The Last Chance Texaco

Archive for the ‘Justice’ Category

My credit score must be improving.  I’m getting more and better junk mail.  Here’s to clearing away some wreckage.

“Simply tell him that we will never get over drinking until we have done our utmost to straighten out the past. We are there to sweep off our side of the street, realizing that nothing worth while can be accomplished until we do so, never trying to tell him what he should do. His faults are not discussed. We stick to our own. If our manner is calm, frank, and open, we will be gratified with the result.”

I’ve never gone into any detail about this part of my life but to mention it once here.  It isn’t something that I share, usually.  It has just been too shameful and painful and personal.

And it is complicated enough being a gay man without having to explain your marriage to a woman.  If I’ve left this detail out in the past it is part lie of omission, part simplifying an already complex story.  But there it is.  I was married once.

I met her in 1985.  She was a friend of a boyfriend.  I was leaving him and he was desperate that I shouldn’t completely disappear.  I would come to my senses and come home.  He was sure of it.  He asked her if I couldn’t stay with her awhile; just till our relationship sorted itself out.

Well, that relationship never sorted itself out; probably because MS and I got along great.  We had a perfectly great time together, liked each others company, each had something the other wanted, and we somehow ended up in bed together and were married in 1987.

It seemed like the perfect solution.  If I was married to a woman I would obviously escape the plague that was killing the men in our neighborhood by the dozens.  She had a little bit of money and a good paying job she had to go to for a day every three weeks or so, which freed me to do important things like learn to cook and paint the apartment.  Of course I didn’t have any real skills; nothing marketable.  I was 20 years old.  I dropped out of high school and ran away from home three years earlier.  Like all my other relationships of that period, she met the qualifications to be a rescuer, and I let her rescue me. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m totally double dipping today. Sorry. I spaced it that today is Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. I’m not Jewish, but I am fascinated by their faith, their culture, and their traditions. And this day is particularly important in the Jewish faith and it speaks to me in terms that I relate to my recovery.

According to Jewish tradition, God inscribes each person’s fate for the coming year into a “book” on Rosh Hashanah and waits until Yom Kippur to “seal” the verdict. During the Ten Days of Repentance, a Jew tries to amend his behavior and seek forgiveness for wrongs done against God (bein adam leMakom) and against his fellow man (bein adam lechavero). Read the rest of this entry »