Oh Dave! Now

What you missed in Part 1:  On a trip to Minneapolis and Madison, Eric and I dodged an onslaught of privates up in our grilles—hidden rental car charges, bathroom fans, family transitions, and bouncing cleavage.  You should read Part 1 first. Or forge ahead, knowing that as guests in homes and lives, we navigated around our hosts’ varying “privacy settings.” A selective shout-out of what I saw continues…

Come Over to My Place

With Friday night’s bacchanalian celebration and my flirtation with J still fresh in my memory, on Saturday night we went to see another J—my friend for 30 years—and his newly renovated Victorian house in a neighborhood not far from popular Lake Calhoun, a non-stop parade of joggers, cyclists, and sunbathers. Following a house tour, we sat at the granite counter bar in the kitchen, sipped vodka-cranberry juice cocktails, and visited while J prepared appetizers and dinner. At around 6 p.m., his partner T came home from work and joined the reunion.

While oo’ing and ah’ing over the amazing renovation they had done, we devoured a plate of baked cocktail wieners wrapped in bacon and sprinkled with brown sugar (yum!). Then we moved to the dining table for a meal of salad and red curry chicken over jasmine rice that left us pleasantly stuffed to the point of blurry contentment. But the night was far from over. We were meeting my family near the U of M campus to see a local band, in which my niece’s boyfriend was the drummer. J and T decided to shower and change clothes, so Eric and I took a quick walk down to the lake. It was around 8:30 p.m. but still sunny and warm. As we waited to cross the narrow road that circled the lake, a thin, dark-skinned boyish man came up alongside me and smiled. I smiled back but then turned to cross and go down a stairway to the beach. Eric and I stood at the edge of the beach and looked over the lake at the sunset as people streamed behind us on the bike path.

Suddenly, the thin man came up alongside me and said in a quiet voice, “Do you have a boyfriend?” I had had enough drinks to be amused by his forwardness and replied with bravado, “Yes, he’s right here, we’re boyfriends,” gesturing at Eric. The young man went on to explain that he was from Guyana and lived a few blocks away—he told us the intersection. His boyfriend was in New York for the weekend to attend his son’s college graduation. The man never came right out and said it, but clearly he was inviting us over to his house, or rather, his sugar daddy’s house, for an impromptu sex party. I said we were visiting some friends nearby—deliberately not telling him on which street—and were leaving shortly for a concert. He wouldn’t leave us alone so I finally said we had to go back to our friends. Before we could get away, he said he’d be going to the gay bars downtown later and hoped to see us there.

We made our way back to J’s house, looking back to see if Miss Guyana was following us because if so, we schemed to take him on a roundabout route. We ducked quickly into J’s house and locked the door. J was surprised to hear about our encounter. The first thing he asked was “You didn’t tell him where I lived, did you?” We assured him we didn’t. The last thing he wanted—really!—was a pushy young man invading his privacy and coming to his door uninvited.

We never made it to the Gay 90s bar downtown after the concert, though we tried. The concert by Dessa and her band at a really cool venue, the Varsity Theatre, was great (my guess is she’ll become a national pop star—check her out). Traffic downtown at 11:30 p.m. on a Saturday was insane. After a couple of attempts to get near the bar, we gave up, called J to say goodnight, and went back to the suburbs.

Between a Hill and a Rock Place

In Madison we stayed with Eric’s sister and brother-in-law. It was our first time staying with them and they made us feel at home for a short but relaxing visit. There is a lot going on in their lives right now, which they discussed with us in confidence. One key situation will be decided in a court-of-law so any discussion of it is moot—if there were a jury I wish I could be on it. For now, I’ll pretend I’m sequestered and can’t discuss it.

During the day they were working so Eric and I played tourist and infiltrated two famous private homes. First stop was a guided tour of Frank Lloyd Wright’s home and architectural college outside of Madison in Spring Green. The house is called Taliesin (Tally-ESS-in), which we learned is Welsh for “shining brow.” Wright picked the name because it refers to the open hilltop that the house is wrapped around. He was a leader in architecture that blends in with the environment. Most architects would have plunked the house down on top of the hill. Wright was highly influenced by Japanese architecture so the stone exterior is long and low to the ground, with a nearly flat roof. Inside, the doorways and entry ways were low, in order, we were told, to keep people from gathering in those spaces—Eric at six foot tall had to duck. But main rooms like the living room, family room, and bedrooms had high ceilings and many windows to view the river and valleys below. The tour guide explained that Wright tried to use local materials for his designs. In the case of Taliesin, begun in 1911, that meant, to our repulsion, a lot of plywood for walls, floors, and built-in book shelves and benches. Elegant and imposing on the outside, the inside details of Taliesin were kind of tacky, even horrifying, by today’s building standards.

The history of the house is similarly notorious. The private lives of Taliesin were splashed across the headlines in 1914 when a bi-polar servant went berserk. He set the residential half of the house on fire and murdered seven people, including Wright’s beloved mistress Mamah, with an axe before poisoning himself. Wright was working in Chicago at the time or he might have been one of the victims. The house was rebuilt, burned again in 1925, and rebuilt again to its present layout. Both the house and the college at Taliesin are interesting structures and the grounds are spectacular, well worth a visit if you’re ever in Spring Green.

After lunch and shopping at the visitor center, we drove on to the House on the Rock, an attraction advertised on the freeway but about which we knew nothing. After the grand opera of Taliesin, the House on the Rock was like stopping at a honky-tonk after the show, albeit an incredibly humongous honky-tonk with flashing red lights and gaudy decor. I had the sense of not only entering the privacy of a man’s home, but also of his warped and fascinating mind.

The House on the Rock was conceived by a local named Alex Jordan who had or raised a lot of money to build a bizarre house. On a rock. Hence, the clever name. The House. On the rock. Get it? He built his house on a rock and called it—the HOUSE ON THE ROCK. Subtle. More importantly, he amassed collections of Americana that are unrivaled. The tour is divided into three sections. We only had time to do section three, which omitted the actual house but included a couple of cavernous warehouses that housed the “largest carousel in the world” in one, and three large pipe organs in another. (Eric, who has a degree in organ, was in heaven!) Why he built all this is never really explained, other than noting that he didn’t want to explain his reasons. He wanted people to experience the collections in their own way. Well, after walking through darkened warehouses on winding paths, ramps, and stairways, what I experienced was sadness for an obsessive compulsive personality. But I respected and marveled at his preservation of unusual artifacts of another time and way of life.

The warehouses didn’t have much rhyme or reason—the carousel and organs may have taken up the center and focus but interspersed helter-skelter were stacks and stacks of kettle drums, suits of armor, carousel horses, copper distillery vats, and antique horse-drawn buggies and sleighs. To see the assortment and details of the ancient sleighs—close enough to touch them—was thrilling. His collection of more than 250 fully outfitted dollhouses and dozens of model circuses were arranged orderly enough. But there were no display cards to explain their history.

One room had hundreds of shoe-box size mechanical displays—you push a button to set them in motion. For example, Jonah rocking back and forth on top of a bucking whale. A small plaque on the waves beneath the whale was inscribed “One of our beautiful diamonds will make a whale of a difference.” We figured out they were used to entice window shoppers to enter stores to buy jewelry during the 1920s-1950s.  The coffee-table book we bought later calls these devices Baranger Motions.

If there was a map to the collections, we weren’t given one. Other visitors breezed past us and the dollhouses and circus tents, but wouldn’t you know it, they all stopped to study the collection of guns and weaponry, a section that we pushed through quickly.

The vastness of this man’s private collections (and the confinement) became overwhelming. “Enough,” we said. “TMI.” It took effort to get up and out of the depths of the exhibits to the exit. I would have liked to have seen the house and some of the other collections, so we will probably go back on another trip. I found out later that my younger brother had visited the House on the Rock once, doing all three tours, but he deliberately kept that fact a secret—he felt ripped off because it was so disorganized. He was afraid that if he told family or friends he had visited, they would take it as a recommendation, visit themselves, and then “punch him in the stomach” for making a bad recommendation.

I’m not keeping it a secret because the cost ($28.50 a person for all three tours—ticket good for a year) was pretty reasonable, considering how much tickets to Avatar 3D and Disneyland are. Just don’t expect to witness the elegant and innovative mind of Frank Lloyd Wright—or Walt Disney for that matter—when you visit the House on the Rock. This guy must have smoked some really good stuff starting in the 1950s all the way through to the 1980s.

Back to the Bubble

My brain was similarly muddled with sensations by the end of our memorable trip. My account of it is guaranteed to be the truth, even if I didn’t list out all the private line items (like on our rental car agreement). In fact, I came away with a better appreciation of protecting privacy. It’s not just a simple matter of etiquette. It’s acknowledging that in our complex world and lives, it’s not necessary to always have full disclosure. Behind every door and every face—every landscape—is a rich abundance of private experience and thought.

As mates, Eric and I travel in a kind of “bell jar” of privacy that most couples enjoy. We automatically respect one another’s boundaries. We maneuver through the world and our lives with an unspoken agreement and understanding that no matter what, we are connected. Beneath our physical beings and the faces and personalities we reveal to the world in general, we know there is a lot more going on. We know this without needing to elaborate on it. We give one another status updates but accept that there is a limit to what is necessary and appropriate to share and uncover. Just knowing every individual and household is rich with mystery and treasure is enough.

And the winner of the 2nd Annual Del Marcus Golf Open is…

You’re probably dying to find out how the family golf tournament—the main purpose of our trip—turned out. Great! The t-shirts—designed by my niece’s drummer boyfriend—were excellent. The weather was muggy and cloudy, but it didn’t rain as predicted. Nine golfers, nine holes, and the trophy this year went to…me.

I don’t play golf often, but I practiced at the driving range and on a short course in Oakland a few weeks in advance. I think I figured out the secret to hitting the ball straight. I know what point of my swing to pay attention to so I don’t chop, slice, or hook. I began the tournament with one of the best drives I’ve hit in a long time—and shot par on the first hole. Four strokes compared to about eight the year before. On the 93-yard fourth hole, we had predetermined that a prize would be given to whomever got closest to the pin on their drive—I won that prize too as I was the only one to land my drive on the green.

Was my score the best of the day? Not exactly. To determine the trophy winner we use a formula to calculate a handicap, based on the scores of three holes, picked randomly after the round. One of the three happened to be my worst hole of the day, which ended up being in my favor.

But you don’t need to know all of these behind-the-scenes gory details. As far as the history books go, I’m holding the trophy this year. That’s really all anyone needs to know.

Happy Father’s Day, Dad! Love you and miss you.