Fried & True

by Fay Jacobs

  It was not until two years later, when I was sent to the bedroom to get a sweater for Muriel that I learned the truth. There, on the floor by the bed, were two cut crystal glasses and a half gallon jug of Scotch.

  Yes, they only had one drink each night in the living room.

  When I reported my discovery to the ladies, Anyda pretended not to hear me and Muriel’s eyes got that well-known twinkle as she cackled and giggled like a teenager.

  At 5 p.m. tonight, wherever you are, let’s raise a toast to Miss Muriel.

  July 2006

  LETTERS FROM CAMP REHOBOTH

  FLIPPING THE BIRD

  I live in Animal House.

  Our dog groomer left town a while ago and Bonnie began clipping our pups herself. Quicker than you can say buzz cut our dogs were exceedingly naked and shorn like sheep at a Marine induction center. For the first ten days after the shearing they had to wear newborn onesie outfits to stop the shivering.

  But since then my spouse has gotten much better at this grooming thing, perfecting the Schnauzer cut—feathered legs, clipped mustache, square beard, shaved sides and long eyebrows. Our boys could model for Canine Klein.

  Soon, friends with Schnauzers started to drop off their pooches at the house for haircuts. Occasionally, brave friends with other breeds asked Bonnie to prune their pets too, and it’s amazing how fast Bonnie could turn almost any breed into faux Schnauzers. The AKC will soon be registering the Schnorkie, Schmaltese and Schmutt.

  Last weekend was particularly busy here at Schnauzerhaven. We had human and canine houseguests, non-stop events and the usual summer craziness. On Friday morning, we saw a weird shadowy thing bouncing off the walls in the sunroom and our dogs plastered against the sliding glass door like Garfield on car window suction cups.

  One of our houseguests investigated. “Oh my, it’s a bird, it’s stuck in here,” she said, at which point she started trying to shoo the panicked creature out the door. Startled, the bird dive bombed her head and there she was, barricaded in the sun-room channeling Tippi Hedren in The Birds.

  I knew better than to inject myself into the pursuit, so I summoned my spouse. She entered our new aviary and started to chase the creature, too, which prompted the question “how many lesbians does it take to….” It was all very Keystone Kops, with the bird and its pursuers flying all over the place.

  Finally, Bonnie coaxed the interloper onto her outstretched arm and escorted the bird outside. The dogs, crestfallen, couldn’t believe their bad luck.

  As we left the house for an afternoon downtown and ladies happy hour Moxie and Paddy stayed home enjoying their last hours of solitude. The following day we would be taking in two more Schnauzers for doggy day care.

  Yes, we sometimes provide daily or overnight lodging for non-shedding breeds. Not only are we getting a reputation for having a canine safe house, but sometimes I think somebody posted us on Doggie Hotels.com. We do offer five biscuit lodging with amenities like spa service and, if Bonnie or I put our java mugs down to get dressed or visit the library, there’s in-room coffee. Fortunately they do not need high speed internet access or a complimentary USA Today.

  Unfortunately, we’d forgotten to inform our human guests about the two additional dogs that would be checking in on Saturday morning. They awoke to a terrible thunderstorm and a pack of howling animals. Discovering that the two household Schnauzers had, in the night, multiplied, our friends considered giving up martinis.

  I assured everyone that the double vision was not alcohol induced and we set about preparing breakfast. We’d just popped the champagne cork for the Mimosas when the phone rang. “Is Bonnie there?”

  It seems that a dog visiting friends down the street had gone under their deck and was refusing to come out. Driving rain continued unabated and it was worrisome. “They need a dog whisperer,” I said.

  So Bonnie threw on her raincoat and headed for this new animal emergency. Sure enough, a friend’s Beagle (If Bonnie clipped it, would it be a Schneagle?) was entrenched in mud under the deck. I bet Bonnie wished she’d kept that bird as bait. Unable to succeed through her powers of persuasion, she resorted to crawling, on her belly, under the deck for the rescue. Three gay men stood watching, squirming at the thought of the muddy and perhaps varmint filled mess Bonnie was willing to crawl in.

  With her mission accomplished, our drenched and mud-caked animal rescue expert arrived home to learn that our two visiting Schnauzers would not be picked up until late that night, having requested, yes, a late checkout. So it was back to cooking breakfast.

  And in our house, cooking is a problem for many reasons, one of which is the obvious fact that we rarely do it. But perhaps the real reason is that our dogs are terrified when we cook. How’s that for a culinary reference?

  Once, back in their puppyhood, I was broiling chicken wings and the tips started to blacken and sizzle, as they will do, setting off the smoke alarm. Well, you’d think Zambelli had detonated firecrackers up those Schnauzers’ butts. The dogs fled to the back of the bedroom closet, holed up there, shaking, for two hours. Now I’m sure the sound of the smoke detector hurt their sensitive ears, but I also think they were being little canine drama queens. Regardless, I tried never to let that happen again.

  But from that moment on, every time we’d turn on the oven, stove or microwave, my dogs trembled, drooled and hyperventilated from post-traumatic stress syndrome. They carry on like that if we prepare anything from a turkey dinner to a pop tart.

  We tried behavior modification techniques, luring the dogs toward the stove by offering them a taste of whatever was in or on the offending kitchen appliance. This worked pretty well, as they no longer ran from the room. They’d just hang around drooling and panting until we gave them a taste of our chicken or fish.

  I actually think we were beginning to make progress putting their childhood smoke detector abuse behind them when it happened again. Negligently tended pork chops. The damn smoke detector went off, our dogs had flashbacks and have not trusted us in the kitchen since.

  So we were cooking scrambled eggs and my houseguests asked, “What’s the matter with the dogs? They’re shaking.”

  “We’re cooking,” I said.

  Face it, it’s not encouraging for guests invited for a meal to see your dogs hiding under the coffee table in terror because you are cooking.

  I was explaining the genesis of their mental illness to our wary guests when the phone rang. It was friends asking if we’d mind watching their little darling the next day. Later, we got yet another booking.

  So here it is Monday night, I’m finishing up this column, and the door bell rings. It’s the parents of the Schnorkie, coming to fetch their best friend. That left one Schmaltese with a late checkout, a Schnauzer with a salon appointment for Tuesday and us, eating carry-in food so we don’t upset the pack by cooking. Now we’re wondering if we should re-carpet or just surrender and tile the living room. Later this week we have another overnight boarder, setting up a three-dog night.

  We live in a kennel. We love it. Bring on the Schnocker Spaniels.

  August 2006

  LETTERS FROM CAMP REHOBOTH

  FORE! SCORE! AND A YEAR AGO…

  Sit down. I won a golf tournament. Well, not individually. And it was actually a team game of “best ball” and our team won third place in spite of me.

  This golf thing is getting out of hand. Now that I’m an athlete, I gave up a winter trip to Naples, Florida, the shopper’s paradise, for a week in Hilton Head—an island with six golf courses and twenty alligators to every permanent resident.

  Of course, when the tourists descend on the island it’s like Rehoboth’s boardwalk in July—thousands upon thousands of straight people. To borrow a phrase from Jerry Seinfeld, “Not that there’s anything wrong with that.” But given Hilton Head is a golf resort, there just had to be lesbians around but I never saw any evidence of them. Except us, of course.

  When we found out that they’d give us $100 if we sat
through a time share lecture we saw visions of greens fees dancing in our heads. In hindsight I’d rather have made a buck as a professional alligator wrestler.

  The wait in the lobby before being shuttled off to a sales person was so long they had a magician entertaining. It was like being stuck in an elevator with David Blaine, except this guy had no magic skills. Wait a minute, does David Blaine have magic skills other than a highly practiced death wish?

  Anyway, this Blaine-like person kept telling hideously insulting “wife” jokes while he insisted on executing a trick where he set a twenty dollar bill on fire. After we’d been stranded with him for over 45 minutes he did manage to entertain us by setting his pants pocket on fire. We got our $100, so at least the guy wasn’t a liar liar with his pants on fire, but it was painful—for everyone concerned.

  For golf, though, the resort was perfect. Every day we’d be up and out early, playing the game with the gators watching our every move. One time I whacked the ball directly at a gator’s jaw. Is it the alligator you run away from in a zig zag or a crocodile? Since retrieving that hook shot could have turned me into Captain Hook, I just took a stroke, tried not to have a stroke and fled zigzagedly.

  The courses were long and tough, with deep ravine-like sand traps. The hardest thing for me was getting out of the sand traps—and I don’t mean the ball.

  I’d say that I got to practice my short game on the greens, but actually my long game is my short game and I didn’t know what the heck I was doing. But I had fun. One time I teed off and my ball hit the water, skipped across it like a stone and bounced up into a sand trap. That’s multitasking.

  At any rate, my winter golf prepped me for our CAMP Rehoboth Women’s league this spring and summer and ultimately gave me the illusion of grandeur needed to participate in the July 10th tournament. It was 96 degrees by 8:30 a.m.

  From the minute we registered I realized our folly. First, it was a “links” course, explained to me as a very long, narrow “targeted” Scottish style course with hilly moguls, deep sand traps and a ridiculously narrow fairway. It looked we’d be walking the highlands calling for Heathcliff.

  Our foursome completed the first hole in fifteen minutes. At this rate we’d be back to the Clubhouse by next Tuesday. Luckily, since it was the “best ball” format, if one of the other three hit a respectable shot, all I had to do was sit in the golf cart and perspire. It would have been 110 degrees in the shade had there been any shade.

  However, one good thing about this fancy course was the service. A refreshment cart showed up every few holes asking us if we wanted anything to drink—and drink we did—water, Gatorade, more water, anything to keep us cool. We drank so much, that by the last time the cart came around and the gal asked, “Want anything?” I requested a catheter.

  One of my teammates laughed so hard she made the catheter request moot.

  As our carts sped from one hole to another, trying to keep marginally ahead of the team breathing down our golf shirts, I felt like I was in a car loaded with Borscht Belt comics running the road in the film It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.

  Arriving at a hole, we’d whack at the balls and then run to find whatever shots landed in the skinny fairway. “I’m not stopping to find my ball,” Bonnie yelled. “I’ve got plenty of balls.”

  Well, that’s true.

  By the time we finished what seemed like 128 holes and the battle of bunker hell we were drenched, exhausted and a thoroughly sorry lot. So imagine our surprise at winning third place among the women’s teams.

  In hindsight, what helped us most was not spectacular golfing, but shopping. Since this was a charity event, you could purchase Mulligans (do-overs) and Sandies (get-out-of-the-sand trap-free cards). I may be a lousy golfer, but I’m a shopping professional—so I purchased quite a few of these goodies before we got started and, as most shopping sprees do, it made all the difference in the world.

  So, tourney win behind me, and league play continuing, I seem to be sticking with this golf thing. Truth be told, the only reason I took up golf in the first place was to write a damn column about it. Who knew I’d actually like it.

  But the bad thing is that I’m improving. When I started, I was a team joke. It was incongruous and hilarious. I was the league mascot. Everybody wanted to play in my foursome because the whole idea of me taking up a sport was a big yuk.

  But after little more than a year, the sad truth is that I’ve improved just enough to ruin my game. I am now just a garden variety awful golfer, no longer a novelty, no longer so amusing. In fact, occasionally I make less than double par. It’s so sad.

  So for your protection and mine, this is the last you will hear about golf from me. Unless of course, I wind up in the LPGA or playing in the Dinah Shore Classic.

  And I imagine you’ll see me gator wrestling on Animal Planet long before that happens.

  August 2006

  LETTERS FROM CAMP REHOBOTH

  THEY DON’T CALL US GAY FOR NOTHIN’

  I heard it on All Things Considered on NPR. Age quashes our spirit of adventure.

  Really? Do they know any gay people? A neuroscientist, probably funded by a stupendous government grant to study such things, states that there is a certain age when the typical American passes from the novelty stage to that of utter predictability. Old Fartism as it were. Okay, for some things, like staying up until last call at any of our local watering holes, my behavior is utterly predictable. No way, José.

  However, I chuckled when the NPR correspondent explained that if a person in Nebraska hasn’t tasted sushi by age 26, the likelihood of that person eating sushi in their lifetime was about the same as me getting into a size 6.

  I know they didn’t consider gay people in the Bell curve, because for us, it’s pretty much out of the closet and into a Japanese Restaurant.

  A late bloomer in every sense, I was 38 when I first tasted sushi, and in fact, I first tasted eel last week and liked it. Toto, I realize we’re not in Nebraska anymore, but living in Sussex County should be relatively equivalent.

  I howled when I heard that youngsters who have not had their tongues pierced by age 22 probably will never have it done. I believe this one, straight or gay. Therth no way I would conthider having my tongue pierthed, no matter what the purported benefiths.

  I did, however, get a tattoo at age 56. I wasn’t the only grownup client in the shop but that was just because Bonnie accompanied me. The rest of the tattooees, clearly heterosexual boys and girls, wore dental retainers and got there on learner’s permits.

  I just think that gay people have a wonderful spirit of adventure well into old age. Heck, old Sarah Aldridge penned her last novel at 92. Bonnie celebrated her 40th birthday on a roller coaster. I know somebody who got her first kayak for her 75th birthday.

  It probably has to do with the coming out process.

  Face it, once we struggle to come out to ourselves, then to our friends, then to family, colleagues and the rest of the world—and keep having to come out, and gauge just how far to come out, every single time we meet somebody new, our spirits of adventure are pretty well practiced. Along with the thickening of our skin, but that’s another whole topic.

  Now far be it from me to stereotype, and I’m sure that there are pockets of adventurous adult heterosexuals all over the globe, but even according to my straight friends, gay people are often envied for their adventurous natures. “You and your friends have such a wonderful time!” I’ve been told, time and time again, by slightly green-eyed straight people.

  Of course, they might just be envying our relatively carefree lives, unencumbered by offspring and the ensuing orthodonture, driving lessons and tuition. It’s a possible explanation but I don’t buy it.

  After all, lots of gay people have children from previous straight relationships and even more are starting their own families these days. These nuclear family gays, male or female, still seem to have more adventure in their souls than most straight people at the same stage in li
fe.

  I think this late onset of adventure is caused by our delayed development. Which, in this case turns out to be a great thing. Unlike our straight peers, most of us gay folk (at least those as old as I am) got a very late start in the dating department. I don’t know about you, but I never made out in the moonlight, took skinny dips, or went to a dance club with someone I actually wanted to share those activities with until I came out of the closet—at age 30.

  I wasn’t 14 the first time I kissed someone and melted, I was 31. I wasn’t 18 the first time I danced til dawn at a crowded, throbbing disco, I was 33. And I wasn’t a teenager when every song on the radio made me sigh or cry. I was 34.

  Getting such a late start makes you want to make up for lost time. My thirties and forties were spent at Gay Roller Skating nights, all manner of bizarre theme parties and marching for gay rights with the same youthful exuberance I had when I marched against the Viet Nam war in my twenties. And that’s the spirit that leads gay people to break the fuddy-duddy barrier. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

  Take last night for instance. I was driving around the neighborhood when I spied a friend of mine out riding her newly purchased Segway—that two wheeled vehicle where you stand up and buzz along, balancing yourself like a dreidel.

  “Here, give it a try,” she said. “Now that you’re a golfer and an athlete this should be a piece of cake.”

  “Hah!” I answered. But for some reason, coward and klutz that I am, and pushing my sixth decade to boot, I had this inexplicable urge to try the thing. I gingerly stepped onto the Segway, had a helping hand to steady me up, and then took off, yelling “wheeee” as I went rolling down the street, jowls and chins flapping in the breeze.

  And while I love our gay spirit of adventure and promise not to let the old rocking chair get me at any age, I altho promith that I will never get my tongue pierthed no matter how adventuruth it may be.

  August 2006