – who took me back to his place in the Village for an hour of fun. When he whipped out his tool, I said to myself, “What do I do with that?”

But I’ve always been a quick study.

Being a good Lutheran boy and former Sunday school teacher, I had no hang-ups like a lot of my later Catholic gay acquaintances had about being a homo, and once I knew there was a life out there, I jumped in feet first. But I lived at home and the West Village scene didn’t get going til after midnight, a big problem when you have two hyper-active, overly protective parents So when it was time to go for my master’s degree and try to save my ass from being drafted – Vietnam was raging – I decided to apply, and got accepted to a college as far from Wallington, New Jersey as I could. I didn’t even realize that the University of Southern California was a rich kid’s private school, not part of the California state university system. But it didn’t matter. I was determined to have fun while finishing my degree and LA was the place for me. My graduate pursuits would be a socially accepted reason for an X-rated movie.

A Dustin Hoffman wanna be, I had decided to enroll in the Drama School. I would have some academic courses, some lit, but there would also be a chance to act.  Plus I figured there was a greater likelihood I’d meet some brothers. But that theory was shot down the first week of classes. Everyone seemed old – at least older than me. Many were already working, in the studios, in TV, or local theater or in jobs that had no connection at all with show biz. No bedroom material to be found here.

That is, except for one guy, tall and railly, I figured just a bit older than me, who hobbled in every morning to Aesthetics Theater class a few minutes late on crutches and left a few minutes before the lecture ended, I assumed, so he could make it to his next class. He had a long face, etched features, a neatly trimmed goatee and jet black hair that was almost shoulder length, and even in the warm LA fall weather when the rest of us were in shorts he wore 501’s.  And he was always with a pretty young girl with a cheerleader smile and blonde Shirley Temple curls.

At that time, USC was not the sprawling mega-campus it is today. Then it was surrounded by a lower class Mexican neighborhood like Main Street Disneyland in the middle of a ghetto, and I, tight on bucks, took a room in a local boarding house near the campus for forty five bucks a week. But that didn’t prevent me from exploring the hinterlands of Hollywood – Hollyweird – Home of the Queers.

Equipped with a copy of Damon’s gay bar guide I had picked up in a Christopher Street sex shop in NYC’s West Village, I grabbed a City bus one Saturday afternoon for Hollywood Boulevard. Grauman’s and the Walk of the Stars were exciting for a movie buff like me, but the rest of the Boulevard resembled a real bad D movie. Shaved headed Jesus freaks, petition-pushing peaceniks with hair down to their assholes, bleached boys with tight, tight T’s and sewn-on levis, and big busted mini-skirted ladies  excremented over the streets like Circus performers or extras from Olivia DeHavilland’s “Snake Pit” out on release for good behavior. The sidewalks even smelled of them.

After all, before there was today’s glitzy, pretty boy, overpriced West Hollywood, there was Hollywood, not the mythical Hollywood perpetuated by entertainment pundits, but a seedier version of the town that by the time I arrived in the late ‘60’s was still pretty with its blocks of pastel colored garden apartments, but pretty like a still kinda-in-shape seventy year old whore with a good Max Factor make-up job. I found it ironic that Hollywood as a municipality technically didn’t even exist, and was just a section of the City of Los Angeles.

I was about to pull out those bar addresses I had scribbled down from Damon’s when I spied the newspaper vending machine on the corner selling  a pseudo-Commie, Super Left rag, “The Free Press,” where in the back pages were these want ads, “Guys Seeking Guys” listings, all there in their 8 point Times Roman glory.  Remember, these were the days when web was a word still associated with spiders.

That night, I spent a hard-on hour crafting my three line ad, molding it like Michelangelo did David til it was just right:

“5’ 6, 22 years old, boyish good looks, straight acting, hairy, wrestler’s build, looking for same for some fun, etc.”

About a week later, I got my first sealed envelope from the Press with three responses to the paper’s anonymous drop box. The first one went on and on and on about his life, the guy had to be at least 40 – Christ. The second, with his “walks on the beach” sounded all bullshit. Ah, but #3 was short and sweet:

“Hey guy, saw your ad. You sound HOT.  I’m 5 11, 25, moderately hairy, hippie type, long brown hair, into wrestling – AND LOTS MORE. Live and work in Hollywood. If you like, let’s meet at Grauman’s – write me and let me know when. F.P. Box 432D.”

We rendezvoused by Bette Davis’ footprints a week later. His name was John, (yea, sure) and he was tall and well built, with a mop of hippie hair, a scrawny beard, and on the cute side.

We had coffee at Arthur J’s, the diner not far off Hollywood Boulevard which even on weekday afternoons was a heavy gay mecca. John had left his family back in Omaha, and was just breezing along, working at a local record store. Sure, he had gotten his draft notice and had used it for toilet paper. Then we walked over to his apartment house off Western and, well, played.  It was the first time I had been able to suck cock without watching the clock, and the first time I found a guy really dug my fur. John had just a bit on his chest and abs but nothing like me. We exchanged numbers and promised to meet the next week.

It was about the middle of the week when I noticed I was real itchy around the crotch. Then, as I was taking a shit, I saw the little critter crawl cross my thigh. First, I hit the medical books at the university library, then the pharmacy on the corner where I felt like a leper buying Rid.

“You got what?’ John shouted on the phone. Then he hung up. I never saw John again, though he probably had been the source of my infestation, but Rid for this furry boy who liked to mess around became an awkward but essential friend for life.

Jordan, my bittersweet LA love was in the wings…

Jordan: Part II Wednesday

 

Less We Forget..

Less We Forget …

My blog about 9/11 which I personally experienced …

http://wp.me/pXwOp-1AV

There have been at least eighteen committed acts of terrorism on American soil since 9/11.

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Is South Florida’s Golden Age as America’s Party Town Coming To An Abrupt End?

Is South Florida’s Golden Age as America’s Party Town Coming To An Abrupt End?

I semi-retired to Fort Lauderdale from New York in 2002, so it wasn’t that l was down there when it was all happening, l actually witnessed it as it happened: Fort Lauderdale’s transformation from a spring break town and trailer park haven for retirees to an international vacation mecca for millions, including millions of gays who made Fort Lauderdale and Wilton Manors the unofficial gay capital of the U.S., and the place to live if you wanted the closest thing to paradise in the continental United States.

Now in less than forty eight hours, it could all be gone …

After exhausting vacations abroad in the seventies and eighties, l was looking for a place to just hang loose and l quickly discovered that “Forever Summer” Fort Lauderdale was that place. By 1991 l had purchased a snowbird getaway one bedroom condo in Wilton Manors for just twenty five thousand dollars (later at the height of the market it sold for almost $200,000). It just happened to be a few blocks from the Alibi, that would become the epicenter for gay life in south Florida, which had just opened in what was once the site a “shooting” gallery for heroin addicts.

I had looked at properties in South Beach, Miami, as the art deco hotels of Miami Beach’s heyday in the thirties and forties were being saved from the demolition ball by preservationists, many of them gay, and some converted into condos selling for thirty five thousand dollars – yes. But l was already in my mid-forties and the gay guys were all too young and pretty.  I opted for Fort Lauderdale and its diversity of ages and styles – and a healthy leather scene which at the same time was disappearing from NYC. To this day, Miami guys who want a man, not a boy, travel the thirty miles on IS 95 to have fun in Lauderdale.

The Fort Lauderdale Eagle was soon followed by the Ramrod which became a must see stop for any self-respecting leatherman from San Francisco to Sydney.

Yes, Fort Lauderdale, which still had segregated schools in 1970, was shedding its spring break image propagated by the movie, ”Where The Boys Are” to become an international tourist resort and a growing mecca for gays who were looking for a break from the winter or a move to a warmer, breezy lifestyle.  The town certainly lived up to its self-effacing name, Fort “La-de-da”: a gay beach, Sebastian, and a nude beach just outside Miami, gay restaurants,  and thanks to groundbreakers like the Alibi its own gay strip of bars, shops, and eateries. Plus two well established bath houses and eventually its own sex club for NSA sex even before the web.

Virtually every gym on the east side of Broward County, for which Fort Lauderdale is the county seat, had a sizable gay membership, and soon regeneration centers to stay young, offering testosterone and human growth hormones and non-invasive cosmetic miracles started popping up like pizza parlors.

And as the resident gay population grew, towns in the Greater Fort Lauderdale area, in particular, Wilton Manors went from rags to riches almost overnight. Real estate values skyrocketed as more gay guys and gals – and straights  – wanted their own slice of paradise. I firmly believe the Gay Rush played a significant role in the first South Florida Real Estate Boom of the early 2000’s (which stung a lot of people when values plummeted in the Bust of 2007) and the current resurgence as more and more baby boomers with money, str8 and gay, are ready to leave the snow for fun in the sun. By 2015 Florida had supplanted New York as the third most populous state in the country, after California and Texas, its total population growing by 25% in just the years l was there.

Yes, South Florida was fast becoming the new Southern California – without the smog.

A cheaper cost of living than many comparative metros, a lively gay scene, particularly during Season when Fort Lauderdale became the world’s gay playground, a breezy lifestyle, and a strong network of care to the HIV positive also made South Florida a magnet for guys with little more to offer than their looks, content to work at low end jobs as waiters, bartenders,  lawn guys, and house cleaners – or hustlers –  or live off their disability checks supplemented by under the carpet work or even drug dealing, and more than a few looking for an easy way out as daddy’s “boy.”

And where free and easy sex exists, drugs like meth and unsafe sex which made South Florida the HIV capital of the country soon followed.

So if Irma is as devastating as predicted, will this Golden Age suddenly come to an abrupt end? Tourism and agriculture are Florida’s major economic powerhouses, so if the tourism infrastructure is decimated and the orange groves are blown away – we’re the largest producers of orange juice after Brazil – will the low end jobs that many gays now hold go with them? Will there be a mass exodus of drifters back to Des Moines, Iowa and Fargo, North Dakota? Will Florida overnight suddenly become a poor state for years to come? Will its strategy of attempting to attract the wealthy with real estate in the six figures now the norm, real estate the average Floridian making fifty thousand dollars a year could not afford, backfire as retiring Baby Boomers and international money and even people like me who stand to lose their homes reconsider investing in a place that now may be vulnerable to a new cycle of hurricane activity that could last decades?

To its defense, Florida has been trying to diversify its economy so that it is not vulnerable to the whims of the American economy; after all, tourism feeds off money made elsewhere. Right now, Amazon is looking for a major metro area with an international airport and large enough labor pool to build a second base of operation and theoretically Fort Lauderdale and Miami are cities that would meet the criteria. But would a large multibillion-dollar corporation establish a base in a state where a sudden storm could cripple its bottom line?

Whenever I brought up the subject of the inevitability that we would be hit by a bad hurricane, buddies and friends would scold me for being a pessimist. But after Wilma I realized that South Florida is like a Glass Menagerie, oh so pretty, but oh so fragile.

And as I sit here safely in my Pennsylvania home and watch this living nightmare unfold on television, I keep asking myself, if my house is blown away, would I rebuilt? Would the lifestyle I so coveted and even bragged about all these years ever return?

And my response to myself is always the same:

That’s a damn good fucken question.

 

 

My Life as a Gay Man: The Series My first Sex Object, My Dad

My Life as a Gay Man: The Series My first Sex Object, My Dad

While gay guys are supposed to identify more with their mothers and I guess that was true in my case too, my confidence in being the gay man I am today came from my Dad.

No, I never had sex with my dad nor did my Dad want sex with me. But there were moments during my adolescence I wish he had.

Though plain featured Eastern European in the looks department (his parents were from Slovakia), not a giant of man at 5-7, not very interested in sports, a high school drop-out, and not very demonstrative, he nonetheless impressed me with his naturally masculine demeanor and hirsute, stocky – not sloppy – physique. It was that body – seeing my dad naked as he emerged from the shower – that awakened my sexuality and gave me my first hard-ons when I turned 12 and I began to see him emerging in me, particularly the fur. Then, I felt self-conscious, but years later as I entered gay life, I wore it like a badge of honor for it was my fur – much like my dad’s in texture and abundance – that separated me from other guys, taller guys, handsomer guys and even younger guys and placed me in a sought after league all my own.

Again my father was not the typical sports freak dad and I must lay blame my disinterest in competitive sports at his doorstep. True, not having those skills so associated with being male in American society caused me grief in high school, but that failing was more than compensated by other, far more important virtues he instilled and cultivated in me – patience and imagination.

From my slightly psychotic mother, Russian in background (yes, I’m a Slavic pedigree), I inherited my wildness, short temper and cynicism about people and life. Ah, but from my father I learned that listening got you further than shouting, a trait that served me well in my decades in public relations where learning how to get and give was paramount to success.

And while he never graduated high school and was a factory laborer all his life, with a brief stint in the Air Force where he bailed out over Nazi Europe and became a World War II hero in the process, I think if he had had the benefit of an education, he would have become an architect or engineer, someone destined to build things. He often helped me with those “hands-on” school projects where that knack to think outside the box was needed, and my curiosity about things and visual sense ( I still assemble things looking at the pictures, not reading the directions)  blended well with my interest in reading I inherited by osmosis from my mother, an avid reader all her life.

Unlike with my mother, I rarely quarreled with my father – he was just not the quarreling kind – and I often wonder if his patience and holding back his frustrations with his wife, an unsettled and unsettling personality who often berated him, led to his early demise at 74 from a stroke. I blamed her for his death throughout the fourteen years she survived him, but now both of them are gone, lying side by side for eternity, and there is no use in crying over spilled milk.

I never discussed being gay with either of them nor did they ever really bring the subject up despite my disinterest in women. But I often wonder to this day how he would have reacted had he known or I placed whatever he might have thought squarely on the table.

Maybe he might have just listened.

All I can tell you, incestuous as it may sound, I still subliminally remember my first sexual awakenings with my Dad every time I kiss a man.

Next week – : 1971: Jordan, the first hirsute guy of my sexual existence who just happened to be a double amputee.

 

 

 

 

The Logistics of Disaster

The Logistics of Disaster

As l said yesterday (see my blog, “Three Days To Disaster”), though l live in Lauderdale, which along with Miami, the Keys, and Palm Beach, are right now at the epicenter of Irma, the most destructive storm ever to hit the continental United States, l have chosen, l think wisely, to remain here at the Pennsylvania home l share with my ex and which l have spent the past summer and was just ready to leave when Irma reared her ugly head. Since hurricane season runs from May to December, every summer l leave the house with shutters up and lawn furniture in as if a hurricane were going to hit tomorrow.

Well, now that’s exactly what’s going to happen.

Okay, my house had to pass a number of structural codes and standards enacted after Hurricane Andrew in 1992 in order to be covered for hurricane Insurance, but does that mean that a house built when Lyndon Johnson was President will be able to handle the one hundred eighty miles an hour winds of Irma?  And even if my roof isn’t blown off, will my house be flooded from the street or on the canal side? Or will my screen patio enclosure which has been rescreened twice just since I’ve owned the house but with the original aluminum framing dating from the sixties, a place where l spend most my daytime hours and do most of my writing, become a pile for the junk dealer?

Coming to grips of possibly losing everything in a matter of hours isn’t easy, though philosophically l wonder if this is God’s way of cleaning up my house early. After all won’t most of my possessions end up in a dumpster when l die anyway?

But an even greater nightmare may be the logistics of disaster, dealing with the claims adjusters, the contractors, FEMA… Already stretched by Harvey, the companies and government will have to hire an army of temp workers to handle the avalanche of cases that will appear overnight, help that will have fast track training and little experience.

So just because you have a hole in your roof and maybe the spare bucks to get it at least half assed fixed while you wait for the elusive check from the insurance company, will you be able to find a contractor who knows his stuff and isn’t swamped, or isn’t one of those opportunistic charlatans who will be flooding the state looking for easy marks, desperate homeowners? Or if you’re a tenant, how much haranguing will you need to give your landlord to fix your leaking ceiling or non-functional toilet while he’s waiting for his insurance check to come through?

And while my 2009 Honda Element is with me as l wait it out here in PA, what happens to all the thousands of cars that may be trashed by Irma?

Will smaller companies with minimal reserves file for bankruptcy and stiff policyholders? Will the reinsurance market designed to deal with this itself go belly up? Did anyone ever program in two major disasters back to back?

Last l heard, orange futures were up at prospects a good portion of Florida’s orange groves, which are the second largest producer of orange juice in the world after Brazil, may be wiped out. What will happen to insurance rates across the country after a double whammy duo like Harvey and Irma?

FEMA has already burned through its budget with Harvey. Will there be anything left for Florida, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, all U. S. soil?

And what about the future Harveys and Irmas?

FYI: The hurricane season is still young.

 

 

Three Days to Disaster?

Three Days to Disaster?

Wednesday, September 6, 2017, 8pm

When l was a kid growing up in Jersey in the fifties and sixties, hurricanes were crazy, mostly rain storms that came and went. Now, in three days, Irma, the most powerful Atlantic hurricane in recorded history, may plow into Florida with a vengeance and take away my home in Fort Lauderdale and just about everything I own in my life with it, the price, as one buddy put it, of living in paradise.

I use the word vengeance because those of us who have come to take up residence like me or buy snowbird getaways, say, the last dozen years or so in Florida, especially South Florida where the endless summer the rest of the country and most of Europe covet – Palm Beach, Fort Lauderdale, Miami and the Keys – have been lulled into a false sense of reality: that the era of destructive storms is over or even that global warming is steering them away to other unfortunate parts of the country like the Carolinas,the Gulf or even  the East, i.e., Sandy.

One unexpected surprise or l should say shock when you buy a home in south Florida is the hurricane insurance which is based on the purchase price of your home. Now l bought my home in 2001, just a few years before l semi retired and before the Great Real Estate Boom and Bust, for $140,000,  three bedrooms, two baths, with an inground pool and screened-in patio on a canal. Today this same house goes for $300,000. My insurance, again based on the value of my home when l bought it, is close to three thousand dollars a year, not the seven or eight hundred for the typical house insurance back North. And the deductible is not five hundred or a thousand dollars but a percentage of the value of your home which means l would have to incur $4000 in damages before l get a dime. People who paid more for their home pay even more for their insurance. Plus your home needs to pass an inspection before a company will give you insurance: your roof must be in good condition and have at least three years of life in it, and your power box, water heater and central AC also need to be of recent vintage.

Yes.

Now, while i’m in a flood plain and the level of water in the canal behind my home can be controlled within reason, my concern has always been water damage from the front if the sewers clog or the street gets flooded.  So besides the three thousand for the hurricane coverage l spend another $500 for flood insurance.

Since Wilma in 2005, South Florida has not seen a direct hit in at least eleven years and l know friends, if they had no mortgage, who decided not to have insurance at all. When l look at the close to forty  dollars spent on insurance over that period l wondered if they were right.

Until now …

I was there for Wilma which was classified a Category 2 hurricane after the fact. While there was no damage to speak of in my neighborhood,  we were without power for three weeks because Florida Power and Light had failed to replace many of its old wood poles for concrete which they did after they got their caught with their pants down. At the time none of the gas stations had emergency generators so there was no way to pump gas and without power the supermarkets were empty warehouses. Most people’s priorities was how to charge up their laptops or phones.

But now that is the least of our worries. Someone will get hit and hit hard, and it’s a terrible statement on humanity but when you live in hurricane alley as l do you hope it’s someone else, not you.

I had spent most of the summer up with my ex at our home in northeast Pennsylvania and was hanging around to take George for his one week post-op visit for his cataract surgery which was successful, and head back this week for Lauderdale and home.

But why? Every summer before l come up l also put up shutters and pull in my patio furniture and do whatever else as if a hurricane was coming tomorrow, so there was little l could do  if and when Irma hits except put myself and my three dogs in harm’s way. (Shelters do not accept animals.) Sadly all these precautions are to avoid or mitigate wind damage. I have sand bags inside my two front doors but not much can save you if you get extreme flooding like Texas did.

As of today the weather experts say it is likely to hit Florida Saturday night into Sunday, but where is a roll of the dice and where after that could involve the entire Southeast. My neighbor here in PA who recently retired as a meteorologist for one of the major TV stations in New York City, which is an hour by car from here, says it’s only going to kiss southeast Florida and head for Florida’s West Coast but that still means thousands if not millions elsewhere will suffer.

And so l sit and wait here at our home in PA in between frantic texts from my Florida neighbors about the panic at the supermarkets and the gas stations, a change from the overly complacent attitude people had in previous threats.

Maybe Texas taught us all a lesson.

Or maybe after twelve years of nothing Florida’s luck has run out.

Are we once again in the viscous storm cycle of my youth or has global warming already done us in?

Does it matter now?

A New Continuing Series Starting Friday: My Life As A Gay Man, as told through my experiences with the most iconic men in my life…

A New Continuing Series Starting Friday: M y Life As A Gay Man, as told through my experiences with the most iconic men in my life…

Life as l often say is of the moment, and right now, at this moment of my life as l enter my seventy first year, l’m damn lucky. Outside of some sore bones, l have absolutely no health issues affecting most people my age. I have a handsome 42 year old lover back in Lauderdale while spending the summer with my cantankerous ex for whom, pushing 80, with failing vision l have become something of a caregiver; plus assorted fuck buddies, each with their own shall we say, “specializations.”

But that is not to say that l’m not a war weary veteran of The Gay School of Hard Knocks.

In my fifty years as an active gay man, l lived the birth of Gay Liberation; the decadent seventies; the AIDS genocide of the eighties and into the nineties that wiped out some of the handsomest men of my generation; through the fast changing first decades of this millennia and the web which has totally reinvented gay life, not always for the better.

My experiences during those years helped shape, no, became my works of erotic gay romance:

“Basic Butch,” my short story collection of guys – and a few gals –  who lived life on the edge with consequences they never bargained for;

”Not In it for The Love,” about a Florida drifter who becomes a Wall Street broker’s toy boy but finds love, something he never wanted, from a crippled musician until 9/11 tears all their lives apart;

“The Czar of Wilton Drive,” which is the bar strip in Lauderdale, where a young naive New York suburban millennial inherits two of the most popular gay bars in Fort Lauderdale from his dead gay uncle and is suddenly immersed in the underbelly of South Florida gay life and falls in love with the man responsible for his uncle’s death, and

“Buy Guys,” about two Jersey pretty boys, becoming lovers, who go down to Lauderdale to hustle gay retirees and vacationers as male escorts but find their scheme blow up in their faces.

My newest book for publication later this fall, “For The Love Of Samuel,” tells the story of an aging gay man who finds eternal youth and the love of his life in the magical relic of a long dead Civil War soldier.

The raw experiences on which my erotic fiction is based come from the experiences l have had with some of the most iconic men in my life, and it these experiences that l will be sharing with you in my new continuing series, “My Life As A Gay Man” which begins Friday with my first sex object, my Dad.

Coming Later This Fall: “For The Love of Samuel”

 

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… my latest novel of erotic gay romance, “For The Love of Samuel.” After a series of romantic mis-steps, an aging gay man finds eternal youth and the love of his life through a magical dog tag of a long dead Civil War soldier.

Available at amazon.com and Kindle books November 1 2017.

Happy Labor Day Weekend!