I Feel Love....

Today, June 22nd, is my belly-button birthday. I was born in the decade in which we fought and won WWII. I'm a boomer. I am not aging gracefully. My motto remains, "It's never too late to have a happy childhood."

But if anything, I am a child of the 70's. The disco era. I came out of the closet when I came out of the Navy. And I immediately started hitting places in Philadelphia with names like Oz, Allegro and The Steps, and places in New York like Barefoot Boy and Uncle Charley's.

This was pre-Studio 54.

Then I moved to Seattle. And in those days (by now it was 1976) if you wanted to dance in Seattle you either went to Shelley's Leg or the Boren Street Disco.

I went to both. I made a lot of dance friends. We had a great time. We loved Grace Jones and Sylvester and ABBA. But the Queen of Disco was her Majesty, Donna Sommers.

And for our money, this was the song that defined her and defined the era.

The Big Six-Oh

Let's just get this over with. I'll be 60 on Sunday.

There. I said it. 60.

Here's a recent photo:



This is how they count to 60 on Fire Island and in Provincetown and Rehoboth:

"57, 58, 59, ten-thousand..."

Gay people aren't supposed to live to be 60. If we're truly fabulous (and drunken sluts) we should die, fabulously, by the time we're 40 ... or 45 if you really stretch it.

So here are my weekend plans (and if you want to make God laugh, just tell her your plans):

Saturday:

7:00 a.m. drop off cleaning and dry-cleaning. pick up same from last week.
7:15 a.m. sit down with the Saturday NYTimes, a couple of trail-mix bars and a steaming cup of soon-to-be-a-thing-of-the-past coffee.
9:00 a.m. freshen up a great deal.
10:00 a.m. attend a 12-Step meeting (with my sponsor) in Princeton
11:30 a.m. haircut in Princeton at "La Jolie" or, as I call it, "La Faggy."
12:15 p.m. pick up a new air conditioner for the living room at the Home Depot on Route 1.
(maybe a movie somewhere in here)
4:00 p.m. arrive at my sponsor's house so he, his wife and mother-in-law can take me out for a sober evening of turning 60. As opposed to how I'd LIKE to spend the evening.
10:00 p.m. bed

Sunday

All day Death Watch in bed; blinds closed; phone unplugged; giant bags of Ruffles potato chips and cases of flavored water from Tarjay, strewn about the room.

Monday

Old Age.

I feel better already.

Old Queens

When I got home last night there was a message on my answering machine from my (half)-brother. Our dad is in the hospital. He was delirious and suffering from dehydration (the two go hand-in-hand with the elderly) on Monday, had driven HIMSELF to the hospital (pain-in-the-ass-never-ask-for-help type that he, and the rest of us, is and are).

There is just he and my step-mom in the house. There's plenty of family within driving distance, however. My step-mom's mind is shot and she really shouldn't be left alone. Dad had sense enough to get himself to the emergency room. However, he did not have sense enough (or time enough) to drop her someplace where she'd be safe -- from herself and others. So she was left home, alone.

Although he's 83, he'll probably be fine. This time. But the time is coming when "something" will "have to be done about" them both.

I have a half-sister and half-brother. Dad is really more their dad than mine. Aside from the sperm donation he didn't really have anything to do with me until I was an adult. That wasn't his "fault" (my birth mom was a vindictive, hateful bitch, not to put too fine a point on it), but we don't have a typical father-son dynamic in our relationship. We're more like cordial friends. We certainly don't feel obligated towards each other for anything. Or, at least, I don't.

And that's why I think that they are more my half-siblings problem than mine. Nobody helped me with my birth mom when the time came for me to become her legal guardian and to commit her to a nursing home. I had to walk through that pretty much alone. With an expensive law-firm in Wilmington, Delaware. My mom didn't have any friends at the end of her life, and she'd blown through about five husbands. Nobody wanted anything to do with her -- but it fell to the "dutiful son (me!)" to see to it that she was cared for. If you call old-age hell-holes "care."

So, forgive me for wanting to keep a polite distance from the current familial drama.

However, this coming on top of "H"'s death last week has left me even more distanced from life than usual. And it's not helping matters that this coming Sunday

I__T_U_R_N__S_I_X_T_Y

Is it any wonder, then, that I occasionally lapse into thinking "Please God, just let me die peacefully in my sleep Saturday night"?

At least I'll look pretty good. I'm getting my hair done Saturday morning.

And my friends, L&M, are taking me out for a birthday dinner Saturday night.

Come to think of it, things are actually pretty good right now.

But come Sunday, if I live that long, I, like the late lamented Quentin Crisp, will officially become

One of the Stately Homos of America!

Getting On

It's my penultimate birthday before the big "Six-Oh."

I am officially decades older than I ever thought I would be. I have severely mixed feelings about having achieved (?) this venerable age. Mostly my feelings revolve around small arms and household poisons and wondering where I can obtain both.

Sometime in my late teens, probably around the age of 17 or so, I was so unhappy with life that I remember being awakened from a violent dream one night in which I was being shot to death at the age of 30, I'd be "done in." My "killer" in the dream was a jealous lover. I thought it was very glamorous and dramatic to be killed in one's prime by a jealous boyfriend.

Keep in mind that at the ripe old age of 17 I'd never had a boyfriend and, because it was 1965, I wasn't even sure what a boyfriend was... but I knew that a) I wanted one and b) I wanted to die at his hands while I was still young and beautiful (stifle yourselves).

Flash forward to the age of 41. Two weeks after that unremarkable birthday I had a massive coronary on the evening of one of the hottest days ever recorded in New York.

I lived (obviously), but only barely. For at least another decade and a half I was sure that God hated me so He kept me alive. For that decade and a half I smoked like a chimney and drank like a fish. I wanted to be more right than God. I was jealous that I wasn't God. I hated God because I wasn't Him. I hated God because I was still alive.

Then I got sober 90 days before my 50th birthday. I never told a soul, not even my 12-Step sponsor, that it was my birthday. I believe I was in court having my license suspended for six months that day. It was a great way to spend my 50th birthday! I was paying my debt to society, starting to clean up the wreckage of the past, and moving out of my drunken life into my new, sober one.

I have continued, for the last decade, to keep this date quiet from all of my new friends and acquaintences. Fortunately for me, most of my old friends, and what little remains of my family, have nearly completely forgotten my birthday.

Look, I have this theory that there's an age beyond which you should just get over the fact that people forget your birthday.

That age is 7.