54th Week

A Charlie story...his first job out of law school was working for a firm downtown, there was some case they wanted him to go into court and lie under oath for their client.  He wouldn't do it.  They canned him.  Years later the firm ran into difficulties (gee, never saw that coming) and the whole lot got disbarred.  Charlie was the most truthful person I ever met, astoundingly honest.  He would not have lied anyway, especially not under oath, and especially not after just having finished law school and been admitted to the bar.

The same firm had a practice that all their male attorneys needed female company at company gatherings.  They set him up with a nice young lady.  Being gay and having no interest in the company of women, and being as considerate and kind as he was, he perfected the tactic of not being offensive to the young lady, but of boring her.  He talked about cottage cheese with her.  For hours.  Wow.  I bet she was glad when that gathering was over.  He never heard from her again.  And I bet word got passed among her friends & contacts that Charlie was off scale boring.  But it does illustrate his kindness and consideration and his ability to work a situation satisfactorily.

A Country Store

Charlie and I were driving through Michigan once, came upon a nice country store.  Great apple pies, berry pies, a real find.  Not exactly in the middle of nowhere but definitely not in the middle of any town.  We both noted the above memento for sale, separately.  Many miles down the road it came up in conversation and we decided it needed to be bought.  We vowed to do so on our next trip which would be God only knew when.  And then...several years later, there we were driving through Michigan again, and came upon the same country store.  Only it had burned down.  How sad.  Sad for the owners and workers, for sure, but also for us, no way we could get our desired memento.  Such a monument to good taste.  And then...amazingly enough, friends visiting Vegas purchased this one for us.  How did they know?  How?

Thanks, Ann

On the phone with sister Ann the other day, she brought up a memory that kind of sums up the Charlie Bob relationship.

Little Makena on Maui, a paradise beach.  We were there for sunset one evening.  A Salvador Dali sunset, awesome patterns.  Whales playing just off shore.  A "OK, where do I sign?" moment.

She was sleeping over at the house here once.  We came home from some place at night, singing.  Some silly fun song.  We were laughing and singing.  We did have fun.  She thought it was funny, remembered it all these years.  I don't remember the incident, but I can sure picture it, we did have our songs.

Hawai'i

We won the first trip to Hawai'i  in a raffle in 1981.  It provided air fare and four days at a Waikiki hotel.  Nice.  Very nice, in fact.  Waikiki is a great beach and the area is a great show.  But Charlie said why not pony up some more money and take in Maui and the Big Island, too.  Thank God he did!

I was in love with Hawai'i from landing at the Honolulu airport.  Beautiful plants, nice air warm and humid with gentle winds, beautiful craggy volcanic peaks clothed in the most vivid green and of course it only got better from there.  We stayed at an Outrigger hotel a few blocks from the beach, visited BC's friend Annie & hubby from a large friendly Chinese family, shared Sunday dinner with them.  First night they took us to a Hawaiian music show, Kaanikapila.  I remember a hula from Niihau, topic being the capture of a Japanese aviator during WW2, and even though there is a vast vast vast amount about hula I do not understand, I could understand that one, the motions, the movements conveyed everything quite clearly.  Then on to Watertown for another Hawaiian music show.  We loved it.  At one point a huge huge Hawaiian playing a uke saw out of the corner of his eye an enormous cockroach cruising down a grass mat behind the band, he casually hula'd over, knocked it to the floor with his elbow, and mashed it with his foot, without missing a beat.  We dove at Hanauma Bay, such wonderful colorful fish.  I am a California boy.  I love California.  I thought nothing could seriously top California.  Even in terms of fish.  I dove all through my childhood and loved looking at the fish at Casa Beach or the Cove, but the spectacular colors on the fish at Hanauma Bay seriously knocked me out.  Then just cruising around the island...the landscapes, the craggy volcanic peaks and valleys, the green.  The colors in Hawai'i are very vivid and I have my theory on why:  I think its because closer to the equator the sunlight comes in at a more vertical angle, less atmosphere cutting the strength of the sunlight, so it picks up and transmits the colors better, but they are definitely more vivid in Hawai'i.  Greener green, bluer blue in the ocean and the sky, pure white spume over the waves and in the clouds, majestic black lava, vivid red in volcanic soils.  Its quite striking.

From Oahu to Maui, to a condo at Kahana.  It was fine.  Maui was fantastic.  We discovered the nude beach at Makena and loved it.  We drove over to Hana, the road was very scenic, we were relaxing by Hana Bay and somehow met a haole local, Mark from New Jersey who was very taken with BC.  He showed us around.  Took us up to Waianapanapa, showed us about the cabins, showed us Red Sand Beach, also a nude beach.  It was so beautiful, so perfect.  "We don't have to leave.  Ever!", I said.  We would make ample use of the cabins in the coming years.  The Hana side is lush jungle, little streams and waterfalls, huge cliffs and outcroppings over the sea, huge valleys.  Population of Hana is about 600.  You make a reservation for the cabins with the state parks department, and buy food for your stay at Pay 'n Save (or whatever the name is now) in Kahului.  Its a gorgeous park.  You can swim at Waianapanapa.  Also Hamoa and Kaihalulu Beaches in Hana.  We drove to the top of Haleakala (10,025 ft) for sunrise one morning, following BEP and BAU.  It was seriously cold up there, but well worth it watching such a spectacular sunrise.

From Maui to the Big Island.  Landed at the Kona Airport which is out in the lava fields.  Bleak.  I was despondent that we had left the garden paradise of Maui for he bleak desolate lava fields of the Big Island.  But of course I fell in love with the Big Island, how can you not?  We had a room at the Kona Surf, a luxury hotel which had fallen on hard times and was offering bargain rates.  In the parking lot we met a friendly local lad, Bill, of Hawaiian and Filippino ancestry.  Later we met him again at Drysdale's bar in Kona and put cards on the table so to speak.  While Charles drove back to the hotel I sat in his car and he assured me I could do anything I wanted, adding, "I really mean that".  What welcome words.  We all had a wonderful time.  He invited us to his sister's birthday party that night.  Because we were friends with Bill we were friends with his whole family, it was like we'd known them forever.  The mom was pleasantly drunk and kept asking me, "Well, how you like Hawai'i?".  We saw Bill again a few years later in Honolulu.  Majorly cute.  Nice guy too.  Purple speedo.  We drove over to Hilo via the Volcano Highway.  We hiked the Kilauea Iki trail.  Incredible.  Down down down through a fern forest, you emerge on a lava crater, figure 8 shaped, maybe 1  1/2 or 2 miles across, giant blocks of lava, the throat from which the giant 1959 eruption emerged, then back up through the fern forest.  On to Hilo.  Some friend had advised to bypass Hilo, called it a dump.  Wow.  How could you not love Hilo.  When I think of Hawai'i, of the Hawaiian reality, the Hawaiian experience, I think of Hilo.  It is a wonderful town, it is real, it is like the largest Hawaiian town.  Street names are all Hawaiian:  Kilauea, Haili, Komohana, Halai, Waianuenue.  We met John S working at Lauilima, a health food store, he became a friend until business intruded and we had an outfalling.

 Waianapanapa, Maui

 Kalalau, Kaua'i

Mauna Kea overlooking Hilo on the Big Island

That was all just the first trip.  I have often tried to count how many trips we took and I can't.  It may be as high as 20, definitely more than 10.  Maybe even 25.  For a few years there was Hawai'i Express out of LA that flew real cheap, $100 each way, inter island fares were in the $25 -$ 40 range, having friends we could stay with or access to cabins made it very doable. Also Charlie owned 3 houses in Hawai'i, 2 of which would periodically come vacant and he'd say "Lets go!" so we would.  We stayed at his Kona place and his Hana place, and he went over a few times with other people and stayed there, too.  We stayed at cabins at Koke'e at about 4000 ft. on Kaua'i, close to the Kalalau overlook.  We hiked Kalalau three times.  Best hike in the world.  So hard.  So worth it.  One of the hikes I got to the beach with Charlie right behind me but he didn't show up for a long time, finally I walked back, his pack had broken, he said smelling my sweat made him happy, knowing I was coming back for him.  And you did sweat on those hikes.   Hawaiian trails make you strong.  Magnificent trails.

First Kalalau hike we stayed at the Reef Motel and were kept awake all night by a professional lady entertaining her male client.  Both drunk and very loud.  But the hike went off fine.  The Reef added a new section where we stayed a few years later.  We stayed at the Hilo Hotel in Hilo in 1991.  I recorded quite a few Hawaiian songs from KAHU.  KAHU has been out of business for many years now.  Too bad, they did great Hawaiian music.  Also recorded KMVI on Maui, but it has changed to all sports.  Too bad.  You can get sports anywhere.  Hawaiian music, not that easy.  Also recorded KCCN in Honolulu, it, too, is a sports station now, but you can get Hawaiian on KAPA in Hilo and KINE and KKNE in Honolulu.  I started trying to learn the Hawaiian language so I could understand the pretty songs we love so much.  Funny.  You can understand speech better than singing.  I can pick up words in a song but stringing them into meaning is not that easy, maybe song is more esoteric.  A fellow in Japan helped me immensely learning Hawaiian, what a godsend, a professional language teacher (teaching English & French to Japanese students) and he wanted to teach me Hawaiian over the computer to help himself learn, we were on the computer for hours for years, me at 6 am or so here, he at whatever the Japan time would be.  He was a superb teacher, I was very lucky to have him for a kumu.  He seems to have gone on to learn more languages, it is a natural ability for him. I do Kaonamakekai from time to time.  Obviously the decline and death of Charlie cut that out.

Our last trip was to the Big Island in 2010 for the Merrie Monarch Hula Festival.  Charlie had hit that phase of the disease where things irritated him a lot, but we still had a good time.  We stayed at a condo of a friend of a friend, 6th story overlooking Hilo Bay.  You could walk to the store, across the Singing Bridge.  We saw whales playing out by the breakwater.  Charlie swam at Hapuna, his last time in the ocean.  Hilo is a beautiful town.  It rains a lot.  Thus you have museum quality orchids and other exotic blooms growing out of cracks in the sidewalks.  You have an entire section of wild orchids growing east of town.  Out Keaukaha way you get beautiful little pocket beaches among the jungle and black lava rocks with fantastic views across the bay to Hilo with Mauna Kea looming so beautifully above.  Mauna Loa.  Is it possible to have a favorite mountain?  Mauna Loa is mine.  It is magnificent.  It is huge, absolutely huge.  By volume it has more rock than all the Sierras combined.  A base of 250 miles across on the sea floor, 19000 ft. below.  The slope is sooooo gentle!

A Year

Yesterday was a year since Charlie passed on.  Very hard anniversary to take.  I spent a lot of time out at the Sunset Cliffs natural park where Charlie & I would often walk and just sit on the rocks watching the waves roll in.  Its a beautiful and quiet spot.  Yesterday was cool and gloomy, even though it was Sunday there was almost no one there so I could kind of commune with...with my inner self and maybe with Charlie too.

There has been a little shrine for Charlie in the house since he passed away.  Its still so hard to believe he's gone.  He was so full of life, so healthy, so intelligent and active.

Charlyne & Jim had Mary and me over for dinner last night, it was a very pleasant gathering.  We raised a toast to Charlie, all thankful for having him in our lives and for all the goodness he brought into our lives.  A few people have called or e mailed, I just haven't been in the mood to answer.

A Year Ago

A year ago today Charlie was in a hospital bed at UCSD Med Center in Hillcrest, hooked up to tubes and breathing machines.  He was drugged, medicated, the breathing tube irritates patients' throats so they have to be sedated.  I don't know if he was aware of what was going on.  He was so far out of it.  I am real broken up, I have cried a lot, all those horrible memories coming back.  He was such a good, good, good guy, he never deserved any of it.  I loved him.  We all loved him.  He only had a couple of days left to live.

Basketball

Charlie loved basketball.  My sport was always surfing, his was basketball.  He played in as many as four leagues a week.  He played at the Jewish Community Center a couple of years.  He said the team roster was like an IQ test:  which name doesn't fit?  Goldstein, Epstein, Ginzburg, McKain...

He played in the Coronado league on the beautiful and prosperous island of Coronado.  He observed that the school district there spent lavishly on athletic facilities with a tendency to let everything else slide.  Coronado was always the town with the highest percentage of registered Republicans in the country, a lot of retired military and active military there.  One night he came home greatly shaken from a league game, one of the players had died.  Only about age 35, had a seizure and before paramedics could arrive he was gone.

He played in a league way up in Scripps Ranch, he'd fight afternoon/evening commuter traffic up I 15 to get to his games.  He played in the gay league.  He played on the San Diego gay team in the Sydney Gay Games (you can't call them the Gay Olympics) in 2002, and had a great time including a tour of Australia.  One of his best, funniest stories was from the gay league.  One year the league played at a gym in Balboa Park.  A friend of ours, a tall Black man, a seriously good basketball player, showed up at the gym one night to shoot a few hoops, saw Charlie and they talked and hung out.  He has a strong resemblance for a famous pro basketball player.  So the rumor got started that he WAS that famous basketball player and Charlie was his boyfriend.

We were visiting our friends in the Haight once, and the brother of the guy was visiting from some not too liberal town in the central US.  He was not overtly hostile to gays but had some attitude.  He, too, was a basketball player and he and Charlie went down to the gym to shoot some hoops.  Charlie said the guy was blown out, kind of miffed, that a gay guy could shut him down and out shoot him.  Charlie always said defense was the most important part of the game.  I saw Charlie play, he was good.  I saw him shoot the winning basket for his team.  One of the first things I noticed that made me think things were not quite right with Charlie was when someone threw him a pass and it bounced off his chest, it was an easy pass and he could not handle it, almost didn't react to it.  There were a lot of other signs that things weren't right.  Charlie was always so stable, so healthy, so sensible, so right on things that even while he was going down hill I tended to doubt my own impression that something was wrong:  its Charlie, he must be OK.  He was very healthy.  His labs always came back perfect.  Kaiser sends you results with a range, to be healthy you want your results within that range, and his were always perfect, right in the center.  And yet that magnificent brain was deteriorating.

I took him surfing.  He did very well for a beginner.  All this seems like just yesterday.  It always seemed so remarkable, when I was a little kid, being with my grandfather, that he could flash his memory back 50 or 60 years, and now I can do that, too.  I can easily remember incidents from my childhood.  I remember the day Sputnik went up, the day Russia invaded Hungary, the 1960 election, the day Kennedy was shot, that is coming up on 50 years this November 22.  Wow.  And it does seem like yesterday.  It seems like only yesterday Charlie and I met at that party in North Park, only yesterday we did all that precinct walking, all those CDC and Democratic Club meetings, all those precinct walks, those conventions, the great trips together.

Anniversary

Tomorrow would be our 37th anniversary.  Here we are at Crater Lake with Don & Don of Portland & Medford in about 1995.  Several years later we were driving from Seattle back to San Diego.  At Eugene we had the choice of going I5 and hauling ass back to San Diego or taking the scenic highway through the Crater Lake area and Charlie very fortunately wanted to do the Crater Lake highway.  They let you hike down to the lake, it was awesome, incredible, it really is astoundingly beautiful.  We got a motel in Medford then continued back home.  From the top of the mountain you can see hundreds of miles, the elevation must be over 8000 feet, you can see the big Cascade volcanos from California all the way to Washington State, a huge sweep of territory and beautiful forests.  On the highway out of Eugene Charlie was having a little trouble, the quickly alternating shadows and bright from trees along the highway gave him a migraine, I always wondered if that might have been an early symptom of his disease.  But he handled the walk down and up the crater to the lake just fine.  He was driving a lot less by then, I think he was aware that his driving was not up to par.

On that topic, I remember a time when we were at a friend's house and I had had a bit too much to drink so didn't want to drive, I asked him to and it was a wild ride.  At one intersection when he got his green light he went into the wrong lane and got honked at, it was a serious mistake, then on the freeway he would alternate between way too fast and way too slow, and on an onramp he was speeding scarily. It broke his heart and infuriated him when the DMV took away his license but thank God they did, seeing how badly he drove that time coming home from the friend's house was alarming, he had been driving all over town, using the freeways, going to & from meetings so I am glad he never got into an accident.

So anyway, it would have been 37 years tomorrow.  We met at a party thrown by a friend of his from high school, who had been a partner of mine for several months.  We did not fall in love right away.  It took a while.  We just hung out, got comfortable with each other, he had a great sense of humor, really a dry sophisticated wit, ironic, I appreciated that very much.  I also appreciated his politics.  We did not disagree on much and when we did I had to admit he was usually right.  He once turned down a date offered by a rich Republican who had offered to fly him off to a vacation in Tahiti or some wonderful exotic place like that but Charlie would never have anything to do with Republicans.  And I had been a Republican as a kid.  My family were Eisenhower Republicans, the party wasn't always crazy, there were some good Republicans back then.  But Nixon made a Democrat of me and I have never regretted the change, the Republicans are just too crazy now, denying climate change, wanton obstructionism, etc.  Charlie would have LOVED this last election season, the total comedy of the Republican primary season followed by what really was the best election I have ever seen, Democrats winning big top to bottom and so much of it because the Republicans were just being such total a. holes, showing themselves for what they really are.  Politics were always important to us.  We walked precincts together, that was our first date, in fact.  Charlie was always much more political than I.  Neither of us could ever understand how mixed party couples could exist, its such a huge philosophical divide.

What do I miss most about him.  Just the company.  Just talking with him.  Our afternoon walks.  For decades we took walks usually down to the pier and back, sometimes out to Sunset Cliffs, just talking, often about politics, how horrible the Republicans were or of course gay topics as you'd expect.  I miss cuddling, wrapping him up between my thighs and in my arms, putting my head on that beautiful chest (best chest ever, even when he was ill) and listening to his heart beating.  Just simple things, watching TV together.  Those interminable drives up to and back from Oakland to visit Steve & Pat.  It seems like just yesterday that we met.  All the other guys at the party split to go to the gay bar, we stayed around and chatted.  Next day after walking the precinct for Kapiloff we went to the beach, I remember it as a hot and sunny day, we were at Pescadero St. beach, there was sand on it then, that all washed away after a storm in 1982 and never came back.  1982 Charlie had a melanoma diagnosed on the back of his leg, a level 4, his first doctor gave him only a 50-50 chance of surviving, how scary that was.  But they did biopsy on lymph nodes that showed no spread so the doctor raised Charlie's chances to 95%, he had two other melanomas but they were caught extremely early and posed no danger.  Our friend Sandy had melanoma also in 1982, we all resolved to celebrate with a trip to Hawai'i if the 5 year safety period was reached, it was, and we did, and then with Sandy we met up in Montreal and partied big time there and down the coast of Maine on another trip.

I love you Charlie.  I hope I get to see you on the other side, whenever that comes.  Love, Bob

A Whale Story

As I said before Charlie loved Stanford.  Seems like everybody who attended there has wonderful memories of it.  Stanford does a great job of keeping their alumni involved, I said that, too.  One of the events they had a few years ago was a trip on a whale watching boat and Charlie attended.  Unfortunately it was cold and a bit rough at sea.  Charlie got seasick.  Knowing that the best way to overcome seasickness was to stay on deck, that was where Charlie spent the cruise, out on the deck in the cold wind.  He came back majorly chilled.  He got in the bathtub to warm up.  Amazingly enough the hot water heater was between cycles, there was virtually no hot water in it.  Bummed?  Oh yes.  So I filled pot after pot with water and heated them on the stove and unloaded them in the tub.  He finally warmed up.  Charles also expected to get sea sick on the ferry from the South Island to the North Island during our trip to New Zealand in 1985.  Its said to be a reliably rough crossing.  So he took anti seasick medicine, I guess he overdosed on it, he slept through the crossing and was groggy for the day. It was a smooth crossing.