Homobiles: Breaking My Cherry

I hustled into San Francisco last night to go to Dixie de la Tour's birthday party - it was a big freaking deal, all the Bawdy Storytellers long-time community folks telling Dixie stories, loving on her, roasting her a bit.  I was really nervous about telling my Dixie story because I thought I didn't have one, but as so often happens around her I discovered that I did indeed have something to say, most of which was Thank You.  Dixie has been such a big part of me finding homebase & community here in the Bay.  The fact that she can take my high-pitched enthusiasm about Bawdy & the magical things that happen there and absorb it and want to still be around me for more makes me smile.  We've been offering each other a lot in the way of mutual admiration and we work pretty darn well together.  Dixie & Bawdy have given me a way to find my voice and I can't thank her enough.

The party was a lot of fun and I ended up at a table of rowdy queer troublemakers, so you know I loved that.  But as soon as the party broke up I went to my car, unbuttoned my dress shirt right there on the street & changed into my Homobiles uniform for the night - nerd core T shirt & an Ani Difranco hoodie.  My first call ("a tag") came right away and I was consumed with nervousness about everything - the windows were all smudged, a bird had pooped on the car during the show, the drag queens would maul me for infractions, these sorts of thoughts.  But I quickly settled into an easy rhythm and the dispatcher was very gentle with me.  Thank you to Mitch for still liking me when my phone kept autofilling "min" into "mom."  Somehow this turned into a very unlikely joke between two masculine of center folks who have never met!

Some highlights: talking about the different film versions of Sense & Sensibility with a passenger, a customer telling me to turn the GPS off because "she was the only alpha in the car" and then doing a pitch perfect impression of a GPS from the back seat all the way home.  The drunk straight girl placed carefully in my car by her lesbian friend who proceeded to act as if she was in a more normal cab & complained multiple times to the guy she was on the phone with about how "all the lesbians at the party hit on her" without really clocking the fact that she was being driven around by a butch dyke.  I decided to fully explain what Homobiles was when she asked how much the ride was - that flustered her a bit cause she was expecting a quote & not a mission statement. And the guys who were talking about porn so I decided to chime in by telling them I had repped both Chi Chi LaRue & Colt Studios for years.  I think I have new friends.

The last fare of the night were 5 self described "skinny bitches" who crammed themselves into my car at 5:45 am and proceeded to direct me all over town looking for the after hours club they wanted to go to.  The guy riding up front hijacked my music system with hilarious results - all six of us ended up singing "Careless Whisper" together while flying down the hills.  They found the place after a false start - I had no idea there were parties that started at 6 am but I think I have a lot to learn in that department.

As the hour ended and no new fares popped up I wanted to see the water.  I was planning on watching the sunrise from somewhere devastatingly beautiful and instead ended up driving the one-car Pride parade during the early blush of dawn.  But I found my way down to a fishing pier so I could walk out and really hear & feel the tug of the Bay.  I was underneath the shadow of a ginormous cruise ship which earlier in the dark had startled me, looming up above me like a docked spacecraft all lit up or a small city looming in the water, dazzling in its brightness.  Now it just looked like a massive cruise ship but that's still pretty cool to look at, as much as I would like to never be on one. So I took my pictures (like the one above) and breathed the fresh air, loosened my back & legs, stared dazedly at the sprinklers dousing the flowers and sat in the car to count my money (not bad, by the way).

I still don't really know what this job is going to feel like - will it be too much for my nearly  40 year old body to take this upside-down schedule a few nights a week?  Or will my life-long night owl tendencies plus the pure joy of so much very random social contact, flirting, and meeting new people keep me high enough to avoid the bad crashes?  I know that it will provide a lot of material!  So now I need to go clean a large amount of spilled coke out of my floor mats, take the car to the wash, get a haircut so the back of my head looks sharp from the back seat and get ready for another round tonight.  I can't wait to see what unfolds.


Notes: things I found out I need - more breakfast & over-night coffee & food recommendations, a list of bathrooms & a new Pack & Pee, and a digital camera to capture the things I see in the night (when an iPhone just won't do).

Homobiles Magic Night One

In fifth grade I told my mom that I wanted to be a truck driver or a taxi driver and I don't remember how that was received but it probably was not her first choice.  Tonight I managed to live out my dream: I'm going to try my hand at being a cab driver for Homobiles.  More accurately I will be a volunteer driver for this non-profit which provides safe rides homes for the queer community and their allies. I will gladly accept donations for my work (which is how we pay for our own gas, car upkeep and it is where our take home pay comes from).

Tonight was my first full shift doing a ride-along with another driver.  She was an amazing trainer, having spent years as a yellow cab driver in her hometown of San Francisco before joining Homobiles shortly after they opened.  I'll write more about the history & premise of Homobiles another time (it's a good story) but want to thank my kind trainer for a night full of good conversation, driving all over the city teaching me connective tissue of roads and on-ramps while talking about the Bay, the queers, and all the other things.

The reason I'm staying up a few more minutes before crashing into bed is that pure magic happened at the end of the night. There has been this thing happening since the moment I moved here (and other people report similar phenomena) where I frequently, unexpectedly and delightedly bump into people I have known in all my past lives (well, most of them).  The dyke who I really connected with when we all got snowed in over President's Day weekend in DC after the True Spirit conference, long-lost friends from college, people I haven't seen in years have all surfaced in unexpected but understandable ways.  We've all rolled downhill towards the Bay, drawn by similar and diverse reasons to call this area home or to come for visits.

So when we pulled up outside our destination in the early-model Prius I was both astonished and not at all surprised to see him standing there.  I haven't seen Ghalib in 15 years - approaching 40 allows for sentence like this to start cropping up in alarming fashion.  He arrived at Hampshire College from Jordan, a Palestine 17 year old who rapidly emerged as a fierce queer artist and activist.  And I loved him like a brother.  And there he was in the late night and I could hug him and call him habibi.  It was instantly familiar in the cab, like it was last month that we'd last chatted.  Facebook keeps us up on each others lives, he lives in Hawaii but is here to watch his sister graduate.  And when we dropped him off I got out to hug him again and did not want to let him go.

We'll see each other soon and be able to talk more about what we meant to each other as young queer activists trying to make our way in a world neither of us knew. My heart is full and I teared up when we left - feeling like a benediction had been bestowed upon my shift, my new gig.  Driving home across the bridge to Oakland felt like wild freedom and the taste of something new in my mouth but grounded by these things, the queer community people I meet who instantly feel so familiar plus those long lost familiars coming back around. Pure magic.

over due and right on time

When I meet new people and have a chance to talk for a while, at a dinner party or a weekend event, it is not uncommon for someone ask me if I write after I've told a few stories.  Or they will tell me I should write, sometimes rather insistently.  I honestly don't know what makes strangers and new acquaintances jump to this conclusion with alarming consistency and frequency.  But why should I give them weight over people who know me better?  On the phone with my mom recently she told me something amusing that had happened to her and added "You can use that in a story."  She takes it for granted that I should write, often says "Oh, that should be a children's book" or "Well after you write your first one you should do another one about THAT." Ok, mothers often see their children's gifts and perhaps that is more accurate than strangers or perhaps wildly less so, but it should count for something, she's known me a long time.

Before college was over my best friend wrote a list of "Ten Stories You Have to Write," stories I'd told her over the years, some only to her, some that she heard me re-tell many times.  I still have that piece of paper she handed me, along with the promise that I'd dedicate a book to her and the burning desire in my whole body that this would come true.

I write the most when I am in love.  Or in lust. Or in pursuit.  I write best when it is all three of these things at once.

I had a lover who inspired me to fill up her mail box and I wrote so many words to her that I can never have back.  I don't want them back, but I want that need to write, to spread ink, to show myself in words and poems, other people's poems and my own.

Of course it has come up in therapy, in other situations where people I trust and love recommend that I journal, blog, spit-it out, Write Down the Bones, all that good stuff.  And I know that they are right and I am always always resistant.  Even if I make a start it usually dries up quickly.  When packing to move across the country I lost count of how many blank journals I found with only a few pages in front filled in.  Each start was at a momentous occasion, a watershed, during travel, a really low point or a one so giddy my handwriting seemed to fly off the page. There's even this discarded blog, an old livejournal account somewhere and other attempts to use digital gadgetry to lure me into opening the faucets.

The most persuasive case anybody ever made was my Dominant.  Early in our relationship she threatened to "top a book out of me" and it sort of aches that she didn't because that probably would have worked better than anything I've ever tried.  But she did give me an amazing gift: a daily writing assignment.  Looking back it shames me to think of how I mistreated this assignment, all the ones I missed, especially early on.  The way I woefully missed the mark when she asked me to make a gift of a book presentation of them to her - I really only completed that one in time for us to break up and only half of them where there.  The assignment was to take a picture of my body in the course of my day and write for ten minutes and send it to her, no edits.  Mostly the picture was the challenge.  I grew to love looking for a new angle, the right light, an interesting texture for the background.  I learned my body all over by seeing it this way, in parts and pieces and at arms length.  Sitting down to write for ten minutes was usually not very hard because it was so easy to sit down with my phone or at the keyboard and summon Her presence and just want to spill my words all over Her boots, to type my guts out and show them to Her.  Waiting for a response was sometimes easy and sometimes the hardest thing in the world.  Trying not to slip into a depressive tone for multiple days on end when I was struggling with The Black Dog was hard, but held up a mirror to my emotional state that often prompted me to shift gears.  The biggest challenge was usually stopping at ten minutes. I would often start a story that was bigger than would be properly addressed in ten minutes and think that I should put the bones aside to flesh out later.  But I never did.

When the relationship ended it was the assignment I mourned every day almost as much as the loss of Her as my Miss.   I guess it was my most tangible, vibrant daily connection with Her so it's too wrapped up to differentiate really.  But I still mourn the loss of that ear, that reader, those eyes on my pictures and words, her insightful feedback and knowing remarks. Even as I dreaded the harder critiques, the sometime silences or the misfires I always wanted to hear what she thought, how she saw me, what it sparked in her.   And I tried, afterwards, to replace this ritual with another, to find another way to keep gushing out my words and images, to keep my eyes sharp for things to write about.  But it didn't work.  I really just missed Her too much no matter how I tried to shift it and the words went away and it hurt to be sharply observant when she was the one I wanted to tell.  It's been a while now, over a year since it ended, but writing this is making me cry as I type because it has a sharpness to it that has dulled but remains true.  I want.  I want an ear, a set of eyes I trust and admire, and if it isn't her I need there to be a charge, a need to share myself that up until now I've only found with a lover.

This week something rather amazing and unexpected happened.  The content can get set aside for another time but I discovered a friend's beautiful, luminescent blog and it made me ache to write.  I wanted to write back to her and I wanted to read everything and yes I'm tipsy with attraction to her but the blog really sent me over the edge.  She quotes some of my favorite poems, writers, books and talks about ones I don't know yet.  I don't know her very well but reading her blog was like spending thoughtful time with her, in her space, in a way which made me want read more and to write back.  So tonight I'm going to try for the alchemy of turning this first blush of longing into a desire to write for myself.  Do I want her to read it? Yes.  Am I going to send it to her tonight? No.  Am I going to be tempted to edit, temper, muddy things so that it fits a courtship I would like to pursue?  Yes, and I might even give into that temptation a bit, but I want to write mostly to let this pressure out of my chest, to let these words out of my fingers, to let it go more than to grab hold.

So that's a hell of a post and I know it took longer than ten minutes.  But this is my own assignment to myself, to turn the faucets on, to not less these new stories go undocumented, to be gentle with myself when I miss and allow generous make-up policies but to stay with it at least until the year turns and see what it feels like to let these beating wings fly.

Talking about Rihanna & Chris Brown

I heard a great piece on NPR's Tell Me More, my favorite newsprogram, about the Rihanna & Chris Brown domestic violence incident. The discusssion centers around moms and how they are talking to their teens not only about this incident but also about their own history with domestic violence. The listen to the story here, it is very thought provoking even if you are neither a parent nor a teen. The focus on how we tell our own stories, to ourselves & others, was fascinating.

"Have you ever been part of a trilogy?"

I adore Better World Books and this little animated short, loaded with double entendre, only made me love them more:



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For Today

Just a quote, from Audre Lorde:

"Our visions begin with our desires."

A Poem from My Queen

When I'm very lucky I get a poem in the mail. This one arrived after an extended discussion about Rick Warren on Inauguration Day when I unexpectedly found myself heartened by his inclusion.

The Love Religion by Ibn Arabi

The inner space inside

that we call the heart

has become many different

living scenes and stories.

A pasture for sleek gazelles,

a monastery for Christian monks,

a temple with Shiva dancing,

a kaa'ba for pilgrimage.

The tablets of Moses are there,

the Qur'an, the Vedas,

the sutras and the gospels.

Love is the religion in me.

Whichever way love's camel goes,

that way becomes my faith,

the source of beauty, and a light

of sacredness over everything.