Authors: Fay Jacobs
Fried & True (12 page)
July 2004
LETTERS FROM CAMP REHOBOTH
My partner Bonnie did a brave, tough, loving thing last week. She played the slots with her mother. Okay, you have to know the history to understand the depth of this gesture. My mother-in-law is an unrepentant gambling addict.
For the better part of Bonnie's 50-something years and the entirety of our 22 year relationship, we've been yanking Mom out of various casinos and bingo parlorsâoften just a step ahead of the mortgage man.
Now it's tough enough for gay people to deal with family baggage related to our sexual orientation, but add addiction to the mix and you have bona fide American Tourister.
For my part, I couldn't understand what was so bad about bingo. It's a game we played in school. What????
Then Bonnie took me to the bingo hall. No church basement this. Lights flashed, bells went off and a herd of Winston-puffing gamblers sat glued to their cards, some playing 48 games simultaneously. I was so inept I couldn't even manage one game card efficiently. Mom, and the 85-year old woman to my left could dab their total of 96 cards with the permanent marker digit dabber and then swoop in to mark mine before I realized my number had been called. I couldn't even get out of their way in time to avoid having my forearms dabbed like a Jackson Pollack canvas.
Permanently marked in bright colors, I watched the bingo-mania give way to the next phase of the evening: the unfortunately named ripoffs. These are instant games where you rip off five tabs to see if you've won. The bingo mavens rushed the ripoff counter, pitched large bills at the clerk and commenced ripping numbers like crazed pigeons pecking seed. Winners traded winning tickets for more ripoffs, losers shed the debris on the floor. By night's end, nobody had any money as we
waded knee deep in cardboard toward the exits. I was beginning to understand the problem.
Next we heard that Mom went on a Bingo Busâa five-day tour from Maryland to South Carolina and back, stopping for a chance at big jackpots at all the hot bingo mills en route. All I can say is that by the time bingo Mom and the other gaming nuts got back, they'd gambled non-stop for days, sitting on the bus or in bingo parlors with their ankles swelling like soccer balls. For five days, nobody wanted to miss a G-18 to go potty. Yuck.
But it was the time we opened our credit card bill to find it speckled with charges from Glen Burnie Bingo World that the poop hit the propeller. After a text-book intervention, the requisite crying and teeth gnashing, followed by the eventual acceptance of consequences, we all wound up at Gamblers Anonymous.
Bonnie and I joined the GamAnon family sessions. Personally, I think the gamblers were all in a room trading tip sheets while we entertained ourselves with sob stories of the pissed and penniless.
Actually, I think Bonnie and I were the entertainment, since the group couldn't figure out how we were all related. “Oh, you are so lucky to have a best friend accompany you here⦔ I'm pretty sure we were the only lesbians they'd ever encountered, and I'm positive I was their first Jew.
Be that as it may, life continued with Mom on the wagon occasionally and back on the bingo bus more often than not. But, as they say, life is what happens when you have other plans. Five years ago Mom was diagnosed with ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease.
The disease is as cruel and as powerful as addiction. Combine the two and you have a woman who has trouble walking, talking and swallowing but who can con her equally elderly neighbor into taking her to play bingo three nights a week.
Necessity forced Mom to move to an assisted living facility and when she could no longer gamble, things got really ugly.
One night Mom mounted her mobility scooter, crashed through the nursing home doors and headed for that neighborly getaway car waiting to take the fugitive to the bingo hall. She was apprehended in the parking lot. You gotta laugh. I think.
Now I know many gay people who have had to take care of aging parents who had often made their children's lives hell because of sexual orientation issues. But in the end, whether the parents came to terms with their gay children, or were merely senile enough not to remember the family schisms, lots of relationships were pasted back together before, or just as, it was too late.
In Bonnie's case, her Mom was failing fast, refusing to be fed through her tube, resisting anything to help herself, and generally giving up.
Bonnie showed up at the nursing home and said to Mom, “If you don't eat, how will you have strength to go to the Slots at Charlestown?” The patient lit up, furiously punched the bell for the nurse to get her dressed and off they went.
While Mom could hardly move or sit up in her wheelchair, she knew which slot machines she wanted and which were unacceptable. Finally, at the very perfect machine, twenty bucks in quarters got swallowed before Mom started to tire. Then, the old lady strained to push the button on the one armed bandit one last time and bang! She hit for a sizeable jackpot.
“I never thought I'd do this again,” Mom scribbled on her note pad, her only means of communication. “Love U.”
Acceptance, forgiveness, amnesty. It works both ways. We should all be so lucky.
June 2004
LETTERS FROM CAMP REHOBOTH
Just in case
Letters from CAMP Rehoboth
was thinking of conducting a readership survey, I'm here to say they shouldn't bother. Letters has a huge readership. I know this because following my column about my getting my ankle tattooed, I had hundreds of people, many of them complete strangers, come up to me, asking me to prove that I actually got the tattoo.
This resulted in my having to stand on one foot while lifting the tattooed ankle high enough for people to see my seahorse body art. I fell over a lot. If we happened to have the conversation by a fire hydrant I looked like a urinating Schnauzer. It was not my most graceful week, but I can certify to a vast readership.
And speaking of vast readership, the good news is that I was recently asked to pen a column for the national GLBT magazine
The Advocate
.
Time out here: readers, do you know the meaning of the acronym GLBT? A straight friend of mine thought it was a sandwich, “I'll have a GLBT on pumpernickel toast, please.” Actually, GLBT stands for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender, the diversity of our “gay” community.
So the good GLBT news was that I was asked to write a national column. This was also the bad news, since I was asked to come up with ideas for a suitable topic in three days. No pressure.
The magazine was trying out new writers for a possible rotating spot writing the back page essay. Think Andrew Sullivan, Michaelangelo Signorelli. Urvashi Vaid. Serious writers. Very humbling.
While the editors had read excerpts from my book and decided they liked “my voice,” they gave me the impression that my usual skewed look at life, liberty and the pursuit of column
fodder was a little too cavalier for their gay news publication. They wanted something more weighty and erudite. Kinda like that play
I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change
.
I toyed with writing about scientist Steven Hawking's shocking admission that he miscalculated black holes and they don't swallow matter into the great abyss after all, but I had no idea what the hell he was talking about.
I tinkered with the latest findings of the food police, who just announced that certain vegetables, like broccoli and spinach may help older women keep their brains sharper. I began expounding on the theory but couldn't concentrate. Somebody find me an asparagus spear.
Taking a cue from all the writing coaches I ever had, I decided to pitch them stories about two things I am comfortable covering: the gay marriage debate and the upcoming elections. Before I could get the first sentence down on paper I got an e-mail from the editor requesting story ideas on anything but gay marriage and Kerry-Edwards. Kill me now.
Stymied, I knew my traditional methods of vetting column ideas wouldn't work. Stories arising from everyday disasters at home (“Lawnmower falls from pick-up truck”) were too mundane, ideas from weird internet stories (“Nude man covered with nacho cheese arrested.”) were too silly, and great, big, ponderous social issues were really out of my league.
After two hours of staring at my computer screen and coming up with not so much as a paragraph I gave up. Hell, it was only a chance to write for a national publication. No big deal. Auuugggghhhh!!!!!!
I turned on the TV. There, before my eyes was a commentator discussing gay rights legislation, along with film of two menopausal middle-aged lesbians feeding each other wedding cake. “Gee,” I said to Bonnie, “remember when the only pictures of gay people on TV were parading drag queens and dour dykes on bikes? Things have really changed.”
Bing
.
So I proceeded to write a column pointing out the incredible
change in the televised image of gay people over the past decade. I had a grand time, noting that once there were only disco bunnies and bull dykes on the screen no matter what the topic.
Part of the column questioned why mainstream media didn't go out of their way to show the diversity within the gay community. “After all, the far right has a huge investment in demonizing us and it wouldn't have served their nefarious purpose to make movies about middle aged women purchasing antacids at K Mart or handsome young men delivering Meals on Wheels.”
Hey, CBS, CNN and the rest. Earth to networks: Homosexuals are not homogenized. All heterosexuals are not members of Hell's Angels or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. All gay men don't wear thongs or Vera Wang. All lesbians can't dive under your hood and rebuild your carburetor. There are eight million stories in the naked city and not all of them are naked.”
I went on to talk about the improving image of gays on television, saying it was about time, and being very glad for the adjustment. My entire theory was that the change was good. As a zinger at the end of the column I added a line about hoping the news outlets would still humor me once in a while with a shot of a bare-breasted parade marcher. Made my point, end of column. Finito.
I e-mailed the column to the editor, nervously awaiting a reply, my nationwide writing career hanging in the balance.
The next day I got a note back. The editor chopped my essay to bits, and told me it was a good start. He loved the last line and said I should expand on that theory. What does it mean for our community to have normalized images of gays on TV? Is this good or bad for our identities and should we be worried?
Worried? What worried me was that the editor pretty much eviscerated my story and wanted me to fill in with a theory I'd never really considered.
Okay, what does this new image of GLBT people in the news mean? Hmmmm. Is it a totally good thing? The editor got me thinking. So I gave his premise a whirl, argued both sides of the question and added back a couple of my favorite axed lines.
By the next day I heard from the editor again, with word that the column was just what they were looking for and that it will be published August 17. Go figure.
In the meantime, for the record, despite what I say in
The Advocate
, I think it's pretty swell that images of gay people on TV have improved a heck of a lot. And while there may be lots of gay people who still prefer to be seen as social renegades, I'm quite happy to see our community viewed for all its diversity, thank you.
So I guess my writing style has been broadened by this experience. I learned I can be more flexible. Although I don't think you'll find me being more argumentative or weighty (unless it's a column on the
South Beach Diet
) in these pages. But I hope I get another swipe at that kind of thing on a national level.
But take it from me. I really love our new TV images. It's about time.