Okay, this is sort of a here and now post but, at the same time, I refer to stuff that has happened in my past. So, let’s call it a “that was then, here is now” moment. I was inspired to write this because, a few weeks back, I met someone I used to work with. I haven’t seen this person since before Thalia was born, and that would be more than twelve years ago. As is just so typical of lesbians, she asked me, “What do your kids call you?” I replied, “Ma.” She looked at me, “And what do they call Beth?” I looked at her and said, “Ma.” She got this confused look on her face, “What if you’re together and you both answer at the same time? What happens?” I though about it for a minute, and then told her that Thalia will usually point to one of us and say, “You” or “This one.” That seemed to disturb her.

What this person wanted was two distinct names. Like, maybe ma and mom. Or mom and mother. I mean, you cannot imagine how long she went on about this. It made seeing her again a real chore. I call that “processing,” and lesbians are notorious for processing. Not this lesbian, mind you, but most lesbians. Shit, get a room full of lesbians together and you can almost hear the whirring sound. Let me tell you where I come from on this one.

I live in a “No Processing Zone.” Seriously. I come from a home where both my mother and my grandmother were called, “Ma.” We used to congregate at my grandmother’s house after Sunday morning mass to eat meatballs and dip bread in her gravy (that’s spaghetti sauce to non-Italians). When I say “we,” I meant our family plus my aunts and uncles and their families. There were more people calling each other “Ma” than you could shake a stick at. We worked it out. There has been absolutely no lasting trauma from it.

Now, for the benefit of those who haven’t seen the evil mother-in-law, I’m going to include her photo here. Doesn’t she look like a lesbian? She processes too. Yes, she wants Thalia and Aaron to call her Mamé because that’s what “her boys” call her. Her boys, of course, are her other grandchildren. I knew there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that Miss Thalia would comply. When I told her, she looked at me and said, “I’m not calling her that.”

Now, there was a period in my life when I lost my fucking mind. I’m not prepared to write about that in much detail yet, but I’m getting there. Suffice it to say that I was involved with someone else, and this person was a processor par extraordinaire. To this day, I’m not sure WTF happened to me. This woman had every characteristic that I just about disliked in a person, and processing was just one of them. Needless to say it was over before it began.

I don’t say that I never think things through. I do, but I’m more likely to just “go with it.” I also don’t over-analyze a situation like my bride does. If someone does something that hurts her, she has to know why the person did it. I don’t want to know why. I just want the person to fucking stop. It’s simple for me. The less time I spend in the processing zone, the more productive my life is.

In every life, there are people who do not occupy a significant part of the memory. Nevertheless, these people made some kind of indelible mark. Welcome to the “Characters” category.

About a month ago memories of this guy we’ll call Stan came back, not in any sigificant way, but with enough force to merit my laughing out loud. I’ve tried to remember more since then, but am stuck with two memories that dominate.

George met this friend in college and he quickly became part of the group. He was really funny and he would just plain embarrass you in public. The short story is that Stan, George and I used to go drinking at the airport. Yes, Logan Airport. We’d go to the swanky lounge and pretend we were waiting for a plane to fly us somewhere. We’d sit there and watch the flights take off and land. We could spend hours there. It was absurd, really. Can you imagine trying to do that now in a post 9-11 world? You’d never get that far at any airport, let alone Logan.

One night we were leaving the airport and were on the bottom floor where people where checking in for their flights. It was really busy that night. George and I were walking ahead of Stan, but didn’t really realize he had fallen behind. He did that deliberately. Pretty soon, we heard a commotion and turned around. There he was pretending to be blind. I mean, he was very convincing. He was boucing off people and yelling, “Hey, wait! I’ve lost you. Don’t leave me here! Where are you!”

I believe we were caught by surprise and we really didn’t know what to do, simply because this was a new “act” for him. George was stuck between just letting him go and running back and getting him. Actually, what we really wanted to do was pretend we didn’t know him. Eventually, we ran  back and grabbed him, but we were not saying very nice things to him. The whole airport was glaring at George and I for letting this poor blind kid fumble around and find his way.  I just remember that when we got away from the masses of people, we stopped in some corridor and just laughed like hell. And that’s the end of the memory. Bang. I’ve not been able to go any further.

One other time, I remember the three of us going to see Linda Ronstadt at the Music Hall in Boston and he pulled the blind thing again. We were really quite close to the stage. Stan waited until the clapping stopped between songs and it had become extremely quiet.  He then turned to me, grabbed my arm, and said in a very audible voice to those around us, “Tell me. How does she look?” Well, that was it. We all were just rolling in the aisle. It was unbelievable. He was the kind of guy who caught you every time. He kept doing it, but you could never anticipate when he would try it.

And those are my only memories of him. Short but extremely sweet. Maybe somewhere down the road, there’ll be more! Who knows.

Anybody remember that old SNL skit with John Belushi and Bill Murray about the the friends that overstayed their welcome? It was actually called “The Thing That Wouldn’t Leave,” and John Belushi was the flagrant friend. It was hysterical. Well, it actually happened to me back during the eighties. To make matters worse, I was also in the middle of one of those very bad long-term relationships we lesbians sometimes get ourselves into. Her name is Miss Headcase to you.

I had a friend named Margo that became good friends with Miss Headcase and I. Margo and I worked together. She was a product manager and I was the marketing services manager responsible for her product’s promotion program. I shit you not that every single problem this girl ever had was a result of the slug she called her boyfriend. This guy was a dirtbag. In fact, we’ll call him Mr. Dirtbag. It doesn’t get any more accurate than that.

He basically lived off Margo. This guy simply didn’t work and it wasn’t because he couldn’t work. He was a drunk and a coke head who had already spent time in The Tombs of New York. The problem was that he was as engaging as hell and you could really have a great time with him. What money he did end up with, he was generous with. In other words, he was hard to dislike.

One time I suggested that we all go up to the Saratoga Performing Arts Center to see Emmylou Harris. She is one of the few country performers I really dig and it’s because she pushes the envelope like few have before her. I got hooked and then got them hooked. They thought it was a great idea. We drove up in separate cars the night before and stayed at a place called the 1811 House in Vermont. I know the place is still there and I also know it has changed hands since then. I remember the suite that Margo and Mr. Dirtbag rented. It had a spiral staircase up to the bedroom, and a fireplace in the living area.

Mr. Dirtbag was in rare form that night. The coke was everywhere and the party went until the wee hours of the morning. We had a blast. I remember thinking it was a damned good thing that the concert was not until the following night. We needed time to recover because we had to go from Manchester, Vermont to Saratoga, New York for the show.

However, time had passed for Margo since that fun event. The times were interspersed with too many days and nights of living with Mr. Dirtbag’s antics. Sometimes he would go on benders and disappear for days. Other times, she couldn’t get rid of him. She decided that she’d not be there when he returned from New York this time. That’s when she asked if she could stay with us for a few days while she found another place to live. Of course, Mrs. Headcase and I thought it was a good idea for her to get out and we readily agreed.

Here’s the problem: The days turned into weeks and months of camping out on our sofa. She turned the living room into a bedroom. It looked like a bomb hit it every day. If that wasn’t enough, Tommy was trying to hunt her down. He only had a cell phone number and did not know where she was…yet. However, by now, her apartment was gone and she had no apartment to move to.

As time passed , Miss Headcase decided this was my fault. You know how that works, it’s the old guilt by association thing. Margo just happened to be my friend before she was our friend. Get it? The added tension wasn’t helping my own relationship much.

The only saving grace was that Margo had periods of extended travel. I was in the middle of such a break and it was mid-week, so I decided to knock off work early and take the next day off. When I walked in my apartment door about an hour later, Mr. Dirtbag was sitting in the middle of my living room with none other than Margo, who had finished up her trip a bit early.  So much for peace and quiet. And so much for peace, love and understanding.

I was working on my final exposed nerve. All I needed to see every damned day was Mr. Dirtbag lazing around my apartment NOT WORKING and getting fucked up all day. I mean, I certainly was a party animal, but there was a time and a place for everything. “We’ll be out by Friday,” was all she said. My reply was simple. “No. You will be out by Thursday, which is tomorrow.” I remember vividly what I said next, “Hotel Della Piana is now closed.”

That was it. I didn’t see them for the rest of the day, and they went out for dinner that night. We didn’t hear them come in, but I know for sure their stuff was still there when I went to bed. Miss Headcase and I slept a bit later the next morning because I took the day off. By the time we got up, the living room was empty. They were gone. Just like that, after weeks and months of tension, it was over and done with.

There was still the little matter of working together. Was it uncomfortable? Oh, yeah, in the beginning it definitely was. Time took care of that though. It eventually settled back down into a friendship of sorts, although not like the one before she camped out at Hotel Della Piana. In a year, she was gone from the Company. She came from the New Jersey shore and I hear she got a job that allowed her to return there.

Several years later, I’d run into Margo again. But that’s a different story for a different day.

I had almost forgotten this. However, this morning I was tripping through my photo folders and I came upon this gem of a photo. It’s actually a photo of my roommate, Steve, in the Boston Globe holding a sign reading, “Anita Hitler preaches hate no matter if you’re gay or straight!” It was the day after the Gay Pride Parade in Boston. I’ll be honest with you, I can’t remember the year. However, I remember thinking that I hoped my mother didn’t choose that particular Sunday to read the paper.

To this day, I’m still not sure if she knew I was gay. I mean, she had to have known. By the time she died, the last date I had (as far as she knew) was my senior prom. (He was gay too. That’s another wild story for another day.) She used to refer to me as a “career girl,” who didn’t have time for marriage. Well, she was right about that part anyway.

Of course, years earlier she went snooping around my room, looking in my drawers, stuff like that. Well, you know, if you go looking for stuff to make your hair fall out, you’ll find it. And she did. She found a couple of letters my best friend had written me. We’ll call her Linda. We had quite the thing going on, and it went on for a while. We were just in high school, and I was a couple of years ahead of her. We lived on the same street, which made it easy. Anyway, finding those letters freaked my mother out. I mean, big time. She lost her mind. One thing about Italian mothers, they love the guilt thing. It was the hand-wringing “Oh, my God, where did I go wrong?” Oh, yeah.

Unfortunately, I don’t do guilt. Not good for you. All I had to remember was that after a day or so, all I had to do was treat this like it was some kind of opportunistic infection. It was a mistake that won’t be repeated. She liked that. It was exactly what she wanted to hear. I was 37 when she died, and we never talked about the ‘gay’ thing again, even though it wasn’t going away and I did it plenty more over the years!

Anyway, on that day, I believed we started out on Boston Common after the March and made our way to the bars that evening…all evening. Ah, yes, Boston’s gay bars. There was nothing like them in those days and there’s absolutely nothing like them around today. Plenty of those stories to come.

This is quite the flashback. One of my very good friends says this is something that could only happen to me. I’m not sure about that, but given my track record there’s no reason why it shouldn’t happen to me. And it just so happens that this all started in a gay bar.

My friends and I spent a considerable amount of time in the bars at the time this took place, and I’m talking about the 70s to 80s time frame here. We spent a lot of time in Boston at Buddies, Somewhere, Darts and Our House (which was actually in Allston, I believe). Now it’s damned near impossible to find a gay bar, and that is very sad. Some places are ‘gay’ one night of the week. The only problem is most gay people are pretty much ‘gay’ full time.

Anyway, it just so happens that there was a pretty healthy bar scene in the suburbs as well. One place that served gay clientele (and still does to this day) is the Randolph Country Club. Been in business for years. We had been frequenting Boston bars week after week, then someone told us about this place called DiRocco’s in Tyngsboro. (I can find almost nothing on this place no matter where I look. However, I offer proof that it existed!) We tried it and liked it and went more than once, I believe. I remember the turn of events vividly on one particular trip there.

This woman asked me to dance. Well, we ended up hanging out together most of the night. She came over and sat at the table with me and my friends, the whole nine yards.  The whole evening it really drove me crazy that she looked vaguely familiar to me. At the time, I was working for a Fortune 500 high tech company and had been there for quite some time, but her face didn’t really ring that bell. The long and short of it is that she ended up coming back to my place in Melrose. Without going into the details, let’s just say it was a long, active and eventful evening. We really didn’t talk about much of anything pertaining to work or our personal lives. Until morning, and that is precisely when the bell rang on her familiar face.

Oh, yes. Turns out my new friend, we’ll call her Ilene, just so happened to be married to a guy that I interacted with pretty regularly in my job.  Yep. Same last name. And, guess what, totally unbeknownst to me, she also worked there.  Quaint. No? I can’t exactly remember what my reaction must have been that next morning as I was getting ready to go to work, but I know Ilene spent a considerable amount of time telling me not to worry because she had an “open relationship” with her husband. He wouldn’t care. Hell, she and I could even continue to carry on without fear! Fucking wonderful! Yeah, that wasn’t going to happen. (Although, to tell you the truth, I had one hell of a time that night.)

This singular event in my life had so much potential for ugliness. It really did, considering that the three of us worked in the same building. I was lucky on this one. I told her that there was no way there would be a repeat of the prior evening because my Catholic guilt would get the better of me. (That was a crock of shit. I just didn’t want to deal with being in the same building with the two of them.) I was lucky that Ilene accepted that decision. And, even if her other half knew about the incident, he never let on. Bullet dodged. I would survive to make other really dumb mistakes. Stay tuned.

Writer’s note: The photo in this post is borrowed and depicts gay bar life in The Castro. It is used here strictly for effect. Some of what’s out there is really cheesy.

The other night we had a friend from my old corporate servitude days over for dinner. I’ve already confessed to having a Facebook account and I just randomly began typing names in one day. Bella’s name popped up and I was equally as excited to find that she lives one town over in Newburyport. To put it mildly, we had a blast. We shared stories about where we worked together that neither of us told each other about in the past.

The other aspect that was great is that our career paths since our corporate days aren’t that different. I was almost embarrassed to tell her I’ve been shucking coffee to the entitled masses for the last four years until I found out she was a cashier at Whole Foods for six years. Life is great, isn’t it? Where else but in America can you be the absolute best at what you do and end up kissing retail butt? It’s the new American dream…sort of like a reverse mortgage in drag.  Today she’s designing  jewelry and taking her stuff on the road to shows, and I’m trying to make money writing.

Anyway, we had a person in common when we worked together that I can best call certifiable. In the corporate battle of the wills between Bella and someone I’ll call Mr. Anal, Bella got the short end of the stick.  He was the problem. Not her. However, even I didn’t know how whacked he was until I had gotten fired and started using him as a freelance designer for my business.

To call this guy anal retentive would be mild. We’d miss every freakin’ deadline because he would bounce around between ideas for so long. Then, when you got the material from him, there were the inherent errors. Typos. Bad line breaks. Missing punctuation. You name it. Things that should never have happened. Sloppy. He was just plain sloppy and it drove me fucking crazy because it invariably created more delays in delivering the product. It was then that I began to realize what Bella had been up against.

The long and short of it is that this guy was obsessed with colonics and his internal piping. He was (and I hear he still is) a whack job. His wife, however, Mrs. Shrew, really wore the pants in his family. She pushed this guy around like he was a pile of trash and she was a broom. Since my Beth always calls me Freud, let me exercise my pathetically appointed psychological knowledge: Mr. Anal was obsessed with his internal piping because he felt like a pile of shit most of the time. I mean, you could almost feel like he was the worst person on the planet…until you spent more than an hour with he and Mrs. Shrew together. There would be no taming of this shrew.

Anyway, it came to the point where my business was falling apart and, believe me, I owed a lot of money. He was one of the people I owed. I mean, when I say I lost everything, I’m talking a homeless type of everything. I’m not ready to talk about that today, so don’t hold your breath. The long and short of it is, in spite of this fact, he dogged me to the point where he paid to have me arrested. You know, aside from torturing someone who did something unintentionally, there was no purpose to that. But then again, I annoyed the crazy person.

Standard coward’s disclaimer: With the exception of Beth (my wife) and myself, none of the names here are real. I’m not going to do that unless people feel comfortable enough to be named. And, as you will be able to deduce, some given names mean something while others do not. There’s no real reason for using the name Bella. It was just top of mind. There is, however, a reason for using Mr. Anal and Mrs. Shrew.