I didn’t get to say a proper goodbye in the hospital—anyway not one I knew you could hear—so this one will just have to do.

What’s a proper goodbye? How do I do this?

Do I tell you how joyous my memories are of our travels and other adventures?

Do I tell you how sorry I am for all the times I made you cry?

Do I tell you how much I wish you hadn’t been feeling bad these last few months, and how I wish I could have snapped my fingers and brought you back to good health, to comfort?

Do I tell you I’ll be OK?

I do think a lot—with immense joy—about all the places we’ve been, and then I think about all the places we planned to go.

What am I going to do without you?

I’m sorry I never learned how to fold a fitted sheet. You were the expert and I never tried very hard to figure it out. The same with fondue: You’re the master, and while I suppose I can learn how to do it it won’t be any fun.

About our adventures…

I think about driving from Houston to Toronto and back, only to run out of gas a mile from home. Or the sightseeing flight in Toronto, where the pilot let you have the controls but took the wheel back when he realized the reference point you were aiming at was the CN Tower.

I think about our 12 hours together in Tokyo, when I went for work and you came separately. To get the good airfare you arrived a day ahead of me and slept on the floor of a family-run inn, and then you went home a day after I got there.

I think of all the wonderful meals we had in 25 states, 10 countries and four continents. I think of all the meals we made at home, both for ourselves and for the guests at our countless dinner parties. People have been telling me how special those events were. You and I were very good at creating connections among our friends, and that’s a great part of our legacy.

The alarm on your phone goes off at 7:30 every day and I love hearing it. Maybe one day I’ll turn it off, or maybe one day I won’t have your phone at all. But not now and not soon.

I miss you terribly. I miss telling you I ran into somebody we know. I miss showing you funny memes even if they made you groan. I miss asking you what your MFA words mean.

I miss touching your hand across the emergency brake. I miss squeezing your shoulders when you got into bed.

I miss watching a movie and saying about an actor, “That guy was in such-and-such,” only to hear you snap, “Right now he’s in THIS. Watch THIS movie!”

I miss watching YouTube videos about Paris restaurants with you, thinking about our next trip.

In these last difficult weeks I would have understood if you’d groaned some, if you’d cursed your limited mobility, your pain. But you didn’t. What I saw in you was nobility. I admired you for it and you inspired me. I’ll remember it always.

I think you were embarrassed to ask for help lately with getting dressed and being driven to all those appointments, but I hope you believed me when I told you it was ok, that that’s what people who love each other do for each other. I felt honored to help you. Thank you for letting me.

After all, you took care of me plenty of times. After my HIV diagnosis and my suicide attempt you were my partner in recovery, never with resentment or bitterness. We got through it together. We got through things. That’s who we were.

So many people have said to me that while they hadn’t ever met you they knew how special you were simply because of all the times I’d told them how special you are. Funny but I never thought of having done that so much, but I suppose it’s natural, like breathing. Telling people what a great person you were came easily because it was always true.

I told you many times how proud I was of you for your wonderful work in the community. But since you’ve been gone I’ve been knocked out to realize just how many lives you touched. People have praised your generosity of time, advice and encouragement. One of the best compliments I heard was, “Calvin always showed up.” You showed up for festivals, meetings, conferences, panel discussions, group projects. You showed up everywhere. Calvin, I hope you knew what a big deal you were in our community. You were on the front page of the paper.

The nice people at Applebee’s are very upset by your absence. It’s jarring to them and so many others to see me without you. I don’t like being without you. Edwina called us a boxed set, which is as good a way as any to describe you and me.

My first response to difficulty was always fear. “This is terrible! What’ll we do? How do we fix this?” But it was you who always stayed calm and led us through those challenges.

Seeing you cry always tore me up when it was over something I’d done. But sometimes you’d cry over a song you’d heard. I never knew anyone who reacted so viscerally to beauty, and when you cried like that…it touched me as well.

I’m so glad I could hold your soft hand as you left the world, our world, my world.

I’m scared of the day I stop counting the days without you. I’m scared of the day I sleep normally again. I’m scared of when I don’t cry so much.

I don’t know how to do this, Calvin. I’m probably supposed to tell you not to worry about me, that I’ll be ok.

And maybe I will. I guess I will.

Goodbye, Calvin.

I loved you ever since the day in 1993 I asked if you were the one and you said yes. I loved being loved by you.

-Clay

As delicious as these morsels are, however, they are not my favorite part of the chicken. The delicacy I love most is harder to get at, especially without using your teeth. In the second segment of a chicken’s wing—its forearm, so to speak—are two bones, the radius and ulna, just as in us humans.

It’s what lies between these bones that excites me. The extonsor carpi ulnaris and extensor carpi radialis, which the bird uses to extend and retract his wingtips, are hardly bigger than matchsticks, and from a plate of wings you’ll get barely a mouthful. But though some excavation is required, the effort is worthwhile.

Keep your drumettes and give me your flats and I’ll be happy. I’ll nibble and gnaw my way past the skin and through the forearm’s outer musculature, pull away one of the bones with my teeth, and gleefully extract the bits in question. Those are what make chicken wings worth my time.

SPOILER AHEAD

The sex scenes have not undeservedly drawn a lot of attention, but late in the six-episode first season (a second has been confirmed), the story moves beyond secret trysts to something deeper. Shane and Ilya display and express feelings of tenderness and affection beyond the pure carnality that surfaced with a bang within the first few minutes of Episode 1.

Near the end of Episode 6, at Shane’s getaway house in the Canadian countryside—Ilya’s “I’m Coming to the Cottage” has become memeworthy—the two men are discovered in a PG-rated embrace by Shane’s father, who skedaddles. Shane and Ilya go to Shane’s parents’ house, where Shane spills the beans about himself and his relationship with Ilya. Shane’s parents reveal that they had suspected their son’s homosexuality, but until now he had acknowledged it only to a couple of people.

Here’s where the story stuck a knife in me. Shane tells his mother he had tried hard to change himself but couldn’t. His mom replies, “You have nothing to apologize for.” Shane had a hard time hearing it but his mother went on. “I’m sorry I made you feel like you couldn’t tell me.”

Through my tears my childhood rushed back to me.

I was a so-called sensitive child, which I took at the time to mean I didn’t play sports, I cried freely and I had a hard time expressing my feelings. My mom would try at times to draw out of me whatever had me upset or worried, and I can see all these years later her sitting next to me on my bed. Her speech was always the same.

“I want you to know you can always talk to me. You can come to me with anything.”

And then, again always the same: “Don’t ever tell me you’re homosexual, but other than that you can always talk to me.”

It never occurred to me until decades later, when I was in my forties, the effect my mother’s words had on me. And the realization hit only with the help of a therapist. Shrinks are usually pretty stoic; they want to help patients come to their own understanding of the things that make them who they are. But this time, the therapist’s eyes bugged out.

“Your mother said that to you?”

“Yeah. A bunch of times.” The significance hadn’t hit yet.

“Clay, don’t you see the effect that could have on a child?”

In one of those slap-on-the-forehead moments that make therapy so valuable, much of the puzzle of me began to piece together. As certain feelings developed in me—in middle school P.E. class, for example—I suppressed them. More accurately, the suppression took place in a deeply subconscious way. I learned much later, again in therapy, that whether I knew it or not these internal goings-on consumed considerable emotional energy that could otherwise have been devoted to the normal struggles that occupy a teenager’s life.  

How I wish that someone would have said to me what Shane’s mother said to him. My own coming-out at 21 or 22 was clumsy, conducted entirely by mail. Shane was clearly terrified when he said the words: “I’m gay.” But he had someone to let him off the hook. I didn’t, at least where my mother was concerned.

Mama is long gone so there’s nothing to work through with her. Maybe that’s why Heated Rivalry hit so hard, because it brought to the surface things I’ve preferred not to dwell on. But maybe at the same time what it’s made me feel isn’t so much regret for myself as optimism over how things can be.

Swan opens at 8; I arrived around 8:15 to find only a couple of stools vacant. If you get there much later there will be a line—there were a couple dozen people waiting when I left at 9:30—and if you arrive after noon, there’s a good chance you won’t make it in before they close at 2.

As I slurped my oysters, which came from Tomales Bay, an hour north of San Francisco, I remembered the first ones I ever ate. It was the fall of 1970 in San Antonio. I was nine.

The Kangaroo Court restaurant sat a couple of blocks from the Alamo and below street level, on the so-called River Walk. My parents and brother, and my grandparents in from Houston, sat outdoors.

We sat here

This was a lunch of firsts. I’d never heard of gazpacho but ordered it, possibly believing I was getting something akin to Campbell’s Cream of Tomato soup. It certainly wasn’t that but I liked it.

And then came Oysters Mornay. I knew very little about oysters but when I heard that Oysters Mornay involved cheese sauce I was sold. I probably would have been happy with a wadded-up paper towel in cheese sauce. And the oysters didn’t disappoint, but maybe it was just as well for that first ride that I could taste more cheese than oyster. And what do you know, a pearl! In the very first one! It was barely bigger than a BB but everyone expressed delight for me nonetheless. These days I’d be more worried about breaking a tooth than happy to find the pearl.

It was a great gift my folks gave me—letting me be adventurous when it came to restaurant menus—though maybe Mama’s dislike of, and lack of talent for, cooking contributed to their generosity. Mama didn’t much care what I ate as long as she didn’t have to cook it, and Daddy was happy not to be eating Mama’s food. He probably suspected that I shared his sentiment.

The meal wasn’t over, as I was allowed a piece of New York-style cheesecake. I enjoyed some familiarity by then with the plain Sara Lee version but I didn’t know what “New York-style” meant; the exotic sound must have drawn me in. This luscious wedge of magnificence came smothered in strawberries, and I was hooked. A fine repast indeed.

Over the years I’ve consumed raw oysters in several states and countries. In Paris it’s not uncommon for a restaurant to offer 20 varieties and sizes. In Louisiana, where I spend a lot of time, there are oysters, oysters everywhere, from plump, just-off-the-dock raw ones the size of a baby’s shoe to the fancified baked ones. I had the Oysters Rockefeller at Antoine’s in 1972 and remember liking them. Be sure to check your teeth after you eat Oysters Rockefeller is what I always say.

I hesitate over raw Gulf oysters, having read a bit about a pesky warm-water parasite called Vibrio vulnificus, who can kill you if he has a mind to. With around a dozen deaths from the critter so far this year on the Gulf Coast (none in the western U.S.), the risk is there.

What I will have on the Gulf is another Louisiana specialty: chargrilled oysters. You put oysters-on-the-halfshell on a hot grill, spoon over them some butter, garlic, herbs and parmesan or romano cheese, and let the flames begin. At once meaty, juicy, briny, buttery and smoky, that’s about all I can ask for.

Chargrilled oysters appear on menus across Louisiana and they rarely disappoint. But at one restaurant the memory of which I’ve tried to suppress, they used mozzarella on top and the result was a blasphemous mess. My favorite place for these delicious gems is Harbor Seafood, in Kenner, La., only minutes from the New Orleans airport. I arrange travel in or out of the airport to give myself time for a Harbor visit. Except for the fishnets draped artfully behind the bar, Harbor could easily pass for a middling Mexican or Chinese restaurant, or the kind of place whose neon sign on the front flashes “Best Steaks in Town.” Décor is not Harbor’s strong suit but the food makes up.

Within just the past several days I found myself yet again in San Francisco, where I managed to down more oysters.

First, at Zuni Cafe, came some Humboldt Bay Kumamotos. The freshly grated horseradish was an elegant touch. At lunch the next day, at the seafood bar at Hog Island Oyster Company in the Ferry Building, I gobbled a dozen goodies from Tomales Bay.

I don’t like fried oysters, oyster stew or oyster stuffing, and definitely not the little smoked ones in the flat cans. I have a jar of oyster sauce in my refrigerator.

“Hm,” I thought.

Well, once inside the terminal, what did I behold but a ticket counter with, on the wall behind it, the same consonants as those I’d seen on the plane. A route map on the wall indicated that this airline went only to Chicago, Kazakhstan and Bangladesh.

But aware that it was not Chicago in which I had only a moment before arrived, and certainly neither Kazakhstan nor Bangladesh, I thought, “Then where am I?”

That’s when I woke up, without finding the answer to my existential question.

It was not until I was seated at my place at one of the tables extending perpendicular to the dais that I realized that I myself was the honoree at the testimonial dinner. Given my seat halfway down one of the long 40-chair (20 on each side) tables, the situation surprised me. Wouldn’t the honoree, I wondered, have a better seat?

I didn’t have much time to ponder the curious state of things before I discovered that Mr. Telly Savalas, the only person of the two hundred or so in the room bedecked in black tie, was sitting at the next table over, barely 15 feet from me. He noticed me noticing him, and called out, “Hey Clay! Catch!”

With this he picked up, with the fingers of his right hand, the beefsteak from his dinner plate. (Despite the décor and vibe of the banquet room, I cannot report with certainty that baked ziti appeared on or near Mr. Savalas’s plate.) Mr. Savalas then hurled his steak at me, like one might hurl a Frisbee.

In a banquet environment—with or without baked ziti—it would be common to be served a filet mignon, but in the case of my testimonial dinner this was not the case. What Telly Savalas threw at me that night was not a hockey-puck-shaped filet mignon at all. No, it was a flatter cut of beef, such as a ribeye or strip.

Ribeye would be a nontraditional cut for banquet dining, largely because of the fat and gristle the diner must excise. It was therefore likely a strip steak that Telly Savalas threw my way at the dinner where I, it appeared, was the honoree.

Had Mr. Savalas been farther away from me when he whirled his strip steak at me I might have had time to catch, duck or do anything else one might do when the target of an airborne beef attack. But no, I had barely heard the utterance from Mr. Savalas’s mouth when the flying bovine bit landed in my lap. The fact of the lap-landing would indicate that Mr. Savalas lobbed his steak more than dispatched it with a purely horizontal trajectory.

If I were wearing dark clothing there may have been a way to conceal the effects of the assault but alas, I had khaki pants on, and red beef-juice splashed across the space between my belt and the bottom of my zipper.

Concerned about my imminent, presumed trip to the speaker’s platform to accept the tributes ahead, I motioned to the mistress of ceremonies to come over. She did, and I pointed at my lap and whispered to her, “Don’t make me go up there.”

Before I heard her response, I woke up.

There was, however, a place we’d go to called El Bosque. The menu seems now almost cliché: tacos, enchiladas and chalupas, all of which were accompanied by rafts of iceberg lettuce and a wedge of tasteless tomato adorned with a dab of sour cream. I liked enchiladas the best, possibly because they required only utensils to eat them and not my hands. I’ve never been mad for food that leaves my hands soiled. I make an exception now for chicken wings but do my best to use only one hand while eating them.

I don’t recall eating nachos at El Bosque, at least not like my dad’s nachos. I can’t imagine that what he used to make on Sunday afternoons, because of their simplicity, would go over very well in a restaurant. But I cherish the memory of the care that Daddy used to lavish on his own nachos.

First he’d cut corn tortillas into sixths. He’d fry them in oil, never stepping away from the stove, turning them and turning them and adjusting the heat under the pan as necessary to produce golden, perfectly crisp triangles, which he’d then place, one-by-one with tongs, on paper towels. He’d then dust them with salt.

Chips made, Daddy would arrange them on a cookie sheet. He’d cut inch-by-inch-by-eighth-inch slices of cheddar, place one on a chip, and top it with a slice of pickled jalapeño. Canned pickled jalapeño was something you could get in the supermarket in San Antonio in 1972-ish.

The cookie sheet would spend a couple of minutes under the broiler, remaining long enough for the corners of the chip-triangles to darken seductively. The cheese would by then have softened.

I made some of Daddy’s nachos just now and thought of documenting the process step-by-step. But I think what’s more valuable than pictures of me making nachos is remembering those that Daddy made. That said, here’s what I produced just now.

The memory clear and the nachos delicious, I don’t think I’ll make these nachos again.

Such luxuries would otherwise have been materially beyond our family, especially considering that Mama bought the TV at Neiman-Marcus, if it weren’t the case that she had taken a part-time job at Neiman-Marcus for the holiday season and received a discount there. She worked in the gift department, where she was tickled to have sold a crystal vase to the actor Stacy Keach. Mama got a lot of mileage over the years out of her encounter with Stacy Keach. I think she had a crush on him.

Some years later, when my brother moved off to college, the little Sony TV passed down to me. By then the channel-changer knob had broken, and changing the channel required a pair of pliers. The little spindle on which the channel-changer knob had previously been mounted was half-moon-shaped, and I kept track of the channel by the position of the half-moon. 

I have always loved taking baths—something to do with womb-memory, perhaps—and in the mid-1970s I took a bath most Saturday nights. So far, so good. But where I diverged a bit from what might be considered best practices of electrical safety was my carrying the little Sony TV into the bathroom, placing it on the toilet seat, plugging it in, and watching it from the bathtub. I viewed countless episodes of the Carol Burnett Show from the bathtub. If I was otherwise occupied on a Saturday night and took my bath on Sunday, I watched whichever James Bond or John Wayne movie was on.

I would at times reach from the bathtub and, with my pliers, change the channel. This might have happened when Carol Burnett was in reruns or the Movie of the Week was no good.

It makes perfect sense now that I might have been somewhat at risk of death by changing the channel on a TV set with a pair of pliers while sitting in a bathtub, but during the Ford and Carter administrations it didn’t occur to me.

Live and learn.

He/Him/Shazam!

The Case of the Schizo Gazelle

Here’s to Yesterday

Springtime in Akron (and its obvious sequel, Summer in Sheboygan)

Death at Arby’s

Love at the Woolworth’s Lunch Counter

Crybabies: A Story of Mortuary Science

See You at Seven-Thirty

Heapin’ Helpin’ o’ Justice

For all this peculiarity, I almost never have bad dreams. Maybe this indicates a state of good psychic health, or maybe nightmares happen and I suppress the memory of them, but either way I haven’t had a bad dream in years. Not, that is, until two nights ago.

The setting was real: Calvin’s and my under-construction shipping-container house in Mississippi. I arrived there from California to discover with shock that an entire 40-foot wall of one container had been removed. The rear of another container was likewise open to the elements, the doors there having been taken off.

I cried out to Calvin, “What happened??? How did this happen??”

He was reserved to the extent I wondered if he were drugged with something. Responding to my question he said quietly, “Some of the neighbors thought that this end of the container would be cooler, so they moved the kitchen.”

I then noticed that the interior framing had been changed to create an altogether different room arrangement from what I’d left after my last trip to Mississippi.

As Calvin described the neighbors’ interference in our project, I observed a dozen or so adults milling about in our front yard.

“Who are these people?? What’s going on???” Calvin did not reply.

After that, neither he nor anyone else seemed to acknowledge my presence, much less answer my desperate cries for information. The only exception was when I asked Calvin why the hell there was a finished bedroom, complete with furniture and white bedding, and where he’d gotten the furniture.

“From the place down the road,” is all he said.

A disturbing idea came to me: Calvin had been subsumed in a cult. Awful as the possibility was, I became surer of it when, after I asked Calvin if he wanted to go to Pizza Hut and he nodded yes, one of the people milling about in our yard — a man in his forties with salt-and-pepper hair — approached and said, “I think I should go with you.”

This is where I woke up.

The dream was highly upsetting, perhaps because it didn’t involve a monster under the bed or some other imaginary source of terror. No, this dream was about real things, real people and my real life. I hesitated to write about it at all because it would mean experiencing the unpleasantness anew, which indeed it has, but I decided — I hope — that picking through things might help to exorcise the bad memory.

Or maybe what I need is a dream about Albanian sit-coms, President Fillmore or guppies to flush the pipes.

(I checked in with Calvin, who stated believably that the shipping containers were intact and that he was not in a cult.)