Life so far - in Wynn's own words
I thought I might share a particularly good email Wynn sent to high school friend Noel Taylor in March of 2000. Wynn and Noel hadn't spoken in 13 years so Wynn wanted to catch her up on how his life was going. - Scott Martin
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Date: Mon, 6 Mar 2000 01:58:30 -0600
From: Wynn Martin [wynn@zenx.net]
To: Noel_Taylor [nttaylor@enteract.com]
Subject: Life so far
Hi, Noel. :)
It's neat to finally be writing. Gosh, the thought of it all is fairly daunting... to try to offer a meaningful snapshot of thirteen years; it HAS been that long, though it's difficult somehow to imagine how.
You can't really be surprised that I still remember you, or the six-word lesson you offered that fixed my two-year-old driving problem. *smile* I think I only really knew you reasonably well for one year at Bellaire, but you were nevertheless one of the most meaningful friends I had; the other was my girlfriend, such as that was: Renee James.
I liked high school, and part of the reason I enjoyed the adventure was my weird popularity, of course. I was something of a mascot to the class ahead of me, because I'd originally intended to graduate in three years, and often took courses with the class of '86. Similarly, my own '87 peers treated me differently for the same reason. And I was certainly NOT popular in the POPULAR sense of being popular-- I dressed funny, I was no stud, I didn't listen to the right music... but I made people laugh on the bus, and gave wickedly daring presentations for class, and had lots of friends. The best kind, too, of course: the sort who hung out in the TPP shack.
But being generally liked and having lots of friends everywhere isn't the same as having a BEST friend, or even very MEANINGFUL friends. Even befriending the best people doesn't mean that you share the best relationships. I mostly played a role of some kind for every environment in high school... usually entertainer, or mascot-to-the-class-ahead. That WAS a real part of who I was; those roles helped define me. So, they weren't insincere. But, few people saw more of me than that, mostly because I didn't have someone with whom to share more.
There were two friends of mine at Bellaire with whom I felt a deeper empathy, because we were just a lot alike. You were one of those, and Renee was the other. Ironically, it's because Renee and I had an "officially recognized dating relationship" that we weren't as absolutely comfortable with one another as we might have been; instead, we were concerned about what it meant that each of us was of the other sex, and we were "dating," or goodness knows what. Those questions, roles, responsibilities got in the way of what really was the best foundation for our mutual interest in one another: we were a lot alike. We still are, in fact.
But a difference between you and Renee for me was that over time, I became completely comfortable with you, and that wasn't true with Renee. I felt the same kind of closeness and desire to share myself meaningfully, but it was easier with someone who wasn't supposed to be my girlfriend.
I remember, in particular, a few really good experiences shared at your house... when we watched "The Wall," for instance, and talked meaningfully about it, about childhood fears, about the awkwardness of relationships with our parents. And then, a year later, the single driving lesson was meaningfully important to me. I had been really intimidated by driving, probably because I'd been hit by a 16yo driver when I was a child-- the source of my leg injury. And then I'd had the added challenge of trying to learn the manual transmission from my father in what was clearly, to him, an opportunity for father/son bonding that he needed and wanted badly... desperately. It was tragic, when that had failed so awfully. I'd actually snapped the clutch cable, and was humiliated to the point of DAMAGE that we had to be picked up by Mom to get home. So, ask a friend for help later was a really humbling experience, and an expression of my trust in you. I didn't have those thoughts consciously at the time, but that's what was going on underneath.
So no, of course I've never forgotten. And I've thought of you many times, when I've driven someone else's car, or during the brief, fantastic summer that I owned an RX-7 (oh MAN that was fun!). And just from time to time when I've looked back at my high school experience, and thought about my friends. Usually, a bunch of other names spring to mind right away, because other friends were either friends for a longer time, or seemed somehow more compelling in their interest to me-- Jon Polsky, for instance, just absolutely fascinated me. I did many more "fun," crazy things with Renee, or with Sammy Buck, than you and I did. But though things were pretty low-key, your friendship was nevertheless among the most meaningful. I don't think I ever connected with Sammy or Jon the way you and I did a few times, when we talked and were, I think, once moved to tears. Renee and I did, but again, there was that awkwardness. You and Renee were also the only people with whom I shared exactly the right sort of silly appreciation for Dr. Who. *laugh!* Arthur Nunes was an absolute, geeky Whovian. You, Renee and I, though, were just one step removed from that extreme; fans, to be sure, with lots of stupidly expensive Who books and stuff, but removed enough to laugh at ourselves and the absurdity of it at the same time. Arthur, I think, was lost.
Curiously, I've also found Arthur again in the last few years-- we happened to meet in the most outrageously unlikely fashion, when we both entered an intersection at the same time when he was back in Houston one weekend. Arthur is so utterly out of it that he couldn't figure out how to get around or get out of my way, and we ended up staring at each other, both stopped in the middle of the intersection, until we suddenly RECOGNIZED one another. It was profoundly surreal. Of all my friends from Bellaire, only Arthur has actually surprised me by eventually having lost his virginity. ;-)
*laugh* It's funny that you wrote about the "overall" issue, and word play, before asking about my time at Rice. I'd been admitted, officially, as a prospective electrical engineer, though I spent my freshman year really working toward a computer science degree. But all kinds of important things happened that year to make me reevaluate, and it worked out in my favor, though it was difficult at the time, of course.
First, both calculus and chemistry spanked me pretty well at Rice, after years of cruising effortlessly through math and sciences in every school or testing experience I'd ever had. I still found physics intuitive at Rice, but chemistry was like a magic show. And while first semester calculus was no problem at all, the second semester might have been in Sanskrit. I took a D- as a mercy grade.
That rattled me pretty well, but it was my summer job in a computing environment that did me in. My own job was actually pretty cool, for a starting summer job. I was promoted after a week to a sysop for the geoseismic firm's computer, an already-aging DEC VAX 8650. I was well-paid by standards for summer jobs at the time, and it was a swank position. No programming, but the programmers were at my mercy for allocation of cycles and such. *grin* It was pretty geeky.
And I had a fair amount of fun, at the controls. But I also had a good view of the programming scene, and it was a wake-up call. These people were not creative, nor allowed any creative room or self expression. They seemed less like programmers, in my mind, than mere coders. They translated someone else's flow chart into FORTRAN, or DEC assembly. And they did it from dawn until 10pm, and on weekends, and Independence Day. It was grim.
At the end of the summer, with a sense of impending dread as the new semester approached, I searched for a new major. Something not computer. Something... easy. I just prayed I could find something I could DO, something with which I could get away, and take a degree to show for my time, and my parents' money.
I settled on English. It was, in my mind, a cop-out. I was embarrassed. I chose it because it would be easy for me, and because it was actually kind of FUN for me to read, and write papers. I liked literature, and I really enjoyed writing, breaking the rules, stirring up some trouble and controversy.
...Of course, those are the best reasons to have chosen that path; I just didn't recognize thosevalues at the time. I was actually ashamed, to have chosen something because it would be easy and even fun for me. Even years later, I thought I had made the right decision for the wrong reasons. It was years later still that I realized, in retrospect, that I had accidentally made the right decision for the best reasons possible.
I did promise to write you a novel tonight, didn't I. *grin* :)
My little black cat, Jenny, is curled up in the chair beside me, in front of our PC. I'm sitting at the Mac, from which I still prefer to do my writing, and creative work. To this day, that cat is the only pussy I've ever had. *laugh!* More on sex later, since thank goodness the story isn't as bleak as all that. :)
English and I got along infamously at Rice. Profs and I loved and punished one another, and I think we changed each others' lives. When I cared, and was inspired, my reading and writing were passionate beyond compare, and I was unconcerned with expectations, tradition, "requirements," or boundaries. Fortunately, this was true for only perhaps a third of my work; any more might literally have killed me. For that third, though, I got an A+ or an F or D-, or the instructor would be unable to assign a grade. At the end of my senior or fifth year, I remember being called to Dr. Wallingford's office regarding my final paper. Kit Wallingford and I literally cried; we didn't know what to do with me. She called my work brilliant, defiant, irrelevant to her class... what were we to do? Well, we were already doing it, of course: crying... talking... laughing; we did laugh. There were more tears than laughs that afternoon, but it was a great demonstration of our passion, our learning, and the relevance of reading, writing, and poetry in our lives and experience as living beings.
One of the great things to happen during college was to grow closer to my brother by living farther apart. Scott had always been expected, unfairly, to be like his brother. I was the "good kid," of course: good grades, better test scores, often the teacher's pet, literally an alter boy at church. Scott came home in police cars.
We'd grown up on awful terms, and had never been friends. We didn't play together, talk, or even coexist. We fought, or avoided one another. We actively disliked one another, for our entire childhood. Scott was compared with me, and the comparison seemed unfavorable... so I was resented. And I saw in him a nasty, spiteful, unsuccessful troublemaker, whose trouble was often made to bring down my pedestal, whenever he got a chance to take a swipe at me. I was a terrible older brother, and he was a difficult, troubled kid.
But with Wynn out of the house as Scott started high school, I wasn't such a threat any more, and our parents efforts were focused exclusively on Scott. Unfortunately, all their attention to his academic trouble reinforced his esteem problems, by demonstrating their lack of faith in his natural ability.
Of course, Scott is not like me. He has his own skills, talents, and powerfully unique assets. He just needed a chance to discover them, and then express them. So, after he almost failed his freshman year at Bellaire-- your junior year, perhaps?-- our parents moved him to a private school. And amazingly, they listened when I suggested that they give him a REAL chance to start over, by getting out of his face, his work, his friends. And they did. They offered him, for the first time, their trust... and he did well with it.
He didn't and still doesn't offer a lot of proactive communication regarding developments in his life, but he quietly did his work well, got good grades, and developed a commendable skill in photography. Today, in fact, he has his own digital imaging company, in San Antonio.
But while I was at Rice, our relationship changed dramatically. For the first time, I was not the enemy. And Scott was not mean to me. And, we had something in common, in a way: parental escape.I was kind of glad to be in a new place, doing my own thing, and this seemed a little like Scott's new space and opportunity to reinvent himself. He knew I was appreciating my new freedom, and wanted that. Although things were different for him at home, there was still tremendous tension between Scott and our parents, particularly our mother, with whom his relationship is still challenged.
One evening, something truly amazing happened. It was the last day of classes of my junior year at Rice, and still the second semester of Scott's junior year of high school. My best friend and I decided to celebrate the end of classes by having a low-key, wine-and-cheese event for ourselves in my room that evening. I'd just turned 21, and although I'd been the laughingstock of Rice University for most of three years because I was The Guy Who Does Not Drink, I was getting over my irrational fear, and looking for constructive opportunities to enjoy a drink in a nice setting with a good friend. Tom was the right friend, and the end of classes seemed the right occasion. We didn't know anything about wine, and bought a nasty gallon jug of Gallo chablis, honestly thinking it would last us the entire summer; we'd found an off-campus apartment to share for the summer and the next school year.
It wasn't an evening about drinking; it was an evening of friendship and celebration. We bought some French bread and several cheeses to have with our wine, and we enjoyed it. We enjoyed it so much that between just the pair of us, we finished the wine. A gallon of it. In about 90 minutes, honestly without ever really being very aware that we'd done anything of the sort. We each drank half a gallon of wine in a sitting. You can imagine the disastrous sickness of it all later that night.
But before we'd hit the bottom of the jug, the door flew open, and there was Wynn's brother Scott, screaming and crying and in absolute fury and distress as he ranted desperately for maybe a minute about some horrible fight he'd just had with Mom and she's being a bitch and I got an F on a test because blah blah Mom bitch bitch freaking out stole her car and drove here because I didn't know where else to go and can I stay here tonight? *pant, cry, wheeze* Tom and I were stunned. We were sitting on the couch and had been laughing like drunken fools when the door burst open, and we were frozen in time when Scott delivered this raving, panicked rant for a moment. Suddenly, as he wiped his nose, still standing in the doorway, Scott really looked at us for the first time, and suddenly looked powerfully confused. What th...?
"Wait a minute..." he said, with a look of discovery slowly erasing the pain and tears, even as a weird smile began to emerge involuntarily. "...You're DRUNK!"
Well, after a moment's fear had passed, Tom and I suddenly cracked up and laughed and laughed, and offered Scott some wine (which he declined, before crawling into the safety of my bed for the night), and Scott is my best friend in the world today. I am delighted that he got engaged this month, and I spent the evening tonight with his fiance, Jenny (not named for my cat), whom I love dearly.
My senior year at Rice was a particularly challenging and perhaps terrible time of my life. It was both wonderful and awful to live with Tom Saberhagen, youngest son of sci-fi classic author Fred Saberhagen, who is an amazing man, by the way. Tom and I were amazingly close, and he was the best, best friend I've ever had. He is philosophically and intellectually more stimulating than anyone else I have ever met, let alone known, and we often stayed up all night, staring at the ceiling together from the two couches upon which we slept in our sparsely decorated apartment. We'd talk and debate and argue and wonder and laugh and cry and think and pause... and the sun would come up, and we've have classes to attend, and we'd have had no sleep... The practical things in life seemed so mundane, so small, relative to the Whole of everything. We searched a lot for meaning, or new perspective. Tom has the most incredible gift for perspective; he sees things in ways I had literally never imagined. He's so open minded that he's actually distracted by all the ways in which he perceives things all the time; it's often difficult for him to make decisions and settle upon one perspective for practical benefit.
We shared tremendous trust, mutual respect, love, intimacy of a sort that few people probably ever experience, I think. I don't mean physically-- it frustrates me that people use "intimacy" as a synonym for sex. I mean instead that we were meaningfully close friends, whose sharing went beyond the clothes we treated as community property, and was extended to all our consciousness. We worked very hard to try to share with each other our new discoveries, perspectives, philosophies, all the time. It was very difficult on us, and immensely rewarding.
Ultimately, the trouble grew greater than the reward, unfortunately. We both grew that year to live so exclusively in the mind that we had practical trouble with responsibilities to academics and such. And, something remarkable and dangerous happened: we grew to know each other so intimately that each of us could see the truth in the other, even when we lied to ourselves. We saw in each other the defenses that protected us against ourselves, and that was dangerous. And we were all about truth, and seeing reality for what it is, so we challenged each other when we saw these inconsistencies. Those internal things against which our natural defenses protected us were suddenly brought out, and reflected from outside. I challenged Tom regarding his relationship with his father; he'd always been unable to really address that conflict, and had buried it. How could Tom ever match his father's intellect, or writing, or success? He could not, of course-- not at 20, at least, and it would have torn him to pieces if he hadn't built a defense of denial around the problem. It was disastrous of me to push at those walls, and challenge him where his wounds were already to deep for him to address internally, let alone from outside scrutiny and attack.
But even worse for us was the truth he could see inside me that I could not address. We loved one another, and shared that deep appreciation. But I was also in love with Tom. IN LOVE with him... obsessively, painfully, and beyond hope for reciprocation. It was tragic from every perspective, absolutely. The feeling could not be reciprocated from outside; but it also could not be accepted, or even acknowledged, from within. In defense of his sanity, Tom moved one day without notice; I came home to find the place barren, and I was lost. It wasn't just about Tom-- the greater pain was just inside myself, and about myself. To be resuscitated later, and find myself not quite dead despite sincere effort, was the worst experience I will ever have; humiliating and miserable beyond comprehension.
I turned everything off then, for some years, and was just numb. I stopped pondering philosophy, metaphysics, the reality of the world... I just lived. It was better than pain. I even had a lot of fun a lot of the time; it just wasn't meaningful fun, except for the course I taught at Rice on Dr. Seuss after I graduated in '92. I'm something of an authority on Dr. Seuss today. :)
For four years after graduation and a short stint at underpaid university faculty life, I worked as the computer network manager for a small, progressive research group at M.D.Anderson Cancer Center, across the street from Rice. Eleven of us were on the cutting edge of integrating medical conferencing with this newfangled "internet" thing, well before a friend of mine down the street-- Chuck Shotton-- wrote what soon became the world's most popular web server, which evolved into WebStar. These were geekily exciting times, so it was okay to cruise along in emotionally-numb mode for a while, and still find life reasonably stimulating.
Over time, I grew safe and strong enough to began addressing some self-improvement issues. I'd made a bit of a list.
[Dear GOD! I've just taken a two-day break from the email, which so far has happened in just that first, 3-hour stretch; now, I'm pretty overwhelmed by the magnitude of it, but will try to wrap it up.]
I have, by the way, license plates that say "SLUGS."
SO! It was 1995, and I made a list of issues to address in my life. The were mostly simple, but broad ideas. I wanted to listen to people, instead of talking so much; be more humble; be less defensive; more sensitive; wanted to be more relaxed all of the time. I picked one issue at a time, and worked on it until I felt as if I'd made some good progress, and then added another.
I was amazed by how easy it was to successfully change. What was difficult was not the change, but the commitment to change. That amazed me; I'd really believed that behaving differently would be very challenging, and that wasn't the case, once I'd CHOSEN to behave differently.
For instance, there were always small conflicts at work. That's probably normal. But, I was always very defensive, and never easy-going, or willing (able, I thought?) to listen and really consider criticism appropriately. Well, it's not really difficult to DO that-- what's hard is to DECIDE YOU'RE GOING TO. It's too easy to feel like, "I'm RIGHT, so I shouldn't have to put up with this." Or, "I'm WORTH something, my perspective is valuable, so I'm going to fight for my perspective." Driving is a great example. I decided that I was going to be kind to other drivers, even when they were wrong, or stupid, or even mean. REALLY DIFFICULT COMMITMENT. In the instance that a guy cuts you off, it's almost compellingly tempting to grip the wheel tightly, flip the guy off, race around him to show him who's boss... you've been there. But, I discovered that if I just decided not to do that-- difficult decision, but if I mananged THAT-- then I could let it go, break, and wave with a smile, as if to say, "Sure, come on in," instead of, "ASSHOLE CUT ME OFF FUCKING *MORON* GO BACK TO NEW YORK!" Heh heh...
Well, at the end of only several months, I'd made real progress on all of the issues I'd dentified. It was pretty amazing, really. I think it was possibly in part because I was still sort of emotionally numb. Life was fairly flat. Not bad, just not... not much of anything. I wasn't going to settle for that, though, so I decided to make some changes, and prepare myself for moving onward to better things. Hence the list, and the success, I think. I basically made myself a better person in half a year... because I decided to. And that was just about all there was to it.
Bolstered by the confidence that came with that success, and the cheerful faces of delighted friends and family who noticed the change, I was finally ready to address the last, lingering thing on that list. I hadn't really enumerated it or spelled it out for myself even then, because it was repressed, of course-- a clinically psychotic repression, I'm certain.
But, of course, I was a Big Gay Homosexual, to quote the kids on Southpark. "Whoa! Your dog's a big gay homosexual!" "Is not!" Heh heh... is, too!
*sigh* I joke about it now, and it's actually sort of disappointing, in a way, to have lost most of the passion now for the original story, and the whole coming-out experience. It was really hard, and I could write an email this length about just that year, and just the coming-out experience. I'll try to give you just the Cliff's Notes version:
I honestly didn't figure it out and put a name on it until I was 25. Tom understood it when I was a senior at Rice, and somehow at that point I KNEW, but I managed for the first time to actively repress it. Before then, I didn't even understand.
And even then, I didn't quite get it that I was gay, and that gay people are really just people who are... gay. Honestly, even at 20 years old, I was an absolute victim of stereotyping, and felt like gay people were all limp-wristed, moustache-bearing, middle-aged, effeminate hairdressers. Whereas now I know they're also flight attendants. *grin!* But sincerely, I had never identified myself that "those people," so it honestly never even OCCURED to me, I think, that I might be GAY. I was aware, even in high school, that I was a lot more turned on by guys than girls, but then I thought I just hadn't grown into a mature attraction for women yet... and later, I just thought there was something wrong with my sexual orientation. Never connected that with being gay, somehow.
And when it finally dawned on my that, in fact, I was pretty EXCLUSIVELY attracted to guys--sexually, romantically, in fantasy, you name it-- I was horrified. I didn't want to be associated with those GAY people; I don't cross-dress, hair-dress, call my friends "girl." I really thought that I must be unique. I wasn't gay, I was just a NORMAL guy who was, incidentally, sexually attracted to guys.
The birth of widespread email and internet access had a lot to do with my coming out, and coming to understanding. Before I came out to any friends, when I was finally ready to begin addressing the issue for mySELF, I did some reading, and found a usenet discussion group. There, I befriended a like-minded Canadian graduated student, Anthony, who was in just about exactly the same position. Plus, he was smart, funny, and we just hit it off very well. He's a wonderful friend to me today, half a decade later-- Dr. Majanlahti, now living in Rome.
After some months' sharing with Ant, and reading about others or catching a book at the library for some background and such, I felt ready to tell a friend in Houston. I was terrified, and I think John thought I was going to tell him I'd killed someone or something. I sincerely expected him to be horrified, or to think I was in love with him (which was not the case), or that he'd just feel betrayed or something. Instead, he was pretty excited about this new awakening for me, and injected a lot of humor in the whole experience, even the evening I told him. "Well, HELL! We've got to get you the right PORN for the first time in your life, for crying out loud!" *grin!* A blessing I know I can never fully repay.
Hmm; I've gotten slightly out of chronological order, I think. Before telling my friend (housemate, actually, a med student) in Houston, I had written a terrified, extremely emotional email to my best non-Tom friend from Rice, Kevin Hoke, who had recently moved to Caltech for his Ph.D. in chemistry (he's been working on it for seven years, and likes it to much to actually finish). I wrote Kevin twelve pages of email, and it was gut-wrenching; full of apology, terror, pleading for understanding-- it was awful. Kevin, who is something of an emotionless Vulcan, was a little put off by the extremity of my terror and emotional need, but was reliably stable in his logic, balance, and friendship. He said it didn't matter, of course, that our friendship was really about other things. He reprimanded me, though, for the really challenging email, and recommended that I calm down, and not make it such an ordeal for the next victim I'd tell.
That was my brother, Scott, to whom I sent merely THREE pages of gut-wrenching, horrible, terrified, tearful and apologetic email. But, that was still something of an improvement.
At this point, Scott was in school at Evergreen State in Olympia, Washington; more like a sort of hippie camp than a college, but it fit Scott very well. I think he majored in Weed & Love. Scott's reply was pretty simple, and I remember it almost verbatim. He wrote, "Yeah, kinda figures. ...Hey, my Macintosh came in today!"
When I explained that it was, in fact, a big deal to me-- he'd gone on to say that all of his friends were gay or at least pot farmers-- he was very supportive and understanding, and was a tremendous help to me.
Then, I told John in Houston, and finally felt a lot more comfortable.
After a few months, though, very little practical good seemed to have come from those coming-out experiences, except for the marked improvement in my appreciation for porn. It dawned on my slowly that, Hmm, maybe I need to meet other GAY people.
Again, this was a surprising revelation for me, and I had to work to accept the idea. For the first half year of my dealing with my own homosexuality, it hadn't really occurred to me yet that I might one day be HAPPY with another GUY. I'd basically thought of it as a process of just admitting a terrible problem or shortcoming-- a tragic truth to accept, that I would NEVER love Renee James or any other woman the way I'd always wanted to. Suddenly, this new idea was pretty overwhelming: whoa. I might actually enjoy the company of another guy. Dear god! I could have a BOYFRIEND!
It was still, sincerely, a fairly yucky idea to me. I knew I couldn't have a GAY boyfriend-- but maybe, MAYBE there was someone else out there like ME, or like Anthony, and I could spend a lot of time with him, and we'd really like that. Hmm. Revolutionary, this thought.
So, eventually, I called the one friend of mine whom I was fairly certain might be gay, since I'd been over to his house every Saturday for a year to watch Twin Peaks and Star Trek:TNG with all his half-naked, effeminate friends, who were all male and used to tickle each other on the couch a lot. Don was, in fact, a Big Gay Homosexual. Whoa! I was right.
Don introduced me to a group of friends who share dinner on Thursday and Sunday nights. The group is really just a group of friends, who've been introduced through other friends in the group... it's mostly gay, but not entirely; mostly Rice grads or their spouses or exes, but not entirely. All good people. It seemed a good place to perhaps meet some good people who might also happen to be gay.
Um, THAT worked! At my second dinner, I made eye contact with a handsome young lad who was drawn to me when I stepped through the door. Well, I'm sure this had happened before, but I'd have freaked out and then forgotten it, of course. THIS time, in this new context, I was still scared utterly shitless, but for the first time, I allowed myself to look back, and noticed that I felt amazingly, stunningly good to be so flattered. ...Plus, hey: this guy was pretty cute himself. And we had mutual friends, and he came with good references, and was at UH, and he listens to great music, and for the first time in my entire life, I not only looked DELIBERATELY at another, handsome guy, but I actually ENJOYED it. I did still feel a bit guilty, I was certainly very afraid, but I was really wrapped up in the EXCITEMENT of it, which was new and compelling.
It was SO new and compelling that I didn't know how to interpret it, of course, and didn't do a very good job. Marcus is friendly, handsome, kind... and utterly boring, and not very bright. But I'd never been the willing object of someone's flattery like this before, and was also overwhelmed that the attention should come from a truly cute fellow, so I was just completely lost in it all. We spent every waking moment together for a week, and I was giddy with the excitement of it. Eventually, of course, we ripped each others' clothes off and I had my first, limited sexual experience with another person (I'd certainly been practicing a lot on my own, of course), and then didn't hear from him again for four days. It was the world's most absolutely classic, textbook sort of case, except that Marcus wasn't a jerk, he was just really, really simple. He hadn't been after getting into my pants, but once that happened, the mystery was mostly over, and suddenly I felt really, really dumb. I didn't punish myself for it; I allowed myself some credit for having had no experience before, and was understandably naive. But, I made a point of learning from the experience.
I was blessed to meet Ryan Wyatt at dinner shortly thereafter, and that was really something of a miracle. There was a lot of coincidence involved in my running into him again later in the world on my way to work one morning, remembering his email address (in part because he was Ph.D. student at Rice in astronomy at the time), and getting in touch with him again, but it worked out in our favor. Ryan was the manager of the planetarium at the museum of natural science, but just a year my senior, and though he wasn't as cute as Marcus, he was reasonably handsome, and extremely stimulating intellectually. Ryan eventually became my first boyfriend, and was-- in some ways-- the best match I've every had in that capacity. It's too bad I wasn't better prepared yet for a relationship-- didn't yet understand the patience required, the compromise, the forgiveness for past mistakes... I'd never had a boyfriend before. But, we were a good match, and had a lot of fun. Friends rolled their eyes in mock dismay when we showed up together at parties, out-punning our best competition together as an unstoppable team. We won the pumpkin-carving contest together at Halloween, and there wasn't another couple among the dinner group that dared sit across a smart board game from us. *grin!* Plus, he was sweet, and I swooned in absolute delight when we finally kissed, after almost a month. He had the patience and thoughtfulness to take things at my pace, as I grew and learned.
Later, I dated a Brian, James, Greg, and another Ryan. Brian dated the first Ryan for a while. This stuff is pretty challenging, of course, but all of us have not only survived it all, but grown to be meaningful, loving friends, except for the second Ryan, with whom the relationship was too short to grow into something very meaningful. Anyway, the others are among my best friends in the world. Greg just moved into a place literally around the corner from mine, so we visit a lot... and Brian programs for my company today, on a contract basis.
I left M.D.Anderson and joined a startup consulting company. There were just two partners, and I was their first employee. Entech grew to be widely loved and praised, and within three years had 30 employees and was the best-ranked internet service provider in Houston for businesses; we were mostly a consulting firm, but offered internet service provision and connectivity for business clients-- digital only, dedicated, no dial-up. It was pretty neat. Entech was sold in early '99, and in late '99 the parent company was purchased again by a national internet service provider, for the ISP clients and infrastructure. They got rid of consulting, and offered a modest severance package. The two guys for whom I'd begun working three years earlier made about seven million dollars. Each.
I started a new firm with a tremendously neat business partner, Michael, and today we have a consulting/support company, Techzentric. We're only a few months old, don't have a web site yet (though we take web design projects for our consulting/support clients), and have only a little more work than Michael and I can do ourselves, but we're growing. We contract the overflow work out right now. Most of my clients from the past few years have followed me, and love the new company, which is focused on people, rather than technology. I don't care at all about computers-- I care about people, and Michael's philosophy is the same. Techzentric does a lot of community service, and offers support for non-profit healthcare organizations; AIDS Foundation Houston is one of our largest clients, and we offer them inexpensive support for which we don't really make much money. ...But that's okay, because we bill corporate clients $115/hr, and keep getting referred to their friends and other companies for more work.
At about the same time I began my coming-out process, I was also a pretty avid cyclist. I was bicycling about 20 miles each day, and 30 miles a day on weekends. I was in the best shape of my life... and hey, I had a great ass. *grin!* It was pretty cool. But, my right leg was a problem. The knee didn't work very well, and was uncomfortable. Worse, I had a leg length discrepancy of about two and a half inches, which is pretty morbid.
I talked with orthopedists, did a lot of reading, and eventually began an Ilizarov reconstruction of my right femur. This is one of those awful deals with the external frame, pins through the limb, little twisty things to turn each day to stretch and direct new bone growth... you've seen this on TV, or if you watched Gattica last year (mmmm, Ethan Hawk; yum). That meant several more procedures, on top of the seven I'd already endured. I had lots of complications, and even broke a few of the pins-- once in dramatic fashion-- and ended up having a total of 19 operations, ten of them in the last six years. But finally, I have legs of equal length. I've been off my bike almost ever since, but am looking forward again to riding this summer, albeit with less enthusiasm than I had years ago. I'll just be riding for fun and health this year.
Right after that first procedure, to fracture the femur and install the Ilizarov frame, I was really tortured for several weeks. I could not sleep at all, was in constant pain, couldn't take a bath (shower was okay, but awkward, and required an hour-long disinfection process afterwards, to purge all my 30 open wounds at each pin site).
One particularly awful night, about three days after returning to work a week after the procedure, I got literally no sleep at all. I couldn't lie down, so I spent the night in a chair or on my couch, though the transition between them was painful. Never fell asleep, and as the sky began to fill with color before dawn, signaling my last hour before having to prepare for a full day of work at the hospital on zero sleep, I just cried in dismay. I was furious, with myself, the hospital, the world, and I didn't know how I would get through it. I felt horrible, and helpless.
Well, I sent my brother an email that morning, and he surprised me by returning a story-- the first time he'd EVER shared a story with me. He wrote about the guy from whom Scott bought his homebrew supplies-- a Vietnam War vet, who'd sustained a spinal injury in combat. Apparently, the guy had nerve damage, and felt phantom pain that couldn't be medically addressed very well-- there was no REAL damage to the legs that seemed full of pain, and medication was either ineffective, or not endurable in itself; you cannot go about life on narcotics all the time. So, the guy eventually exhausted western medicine's options, and began searching the world for any other solution, in his pain and desperation.
He visited shamanic healers, acupuncture centers in the east, Caribbean witchcraft freaks, and nothing worked for him. Eventually, he happened across a Buddhist monk, who listened to his story and said something like, "You have probably looked into this condition more thoroughly than anyone else alive; perhaps there is no cure for your pain. But, you might be able to learn to separate your suffering from that pain." ...Amazed, the guy chose to stay with the monk and learn; it was the first time anyone had suggested something completely new, this idea that what he really wanted was to escape his suffering, rather than the pain causing it.
Well, I, too, was intrigued by the story-- Scott reports that the homebrew guy says he still has the pain, but is "at peace with it" today, and very happy. I was interested in learning to disassociate my own pain and suffering, of course, but I was a lot more intrigued simply by this profound difference of perspective, and simple wisdom. So, I began looking for a teacher from whom I might learn more about the world like this.
I eventually found a very liberal, Chinese Buddhist temple on the west side of town, with a young monk, Venerable Hung-I (sounds like hung-YEE), who talks in English every other week to a small discussion group. I still go and listen to him, and feel like a learn a lot from this beautiful person. You know that image we have of the beautiful, impossibly wise guru or monk living on a mountain somewhere, who smiles with his simple understanding of the world and offers advice that is so simple, we are in awe of the wisdom, the person, the world...? Hung-I is just like that. He's just a simple, beautiful person, and I'm blessed to know him.
Last year was a particularly rich, exciting year for me. At the start of 1999, I flew to Baltimore to help drive Renee back to Houston with a van full of her things, her two cats, and her year-old son, Sean. Renee's second husband, the father of her only child, had grown physically abusive, which just... my feelings about it are overwhelming.
After we got to Rice together, Renee and I stopped dating, and by our second semester were no longer really in touch at all. We made a point of getting a meal together in the spring to talk and sort of say good-bye, and I'm glad we did that. Afterwards, there was literally no communication between us for seven years.
When we found each other again, living in different cities, we had a lot of catching up to do, but something amazing happened. We felt at ease with one another right away. Renee and I really had been wonderful friends in high school, and knew one another well. We're very much alike. And after several years apart, we had learned a lot, and were able to resume our friendship, but atop a new foundation of trust, and understanding... understanding, this time, of ourselves.
So, when things didn't go well with her second husband-- yeah, it's amazing that she's been married TWICE now, and has a son, Sean-- it was wonderful how much we could trust and love one another, and talk. When Chris grew violent, flew up there and we just got the heck out. It was a beautiful, wintery journey across the country, and I was delighted that we were together. And even happier to have her back to Houston.
Bellaire BEGGED Renee to take Dr. Beam's job, and days later, she became the new IB Physics teacher at Bellaire.
John E. Beam, by the way, is still mostly as you'd remember him, though it's kind of fun that he now regards us as friends, rather than students, and it's interesting to see him offer political opinions and such that he would once not have shared with us-- school politics, teacher rumors, job frustration, things like that. He's retired now, of course, but he and I were in touch before his retirement.
Renee's students so loved her that they invited her to their prom. Renee was overwhelmed at the invitation, and after some thought, told her students that she would go, if her former boyfriend would take her again to the Bellaire prom.
I don't know that you can imagine how that opportunity filled my heart. I'd wrecked prom for us, in 1987-- I did everything wrong. I didn't open doors for her; I didn't rent a car; Mom's crappy, Chevy Citation literally BROKE that night on my way to get Renee, so we were late. And, of course, her date turned out to be GAY, so that's got to kind of suck. But mostly, we didn't have fun because we were dumb, and naive. Like all kids going to prom. There was nothing "real" about that night, about our clothes, our food, the environment... we were playing roles we didn't understand, and somehow excepted under those circumstances to have the most meaningful night of our lives. How foolish, and probably normal.
I was delighted-- beyond that, I was... OVERWHELMED, with appreciation and excitement and gratitude, to have a chance to make it all up to Renee, to go and have a GOOD time at prom, and to know what it's really all about: celebrating one another.
We were picked up this time in a 1928 Oakland Essex; an absolutely amazing find, pulled off almost miraculously just two days before the event. I simply lucked into finding the limo, and was spectacularly fortunate that it was available that evening. I plunked down a bit less than half a grand for the privilege.
Renee looked smashing-- simple, elegant-- in her straight, sleeveless, black velvet dress. A refreshing change from the horrible, poofy fairy-tale dress she and all the girls wore in 1987. She looked, that Friday, like a lady. The wrist corsage (spelling?! Dear God, I've no idea) I selected with the florist-- simply two, deep plum orchids, and nothing else, bound with a strip of black velvet-- complimented her perfectly.
Renee was absolutely delighted when I arrived in the classic limo, and I could not have been more full of pride and joy upon seeing her. Driver Charles helped us into the car, and as he took his own seat in the front, I turned on the CD player. Renee lit up as Steve Winwood's "Higher Love" filled the classic car, and we positively beamed with delight. All the tunes we enjoyed in 1987, while driving about town in Renee's mother's futuristically cool Ford Taurus, filled the limo again as we drove first to dinner, and later to prom, and finally back to my new home. Renee particularly loved Paul Simon's "You Can Call Me Al." The Joshua Tree delighted us equally.
Dinner could not have been more fun. We returned to Hunan, in the Saks Center, where we'd eaten twelve years earlier. This time, of course, we were not intimidated, and instead laughed and really enjoyed the realization that our wait staff was more intimidated than WE were-- a far cry from our experience the first time. We asked them to do something they couldn't deal with, and Renee and I just laughed at the absurdity of it all. Per Renee's brilliant suggestion, I requested that the kitchen simply fill our table with food all night, in tremendous variety and small servings, to give us a broad sampling of appetizers, soups, snacks, salads, entrees, and sweets, some of them vegetarian, please. The Host visited us to clarify our request for the confused waiters who'd tried to understand which specific items we wanted to order. And, the Host wasn't any more clear than they were, finally insisting a little anxiously that we just order whatever we wanted, please. *shrug!* Well, we laughed and said fine, just bring us a #43 and a #29, please. That worked. And, we didn't enjoy the experience any less. Perhaps because we shared a cocktail. And a bottle of wine. (Vichon, 1996-- we really liked it.) And, two coffee drinks. None of which we finished, of course, and we managed to leave with the most absolutely perfect buzz. It could not have been more perfect. Such is the nature of perfection.
Little Sean met us at prom in his own, tiny suit, and was the hit of the event, of course. Renee, Sean and I should have new prom pictures now; I think we were the only couple with a baby. We endured prom just long enough to take pictures, dance inappropriately to some really bad rap, and make a show of getting in and out of our swank ride. Even our driver, who looked as if he'd already spent a lifetime chauffeuring Ms. Daisy, was a charming spectacle. Other limos' windows came down as their occupants leaned out to inspect our own, and Renee and I were reduced to laughter and tears when one prom-goer was overheard berating her date for failing to "get one a'them for HER!"
On the ride back to my place, I did finally give Renee that kiss I'd been swooning over, and she said almost tearfully that it might be a fine thing to have a gay boyfriend. We returned to my place, rented "Empire of the Sun," and watched it together from my couch, touching warmly and sharing junk food until three in the morning. It was, in almost every way, as perfect an evening as a person might dream. I wish I could adequately convey the night's initmacy and emotion. ... I am still in awe of it.
In March last year, I went to Costa Rica with my father for some meaningful time together and great adventure. Rather than visiting the beautiful Pacific coast beaches and tourist attractions at the live volcanos and such, we spent our time in the jungle and rain forest, mostly on foot with a grizzled old guide who hacked a path for us with his machete. We saw tiny, deadly, poisonous red tree frogs, deadly, poisonous snakes, fungus-covered sloths, iguanas, cayman, toucans, three kinds of monkeys, gorgeously tanned Costa Rican 18-year-old guys who looked good enough to lick, and those lizards that run across the water. But mostly, it was some time for father and son to share, in a way we never had before.
We returned feeling refreshed, and more alive than before. I think we often tend to think of vacations as an escape, and then feel worse than before we left upon returning to work, concrete, and routine. I returned feeling not just refreshed, but excited to be alive, and part of a living world. I pay more attention now to all the living things around me, and our living Earth. I appreciate my Dad a little more, and the time we have together, and it reminds me to appreciate ALL the people around me, and those who are somewhere else, or gone away.
In August, Scott and I bought the most tremendously neat, crazy, absurd and wonderful gift for everyone's birthday-- Mom, Dad, Granny, and Scott's fiance Jenny have birthdays within a ten-day period in August. Scott and Jenny drove in from San Antonio, Mom, Dad and I arrived from Houston, and everyone converged on Granny's house in Austin for the birthday gift announcement. We'd worked up a lot of mystique and excitement about the whole thing, but the others were still caught off-guard and a little overwhelmed when they opened an envelope to find... reservations to jump out of an airplane 23 hours later.
Mom, Jenny and Granny declined, but my former boyfriend Brian drove in from Houston the next morning to meet us, and he, Scott, Dad and I went skydiving from San Marcus.
It was stunning. I could not believe I was sitting on the edge of an open door on a tiny airplane (which needed paint) at 11,000 feet over patches of fields, and suddenly was hurled out, spun over and over, and found myself freezing in 120mph rushing air as I PLUMMETED toward the ground with a stranger strapped to my back. I was SO fucking SCARED! My freaky jumpmaster spun us one way and then the other, zigged and zagged after the 'chute opened, made us DIVE to catch up with the pair who'd jumped BEFORE us, and then-- amazingly-- somehow landed us in a 20-foot circle, such that we raced toward the gravel, and then... hung, and stepped to the ground, like walking off a yacht. I turned around to watch Brian Welch land right behind us. My father jumped out of an airplane on his 61st birthday.
It blew me away.
*sigh* Amazingly, that's going to end my story of the past 13 years. Life has been incredibly rich and wonderful, and it's great to get to share with you at least these thoughts and memories.
It's neat to hear that you're doing exciting things, too, particularly singing. You probably remember that I'd once sung with the Houston Boychoir, when it was still Singing Boys of Houston. I miss my voice terribly, and the loss used to be horribly painful for me. I can remember a time in high school when I went to bed having that "three wishes" fantasy... I think everyone must do that some time; imagine how you would spend three wishes? Like the Lottery Fantasy, I think. :) Anyway, I could only come up with two. I wished I could fall in love with Renee, and want her sexually; and I wished I could sing again. I remember heaving with tears running silently off my cheeks that night, as I cried and cried.
Today, these memories all make me smile... not because they weren't painful times, but because I am so amazingly in love with life today, and happy, and these things just remind me of all that I have, and how rich our experiences are.
Peace,
warmly,
wynn
______________
Date: Mon, 6 Mar 2000 01:58:30 -0600
From: Wynn Martin [wynn@zenx.net]
To: Noel_Taylor [nttaylor@enteract.com]
Subject: Life so far
Hi, Noel. :)
It's neat to finally be writing. Gosh, the thought of it all is fairly daunting... to try to offer a meaningful snapshot of thirteen years; it HAS been that long, though it's difficult somehow to imagine how.
You can't really be surprised that I still remember you, or the six-word lesson you offered that fixed my two-year-old driving problem. *smile* I think I only really knew you reasonably well for one year at Bellaire, but you were nevertheless one of the most meaningful friends I had; the other was my girlfriend, such as that was: Renee James.
I liked high school, and part of the reason I enjoyed the adventure was my weird popularity, of course. I was something of a mascot to the class ahead of me, because I'd originally intended to graduate in three years, and often took courses with the class of '86. Similarly, my own '87 peers treated me differently for the same reason. And I was certainly NOT popular in the POPULAR sense of being popular-- I dressed funny, I was no stud, I didn't listen to the right music... but I made people laugh on the bus, and gave wickedly daring presentations for class, and had lots of friends. The best kind, too, of course: the sort who hung out in the TPP shack.
But being generally liked and having lots of friends everywhere isn't the same as having a BEST friend, or even very MEANINGFUL friends. Even befriending the best people doesn't mean that you share the best relationships. I mostly played a role of some kind for every environment in high school... usually entertainer, or mascot-to-the-class-ahead. That WAS a real part of who I was; those roles helped define me. So, they weren't insincere. But, few people saw more of me than that, mostly because I didn't have someone with whom to share more.
There were two friends of mine at Bellaire with whom I felt a deeper empathy, because we were just a lot alike. You were one of those, and Renee was the other. Ironically, it's because Renee and I had an "officially recognized dating relationship" that we weren't as absolutely comfortable with one another as we might have been; instead, we were concerned about what it meant that each of us was of the other sex, and we were "dating," or goodness knows what. Those questions, roles, responsibilities got in the way of what really was the best foundation for our mutual interest in one another: we were a lot alike. We still are, in fact.
But a difference between you and Renee for me was that over time, I became completely comfortable with you, and that wasn't true with Renee. I felt the same kind of closeness and desire to share myself meaningfully, but it was easier with someone who wasn't supposed to be my girlfriend.
I remember, in particular, a few really good experiences shared at your house... when we watched "The Wall," for instance, and talked meaningfully about it, about childhood fears, about the awkwardness of relationships with our parents. And then, a year later, the single driving lesson was meaningfully important to me. I had been really intimidated by driving, probably because I'd been hit by a 16yo driver when I was a child-- the source of my leg injury. And then I'd had the added challenge of trying to learn the manual transmission from my father in what was clearly, to him, an opportunity for father/son bonding that he needed and wanted badly... desperately. It was tragic, when that had failed so awfully. I'd actually snapped the clutch cable, and was humiliated to the point of DAMAGE that we had to be picked up by Mom to get home. So, ask a friend for help later was a really humbling experience, and an expression of my trust in you. I didn't have those thoughts consciously at the time, but that's what was going on underneath.
So no, of course I've never forgotten. And I've thought of you many times, when I've driven someone else's car, or during the brief, fantastic summer that I owned an RX-7 (oh MAN that was fun!). And just from time to time when I've looked back at my high school experience, and thought about my friends. Usually, a bunch of other names spring to mind right away, because other friends were either friends for a longer time, or seemed somehow more compelling in their interest to me-- Jon Polsky, for instance, just absolutely fascinated me. I did many more "fun," crazy things with Renee, or with Sammy Buck, than you and I did. But though things were pretty low-key, your friendship was nevertheless among the most meaningful. I don't think I ever connected with Sammy or Jon the way you and I did a few times, when we talked and were, I think, once moved to tears. Renee and I did, but again, there was that awkwardness. You and Renee were also the only people with whom I shared exactly the right sort of silly appreciation for Dr. Who. *laugh!* Arthur Nunes was an absolute, geeky Whovian. You, Renee and I, though, were just one step removed from that extreme; fans, to be sure, with lots of stupidly expensive Who books and stuff, but removed enough to laugh at ourselves and the absurdity of it at the same time. Arthur, I think, was lost.
Curiously, I've also found Arthur again in the last few years-- we happened to meet in the most outrageously unlikely fashion, when we both entered an intersection at the same time when he was back in Houston one weekend. Arthur is so utterly out of it that he couldn't figure out how to get around or get out of my way, and we ended up staring at each other, both stopped in the middle of the intersection, until we suddenly RECOGNIZED one another. It was profoundly surreal. Of all my friends from Bellaire, only Arthur has actually surprised me by eventually having lost his virginity. ;-)
*laugh* It's funny that you wrote about the "overall" issue, and word play, before asking about my time at Rice. I'd been admitted, officially, as a prospective electrical engineer, though I spent my freshman year really working toward a computer science degree. But all kinds of important things happened that year to make me reevaluate, and it worked out in my favor, though it was difficult at the time, of course.
First, both calculus and chemistry spanked me pretty well at Rice, after years of cruising effortlessly through math and sciences in every school or testing experience I'd ever had. I still found physics intuitive at Rice, but chemistry was like a magic show. And while first semester calculus was no problem at all, the second semester might have been in Sanskrit. I took a D- as a mercy grade.
That rattled me pretty well, but it was my summer job in a computing environment that did me in. My own job was actually pretty cool, for a starting summer job. I was promoted after a week to a sysop for the geoseismic firm's computer, an already-aging DEC VAX 8650. I was well-paid by standards for summer jobs at the time, and it was a swank position. No programming, but the programmers were at my mercy for allocation of cycles and such. *grin* It was pretty geeky.
And I had a fair amount of fun, at the controls. But I also had a good view of the programming scene, and it was a wake-up call. These people were not creative, nor allowed any creative room or self expression. They seemed less like programmers, in my mind, than mere coders. They translated someone else's flow chart into FORTRAN, or DEC assembly. And they did it from dawn until 10pm, and on weekends, and Independence Day. It was grim.
At the end of the summer, with a sense of impending dread as the new semester approached, I searched for a new major. Something not computer. Something... easy. I just prayed I could find something I could DO, something with which I could get away, and take a degree to show for my time, and my parents' money.
I settled on English. It was, in my mind, a cop-out. I was embarrassed. I chose it because it would be easy for me, and because it was actually kind of FUN for me to read, and write papers. I liked literature, and I really enjoyed writing, breaking the rules, stirring up some trouble and controversy.
...Of course, those are the best reasons to have chosen that path; I just didn't recognize thosevalues at the time. I was actually ashamed, to have chosen something because it would be easy and even fun for me. Even years later, I thought I had made the right decision for the wrong reasons. It was years later still that I realized, in retrospect, that I had accidentally made the right decision for the best reasons possible.
I did promise to write you a novel tonight, didn't I. *grin* :)
My little black cat, Jenny, is curled up in the chair beside me, in front of our PC. I'm sitting at the Mac, from which I still prefer to do my writing, and creative work. To this day, that cat is the only pussy I've ever had. *laugh!* More on sex later, since thank goodness the story isn't as bleak as all that. :)
English and I got along infamously at Rice. Profs and I loved and punished one another, and I think we changed each others' lives. When I cared, and was inspired, my reading and writing were passionate beyond compare, and I was unconcerned with expectations, tradition, "requirements," or boundaries. Fortunately, this was true for only perhaps a third of my work; any more might literally have killed me. For that third, though, I got an A+ or an F or D-, or the instructor would be unable to assign a grade. At the end of my senior or fifth year, I remember being called to Dr. Wallingford's office regarding my final paper. Kit Wallingford and I literally cried; we didn't know what to do with me. She called my work brilliant, defiant, irrelevant to her class... what were we to do? Well, we were already doing it, of course: crying... talking... laughing; we did laugh. There were more tears than laughs that afternoon, but it was a great demonstration of our passion, our learning, and the relevance of reading, writing, and poetry in our lives and experience as living beings.
One of the great things to happen during college was to grow closer to my brother by living farther apart. Scott had always been expected, unfairly, to be like his brother. I was the "good kid," of course: good grades, better test scores, often the teacher's pet, literally an alter boy at church. Scott came home in police cars.
We'd grown up on awful terms, and had never been friends. We didn't play together, talk, or even coexist. We fought, or avoided one another. We actively disliked one another, for our entire childhood. Scott was compared with me, and the comparison seemed unfavorable... so I was resented. And I saw in him a nasty, spiteful, unsuccessful troublemaker, whose trouble was often made to bring down my pedestal, whenever he got a chance to take a swipe at me. I was a terrible older brother, and he was a difficult, troubled kid.
But with Wynn out of the house as Scott started high school, I wasn't such a threat any more, and our parents efforts were focused exclusively on Scott. Unfortunately, all their attention to his academic trouble reinforced his esteem problems, by demonstrating their lack of faith in his natural ability.
Of course, Scott is not like me. He has his own skills, talents, and powerfully unique assets. He just needed a chance to discover them, and then express them. So, after he almost failed his freshman year at Bellaire-- your junior year, perhaps?-- our parents moved him to a private school. And amazingly, they listened when I suggested that they give him a REAL chance to start over, by getting out of his face, his work, his friends. And they did. They offered him, for the first time, their trust... and he did well with it.
He didn't and still doesn't offer a lot of proactive communication regarding developments in his life, but he quietly did his work well, got good grades, and developed a commendable skill in photography. Today, in fact, he has his own digital imaging company, in San Antonio.
But while I was at Rice, our relationship changed dramatically. For the first time, I was not the enemy. And Scott was not mean to me. And, we had something in common, in a way: parental escape.I was kind of glad to be in a new place, doing my own thing, and this seemed a little like Scott's new space and opportunity to reinvent himself. He knew I was appreciating my new freedom, and wanted that. Although things were different for him at home, there was still tremendous tension between Scott and our parents, particularly our mother, with whom his relationship is still challenged.
One evening, something truly amazing happened. It was the last day of classes of my junior year at Rice, and still the second semester of Scott's junior year of high school. My best friend and I decided to celebrate the end of classes by having a low-key, wine-and-cheese event for ourselves in my room that evening. I'd just turned 21, and although I'd been the laughingstock of Rice University for most of three years because I was The Guy Who Does Not Drink, I was getting over my irrational fear, and looking for constructive opportunities to enjoy a drink in a nice setting with a good friend. Tom was the right friend, and the end of classes seemed the right occasion. We didn't know anything about wine, and bought a nasty gallon jug of Gallo chablis, honestly thinking it would last us the entire summer; we'd found an off-campus apartment to share for the summer and the next school year.
It wasn't an evening about drinking; it was an evening of friendship and celebration. We bought some French bread and several cheeses to have with our wine, and we enjoyed it. We enjoyed it so much that between just the pair of us, we finished the wine. A gallon of it. In about 90 minutes, honestly without ever really being very aware that we'd done anything of the sort. We each drank half a gallon of wine in a sitting. You can imagine the disastrous sickness of it all later that night.
But before we'd hit the bottom of the jug, the door flew open, and there was Wynn's brother Scott, screaming and crying and in absolute fury and distress as he ranted desperately for maybe a minute about some horrible fight he'd just had with Mom and she's being a bitch and I got an F on a test because blah blah Mom bitch bitch freaking out stole her car and drove here because I didn't know where else to go and can I stay here tonight? *pant, cry, wheeze* Tom and I were stunned. We were sitting on the couch and had been laughing like drunken fools when the door burst open, and we were frozen in time when Scott delivered this raving, panicked rant for a moment. Suddenly, as he wiped his nose, still standing in the doorway, Scott really looked at us for the first time, and suddenly looked powerfully confused. What th...?
"Wait a minute..." he said, with a look of discovery slowly erasing the pain and tears, even as a weird smile began to emerge involuntarily. "...You're DRUNK!"
Well, after a moment's fear had passed, Tom and I suddenly cracked up and laughed and laughed, and offered Scott some wine (which he declined, before crawling into the safety of my bed for the night), and Scott is my best friend in the world today. I am delighted that he got engaged this month, and I spent the evening tonight with his fiance, Jenny (not named for my cat), whom I love dearly.
My senior year at Rice was a particularly challenging and perhaps terrible time of my life. It was both wonderful and awful to live with Tom Saberhagen, youngest son of sci-fi classic author Fred Saberhagen, who is an amazing man, by the way. Tom and I were amazingly close, and he was the best, best friend I've ever had. He is philosophically and intellectually more stimulating than anyone else I have ever met, let alone known, and we often stayed up all night, staring at the ceiling together from the two couches upon which we slept in our sparsely decorated apartment. We'd talk and debate and argue and wonder and laugh and cry and think and pause... and the sun would come up, and we've have classes to attend, and we'd have had no sleep... The practical things in life seemed so mundane, so small, relative to the Whole of everything. We searched a lot for meaning, or new perspective. Tom has the most incredible gift for perspective; he sees things in ways I had literally never imagined. He's so open minded that he's actually distracted by all the ways in which he perceives things all the time; it's often difficult for him to make decisions and settle upon one perspective for practical benefit.
We shared tremendous trust, mutual respect, love, intimacy of a sort that few people probably ever experience, I think. I don't mean physically-- it frustrates me that people use "intimacy" as a synonym for sex. I mean instead that we were meaningfully close friends, whose sharing went beyond the clothes we treated as community property, and was extended to all our consciousness. We worked very hard to try to share with each other our new discoveries, perspectives, philosophies, all the time. It was very difficult on us, and immensely rewarding.
Ultimately, the trouble grew greater than the reward, unfortunately. We both grew that year to live so exclusively in the mind that we had practical trouble with responsibilities to academics and such. And, something remarkable and dangerous happened: we grew to know each other so intimately that each of us could see the truth in the other, even when we lied to ourselves. We saw in each other the defenses that protected us against ourselves, and that was dangerous. And we were all about truth, and seeing reality for what it is, so we challenged each other when we saw these inconsistencies. Those internal things against which our natural defenses protected us were suddenly brought out, and reflected from outside. I challenged Tom regarding his relationship with his father; he'd always been unable to really address that conflict, and had buried it. How could Tom ever match his father's intellect, or writing, or success? He could not, of course-- not at 20, at least, and it would have torn him to pieces if he hadn't built a defense of denial around the problem. It was disastrous of me to push at those walls, and challenge him where his wounds were already to deep for him to address internally, let alone from outside scrutiny and attack.
But even worse for us was the truth he could see inside me that I could not address. We loved one another, and shared that deep appreciation. But I was also in love with Tom. IN LOVE with him... obsessively, painfully, and beyond hope for reciprocation. It was tragic from every perspective, absolutely. The feeling could not be reciprocated from outside; but it also could not be accepted, or even acknowledged, from within. In defense of his sanity, Tom moved one day without notice; I came home to find the place barren, and I was lost. It wasn't just about Tom-- the greater pain was just inside myself, and about myself. To be resuscitated later, and find myself not quite dead despite sincere effort, was the worst experience I will ever have; humiliating and miserable beyond comprehension.
I turned everything off then, for some years, and was just numb. I stopped pondering philosophy, metaphysics, the reality of the world... I just lived. It was better than pain. I even had a lot of fun a lot of the time; it just wasn't meaningful fun, except for the course I taught at Rice on Dr. Seuss after I graduated in '92. I'm something of an authority on Dr. Seuss today. :)
For four years after graduation and a short stint at underpaid university faculty life, I worked as the computer network manager for a small, progressive research group at M.D.Anderson Cancer Center, across the street from Rice. Eleven of us were on the cutting edge of integrating medical conferencing with this newfangled "internet" thing, well before a friend of mine down the street-- Chuck Shotton-- wrote what soon became the world's most popular web server, which evolved into WebStar. These were geekily exciting times, so it was okay to cruise along in emotionally-numb mode for a while, and still find life reasonably stimulating.
Over time, I grew safe and strong enough to began addressing some self-improvement issues. I'd made a bit of a list.
[Dear GOD! I've just taken a two-day break from the email, which so far has happened in just that first, 3-hour stretch; now, I'm pretty overwhelmed by the magnitude of it, but will try to wrap it up.]
I have, by the way, license plates that say "SLUGS."
SO! It was 1995, and I made a list of issues to address in my life. The were mostly simple, but broad ideas. I wanted to listen to people, instead of talking so much; be more humble; be less defensive; more sensitive; wanted to be more relaxed all of the time. I picked one issue at a time, and worked on it until I felt as if I'd made some good progress, and then added another.
I was amazed by how easy it was to successfully change. What was difficult was not the change, but the commitment to change. That amazed me; I'd really believed that behaving differently would be very challenging, and that wasn't the case, once I'd CHOSEN to behave differently.
For instance, there were always small conflicts at work. That's probably normal. But, I was always very defensive, and never easy-going, or willing (able, I thought?) to listen and really consider criticism appropriately. Well, it's not really difficult to DO that-- what's hard is to DECIDE YOU'RE GOING TO. It's too easy to feel like, "I'm RIGHT, so I shouldn't have to put up with this." Or, "I'm WORTH something, my perspective is valuable, so I'm going to fight for my perspective." Driving is a great example. I decided that I was going to be kind to other drivers, even when they were wrong, or stupid, or even mean. REALLY DIFFICULT COMMITMENT. In the instance that a guy cuts you off, it's almost compellingly tempting to grip the wheel tightly, flip the guy off, race around him to show him who's boss... you've been there. But, I discovered that if I just decided not to do that-- difficult decision, but if I mananged THAT-- then I could let it go, break, and wave with a smile, as if to say, "Sure, come on in," instead of, "ASSHOLE CUT ME OFF FUCKING *MORON* GO BACK TO NEW YORK!" Heh heh...
Well, at the end of only several months, I'd made real progress on all of the issues I'd dentified. It was pretty amazing, really. I think it was possibly in part because I was still sort of emotionally numb. Life was fairly flat. Not bad, just not... not much of anything. I wasn't going to settle for that, though, so I decided to make some changes, and prepare myself for moving onward to better things. Hence the list, and the success, I think. I basically made myself a better person in half a year... because I decided to. And that was just about all there was to it.
Bolstered by the confidence that came with that success, and the cheerful faces of delighted friends and family who noticed the change, I was finally ready to address the last, lingering thing on that list. I hadn't really enumerated it or spelled it out for myself even then, because it was repressed, of course-- a clinically psychotic repression, I'm certain.
But, of course, I was a Big Gay Homosexual, to quote the kids on Southpark. "Whoa! Your dog's a big gay homosexual!" "Is not!" Heh heh... is, too!
*sigh* I joke about it now, and it's actually sort of disappointing, in a way, to have lost most of the passion now for the original story, and the whole coming-out experience. It was really hard, and I could write an email this length about just that year, and just the coming-out experience. I'll try to give you just the Cliff's Notes version:
I honestly didn't figure it out and put a name on it until I was 25. Tom understood it when I was a senior at Rice, and somehow at that point I KNEW, but I managed for the first time to actively repress it. Before then, I didn't even understand.
And even then, I didn't quite get it that I was gay, and that gay people are really just people who are... gay. Honestly, even at 20 years old, I was an absolute victim of stereotyping, and felt like gay people were all limp-wristed, moustache-bearing, middle-aged, effeminate hairdressers. Whereas now I know they're also flight attendants. *grin!* But sincerely, I had never identified myself that "those people," so it honestly never even OCCURED to me, I think, that I might be GAY. I was aware, even in high school, that I was a lot more turned on by guys than girls, but then I thought I just hadn't grown into a mature attraction for women yet... and later, I just thought there was something wrong with my sexual orientation. Never connected that with being gay, somehow.
And when it finally dawned on my that, in fact, I was pretty EXCLUSIVELY attracted to guys--sexually, romantically, in fantasy, you name it-- I was horrified. I didn't want to be associated with those GAY people; I don't cross-dress, hair-dress, call my friends "girl." I really thought that I must be unique. I wasn't gay, I was just a NORMAL guy who was, incidentally, sexually attracted to guys.
The birth of widespread email and internet access had a lot to do with my coming out, and coming to understanding. Before I came out to any friends, when I was finally ready to begin addressing the issue for mySELF, I did some reading, and found a usenet discussion group. There, I befriended a like-minded Canadian graduated student, Anthony, who was in just about exactly the same position. Plus, he was smart, funny, and we just hit it off very well. He's a wonderful friend to me today, half a decade later-- Dr. Majanlahti, now living in Rome.
After some months' sharing with Ant, and reading about others or catching a book at the library for some background and such, I felt ready to tell a friend in Houston. I was terrified, and I think John thought I was going to tell him I'd killed someone or something. I sincerely expected him to be horrified, or to think I was in love with him (which was not the case), or that he'd just feel betrayed or something. Instead, he was pretty excited about this new awakening for me, and injected a lot of humor in the whole experience, even the evening I told him. "Well, HELL! We've got to get you the right PORN for the first time in your life, for crying out loud!" *grin!* A blessing I know I can never fully repay.
Hmm; I've gotten slightly out of chronological order, I think. Before telling my friend (housemate, actually, a med student) in Houston, I had written a terrified, extremely emotional email to my best non-Tom friend from Rice, Kevin Hoke, who had recently moved to Caltech for his Ph.D. in chemistry (he's been working on it for seven years, and likes it to much to actually finish). I wrote Kevin twelve pages of email, and it was gut-wrenching; full of apology, terror, pleading for understanding-- it was awful. Kevin, who is something of an emotionless Vulcan, was a little put off by the extremity of my terror and emotional need, but was reliably stable in his logic, balance, and friendship. He said it didn't matter, of course, that our friendship was really about other things. He reprimanded me, though, for the really challenging email, and recommended that I calm down, and not make it such an ordeal for the next victim I'd tell.
That was my brother, Scott, to whom I sent merely THREE pages of gut-wrenching, horrible, terrified, tearful and apologetic email. But, that was still something of an improvement.
At this point, Scott was in school at Evergreen State in Olympia, Washington; more like a sort of hippie camp than a college, but it fit Scott very well. I think he majored in Weed & Love. Scott's reply was pretty simple, and I remember it almost verbatim. He wrote, "Yeah, kinda figures. ...Hey, my Macintosh came in today!"
When I explained that it was, in fact, a big deal to me-- he'd gone on to say that all of his friends were gay or at least pot farmers-- he was very supportive and understanding, and was a tremendous help to me.
Then, I told John in Houston, and finally felt a lot more comfortable.
After a few months, though, very little practical good seemed to have come from those coming-out experiences, except for the marked improvement in my appreciation for porn. It dawned on my slowly that, Hmm, maybe I need to meet other GAY people.
Again, this was a surprising revelation for me, and I had to work to accept the idea. For the first half year of my dealing with my own homosexuality, it hadn't really occurred to me yet that I might one day be HAPPY with another GUY. I'd basically thought of it as a process of just admitting a terrible problem or shortcoming-- a tragic truth to accept, that I would NEVER love Renee James or any other woman the way I'd always wanted to. Suddenly, this new idea was pretty overwhelming: whoa. I might actually enjoy the company of another guy. Dear god! I could have a BOYFRIEND!
It was still, sincerely, a fairly yucky idea to me. I knew I couldn't have a GAY boyfriend-- but maybe, MAYBE there was someone else out there like ME, or like Anthony, and I could spend a lot of time with him, and we'd really like that. Hmm. Revolutionary, this thought.
So, eventually, I called the one friend of mine whom I was fairly certain might be gay, since I'd been over to his house every Saturday for a year to watch Twin Peaks and Star Trek:TNG with all his half-naked, effeminate friends, who were all male and used to tickle each other on the couch a lot. Don was, in fact, a Big Gay Homosexual. Whoa! I was right.
Don introduced me to a group of friends who share dinner on Thursday and Sunday nights. The group is really just a group of friends, who've been introduced through other friends in the group... it's mostly gay, but not entirely; mostly Rice grads or their spouses or exes, but not entirely. All good people. It seemed a good place to perhaps meet some good people who might also happen to be gay.
Um, THAT worked! At my second dinner, I made eye contact with a handsome young lad who was drawn to me when I stepped through the door. Well, I'm sure this had happened before, but I'd have freaked out and then forgotten it, of course. THIS time, in this new context, I was still scared utterly shitless, but for the first time, I allowed myself to look back, and noticed that I felt amazingly, stunningly good to be so flattered. ...Plus, hey: this guy was pretty cute himself. And we had mutual friends, and he came with good references, and was at UH, and he listens to great music, and for the first time in my entire life, I not only looked DELIBERATELY at another, handsome guy, but I actually ENJOYED it. I did still feel a bit guilty, I was certainly very afraid, but I was really wrapped up in the EXCITEMENT of it, which was new and compelling.
It was SO new and compelling that I didn't know how to interpret it, of course, and didn't do a very good job. Marcus is friendly, handsome, kind... and utterly boring, and not very bright. But I'd never been the willing object of someone's flattery like this before, and was also overwhelmed that the attention should come from a truly cute fellow, so I was just completely lost in it all. We spent every waking moment together for a week, and I was giddy with the excitement of it. Eventually, of course, we ripped each others' clothes off and I had my first, limited sexual experience with another person (I'd certainly been practicing a lot on my own, of course), and then didn't hear from him again for four days. It was the world's most absolutely classic, textbook sort of case, except that Marcus wasn't a jerk, he was just really, really simple. He hadn't been after getting into my pants, but once that happened, the mystery was mostly over, and suddenly I felt really, really dumb. I didn't punish myself for it; I allowed myself some credit for having had no experience before, and was understandably naive. But, I made a point of learning from the experience.
I was blessed to meet Ryan Wyatt at dinner shortly thereafter, and that was really something of a miracle. There was a lot of coincidence involved in my running into him again later in the world on my way to work one morning, remembering his email address (in part because he was Ph.D. student at Rice in astronomy at the time), and getting in touch with him again, but it worked out in our favor. Ryan was the manager of the planetarium at the museum of natural science, but just a year my senior, and though he wasn't as cute as Marcus, he was reasonably handsome, and extremely stimulating intellectually. Ryan eventually became my first boyfriend, and was-- in some ways-- the best match I've every had in that capacity. It's too bad I wasn't better prepared yet for a relationship-- didn't yet understand the patience required, the compromise, the forgiveness for past mistakes... I'd never had a boyfriend before. But, we were a good match, and had a lot of fun. Friends rolled their eyes in mock dismay when we showed up together at parties, out-punning our best competition together as an unstoppable team. We won the pumpkin-carving contest together at Halloween, and there wasn't another couple among the dinner group that dared sit across a smart board game from us. *grin!* Plus, he was sweet, and I swooned in absolute delight when we finally kissed, after almost a month. He had the patience and thoughtfulness to take things at my pace, as I grew and learned.
Later, I dated a Brian, James, Greg, and another Ryan. Brian dated the first Ryan for a while. This stuff is pretty challenging, of course, but all of us have not only survived it all, but grown to be meaningful, loving friends, except for the second Ryan, with whom the relationship was too short to grow into something very meaningful. Anyway, the others are among my best friends in the world. Greg just moved into a place literally around the corner from mine, so we visit a lot... and Brian programs for my company today, on a contract basis.
I left M.D.Anderson and joined a startup consulting company. There were just two partners, and I was their first employee. Entech grew to be widely loved and praised, and within three years had 30 employees and was the best-ranked internet service provider in Houston for businesses; we were mostly a consulting firm, but offered internet service provision and connectivity for business clients-- digital only, dedicated, no dial-up. It was pretty neat. Entech was sold in early '99, and in late '99 the parent company was purchased again by a national internet service provider, for the ISP clients and infrastructure. They got rid of consulting, and offered a modest severance package. The two guys for whom I'd begun working three years earlier made about seven million dollars. Each.
I started a new firm with a tremendously neat business partner, Michael, and today we have a consulting/support company, Techzentric. We're only a few months old, don't have a web site yet (though we take web design projects for our consulting/support clients), and have only a little more work than Michael and I can do ourselves, but we're growing. We contract the overflow work out right now. Most of my clients from the past few years have followed me, and love the new company, which is focused on people, rather than technology. I don't care at all about computers-- I care about people, and Michael's philosophy is the same. Techzentric does a lot of community service, and offers support for non-profit healthcare organizations; AIDS Foundation Houston is one of our largest clients, and we offer them inexpensive support for which we don't really make much money. ...But that's okay, because we bill corporate clients $115/hr, and keep getting referred to their friends and other companies for more work.
At about the same time I began my coming-out process, I was also a pretty avid cyclist. I was bicycling about 20 miles each day, and 30 miles a day on weekends. I was in the best shape of my life... and hey, I had a great ass. *grin!* It was pretty cool. But, my right leg was a problem. The knee didn't work very well, and was uncomfortable. Worse, I had a leg length discrepancy of about two and a half inches, which is pretty morbid.
I talked with orthopedists, did a lot of reading, and eventually began an Ilizarov reconstruction of my right femur. This is one of those awful deals with the external frame, pins through the limb, little twisty things to turn each day to stretch and direct new bone growth... you've seen this on TV, or if you watched Gattica last year (mmmm, Ethan Hawk; yum). That meant several more procedures, on top of the seven I'd already endured. I had lots of complications, and even broke a few of the pins-- once in dramatic fashion-- and ended up having a total of 19 operations, ten of them in the last six years. But finally, I have legs of equal length. I've been off my bike almost ever since, but am looking forward again to riding this summer, albeit with less enthusiasm than I had years ago. I'll just be riding for fun and health this year.
Right after that first procedure, to fracture the femur and install the Ilizarov frame, I was really tortured for several weeks. I could not sleep at all, was in constant pain, couldn't take a bath (shower was okay, but awkward, and required an hour-long disinfection process afterwards, to purge all my 30 open wounds at each pin site).
One particularly awful night, about three days after returning to work a week after the procedure, I got literally no sleep at all. I couldn't lie down, so I spent the night in a chair or on my couch, though the transition between them was painful. Never fell asleep, and as the sky began to fill with color before dawn, signaling my last hour before having to prepare for a full day of work at the hospital on zero sleep, I just cried in dismay. I was furious, with myself, the hospital, the world, and I didn't know how I would get through it. I felt horrible, and helpless.
Well, I sent my brother an email that morning, and he surprised me by returning a story-- the first time he'd EVER shared a story with me. He wrote about the guy from whom Scott bought his homebrew supplies-- a Vietnam War vet, who'd sustained a spinal injury in combat. Apparently, the guy had nerve damage, and felt phantom pain that couldn't be medically addressed very well-- there was no REAL damage to the legs that seemed full of pain, and medication was either ineffective, or not endurable in itself; you cannot go about life on narcotics all the time. So, the guy eventually exhausted western medicine's options, and began searching the world for any other solution, in his pain and desperation.
He visited shamanic healers, acupuncture centers in the east, Caribbean witchcraft freaks, and nothing worked for him. Eventually, he happened across a Buddhist monk, who listened to his story and said something like, "You have probably looked into this condition more thoroughly than anyone else alive; perhaps there is no cure for your pain. But, you might be able to learn to separate your suffering from that pain." ...Amazed, the guy chose to stay with the monk and learn; it was the first time anyone had suggested something completely new, this idea that what he really wanted was to escape his suffering, rather than the pain causing it.
Well, I, too, was intrigued by the story-- Scott reports that the homebrew guy says he still has the pain, but is "at peace with it" today, and very happy. I was interested in learning to disassociate my own pain and suffering, of course, but I was a lot more intrigued simply by this profound difference of perspective, and simple wisdom. So, I began looking for a teacher from whom I might learn more about the world like this.
I eventually found a very liberal, Chinese Buddhist temple on the west side of town, with a young monk, Venerable Hung-I (sounds like hung-YEE), who talks in English every other week to a small discussion group. I still go and listen to him, and feel like a learn a lot from this beautiful person. You know that image we have of the beautiful, impossibly wise guru or monk living on a mountain somewhere, who smiles with his simple understanding of the world and offers advice that is so simple, we are in awe of the wisdom, the person, the world...? Hung-I is just like that. He's just a simple, beautiful person, and I'm blessed to know him.
Last year was a particularly rich, exciting year for me. At the start of 1999, I flew to Baltimore to help drive Renee back to Houston with a van full of her things, her two cats, and her year-old son, Sean. Renee's second husband, the father of her only child, had grown physically abusive, which just... my feelings about it are overwhelming.
After we got to Rice together, Renee and I stopped dating, and by our second semester were no longer really in touch at all. We made a point of getting a meal together in the spring to talk and sort of say good-bye, and I'm glad we did that. Afterwards, there was literally no communication between us for seven years.
When we found each other again, living in different cities, we had a lot of catching up to do, but something amazing happened. We felt at ease with one another right away. Renee and I really had been wonderful friends in high school, and knew one another well. We're very much alike. And after several years apart, we had learned a lot, and were able to resume our friendship, but atop a new foundation of trust, and understanding... understanding, this time, of ourselves.
So, when things didn't go well with her second husband-- yeah, it's amazing that she's been married TWICE now, and has a son, Sean-- it was wonderful how much we could trust and love one another, and talk. When Chris grew violent, flew up there and we just got the heck out. It was a beautiful, wintery journey across the country, and I was delighted that we were together. And even happier to have her back to Houston.
Bellaire BEGGED Renee to take Dr. Beam's job, and days later, she became the new IB Physics teacher at Bellaire.
John E. Beam, by the way, is still mostly as you'd remember him, though it's kind of fun that he now regards us as friends, rather than students, and it's interesting to see him offer political opinions and such that he would once not have shared with us-- school politics, teacher rumors, job frustration, things like that. He's retired now, of course, but he and I were in touch before his retirement.
Renee's students so loved her that they invited her to their prom. Renee was overwhelmed at the invitation, and after some thought, told her students that she would go, if her former boyfriend would take her again to the Bellaire prom.
I don't know that you can imagine how that opportunity filled my heart. I'd wrecked prom for us, in 1987-- I did everything wrong. I didn't open doors for her; I didn't rent a car; Mom's crappy, Chevy Citation literally BROKE that night on my way to get Renee, so we were late. And, of course, her date turned out to be GAY, so that's got to kind of suck. But mostly, we didn't have fun because we were dumb, and naive. Like all kids going to prom. There was nothing "real" about that night, about our clothes, our food, the environment... we were playing roles we didn't understand, and somehow excepted under those circumstances to have the most meaningful night of our lives. How foolish, and probably normal.
I was delighted-- beyond that, I was... OVERWHELMED, with appreciation and excitement and gratitude, to have a chance to make it all up to Renee, to go and have a GOOD time at prom, and to know what it's really all about: celebrating one another.
We were picked up this time in a 1928 Oakland Essex; an absolutely amazing find, pulled off almost miraculously just two days before the event. I simply lucked into finding the limo, and was spectacularly fortunate that it was available that evening. I plunked down a bit less than half a grand for the privilege.
Renee looked smashing-- simple, elegant-- in her straight, sleeveless, black velvet dress. A refreshing change from the horrible, poofy fairy-tale dress she and all the girls wore in 1987. She looked, that Friday, like a lady. The wrist corsage (spelling?! Dear God, I've no idea) I selected with the florist-- simply two, deep plum orchids, and nothing else, bound with a strip of black velvet-- complimented her perfectly.
Renee was absolutely delighted when I arrived in the classic limo, and I could not have been more full of pride and joy upon seeing her. Driver Charles helped us into the car, and as he took his own seat in the front, I turned on the CD player. Renee lit up as Steve Winwood's "Higher Love" filled the classic car, and we positively beamed with delight. All the tunes we enjoyed in 1987, while driving about town in Renee's mother's futuristically cool Ford Taurus, filled the limo again as we drove first to dinner, and later to prom, and finally back to my new home. Renee particularly loved Paul Simon's "You Can Call Me Al." The Joshua Tree delighted us equally.
Dinner could not have been more fun. We returned to Hunan, in the Saks Center, where we'd eaten twelve years earlier. This time, of course, we were not intimidated, and instead laughed and really enjoyed the realization that our wait staff was more intimidated than WE were-- a far cry from our experience the first time. We asked them to do something they couldn't deal with, and Renee and I just laughed at the absurdity of it all. Per Renee's brilliant suggestion, I requested that the kitchen simply fill our table with food all night, in tremendous variety and small servings, to give us a broad sampling of appetizers, soups, snacks, salads, entrees, and sweets, some of them vegetarian, please. The Host visited us to clarify our request for the confused waiters who'd tried to understand which specific items we wanted to order. And, the Host wasn't any more clear than they were, finally insisting a little anxiously that we just order whatever we wanted, please. *shrug!* Well, we laughed and said fine, just bring us a #43 and a #29, please. That worked. And, we didn't enjoy the experience any less. Perhaps because we shared a cocktail. And a bottle of wine. (Vichon, 1996-- we really liked it.) And, two coffee drinks. None of which we finished, of course, and we managed to leave with the most absolutely perfect buzz. It could not have been more perfect. Such is the nature of perfection.
Little Sean met us at prom in his own, tiny suit, and was the hit of the event, of course. Renee, Sean and I should have new prom pictures now; I think we were the only couple with a baby. We endured prom just long enough to take pictures, dance inappropriately to some really bad rap, and make a show of getting in and out of our swank ride. Even our driver, who looked as if he'd already spent a lifetime chauffeuring Ms. Daisy, was a charming spectacle. Other limos' windows came down as their occupants leaned out to inspect our own, and Renee and I were reduced to laughter and tears when one prom-goer was overheard berating her date for failing to "get one a'them for HER!"
On the ride back to my place, I did finally give Renee that kiss I'd been swooning over, and she said almost tearfully that it might be a fine thing to have a gay boyfriend. We returned to my place, rented "Empire of the Sun," and watched it together from my couch, touching warmly and sharing junk food until three in the morning. It was, in almost every way, as perfect an evening as a person might dream. I wish I could adequately convey the night's initmacy and emotion. ... I am still in awe of it.
In March last year, I went to Costa Rica with my father for some meaningful time together and great adventure. Rather than visiting the beautiful Pacific coast beaches and tourist attractions at the live volcanos and such, we spent our time in the jungle and rain forest, mostly on foot with a grizzled old guide who hacked a path for us with his machete. We saw tiny, deadly, poisonous red tree frogs, deadly, poisonous snakes, fungus-covered sloths, iguanas, cayman, toucans, three kinds of monkeys, gorgeously tanned Costa Rican 18-year-old guys who looked good enough to lick, and those lizards that run across the water. But mostly, it was some time for father and son to share, in a way we never had before.
We returned feeling refreshed, and more alive than before. I think we often tend to think of vacations as an escape, and then feel worse than before we left upon returning to work, concrete, and routine. I returned feeling not just refreshed, but excited to be alive, and part of a living world. I pay more attention now to all the living things around me, and our living Earth. I appreciate my Dad a little more, and the time we have together, and it reminds me to appreciate ALL the people around me, and those who are somewhere else, or gone away.
In August, Scott and I bought the most tremendously neat, crazy, absurd and wonderful gift for everyone's birthday-- Mom, Dad, Granny, and Scott's fiance Jenny have birthdays within a ten-day period in August. Scott and Jenny drove in from San Antonio, Mom, Dad and I arrived from Houston, and everyone converged on Granny's house in Austin for the birthday gift announcement. We'd worked up a lot of mystique and excitement about the whole thing, but the others were still caught off-guard and a little overwhelmed when they opened an envelope to find... reservations to jump out of an airplane 23 hours later.
Mom, Jenny and Granny declined, but my former boyfriend Brian drove in from Houston the next morning to meet us, and he, Scott, Dad and I went skydiving from San Marcus.
It was stunning. I could not believe I was sitting on the edge of an open door on a tiny airplane (which needed paint) at 11,000 feet over patches of fields, and suddenly was hurled out, spun over and over, and found myself freezing in 120mph rushing air as I PLUMMETED toward the ground with a stranger strapped to my back. I was SO fucking SCARED! My freaky jumpmaster spun us one way and then the other, zigged and zagged after the 'chute opened, made us DIVE to catch up with the pair who'd jumped BEFORE us, and then-- amazingly-- somehow landed us in a 20-foot circle, such that we raced toward the gravel, and then... hung, and stepped to the ground, like walking off a yacht. I turned around to watch Brian Welch land right behind us. My father jumped out of an airplane on his 61st birthday.
It blew me away.
*sigh* Amazingly, that's going to end my story of the past 13 years. Life has been incredibly rich and wonderful, and it's great to get to share with you at least these thoughts and memories.
It's neat to hear that you're doing exciting things, too, particularly singing. You probably remember that I'd once sung with the Houston Boychoir, when it was still Singing Boys of Houston. I miss my voice terribly, and the loss used to be horribly painful for me. I can remember a time in high school when I went to bed having that "three wishes" fantasy... I think everyone must do that some time; imagine how you would spend three wishes? Like the Lottery Fantasy, I think. :) Anyway, I could only come up with two. I wished I could fall in love with Renee, and want her sexually; and I wished I could sing again. I remember heaving with tears running silently off my cheeks that night, as I cried and cried.
Today, these memories all make me smile... not because they weren't painful times, but because I am so amazingly in love with life today, and happy, and these things just remind me of all that I have, and how rich our experiences are.
Peace,
warmly,
wynn
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