Red Room Where the Writers Are

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It was Sunday afternoon, and I was standing in line at Flowercraft at the corner of Courtland and Bayshore waiting to have my ticket written up by Hernan. I had three flats of the perennials that I replace at this time each year. Suddenly my TREO rang, and I apologized to Hernan. It was my cousin Ginger calling from Royal Oak, Michigan. Although she is a distant third cousin, she is exactly a month older than me, and we have shared many common family and cultural experiences. Royal Oak is the hometown of Eagles frontman Glenn Frey, Tom Hayden and Dr. Jack Kvorkian. It has potted plants hanging on its main thoroughfare during the warmer months and the largest number of sushi and Basque restaurants in the upper Midwest.

“Hey Biggs-boy, what’s up?” I always hate it when Ginger opens with this greeting.

“John Hagee is punishing San Francisco for pushing forward gay marriage,” I said. “It’s hotter than hell here. Everything and everyone stinks. There are tiny wisps of fog above Bernal Hill taunting me but refusing to come to the Mission. I’m in hell.”

“You’re so funny,” she said with that dismissive air that she’s always used to let me know that she has a full month of more life experience than I. “Hey, do you still go to that old fag’s writing group?”

“Sometimes,” I offered warily, smiling and swooning slightly as Hernan handed me my yellow ticket to take the register as he said, “Here you go, boss.”

“What do you mean, sometimes,” Ginger demanded, as I pictured her annoyingly twisting a lock of her hair the color of an Irish setter that is now cropped medium length with a mild left hung swirl, but I could remember it having once draped all the way to the bottom of her spine. That would have been in 1971 when she was the top pot dealer north of 8-Mile Road. The following year she was an alto in Up with People and block leader for Youth for Nixon.

“I mean precisely that, sometimes I go but not lately because it’s been so frigging hot in San Francisco that it’s too miserable to walk. Anyway, I rarely write anything these days and when I do, it’s garbage.”

“See, there you go,” she said.

“Don’t question me!” I shouted, loitering in the shade of the Japanese maples since I refused to be one of those people who talk in line on cell phones and already angered that Ginger was making me one of those people that talk on cell phones in public.

 “Well what do you write about?” she asked.

“Singular you or plural you?” I countered.

“Both”

“It can’t be both,” I said. “The plural you includes all of the second person pronouns.”

 “What do you old fags do in that class? Diagram sentences? Okay, what do they write about?”

“The gamut – prose, poetry, plays…memoirs.”

“Oh, that sounds horrible!” Ginger screamed in my ear. “And what do you – singular – write about?”

“I don’t remember. I usually throw it away and forget what I wrote the next day.”

“Well I certainly hope you don’t write about me like you did on that blog of yours a while back. You do remember that I’m married to an attorney.”

“For now,” I said, waiting for a response that did not come.. “Ginger, I promise that your life is not that interesting. Did you call for a reason or to talk about my old fag’s writing group?”

She cleared her throat, as if she were her husband making a closing argument. “You know, Biggs-boy, I’ve always respected your skills as an editor, and I was wondering if I could ask you to read something that, you know, I’ve written.”

I looked at a reclining Buddha with a hand scrawled $350 price tag affixed to its toe and tried to focus on the calmness this garden totem should be bringing me. “Dare I ask what you’ve written?” I ventured.

“A memoir,” she said wistfully. “I’m toying with the title A Man Called Hoss.”

“Oh, don’t tell me you’re still harboring that deluded fantasy,” I groaned.

For more than 35 years now, Ginger had perpetuated the myth that at age 14 she had been involved in a six-month affair with Dan Blocker, star of Bonanza and unlikely anti-war activist. The big man from Dekalb, Texas, had figured heavily in my earliest childhood memories, and I often said that I learned how to be gay by watching Bonanza since it was the first time I had been exposed to so many men in tight jeans and in living color on NBC. How fitting that the show was preceded by that strutting peacock with his tail of phallic, erect paintbrushes reaching for the heavens.

“Don’t spoil my memory of poor Dan Blocker with such a ridiculous tome,” I pleaded.

“But I have a story to share,” she said. “The world needs to know what he did to stop the war, to campaign for Eugene McCarthy and later McGovern…You know I was so unaware of the injustices in the world until Dan opened my eyes.”

I could hear my mother’s voice in my head as she warned about the similar fables Ginger’s mother, Aunt Louise, manufactured to heighten her legend. It was true that in 1969, Louise left her husband Larry and took Ginger and her brother Little Larry, who by then was going by L.J., and moved to Los Angeles. But by 1971 – the year Dan Blocker moved to London to protest the U.S. involvement in Vietnam – they were back in Royal Oak, and Larry was on the lead team that retooled the AMC Pacer.

During their time in L.A., Louise worked at the cosmetics counter of Bullock’s Wilshire where she may have, in fact, encountered a handful of celebrities. But many of her stories were highly dubious. For years she contended that she did personal beauty consulting for Marie Callendar whom she claimed drove up from Long Beach twice a week to have her rouge and foundation adjusted. Years later, my cousin Sheldon was on a flight from Houston to Des Moines and sat next to Don Callendar, the founder of the chain named in honor of his mother. Sheldon was thrilled to share our mutual family connections and was devastated to learn that it was just a fiction created out of a greedy need for manufactured celebrity on Louise’s part. Don Callendar assured him that his mother did all of her own make up with products she procured at The Broadway.

Years later during spring break from college when Ginger and I were enraptured by the Sex Pistols “Never Mind the Bollocks” album, Louise was sure that this raucous and raw new sound was an assault on her former employer. We never corrected her, and years later when the store was attacked during the South Central riots, she was sure that it was the work of an African American gang called the Sex Pistols.

Now Ginger was perpetuating her mother’s tradition of fuzzy facts.

“So you can verify all of the incidents in this book?” I asked.

“Of course I can,” Ginger said. “But…well, I mean it was strictly hush, hush since Dan was married at the time. We did have dinner at Lorne Greene’s house once, but…he’s dead. You know Lorne Greene was a big old fag. I wonder if I should put that in there?”

“He was not, Ginger!” I blasted. Hernan walked by me, casting a knowing glance and then wrote up an order of succulents for a woman with a tattoo of Olive Oyl on her left shoulder and a sundress with a repetitive design of apricot begonias.

Lorne Greene being gay would be a nice rumor, since as kids we always said that Ben Cartwright was secretly married to Hop Sing. I could only imagine how my cousin Jeb would react to this. Jeb is my first cousin, and five years younger than Ginger and me. The three of us used to watch Bonanza stretched out on huge pillows in the basement of Larry and Louise’s Tudor-French Provencial tri-level ranch house surrounded by junipers and azaleas I wanted to be Hop Sing since he cooked and wore silk. Ginger wanted to be ravished by Little Joe, and Jeb – to the horror of his status-obsessed mother with her prim posture and faux Boston Brahman accent – wanted to be Hoss. Ginger and I would push Jeb around in his baby carriage with a cowboy hat made out of Play Dough and called him Little Hoss. Once, when he was running around barefoot, to our amazement we discovered that he had webbed toes. We came up with the idea of starting a hillbilly circus we called the Bonanza Bigtop. I wore Jethro Jeans, Ginger wore short shorts and called her cat Pussy Permew a critter a la Ellie Mae, and we charged kids a nickel to see our freak show – Baby Hoss the Web-Toed Wonder.

Just as we pulled off his socks, all the kids would let loose a collective wheezing gasp, and then Jeb, in his high-pitched twangy ranch-lingo would say, “Aw, pa, looks like thar’s a big ol’ storm a comin’ on. Better get them horses in da barn!” After that, some of the kids would get pissed because we only had one act in our freak show and demand their nickels back, but most were amazed enough to see Baby Hoss the Web-Toed Wonder, and we had a steady enough business that summer that we were able to buy both the Cowskills album and the soundtrack to Yellow Submarine with our earnings.

        “Will you at least take a look at the manuscript?” Ginger pleaded.

        “Maybe you should come to the old fags writing group and share it the next time your in town,” I suggested.

        “Ooh, gross,” she said. “Why would I want to be in an entire room full of fags?”

        “I’ve been in the opposite situation with you more than once, Ginger. Need I remind you of Chippendale’s in Fargo in 1986?”

        I am the only person – and certainly the only male – that has been to all four of Ginger’s bachelorette parties. Even though a divorced woman really doesn’t quite qualify as a bachelorette, that didn’t stop Ginger from hiring a male stripper four times in a row to entertain her and her circle of alcoholic Junior Leaguers. We had a long standing argument about the sexual orientation of Marcus Angelatelli, the show boy who showed it all at Lulu’s Lilac Lounge on Route 47 in Grand Rapids in the fall of 1989. Ginger contended that they shared a steamy session of passion on her last night of freedom before tying the knot with Dr. Max Bornstein, a marriage that would last all of 18 months.

        Much to Ginger’s chagrin, I assured her that Marcus was that same person who used the nom de porn of Julio Grande in a series of gay pornos in the early to mid- 1990s, including Shaving Ryan’s Privates and The Boy Fuck Club. She refused to face reality, even when I mailed her copies of the videos, none of she which ever returned, by the way.

        “Well, maybe I’m not quite ready to share this manuscript, even with you,” Ginger said. “I still have to do some fact checking. And I want to make sure it’s also light hearted. You know I have a great gift for comedy.”

        Ginger does, in fact, have a great gift for comedy, especially when she doesn’t intend to. This was evidenced at the memorial service for her mother in which she closed her tribute to her Louise with a rambling fictionalized explanation that her mother’s death from chirrhosis of the liver was not caused by what was lingering in the bitter dark corner’s of everyone’s mind but from a rare genetic defect that had skipped three generations but had knocked down great-great granny Cheuvront in Cherbourg in 1887 as well.

        Even the vicar had trouble keeping a straight face as he followed Ginger at the pulpit and delivered a dreary eulogy about the magnificent legacy of Louise’s life that, fortunately, made no mention of Marie Callendar.

        “You’re a barrel of laughs, Ginger, I’m sure,” I said, anxious to make my way to the register and get home to plant my Elysium

“Well, I’ll consider sending you the manuscript, if I have time,” she said grandly. “But, whatever you do, don’t write anything about me for that old fag’s writing group. Remember, Martin’s the eighth leading attorney in Michigan.”

“Scout’s honor,” I said. “Besides, I only write fiction. Memoirs are too tedious.”

I took my yellow ticket to the register, keyed in my PIN and took one last glance at Hernan, his sly smile shaded from the brilliant sun by an enormous straw sombrero. Thoughts of asking him to help me fertilize the soil, plant perennials and get our hands deep into the earth raced through my head as our eyes met for one last time, and I wished he would call me “boss” again as I walked towards the gate. But there’s always next weekend and plenty of six packs of pansies and sprawling ferns waiting in the shade for that next visit.