The Line

"Okay, I'm done. Let's get out of here."

Mark's famous last shopping words. It lifts my spirits to hear, so I look over to the checkout lines. Five cashiers, short to no lines, perfect timing.

"Wait here..." Mark tells me, "I have to go get one more thing."

Aaaaaaargh! The very predictable, I need one more thing, line from Mark. Every damn week he does this to me. I would go get in line to check out, but I've been here before. He never gets back in time and it is embarrassing. So I wait just outside the checkout area. I wait, and I wait as more and more shoppers roll on up to the cashiers and long lines form. Finally Mark arrives.

"Okay, there's a short line down there. Follow me, Mark."

We rush down to the short line and as I start putting our purchases on the counter, the cashier snaps at me.

"This is the Express Lane sir. Fifteen items or less."

Sonofabitch. So I return our stuff to the cart and look for another line. Ah, ha. Two cashiers down is the shortest, so I wrangle our cart and Mark over there. The lady in front of us has only about twenty things in her cart, the guy ahead of her has what looks like even fewer things. But no, something is wrong. The manager is at the end of the counter. He's grabbing things off the counter next to us and putting them on our counter. Thing after thing, moved over to our counter. The computer on the next lane has crashed and now we have to wait while they move everything over. Sonofabitch. I look around. All the other lanes now have long lines, so we stay. If only Mark didn't need that 'one last thing'. Finally the manager has all the groceries from the other lane moved over and the man who is purchasing them sticks his card into the little keypad. The cashier stops scanning items and looks up.

"I'm sorry sir, but you can't pay for this item with an EBT card."

Another snag. A long conversation ensues. I look over and in every other line, the people who were two or three back from us are now getting their items bagged and are leaving. Meanwhile, we haven't moved an inch. I don't know why, but I am the worst judge of checkout lines ever.

Keys to the Kingdom

One of our favorite restaurants is the sushi place around the corner from our house. It's within walking distance, if you consider one half block within walking distance, but we drive. Seriously, we drive one half block. The drive actually takes us two blocks out of the way because of the one way streets. You see, on foot we would have to cross a busy four lane street at rush hour to get there. As pedestrians we are nothing more than a meat target for the morons in a hurry to get home. So I drive. Last night I led the way out to our garage, with Mark behind me. I unlocked the garage door, then the car, and we drove off to Pride Sushi. After a bottle of chardonnay, fried octopus balls, crab rangoon, and two plates of sushi, it was time to go home. I pulled into the garage, got out of the car, locked up the garage door, then reached for the keys to the house. No keys. I keep my car keys and my house keys on two different key chains for this very reason.

"Mark, I can't find the keys to the house." I cried as I patted down every inch of my clothing and checked every nook and cranny.

"Waaaa.... you asshole. You do this every time.... waaaaa"

"Right, I purposely lost my house keys. why don't you have yours?"

"You idiot... "

"Seriously, you're not helping things. So if I were you, I would just shut the fu...."

"Waaaa... I have to pee.... Open the damn door..."

Only one thing to do. I ran back over to the sushi restaurant. No I didn't drive back. Instead I ran over there, crossing Peterson Avenue, cursing at the rush hour traffic, throwing up my middle finger at the drivers as they careened towards me. Nobody stopped as I ran Frogger like across the street. I entered the restaurant and looked for my keys in the booth where I was sitting, then I looked on the floor. Nothing. No keys. Meanwhile everybody in the place was trying to help, moving chairs and crawling around under tables. No keys. So I returned home, got the big ladder out of the garage, and climbed into the house through the bedroom window. The bedroom window has a fan in it. I pushed the fan in, dropping it on the floor. The dogs immediately went crazy. Good dogs, very good dogs. If I were a burglar, I would have shit my pants. Anyway, I shimmied in through the window, out the back door, down the porch steps, and opened up the porch door for Mark. He sashayed in without a word. After returning the big ladder to the garage, I walked back to the house. Cursing and spitting angry, I was looking down. There, a few inches off of the sidewalk, were my keys laying in the grass. Apparently I had dropped them before we had even got into the car to go eat. Well goddamnitsonofabitch.

The Capri Pants Gave it Away

Let me say right here at the start of this post that I am not looking. Mark and I are just fine.

Fifty years ago I couldn't wait to get the hell out of Tinley Park. Suburbia was a vast wasteland for a young gay man. So I packed up my crap, loaded up the VW hippie van, and moved into Chicago. There I found a nice little apartment near Clark and Diversey, Chicago's gay neighborhood at the time. It was so gay you couldn't take out the garbage without bumping into another gay man. There were three gay bars within one block of my apartment, and as a pizza delivery man I got propositioned almost every night. It seemed that some men who were ordering pizza had more than just an appetite for cheese and sausage. Hmmm.... now that I think about it. Anyway, I had moved from the drab suburbs to the center of the gay universe that summer. Over the years I have made friends with a number of people who live out in the suburbs. Gay men embracing the suburban life that I hated. I have often wondered how they did it? What was out there for them? I couldn't figure it out. Forward fifty years and I am out in Tinley Park visiting Mom. Mark is with me and he begs me to take him to the HomeGoods Store out there. Something about their having a better selection than the store in Chicago. So we stop there before visiting Mom and I make a bee line for the bathroom. Fifty miles of driving has shaken every drop of liquid to my bladder. When I'm done and leaving the bathroom I notice a man in an orange tee shirt and shorts right by the door. I wander through HomeGoods looking for Mark. I turn left, there's the man in the orange tee shirt. I stop in the pet supply area. I look up and there he is again. Still looking for Mark, I go over to the kitchen aisles. Mark is looking for vanilla extract and when he sees me, he enlists my help. So I wander down the aisle to ask an employee if she can point me to the vanilla extract. It turned out that they did not have vanilla extract. What they did have was a man in an orange tee shirt following me around that store. That's when I noticed the attractive young man with bleached blonde hair, wearing denim capri pants. I suddenly realize that the two men are not shopping. I wander around a bit more while Mark shops and no matter where I am, there they are. Like sharks circling their prey. My gaydar, now honed by fifty plus years of living in gay neighborhoods, is pinned to 'very gay'. So this is where suburban gay men look for other suburban gay men, HomeGoods. And then I thought about it a little more and wondered, was Grindr not working today?

Lessons in Bike Riding, Gym Class, and Porn. From My Youth

It’s amazing how children are protected these days. They have to wear helmets when they ride their bikes, making them look dorky. I guess if all the other kids look dorky, it really isn't that bad. At school, competitive games in gym class are discouraged. I guess they don't want kids to learn about winning and losing. And then there is sex. Parent’s think they’ve protected the kids from porn with apps, but trust me, they are like little Einstein’s when it comes to getting around things like that. I'm sure parents all have good intentions. I'm just glad I'm not one of them.

When I was a kid, I learned a real lesson not to ride my bike at breakneck speed around a corner with gravel in the middle of it. It was dinner time and I heard my mom ringing the cow bell half a mile away, so I had to get home in a hurry. (That's another story, my mom and the cow bell she used to summon us.) Anyway, I slid twenty feet on my face through that gravel and was late for dinner that evening. In middle school I also learned about dodgeball and justice from Mr. Kostecki our gym teacher. During gym class one kid pulled another boys shorts down as a joke. Yes we all laughed. Mr. Kostecki our gym teacher did not. Mr. Kostecki made the offender play the rest of the dodgeball game in his jock strap. He was placed in the middle of the dodgeball circle and he had to stay there no matter how many times we hit him. By the time we were done his ass cheeks were rosy red. As far as porn for kids, in the 1950’s there was no internet. We had Paul, the neighbor kid down the street. He apparently knew all of his dad’s hiding places. I’ll never forget the deck of porno playing cards his dad had. Especially the joker.

Margaritaville

You would think that growing up with ten brothers and sisters I would be able to live with only one other person in the house. The truth is that ten siblings will make you quite happy to live all alone when you grow up. Sometimes I just want everything to be quiet and Mark can make that difficult. Every once in awhile he will move on up behind me and scare the living shit out of me. Not on purpose. I will be so relaxed and into my own thing that all he has to do is say something and I jump out of my skin. He has a very loud voice that breaks the quiet of the moment, and startles me. And then there is this thing he does where he sits three rooms away and screams across the house for me to bring him something. A snack, a soda, a margarita, something like that. Once again, living alone would make that go away. But that's not going to happen. I am stuck with loud Mark, and two dogs who like to go out at odd moments.

Saturday I was up in Evanston, Illinois and I came across  a used stereo component shop. Back in the olden days everybody had component stereo systems. One piece would be a tuner so we could listen to the radio, another would be a turntable for records, another would be a tape deck, and in later days a CD player. If you are under twenty years old, Google those things. Anyway, I have had that whole bunch of components sitting in my office now for three years. The main piece that you plug everything into broke and rendered them useless. So I wandered into that stereo shop and walked out ten minutes later with what I needed to make all my stuff work. Now I can sit back with my headphones on, crank that stereo up loud, and ignore everything around me. It's as if I live all by myself, in my own little world. I can't hear a thing other than my music. Mark can get his own margarita.

Tornado Boy

Back in 1956 we didn't have tornado warnings like they do now. In August of that year, I was six years old and watching my brother and his friends play baseball in the park. While sitting there I noticed a strange cloud formation that stretched from high in the sky all the way down to the ground. I was fascinated by the way it moved and the way all kinds of junk seemed to fly up where ever it went. It was a tornado, and it was ripping through our town  just three blocks from where I was sitting. After a few moments of quietly watching it I finally said to my brother, "What is that?"  All I remember from that point on is flying through the air. Not because the tornado had picked me up, but because my older brother had grabbed me and was running full speed towards our house a full two blocks away. My brother apparently understood the danger of what was happening, because he didn't take the long way home. He cut straight through yards and over fences with me firmly in his grasp. Honestly I don't think my feet touched the ground once until we arrived at our house and we were all safely in the basement.

I don't think anyone was killed in that tornado, but I do know from that point on I learned to respect the power of nature. These days there are people who go on tornado hunting vacations, where a guide takes them across the Great Plains of the U.S.A. hoping to see a tornado. All I have to say about that is, what the hell is wrong with those people? Don't they know, all they have to do is buy a mobile home, park it near a corn field in Oklahoma, and wait. They'll see a tornado sooner or later.