Sirenita Lake's Open Salon Blog

Buying a Condom, Old School

Mon, 9 Nov 2009 13:11:36 -0500

How I came to be buying a condom in a Hilton hotel across the street from LAX is a meandering tale of impulsive decisions and their consequences, tragic or comic. In the late 70s, I graduated from college with a degree in linguistics. I had no particular plans for being any kind of linguist, but chose linguistics instead of English on the vague assumption that somehow there were more jobs available to someone with a linguistics degree. Not knowing a thing about the discipline other than the name, I was completely surprised by the course content, which was much more technical and scientific than anything I associated with the study of language. But then, that was probably more practical, wasn’t it? So I decided, all right then, I’ll learn to slice and dice language 18 different ways.

I studied phonetics, morphology, theories of grammar and deep structure, and historical and social linguistics. We studied language acquisition using examples of feral and abused children. We learned to reconstruct dead languages and rescue dying languages from oblivion. We studied the use of metaphor and ellipsis and how that revealed power relationships, and the text we used was the Watergate tapes. I learned to program the department computer, a dinosaur about the size of a small refrigerator with a row of switches you could flip to ones and zeros, in case you didn’t feel like using the teletype. A graduate student and I wrote a program to sample and add together sound waves. I mapped verb forms of a dying Northwest Indian language based on a dictionary compiled in the 19th century by a missionary. I was a pretty smart undergraduate.

I finished college and moved out of my Berkeley apartment and back to my mom’s house in San Francisco. I was done with Berkeley. It’s a great place, but there is something in me that needs the urban diversity of San Francisco more than the youthful energy of Berkeley. I was tired of the young and brilliant.

Mom’s tended to be an easygoing household. My friends and I would sit around with my mom and sip wine on the weekends. I didn’t mind going home for a while. I needed to take stock. I had no idea what you did after graduating from college. I knew by then that I didn’t want to be in linguistics. I was meant to go to graduate school, but in what? I figured I would take 6 months or a year to think about it. When it came to my future, I foundered, not because I had no talents or interests—I had enough of those to confuse the hell out of me—but because I still had no idea how life was done.

One evening four days after my last final, after everyone had gone to bed, I walked to a local bar for cigarettes. Once there, I decided to have a beer. The bar being refreshingly not a Berkeley student bar. I got to talking with a boy around my age, drinking slow. The bar did not stay open late on weeknights, so we grabbed a few beers and went and drank them at the beach, sitting on some rocks on the spit of land that makes up one side of the Golden Gate, around the corner from the bridge.

I’ve wondered many time since then how defective my judgment was that night. I tend to trust people and I was feeling pretty confident that night. The guy was a perfect gentleman and not an academic, activist, poet or any of the intellectual cream I was used to associating with. Still drinking slowly, we watched the waves for an hour. Then, around two in the morning, I said I had to go home. He graciously helped me down the rocks and we walked to the car.

We now know from studies that you can be impaired without appearing drunk. In those days and in the context of college drinking, we were not drunk. We could walk straight, see, speak without slurring and in general, maintain. I had no hesitation about getting in a car with that boy because he was not, as we judged it then, drunk. If that wasn’t risky enough, we never wore seat belts. Back in those days, most cars didn’t have shoulder belts. You had a choice. Wear your lap belt and hit the dash in an accident, or don’t wear it and hit the windshield. Mostly, we didn’t bother.

We drove through the Presidio, the stunningly scenic military base in San Francisco, toward my house. We went the wrong way, probably due to my directions. Was he looking for a street sign? For whatever reason, he drove through a stop sign. A cop saw him and turned on his light. This guy, the perfect gentleman who had not even made a pass at me though we sat alone on the beach drinking for an hour, decided to run from the cop. I have an elusive memory of great fear. I love speed, but not through the unpredictable streets of San Francisco. I did not want to scream or argue, because I was afraid that would cause us to crash. I remember saying hopefully, “I think you lost him,” and the guy answering, “No, there he is.” That’s the last thing I remember.

I came to in a hospital bed. I was aware of intense, existence-defining pain before I was fully awake. The pain was the reality around which everything else—the bed, the room, the nurses—was organized. My brain was not working right. I don’t remember at what point I knew I had been in an accident, of my skull fractures, the black eye, but I do remember being asked my name and who the president was. I was annoyed to have to keep repeating this information. I also remember being told that I could not have any pain pills, because the doctor wouldn’t know if I was groggy from medication or brain damage. I could not eat because it hurt to chew.

After three days, I was sent home. Whatever could have happened to my brain didn’t happen and there was nothing more the doctors could do. My right eye was black halfway down my cheek. My hair was shaved back into a peninsula on the right, a receding hairline framing the stitches that ran from my eyebrow to my scalp. I looked like the bride of Frankenstein.

A week or so after I got home, I remembered with something like wonder that I had finished college. I remembered that I had a degree in linguistics. But I was back to square one—I didn’t know what linguistics was. It was erased. That depressed me. I could not read, because I could not remember the beginning of a sentence by the time I reached the end. It would be several months before I remembered what I had been doing before I got hurt. Folks at my volunteer job wondered where I had gone, I had vanished so completely from the Berkeley scene. It took a year for the headaches to stop completely, and I was prone to fatigue. Graduate school, even as a concept, was off the table.

I needed to do something with myself, but I had no clue what. Six months or so after the accident, my mom needed a set of tires. I went with her to the nearest tire store, a Firestone. We bought her tires. I was still in that passive, post-trauma state where I let people make decisions for me. The Firestone store had a sign in the window: they were looking for a part-time clerk. As she paid for the tires, my mother suggested me. The manager was agreeable. I went to work for Firestone.

At first, I did paperwork for a few hours a week. I got along well with the manager and the mechanics. I was smart. The manager, Bill, asked me if I wanted to sell tires. I said, sure. He was an extravert and a natural mentor, and seemed immune to the sexism that you would expect in the all-male automotive business back then. After a while, I became a full-time sales person. I was pretty good, and selling tires is not rocket science. In time, I became a passable service writer as well. There was something very grown up about having a working class job selling tires and tune-ups. Instead of writing papers, working on the Chicano literary newsletter and protesting in Sproul Hall, I measured tire tread, drove around town in a 3/4 ton pickup with a broken air compressor in the back, and gave orders to mechanics.

My old college radical friends, when I ran into them, were not impressed with my job. The working class was all well and good, but you didn’t want to be one. Still, I liked it.

Bill then suggested taking the next step, becoming the store assistant manager. The store opened at 7:00 a.m. and closed at 6:00 p.m. and he’d been running it by himself for a while. I was reliable; I needed to start sharing the opening and closing responsibilities. If I became the assistant manager, Bill could take Saturday off, which would please his stunning wife, Linda, a former model. I asked Bill more than once how a grease-monkey like him managed to land a wife like Linda. Linda wanted him home more, and I was to pick up the slack.

And that is how I ended up in City of Commerce, California, for a week-long Firestone assistant manager training course for sales employees in the western states. Staying in a hotel alone for the first time in my life, on the first business trip of my life, was pretty exciting, but I was surprised to find myself a curiosity to the other assistant-manager trainees. I was no Linda, but I was the cutest—and only—girl in the training course. I found myself in conversation with the guys in the class, one after another. I would make friends with a guy only to find that he didn’t want to hang out the next day. Someone else did, though. Apparently, they had organized themselves to take turns, having a gentle competition to see which of them I would select.

I gravitated toward Tim, an older and socially smooth man from Arizona. I remember an afternoon by the hotel pool, flirting with all of them, and finding Tim’s body especially nice. Some time later, we kissed. By the end of the week, it was clearly me and Tim. Then the course was over and it was time to go home, me to San Francisco and Tim to Prescott. We talked about staying in touch. He asked me to spend a day or two with him in Commerce after the course, but I was reluctant. I barely knew the guy, and I have, until very recently, been skittish about committing to spend time with people.

We met the other guys for the ride to the airport and went for a drink together as planned. Tim looked good to me and I wondered if I had made a mistake not agreeing to stay. Not long after we sat down at the airport bar, the other guys vanished, one after the other, made quick excuses. I was astonished. This was my first exposure to the phenomenon of guys cooperating, rather than competing, to get one of them laid. When the last of the tire boys was gone, Tim said, “There’s a hotel across the street from the airport. We can walk there. I’ll ask you one more time—stay with me.”

Now I wanted to. But I said, “We can’t. We’ve checked our luggage. We don’t have anything.”

Tim, older and more experienced, said, “You can get whatever you need from the hotel. They a drugstore.”

I gave in. We told the airlines we would not be flying that day. Our luggage gone, we started walking to the hotel. On the way, we discussed what we needed. Just toothbrushes, some toothpaste and deodorant.

“And a condom,” I said. I felt very, very grown up. I had lived with a guy; I had finished college, where I had an affair with my professor; but I had never discussed condoms with a man before. Condoms were what you used in an emergency, when you didn’t have your diaphragm or weren’t on the Pill. Condoms were a worldly thing to do. I felt every bit of it.

We were able to get a room at the Hilton. After grabbing the key, we went directly to the drugstore off the lobby to get what we needed. I reminded Tim to ask the guy for a package of condoms. The man had to do that—ask for the condom—because in those days, they were kept behind the counter to prevent the underaged from buying them.

One of the features of travel back in those days, and until the early 90s, was the ubiquity of Japanese tour groups. A group of Japanese girls came into the drugstore as we shopped, wandering around singly and making selections. Tim and I took our toothbrushes up to the counter. The clerk was a woman. She began ringing our purchases up. Tim glanced nervously around. He was the only man in the store with a dozen women.

“Will that be all?” the clerk asked politely. I waited for Tim to speak. He froze. I stared at him. What was wrong with him? Could he really not ask a woman for a condom?

I mustered my most sophisticated, nonchalant look and said, “May we have some condoms, please?”

She raised an eyebrow. “Some what?”

“Condoms.”

“What’s that?”

Damn, this was going to be harder than I thought. Embarrassed, I said, “Um, prophylactics.”

She said, “Huh?”

Exasperated, I said, “You know, rubbers.”

“Oh, you want rubbers!” She smiled. “Which kind?”

“There are kinds?” I quickly ran out of sophistication.

“Oh, there are lots of kinds!” she said enthusiastically. She pulled up an 18 inch by 2 foot display board from behind the counter and propped it by the register. Stapled to the board were a dozen and a half packages of condoms. She pointed, “This is regular, this is large, this one is ribbed, this is lambskin, this is ultra thin, this has a receptacle tip, this is ultra-thin with a receptacle tip, these come in colors...”

Tim had backed away, as if to indicate that he was not involved in this transaction. But I had company. A half dozen Japanese girls had gathered around, as clearly there was a sex-ed lecture with visual aids going on. Some American thing. They didn’t want to miss it. There was pointing and nodding, and commentary in Japanese.

“Can I get lambskin with a receptacle tip?” I could play this.

“No, they don’t have that. They make them from...,” she frowned, thinking.

“Lambs?” I said.

Her face brightened, “They make them from lambs. This one here has the receptacle tip.”

I got my receptacle tip and paid. Outside the store, a red-faced Tim sighed comically and whispered, “My hero!” We had great sex. His shyness stopping at buying a condom from a friendly female store clerk.

(thefuddler turned me on to this funny link. Guys, check out How To Make Condoms Suck Less. )

A Week of Syphilis

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 23:10:55 -0400

A month ago, continuing my exploration of risky behavior, I hooked up with a guy from Craigslist. I refer to him affectionately as my Randy Old Goat, because he has more lovers than anyone in his 60s can be expected to keep up with. There’s the boyfriends, the other girlfriends, the wife, and now me. Randy is a sexual champ who admits it helps to be retired. He’s a smart and decent guy, who, like all guys my age or thereabouts, hates condoms, though he will use them. I’ve noticed that condoms can be an obstacle for guys in my age group, whose wood gets softer over time. The question is, which is more tedious, using condoms with all their drawbacks or performing the workaround—get an STD test, share the results with me and keep me apprised of all your contacts.

So Randy and I went to the San Francisco City Clinic, the highly effective, city-run STD clinic. I knew their reputation, and while both of us have health insurance, I wanted him tested by experts. Of course, I would have a test, too, but I had no worries. In spite of my (self-created) reputation as a wild woman, I’ve really had very few "contacts" in the last 20 years.

The clinic was orderly and comfortable. There were only a few people sitting in the clean airport waiting room chairs and one or two in the line to check in. I had not shared my fears with Randy, but I had half imagined something hellish like the waiting room at San Francisco General Hospital (crowded, everyone looking sick or crazy) but sleazier. Those other patients looked like us, only younger. I relaxed. Randy was less impressed. With his different frame of reference, Randy didn’t realize just how civilized the clinic turned out to be. Fearing a long wait, he suggested that we leave and see our own doctors.

“Look, you rich, white, entitled Marin motherfucker,” I explained, “we’re doing this here.” I’m sometimes surprised how gritty and urban my natural environment looks to him.

“All right.” He smiled. He really is a sport.

While waiting, we discussed what we were going to say. I wanted the clinic to take us seriously as possibly infected individuals or they would not test us. I advised Randy to play up the boyfriends. I had my own, condom-free sex with a previous lover to report. I need not mention that he got tested first. I wanted them to find whatever they found.

I have dodged some bullets and not others. I caught a disease of junkies as a teenager. It was once thought to be sexually transmissible, but was later dropped from the list of recognized STDs. I see the fact that I can’t give it to anyone through sex as a gift of the universe to me personally. In the 80s, around the start of the AIDS epidemic but before the virus was discovered, I dated a bisexual man. Both he and his boyfriend participated in the exciting world of baths and sex parties. I got to play a little, too.

Back then, the cause of AIDS was a matter of speculation—too many drugs, too many infections, maybe a disease agent. We assumed that a strong immune system would protect you. People were getting sick around us, and we kept doing what we were doing. Later, after I had broken up with my boyfriend, both he and his friend became positive. The friend died. I never caught HIV. It seems ungrateful to be careless now.

We did not have long to wait. We were called into examination rooms and interviewed by nurses. We gave various samples. We were told to look up our results online the following Tuesday. We were told “If a test comes up positive, we’ll call you before the results are out.”

No one called by Tuesday, so I dutifully looked up my results online. No stress, no worries, all pro forma.

I was “weakly” positive for syphilis.

I sometimes wonder what it feels like to be one of those guys who gets busted by DNA for something they did 30 years earlier, what it feels like when the cops come to the door. I wonder if they think, “How will I explain it to this person, to that person? How bad is it going to get? When and how thoroughly do I give up?” I wonder if they feel the sudden skin puckering, blood rushing to hide, brain on pause feeling. I was frozen for a moment, stunned.

Then I started doing what I do—looking stuff up. I found the following dismaying information: the result of the VDRL syphilis test, stated the way my result was, could mean either a false positive, a former infection, or tertiary syphilis, that state of syphilis where you begin to sink into dementia. It seemed to explain some things, but isn’t that what you always think? No wonder I was tired. No wonder I couldn’t concentrate. No wonder I seem to lack the self-command I once had. My brain was being eaten by syphilis.

I thought about the contacts I could have infected. I thought about my husband and his girlfriend. I thought about my lover Blue, who had the foresight to get his own STD test before our affair. I thought about Randy, his wife, his boyfriend, the boyfriend’s wife, the other girlfriend, the one with a boyfriend. A hall of mirrors of sexual contacts.

My lack of self-control manifested itself in the need to inform all my lovers immediately that I was possibly syphilitic. I knew there was a chance it was a false positive, but I panicked at the idea that Randy might have sex with his wife. I knew, of course, that we had (most of the time) used condoms, that I had no oozing sore that could have infected him—in fact, I didn’t recall having a dramatic chancre sore down there, like the one on the syphilis poster at the clinic, ever—but I couldn’t take the chance. I imagined him leading his innocent wife to the bedroom and wanted to scream, “Stop!” I texted and emailed madly.

The next day, I tried calling the clinic but naturally, no one is ever available to come to the phone. I was losing faith in the clinic. Shouldn’t they have called me by now, even without my calling them? I called Randy. “I have to go back to the clinic. You probably shouldn’t come over today. I can’t have sex until I know. In fact, I may never have sex again.”

The unflappable Randy said, “Don’t be silly. I’ll go to the clinic with you.” I had refused my husband’s offer to stay home and take me to the clinic—I’m enough trouble—but frankly, I could do with someone to hold my hand.

Aside from a bit of head-butting with the receptionist, who seemed not to understand what I wanted, the visit went well. I was seen by a counselor within 15 minutes. He explained the possible meanings of the test result, which was pretty much what I had learned on my own, but more authoritative. I learned that the blood tests were only run once a week, so the lab was just then running the confirmatory test using the same blood sample. He offered to let me talk to a doctor.

If having syphilis that day had a silver lining, it was Dr. Joseph Engelman. Being in the froth that I was, I didn’t notice how damned attractive the man was, but I knew I was in the presence of an exceptional physician. He saw me immediately. He was in no hurry. I was the only patient in the world. He stepped me through the symptoms and progress of the disease and verified that I had no symptoms. He explained the thing that immediately made my claws loosen their grip on the ceiling tiles: almost no one gets tertiary syphilis. You take antibiotics sporadically throughout your life for various ailments and without realizing it, you wipe out the syphilis. Even if you have advanced syphilis, you can’t give it to anyone without the sore.

He also reassuringly explained that I was not in a high risk group.

“I was totally wild when I was young,” I said, failing to add that I was not much better now that I was a semi-invalid with nothing to do except mess around.

The doctor waved away my protestations of crazy wildness. He was not impressed. I guess at that clinic, I was competing with some real pros. But he remembered what I had said.

Last night, I checked online for the confirmatory test results and they were negative. Today I shot the doc an email, asking him to interpret the results. Had I had syphilis and gotten rid of it, or what? He replied that I had never caught it, even when I was “young and wild.” How does a doctor in a busy clinic remember the exact words I used two days earlier? A public health doctor who pays attention. The man is a saint.

So I’m left with the syphilis hangover. What the fuck did it all mean, apart from a lapse in protocol on the part of the clinic, who should have called me and told me not to panic in the first place? It might be over dramatic to say that I will never be blase about condoms again. I know that men in my age group are unlikely to give me a disease, even Randy Old Goats, as long as their contacts are stable and they take precautions. One thing I have never achieved is perfect consistency in anything, so why should this be any different? I seem fairly lucky at dodging bullets. Nevertheless, I can’t help but be more conscious of the condom issue.

The lasting impression is the chain of contacts, the feeling of being in bed with a half dozen people, most of whom I’ve never met. Not so much creepy as awe-inspiring in its connectedness and a graphic illustration of the responsibility I have, as a good sexual anarchist, to each of those people.

Open Call: My Favorite Things

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 14:10:42 -0400

Life is Good is one of my favorite people on OS, so when she declared an open call about your favorite things intended to help us get to know each other, I wanted to play. However, if you ask me my favorite book or movie, I never know what to say. I like too many things and some of my favorite things are quite unruly. Here are my favorite things in no particular order:

Cats, soft blankets, fluffy towels, dancing, any food made from cream, road trips, guys with motorcycles, guys with motorcycles who take me on road trips, books, movies, clean houses, Latin music, drums, leather and suede, yellow things, cooking, shopping, throwing dinner parties, art, my husband, romantic sex, kinky sex, sex with women, sex with men, photography shows, email, flower gardens, flowers in vases, tiny blue or purple wildflowers that you have to get down real close to see, swimming, bodies of water, fast cars, trains, dark chocolate, meat, cheese, hardwood floors, gardens, big windows, greeting cards, organizing, eating with my fingers, making people laugh.

Glass and metal furniture, butterflies, writing, love, family, friends, cognac, rooms with chair rails, rooms with dish shelves, tile, rain storms, mountains, deserts, the hum of bees around a fragant bush in a wash, singing, problem-solving, getting paid, leaving a tip, pursuading someone, solitude, heights, houses, derelict buildings, country roads, churches, comedy, aquariums, rhinos, witty conversation, helping people, good drugs, funny stories, family stories, crime stories, new tires, succulents and cacti, friendly dogs, bath salts, massages, opera, dressing up to go downtown, phone sex, public sex, sex with married women, sex with married men, safety, risk, walking, driving, moving toward the horizon, moving, moving.

My salad: mix salad greens with slices of tomato and rings of red onion, toss with a dressing of balsamic vinegar, olive oil, salt, pepper, garlic and dried thyme, and sprinkle pine nuts on top.

Handicapped Parking

Fri, 9 Oct 2009 13:10:05 -0400

The angry man was waiting for me as I parked my car in front of my physical therapist’s office building. He was pissed because I had honked at him. He had been having an argument with his teenage son in the crosswalk of a busy thoroughfare, and the kid bolted to the opposite side of the street. The older guy started to follow more slowly, right into oncoming traffic. I tapped my horn. He stood in front of my car, mouthing angry words and waving his arms, forcing traffic to a halt in my lane.

He finally gave up and stepped out of the street. I wasn’t going far, just a few feet to the parking lot of my physical therapist’s building. When he saw where I was going, he stalked after me and stood waiting while I parked in the convenient handicapped parking space and hung my placard with the icon of a wheelchair on the mirror. He was spoiling for a fight, and as the real source of his annoyance had taken to his heels, I would do.

He blocked my path. “Who the hell do think you're honking at?” he demanded.

“It looked like you were about to step into oncoming traffic, so I tried to warn you,” I said as tolerantly as possible. This guy as the hapless father of a rebellious son and I felt no need to put him down for his foolish behavior in the street.

The guy looked frustrated. The argument was not developing satisfactorily. He said the meanest, most irrelevant thing he could think of. “You’re not even disabled! You probably borrowed that placard!”

I replied with the look that used to quell a classroom full of rowdy teenagers, the one that was a study in demonic possession, the change from bland to evil was so startling. He turned and fled.

I don’t know what I would have said to him if he had stayed.

“Not every person with a disability has a wheelchair, regardless of the picture on the placard. I have arthritis in my hips and knees. I have degenerative disc disease. My spine is deformed and without discs, every step on cement hurts. That’s why I have a placard.”

No way was I sharing my medical problems with an asshole. Nor with the rest of the population of San Francisco, some of whom, no doubt, also believed I borrowed the placard. I practice not caring what other people think. One day, I’ll be really good at it.

I went to the doctor yesterday. In the handicapped zone, a guy was sitting in his car. He did not have a placard. I pulled in behind him, assuming he had dropped someone off and was leaving. He didn’t, so I drove up next to him and asked if he was going soon.

“No!” he replied, in a tone that said, “What are you, stupid?”

I was shocked at his rudeness in hogging the parking spot. It showed on my face.

“Do you have a handicapped placard?” he sneered.

“Yes!” My tone implied, “What are you, stupid?”

“Lemme see it!”

I showed him the damn placard, and he had the grace not to question my credentials, but explained that some people pretended to be handicapped. Did that make sense? He didn’t have any right to be there himself.

I hate it. I hate having a disability. I hate having constraints. I hate not being able to do things that I love. I used to lift weights. I used to dance in our Carnaval and Cinco de Mayo parades. I learned to ride horses at 49. There wasn't anything I couldn't do, other than hit a ball with a stick, but I could live with that.

I can’t stand for more than 10 minutes without the possibility of sudden pain so severe that I can’t walk. That means I can’t do my own errands. I was a world-class shopper, but now I can’t wander and look at things in a store. Shopping for groceries with my husband the other day, I got hit by the pain and had to sit on the floor while he went back to the car to fetch my cane. Leaning on the cane, with my husband holding me up, I was able to get out of there.

I don’t go to galleries and museums. I don’t go to anything with a line, unless I know I can find somewhere to sit while someone else holds my place in line. I have yet to try flying, but flying is about standing in line. I pass on most parties, because while my friends have chairs, I don’t want to sit in one waiting for people to come to me. What if they don’t?

I exercised for years and I’m still in good shape, although my torso shows the signs of my spinal deformity in the form of love handles created by the collapse of my lumbar spine. I make myself stand up straight (most of the time), suck in the gut and walk gracefully, if slowly. I try not to bend forward from the waist, the hallmark of a bad spine.

There are still things I can do. They confuse me and make me feel not disabled and, by extension, not deserving of my placard. I can walk for a couple of hours on hiking trails because dirt doesn’t transmit the same shock as concrete. I have no trouble with hills or stairs. I can dance for longer than I can stand because my knees stay bent. I can swim. I can have sex. Now there’s something I don’t want the other drivers to know about. Sex and parking? Nobody deserves that.

Having a bad back is a continual embarrassment. If I’m not collapsing in a store, I’m pissing off somebody who thinks I look fine. I don’t look like someone who has to sit down right now. I have an absurd inner conflict. I try not to look disabled, but sometimes I need concessions. I hate announcing my disability or asking for help. I’m hyper-aware of looking odd because my disability is not obvious. It’s almost a relief when my back gets so bad that I need a cane. “There, see, I have an old lady cane,” I say mentally to those appraising competitors for parking spaces who think I’m cheating with my placard.

The cane is a passport. I’ve learned to appreciate its power to legitimize my parking placard and excuse my gimpy behavior. I got the cane from my aunt years ago when I tore my ACL. My husband and I had a vacation planned and didn’t want to cancel it, so I borrowed the cane and we took a plane to New York.

Flying with a cane is tough. As I was going through airport security, the guard snatched the cane from my hand and sent it down the conveyor belt. As an afterthought, she asked, “You didn’t need that, did you?”

“No,” I mumbled, painfully limping through the metal detector. I didn’t add “it’s a fashion statement” because those guys are cranky.

On the airplane, the attendant again took my cane. “I’ll just put that away for you during the flight,” as though I would have no need to stand between San Francisco and New York. The flight attendant reckoned without my bladder. Halfway through the flight, I got up to use the rest room. On the way back, the seat belt light came on. We hit sudden, horrendous turbulence and the plane bucked like a pissed off horse. The flight attendants fled to their seats and left the drinks tray blocking the aisle between me and my seat. And me without my cane. After the initial shock of pain, I rode out the turmoil on one leg, like a loopy one-legged surfer. Without a cane in my hand, no one realized that I was injured.

That trip was a lesson in the value of the cane for explaining what I’d rather not, heartless airline staff notwithstanding. I was determined to enjoy New York. As a concession to my injured status, we took a lot of cabs, but back then, before I became generally discouraged, I was willing to venture some risky activities. Once we even decided to take the subway. We climbed into a full car. The only seat available was the front bench, the one with the sign that says to let the elderly and disabled have the seat. Sprawled in the middle of it, taking up the whole thing, was a teenager in full thug regalia, a rag knotted around his head and a look of bored and contemptuous abstraction on his face.

Kids don’t scare me. I was a teacher. I scare them. I went up to the kid and said, “Could I slide in next to you?”

He swung his head around and his eyes widened at the cane. He jumped up. “I’m sorry, ma’am. Please, you sit down.” In the years since I have become a government-certified gimp, I have never seen a clearer example of the power of the cane. Folks don’t believe the placard, but they believe the cane.

My Truck Stop Murder

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 15:08:30 -0400

I was 19. It was an abandoned quarry. I was in the cab of a semi truck, one guy at the wheel, the other in the sleeper. I had been asleep, exhausted, since just outside of Reno, and woke up to the screech of breaks and an abandoned quarry in the dim morning light. In the second before the driver turned to me, I knew it all. There was only one thing two guys did with a 19 year old girl in an abandoned quarry and it was not good. I hoped to survive.

I was as restless then as I am now. I didn’t know that then, didn’t know that it was a facet of my personality. In fact, I had no idea that it mattered what your temperament, your abilities, your likes and dislikes were when you made decisions, if you made them at all, about how you were going to live. To my working class Latino family, it was all about getting a good job, which at the time meant teacher, nurse or secretary.

So, left alone to figure out what I was good at, with the unappealing goal of getting a good job with benefits, I did what came naturally. I failed. I did, once in a while, land a clerical job, but I sucked, totally and apparently irremediably, at clerical work. It was only years later that I found out I had ADD, but by then I’d learned, in desperation, to work around my jumpy attention span. In those early years, the feedback the world was giving me told me that I was unemployable. I thought about going to college, though the idea of filling in the application form was daunting. I had some hellacious ADD back then. I still labor over forms like they were doctoral dissertations. My mind doesn’t track right. At the time, my life seemed to have a big “No Outlet” sign on it, so I partied a lot, took drugs and fucked a lot of guys and a few girls. Now there was something I was good at.

When I was nineteen, I had not gone to college, much less teacher school or law school. I was still a high school drop out. In fact, I am still a high school drop out, high school being a diploma I never got. At nineteen, I was a serious mess. A restless, underachieving, curious teenaged mess, resembling nothing more than those feral cats I would later rescue, scared but wanting that treat, risking it all for that treat. I was terminally shy as a child, and overcame shyness because the kind of stimulation I needed, emotional, intellectual, and physical, was available only from other people. I learned to talk to them, even pretended to be one of them.

Those were still the hippie years and hippies traveled. I’d already been on a couple of hitchhiking trips to Mendocino, where friends had a cabin. I’d even hitchhiked alone one time, and had a memorable trip through the twisty roads on the back of a motorcycle, freezing, scared, exhilarated. When my friend Diane suggested that we visit her family outside of Boulder, Colorado, where they had some property and took in a bunch of foster kids and always welcomed another hand, I was there.

As was typical back then, we decided to go one morning, and by early afternoon, we were at the freeway on-ramp where people stuck out their thumbs to go east. Lots of people. We should have been dismayed. Politely standing behind earlier hitchhikers, we would have a long wait until at least ten other people or parties got picked up. We started to get hungry. A hippie we were hanging out with had a baggie full of sprouts. People ate sprouts back then. Bean sprouts, may they burn in everlasting hell. We ate the sprouts, and belched sprout gas for hours. We counted our money. Between the two of us, we had $3.00. We decided to live a little and invested part of that in a bag of chips.

We got as far as Folsom that day, and Diane said she had a grandmother somewhere in the area, she thought in an apartment complex in Roseville. We made our way there but we never found the grandmother. We were sitting dejectedly by the complex’s pool, rationing our chips, when a resident walked by and asked who we were. We explained that we had lost Diane’s grandmother and had nowhere to stay. He gave us some advice and left. A few minutes later, he was back. His wife had chewed him out for leaving two kids on their own outdoors. She fed us, gave us blankets, and in the morning, dropped us off at a good hitchhiking spot. It was the first of many kindnesses I experienced.

We got a ride through Nevada, both of us sitting on the front bench seat with the driver. Diane and I started discussing how far we could get on our money, which was down to two dollars and change. It was completely innocent, that time. When the guy dropped us off, he handed us a ten-dollar bill, which bought about the same amount of groceries as a hundred would today. He said he wanted us to eat. We were stunned, thanked him profusely, and learned a new trick. We arrived in Colorado with nearly twenty bucks. Pretty good for a couple of teenage idiots. In our defense, we still felt like kids, and saw nothing wrong with getting adults to take care of us.

I had a wonderful month or so with Diane’s family, bonding with one little boy in particular, the first and last time I’m actually lusted after motherhood. I tried to follow the rules and give all the kids equal attention and I was careful not to make any promises to the child, but me and that broken Latino six year old had a magnetic attraction for each other. Fortunately for him, I was not his primary caretaker, or my leaving would have been tragic. It was hard to say good bye to Roger but I had to go home and try to reconcile my rebellious restlessness with the necessity of growing up. Since Diane was home, she stayed in Boulder.

I still had some of our earnings from the trip out, having worked for my keep in Boulder and not having had to spend much. Besides, minor league con-child that I was on that trip, I knew how to get more -- just let a nice middle-aged driver know I was hungry. I had excellent adventures on the way home to San Francisco. I caught a ride with a hippie in a beat up car from the 30s, like something from a gangster movie. He had picked up a motley collection of hitchhikers and we got along great. We took a side trip to go wading in the Great Salt Lake. We ill-advisedly spent the night on the ground in the mountains, woke up soaked with dew and freezing, and retreated to the car, where we huddled together until morning. Somewhere before Reno, Nevada, I called my boyfriend and told him I was going to be home the next day. That’s how the final adventure began.

He said, I’ll meet you in Reno and take you home. If that had happened, it would have been perfect. Riding from Reno to San Francisco on the back of a motorcycle would have been a memorable combination of pain and pleasure and a lifelong memory. But it was 1971, before cell phones. Neither of us knew Reno, so he came up with a strategy that might have worked in some other town -- I was to wait for him by the first off-ramp in Reno. I was dubious but agreed, not yet having outgrown the reflex obedience to boys. I regretfully said good bye to the car-full of hippies whom I’d ridden with for the last day or so. They left me at what they figured to be the last off-ramp out of Reno as they made their way to Sacramento, and I managed to cross the freeway on an overpass that was not getting much traffic to what appeared to be the first off ramp into Reno.

I stood there in the cold from around 8:00 in the evening until around 11:00, when a cop car pulled up. Shit. I had already been hauled off to jail once for illegal hitchhiking, and I had no idea if what I was doing was against the law in Nevada. Fortunately for me, the was very little law in Nevada. The cop merely asked what I was doing, having seen me before and wondering why I hadn’t gotten a ride yet. I explained the situation, and he said, “Oh, if you want the first off-ramp in Reno, this isn’t it. I’ll take you, hop in.” I have no idea of it was well-meant or he just wanted the grubby hippie chick out of his jurisdiction. In any case, he drove me a couple of miles down the road and left me.

I stood in the spot I was taken to and after a while, watched my boyfriend ride past on his motorcycle. I knew no amount of screaming and jumping was going to get the man’s attention over the roar of the motorcycle and other traffic, but I screamed myself hoarse. Then I waited for him to come back, as I assumed he’d try other off-ramps when he didn’t find me where he expected to find me. He never came back. He chose to search for me on the streets of Reno, thinking I had gotten the urge to sightsee in the middle of the night. After an hour, I decided I needed to get my own self back to the City. I saw a truck stop on the other side of the freeway and made my way to it on another overpass. This time, trucks missed me by what seemed, and probably was, inches.

I don’t know how different the truck stops were then, as I was at that age when you’re both worldly and unbelievably naive. I know that there is prostitution at truck stops today and that it is dangerous for the women who do it. I have no idea whether the guys who saw me at the truck stop assumed that I was a prostitute or whether there were any prostitutes working the place. It never occurred to me to wonder, or I might have been discouraged from looking for a ride there.

Before I needed a ride, I needed a coffee and donut, and I had a buck or so left after buying breakfast for my road buddies ages ago. I was sitting at the counter when a kind-looking middle-aged guy asked me where I was going. I told him the story. He seemed to take me at face value, and said that if his partner agreed, they could take me as far as Oakland.

Oakland! I could almost walk home from there, if it wasn’t for the pesky bay. I could certainly call any of a number of people to come get me. Oakland! I would take it.

The partner showed up and I had my first twinge of doubt. He was the type who fancied himself a ladies’ man, flirting in that tedious way the unhip had, guaranteed to earn you a rejection from a hippie chick. The gentlemanly one reassured me: he had daughters, I was safe. All he wanted was someone to talk with him, help him stay awake. I have always had good instincts, even when I didn’t deserve to, and I decided the guy was cool.

I was tired, but I felt joy climbing into the cab of a big truck. For a hippie of the time, a ride in a semi was the stuff of legend, and I’d never met a girl who had done it. We took off and rode in easy companionship, me seated between the men. Curious and excited, I asked them about their travels. The guys entertained me with stories of driving across the country and getting off the highway in Chicago, where they knew these sweet-natured whores who always welcomed and took care of them. I was happy to know that they had recently gotten their satisfaction; that took the pressure off me. The need to fend off guys was always present back then.

My first alarm came when we approached the Nevada/California border. The ladies’ man said in a jocular, leering way that I should get into the sleeping compartment at the back of the cab. I said stubbornly that no way was I doing that. The gentleman explained that they had to hide me, because it was illegal for them to pick up hitchhikers. Seeing the sense of that and not wanting to get them in trouble, I crouched in the sleeper as we went through the border routine. As the truck picked up speed past the border, I dove out of the sleeper, not wanting to spend one more minute there than absolutely necessary. Even the gentlemanly driver laughed at my determination not to be placed in a vulnerable position. Lover boy asked one last time for form’s sake if I would join him in the sleeper, then, giving up gracefully, said good night and climbed in by himself.

I’m not sure how many words I said to the driver who I was supposed to entertain with my conversation before passing out. It was 2:00 a.m. when we left the truck stop and I was trashed. The driver let me sleep. I didn’t wake up until I heard the brakes and felt the bouncing as we drove into the quarry.

I knew it was a quarry, though I was a city kid, because there was a working quarry near my aunt’s house in Pacifica. I had certainly read about quarries. Kids drowned in them. They were scenes of crimes. There was absolutely nothing that two men in a truck with a 19 year old girl could possibly want in a quarry that didn’t involve me being hurt really, really badly. I checked the horizon, where the sun was rising over the quarry walls. Nothing. No traffic, no people, no huts, no way out.

The driver turned to me. “We gotta connect the speed governor. We disconnect it back east so we can make time on the road, get ahead of schedule. That way we can party with our friends in Chicago and we still get in on time. They check the governor at the station, though, so we gotta reconnect it before we drive into Oakland. You should’a seen your face! Guess this place scared you, huh?”’

I smiled weakly. I was not dead at 19. I’m still not dead. It’s about time to risk my life again, before it’s too late.