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12:22 am - Thu 6/06/02
My Life Story (Pt III)

My Life Story (Pt III)

The 80s

At the end of the 70s, I ended up at the home of Margaret Zick, Ray and Don Zick's mother (Ray was in the grade ahead of me at school, while Don was in the same grade). I had been friends with Ray from choir, though the friendship had basically lapsed at that point, but when I ran away from the Pupos, I went to the Zicks to use their phone (After spending the previous night in a motel on the outskirts of town).

I'm not sure exactly what the plan was--I think I was going to call my old social worker and go back to West Virginia--but I ended up staying with the Zicks through my last year of high school (Did I hope that was going to happen? Maybe. In any case, I know I was pretty easily persuaded out of my rather-vague "plans").

I've often thought that if I'd ended up at the Zick home earlier in my life, I could have been a very different person. At the very least, I think Margaret could have been the "Mother" I hadn't had since Mrs DeHaven, years before.

Around this time, I started to keep a journal. I don't know if I initiated it or not, but after my "breakdown", I started to see a therapist at Catholic Social Service, and I remember absolutely nothing about the sessions...except that the therapist suggested I start keeping a journal.

And twenty years later, I'm still doing it.

In the summer of 1980, I moved to Lansing (I had attended a theater workshop at MSU in the summer after my sophomore year of high school, and made the decision to study theater there when it was time for college. When I lost interest in school in the interim, my grades slipped big time, so the "plan" then became to go to Lansing Community College, get my grades up, and then go to State).

This was the decade when it seemed like everything happened. It feels daunting to just try to get hold of it, if you know what I mean.

It took two years, working my up from a two line part as the priest in Hamlet, before I got a major role in a show--"Berger" in Hair (The audition, btw, was a turning point as well. I "pulled out all the stops" as I sang the title song, leading the director to say afterwards, to the laughter of everyone watching, "Jim, could you do that again, with just a little more energy?". It was the first time I ever remember being really amazing at an audition). That show was maybe still the greatest theater experience of my life.

The most important person in the 80s? No contest--Jane Zussman (Formerly Jane Shipley, and formerly before that, Jane Gaston).

I met her at an audition for True West--Neither of us got in--and got to know her better (Much better, as it turned out), when she cast me in The Star-Spangled Girl at the Okemos Barn Theater. This was around the time when her husband "came out", and Pam Schaefer, a woman I thought I was in love with, rejected my advances, so in our mutual woundedness, we found each other. There was a brief--what to call it?--a brief period of mutually needy sexual contact. I was the one to break things off, and if it had been left up to me, that would probably have been the end of things (After all, it always had been). But Jane persevered, and seeing as how she's been my best friend and supporter for years, I'm pretty glad she did. She's listened to me rant drunkenly in the middle of the night, loaned me money, and given me a ton of emotional support. And probably most importantly in the 90s, she heard me when I said, "I'm really lonely, and I need you to be my friend again" when we'd "lost the connection" after her marriage to Mark.

I discovered porn in earnest during the 80s. I always tell people about my first night in Lansing, and how I was so impressed, coming from a small town like I did, that Lansing actually had a "red light district". The porno places were dirty and scary and exciting, a turnon that also made me embarrassed and a little ashamed of myself. I remember Jesie St James, and Ginger Lynn, Kimberly Carson, Barbara Dare, and Blondie. I also remember seeing my first gay porn there.

An important thing that happened in the 80s was learning how to play the harmonica. I remember getting the "Klutz Press" book Country and Blues Harmonica For The Musically Hopeless, and being all proud of myself when I played some simple tune to Beth N, my girlfriend at the time, over the phone.

My only two "adult relationships" happened in the 80s.

At this point, I barely remember Beth Revitzer, the woman I've come to call "Beth I".

We met during Hair. She was a friend of Sal's, a very handsome young guy who was in the show. I'd thought they were an "item", until she told me they weren't (At a party during that time, we were talking, and becoming frustrated by my slow moves, she said, "Listen, if I give you my number, will you call me?").

We lived together for over a year, but like many of the other people I've talked about so far, I don't really remember her in a normal, day-to-day way; I remember some outstanding sex, I remember some fights, I remember both of us being slobs and not having any money, but sadly, above everything else, I remember the breaking up (It's a complicated story, but basically, she broke up with me five minutes after I returned home from a month or so in Atlanta. We had been living in Texas, then had spent the summer in Alpena, Michigan, where I'd worked at Thunder Bay Theater, and after the season ended, I was going to follow her back to Texas, after an audition in Atlanta, working out of a labor pool to get bus fare back to Houston. I tried to kill myself early the next morning after she'd broken the news, by taking 30 or 40 Tylenol, but was on a bus back to Michigan by the end of the weekend).

The other Beth, Beth Nelson ("Beth II"), was the most "serious" relationship I've had, and sometimes I'm afraid it'll be the last one.

I met her the first time during the second season I worked at Thunder Bay, in 1983, when I was acting and she was a volunteer (Helping convert the old Tobacco and Cigar warehouse into a theater). I was with Beth R. at the time, and she was dating another actor in the company (We actually double-dated a time or two).

I didn't see her again until four years later, after I had broken up with Beth R. and was back at the theater (Now she was writing grants for the theater, and working at Big Brothers/Big Sisters). She was married--not to the actor. To another guy, David Nelson--but the marriage was ending.

She asked me out to lunch--being interested in me, though I didn't pick up on it at the time (I think I assumed she was "out of my league")--but she felt guilty because she was still married; At one point, she actually "broke up" with me, which I found confusing, since we hadn't actually done anything at that point but hang out and talk.

But the divorce did happen, and we started to date in earnest towards the end of my time at the theater. I went back to Lansing, we wrote long letters to each other, and she came to visit once or twice a month, in my little apartment above Joe Covello's--a gay bar in downtown Lansing that was torn down years ago--and when went I went back to Thunder Bay the following year, I moved in with her (She was in shows at the theater at this point--She was a "Kit-Kat Girl" in Caberet and danced in the second Definitions dance show).

When the season ended, she and I and her youngest daughter Julie moved to Lansing--Julie was ten at the time, I believe--and my memory of things is that it went bad pretty quickly. I know there were good times and some very enjoyable sex (At least for awhile there), but all I really remember clearly now is that we never had enough money. Beth was selling family heirlooms and her "Occupied Japan" collection, in order to make ends meet. And for some reason, I just didn't seem to "get it"--why didn't I quit school and get a full-time job? Well, I guess I did eventually, when I got the job at Schuler Books--but by the time I did "get it", it was too late.

Beth was a manager at a "Mr Taco" for a time, then tried selling cars at Jack Dykstra Ford, while I went to school and made a little money, first by being a "patient model" for nursing classes, then with a drive-around paper route.

Then Beth took a waitressing job at Deju Vu, a strip club in Lansing. From waitressing, she progressed to stripping, and that was really tough for me to take; I was deeply angry, at her and at myself, ashamed, and I remember being particulary angry and confused when she didn't stop doing it after I got the job at Schuler Books (I'd thought that job was going to be our "salvation" somehow, which was not very realistic, since I couldn't have started out making much more than minimum wage).

I was pretty much angry and upset all the time during that period, climaxing when I read her journal, and found out she had worked in the "fantasy booths"--A line she'd said she would not cross--and when she came home from Redi-care, on Mother's day 1991 (I don't remember what she'd gone for now), I started yelling and screaming at her, and hitting her, and to make an ugly story short, that was the end of our relationship, complete with restraining orders, court appearances, and a conviction for assault and battery (This was a week before my 3Oth birthday).

(I've done some sorry things in my life, but this gets my vote for the sorriest.)

I moved around a lot in the 80s, within Lansing at first, then all around--To Galveston, to Houston, to Alpena, to the Catskills, to Miami Beach--and during that time, getting a sense of perspective about Lansing (Bigger than where I'd come from, but by no means the "Big City" I'd thought it was).

But during the 80s, Lansing became my home. I went away, on one unsuccessful effort or another, but when things got tough and it was time for me to run back home, Lansing was where I ran back home to.

 

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