Near Greenville, WV, July 25, 2010 -- I've been in America more than a month now, and just getting started on a column. Is it really that hard or am I just putting it off? Probably both.
At 12:05 a.m., June 20, a month and five days ago, I got on the bus in Ourense, Spain, for my six-hour trip to the Madrid airport, where I was scheduled to board a UAL plane about 10 a.m. for my 11 a.m. flight to Norteamerica. Since the entire Western Hemisphere is America - North, Central, and South, they refer to where I'm from as Norteamerica and to me as a Norteamericano. Makes much more sense than the arrogance of the denizen of North America, who can think of only one America - the one he/she lives in.
Anyway, I had a reasonably comfortable window seat on the plane, slept a lot since I had been on the bus all night long. After an eight-hour (I think) flight, arrived early at the Dulles Airport - about 1:30 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time. Then I had a six- or seven-hour wait at Dulles until an 8:30 p.m. flight to Atlanta. I dozed, watched some woman talking on her cell phone for two hours (they do that a lot here in the States), bought a book called A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson, the American humorist who married an English woman and is quoted extensively in many of my Britain-published textbooks on English as a Second Language. Actually, he proved his value as a researcher and serious writer in his book, The Mother Tongue, a history of the English Language that I wouldn't part with.
This new book is actually a history of science, and much more user-friendly than Stephen Hawking's books. I tried to read Hawking's Brief History of Time the last time I was in America almost 10 years ago and have never been more confused by a brilliant writer - or any writer, for that matter. Was he really being obfuscatory? I don't think so. Am I stupid? I don't think so. I think he is just an incredibly brilliant writer about things that I can't get my head around, like anything having to do with science..
Bryson had, I think, a more average brain, like mine. In any case, time (even without knowing its history) eventually passed, and about 8:30 p.m. I boarded a small, comfortable, executive plane, and about 11:30 found myself in the Atlanta airport. After I finally found my luggage, Bob Fletcher, whom I hadn't seen in nearly 40 years, found me.
After stopping for the first bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich (BLT, in American shorthand) I've had in god knows how many years, we arrived at Bob's home in Rome, about 40 miles from Atlanta. I was quickly reminded again that it's virtually impossible to live in America without an automobile. Bob and his wife Jeanette have two - a late-model Honda SUV and a 10-year-old Chevy Corvette. He also has a closed utility trailer and a 20-year-old speedboat
His house is about five years old and is located in an upscale suburb of Rome. Of course it's air-conditioned, and I heard them mention that the monthly summer electricity bill is about $ 330! Ye gods!
The whole county has a population about half that of the city of Ourense, but whereas I can walk from one end of Ourense to the other in half an hour, it takes that long to simply drive from one end of Rome to the other. Grocery stores, drug stores, clothing stores, hardware stores, are all plunked down in shopping centers that are miles from each other.
And then I got introduced to the American medical bureaucracy. The reason I'm here, remember, is because I'm a veteran and also on social security and as such am entitled to free medical treatment and very cheap prescriptions. Bob is also a veteran and has had some experience with the VA medical system, so we went to the VA clinic in suburban Atlanta for me to register as a veteran qualified to receive medical attention. It was relatively quick and those on the staff were mostly black and very polite. I should call the VA number in Atlanta and get registered for my first medical appointment. I did. "Within a week," they told me. I should receive verification of that in the mail.
When I hadn't received verification by the following week, Bob and I went to the VA office in Rome. Nope, they had no record of my call or of my appointment. Okay, then, I want an appointment now for as soon as I can get one. That turned out to be the 29th of July - next Thursday.
I know what will happen. My doctor will give me a physical examination, and will quickly note my lack of depth perception and inability to see. "Oh my goodness," he/she will say; "you've got to see an ophthalmologist," and will make an appointment for me. How soon? Probably not very. The ophthalmologist, when I finally see him/her, will say, "oh my goodness, you have to have eye operations to remove your cataracts," and will make an appointment for me with an eye surgeon. How soon? Probably not very. The eye surgeon will schedule a pre-op appointment for me for one eye; then I will have an operation. Then he will schedule another pre-op appointment with me for the other eye a week or two later. Then I will have the other eye operated on.
I also need to see a heart doctor, a kidney doctor, a throat doctor, a rectal specialist, and have a hearing exam. Will I have all these completed by the time of my return flight to Spain on Sept. 20th? Probably not. God knows how long I'll be in the States before my medical stuff is completed. In the meantime, I want to see friends in Seattle, my old Russian friend Sasha near Chicago, friends and family in Florida, and maybe even some relatives in North Carolina. How much time is that going to take? I don't know.
I also received an e-mail from Misha in Moscow yesterday, who said things are going well for him; he has a job and a room. That's the good news. The bad news is that he asked me for 35,000 rubles in September, which at today's rate of about 30.4 rubles to the dollar is about $ 1100. This will buy him an international passport and give him money to come to me in Spain in December. I wrote him about the medical bureaucracy problem and told him I might not be back in Spain in September as I had planned.
There are also some other potential problems, which I will explain below.
Getting set up with the VA was a snap compared to my efforts to get a "walking license" in Georgia. If you don't want a driver's license, you can get just an ID from any Motor Vehicle Dept. Sounds easy. So I went to the Rome/Floyd County Dept. of Motor Vehicles office in Rome. When was my last driver's license? Good god, I've been in Russia for 12 years and Spain for 6 months. I haven't had a valid driver's license for almost 13 years.
What was my driving record? Who cares? I only want an ID card. Doesn't make any difference. We have to have a fax from the Washington Dept. of Motor Vehicles showing your driving record there. They gave us a Xeroxed copy of the DMV phone numbers from each state in the union. The only problem was it had been Xeroxed so many times that the numbers were no longer legible. Even so, Bob and I - mostly Bob - finally got the appropriate number of the Washington Dept. of Motor Vehicles in Olympia, Wash.
I explained what I wanted. Before I had barely started, the bureaucrat on the other end of the phone snapped, "We don't send faxes."
So we had to send an overnight request for the information. How much is overnight mail now? Would you believe $ 18.50? That's the same amount that a $ 25 savings bond cost in World War II. Anyway, nothing to do but send it with a check written by Bob for $ 10 to cover the cost of mailing me the answer, which I got a week and two days and $ 35 later.
To make a long story short, I now at least have a valid ID that I can use to get my new passport to be perfectly legal when I get back to Spain, since I lived there as an illegal alien after my trip to Andorra for the sole purpose of complying with Spanish law turned out to be a joke because they didn't check passports going into or out of the country - a dilemma which I've described in an earlier column.
My old friend Sam Love, who now lives in New Jersey and is renting a summer home in New Bern, N. Caro., came by to see me on Monday night before I left for Virginia and West Virginia on Tuesday night. In Europe - even in Russia, which has the worse consumer record I know of - when you buy a bus ticket, you also buy a reservation.
Not so in America, where there is only one inter-city bus available; i.e., Greyhound, which was going bankrupt until it was purchased by Trailways several years ago. But because the Greyhound name is so much better known, Trailways adopted it as the name of the bus company and dropped Trailways.
Anyway, I bought the ticket to Richmond from Dalton, Ga., which is quite a few miles north of Atlanta and would save Bob and me a lot of time, even though the bus wasn't due to depart Dalton until 2:20 a.m. Of course, we had to pick up the ticket in person. The only problem was that the bus station would be closed at that hour, so we would have to pick it up sometime earlier. When we did, we were informed that seats were "first come, first served." It didn't make any difference when you bought the ticket, it would depend on how many people were standing in line ahead of you and how many empty seats were on the bus. "Sometimes, that bus is full, and sometimes there are 20 empty seats," we were informed when we picked the tickets up.
And what if the bus is full? "There's another bus at 8:30 in the morning," which wasn't even on the Greyhound schedule. So I didn't know till 3 a.m. Wed. morning (the bus was 40 min. late) whether I was going to get a seat or not or whether we were going to have to spend the night in the Honda at a filling station in Dalton waiting for the 8:30 a.m. bus. Fortunately for me, there was a seat.
What of the disparity between plane - even train, when it's available - and bus? When you buy a ticket or the plane or train in America, you automatically get a reservation. But the bus is "first come, first served," even though it would be just as easy to reserve a seat on the bus when you buy it. I have a theory about that: The bus is for poor people. Rich people drive or fly, or take the train, when trains are available, which isn't much, because of the automobile/plane lobbies. We spend billions of dollars subsidizing airports and highways, but trains have to pay their own way. In Europe and Russia, trains are the transport of the people. In America, it's the car or the airplane. Only the poor - i.e., the blacks and people like me - ride busses. Trains are even more expensive than planes because lobbyists have squeezed big bucks out of Congress for airports, but there is no lobby for trains, so they get no congressional support. Bus riders are poor; therefore, they don't count anyway.
Only in America!
As would happen, my seat -- the only one available as far as I could tell - didn't work right. It wouldn't recline. So from 3 a.m. to 6 a.m. I sat bolt upright -sometimes mercifully sleeping, sometimes not - until we reached Knoxville, TN. After about half an hour's wait, I was able to board another bus and actually got a window seat. There was a lot of police activity. Turns out a nearby bank had been robbed. They actually went through some passengers' suitcases, but not mine. I guess at my age they figured I didn't look like a bank robber.
From my new perch by the window I saw the local gendarmes with some handcuffed dude. Then they took the handcuffs off and he boarded my bus! When we arrived in Ashville, NC, a couple of hours later, a couple of cops boarded the bus and called this guy's name. He went forward, they took him off the bus and handcuffed him again and he rode away in a squad car.
Only in America!
Boarding in Ashville, was a good-looking, very laid back and savvy guy named Tommy, who it turns out is a middle school geography teacher in Ashville. Tommy and I rode and talked all the way to Richmond. He's 34, though he looks younger, rides a bicycle a lot, has a car for longer trips - but not too long, because he was riding the Greyhound to Rhode Islands where his girlfriend - a girl who is a friend or a girl who he fucks? The former, I think, cause he's not married and not living with a girl. He has traveled a lot and has all the correct attitudes about the environment, use of oil, etc. Anyway, I got his e-mail address and e-mailed him after I got here inviting him to visit me in Rome (I got Bob's permission first), but he hasn't answered - yet. Oh, well, maybe later, maybe not at all. Maybe he surmised that I really wanted to have sex with him, in which case he would be right; and maybe he doesn't want to be groped by a 77-year-old.
I was met in Richmond by Francine, George Crutchfield's wife, whom I had never seen, but my experience is that if two people are really looking for each other, it will be obvious enough that they will find each other. It worked this time, though she did have a recent photo of me. Unfortunately, my vision is so poor that I didn't see George across the room. But would I have recognized him even if I had had 20/20 vision? Questionable.
George is my age, but he has had some terrible health problems, starting about 20 year ago with a tooth procedure. It turns out that the teeth, the eyes, and the cuticles are the only place where germs can normally enter the body. And during his tooth procedure, germs entered his blood stream and had eaten a good part of his aortic valve before he realized what had happened. It's called bacterial endocarditis.
He has had three open heart surgeries, pneumonia, staphylococcus, numerous bad reactions to drugs, and was given up to 6 months to live about 2-1/2 years ago. He walks very gingerly and has little strength in his legs - and this is a guy that used to coach football! - can't walk up and down stairs, and is very close to being an invalid! His hair is of course white and he has a white beard. Chances are I wouldn't have recognized him even if I could have seen the "Florida Southern College" sweatshirt he was wearing.
He's also had a very distinguished career. I found out from Who's Who in America that he was professor of journalism at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond for 30 years; simultaneously taught editing on weekends to the Dow Jones copy editors for some 30 years, and is the recipient of numerous honorary degrees and other awards, including from our alma mater, Florida Southern College.
They live on a many-acre farm fronting on the James River in Midlothian, Va., about 15 miles outside Richmond. They cook very little, so I was treated to lunches and dinners at many different places - some very high-toned, since he's a member of some of the best local country clubs.
The Crutchfields are very environmentally aware, so the fact that they drove a new Cadillac and have two 25-year-old Cadillacs sitting in their yard surprised me a little. But, hey, we're still in the age of oil - BP's disastrous blowout in the Gulf of Mexico notwithstanding - and they both, George and Francine, have lived a very productive and generous life and deserve some luxurious living (although that's probably how lots of Cadillac and Lincoln drivers excuse their profligacy).
They also have a Segway, which both George and I rode for the first time. I think it's the vehicle of the future - battery powered purveyors of one person, standing up. But you can add baskets and even a trailer to carry groceries and other small items in. They have their disadvantages, of course - they're very heavy, are utterly defenseless against powerful autos and trucks on the road, have a top speed of about 15 mph, and are primarily level-ground vehicles - i.e., are limited in steep up- and down-hill traveling, etc.
But by the time Norteamerica is hit by a real energy crisis in 10 years or so, I think enough research will have been done on them that lightweight, more versatile, sit-down models will be available
In any case, they treated me royally and didn't allow me to spend a penny (except to buy The Communist Manifesto and Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations at the local Barnes & Noble store).
On Sunday morning they drove me to the Greyhound Bus Station in Richmond, and I boarded the bus for my next and last leg of this trip - to southern West Virginia, where I am now staying.
My buddy Ned met me in Bluefield, WV, where ex-lover Jim and I used to have a huge home that we used for rental purposes and were going to keep as income property when we retired in 1990 to our mountain-top home near Greenville, WV. Arsonists destroyed that dream and changed our lives completely - for better or worse. We moved to Seattle, split, I moved to Russia, and then Spain, and here I am now.
So who is Ned? I first met Ned in 1974 when he was a gorgeous 24-year-old and I was a mere 41. Now Ned is 62! Of course I fell in love with him 36 years ago, though he was married. He didn't realize that Jim and I were gay until he and Lee, his wife at the time, came to a party we threw in Washington, D.C.
Sometime after that, he got divorced, pursued several love interests (female, of course - he was/is incorrigibly straight), and remained among the closest of friends until Jim's and my dreams were destroyed by fire in 1985. Jim and I moved to Seattle on Dec. 7, 1987, but Ned and I stayed in touch, and I came back for his wedding to a shrew named Dorothy in about 1993.
We have continued to stay In touch throughout my tenure in Russia and Spain, and he actually suggested in a telephone conversation after I got back that I move back and live with him on his 28-acre farm near Greenville. That's where I am now! I am thinking seriously of doing just that. I have lots of friends here. I don't think I could realistically expect to find a gay young lover here, but then neither could I in Spain. At least I am among people who speak my native language - sort of, since West Virginians have a strong southern accent and butcher the spoken English language to the point that sometimes we don't understand each other.
The other unknown is that he has a seven-year old daughter Elli by his post-Dorothy marriage to Missy, which also came unglued. But she's a sweet, intelligent, well-behaved little girl and she and I get along fine. I also spent a good part of yesterday afternoon with Judy, the wife of my ex-buddy Dave Wagner, who died of a congenital heart condition almost 10 years ago. Judy, now 70 and a part-time teacher here, suggested that I could probably get a job as a substitute teacher in Monroe County, making pretty big bucks - she thinks about $ 100 a day.
Ned also thinks I could help him in his architectural business keeping books, answering phones, and carrying on correspondence. Those two jobs could be handled simultaneously.
I would probably be bored here. But where wouldn't I be bored, except in Russia, where the curiosity about what's going to happen next and the pretty young boys anxious to be taken care of kept me from getting bored for 12 years, but I have "escaped" Russia and don't plan to return - certainly not to live.
If I move to West Virginia - or anywhere else in the States, though West Virginia is now the top contender -- what will that do to Druzhka's plans and to Misha's? Druzhka is in fact bi-sexual, and wants children. That probably means marriage to a woman, even though Spain has legalized homosexual marriages. If I become a legal resident of Spain, which is questionable, I could marry Misha, but would that make his coming to the States as my marriage partner legal? It would in some states, but I think not in West Virginia.
In any case, I have time to think about what I'm going to do, and it's really time I started thinking about my own welfare first, and other people's second.
See also related pages:
Chapt. #304 - Still no eye opeeration; I'm bored in America
Chapt. #302 - Fiesta Queen
