Sunday Drive: San Francisco

 

Back in 2015, my truckbuddy Frank published Did You Ever See a Horse Go By, his memoir of growing up gay and coming out late; now he has released it on his blog as a free PDF file, newly revised and complete with color photographs. 

The book is a vivid, poignant, sometimes funny, often brutally honest account of the fears, perplexities, and eventual triumphs of finding his way to adulthood as a gay youth in a straight world, before and after Stonewall - something we all had to go through in the 1960s and 1970s. Young gays today have no idea what a struggle it was.  But Frank surmounted all the difficulties and went on to lead a productive, fulfilling life as a proud gay man.

I admire Frank's courage and diligence in setting down his detailed memories so plainly, exposing his inner life for all the world to see. I can't do it - I have the memories, and our experiences paralleled each other's, but it's still just too hard to write about, even after all these years.  The scars have grown over, but they are still quite tender. 

I heartily recommend Frank's book to all my other truckbuddies and readers. And I hasten to add, it does have a happy ending - very much so. Click on the link below to go straight to the PDF. 

Did You Ever See a Horse Go By?

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Can You Say Narcissistic?

Trump's niece, a clinical psychologist, can and does in her damning, soon-to-be-released family memoir:






You can read more excerpts in the Washington Post and the New York Times.

But of course, Mary Trump doesn't tell us anything about her uncle that couldn't already be seen by any casual observer:  he's a cold-hearted liar, cheater, bully, narcissist, maybe sociopath - a conceited rich kid with an infantile mind who has oozed and schmoozed his way through life on daddy's money, without ever having to suffer the consequences of his actions.

And talk about daddy issues - no wonder he's always sucking up to ruthless, strong-man dictator types, desperate for their approval.

But I suspect, as I've said before in this blog, that just as in the old Greek plays about powerful men consumed with hubris, his actions are soon going to catch up with him, big time.  Call it what you will - nemesis, karma, divine justice - there's just no wheedling your way out of it.

It could come as soon as Election Day - 120 days from now.  And just think what a huge ratings flop that would be. A failed president! A loser! Sad.

The Incandescence of Memory: A Review of Did You Ever See A Horse Go By?

For several months now, your Head Trucker has been reading and re-reading a wonderful book, and struggling to find the words to describe it. The reasons for the struggle are various: for one thing, since late summer life here has been full of sundry and boring domestic, financial, digital, and physical crises that have kept me alternately upset or immobilized.  And then there was the election, for chrissake.  Sometimes life is just one damn thing after another, you know what I mean, fellas?

For another thing, despite the book's lovely, impeccable writing, it so often moves me to tears or makes my heart double-clutch with recognition that I have been able to read only a few pages at a time before having to close it up and set it down again. It's that good: them old Greek boys you may have heard something about in lit class between daydreams and snoozes held that art should be the mirror of life; and this book is a mirror indeed, polished to a high sheen and often casting a glaring, dangerous light into shaded nooks and crannies of the author's soul, and even into my own, it seems.

The book is Did You Ever See a Horse Go By? by my longtime truckbuddy Frank De Francesco, and though it is his first and only book to date, it is well worth the cover price: a little gem of a memoir that I recommend wholeheartedly to all my other truckbuddies and readers. Frank says, "While I'm not sure the world really needs another coming-out story, I feel deeply the need to tell it."

I think the world does need this particular story.  In her well-known essay "On Keeping a Notebook," author Joan Didion wrote that the reason for recording her memories was to "Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point."  Because, she said, "We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were."  And of course we know what happens to those who forget the past.

Frank's book recounts in exquisite detail the fears and feelings and fantasies, the loves and lovers, the guilt and shame, the confessions and repressions, the one night stands and the long-term commitments, the lost and the found, the hopes and the terrors of coming out at age 36, after many years of sheltering in a devoutly Catholic closet in New England. How odd, then, that his memories, feelings, regrets, and joys should so well parallel all that I went through in my fundamentalist Protestant closet down in the Deep South. And yet not so odd after all -- what Frank is really writing about here is not merely his coming out, his life, his memories, but the human experience of being gay and alone and afraid of so many things: censure, rejection, failure, despair, the acid drip of loneliness. All men and women since the world began have endured, or at least feared, these things, for such is the nature of sublunary life:  it is not good for the man to be alone.  But certain exquisite pains and torments are reserved for the gays, or were.

 And he writes about it all very clearly and concretely, with smooth, careful cadences that lead the reader through some fearsomely honest revelations, which normally one might confide only in one's closest friends.  But that's what this book is like:  a comfortable conversation with an old and trusted friend, patiently explaining the real reasons why he did whatever it was he did, trusting that you in turn will listen and understand, not laugh or turn away.

Frank is a very brave writer; I could never be so brave. It's not that I have forgotten anything, but that it's all still too close, too vivid in my memory. After all these years, the scars of battle on my soul and on my heart are still too tender to bear much touching. I admire Frank for the courage and the toughness of his writing, which I am sure was not easy. But somehow he was able to bare his soul to the reader, as all great writers must do sooner or later.

We who were born in the first decade or two after the last world war have been privileged to witness a remarkable period in human history, when homosexuality went from being "the love that dare not speak its name" to being publicly affirmed, even celebrated, by the President, the United Nations, and just about every major city and (who would have thought?) major-league sports team across the country, while same-sex marriage went from being a laughable fantasy to being enshrined in constitutional law by the Supreme Court:  truly a breathtaking phenomenon when you stop to think about it, and all within the span of one ordinary lifetime. Sometimes I can hardly believe it myself.

Frank says of his motivation for writing the book:

For me, the value in telling my story here, beyond the healing, is to preserve a tiny slice of collective history--to document what it was to be gay and to come out in a particular time and place. I want to remember all the others who were there along with me, creating our lives together and defining our sexuality as we went along. My hope is that others find some value in that as well.

I'm quite sure that everyone who reads the book will find that value. It's a fine book, beautifully written and deeply moving, which I hope will find its way into the hands of many readers.


P.S. I forgot to mention all the candid sex scenes, guys. Those are good too, yessir:  real Adults Only stuff.  No, I'm not putting you on; go buy the book and see for yourself.

A Daughter's Tale: Mary, Lady Soames

Mary's wartime service was spent in an anti-aircraft unit defending London
and environs from the Nazi bombers.  Here she is shown accompanying
her father as his aide-de-camp at the Potsdam Conference in 1945.

I've spent the morning reading all that I can see on Amazon preview of A Daughter's Tale by Winston Churchill's youngest child, Mary, who is still going strong at age 90 and published this, her seventh book, last year. It's very good reading, and Lady Soames is what my mother and grandmothers would have described as a lovely person, who has led quite a remarkable life.

Here's a clip from an interview by Andrew Marr last year:




If you're into modern British history, I can also recommend an hour-long interview done by Brian Lamb on C-SPAN in 1999, in which she discusses her then-new book Winston and Clementine: The Personal Letters of the Churchills.


A related thought: I've also been re-reading a book that's been in my possession for many years now, The Gathering Storm, the first volume of Churchill's memoirs of the Second World War, in which he chronicles the long, inexorable drift towards war - which happened precisely because the Western democracies were so terrified of repeating the horrors of the 1914-18 war, on an even larger scale, that they refused to stand up to the dictators, or maintain their military strength, until it was all too late.

Of course, the dangers of appeasement are all too clearly seen now, in hindsight. And the lesson was misapplied later by those who should have known better, such as in the Suez Crisis, and to some extent in Korea and Vietnam. On the other hand, it seems to me that by maintaining a more than adequate nuclear defense, the West certainly did forestall any aggrandizing ambitions the Soviet Union may have had, and ultimately hastened its downfall.

I thought of all these things the other day when I was reading an article in the Telegraph about the current debate over renewing Britain's Trident nuclear submarine defense - at a cost of many billions of dollars to the British taxpayer, of course. I was struck by one particular comment some reader left on that article, to the effect that, "Well I don't see anybody planning to start another world war, so why should we spend all that money on a system that will never be of any use."

Oh but children, the course of human events takes many strange, unexpected twists. Who foresaw 9/11 or the Crash of 2008, huh? And now the rotten aroma of the 1936 Berlin Olympics wafts across the ocean from the direction of Moscow. There's no exact parallel between Putin and Hitler here, and I'm not implying there is one; but take a look at the map of antigay countries, and you'll find a huge block conveniently extending from Russia through most of Africa and Asia.

Granted, that covers a lot of very different political and religious systems; but history makes strange bedfellows. Nor am I saying anyone would go to war specifically over the the gays - Hitler did not go to war just so he could kill the Jews, there was more to it than that.  And ruthless cruelty is not extinct in this old world. Better to keep one's guard up than to have no power of resistance or deterrence at all, is what I'm saying.

Again, if the subject interests you, read Churchill's magisterial 1955 speech on Britain's decision to develop a hydrogen bomb, and see what parallels you can find with the present time.