I searched for him for 34 years. Before the Internet all I had was various blogs and USENET news groups where I would post the occasional message in a bottle. I got no replies. I paid money for CDs of all the national public white pages (the part of the phone book with just the names, addresses and phone numbers of people who hadn’t paid to have their numbers private) so I could search for him by name. But there were hundreds, if not thousands of people with his first and last names and I did not know his middle name, or that he was actually going by his high school nickname.

Then the AIDS crisis hit, and I walked between the panels during the Names Quilt’s first showing on the Washington Mall, and afterward I had recurring nightmares of walking among the panels and finding one with his name on it. Worse were the nightmares where I was walking in the halls of our old high school and seeing him walk by emaciated and covered in kaposi sarcoma lesions. I would wake up crying my eyes out.

Eventually, in desperation, I did a thing that finally, Finally, led me right to him. I had a phone number. Trembling, I called it. Thankfully I got his answering machine, not him, or I would have probably choked and squeaked out some pathetic hello, uh, hi, uhm, maybe you don’t remember me…but anyway…hello…hi…is this Tom…from back in Woodward…hello…hi…uhm…ah…how are you…hello… But the moment I heard his voice on that answering machine I knew it was him after all, I didn’t even need to hear the message, and I instantly became that awkward geek of a teenage boy I was back when I first laid eyes on him and my jaw dropped.

I hung up and carefully composed a message to leave on his answering machine. Then I called again, thankfully got the answering machine again, and trying hard to keep my voice steady, left the message.

Then I had to wait…

September 26th, 2006

The Bitter Taste Of Cartoon…

I think I’ll start a new cartoon strip…Life in Purgatory… Or has it already been done? Would Matt Groening object…?

———-

September 26th, 2006

Life In Purgatory

Seems like I’ve been here before…

——

October 5th, 2006

Not In Purgatory Anymore…

Just so my friends know… I got a response to one of my messages in a bottle this afternoon. Finally. After so long…

You walk in an empty landscape under an endless sky. The earth under your feet is flat, hard, solid rock. Ahead of you is cliff, overlooking a great valley. There are mountains on the horizon. So far away. And…what looks like, perhaps, a city in the distance. Just at your feet is a pool of water, in a small hollow in the rock. Its surface is unnaturally calm.

Look down into it. You see your reflection. It is deceptively clear. You see yourself, here, now. As you are. Right this moment. You see every detail of your face, sharp and crystal clear, looking back at you. But unlike most people who come this way, to look into this pool, you know that this is not all there is to you. There is more. The rest of you is there, in the darkness below the surface. You know this.

Reach a hand into the water. Did you slack through most of your life? Did you walk it with your eyes closed? Your mind blissfully content with the moment? Never questioning. Never doubting. Never wondering? Then the pool is quite shallow. Your hand reaches the bottom soon, and encounters only the same hard smooth rock you have just walked across. But if you kept your eyes open, and your mind active, and your heart engaged, then it is quite deep. Your hand does not touch bottom no matter how far into it you reach. The water is cold. It is dark. It is deathly still.

Reach down as far as you can. Then stir the water. Just a little. Careful. The reflection of you, here, now, ripples away. Watch. Something else, something from deep down in the pool, shimmers up to take its place.

Be ready for what you see.

——

October 6th, 2006

Whirled

Two panels from “Dope Rider and the Crescent Queen”
©1976 by Paul Kirchner

So for years now…34 years to be exact…I’ve been throwing these little messages in a bottle out into the world, where, hopefully, they would eventually find there way to a certain someone. So what happened between us back when we were both teenagers is pretty central to who I am today. So I finally got a reply. After 34 years of searching for him I finally found him. So we talked. For just over an hour we talked. You have to expect that 34 years is a lot of time for things to happen. And things did happen. Many things he told me about. And many things I can only guess at from what he would only allude to. He sounds just like he always did. It was like picking up the phone and talking to him back in 1972. It was eerie. It was wonderful. It was thrilling. It was disturbing. He’s the same guy he was back then. And he’s different. And things have happened in 34 years. Many things.
And I feel like…a gently whirling dust devil just suddenly smacked into me and threw parts of me that no one has ever touched or disturbed in 34 years reeling into the air, scattered across the sky, and now I’m just standing here becalmed, watching it all lazily settle back down, and I know it will still be me when it does, but different, and I don’t know what will happen next because those parts of me ran so old and so deep and so still…

“How do I get to Tucumcari?”

…and then, of course, I had to deal with the consequences of doing the thing that brought me back to him. Four months later it was this:

February 25th, 2007

I Can’t Draw…

Sorry…

Unforgettable…That’s What You Are…
Unforgettable though near or far
Like a song of love that clings to me
How the thought of you does things to me
Never before has someone been more

Nat King Cole is singing on my iPod and it’s drizzling freezing rain outside and I’m nursing a glass of Kahlua and there is a face and a name that I just can’t get out of my thoughts, and it’s been like that for days now and I’m sorry. I had a couple of cartoons I wanted to get finished before today and I just haven’t been able to put pen to paper for days now. This is why I stopped drawing, stopped painting, stopped working with my cameras, for over a decade…it’s why I’m a software engineer now, and not the graphic artist or photographer everyone from Woodward assumed I’d become someday…this bundle of feeling that I have to deal with every time I walk into that space inside of me where all my creativity comes from. There’s a piece missing from what should have been my life and before I can sit down and do anything in my art room I have to deal with that and sometimes I just can’t. There’s a bit of that loss, that quiet, waiting, life-on-hold emptiness, in Everything I’ve Ever Done since 1975 and by the late 1980s I just got so sick of seeing it staring back at me from my artwork that I just stopped doing anything…I took my easel down, put my oils, my pens and charcoal sticks, my drawing pads away, put my cameras away, and just plinked on a computer (just like I’m doing now) for creative release.

I want that part of me back. I really want it back. But it’s a struggle. I have my ups and downs now…and this week has just been particularly bad. I’m sorry. Nothing more for now. I just can’t. I guess this is why I’ll never be a professional cartoonist or artist. I’m sorry. I just can’t. I’m sorry.

I remember skies
Mirrored in your eyes
I wonder where you are
I wonder if you
Think about me
Once upon a time
In your wildest dreams

I started my semi autobiographical cartoon series, A Coming Out Story, as I said at the time, to try and make sense of what happened to me back in high school, back when I finally had to admit not only am I gay but I’m crushing madly on a classmate, and it’s 1971 and neither one of us have any hope of that magical first crush being anything but as confusing minefield of feelings and fear. I had no idea back then of where he’d gone or even if he was still alive.

And then I found him. And we started talking again. And it was wonderful again. And a minefield of feelings and fear again. For most of us of our generation, it will always be a time before Stonewall.

We talked and talked and talked. It was wonderful. A little tentative flirting happened, but it was impossible and we both knew it. But I still held out hope we could be friends, if long distance ones. Even that turned out not to be possible. I was out and proud and he needed me to be closeted, at least in public around him, and by then I’d stood my ground so often and had the life bruises to show for it that I wasn’t doing that for anyone, let alone the guy who made my heart sing when I was a teenage boy. Even if he never loved me back, even if we weren’t really all that compatible to begin with, I was never going to betray that moment when I discovered how wonderful it was to be in love, how wonderful life could be after all. But he had his comfort zone and he told me to my face that he was going to stay in it.

A few years later we had one last heart to heart where he told me things I could swear he’d got from a stint in ex-gay therapy. He told me there were times he’d look in a mirror and not know who it was looking back. This was the guy teenage me once thought hung the moon and the stars. I walked back to my hotel room thinking this must be what it’s like living in Nietzche’s abyss.

Ten years after I found him again he told me to go away.

I’ve struggled to bring my cartoon series to a proper end ever since. I tacked on an ending but it isn’t the one I’d planned, and there was so much more I wanted to tell. But I have no energy. That life-on-hold emptiness inside me never left. I’m only still alive now because I’m so used to it being there.