They asked me why I’d come back out of retirement. A few friendly jokes were made and we went our separate ways, knowing we’d see each other again at the office soon. I could appreciate why they might not have understood. Our lives weren’t all that different, but different enough.

I’ve been trying now for just over a year to get a head of steam up for doing some of the art projects I have stacked up. And…I couldn’t. I have artwork on my drafting table and in my iPad that I can only touch occasionally, and then on briefly. Mostly they just sit unfinished. My cameras sit untouched. I have rolls of film sitting in my darkroom and chemistry to develop them with that I haven’t touched. 

I would lay in bed for hours flipping through the social media posts on my smartphone. Often it’s just staring at the beautiful guys on Instagram or YouTube. I have a Google search string that brings me photos of beautiful long haired guys that I flip through, one after the other. Then I put the phone down on its charger, turn off the light and try to sleep. I imagine stories about gay couples having adventures in science fiction or fantasy worlds until I can finally sleep. Sometimes I try to write these stories but I have no energy to really dig into it.

It began to feel all too familiar. Like it’s the 1980s again, and I’m sitting in my bedroom with the lights turned down, almost off, and I’m staring of into the darkness outside my bedroom window, unable to feel anything inside of me.

I think of that period in my life as the dark time.

In my photo catalogs there’s a note about the discontinuity in catalog numbering. Actually there are two. The catalog numbers begin with a 10000 series. Those are the rolls of film I shot starting in the early 1970s when I was just getting serious with photography. I started counting the rolls of black and white negatives at 10001. At some point suddenly there is a shift to a 20000 series. That discontinuity I explain in the notes, is the gap in my photography that occurred when I lost all interest in my artwork, and for a period of time, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I did nothing creatively. It wasn’t just my photography that suffered, but apart from a series of drawings on the topic of gay first love…and these disturbing drawings…

I did nothing. In part, it was I didn’t want to see what was coming out of me. But also, I had lost interest. The urge to get it out just wouldn’t come. When I looked inside, there was nothing there.

The late 70s and early to mid 1980s were a dark part of my life. In 1973 my first high school crush, strike one, suddenly moved away and I had no idea where he went but I was certain I would never see him again. By 1980 I was coming off of a disastrous crush on a straight classmate, strike two. Then I made it to my 30s, which I was told was over the hill for gay guys, without having found that significant other to love and be loved by. That period of time was Reagan/Moral Majority/AIDS time when hostility toward gay people was hot and venomous. I began to believe that I would never have a lover, that I was somehow cursed, too ugly, too weird to be lovable.

Much later in my life some gay guys I’d regarded as friends told me essentially that no, I’m not too weird, and no I’m not cursed…I’m just too ugly.

I was mostly unemployed, save for the random Manpower job. I spent my days walking aimlessly in the neighborhood, and my nights in my bedroom in the apartment I shared with mom, blasting my mind with pot and alcohol, listening to music and staring off into nowhere, long past midnight.

I came close to suicide several times. Once I sat on a bridge over the railroad tracks waiting for a train to come along that I would jump in front of. Some part of my mind wondered what that would do to the engineer who saw it and I backed away. But I kept thinking of ways to do it that would be instantaneous and not involve anyone else. Thankfully I was not in that creative place just then where I could actually think of one. In some ways, oddly enough then, the emptiness may have spared me. I didn’t care enough about living to even figure out how to end it properly, artistically.

I don’t remember much about this period in my life. Sitting here now It’s hard for me to even to get the timeline right. All I remember, is darkness and sitting alone at the foot of my bed. I created no art because there was nothing inside.

In retrospect the pathways out of a darkness like that can seem strange and random but also somehow preordained. There are times I wonder if some kind spirit in the great beyond looked kindly on me and put some lucky breaks in my path. I regard myself as a man of science, and I am an atheist, but I am also an artist and sometimes I can’t help but wonder.

I would spend nights listening to my shortwave radio, as if tuning in signals from a planet earth I could only listen to from light years away. With the money I made doing random jobs I bought an inexpensive Commodore C64 to pick up radio teletype signals. There was a kit you could buy with a software cartridge and tuner box you’d connect to the radio speaker. It would translate the bleeps and chirps of RTTY transmissions into characters on a screen. I discovered teletype news and weather services I could tune into and read.

Then I learned about computer bulletin boards and bought a modem and software to connect to various BBSes. That led me to some gay bulletin boards and FidoNet echos and I began tentatively reaching out to other gay folk on them, and I began to feel less alone. But just a little. Nobody I ever wanted to get close to wanted anything to do with me. One said I was too intense. Another was willing to let my cameras give him some love, but not me.

The Commodore’s user interface was its BASIC interpreter and I began experimenting with writing programs. Later I learned that Commodore PET Basic was written for Commodore by Microsoft.

One day at a HAM fest, while I was looking for tubes for one of my shortwave radios and a stereo preamp I owned, I discovered I could buy parts to build my own IBM PC compatible computer. Building one was easier than the Heathkits I used to build because it was just a matter of buying the right circuit boards and plugging them together with a power supply and case. I got it working, and began surfing the bulletin boards with it. Then I bought a copy of Microsoft Quick Basic I began writing computer programs as I had done with my C64. It drew me in.

I discovered a world that had its own sterile beauty…one of logical structures, cold hard steel and chromium algorithms. I discovered I could build logical structures whose beauty I could admire and love without needing to go near the parts of my heart where I didn’t want to go anymore. It was a kind of art I’d never known existed. The art of pure logic. I dove into it. I got good at it.

It was the time of the dot com boom and anyone who could make the little microcomputers do tricks was in demand. I did volunteer work for a local gay BBS and made a program to distill the file a fellow user who worked for a wire service provided that contained news about the community you almost never saw in print anywhere. We were a people not fit to print in family newspapers. The program I wrote in Basic would separate the articles into individual files formatted for the BBS software we were running and create the menu items for each. Then another program I wrote would upload them into the correct directories on the BBS server.

I got better and better at teaching micro computers to do tricks. I developed and wrote a membership support system for a local gay activist organization, that had a backend user database in dBase 4. Among other things it generated welcome letters for new members, and reminders about upcoming dues.

All of that was unpaid volunteer work, but eventually I began getting temp contract work making very good money teaching those little computers do tricks for various businesses. I got work at a contract job agency and my first worksite was at Baltimore Gas and Electric Home Products and Services writing report software for their work measurement system. It was the lucky break I needed right when I desperately needed one, because by then mom had retired and moved south, and I was living in a friend’s basement with no prospects except maybe to end up starving on the streets someday.

Because of those little computers I soon had my own apartment. Then a new car…a little Geo Prism. I hopped from one contract programming job to another, each time gaining more experience and new skills that made me even more marketable. My income rose. Eventually I landed a contract, and then full time employment where the Hubble Space Telescope was operated. I thought I’d somehow died and gone to heaven. I still had no boyfriend, but I had work I was good at that I enjoyed doing, and it came with a good income and benefits. I still had no love life, but I began to feel less empty inside.

One day, while walking around the campus, I saw them setting up for student spring fair. Seeing that reawakened something inside of me, and went back home, grabbed my camera and some Kodachrome and began wandering around the rides they were setting up, taking art pictures again for the first time in over a decade.

I revisited my photography equipment. By then I’d bought a small rowhouse near enough to the campus I could walk to work. I established a tentative darkroom in its basement bathroom. Back in high school I used to commandeer the bathroom in the apartment I shared with mom to develop film and make prints. So this was another reawakening. The smell of photo chemicals took me back to a happier time.

I discovered I had enough income I could buy all the camera and darkroom equipment I ever wanted but could not afford when I was a teenager. I bought lenses I could only dream about when I was a teenager for my Canon F1. I’d bought that camera on fast food work money the summer between my junior and senior years, but I could not afford the good lenses for it, so I bought generic low costs ones. Now I could buy the good ones. Then I found another newer second hand F1 body in a camera store and bought that. Eventually I bought the Hasselblad I’d always wanted but considered a dream only.

I bought a good film scanner and revisited my film catalog. Now I had a computer with photographer workflow software on it to help maintain the catalog. I created the 20000 series numbering to account for the before and after time. In my refrigerator I’d kept a large tray of exposed film I never got around to developing during the dark time. I’d kept that film refrigerated because while I’d lost interest in the art I could not bear to let it and the images I’d shot deteriorate into nothing. That was probably some thread of interest in life keeping me alive during the dark time. I began to develop and examine what was on those rolls, and rediscovered something of the life I had before the darkness that I’d forgotten. At some point a 11000 catalog series was established to account for the rolls I shot in the before time but never developed or cataloged during the dark time. 

I established an art room in the basement of my rowhouse with my drafting table against one wall, and my art room computer and film scanner against the other. I bought a tabloid size flatbed scanner so I could scan in my cartoons and other artwork and put it up on the website I now had where I could display my photography and my cartoons and other art for the world to see.

I still had no boyfriend. In fact by this time strike three had entered, exited, and then re entered my life giving me another false hope, only to be dashed later on. But having that job in the space program lifted me out of that darkness enough that I could endure that. I was making art again. I felt alive again.

For twenty-three years I worked that job and made art in my spare time, putting some of it on my website. I started a weekly gay centric political cartoon that got me the notice of the editor of Baltimore OUTLoud, a local gay community newspaper. He invited me to contribute my cartoons to the newspaper, and that eventually led me to becoming a member of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists. Cartooning was the first love and it felt like another dream come true.

I started a cartoon story about my first teenage crush and how I came out to myself. I did it mostly to try and understand what had happened to me back in high school, and how it influenced the adult I eventually became. Then after 34 years of searching, and after being dumped by strike three, I found strike one again.

We began talking. And occasionally, flirting. But he was married and I didn’t want to interfere, just be friends again. Maybe. Hopefully. Eventually I was to discover we were never really all that compatible to begin with. A big cosmic joke. In a better world where gay teens could date and find out who was good for them and who was not, I’d have figured that out and had a good cry over it back then, not 34 years later. We had an argument and he ordered me to stop speaking to him, which I was completely fine with because I was angry at the things he said to me. Logically. But my heart I felt the darkness coming back. I ignored it.

I still had my art and I could use it to get the grief out of me. But grief like that never goes away, it just becomes part of the background noise. He was the first, but it was more than that. If you read A Coming Out Story, what you see is a very confused teenage boy who was fed all the usual myths, lies, superstitions and playground jokes about homosexuals, trying to come to terms with why he was crushing on a male classmate, then suddenly realizing that he’s in love…that wonderful terrifying confusing exhilarating first love…and it told him like nothing else could that everything he’d been taught about homosexuals was a lie and there was nothing wrong with him. There are gay kids who were driven to suicide by that self realization, but it was by loving him that I knew there was nothing wrong with me.

And then he told me to go away.

If I’d had that happen back when I was a teenager I’d have been crushed but eventually I could have got over it and gone on with my life. In theory now that I’m an adult with an adult’s life experience under my belt I should have been able to get over it even easier. But the way it happened then and now just made it worse.

I coasted along with it, and with the knowledge that came with it, that I’d tried to find love and failed all my adult life. Strike one, strike two, strike three, and all the almosts, and nearlies, and could have beens in between. Deep inside after that argument I knew it was over for me. There would be no boyfriend, let alone a spouse to have and to hold. But I buried it and just kept walking.

At age 69, I retired.

I’d had a heart attack a couple years previously, but it was not a serious one. Just enough to remind me that I was getting a lot closer to the grave then I fully appreciated. I got myself to the hospital in enough time that my heart didn’t suffer much damage at all. But after that I was put on meds for blood pressure and heart rate and after an initial bounce up I began feeling tired all the time. So I retired in order to give myself some time to enjoy that was completely my own, and work on the art projects I was now fully engaged in again.

The first year of retirement was wonderful. I had all the time in the world. I could go stay with my brother in California for months at a time. I could world endlessly on my art. I could take a road trip and explore new places with my cameras anytime I wanted. By then I had my dream come true car…a Mercedes-Benz diesel sedan. I drove it for days and days from one end of the country to the other. It was and amazing time. But I was still just coasting along with an understanding I didn’t want to look at…and then it wasn’t wonderful anymore.

In the second year of retirement I began a downward spiral of inactivity. And once again I began to lose interest in my art. You can only coast for so long.

Last summer I spent several months in California with my brother. Knowing I wanted to retire back to the land of my birth but could not afford to, he kindly made a room for me in his house. The part of California he lives in is stunningly beautiful, and my cameras would give it lots of love every time I visited. But last summer I could barely manage to touch my cameras while I was there. I told myself that it was I had covered that ground so much there wasn’t anything left to say about it photographically. But that’s bullshit. When what I think of as my photographic eye opens and I take a camera walk I am always seeing new things to work with. Last summer I could not see anything. The eye would not open. I felt empty inside whenever I tried.

I began to feel fatigued all the time. I spent days out there barely getting out of bed, often taking walks, mostly to my favorite Mexican restaurant where the margaritas and the food are excellent. I would go for walks in the evening, cigar in hand, imagining stories I could write, thinking about places I might drive to on the way back home, pondering ways I could finally move back home to California, thinking about anything except how I had failed at finding love. One day I got so fatigued and dizzy I went scared to the emergency room, but the nurse and doctor there could find nothing wrong with me. I eventually came back home to Baltimore with just a few rolls of film I’d shot and nothing to show for the drawings and cartoons I was working on.

Now there are rolls of film in my darkroom waiting for me to develop them and I can’t find the energy to do that. There is artwork on my drafting table, and in my iPad that I’ve no energy for completing. 

That first period of darkness came about, I’m pretty sure, when I was approaching and then turning 30, still had no love life, and was beginning to think it might never happen. The thought of that scared me and I pushed it down. Of course I’d find someone to love. Everyone does. But no…not everyone does, and I was no one special. I failed and failed and failed again, and it was just too much. But then this was the world I came of age in.

Now I found myself entering another period of darkness. And lo and behold, who comes to pull me out of it…a second time…?

A few months ago my project manager at Space Telescope asked me if I was interested in coming back to the Institute part time. I said Sure! I loved that job, the working environment was wonderful compared to the bottomless pits I’d worked in previously. And it was doing work I was good at, and for the space program. We are adding text to the textbooks. We harvest light from near the dawn of time and bring it to the world to study and learn from. How many times in a lifetime do you get to be part of something like that. Of course I’m interested. No need to convince me. And actually transitioning to part time work was what I’d initially wanted to do, but was told it wasn’t being offered then.

So we had lunch, and we talked, and we talked. And I went back to the office for a new round of talks and interviews about the part time position they had an opening for. And while I was there I was greeted happily by people I’d worked there with previously. Hi Bruce…nice to see you again…  I felt wanted, I felt needed. Those are good things. And I signed the paperwork and later this month I go back to the Institute part time.

And I’m pretty sure this keeps me from falling completely back into it, like it did before. Just to walk around that campus and know that I’m a part of everything going on there will be a wonderful feeling. And at some point I know I’ll be back to doing my art in my spare time, and using my cameras again. And since I’ll have vacation again I’ll be taking new road trips and seeing new sights, and visiting the land of my birth again in a better mindset.

In retrospect the pathways out of a darkness like that can seem strange and random but also somehow preordained. Maybe some kind spirit in the great beyond is still looking kindly on me, still putting random lucky breaks in my path. I had a meeting with my project manager a few days ago to get some detail about what I’ll be working on when I return, so I can hit the ground running. Afterward I met a couple of my co-workers who asked me in a friendly but curious way why I was coming back out of retirement. They themselves are probably getting close to it and cannot wait.

I explained that having so much time all to myself turned out not to be so good for me and they made a few friendly jokes about it but I can appreciate how they wouldn’t totally understand. They have families, they have kids, maybe even grandkids now, and wives they love to keep them company and keep them engaged and active when they retire. I had a lifetime of failure at the one critical task of adulthood to look back on, and nothing to look forward to. And now I have this wonderful adventure in space exploration to look forward to. And I feel alive again.

I’ll keep working it for as long as my health and congressional funding hold out. It’ll be a good life. Not the one I was hoping for, but a Much better one than I had any reasonable expectation of having. I had enough money in my retirement accounts, and in my social security benefit since I waited two years to claim it, to live comfortably until Death tapped me on the shoulder.  And now you know why I came back out of retirement instead.

When you walk through a storm
Keep your chin up high
And don’t be afraid of the dark.

At the end of the storm
Is a golden sky
And the sweet, silver song of a lark.

Walk on through the wind,
Walk on through the rain,
Though your dreams be tossed and blown.

Walk on, walk on, with hope in your heart,
And you’ll never walk alone!
You’ll never walk alone