Author: Dane Lowell
Submitted by: redadmin

Chapt. 301 - 2,282 words
Columns :: Lord, I’m comin’ home

Galicia, somewhere in northern Spain, April 26, 2010 -- Comments:   Ratings:

Fiesta Queen



Galicia, Northern Spain, April 26, 2010 -- I bought my tickets to the U.S. this week – 600 euros, about $ 800 round trip. I’m leaving Madrid at 11 a.m. on June 20 and arriving in Atlanta about 11 p.m. the same date. Because I’ve heard all kinds of horror stories about how long it takes to get a Social Security or VA (Veterans Administration) medical appointment, I’m giving myself three months and have return tickets for the 20th of September.

To tell the truth, I’m rather excited and a little homesick. It’s strange. I was never homesick in Russia. It’s a little as if I belonged there. Now I’m a little homesick for Russia and the U.S. Not for Russia, but rather for my Russian friends. But I will never go back to Russia to live, I’m fairly certain of that. However, I may go back to the U.S. to live, as I’ve indicated.

In fact, I’ve been thinking a lot about Greg, the son of my friend Dave who died about 10 years ago in Union, WV, of a congenital heart defect. He was 10 years younger than I, so he was only about 55 when he died.

I’ve known Greg since before he was born. I used to have an office in the National Press Bldg. in Washington, and Dave – Gregg’s father -- used to come by and pick me up at my office about 7:30 or 8 , and we’d go have breakfast in the drug store on the ground floor of the Press Bldg. One morning when Dave came he was livid. His first wife had gotten him to fuck her. She had lied to him that she had taken the BC pill. She hadn’t, and now she was pregnant with, it turned out, Greg. So that was my introduction to Greg, about 7 months before he was born.

Some time after that, Dave got a divorce from his first wife and custody of the two kids, Tracey, a girl, and Greg. Greg, of course, grew up. He learned to play the violin, was a goalie at soccer, and when he was about 19, got into a multi-year relationship with a girl whose name I can’t remember.

I moved to Seattle with my ex-lover Jim in December, 1987. When my very good friend Ned got remarried in West Virginia in the early ’90s, by which time Jim and I had split, I went for the wedding. I stayed with Dave in Washington, and he drove me and Greg down to the wedding. By that time, Greg was about 20 and very handsome. I of course had a crush on him that I didn’t tell anybody about – certainly not Dave, certainly not Greg himself. So imagine my surprise and gratification when Greg kissed me at Ned’s wedding reception.

Some time after that, Dave followed me to Seattle. By that time, he had retired from the Environmental Protection Agency. He couldn’t stand some of the U.S. presidents, especially Reagan, any more than I could and was in the upper echelons of the EPA. He found a way for early retirement and moved to Seattle.

Greg and his girlfriend helped Dave move and stayed overnight at my house in Seattle. The next morning was Saturday, and before I left about noon that day to go somewhere – maybe to the court reporting institute where I was teaching – I went upstairs to where Greg was still in bed with his girlfriend. And I kissed him – not passionately. I couldn’t very will kiss him passionately when his girlfriend was in bed beside him, but I kissed him nonetheless.

And then I moved to Russia in December of 1997. When Dave died, I got back in touch with Greg to tell him that, while I had loved his dad very much, I didn’t think he had been a very good father and to let Greg know that I sympathized with him for the loss of his father both then and while he had been alive.

Gregg and I have remained in touch. He inherited money from his father’s estate and bought a farm home in Maine and got a job with the Maine government. He split with his girlfriend and sold the place in Maine and moved to the town in West Virginia where his father had lived. Dave’s second wife, who had been like a mother to Greg and his sister Tracey, had bought Dave’s home (she and Dave had long been divorced when Dave died) and moved into it. Greg joined her in his father’s old house, where I myself had stayed with Dave when I went back to visit in 1991.

I plan to visit this community when I go back this summer. And I wrote Greg and told him that I planned to visit him and Ned. About that time, his nephew, Tracey’s teenage son, committed suicide. A real tragedy. He and Greg had been rather close. I wrote Greg a long e-mail and expressed my condolences and my hope that he was not considering the same end, because I know that he has lots of self-esteem problems and has trouble communicating with other people.

It was then that Greg wrote that his grandmother, Dave’s mother, had herself committed suicide and had had a mental illness that perhaps ran in the family, since two of her sisters had also committed suicide. Dave had never told me this. I knew that his mother had “died” when he was about five, but I didn’t know that she had committed suicide.

I once analyzed Dave’s handwriting, and was struck by his emotional distance from people, which alarmed and upset me because at that time I had fantasies about him! But Greg also told me that his aunt had told him that his mother used to chase him in anger around the house. Dave was afraid of his mother and hence afraid of establishing other close relationships.

I wrote Greg about my handwriting analysis. I also told him about the conversation I had with Dave at lunch in the Press Club when Greg was about 14 and Dave was as proud of him as a peacock. “What if he should turn out to be gay?” I asked Dave. “How would you feel then?”

Dave barely broke stride. “I would want him to be happy. I would want him to find another guy and to be happy with him.” I had never told anyone about that conversation, but I told Greg in an e-mail.

I haven’t had a response from Greg to that e-mail. But in the meantime, Greg has reassured me that he has no notions of suicide, despite his low self-esteem.

To make a long story short, I’m now having fantasies about Greg. Is he a closeted faggot? Is that why he split with his girlfriend? Is that why he kissed me at Ned’s wedding reception, a kiss I can never forget? Is that why he has stayed in touch with me all these years – the only person he has stayed in touch with? I will try to find out all these things this summer, and who knows? If my gay-dar is working correctly, maybe I’ll be living with Greg a year from now :-).

Stay tuned.

Ah, my relentless fantasy! I have also been having fantasies about Max, my former student at the Institute of Diplomacy in Moscow whom I fell in love with and who later became my private student, along with his brother Alex. He was still my private student when I left Russia, and we have stayed in touch.

A couple or three weeks ago he wrote me that he had completed an English essay in economics and asked me to check it for him. As I think I explained in my last column, by this time I had decided to quit the play-acting and to express myself in writing as I normally would. Russians begin their letter simply “Hello, Dane,” or “Hello, Max,” or whatever, and end them, if with a complementary close at all – which is seldom – with a rather formal “respectfully”. I decided to start letters to him with “Dear Max,” and to end them with “Love, Dane.”

He sent me his essay and the essay of a Chechen friend of his whom I had met at his house when he invited me, just before I moved to Spain, to a late lunch prepared by his mother, whom I liked very much. She was outgoing and gracious, and I could see where Max got some of his charm. But why, I kept asking myself, does a guy who is so intelligent, so good looking, so outgoing, and who has so much charm, not have any girlfriends? In Russia!

So imagine my surprise and gratification when I received the next e-mail from him thanking me for editing his and his friend’s stuff: “Dane, I love you.” And he ended his letter with “Love, Max.” Aha, maybe I’m getting somewhere!

So, why stop here? I wrote him another e-mail suggesting that, since I was spending this summer in America, he plan to spend the next summer with me here in Spain. We would speak only English and it would cost him much less than his summers in London – only about $ 600 round trip air tickets. It was a “pipe dream” I said, but I asked him to think about it.

Imagine my surprise when I received his reply: “I’ve read your idea and really like it. I think it will be a great one and I hope I can do that, but if I go to the Army (which he says he will have to do if he doesn’t pass his Ph.D. exam to get into advanced studies – his father is very righteous and wouldn’t think of trying to bribe his way out of the army), I will return only in the fall. But if I pass exams for ph. d. (sic), and have some job, I will come 100%!! I really liked this idea :-)

“With love, Max.”

Ah, pit-a-pat went my heart!

I replied, suggesting that even if he does have to go into the army, which I hope to hell he doesn’t -- I still remember Zhorik’s hazing, which permanently damaged his kidney -- maybe he can come here when he returns next fall. I haven’t received a reply from that letter yet.

Anyway, I am making progress. Maybe my gay-dar is working. :-)

I sent a box of family stuff to Bob Fletcher’s home in Rome, Georgia, where I will be staying at least until I get my medical stuff out of the way. Why did I sent it to Bob? It seems that Austin, the son of another nephew, Dennis’s brother Dallas, has become the unofficial historian of the family, now that I’m not around.

I’ve only seen Austin once, when he was a babe in arms and Andrei [Tiufline], the Russian who later stole my Moscow apartment from me, and I were visiting in Orlando. It must have been around 1994.

But I’ve kept track of Austin. His parents were divorced and my nephew Dallas got custody of him. They live in eastern North Carolina, not that far from Greg in West Virginia.

Anyway, my package gives me an excuse to visit Dallas and Austin and to explain the history of the stuff I have to give him – old photos of his great grandmother his great-great grandparents, some old trinkets that belonged to them, etc. Unfortunately, the 1885 pocket watch that belonged to my Grandfather Lowell, with a fob of my grandmother’s red hair, was stolen along with many other personal treasures in Russia; so I can’t give that to Austin.

But now he must be about 16 – just the right age. Another fantasy developing. In reality, a sexual relationship could never develop, but a platonic, grandfatherly relationship could, and I hope will.

And of course there’s Sasha, who used to be my student in Moscow and later my lover, who has invited me to stay with him in Ohio, where he’s going to school and working. But it’s been a long time since we had sex. Maybe he’s no longer interested. But maybe he is. At least it gives me something else to fantasize about :-)

Ready or not, America, here I come!

Stop the presses! I just had an e-mail from Misha! The good news he is alive and well! He survived the bitter Russian winter on Moscow’s streets! The bad news is he wants money.

He said he now has his Russian passport and wants to come to stay with me, something we discussed before I left. Lord knows I want him to. But he still has to get a visa to the European Union. Then he will have to have money for air fare to Madrid. Timing is bad. I don’t have that much money, and I have to have enough to get to the U.S. I sent him an e-mail yesterday asking how much money he needs. I will send him another today explaining in detail my financial situation and ask him if he can wait till I return in September. It would make things a lot easier.

It also makes my getting Spanish residency much more urgenht. If I am an official Spanish resident, I could marry Misha and he could live here as a resident also. Neither of us would have to worry about renewing our visa every three months.

So I’m relieved – no ecstatic – to hear from him. But it does create the first worries I’ve had since coming to Spain.


See also related pages:
Chapt. #302 - Fiesta Queen
Chapt. #300 - Fiesta Queen