Richard and I arrived in Texas with one trunk and seven suitcases full of stuff. Not a lot of money. And immediate homesickness for Paradise.

 

But the Keltons were generous and helpful, as always, letting Richard and me stay with them in their home in Arlington while we hunted for an apartment. We heard that there was a glut of rentals in the Dallas area and that some good deals were in the offing; so we grabbed a newspaper and circled some ads in the classifieds that sounded promising. Then we borrowed a car from Jane and Horace (one that was missing its ashtray since Jane accidentally threw it away while emptying it; this did not, however, prevent her from continuing to use it as if the ashtray was still there) and headed over to The Big D to check out a few. Arlington, where Richard would be working for Jane’s new real estate development corporation, was out of our price range.

 

We became discouraged early on when it became evident that most of the apartments in our price range occupied vast, warren-like complexes. All of the units looked the same. All the streets inside the complexes were identical. I knew that I would never be able to find our apartment, given my peculiar form of dyslexia that seems to manifest only in the areas of geography and carpentry. In order to find my way to any particular unit, I would have to employ some sort of Hansel-and-Gretel strategy, but my guess was that anything I tried along those lines would be gone long before I ever returned, to wander forever in search of my apartment, like that guy Charlie who got lost in the Boston subway system: “Oh, he never returned, no, he never returned, and his fate is still unlearned!”

 

We gamely visited complex after complex, hoping that we would stumble upon something different at some point, but when we drove up to the eleventh vast, warren-like, geographically-dyslexic-unfriendly honeycomb, Richard and I both burst into tears. Literally. Even when we had been living in a mildewed green army tent, we could find our way there. And even when we had been taking refuge in the cab of our 1953 Chevy pick-up truck that was missing a window, we had had a fantastic view.

 

We couldn’t even bear to think about our adorable apartment back in Costa Rica, with the exquisite little office looking out onto shrimp plants and birds-of-paradise and cobalt-and-emerald-bejeweled lizards sunning on the rocks.

 

But the small, bland suburban houses which we would have had to strain to afford didn’t appeal to us, either. We were starting to feel depressed. It was bad enough having basically gotten kicked out of Paradise. But the contrast did seem a tad over-the-top. Now we knew how Adam and Eve felt!

 

But as we were re-visiting the classifieds one more time, a small, unobtrusive ad for an apartment that boasted a fireplace caught my eye. We called the number listed from a pay phone, found out that the rent was within our budget, and made arrangements to meet the owner there as soon as we could.

 

As we neared the address, our spirits began to rise. The apartment turned out to be in a New England-style salt box built in the 1920s. From the outside, the place looked like it possessed both charm and character. One end of the street was blocked off with posts and a tasteful chain, which kept the traffic down. And just a block away was a commercial street full of tempting-looking cafés, restaurants, bars, and arty gift shops.

 

We waited around for a while for the landlord to show up, but when he didn’t, we decided to try the buzzer that seemed to be attached to the upstairs apartment. The one for rent appeared to be downstairs. Fortunately, the tenant was home, and he invited us up to his place to wait for the landlord.

 

His name was Elrod Serrette, he told us, though he went by Rod, and was a Cajun originally from New Iberia. He was short, lean, and looked a little bit like Roddy McDowell with a crazy, immediately endearing, jack-o-lantern grin. His apartment-mate was a small dog that was a cross between a Chihuahua and Pekinese named Toki, who, he told us, thought she looked like Debbie Reynolds. (Later, when we got to know him better, Rod confided to us that she actually bore a greater resemblance to an Idaho baked potato.) His apartment was gorgeous—contemporary and artistically decorated. He made his money as a graphic designer, draftsman, and make-up artist, the latter of which we were to learn comprised a ubiquitous calling in Dallas. Apparently, women of means in Dallas rarely applied their own makeup for an important social occasion.

 

He seemed thrilled at the prospect of having Richard and me for neighbors, and promised to put in a good word for us with the landlord, who was great, he said. The landlord, a handsome young architect, eventually came by and showed us the flat, which turned out to be the bottom floor of this very cool house. So we took it on the spot.

 

 

“A lot of crime in that neighborhood,” she told us.

 

Really? It had looked bohemian, not run down; but apparently, it was still recovering from having hit bottom in the 60s and 70s. It was now 1984 and as we soon learned, hippies were being replaced by the gay community. Well, we figured that someone as wealthy as Jane didn’t know what it was like to have to find affordable housing, and Richard had lived in a pretty rough neighborhood in Boston while I was attending college. We were just relieved to have found a place that felt like “us,” and that promised to be entertaining.

 

Little did we know.

 

We didn’t have any furniture, but one of Jane’s sons was moving to India with his wife and they were getting rid of stuff. We didn’t have to buy a thing. They also wanted to divest themselves of their car, so we took over the payments and had a cute little Honda Accord to drive around. We went from feeling depressed to feeling very fortunate.

 

When we started moving in and putting our belongings in place, though, we noticed a few aspects of the place that we hadn’t spotted before, having been so taken with the overall ambiance. First, there were sizable dips in the floor that had simply been covered over by carpet. Second, there were cracks in the sheetrock in places behind which structural members no doubt stood. It looked like there was a problem with the foundation; then we found out that the landlord had put the house on the market.

 

Well, we weren’t sure how long we were going to stay in Dallas anyway, and the area was still funky enough (although now, it’s all fixed up with young professionals moving into the luxury condos being built) that we didn’t think that the house would necessarily sell quickly. Besides, anyone who knew anything about house construction would surely notice the cracks in the sheetrock that ran along the jambs of doors and windows. Foundation work was expensive, probably one of the reasons the current landlord had elected to do cosmetic work instead in hopes of turning the house for a profit.

 

So we settled in happily, and soon, it began to dawn on us that we had moved into the gay part of town. Most of the men in the homes and shops near us were the sweethearts I’d become used to over my lifetime, but a few were outwardly hostile, either angry from the treatment that they’d received from heteros in the past, I guessed, or annoyed that we had moved into their enclave and taken a space that could have been rented by someone else. It was too bad, and something I’d never run into before, but it wasn’t enough to dampen our enjoyment of the vibrant, eccentric and mostly friendly energy of the area.

 

Plus, we ended up adoring our neighbor, Rod. You know how every once in a while you end up with The Neighbor from Heaven? Rod was that neighbor. Whenever we had to leave town, he would pick up our newspapers and keep an eye on the place, invite us over for dinner when we got home. He was an outstanding Cajun cook and often brought back sauces and crawdads and cakes (my favorite: Miss Gail’s Cake) from New Iberia that he would share with us. He was hilarious and had a droll, Cajun delivery that we found utterly charming; he called me “Celeste Marie” and “honey chile.” He loved to tell stories and gossip, and Toki was a sweet and funny little dog. She had a habit of furiously licking her own nose when she wanted to be licking one of Rod’s guests instead. “No tongue, Toki!” Rod would admonish her, and she would promptly sit with her bulging eyes locked on his, her zealous tongue apparently operating under a mind of its own while Rod laughed his head off.

 

But shortly after we moved in, we had an unnerving experience. We had gone out to dinner with another one of Jane’s sons and then seen a show. We came back to our place to have a night cap and then, since our car was parked a few blocks away at the restaurant, we all got in their car and drove over to pick it up.

 

Apparently, someone had been watching the house when we left and figured that we were going out for a while. They managed to get the window to the kitchen open and break into our place. When we returned ten minutes later, we unlocked the front door and surprised a big man. He bolted from the living room into the kitchen where he scrambled out the window. It scared the shit out of us; we were shaking when we crept into the kitchen and found the open window. We shut it and saw that there was no way to lock it, so we hammered some nails into the jamb so that the window couldn’t be opened wide enough for a body to fit through. Then we made an inventory of our belongings. The guy evidently hadn’t been there long enough to take anything, but as we continued to rifle through our own stuff, we realized that there wasn’t really anything for him to take. I didn’t have any expensive jewelry, we didn’t take pictures so we didn’t have a camera, and this was on the cusp of the personal computer age, so we didn’t have one of those, either. We didn’t even have a television. No guns. I doubt that he would have been interested in our clothes or bed linens or modest kitchenware.

 

In fact, even though this made us jumpy and paranoid for a few weeks, we came to believe that this early break-in might have saved us from future ones. During the seven months that we lived on this street, every single house that didn’t have a security system got broken into and had things stolen from it. I’m guessing that the thief told all his cohorts that it wasn’t worth breaking into our place—nothing worth stealing. And we also came to believe that something … unusual was looking after the place. I’ll tell that story when I get to it. But in the meantime, we did our best to adjust to our new, very different living situation.