When I was a kid my parents had a book published by Playboy Magazine Press called THE MOVIE BOOK. It had a couple nude movie stills from, like, Last Tango in Paris and such, but otherwise it was a G-rated coffee table book. There was a chapter called Legends, and the caption for the photo of Marlene Dietrich read: “By far the most exotic of Hollywood’s creations, a screen goddess of the 1930s whose image remains eternally haunting.” That was all I needed to read. Over and over.

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In one of my Barbra Streisand books it quotes someone as saying Streisand had “the best legs since Dietrich.” I started to think I had nice legs too after reading this.

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I tried to collect every book written about her. I got about 28? by the time I was 28. In some cases I used interlibrary loan, and when the book came in I photocopied the whole thing and kept that.

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Before the real Marlene, I was first exposed to Madeline Kahn’s impersonation of/tribute to Marlene in the 1974 movie Blazing Saddles (I saw it when I was about 10). She does a song called “I’m Tired,” in the character of Lili von Shtupp, playing off of Marlene’s character Frenchy in Destry Rides Again. All-around funny movie, one of our favorite pizza-and-rented-(from-the-pizza-parlor)-VCR-Friday-night choices, my younger brother and me, when we were kids.

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There was an episode of M*A*S*H where Radar O’Reilly is part of some plot on the base there, and he’s to stand outside a tent smoking a cigarette as a signal to someone. Someone asks someone, “Is that Radar?” to which the other person replies, “Either that, or Marlene Dietrich is back in town.”

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Grandma Shrake told me once, when I was a teenager, with visible and audible disdain, regarding Marlene Dietrich, “I never believed she was a woman.”

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When I was about 15 I started plucking my eyebrows to look like Marlene’s drawn-on ones, which I didn’t realize were drawn on. My dad approached me one day in the basement and asked, head cocked and eyes slitted, with a tired-out, suspicious tone, “Scott, have you been… um, doing something to your eyebrows there?” First I denied it. Then I admitted it but gave the reason as being that my eyebrows “hurt” if I didn’t pluck them. “Don’t do that anymore,” he said flatly. And I didn’t.

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Marlene was 30 years old when she became famous for The Blue Angel. She was famous for another 61 years after that.

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She helped a lot of gay and Jewish friends emigrate out of Nazi Germany to Hollywood. Legend has it Hitler himself wanted to bring her back to Germany to be THE aryan star. Instead he had to make do with a Swede who could speak German, Zarah Leander.

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Her sister was married to a concentration camp guard in Germany during World War II. Marlene denied in public that she had a sister.

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My favorite Dietrich film is the extravagant swansong of her years-long svengali collaboration with Josef von Sternberg:  The Devil Is a Woman. I like how emotionally sadistic she is to the male characters in that movie, her lovers. I hate men.

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She hated Madonna and Meryl Streep.

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Dietrich met the Beatles at a variety show and liked them and their music. They liked her too. Hence her appearance on the cover of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”

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She quit smoking in her 70s. Won a bet with Noël Coward on who could quit, he died of lung cancer not long after she won.

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She never received an Academy Award, Emmy, Grammy, or anything like that.

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When they discovered Dietrich had run out of money in her old age but wanted to continue living in France, the city government of Paris passed a special law: “Marlene Dietrich is not allowed to pay any rent in the City of Paris.” The city covered her rent quietly.

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When I was living in Germany my Junior year of college, someone tipped me off that the then-90-year-old Dietrich was going to call in to a show, a tribute to the Babelsberg UFA studios where “The Blue Angel” was filmed. We watched the show, me and a couple Ami buddies. Dietrich calls in and says a few things in German, then before hanging up she says, in English, “Love, Marlene.” Like she was reading a letter? But she wasn’t. Then this big military band kicks in and plays “Falling in Love Again” — it was very tacky, schmaltzy, this show, and I said “Fucking nazis!” Later my German friend Sabine heard me say it on an audio tape I had made of the TV show airing, and her face dropped.

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I walked down the Avenue Montaigne in Paris in 1991, a year before she died, looking up at the windows, wondering if she were looking down at me.

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My friend Andy called me at the movie theatre where I worked in college to tell me Marlene had died.

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Like most 20th-century female stars, she moved her birth year up by a few years (it was 1901, not 1904), and largely got away with it because there was no Internet back then. And her birth certificate would have been in a city hall in Berlin someplace, probably destroyed during the war.

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My mom told me she thought of me when she saw the news Marlene had died. “I know how much you liked her,” she said.

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I went to her gravesite in Berlin. She’s not buried right next to her mother. Her mother is catty-corner from her. I left a rose on her gravestone.

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Was she always a ghost? Isn’t it incidental that some actual woman had to be Marlene Dietrich, for surely the idea of her and its mystery were only waiting to be freed.

David Thomson, A Biographical Dictionary of Film, 3rd Edition

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All of her lines in the movie Touch of Evil were improvised, including, “You’d better lay off the candy bars,” said to Orson Welles. And “What does it matter what you say about people?”

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Her memoir was largely fictionalized.

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Stinky gave me the Biographical Dictionary of Film me as a gift. On one of our first dates, we had an argument in which I pointed out that Marlene used her married name, “Sieber,” when checking in to hotels and such, to throw reporters off the trail; Stinky responded by saying Stevie Nicks did the same thing. He liked her a lot. Our argument was about how those two people and those two facts are not comparable. I was offended he could mention Nicks and Dietrich in the same breath.

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As a performer she was a diseuse, which is a French word for “talk singer.” She seems only to have one octave, and really just delivers songs in a melodic speaking voice.

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I modeled the way I speak German after Marlene’s way. I’m a diseur.

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She spoke better French, apparently, than English or German. Her German toward the end is actually so bad, so slow and riddled with weird errors, that it makes me doubt she really was born and raised in Germany.

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I wanted to write my dissertation (in the German Department) about Marlene Dietrich’s accent. I quit grad school instead, which I imagine she would have wanted me to do.

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Her daughter wrote a “Marlene Dearest”-type book in the early 1990s, right after Marlene died. Nice. Nice, grateful daughter. Always good to wait till someone is in the ground and cannot defend themselves. A lot of what I know about MD comes from that book. Actually, I believe every unflattering and flattering thing her daughter wrote, but that is not the point.

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In the mid-’90s, several years after she died, her estate sold her image to be used in print ads for Breathe Right. One of the tan snore-prevention strips was superimposed on her nose. “Commentary superfluous,” as we say in German (“Kommentar überflüssig”).

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Her grandchildren and great-grandchildren, the boys anyway, have the last name Riva. So look for them as you go out around in the world. Ask them: Is Marlene Dietrich your ancestor?

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Thank the Lord, they have still never gotten a biopic done. Some stage plays, yes. Drag performances? Sometimes. But they have not desecrated her silver-screen legacy with some travesty like Gwyneth Paltrow or Uma Thurman trying to be like her in a movie.

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Like all famous people, she was very petite, I’m guessing about 5´2˝, based on her dress from The Devil Is a Woman that I saw displayed at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, back in the ’90s when I used to hang out there a lot.

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I don’t do drag much, but in grad school a friend had a variety-show party where everyone had to perform, so I put on half-drag and did a lip-synch (using a boombox) to the epic “Hot Voodoo” number from Blonde Venus. It was not as successful as the belly dancer at the party.

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My friend named her daughter “Marlena” after being exposed to my Dietrichmania for so many years. She used an “a” on the end to discourage people from saying “Marleen” and she pronounces it “Marlayna,” the proper way.

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Just the other day I was at the fabric store getting a replacement silk-covered button for my tuxedo, and while I was looking at the buttons a 50s-ish woman told a very old woman — they were both customers — that she was looking for fabric to sew a dress for her daughter, who was playing (phonetic spellings) “Marleen [sic] Dietrick [sic] in a play.” I asked what play, assuming for some reason it was a school play. It turned out to be an adult play, but the 50+ lady was flattered I thought her daughter was a child and not a grown woman, which she was, the latter.

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In the 1983 documentary Marlene, wherein the then-apartment-bound 80-something Miss Dietrich famously never allows herself to be shown, only heard, director Maximilian Schell asks the great film legend’s trusted gay valet, Bernard, a question:

SCHELL: Is she lonely?

BERNARD: I think so, I think we all get lonely somet-…

SCHELL (interrupting): But I mean is she a lonely person?

BERNARD (after pausing to think): Mm… Yes.

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According to her daughter’s book, Marlene did not like her documentarian or his pretentious attitude, and no matter what he said to her after a certain point during the filming, she would respond, “You’re much too clever for me.” That is a great shutter-upper. He edited it all out to make them both sound better, as people.

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According to her daughter she was drunk during most of the taping of her voice for the documentary. The best scene in the movie is when Schell asks Dietrich what her favorite Dietrich album is. She becomes emotional as she describes Marlene Singt Berlin, and sings snippets from the songs from memory as the visual we see is aerial footage of miles and miles of bombed-out Berlin in the last days of WWII.

She doesn’t know ahead of time, of course, what will be shown along with her voice, but she ends up in tears as she sings the songs.

“…

I was Janis Joplin in college. Not in a student film, or a drag show: I am the reincarnation of Janis Joplin.

You want proof? She died October 4, 1970. I was born October 27, 1970. Any spiritualist will tell you that’s how long it takes for a soul to grab its beads and its Southern Comfort and transmigrate into another body. So, that’s indisputable. Then, look at these similarities:

• She had a younger sister, I have a younger brother
• We both have twin initials (JJ and SS)
• I’ve always had her laugh, a raucous cackle. I call mine the Shrackle

I rest my case.

So I got to Michigan State University and was free to be who I was, finally. Janis Joplin.

I was a student now: Of Janis Joplin history. Mostly I watched the documentary Janis: The Way She Was over and over again until I had her personality “down.” (I have Asperger’s. It’s not funny! It’s annoying. I can and will recite an entire movie script to you in lieu of conversation.)

Janis gave me a louder, more interesting voice then the one I naturally have. I come from a musical family and can imitate things well. By sophomore year I talked and acted like her. Of course, she herself had changed how she talked once she got famous. From a plain Texas girl to kind of like a mix of Mae West and W.C. Fields. She needed a shell, too.

We both had hated high school. Dick Cavett asks her, “Were you not surrounded by friends in high school?” “They laughed me out of class, out of town, and out of the state, man.” So she went to her high school reunion and held a press conference there. Wouldn’t you?

In her brief college stint, she was voted Ugliest Man on Campus. So she moved to San Francisco and reinvented herself as the queen of the hippies, a rock goddess, a sex symbol! Through sheer force of will, and energy: It took guts to get out there with acne, an  imperfect body, and a big scar on her lip from a bar fight. I could relate.

By junior year I had morphed into her outwardly too. I had freaked in, now I freaked OUT. I went from a high-school nothing, who felt ugly and called myself “asexual,” to this:

People were interested in me now. Frat boys? They’d say, “Hey, what are you? A hippie faggot! You’ve got something caught in your hair. Haw haw.” See, I would tie bandannas, beads, feathers and other stuff in it so there’d be surprises when I turned my head.

The only thing I couldn’t get right was the singing. I would try at parties, and my friends would start getting extra stoned, and those who were sober would disassociate and go into their safe place. Why didn’t you bring your singing ability with you into my body, Janis? I tried and tried. “Please! Please! Auwahuauaua!” Oh, man.

By senior year, I had been Janis long enough that I was drinking a bottle of Southern Comfort a day and getting really maudlin. I’ve always wanted to be a dead legend. “I’ll never see 30, man,” I said to my brother, using one of Janis’s lines as my own. He said, “Um, Scott: I think you are an expert on Janis Joplin, and you can imitate her, and we all know you like her a lot, but…” “What? Are you ashamed to have a rock star who died of a heroin overdose in the family?”

Janis was an alchemist. She turned ugly into sexy, shyness into showbiz, and made wastedness into the new professionalism. Even with her addictions, she still adhered to the highest professional standards. It would have killed her to be late for or miss a concert. She also extorted a free fur coat out of the Southern Comfort company for all the “free advertising” she gave them onstage. “Whoo-ee, what a hustle!” she said. “Imagine getting a lynx coat just for passing out every night for two years.”

She missed her last studio session, though, when she was supposed to record the song “Buried Alive in the Blues”… because she died in a hotel room.

Just before graduation, I saw the news came that the Joplins — my real family — were planning a Broadway play about her called “Love, Janis.” I picked up the biography her sister had written, and the book jacket said, “The author lives in Denver.” So I just went to the public library, got a Denver phone book, found her number, xeroxed the page, went over to my parents’ house and called her.

I have never been shy about such things. I prefer talking to famous people, they’re more interesting.

There was a beeping fax tone at first, but then a woman picked up. “Hello?” “Laura?” “Yes.” “Is this the Laura Joplin who is Janis Joplin’s sister?” The guarded, suspicious way she responded with “Who is this, please?” answered my question for me.

I did some fast talking: “I just read your book and loved it, so I wanted to call and tell you that. Your sister was really one of a kind.”

“Well thank you! It’s nice to know people still care,” Laura said sweetly.

“Oh, people still care,” I said. “They care a lot… So is it true you’re working on a play about Janis?”

“Yeah, we’re tryin’,” she chuckled.

“Have you found anyone to play Janis yet?” I squeezed my eyes shut really hard.

“No, we’re still working on that.”

I was talking to Janis Joplin’s sister. The closest you could get to talking to Janis herself without using a medium, or talking to me.

Hearing Laura’s intact Texas accent, which Janis had tried so hard to lose, must have jarred me into a realization. Even with my chronically unstable identity, I might have an authentic voice deep down there somewhere.

Just at that moment I also faced reality: I couldn’t play Janis in the play… because I still couldn’t sing like her.

“Have you thought of Edie Brickell?”

I mentally put away my beads and cut my hair. I still wanted to die when I was 27… but I didn’t die. I’m still here, obviously, having been too chicken to do heroin… Janis must have gotten bored and flown up to Rock ’n’ Roll Heaven. She left me here to face it all alone. With nothing but an encyclopedic knowledge of Janis Joplin history and a serious drinking problem to deal with.

I was raised by my father to A) fear and respect him, but B) to automatically question and then “correct,” if necessary, the behavior of any other authority figure if they stepped out of line. He was also ready to step in himself on my behalf if I complained of anything an adult did that I didn’t like. Serial Mom Dad avant la lettre. When I saw that movie, I said, “Oh, that’s like my dad.” Figuratively, though, not murderously.

By no means a brat, especially not by today’s disgusting standards (“Fuck you, mom!” says the 6-year-old in the grocery store; the mom laughs. Um… nooo, no, no), I nevertheless had my limits of what I would put up with from adults.

SNL was in its infancy at this time. I remember being in the living room of our across-the-street neighbors and a competition show called Battle of the Sexes was playing on the teevee. Farrah Fawcett was one of the celebrity contenders. I swear I remember thinking how offensive I found it, and saying something to the neighbors about how there was no difference between men and women. Just then a teaser came on for the nightly news: “Find out why people all across the country are actually staying in on Saturday nights!” I must have been about 6.

Couple years later, the “Olympia Diner” skit, which is still unbelievably unfunny, was the meme du jour. You may know it as the “Cheeburger, cheeburger, cheeburger!” sketch. It’s as funny as when the doctor tells you you’re all through.

As a family we were visiting relatives in central Ohio. My favorite relative down there was my Great Aunt Nell. Grandma Shrake’s sister. She had lost her only child, a son, in a custody battle with her ex-husband, who was a department store magnate. She had testified against him in court in a drunken-driving case back in the ’40s, and in revenge his family used their influence to see to it she never had contact with her son again.

All she got to keep were her belongings. So she lived in this Victorian duplex filled to the rafters with antiques she had bought in Europe before the bad times hit. Every time you visited her, she’d give you your choice of antique to take home with you. She was a tough old woman whom I adored.

My parents and all the other adults (except Aunt Nell, who was too old and bitter) went out to a dinner-and-drinks thing. All of “us kids” were stowed at the home of a second cousin by marriage whose name I forget. She seemed like a Schlampe. That’s a German word that started out meaning “bad housekeeper” but now has come to mean “slut.”

She put us kids in the basement rec room and told us to play. Meanwhile she was upstairs in the kitchen talking on the phone to her friend and drinking a beer. I remember it was no-brand beer that just said BEER on the can.

“Hahahahahahaha! Cheeburger! Cheeburger!” she laughed, swigged her BEER, repeated it. Over and over.

From the basement I could hear and see her up the stairshole. I couldn’t concentrate on the Lincoln Logs or whatever we were playing. I asked my second cousin once removed, her son, what was wrong with his mom. Nothing? he said. That’s normal around here? I asked. He shrugged.

Cheeburger! Hahahaha! Cheeburger, cheeburger, cheeburger!

I stood up and walked up the stairs to the kitchen, where the woman covered the phone with her hand and asked me what was up.

“Hang up that phone right this minute.”

“What, honey? What’sa matter?”

“You are drunk and I am afraid for my safety here.”

Her face fell and she began arguing with me. “I’m not drunk!”

“Call the restaurant and tell my parents I want to talk to them.”

She looked into my demonic Scorpio eyes. Reluctantly, she did it. She wasn’t laughing now. I dissolved into tears at hearing my dad’s voice. “Please come get us!” I sobbed. “This woman is drunk and acting crazy!”

In no time I was in a very quiet car driving through the cold Ohio night. I was dropped off at Aunt Nell’s and I’m not sure where the adults went, but they left again.

Nell’s signature expression was “That’s no kid!” meaning “I’m not kidding.”

“You keep crying and going on like that,” said Great Aunt Nell to me in a harsh but concerned tone, “and you’re gonna get heart trouble, and that’s no kid.”

I stopped crying, because I respected Aunt Nell.

Stick that in your wok and fry it, Tiger Mom!

When I was very young, I fit in briefly with other boys. They liked me because I was “funny” (ha-ha funny). Soon enough my utter lack of sporting coordination and overall sensitiveness would relegate me to the girls.

During my brief full membership in the boys’ side of the world, some things happened that called my sensitiveness into question, however. My mom and I were laughing about the following shared memory last time I saw her…

Me and about six other boys from Buckingham Road were playing in my best friend Bob’s backyard one day. I was probably using small rocks as puppets and having them reenact scenes I Asperger’sishly knew verbatim from the Muppets, while the others played catch or ran around punching stuff.

A scout from our group came running down the driveway yelling that a mass of strangers was making its way to our territory from the next street over and they wanted to have a war with us.

Bob’s yard had one of those wooden children’s forts, but this was a particularly imposing one with two stories, on pilings, making it some 20 feet tall and about 10 square feet inside. We all clambered into the fort, and looked out the gunhole at the adjoining yards divided by chain-link fences held up by big dark-green clothespin-shaped posts with the tops painted white.

A group of about 10 strangers moved through the back neighbor’s yard, whooping their war cries, and started jumping the fence. They yanked open the trap door of the fort and declared war! Bob yelled “Who are you?” A few of them yelled back that they were so-and-so’s cousins, visiting from Waterford.

“Waterfurd?” I piped up, in my loudest voice, pronouncing it the way the name of this white trash suburb to the north is pronounced. “So you guys are poor?”

This engendered an uproar from both armies. Though it was over 30 years ago, I can still remember how I felt as the stranger boys invaded the fort, their stranger faces coming into view one by one, and my fury escalating quickly, filling me with rage-ohol and then hardening a resolve in me to save us all, my friends, from these filthy enemies.

As the tallest one of them pulled his way up the ladder rung by rung to the second story of the fort, where I and the other clean/good kids were, I knew what to do.

I waited until he reached the top and was hoisting himself up onto our level. Then with both arms I shoved him over the edge. He landed on his back on the first story, near the trap door, with a fort-shaking boom sound.

Sorry, but if you invade our fort I will do whatever it takes to break your back.

The stranger army was now stock-still, as was my own army, for a solid few moments. My shove victim just moaned a little. I knew I didn’t have long, so skipping several rungs, I tumbled down past everyone and escaped out of the fort.

Though I was probably only about two or three feet tall, and some of them other kids were well over three feet, I levitated down the street with about a 30-foot lead. Running isn’t actually the right word for it. There’s the normal adrenaline-fueled flight in fight-or-flight, and then there’s being washed down the street in a tidal wave of your own terror. I sensed the dirty stranger army, minus one of their original soldiers, behind me, and behind them my own comrades trying to get there in time to defend me, their surprisingly vicious little friend.

Defend me? Yes, everyone knew I couldn’t fight, or at least not fair. The Waterford goons would beat me up if they caught me. And as rogue as I was to the rules of children’s wars, I was still their neighbor-friend and thus deserved protection. So, that is why everyone was chasing me down Buckingham that day.

I wished my mom would have been on our porch to see how fast I ran. She wasn’t, though, so I pulled open the storm door, slammed it, locked it, and screamed out “Mom!” with the last of my kinetic energy. Before she could answer, I had found her in the laundry room in the basement.

I dissolved into crazy-eyed, breathless crying but managed to stammer out the recurring question I would always ask her when I choked on a pork chop or sprained my ankle or whatever: “Mom, would you be sad if I died?”

There was no time, the kids were banging on the screen door, but because this war was not a real war, they knew better than to just bust into our house.

I guess they should have known better than to invade our fort, too.

___

See Also: I Hit a Kid in the Face with a Hammer!

Her frequent lunch partner and sister-friend-coworker Ruby was sitting across from her, but looking over at me.

“How old are you?” Ruby asked me. I told her. Then to fill the empty airtime I said, “When I was born, Nixon was president…. He was a Quaker like me. Did you know that?”

Ruby then asked abruptly, “How come there’s no black Amish people?”

I said, “You could be the first.”

She said, “I like their lifestyle. They’re not worldly.”

I said, “We are going to get you in. I’m taking on the Amish racist conspiracy. This is THE civil rights struggle of the next decade. None of us is free until Ruby is Amish!”

SCHELL: Is she lonely?

BERNARD: I think so, I think we all get lonely somet-…

SCHELL (interrupting): …But I mean is she a lonely person?

BERNARD (after pausing to think): Yes.

At least she had a manservant around! You know what I’ve got? Sweet F.A. is what I’ve got. So I’m that much lonelier now than Marlene, my idol when I was a late teenager.

Come to think of it, I was lonely then too.

That’s why I walked down the Avenue Montaigne in Paris in 1991, a year before she died, looking up at the windows, wondering if she could be looking back down at me.

That’s why I left a rose on her gravestone in Berlin in 1995 when I went there. Can’t believe that was 15 years ago now. Time flies when you’re feeling sorry for yourself.

One takes an inventory of all he is made of at the moment of coming apart.

Ten years ago, I had my Crisis. It started on the eve of my 30th birthday. I messed up. I did something that scared me, physically, which led to an increasing number of increasingly frantic visits to doctors, who adjudged that it was all in my head. Then they checked around in my head, and didn’t like what they found. From there the cause/effect boomerangs of bad decisions surrounded me, and my mental state deteriorated.

My dad swooped in and took over, doing damage control and trying to save me. He came across country in a van and we took my belongings and gave them all to the St. Vincent de Paul store. I got to keep a couple boxes of sentimental items and some of my clothes. Then we drove back to Michigan, where I was born.

I won’t say “I lost everything” because I still had my family and friends. But I had to give back everything else. I had to resign my job as Senior Editor at a magazine and give up my apartment and move from the East Coast, where I’d been living for six years, back to Detroit. I had bungled my first adulthood.

For six months I was basically an outpatient mental patient. Not loony, just not my old self in any way. “He has no affect,” was how one psychiatrist described it, talking like I wasn’t there. And I wasn’t.

Disturbed by the statis we were living in, one day my dad said, “I think it’s time for you to go get a little job.” Always one to do what I was told by my dad, I drove around catatonically looking for a “little job” someplace. I randomly pulled into a big retail chain’s parking lot. I took home an application, filled it out, took it back in, got an interview. And, amazingly, even though I was pretty obviously a waste case, the store hired me.

(I later saw my personnel file, and was surprised to see the note the interviewer had written atop my application: “I like Scott.”)

It dusted what crumbs were left of my ego into the garbage can to start my new little job, in the neighborhood where I had grown up, behind a cash register. Puffy from the new meds I was taking, yet still recognizable to all the ghosts and goblins from the past. They all came in. My elementary school gym teacher who had terrorized me, Mrs. Overman, came in. (Why would she be dead?) “Friends” I hated from high school came in, lots of them, and saw me being a cashier. From salaried magazine editor to round-the-clock mental patient to hourly cashier in six months. A little humbling.

I was raised by my dad to question all authority and fight it if necessary. (Except his, of course.) I’ve never done what people tell me to do unless I trust their motives. And here I had complete strangers, the managers at the store, telling me what to do and even trying to punish me sometimes.

The General Manager and I never got squared.  One day she told me, in front of coworkers, to do something, and I said “No, that’s not what I think I should be doing right now” and she accused me of “insubordination.” I said “Look, I am not your subordinate. If there is such a thing as an order of rank, I am above you. So don’t you ever, ever talk to me like that again. Do you understand me?” She just stared at me, her dumb face slackened by her disbelief. She eventually transferred to another store.

And so it went for two long years. Slowly, though, with sweet time, I rebuilt myself while working this little job. Normality crept back in. I got promoted from Cashier to Shelver.

They posted corporate jobs in the employee backroom of every store in the chain. One day the job Copy Editor came through. I applied, and got solid recommendations from he two managers I did get along with. They interviewed me at the company headquarters, which was in a nearby city, and they liked me.

The call came in to the store one day and I was paged up to the office and handed a phone. I got the job! I was back among the living. Soon I would be back on track, with the title of Editor again! And making real money again! I told everyone elatedly what happened. My one friend said, “You’re free now.” We both nodded our heads.

Then 10 days later, on one of my last days in the store, I was called up to the manager’s office. An HR woman from the corporate office was on the phone for me. She was afraid she had some bad news. It had come to her attention that I was on Final Warning for chronic lateness at the time I applied for the corporate job as Copy Editor, and that was against the ground rules for applying for promotions, so she was going to have to rescind the offer.

The shock turned all my nerve endings off. I begged, “You can’t! Please don’t do this to me.” But HR is cold, heartless. They have to do what they have to do… to you.

My parents were the first people I told. As far as they knew I would be starting my new, salaried job in a few days. My dad later told me that when I said what they were doing to me, he thought, “This poor guy has been through enough already.” I felt that way too now. For the first time, my dad did not offer to fight a battle for me. He said, “I’m confident you will figure out what to do about this.”

I needed to hear that. I started pursuing my goal with an animalistic concentration. I went to see my friend, a corporate lawyer specializing in employment issues. And, like me, a fledgling writer. I vomited my story onto paper and then he sliced and shaped it into a 5-page letter infused generously with what he called “red siren words” that HR people would understand. Words like “rescission of an offer constituting breach of contract amounting to constructive termination,” and “malicious intent to damage my career.”

But the biggest red siren was: “retaliatory denial of a promotion I earned in reaction to a harassment claim I had previously raised.” Which was true. I had filed a report when one manager slapped me way too hard on the back one day. He had it in for me after I reported that. Maybe, dear letter reader, there was a relationship between the tardiness and the tense work environment…

We revised the letter many times, and I brought all of my editor’s skills to bear, because I was writing for my life this time. Failure to make them give me the job was not an option. It was going to go down that way over my dead body. And my body would die fighting.

I remember driving in my car with a friend around this time and raging about the wrongful job offer rescission in such a ferocious manner that he told me he was scared and wanted me to pull over.

We closed the letter with:

I request that the Human Resources Department reinstate me as Copy Editor this week for the reasons that I have given, without delay and before it becomes necessary to involve other parties. I ask further that this reinstatement or any other responses to this letter be provided to me before close of business on Thursday, March 21. I remain as enthusiastic as ever about excelling in the Copy Editor position.

Meanwhile, that week, I was once again working on the store floor, like someone who had gotten out of jail briefly only to be sent right back, when again I was summoned upstairs. It was about 4 p.m. on that Thursday. My manager handed me the phone for the third time in three weeks.

The HR woman was pleased to inform me that they had decided to make an exception to their rule in my case. “Thank you,” I whispered and hung up.

That third phone call in the store’s office was the Moment I knew I had the resources inside me to save my own life.

The veiled legal threats in the letter are probably what made the difference. But I’d like to think that another thing came across to those HR people reading it. In between the threats, there was a tone of begging, for mercy. I told them what this job would mean to me: a return to life. It’s my flotation device, don’t yank it from me.

On the day when I had had to resign my magazine job back East, the HR woman had actually cried a little, because she was a kind person and she liked me and knew I had an awful path to go down, and may never get back to where I was.

But two years after the HR woman cried, and a few days after the third phone call in the manager’s office at the store, I was back on track. I started work at the chain’s corporate office. They put me on six months’ probation, meaning I had to be there every day by 8:30 a.m. for six months, and I was. Now 10 years later I’m back on the East Coast, a Senior Editor again.

The depth of my gratefulness for a second chance at adulthood? I won’t even try to describe it. Anything I could say cheapens it. It’s between me and life. Thank you, life. I do love you, you know.

I realized tonight that for the last decade, every place I’ve lived has been adjoined to a butch lesbian’s.

My current next-door lesbian neighbor is about 60, troubled, a chubby, socially awkward gray-haired bookworm and very much a man trapped inside a woman’s body. We share a wall and I’ve often heard her having lengthy, desperate, I hate to say this, but: “hysterical” tirades, first thing in the morning or last thing at night, which I assume are on a phone and I assume are directed at someone else. But I’m just assuming, I don’t really know. The long and short of these lamentations, from what I can catch (she paces the length of her apartment, it seems, so the sound fades and gets closer in alternation), is “How could you do this to me?” She has been abandoned by someone.

____

Way back in Philly there was the racist Sicilian lesbian chef of the French restaurant downstairs. And then in Ann Arbor, when I lived in my heavy-woody apartment with vaulted ceilings and that charming wrap-around staircase, in a Victorian house on the Old West Side… the house next door contained a very old woman on the first floor, and a bull dyke on the second floor, who I think was renting from the old-woman owner. She lived alone up there, I never saw anyone else go in or come out.

I only ever talked to them one time each, besides just waving hello. Once the old woman, who was actually very kindly, trilled over from her porch at me: “My, you certainly have a lot of … visitors, don’t you?” I said yes. “At strange hours,” she added. She had a forced smile on. I wore my own fake smile and emitted a hostile little “laugh.” She moved to a nursing home shortly after that and I never saw her again. Her family came and packed all her necessary belongings.

My one conversation with the next-door lesbian upstairs happened like this.

It was five years ago this month, but later in the month than this, right after Thanksgiving. She pulled into the driveway, which was one of those with just two strips of cement and a mound of grass in the middle, in her green Subaru station wagon. I was sitting on my porch having a glass of champagne, as it was still warm out in the late afternoons that year. She looked startled by my presence when she came around the car toward her own porch, carrying a big plastic bag from Home Depot.

“Oh, hey there!” she bellowed with full-throated, macho heartiness. “How are you?” She looked in her late 40s or early 50s, chunky, with salt-and-pepper close-cropped hair and unfashionable glasses not unlike the ones Dick Cheney favored and favors still. I imagined she had once been a heavy drinker but had given it up some years ago. She looked like she enjoyed hamburgers, though. “I’m fine, thank you. How are you?” I answered. Again, this was the first time we’d ever exchanged words.

Talking to her felt like talking to my uncles when I was a kid. I sensed there was some way I was supposed to act that was a little more mannish than I could manage, but it was just a sense and there’s no way you can ask anyone, so those avuncular/nephewistic exchanges always put me on edge. In that same way my lesbian neighbor and I both slid into a sagging conversational gutter and hung there vertiginously for a moment.

(It’s an open secret that gay men and lesbians have, at best — well, they usually have almost no common ground. We like what they don’t want and vice versa and it’s mutually mystifying and foreign. Having a third party — straights — whose sexual predilections we both find inscrutable… this triangularity somehow does not unite us. We’re strange to one another. Of course, I also feel zero kinship with other gay guys. Look: Homosexuality is not enough to bring us together, there are going to be other differences that are too major for that to happen. Anyone who pretends otherwise — that there is some happy, harmonious, unified Gay Community — is just kidding you and themselves.)

Then she remembered something. “Hey!” she said in a gravy-like baritone. “How was your Halloween?” I had dressed as a witch, like always, and passed out candy on my porch, but she had put me way back in the shade with a complicated light show, semi-professional sound effects, and a genuinely scary Grim Reaper costume that she wore and jumped out and scared the groups of trick-or-treaters such that I heard nothing but children’s screams all night from next door. She was serious about Halloween, man.

She cocked her head and peered over at me, waiting for my answer. “Um, it was… nice,” I said in my weak, reedy voice. Okay. She nodded her head up and down hard, like an oilfield pumpjack. “Yeeeeah,” she said, one of those guttural yeahs that turns itself into a laugh at the end. I had a spacey doll smile pasted on my face. She checked my visage again from across the driveway and waited for me to say something but I didn’t so she turned, her arms akimbo, and looked out over the street.

Her voice fell from baritone to bass and she spoke these two words slowly, loudly, with no irony at all: “Good times.”

She jettisoned her lips out and nodded deeply some more, thinking about Halloween, which had happened a month ago.

_____

There have been times in my current apartment when I’ve been wakened out of a sound sleep by my next-door lesbian sobbing and screeching about lost trust, failed love, betrayal. It is harrowing to wake up that way. But uncharacteristically for me, I would not dream of going to knock on her door and telling her to shut up.

We’re both bristly, we don’t make eye contact when we see each other by day in the communal laundry room. I could never do it, of course, but… I think she needs a hug.

_____   _____

I’ve been thinking about him because of all the bully news we’ve seen recently. It gave me pause the other week when I noticed one of the gay teens who committed suicide had the same last name as my bully.

My bully’s first name was Jamie. Jamie had moved to town recently. Rather than make friends, he took the dark road of bullydom. Jamie was undersized for our age, and so he had a larger co-bully he worked with named Chris. In my memory they just constantly surveyed the neighborhood and the schoolyard looking for victims. Anyone, male or female, whom they read as weak in any way, they would target. They were generalists: Whatever label seemed to fit the individual victim would be fine: Fag? Four eyes? Fatass? Anorexic? Zitface? Nerd? Yes.

Jamie was rather swarthy himself, and Chris was chubby, with freckles and acne, one of those light blonds with translucent eyebrows.

They were unashamed of the fact that everyone knew they were nothing but bullies. If you had asked them about themselves and their interests they would have said “We’re bullies” in the same tone of voice one would use when saying “I play soccer.”

I feared them. As a member of the weakling ranks, I was natural prey for them. One frigid winter’s day they intercepted me and my brother as we crossed the big deserted field behind school, taking our shortcut home. Jamie lived in the new subdivision that had been built near there, in a rather nice-looking, large house. He had no siblings. We saw them coming, and there was really nothing we could think of to do, we just had to fall into it. It was almost drearily predictable. Jamie punched me in the left eye. I noticed how it felt different from slapping, which is flesh on flesh; punching is hand bone to head bone. It’s a hard pain on the front of your skull. It makes a different sound, too. Like a crack rather than a smack.

What distressed me most was that I couldn’t protect my younger brother, who then also got punched. That was it, though, it was over after we had each received one punch in the face. They just turned and walked away, laughing at us.

We ran home, and I was crying and basically couldn’t even talk. My brother told my dad what happened, and before you could say “I own a gun” my dad was knocking on Jamie’s door. No one was home.

My dad had tried once to “teach me to fight,” but it didn’t go well, and he ended up just telling me — this is pretty good advice, actually — that if I were ever attacked, I should just go berserk, act as outrageously, rabidly insane as I could. So why did my brother and I just stand there and get punched like we were getting our savings account books stamped at the bank?

Maybe because I already knew it would not happen a second time. The next school day I found my old friends from when I was much younger, guys who had all grown into big jocks now. We weren’t friends enough to hang around together anymore, but they still had a warm affinity for me, the one who had made them laugh so many times on the playground. I told my “first best friend” what happened with Jamie. The guys had a little talk with him: Hands off Shrake. And so Jamie reverted back to just scowling at me and never came near me or my brother again.

I think someone who chooses to be a really stereotypical bully sent from Central Casting must have mental problems. Like, maybe Jamie had been molested. No girl would go out with him, because: Come on. He was a twerp and a bully with a fat, ugly enforcer bully partner. In a way, those two were dating. Inseparable! Maybe if some larger, more advanced bullies could have called them fags and beaten them up, it would have all stopped.

For some reason, bullying was the only way Jamie knew to interact with the world. Not to be too liberal here, but that’s sad. I remember looking at him and seeing through the whole thing, even then, as a 12-year-old. He looked evil, but also miserable. I even thought maybe there was a way to get to him, to uncover some shred of niceness. Not that I ever tried.

And not that I didn’t enjoy a big laugh when, some months later, Jamie came to school with a black eye.

From… His father? My father? My old neighborhood real-boy buddies? A would-be bullying victim whom he and Chris misjudged?

He looked embarrassed. But as soon as the eye healed it was back to bullying.

Now. I’ve done the math, and… I’m also left to wonder if maybe the kid in the news with the same last name as Jamie was his son. Imagine: This kid was the thing that redeemed Jamie’s life, maybe, belatedly. After years of therapy, maybe, the reformed Jamie had found a woman who loved him, and they had a miracle child, but the child was perceived as gay and got bullied. And then killed himself.

It’s a common last name, though.

They talk funny. And it shows in their signs…

Munchy Box? Chicken Cottage? Mini-Burger that’s not a burger at all, but made of chicken? Top it “up” with wing-dings — 3 of them? Who wants just 3 wings?

Immobilized (ised) how? With a stun gun? I know, I know: They will put a clamp (boot) on the tyre (tire).

It’s called a cookie. And stupendous is not an okay word to use, ever.

A) Is that the late (career-dead) Charlotte Church? B) The shudder-inducing song selection… C) I think it would be spelled Maraoke.

More special agents prefer MacSween Haggis. And when vegetarians get hungry for supper, the first thing they reach for is a meatless haggis… Duh.

The Krankies? “As ‘The Policemen’”? I don’t know who the Krankies are, but I have a hunch they are Scotland’s answer to famed unforgivable Nazi variety show figures Kurt Felix und Paola.

Here’s some more questionable food…

And finally, there’s nothing wrong with this sign linguistically yet it just feels off…