So Cal Story - My Ideal???

Some of you may recall my obsession with beauty pageants – Miss Teen USA, Miss USA, Miss Universe, Miss America – I love and watch them all. Hell, I’ve even stooped so low as to watch the Mrs. America and Mrs. Universe (or maybe it’s called Mrs. World, I can’t recall) pageants hosted by none other than Florence Henderson on PAX (the last one I saw was co-hosted by Omarosa, that freak from the “Apprentice” reality show, so I think I can officially say I am over that one – at least until they find a new host). A few years ago my “pageant friend” Greg & I even dragged my poor boyfriend Allan to the Miss USA Pageant when it was here in Los Angeles, which was too much fun. So not too long ago I log into an old email account I have and one of the 84 messages in my inbox was from the president of the Miss America organization – apparently I had at one point and time signed up for a newsletter - informing me that the 2006 Miss America pageant was finally going to take place on January 21st. I quickly wrote to Greg to see if he wanted to exchange our “picks” for the pageant or if we were going to let this pageant go since neither of us are any good at predicting the winner. He responded yes, we are going to pick and mentioned “oh, by the way, the pageant is in Las Vegas – up for a road trip?” I thought about it for like 2 minutes and responded “Hell YEAH!!!” and next thing I know we are goin to Vegas.

We left VERY early Saturday morning and arrived in Vegas with just enough time to check into our hotel (The Stratosphere), eat some incredibly NASTY food at the buffet (do yourself a favor and avoid the buffet at Stratosphere if at all possible – something tells me that eating your own poo would taste better), do a small bit of gambling (Allan had a short hot streak and won over $100) and make it to The Aladdin Hotel & Casino in just enough time to stand in the most obnoxious line I’ve ever stood in. We made it into the theatre with about 2 minutes to spare before the start of the show. Both Greg & I had picked Miss Utah to take it all – not only was she pretty, smart and well spoken, but she won the preliminary swimsuit competition so I thought for sure she was golden. What we hadn’t figured in to our calculations was the fact that the pageant was being shown “live” on CMT – that’s Country Music Television (I think) – so not only was Miss Utah not in the top 10, but no other western, eastern, or northern state was represented at all. Basically the top 10 was all from the south with the exceptions being Miss Pennsylvania and Miss D.C. (which could still be considered “south” depending on who you ask). My guess is that it was to keep the home audience tuned into the show although I am sure the pageant folks would deny it. In fact, before we left Los Angeles to go to the pageant we decided to record the show so we could watch it when we got home and what do you know – CMT isn’t on the digital cable roster here in So Cal so I guess it wouldn’t have mattered if Miss California was in the top 10 or not – a majority of us here in California couldn’t even root for her at home if we wanted to.

The main difference between seeing the Miss USA and Miss America pageants live was the crowd. At Miss USA there were plenty of pageant people, but they were for the most part kind of subdued. The crowd at Miss America was INSANE! These people were wearing buttons, carrying signs, and screaming at the top of their lungs for these girls. The highlight of the night for me was sitting behind this huge crowd of Miss Tennessee supporters. When she introduced herself at the start of the show about 30 people stood up with signs and started screaming for her. So they are announcing the Top 10 and the host (some dude from Desperate Housewives) says “our next member of the Top 10 is from Johnny Cash’s home state” (or something like that) and the Tennessee fans FREAK! They stand up and scream. The announcer says “Miss Arkansas!” and the Tennessee people are still screaming when they suddenly realize that they are cheering for a black girl from Arkansas instead of a tall blonde white woman from Tennessee. I have never seen a group of people sit down and shut up more quickly. It was a hoot! I was glad that Tennessee didn’t make the Top 10 because those people would have driven me crazy by the end of the night. So when all was said and done Miss Oklahoma won, my new favorite (after Miss Utah was wrongly denied her spot) Miss Georgia was first runner-up and we had a good time. I was really looking forward to the talent part and it was disappointing to say the least. If the pageant is in Vegas again next year we are definitely going and we are staying somewhere other than The Stratosphere.

So Cal Story - Precious (Confessions pt.2) (11/28/05)

(Written 11/28/05)

"Precious and fragile things
Need special handling
My God what have we done to you
We always tried to share
The tenderest of care
Now look what we have put you through

Things get damaged
Things get broken
I thought we'd manage
But words left unspoken
Left us so brittle
There was so little left to give"

"Precious" - Depeche Mode

Life with uncle was usually fun however there were times when things would get strange - strange even for us kids that had no idea what "normal" was. Things would be going along smoothly and then he'd change. I remember one night when I was about 14 driving this huge car he had bought around Sacramento, late at night, in the rain with him curled up in the fetal position on the passenger side floor. As I was driving (without a license mind you) he was screaming orders at me - "you are driving too fast!" "you are driving too slow!" - even though he couldn't see how fast I was driving. Since I didn't live in Sacramento I had no idea where I was going so I wastelling him which streets I was on or approaching and he would tell me which direction to turn, or sometimes not. When he would finally become coherent again he would yell at me for missing a turn or being on the wrong street. We finally made it home at like 4 in the morning. Another time he took my stepbrother & I over to some woman’s house and then left us there. We had no idea who she was, where we were, or how we were getting home and he was just gone. The girl drove us back to his apartment and when we got inside he was throwing a tantrum. He had knocked over all of his plants, was stomping his feet and yelling at us for not being at home - although we weren't home because of him - scary.

The first time I recall him touching me I was young, maybe around 8. He was staying at our house and I am guessing my mom was out of town because we were sleeping in her bed. It seemed harmless enough and honestly I didn’t mind. For every “fun” story I told before (if that is what you call them), there was always a dark side. The lake? I remember him skinny dipping with us and one time while he was holding me in the water he had an erection. The “photo workshop”? Somewhere in the world (unless he destroyed them) there are nude photos of me at the age of 15 in fields down by the Sacramento River and posed on the counter tops and in the shower of his bathroom. I never saw the photos and when I asked him about them he admitted that he had showed them to a friend of his and then decided to throw them away. Again, only he knows. The encounters varied in details as to what we did, where we were, and how conscious he was. Sometimes I initiated it, and sometimes he did. Sometimes he was sober, most times he was drunk. On one trip during the winter break of my freshman year of high school my uncle drove me to a park in Sacramento. He pulled into a parking lot and told me that if I went into the bathroom that there would be a hole in the wall between the urinal and stall and that was my introduction to "glory hole" sex. He waited in the car in the parking lot and if anyone else pulled in to park that he would honk the horn as the signal that I needed to leave the bathroom. I was 15.

The summer between my sophomore and junior years I got caught by my girlfriend having sex with a man at a small nude beach just outside of Redding. By the time I was 17 I was a highly sexual person. I was having sex with my girlfriend, with another boy that went to my school, and with uncle. The last time he & I did anything was at my grandmothers house in Weaverville. After we were done I told him about getting caught by my girlfriend and told him I wasn't comfortable doing what we were doing anymore. He said ok and that was that. What I feared the most was what actually happened - he stopped being interested in me. Maybe it was partlymy fault - I was growing up and was less interested in spending time with my family, but basically our relationship came to a screeching halt. As fucked up as it was that he was having sex with me there was a lot of other things that we did together as well - he introduced me to ballet, to gourmet cooking, to art, to classical music and to the joys of public television just to name a few. And now he was gone.

I met Maryellen when I was 18 and fresh out of high school. We became friends almost instantly and would sit up all night long talking and sharing stories about our pasts. When I finally had the courage to tell her about uncle she was the first person to say the word "molestation". It honestlynever occurred to me that that is what had happened. Sure, I knew it was wrong, but hadn't I initiated it at times? Hadn't I enjoyed it at different times? I mean, I don't recall anyone holding a gun to my head - right? Regardless, she pointed out to me that no matter what happened or how it went down that I was a child and he was the adult and that his responsibility as an adult was to protect me, not to take advantage. It took some time for me to take in what she had said, but in the end I decided that she was right. I also decided that even though I doubted I would everhave children that when and if I ever did I would never allow them to be alone with him should the opportunity present itself.

When Justin was about 8 months old I had a conversation with Maryellen and said that I didn't want Justin to be around uncle. She agreed and was actually kind of relieved that I felt that way. My sister Gina had a daughter that was spending a lot of time with him and Maryellen asked if Ithought she was in risk of being molested. I honestly think it was a "boy thing" with him, but I decided that my sister should know what had happened with me so that she could make the decision for herself as to whether or not her daughter spent time with him alone. Here is where it got really ugly. I called my mom and told her what had happened and asked her how I shouldapproach my sister with the news. See, all of us kids had a very close relationship with him and I knew that it was going to be very hard for her to take, and it just so happened that her daughter was with him at my grandparents house at the time I was talking to my mom. My mom told meshe'd think about how to handle it and would call me back. The next thing I knew my phone started ringing off the hook. Apparently my mom called my other sister and told her and then my older sister called Gina and told her while my mom was on the phone with my dad telling him. My dad then called his sister (my aunt) who went over to my grandparents house and told myuncle and my grandmother. In the meantime my sister Gina was scrambling to get her daughter back home. As you can imagine it was ugly. My uncle threatened to kill me, my mom and my sister Gina and then apparently went into a drunken stupor for a while. My grandmother called me and told me that me, my dad and my uncle all needed to sit down for a face to face andtalk things through. My dad called and reached out to me, but I wasn't interested in talking to him about it (we had never been close, and I wasn't looking to be at that time), so he thought I seemed "blasé" about it – even though I had been dealing with it for a very long time and like I said, wasn't interested in sharing the gory details with him. The person that hurt me the most though was my aunt. She & I had been very close and when we finally talked her exact words were "I don't know who to believe" - and since I knew that she herself had experienced a not so great childhood I went off. I said some very horrendous things to her including some very graphic examples of what had happened and we to this day have never really spoken again (this was 16 years ago and I did see her a few years later at a wedding and all we said was "hello" to each other). My sisters both felt very guilty and basically my family (on my dad's side) ceased to be my family. My grandmother & I worked it out, my dad & I eventually did, but I have basically cut myself off from the rest of that family and have no intentions of being around any of them ever again.

Over the years I have heard stories about my uncle - basically how he used to "roll" gay guys in San Francisco when he was young and an ambulance driver. One of his sisters said she wasn't surprised and had always wondered if something was going on, but I guess it never occurred to her to actually say something to protect me. The one thing that stuck with me was that he threatened to kill me, and while I am a logical person and know that people say things out of anger, I believe that he meant it. After all of the bizarre behavior I have seen, I have no reason to not believe him. Unfortunately my grandmother is now living with him as she is getting oldand can't take care of herself so that means that I almost never see her anymore. And for a while after this happened he lived in Alaska, so I felt very secure. When I was living in Sacramento he moved back there and I was really freaked out for a while. But, I haven't seen or spoken to him since the big reveal, and hopefully I will never have to.

So, back to the phone call from my sister. The news she told me was that they had discovered a mass in his throat and that it was cancer. My first thought was, fuck, one more male in my family with cancer, now I have something else to worry about. My sister had gone over to his house tocheck on my grandmother and had spoken to him. One of the things he said was that what was going through his mind was "why me" and then he thought "why not me?" and when she told me that something inside me snapped. I thought - yeah! Why not the fuck you, you piece of shit motherfucker! You deserve the most painful, drawn out, lingering death imaginable you fuckingasshole. Then the other line on my work phone rang and I had to snap out of it. It honestly caught me off guard. Over the years I have gone to counseling here and there and thought that I had worked through my feelings on this issue. My thought was that what was done was done and that I am who I am today because of the things I have experienced in my past - both goodand bad. I like who I am (for the most part) and suddenly I was feeling really shitty for the way I was feeling. Sure, he took something from me that I can't replace, but shouldn't I be the bigger person and just move on? Shouldn't I not necessarily forgive, but accept what it was and hope that he gets help and finds his own peace? Yeah, maybe in a perfect world but not in mine.

I have lived in fear of him for so long now and I honestly look forward to him being dead. As much as I loved, respected and appreciated him as a child, I now only feel betrayal, hurt and anger. Does he deserve cancer? No, I don’t' think anyone "deserves" something so horrible. But I am not sad that he has it - it only bothers me because it means that I am even morepre-disposed to it than before. He never married, apparently has no friends, and he takes very poor care of my grandmother, so as far as I can tell his death will not have a negative impact on anyone. His actions had a huge impact on my life, on the relationships I developed as a child and as an adult. I sexualized friendships that shouldn't have been because I thought that was all I was worth. I made sex a huge issue in relationships because I was taught at a very young age that it (sex) was the only pleasant way to express yourself. Yet, for all of the hurt, betrayal and anger, there is still a part of me that misses him. I miss having him in my corner (so to speak) as he was my biggest cheerleader when I was a kid. So it is complicated. And the weird thing is that while I do look forward to him being dead and gone so that I wont have to worry about him ever again, I will probably always long for the feeling he gave me as a child – the feeling that no matter what I was a good person, that I was smart, funny, and creative - that I was "Pierre, the neighbor boy" and whenever I was "Pierre", life was good.

So Cal Story - Confessions pt.1 (11/20/05)

(Written 11/20/05)

My workday started today with a phone call from my sister Kari, which is not unusual. Kari has the commute from HELL and frequently she'll call me at work and talk to me while she is driving. The first half-hour of my day I take care of our company's literature requests and then I go up to the front desk, turn the phones on, and play receptionist for 45 minutes until the real receptionist shows up. Some days I get more work done while I am up there, some days I play as many games of solitaire as I can and other days I talk to Kari. Frequently the first thing Kari will say is "I talked to Dad" which is something else that is not uncommon these days. I can't recall if I wrote about this in a previous story, but my dad was recently diagnosed with cancer (if I didn't write about it before I am sure I will soon) so Kari will call and give me updates on his health, treatments or his mood as she talks to him more regularly than I. She is also in the process of buying a new house so we have been talking a lot about that as well so I figured today was going to be a "dad day" - he has been experiencing a lot of pain recently so I thought it would be an update. Instead, she filled me in on the condition of my dad's brother, my uncle who just so happens to be one of the most complicated relationships I have ever had.

Now some of you probably already know what I am about to talk about through prior conversations, but he is not someone I mention often. One of my first memories as a child is of him. I don't know if I actually remember the incident or if I have just created the image in my mind based on hearing the story so often as a child, but it goes something like this. My uncle, both of my sisters & I are sitting in a restaurant in San Francisco. I am young, like maybe two which would make my middle sister three and my oldest sister six. My uncle, my sister Gina and I are all smoking cigarettes while my older sister Kari is hiding under the table. I doubt that Gina & I are REALLY smoking, but we are holding lit cigarettes none-the-less. You see, not only was my uncle a raging alcoholic, but he also was on the eccentric side. He liked to do things that made him seem unique or funny, and I guess in his mind in the late sixties it was funny to have children sitting at his table smoking in a restaurant, and maybe back then it was. He was also very creative and had created nicknames for all of us. One of my sisters was "Susannah" and I was "Pierre the neighbor boy" although I can't for the life of me remember why. Whenever we would all get together (my sisters, uncle, cousins & I) we all had different names and when we were out in public we all addressed each other by those names. Maybe it was his way of creating an alternate universe for us kids where I wasn't Donn, the sissy mama's boy that none of the grown-ups but my mom liked and Kari wasn't the put-upon oldest child that was being held responsible for raising her younger brother and sister because her mom was an alcoholic and wouldn't do it herself. Maybe it was his way of letting us drop that stuff and just be kids - only he knows. I wonder if he & I were still speaking today if he would still refer to me as "Pierre".

As I got older my uncle became even more important to me. My mom married a man that basically hated my sisters & I and both of them were alcoholics. My real dad wasn’t the warm and fuzzy type so the only one of the bunch that brought me any type of joy was my uncle. He lived in Redding for part of my youth and our summers were always the best (or so it seemed at the time). He would take us three kids to the lake and rent a boat to go fishing. He'd drink all day letting us drive the boat and I honestly think that we covered every inch of Whiskeytown Lake. One of the games we'd play was called "man over board" and basically what would happen is out of the blue he'd scream "man over board!" and we kids would spring into action. Whoever was driving would kill the engine, one of us would throw the anchor over the side and the other of us would dive into the water to "rescue" whoever it was that had fallen in. I know it sounds corny, but as kids it was fun. As I look back now I wonder if maybe he was preparing us just in case he got too drunk and fell in - that way we could save him. Again, only he knows.

By the time I was a teenager my uncle had moved to Sacramento and I looked forward to seeing him whenever I could. On many nights he would show up at our door in Redding at 3:00 in the morning and I'd wake-up to him tapping on my window. He'd be drunk and my mom would pack my suitcase and put me into the car with him to drive to Weaverville where my grandparents lived. It was a little town in Trinity County about 45 miles over a mountain from Redding. He drove a stick-shift Chevy Luv pick-up and basically he'd sit in the drivers seat pushing the gas and brake pedals and I'd sit next to him steering and shifting gears - by the time I was 13 I was driving his truck all over the back roads of Weaverville. The trips were never that scary too me, although one time I did fall asleep and swerved off the road, but I think he was asleep too because he didn't notice until we actually hit the gravel. I still to this day can't imagine what my mother was thinking as she stood there in the doorway in her nightgown waving good-bye to us - her young son and his drunk uncle - but then again, she was probably drunk too when she went to bed so maybe she didn't even remember it until the next morning when she woke up.

When I was about 11 or 12 my mom and step-dad bought a new camera, a really nice one at the time. I was immediately interested in it and as luck would have it, I took really good pictures. I became the photographer and would have to be the one that took pictures at the family events. When my uncle found out I was interested in photography he called me up and invited me to Sacramento for a photo workshop. He had bought a new camera and decided that he was going to see for himself if I was any good so he went out and bought like 10 rolls of film. When I got there we spent 2 days driving all over Sacramento taking pictures of things. We even tried to do fancy things like "soft-focus" by rubbing Vaseline on his sliding glass door and taking pictures of the fountain outside. After I left he took the film in for processing and about a month later a package arrived at my house. Inside was this huge stack of pictures in order of how I took them. All through the stack there were notes with suggestions about composition or lighting, or praise about a photo that had turned out particularly good. That was just how he was - he was the only adult that ever encouraged me as a child to explore, to see things in a different way, to believe in myself and my talents, and he was the only one to take an interest in what I was interested in. I loved him because he let me be myself and loved me because I was me.

Unfortunately, there was another side to the story.

To be continued...