Sunday, March 25, 2007
Tales of Spring Break
I realized earlier this weekend that spring break had come and gone without my usual (or at least, every other year or so) spring break vintage reading review. The realization hit me as I was on the way up to the attic to find a copy of Tales of the City, which I had a sudden and powerful urge to read again, for no apparent reason. Or maybe it was because it felt like spring.
Let me backtrack nearly 20 years.
When I went home from college for my last spring break, in 1988, I was discouraged, disheartened, and depressed. I was two months from graduating with no job prospects and really, no idea what I was going to do after graduation. I was on the outs with most of my friends for various reasons, and to top it all off, I was taking classes in Existentialism and creative writing. Let me tell you, there is nothing quite so angst-ridden as an already-depressed 21-year-old reading Sartre and Camus and then trying to write POETRY under deadline and for a grade.
I turned to my tiny school's version of "professional help" (a church-based counseling center that was on campus, but not actually affiliated with the school), where I was put into group therapy with a bunch of people in their 30s and 40s, most of whom were dealing with issues of divorce, drug addiction, alcoholism, or some combination of the three. Since it wasn't a school service, I had to pay for it out of pocket, so I took a job at a fast-food taco place, where I had to wear a ruffled polyester apron and matching headscarf.
Every Wednesday evening I'd go across campus just after dark and grudgingly hand over too much of the money I had earned upselling Bueno Platters and sifting rocks out of the pinto beans (no, really), and then I'd sit and listen patiently while a guy who wrangled exotic ungulates at the zoo for a living ranted about his ex-wife. Then a woman who was going through about her third attempt at recovery from prescription drug addiction went on about the "man shortage" (remember that?) and whether she'd ever get married, and a divorcing couple in their 60s who seemed bewildered about the whole situation, including why they were there, had two completely disparate conversations, supposedly with each other. It always felt like the evening was never going to end, but eventually it did, and we'd all join hands and say some kind of generic knockoff of the Serenity Prayer. I'd go home and stay awake all night, thinking about what I was going to do when I got out of college and wondering if any of my friends were ever going to talk to me again.
So actually, going home for spring break was kind of a relief, except that once I was there, my mother expected me to look for a job. In my hometown. Where I would live with her. By Tuesday I had invented a term paper due after the break and told her I was spending every day at the library, and then I didn't have anything better to do, so I actually DID end up spending every day at the library.
But.
My high school friend (and prom date) Peter* had come out to me just the year before, and ever since then we had had a marvelous time every time we were together. We had been rather close in high school, but there's a limit to how close two naturally reserved people who are keeping major secrets from each other can be. Then the summer after our sophomore year in college we went out one night and stood by the river looking out at the lights and he told me his secret, and it all fell into place. The next year we both dated freshmen at our respective universities, and when we arranged to all get together it turned out that our boyfriends had been best friends in high school, which was a little strange at the time, but by the following year we had broken up with them, or they had broken up with us, or whatever, and we were just a couple of sadder-but-wiser old chums.
One night that spring break, I told my mother that Peter and I were going out to play pool, just like we had always done in high school (except that in high school, we really WERE going out to play pool). I went over to his apartment, changed into my white Guess? miniskirt and sprayed my hair mostly horizontal (Hey! 1988!), and we went out to one of his favorite bars, a dive that had a name like "Roughnecks" or "Wildcats" or some such oilfield-related moniker. We played pool (so I hadn't totally lied to my mother). The bartender sent over a round of root beer schnapps every time Peter bent over to take a shot. We had a great time, didn't pay for a drink all night, and he even got a couple of phone numbers, as I recall. And then we went back to his apartment, where I changed back into clothes that looked like I'd just been playing pool, and he loaned me a book.
The book he loaned me was Tales of the City, by Armistead Maupin. It's the story of 24-year-old Mary Ann Singleton, who moves from Cleveland to San Francisco in 1976 to begin her life. She moves into an apartment house run by a landlady who is more than she seems, and meets a lot of people she never would have met back in Cleveland. It's a quick and entertaining read, and it stands up well; I read it again this weekend and it still evokes San Francisco in the '70s for me. I had to restrain myself from reading the rest of the series, which is also up in the attic on the shelf (except for Sure of You, the last book in the series, in which, IIRC, everybody but the straight woman turns out to be a nice person. She turns out to be an ice-cold bitch who's just been waiting to screw over everybody else. That one I loaned out and didn't care if I ever got back [and I didn't], but now I'd like to read it again to see if my perception of that was wrong at the time it came out. The intervening years might shed a different light on it, or I might just read it differently this time.).
The Tales of the City series was the first--and the only--discussion of AIDS that I found in the media that actually reflected what I saw of the epidemic. I knew people who had it, I knew people who died with it, including two relatives. I heard the crazy theories of people who didn't know anything about it(for example, when my cousin was cremated, someone asked me if that was the law, for health reasons--yes, because WE LIVE IN THE 13TH CENTURY. HELLO!). I worried about my friend Stan*, who got tested every six months because he just couldn't go a full year without something happening that resulted in unsafe sex--a broken condom, a perfect moment, he was just too drunk to care, whatever. Another friend went to 11 funerals in less than a year.
The things we all talked about, the way we talked about it, or around it ("Did you hear? Danny is sick.")--those things predated Philadelphia and Real World San Francisco, but they were in the Tales of the City books. Out in the middle of the godforsaken Heartland, my friends and I needed somebody to give us the language to talk about it, to connect what was happening in our little circle with what was happening on a larger scale, to share the human aspect we were already seeing, and you just didn't get that from the statistics some worried-looking news anchor read on the evening news about how many cases had been reported in our county.
But that was later. That first time I read Tales of the City, right after spring break in my senior year in college, what it gave me was hope. I got the barest glimmer that yes, there was life out there. I could move to San Francisco. Hell, I could move to New York! I knew I wasn't going to, but at least I had an idea that I could if I really wanted to. I could find a neat apartment and some quirky, fun friends and buy secondhand furniture and thrift-store dishes and go places and see things. And that was what I needed during that particular spring break: just a glimpse of another world, another life, a possibility I hadn't considered, something fun and interesting just around the corner, a beginning instead of an end. Of course it didn't snap me out of it completely; that took nearly a year and a move back home and then, finally, the leap, which felt like jumping out of a moving car and landing on my feet. But it got me started, and also gave me something to do with the money I saved by dropping out of the therapy group: buy more Tales of the City books.
* Not his real name
Let me backtrack nearly 20 years.
When I went home from college for my last spring break, in 1988, I was discouraged, disheartened, and depressed. I was two months from graduating with no job prospects and really, no idea what I was going to do after graduation. I was on the outs with most of my friends for various reasons, and to top it all off, I was taking classes in Existentialism and creative writing. Let me tell you, there is nothing quite so angst-ridden as an already-depressed 21-year-old reading Sartre and Camus and then trying to write POETRY under deadline and for a grade.
I turned to my tiny school's version of "professional help" (a church-based counseling center that was on campus, but not actually affiliated with the school), where I was put into group therapy with a bunch of people in their 30s and 40s, most of whom were dealing with issues of divorce, drug addiction, alcoholism, or some combination of the three. Since it wasn't a school service, I had to pay for it out of pocket, so I took a job at a fast-food taco place, where I had to wear a ruffled polyester apron and matching headscarf.
Every Wednesday evening I'd go across campus just after dark and grudgingly hand over too much of the money I had earned upselling Bueno Platters and sifting rocks out of the pinto beans (no, really), and then I'd sit and listen patiently while a guy who wrangled exotic ungulates at the zoo for a living ranted about his ex-wife. Then a woman who was going through about her third attempt at recovery from prescription drug addiction went on about the "man shortage" (remember that?) and whether she'd ever get married, and a divorcing couple in their 60s who seemed bewildered about the whole situation, including why they were there, had two completely disparate conversations, supposedly with each other. It always felt like the evening was never going to end, but eventually it did, and we'd all join hands and say some kind of generic knockoff of the Serenity Prayer. I'd go home and stay awake all night, thinking about what I was going to do when I got out of college and wondering if any of my friends were ever going to talk to me again.
So actually, going home for spring break was kind of a relief, except that once I was there, my mother expected me to look for a job. In my hometown. Where I would live with her. By Tuesday I had invented a term paper due after the break and told her I was spending every day at the library, and then I didn't have anything better to do, so I actually DID end up spending every day at the library.
But.
My high school friend (and prom date) Peter* had come out to me just the year before, and ever since then we had had a marvelous time every time we were together. We had been rather close in high school, but there's a limit to how close two naturally reserved people who are keeping major secrets from each other can be. Then the summer after our sophomore year in college we went out one night and stood by the river looking out at the lights and he told me his secret, and it all fell into place. The next year we both dated freshmen at our respective universities, and when we arranged to all get together it turned out that our boyfriends had been best friends in high school, which was a little strange at the time, but by the following year we had broken up with them, or they had broken up with us, or whatever, and we were just a couple of sadder-but-wiser old chums.
One night that spring break, I told my mother that Peter and I were going out to play pool, just like we had always done in high school (except that in high school, we really WERE going out to play pool). I went over to his apartment, changed into my white Guess? miniskirt and sprayed my hair mostly horizontal (Hey! 1988!), and we went out to one of his favorite bars, a dive that had a name like "Roughnecks" or "Wildcats" or some such oilfield-related moniker. We played pool (so I hadn't totally lied to my mother). The bartender sent over a round of root beer schnapps every time Peter bent over to take a shot. We had a great time, didn't pay for a drink all night, and he even got a couple of phone numbers, as I recall. And then we went back to his apartment, where I changed back into clothes that looked like I'd just been playing pool, and he loaned me a book.
The book he loaned me was Tales of the City, by Armistead Maupin. It's the story of 24-year-old Mary Ann Singleton, who moves from Cleveland to San Francisco in 1976 to begin her life. She moves into an apartment house run by a landlady who is more than she seems, and meets a lot of people she never would have met back in Cleveland. It's a quick and entertaining read, and it stands up well; I read it again this weekend and it still evokes San Francisco in the '70s for me. I had to restrain myself from reading the rest of the series, which is also up in the attic on the shelf (except for Sure of You, the last book in the series, in which, IIRC, everybody but the straight woman turns out to be a nice person. She turns out to be an ice-cold bitch who's just been waiting to screw over everybody else. That one I loaned out and didn't care if I ever got back [and I didn't], but now I'd like to read it again to see if my perception of that was wrong at the time it came out. The intervening years might shed a different light on it, or I might just read it differently this time.).
The Tales of the City series was the first--and the only--discussion of AIDS that I found in the media that actually reflected what I saw of the epidemic. I knew people who had it, I knew people who died with it, including two relatives. I heard the crazy theories of people who didn't know anything about it(for example, when my cousin was cremated, someone asked me if that was the law, for health reasons--yes, because WE LIVE IN THE 13TH CENTURY. HELLO!). I worried about my friend Stan*, who got tested every six months because he just couldn't go a full year without something happening that resulted in unsafe sex--a broken condom, a perfect moment, he was just too drunk to care, whatever. Another friend went to 11 funerals in less than a year.
The things we all talked about, the way we talked about it, or around it ("Did you hear? Danny is sick.")--those things predated Philadelphia and Real World San Francisco, but they were in the Tales of the City books. Out in the middle of the godforsaken Heartland, my friends and I needed somebody to give us the language to talk about it, to connect what was happening in our little circle with what was happening on a larger scale, to share the human aspect we were already seeing, and you just didn't get that from the statistics some worried-looking news anchor read on the evening news about how many cases had been reported in our county.
But that was later. That first time I read Tales of the City, right after spring break in my senior year in college, what it gave me was hope. I got the barest glimmer that yes, there was life out there. I could move to San Francisco. Hell, I could move to New York! I knew I wasn't going to, but at least I had an idea that I could if I really wanted to. I could find a neat apartment and some quirky, fun friends and buy secondhand furniture and thrift-store dishes and go places and see things. And that was what I needed during that particular spring break: just a glimpse of another world, another life, a possibility I hadn't considered, something fun and interesting just around the corner, a beginning instead of an end. Of course it didn't snap me out of it completely; that took nearly a year and a move back home and then, finally, the leap, which felt like jumping out of a moving car and landing on my feet. But it got me started, and also gave me something to do with the money I saved by dropping out of the therapy group: buy more Tales of the City books.
* Not his real name
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