“You wouldn’t know by looking at me, but unhappiness shielded me from the truth of my decline—and rain made my hair flip up at the ends until I looked like a putto in a baroque drawing room. Living in Chicago had sapped the golden hues from my hair, my face, my arms, and lost then too was the thin gold leaf of my hairy legs. Instead of a halo of gold to shimmer around me when I was standing in the moonlight, now I was pale and drawn with a smudge of burnt sienna in the shadows, the color of a red wine reduction and everyone else.”
The Photo Box is drawing to a close, just six chapters left. Published every Saturday on my Substack. Your subscription is free.
Many thanks to those of you who’ve followed my journey as I remember it through this collection of personal essays. I hope you’ve enjoyed the time we’ve spent together.
Okay, so I’m a couple of days behind…no matter. There’s just 15 chapters left to publish at my Substack, The Photo Box. A new chapter is published every Saturday at 8 AM CDT. These are personal essays about my experiences growing up in the 60’s and 70’s during the cultural and sexual revolutions of those decades. Please consider subscribing to my Substack, it’s free!
“This photo was taken the last summer I spent in Rapid City (1973) before moving to Chicago to go to school at the Goodman School of Drama. I worked at the local Elks Club golf course as an assistant greens-keeper; I was a legacy hire — just like Yale or Harvard — my uncle was the grand poohbah, aka the Grand Exalted Ruler, of the Rapid City Elks Lodge and my soon-to-be stepfather, Roy, (he married my mother the morning of the day I flew to Chicago late that August) was the greens-keeper.
“The equipment barn, a wooden structure painted dark green, was behind the pool house and concession stand, just to the left of this pond with the dramatically placed dead tree—once struck by lightning but positioned in the body of water so that it was impossible to remove. Crows loved its vantage point and commented on the whiffs of five irons slicing through the air as the duffers played on the adjoining fairway…” Click the image to continue reading.
Read the latest chapter of The Photo Box on my Substack, robertpatrck1.substack.com. If you haven’t already, please consider subscribing, it’s free. (And I would be eternally grateful.)
Author’s Note: Although I’m publishing my memoir, “The Photo Box” on Substack (robertpatrick1.substack.com), its timeline ends in the summer of 1982. This then is a memory of Christmas 1986.
1986 was the year that Marty was in every photo taken the evening of our Christmas dinner party. When we got the photos back from the developer we couldn’t wait to get home to look at them, so we sat in the car with the motor running and the heat on high, the crank and squeal of the ‘El’ as it pulled into the Howard Street station the score to our movie, exhaust rising and shrouding the car in a winter wonderland, with commuters scurrying by, bundled against the cruel wind whipping off Lake Michigan just a few blocks to the east and as we pulled the photographs out of their envelope (I may have stolen a kiss when we first saw the cake, hidden as we were from public view by the steamed up windows), but after that first photo it was: “Marty and Doug,” “Marty, Cheryl, Dede,” “Marty and Michael,” “oh, look, there’s Vicki!, “Marty and Vicki, Marty and Doug (again),” Marty and Noe.”
It had started to get easier about this time. Not the Christmas/New Year’s holidays necessarily, but just life in general. A career, a lover, a dog, accepting the death of my mother (although still able to cry on cue). There was no foreshadowing of the loss to come, a dark smudge on the horizon, one we’d carefully avoided looking at with great care. Men from the periphery of our circle went missing, but no one ever said anything about them, they had just moved on. That happened, you know, someone you’d met and liked would suddenly have disappeared and months later you’d find out they’d moved to Cleveland or Atlanta, so when they actually started to die, those at the edges of your friendship circle, it didn’t seem that extraordinary–not knowing they had died, but only assuming they had left the city to pursue other interests, other men, another life.
We’d built a cocoon for ourselves after we’d met and fallen in love and committed ourselves to each other. Moving from my little attic apartment to a larger one downstairs, and then, with an assist from my step-father, we bought a bungalow (mortgage at 9%, can you imagine?) in Rogers Park not far from the municipal golf course, set in a little valley with wonderful neighbors next door and around the corner, lots of kids, and dogs, and if not the white picket fence, then something very close.
We’re trained to expect that perfect life in spite of our genetic instincts. prowling the bars, streets, restrooms, train stations, bus depots, bushes, parks, elevators, offices, barbershops, beauty salons, and the gift department at Marshall Field’s, for sex was the status quo; the perfect life, the house in the suburbs, pretty husband/wife in an apron standing at the kitchen window watching the two kids play with the golden retriever on the manicured back lawn, a shiny station wagon in the driveway, the exception. That the one could be so far from the other didn’t matter. It’s all we’d seen growing up–not in our own lives of course, but the lives depicted on TV, or in Redbook, Family Circle, Reader’s Digest, or by Norman Rockwell, in the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, at the church–Catholic, Presbyterian, Evangelical, holier-than-thou. Who wouldn’t want that, you’d ask yourself, everything scrubbed shiny, squeaky clean, the whites so bright, the sun so strong that the contrast between the fantasy and the reality all but disappeared? Sigh.
Marty died a few months later, our disappointment that he’d inserted himself into every photo (well, almost every one) a shameful reminder of our striving for the perfect life. Was he just being prescient? Did he know that we’d always be reminded that he lived so vibrantly, even if we’d only known him for a couple of years? Marty was a tall man, taller than me, and as his health failed, he shrank like he was being erased by some mad artist unsure of the beauty of his work. His partner, Doug, adrift after Marty’s death, said Marty didn’t know at Christmas that he was sick; the loss for Doug a catalyst for moving far away from the pain. Another one pursuing other interests, other men, another life. Doug went on to lose two more lovers to AIDS, he is still alive. Can you imagine that burden, that guilt?
And so, it started. Each Christmas Eve party attended by fewer and fewer of our gay male friends until the last one we gave before we too moved away (I should have written, “ran away”), was attended by all heterosexual couples. Not that we minded, and not that we actually gave it a thought, not me at least, until I sat down the other evening and looked through a photo-album my husband Michael had put together several years ago of photos and mementos–invitations, wine labels, pressed flowers–of all of our big Christmas Eve to-do’s. And one after the other, the noticeable missing friends from each succeeding year. And you wonder if the bubble you’ve built around your life has done any good.
To be honest, I’ve struggled to define what I thought was my memoir, but have determined that it’s less a memoir and more of a collection of memories of childhood and early adulthood. Each chapter is prompted by a photograph, some are mini-memoirs with an emotional arc for the protagonist, others are just ruminations on friendships, lovers, and my mother’s mysterious life before I came along. I’m going to publish it on Substack a chapter a week over the next year and have begun by publishing the foreword and the first three chapters of my book, “The Photo Box” there. I’d appreciate your subscription (it’s free!) and readership. Thank you. https://robertpatrick1.substack.com/p/the-photobox
After 42 years together, we have finally tied the knot! It’s official, we are now husband and husband!
Michael Horvath and I would like to thank everyone for their kind words and well-wishes on the occasion of our wedding. Your love and support is truly appreciated.
We thank those who came great distances to witness the union of our love; and many thanks to our dear family, and friends (both old and new) who also joined us in our nuptials on this perfect day in October.
I’ve been busy with numerous other projects, but took a few days to reevaluate some suggested edits from my editor and have decided to delete this chapter and two others from “The Photo Box”. It’s not that I don’t like them, but they didn’t add anything to the memoir I have written. Thought I’d share this one as it’s a favorite of mine, a little darling, if you will.
Sic Gloria Transit [Jason]
Will you leave me alone if I write about you? Stop sending the Polaroid’s, the telegrams. Stop. The movement in the corner of my eye, the dreams where you lay next to me. Stop. Warm, manly, fragile Jason.
Night
There’s you standing in the dark corner of Touché—beer and urine, cowboys and bikers—black leather jacket, shirtless, tall, and strong. Aviators shielding your eyes, long black hair slicked back from your forehead, but for one lock, a rape. Then there are the flies, bar acolytes, floating around you, all hopeful for a look, a touch, a lick of your sweat, to rub against you as they pass by, and you so tall above them, staring at me, then ignoring me—an aphrodisiac, foreplay, a feather against my neck tracing down my scapula, touching a nipple, and along my side—standing in the opposite corner surprised that you’re interested, so not what anyone in the bar would think you’d look at, let alone want. And later, when we were standing so close together talking in one ear or the other, what were we saying? Do you remember cradling my ass in your big hand and pulling me up into a kiss, even I had to rise up to meet your dark lips, white teeth, velvet tongue. That kiss sunk me.
All those men stood back from us, sideways glances charting our progress, setting the tone for their night, while we talked and kissed some more, Levi’s stretched tight across our crotches, hands memorizing the terrain, the highs and lows of our own landscapes; your arms made for holding another man; and desire, a psychic light of want, lifting me off the floor high above you, the magician’s assistant, while the audience applauded your legerdemain. We must have fucked, did we? Do you remember, Jason?
There’s you lying in bed, arms flung above your head and me astride your smooth body, the bristly hairs of my thighs commingled with the silkiness of yours, resting my hands on your chest, the heartbeat of a warrior. I did not know then how delicate you really were, all I knew was that I had capitulated and flung myself, all of me, at you and you had caught me, and worshiped me, much as I did you. Your black hair the night against the clouds of pillows framing your beautiful eyes, nose, a small spray of freckled roses across its bridge, ones that I would count one two three when you closed your eyes and stroked my thighs.
Afterward, you lifted your body up off the bed and giant that you were, strode into the bathroom to piss, legs apart; then to the kitchen for a clean ashtray, grabbing our warm beers from the living room, and finally standing in the doorway, lit from behind, a crazy-ass grin splitting your face until I said, “what?” “Nothing,” you replied as you sank back into the crook of my outstretched arm, and rolled toward me, our bodies matched inch-for-inch or so it seemed at the time, “nothing” you said as you buried your face into my chest. Do you remember that?
There’s you nervous about me meeting your sister, but she and I fall together conspiratorially in the living room, while you bang around in the small kitchen, a useless apron tied at your waist, spatula in one hand, the smells and sounds of dinner swirling around you–a mystic at Delphi reading chicken entrails in the hopes that you’ll be able to discern what we are cooking up on our own. Until your blond-headed sister, the opposite of you, takes my hand and says, “don’t break his heart, you hear?” blue-eyed beauty, all soft curves, but with the same menace on her face that I’d seen in yours when you fucked me. It hurt.
Did you not know how she scared me? How after that evening, I started the withdrawal, the pulling away from you? Slippery, exhausted, limp. I worked hard to make you happy, did we love each other? Did you love me? I believe I thought I could until I couldn’t any longer. Do you remember now?
Day
There’s you sitting in a chair at a smudged window looking out onto a dirty Chicago winter day–that gray sky and gray ground, meeting in your eyes. The dealer’s boyfriend is doing what young men do around you; staring at your crotch, licking his lips, close enough to laugh at nothing, sitting cross-legged at your feet, wanting you to drop your pants–he may have asked you to do so–did you ask me if I minded? Perhaps, I know it happened while I sat there waiting for his master to cut the drugs and roll a joint; he cared so little, just a part of doing business.
You acted like it didn’t matter and maybe it didn’t. After all, I had acquiesced, not angry, perhaps a bit turned on by the young man’s craven desire. Didn’t I think then that I had you for myself, that no one, no one could take you from me, regardless of their lips and hunger? Our passion for each other did not seem to lessen, ice melting and pulling away from the shoreline, the racket of seagulls outside the frosted window. Do you remember that?
There’s you sitting in your deuce and a quarter, idling on 18th Street while I slipped down into the basement apartment to see a pal and score a bag. My friend dithering and withering in equal measure, “he’s no good for you, Bobpatrick,” his tongue darted out and back in again, tempting, hissing, the radiator rattling under the window. I did not respond, what could be said that would have been the truth, “I know”? A raised eyebrow from both of us.
But I come back up from that little hell, and there you are: sloppy grin, luxurious black hair falling into your eyes, arm across the back of the seat reaching to the window, gesturing with your long fingers, how I loved the magic of your hands, long for them even now, to get in, “let’s go home.” and we did. Was it later that same day, I left you? What excuse could I have given? Do you remember, Jason?
Coda
I called you months later, your sister answered, unhappy with me, but relented and gave the phone to you, a little boy, sad and hurt still, smarting as if I’d slapped you. It’s then I remembered the one night you whispered in my ear as your heart pounded against mine, “I love you.”
It’s a hard lesson to learn: the fact that your dreams have no footing in reality, or at least in your future reality. But what do you know when you’re 14 and your inner life is arguing so forcibly with your outer life? When how you feel on the inside doesn’t jibe with the expectations of the outside world if you even think about it so realistically–realistic thought truly the privilege of time and distance from the moment’s reality–you may have just shrugged your shoulders and thought about something less complex and less frightening.
It’s a more visceral response you’re having, you may even find if you dig deep enough now that your memory of the time is nose to the ground, the scent of what is considered right so conflicted with the actual scents you are smelling; the sounds you hear differ dramatically from the sounds you know you are expected to hear; the close ones expected, the distant ones the truth. This ‘knowing’ of course has been observed and not explicitly explained to you, o.k. perhaps once someone may have said, “men and boys don’t cross their legs at the knee or ankle, Robert.” Even your vision is affected by this confusion, the deafening blur of an unspooling reel of film clacking and shuddering through the projector in a final rush of what your life is or might be; the images of the now so clear and those of the future, well those are only hinted at, a feeling really, perhaps occasionally glimpsed: in a magazine, on the television, a boy diving into the swimming pool one summer, or your neighbor’s father shoveling snow after a blizzard.
You construct a delicate balance, a seesaw weighted on one end with someone else’s expectations and on the other with your desires and dreams as ill-formed as they may be at this time in your life. When you stand back and look at this scene you see yourself seated at either end, a stereoscopic postcard from the turn of another century. For your story is not new and never will be; it is just one of many–I would say millions, but who could count them all, perhaps a neuron-physicist in lab coat and thick glasses or a wizened white-bearded astronomer–how you may envision god had you been me then–gazing at the night sky as it blossoms overhead.
I’m sure I could give you a timeline of my short, but potent theatrical glory, but what would be the point of citing this production and that one, this newspaper clipping — with a photograph! — in the “Living” section of the local daily paper and the awards stacking up, actual trophies — a competition that did not involve a ball, a bat, a marching band (exclusive of your dreams of starring in “The Music Man”), and cheerleaders. Although the idea of cheerleaders during the production of a play has some merit, and I suppose the Greeks had it figured out with a chorus commenting on and encouraging the players from the sidelines. hubris in abundance.
My dreams, as it turns out, were exactly what they needed to be: an escape hatch, an ejector seat, a lifeline, a savior (Jesus with the long golden hair or the big brawny fireman, the leather clad motorcycle daddy or the gray-flannel-suit-wearing banker). They leadeth me through the valley of the shadow of death and deliver me to a life that I could call my own.
Robert Patrick 