I was sitting in Tonique last night speaking to a friend about life’s many twists and turns and I remembered so clearly sitting on the black leather sofa that is now in Steve’s apartment and staring out at West Street in San Rafael – it was an overcast day and as usual, since we were on the other side of Mt. Tam, we were getting the brunt of the seasonal rain. A garden catalog had arrived the day before and I was thumbing through it and the first page had an ad where they would custom make a small replica of your house to hold your garden hose. I flipped out. I literally flipped out. I recalled the words of a guy I once heard interviewed on NPR where he was talking about leaving an establishment he had worked in for many years and he screamed: “I FELT LIKE I WAS IN A GRAVE AND THEY WERE SHOVELING DIRT ON TOP OF ME.”
That’s when I knew I was a having a nervous breakdown and that the banality of my life had caught up to me at warp speed and that I was either going to stay in that grave or I had to claw my way out – PRONTO.
I created a means to an end – a disaster that included Katrina – and I got out.
Fast forward, this year has been a year of many roadblocks. My mother is, well, she is barely still here. My dog Arlene is dead. The adoption – I hate to say – we might be getting screwed all over again. And well you know the rest. Last night, though, we donned our clothes and went to see Romeo & Juliet. We have season tickets to the opera. Neither of us felt much like going but we were in the fake it till you make it sort of mood and needed to get out of the house.
We ran into a friend there and after decided to go for a cocktail – we parked on Rampart and made our way past Donna’s where a brass band was in full swing, then made our way to Tonique where the crowd was a mix of tattoo’d girls, rasta hotties, pretentious gay men and yuppies. We sat huddled together and talked about everything – about how gay men are forced into a life of promiscuity because that is the only place society wants them to be, we talked about how ten years can change you dramatically, we talked about how great a space Tonique is.
Then we left our friend and went by Buffa’s to split a burger. We sat down and there was the usual eclectic crowd with a dog. The dog came over to us and it was small enough for T to lift it and sit it in her lap. A man came in, dressed like he was about do a show in Vegas, and he strapped on his guitar and began to sing Folsom Prison by Johnny Cash. I looked at T and thought I am so lucky in love that I could spit.
We came home sometime after 2AM deciding that today we’d have a bed-in a la John and Yoko, and that we wouldn’t do one thing we didn’t want to do, and we wouldn’t want for anything else, and so far, it is working for us.
