[Note: Email to Jess Anderson]
Some things take too long to happen.
Some things don't take long enough to happen.
Some things happen just right.
And some things should never happen at all.
Too long: I'm (finally) in the process of interviewing candidates for junior support engineers, who will (in reality if not on paper, at least at first) report to me. These are the positions which I was about to leave my current job six months ago over, based on my frustration with the slowness of our growth and my recent detour from my career path. Well, along the way I discovered that unhappy people make unhappy (and therefore unsuccessful) job-seekers. I went on a few interviews in the past few months; they were utter disasters. Now that things are moving ahead, though, things should be a lot better.
And one of my co-workers and I have been giving our boss a course in Fag Hag 101. It all started when I was printing out resumes for the interviewers. I pre-printed the schedule, and used a highlighter to indicate each interviewer's time on their copy. But I accidentally marked off the line for my boss, Mary, on the copy which belongs to Tony, the other faggot in my group. I crossed out the line, and attached a note that said, "Ooops, wrong Mary..." We told this to our boss, who hadn't a clue, never having heard "Mary" used as anything but her own name. By the time we're done with her, I think her thesis on "The Iconography of Judy Garland" should be ready...
Now if I can just get my commute down under an hour... At least I'm car-pooling most days with a friend who lives two blocks away from my home and works two blocks away from my office, so the commute's a little more pleasant. And we get to cruise cute guys as we drive past them in the diamond lane...
Not long enough: I can't believe the deadlines keep rolling on (and rolling by, apparently). I have just enough time to fit this in between last week's trip to LA and next week's trip to the UK. I'll be there from 3 to 15 October (with Dan joining me there on the 10th), then on to the Big Apple from the 15th through the 18th. Odds are pretty good that, if you care at all about this, I'll have seen or at least spoken to you before you see this...
Just right: It's just past a year since I met Dan. I can't believe it. Things haven't been perfect, of course. But they've been pretty damn good. Color me surprised. (No, not Barbra. We don't cover that till Fag Hag 201, right after Bette and Bette.)
Not at all. Oh, yeah, not at all. When I visited the Bay Area in April of 1988 for training at my (now-former) employer, I found out that Rob Bernardo, one of the participants in soc.motss (a gay/lesbian/bisexual-oriented electronic computer service best described as a cross between a BBS, an international network, and a kaffeeklatsch; the "motss" part, which stands for Members of the Same Sex, harks back to the days when the then-coordinators thought the G-word would be inflammatory) was hosting a barbecue at his country "ranch" home. I took about a forty-mile detour on my way to the airport to meet up with some of the people I had until then known only electronically. I think I can trace at least half of the people I know in the Bay Area to either that day at Rob's, one of his later cookouts, or friends of friends I met there. I think that's the day I really decided to move out here, too.
Rob was an odd guy, and mostly in ways I found spectacularly fascinating. He was educated as a linguist, and drifted into computers, not unlike my own background in literary and cinema critical studies and subsequent job decision. He was raised as a Long Islander (Lawn Guy-linter, if you prefer), but remade himself first into your standard San Francisco clone, then into the ultimate Jewish Homo Cowboy, riding in rodeo events, buying a house in the country so he could keep his horse on his property. (I once called him "Hopalong Chasid-dy"; he was mildly amused.) He had a sharp wit and a sharper tongue, but the smilingest eyes I think I've ever seen. And he was pretty easy on the eyes, in a compact, muscled sort of way.
In November of 1988, he invited me over for Thanksgiving dinner. I'd just moved here, didn't have much in the way of contacts, and was glad for the invitation. So there we were: me, Rob, his parents (Jack and Betty, from Great Neck, doncha know), and his new boyfriend, Terry, who was (and is) bright, charming, equally easy on the eyes in a bigger, more muscled sort of way, and quite, quite Black. We had a good laugh before dinner about stuff like "Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the kitchen... Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, Part II!" And it was a lovely day.
So time passes, and I see Rob two or three times a year, often at his barbecues or at dinners for out-of-town soc.motss folks (or "motssketeers" as we call them) who are visiting, and we always get along fine. But gradually, we start seeing less of him, and other things come up for one or both of us.
Then, in mid-July, a friend of mine who is an even better friend of Rob's posts a message to the newsgroup telling us that Rob's in the hospital, and we should come and see him as soon as possible, while we can. Brief, ominous, and shocking: I had no idea he was sick, and at any rate, what could take him from reasonably healthy to at death's door in a matter of weeks?
Well, in all the talk of AIDS as a manageable, chronic illness, we forget one thing: the diseases we think of as manageable and chronic don't work that way for everyone. Rob, who had never had a single serious opportunistic infection before, had come down with pneumocystis and had totally failed to respond to any treatment. This hasn't happened to anyone I've known in years, but I'm sure it's happened to people you know, or to people they know. And now it's happened, too damn close.
I didn't get to see him before he died. He only lasted about a week after I found out, I was away part of that, the visiting population was restricted... all excuses. I never got to say good-bye in person, though there's some question whether, if I had made it to the hospital in those last days, he'd have known about it anyway.
This past Sunday, Rob's mother, sister, and other relatives flew out from New York, his neighbors and friends from the Bay Area drive and trained out to Concord, and network friends either flew in or wired their regards from across the continent. And his horse, Oriana, looked on over the fence from her barn.
We stood around and talked about how much he had meant to us, and read some of his writings and some of his favorite poems, and discussed his favorite music (Tchaikovsky's Fifth, for the record).
And we ate the barbecue his brother-in-law made on his grill and with his sauce, as well as the pot-luck items we had brought to that same place so many times before. And we cried, and we hugged, and we missed him, all of us, among the friends we had shared with him and met at that very place.
I'd give anything now for the knowledge that my friends will gather together and remember me the way we said our farewell-for-nows to Rob.
But, yeah, some things should never happen at all.
