Once we had a place to live and Richard had a job, we set about getting to know our new environment. It was an interesting mix that we had never experienced before: Texas (specifically, Dallas) culture; the culture of the extreme wealthy in the U.S.; an urban, downtown scene; and the Dallas gay scene.

 

 

In fact, Steve had left his Lincoln Continental with us when he went on his trip with Dick and Kackie, when we were still living in New England. We got a big kick out of driving it around dressed in our hippie garb, and once, when we stopped at a burger joint to get a bite, a crowd of teenagers began staring at us and whispering. Finally, one of them worked up the nerve to come up to us and ask if Richard, with his wild, long hair and beard, was some well-known rock star of the time. Kathleen and I laughed and told them no, but they didn’t believe us. They thought we were protecting the identity of the celebrity whose groupies we clearly were. “I know it’s him,” we heard the guy muttering to his friends.

 

Car washes in Dallas offered both espresso and a shoe shine (the shoes in Dallas were far and away the shiniest shoes I had ever seen, and for the first time in my life, I began to worry about the shininess of my own; then again, my mischievous side wanted to plop myself down in a shoe-shine booth wearing my Converse All-stars just to see what would happen.). Everyone in Jane’s circles lived in gigantic houses; the playhouses were the size of a middle-class starter home. They all drove Mercedes, BMWs, Rolls Royces, or top-of-the-line Cadillacs. Every single person seemed to have a radar detector installed in their cars, because when we drove on the vast, crowded highways, with everyone going about 20 mph over the speed limit, every single car would suddenly jam on its brakes for no apparent reason until we realized that a cop with radar must be hiding somewhere in the vicinity.

 

Women wore $1500 dresses, covered themselves in precious gems, wore watches that cost as much as a used car, and spent astonishing amounts of time and money on their hair, makeup, accessories, and grooming. I didn’t possess the money or temperament needed to emulate their example, so instead I simply worried about my pore size for a brief period. Purchasing a bottle of pore-tightener and half-heartedly applying it to my nose for a week was about as far as I got. Then I gave up and just decided to start dressing like Patti Smith on some days and Joan Jett on others. Without the eye makeup. When I was in high school, I wore so much that my eye lashes fell out, and that seems to have dampened my enthusiasm for makeup for the rest of my life.  

 

I was desperate to find a way to get exercise, but the only place this was available was at pricey, trendy gyms that had mirrors on every wall. Actually, at this time in Dallas’s history, mirrors were everywhere just in general, on both the inside and the outside of buildings. No wonder the women we knew re-applied their make-up every two hours! We tried to take some walks, but the freeways chopped up the surface streets, many of which had no sidewalks, and they dead-ended after just a few blocks. The few neighborhoods we found that did have sidewalks apparently had so few walkers that children threw rocks at us as we passed by. I’m not using hyperbole here.

 

 

Dallas had a fantastic downtown library, we were pleased to learn—spacious, well-appointed, comfortable and stocked with every title ever published. And unlike an experience I had at the Boston Public Library when I was in college—where I spent an entire day submitting three titles at a time to an assistant who searched their closed stacks and I never succeeded in getting a crack at a single book—the stacks were open and all the titles were available to check out. Since Richard and I had only one car, I rode the bus to the library, which I shared with African-American maids and Hispanic construction workers. I actually love riding buses. I get to look at the scenery, I don’t have to battle the traffic, and I don’t have to worry about finding a parking place.

 

We were happy to find out that Richard’s delightful cousin Dotti lived in Dallas, so we had family there, and it turned out that Fred, one of Richard’s best friends from childhood, was not only living in the Dallas area but working at Jane’s company as well. (Fred and Toni came to visit while we were living in Costa Rica; Toni, some of you might remember, provided much merriment when she accidentally asked for a brown rooster instead of coffee beans at the San José farmer’s market.) So, between Dotti, Fred, Rod, and the Keltons, we had an amazingly rich social life for a place we had just moved to. And Richard had some knowledge of Dallas as he had attended SMU for several semesters before dropping out to work in the rock-n-roll industry.

 

There were, in fact, tons of great little cafés and shops—probably the best vintage clothing store I had ever had the pleasure of shopping in, with cute, friendly staff that enjoyed your shopping as much as you did—though, the bars were all gay bars, so we tended not to feel totally comfortable there. At this time in our lives, we weren’t much for bars in anyway. And nearby, a hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurant was occasionally open that served a super scrumptious dish that we still remember with longing: Pollo al Beto Perez; poached chicken breast slathered with a tangy sour cream sauce that was bright orange from cayenne and chili pepper.

 

We led such an interesting double life in Dallas, it was easy to get confused and forget which one we were inhabiting. On the one hand, of course, we spent time in rarified, privileged, scrupulously secure environments. One of Jane’s nephews came home late one night, parked his car in the front yard of his home and staggered to bed, leaving the door wide open and the keys in the ignition. Not one thing happened to the car overnight.

 

On the other hand, we did, in fact, live in a dicey neighborhood that was only beginning to gentrify, as evidenced by all the break-ins. The closest supermarket, known locally as The Merry Thumb, was open 24 hours and home to all kinds of urban crazies. Rod told us that one time when he was shopping in the produce section, he heard the sound of something heavy and metallic hitting the floor right next to him and realized that the middle-aged woman shopping for broccoli had just dropped one of her Ben-wa balls.

 

“I wasn’t sure what to do!” he told us, giggling. “Ignore it? Pick it up and hand it to her?” In the end, he simply advised her that she had dropped something and moved on to the cheese section.

 

At any rate, Richard and I decided to visit a nearby park one afternoon, a park that he remembered fondly from his college days, where freaks would gather to smoke, trip, listen to music, and enjoy the sunshine. Of course, the hippie movement was long past and a hardened drug culture had moved into its place. But still, it was a park and a wealthy area lay only a few blocks away so we figured it would be safe. And it was a nice day.

 

We passed two guys sitting at a picnic table on our way into the park and nodded a greeting to them, which they returned. Missing the wild jungle that we had been hiking in only months before, we decided to follow a trail that ran inside a thin riparian zone that bordered a creek. It was thick with brush and small trees. We walked a ways down the river but all of a sudden, I got a very bad, scary feeling. Because of an earlier near death experience I stumbled into when I had ignored that feeling (which I’ll tell some other time), I spoke up.

 

“Something feels creepy,” I said to Richard. “It doesn’t feel safe here. I think we should turn around.”

 

Richard had experienced enough of these types of situations with me that he turned around and started hiking the opposite direction. We hadn’t gone far when we spotted one of the guys from the picnic table standing off the trail in the brush. We tried to make ourselves look as big as possible, just like you would with a cougar. This was not super easy, because Richard is 5’8 and I’m 5’4; but we were at least in good shape. We walked briskly past, nodding at him once again to let him know we saw him there, lurking around in the bushes.

 

Somehow feeling that if we bolted we would arouse the predator in these two, we ambled over to a swing set that occupied a different part of the park from the picnic table. Not long after we did so, they both drifted over in our direction, their impassive placidness making them seem all the more sinister.

 

Okay. Game over. We got up and crossed the street to get traffic between us and to make ourselves visible to motorists, then walked in the street to our car. Then we got in our Honda and drove away. Whew.  

 

So, we never really let our guard down there. And that is one reason that we’ve decided we prefer living in the country (even with the ever-present possibility that at least one of your neighbors is a meth-cooking, gun-toting, crazy-as-shit survivalist). The other is the traffic. Well, and still another is that you need money to access beauty in a city, whereas it’s free and everywhere in the wild.

 

But soon we were about to get a very nice infusion of cash. Jane had decided that her old shopper wasn’t working out. So she offered me the job. It sounded like fun, and it was; but it also ended up being quite a bit of work. And it wasn’t really—let’s face it—“me.”