Six Degrees of Separation

Six degrees of separation are reduced to two, and soundly rejected.

Meeting Uncle Bobby in Waikiki

Business was always a struggle, making money not my strong suit. Point Design certainly didn’t generate the kind of income that I envisioned for even a moderately comfortable middle class life, going to the opera and eating out, much less buying a home in San Francisco. I couldn’t see a way to make it profitable. Coming  up on the big birthday milestone of 50, I would have loved to switch careers, gone back to school, and begun working, as I fantasized  in some lucrative and creative design or internet enterprise, but I’d backed myself into a corner. I was convinced that either I’d made a terrible miscalculation, or there was something basically wrong with me. It would have to remain a dream. I was not very happy. 

I asked Mother and Dad for some assistance, but they refused. To be fair, I think it was just about the time that Dad lost almost all his money (probably close to a million dollars in today’s money), liquidating his holdings in the conglomerate that purchased Ireland Heat Treating. It didn’t help to think that my lack of business sense might be a genetic trait, or a curse, like parents thought of being gay. Both parents were panicked about their forced retirement. Both of them were about as tight fisted as they come to boot. They repeated the tale of woe that they’d lived through the depression, but I read it as punishment for not being the son they wanted, for not doing what they’d intended for me, or perhaps that was just background noise that was always looming. 

Terry, in one of his few magnanimous gestures in our long difficult relationship, decided to send me to Honolulu aboard one of those package deals just to get me out of the madness. I think it was something like $350 dollars for a round trip chartered flight and 7 days in a low budget Waikiki hotel. It had to be around 1985-86 so about an 800 dollar vacation.

There was an enormous banyan tree in the center of a very famous gay bar called “Hula’s Bar and Lei Stand” on Kalākaua in Waikiki, the place where 8 years later I would make my first decision to never drink again. The tree and the bar were postcard Hawaii where the local boys would gather after work and tease the older, monied tourists from the mainland. Some were certainly rent boys. They hung out together; it was far too early to make sexual connections, but they wanted to make their presence known. Sexual adventures were an expected part of middle class gay vacations.

The gay men I’d known in San Francisco who were successful in terms of having a career, making decent money, buying real estate, at least in Uncle Donny’s generation, were straight acting men who maintained a strict separation between their professional lives and their social or gay lives. For the most part they could pass. As far as I know, in the 50’s and 60’s, Bill was not included at the Dupont holiday parties that Donny would have been expected to attend. I’m not 100% certain but I’m 100% certain. The outlet was standing openly out on the sidewalk on Kalākaua in front of Mary’s and Hula’s talking with gay friends. For Donnie’s and the man I’m going to call Uncle Bobby’s generation, this was the beginning of becoming more visible, but the demarcation was that it was on vacation, in Hawaii, away from family and friends. 

Hula’s and Hamburger Mary’s would be leveled in 1998 to make way for an upscale condo development; Hula’s eventually moved to the other end of the beach. That’s really a separate story, but it feeds into the rich man/poor man scenario that was playing out in my mind. The man who owned the property that housed Waikiki’s little gay quarter was allegedly gay. Hula’s was an institution. That one man’s greed cost so many gay men the joy and intrigue of congregating was viewed as much of a sacrilege as cutting down the banyan tree that had been planted long before the birth of the King for whom the street was named, the Merrie Monarch. 

One evening, at the traditional island sundowner when mostly locals would meet for drinks at Hula’s before dinner, I fell into a casual conversation with some older gentlemen, some of whom were at least part time residents. The vacation vibes as well as vodka martinis had begun to melt my inhibitions. A rather distinguished, handsome older man introduced himself as Robert Carroll from Annapolis. I said offhandedly that we were probably related--my mother was Leona Mare Carroll whose family came from the Carroll enclave in Red Hook under the Brooklyn Bridge. Barely acknowledging me, Robert launched into recounting, almost like reciting a memorized script, the history of the Carroll clan. The broad features were the exactly the same as I’d heard mother and Aunt Judy repeat many times: the founding of Catholic Maryland; homage to the sole Catholic, Jesuit educated, signer of the Declaration of Independence; sons and daughters of the Revolution; vast landholdings--and slaves; counting the first Catholic Archbishop in the English Colonies in their lineage; thousands strong family reunions at Annapolis. Robert said he attended regularly because he lived there. A distinguished heritage was also important to your grandmother which is why she repeated it. She also didn’t much like what she deemed the trappings of the later immigration of peasant Irish, as she described them, after the potato famine, and she certainly wouldn’t attend any Irish reunion, not ever for the descendents of Charles Carroll of Carrollton. You might have thought that she and Robert shared a world view. It was almost as if they had learned the history of their ancestors in catechism class.

Robert said he was an antique dealer. He didn’t know Bill Simpson, that would have been a bit too close for comfort, but he and Bill shared some characteristics. He was wearing a fashionable, verging on garish “inside out” Aloha shirt, pressed white slacks and white loafers, no tassels. In the idiom of a bygone age, I would have called him a dandy. On the East Coast, a man couldn’t wear white after Labor Day, and white shoes, with or without tassels, were a total fashion faux pas in any season for men at the yacht club. It was mid-January, and I did notice, but I was more amazed that he was able to keep his shoes so clean. Is my imagination playing tricks on me when I see my distant gay cousin with a cravat? He seemed as if he wanted to appear untouched by the real world, or at least the world that I thought was real.

Robert asked if I had dinner plans and I said no. He said he wanted to try a new restaurant fairly close by that we just opened by some lesbians. Everyone in Waikiki ate dinner out. Without some gimmick, a banyan tree or Polynesian dinner show, restaurants opened and vanished quickly. I don’t think that this one lasted 6 months. Robert was critical of the food. They didn’t seem to have a knack of matching the taste of exotic spices but that didn’t curb their enthusiastic experimentation, or he had inherited the Irish palette’s taste for bland..

I directed our leisurely drunk conversation back to the family tree. Robert asked me if I remembered any names from the Carroll side. I said that my grandfather was named Leo, and that he raised his family in Bridgeport. He died a young man at the beginning of the Great Depression. Robert mentioned that many pious Catholic families had named sons Leo at the end of the nineteenth century so the name was not unusual, given the high esteem for Pope Leo the 13th who championed workers’ rights. But he also recalled that there were some Carrolls in his more immediate, closer family who lived in Brooklyn. There was probably a Leo among them. I called him “Uncle Bobby,” and he laughed. Finally a connection.

When I returned I told mother the whole story of Uncle Bobby. She was not at all amused.  I knew that she would listen with the same homophobia that was full blown every time Bill Simpson visited with Donny, but I felt like rubbing it in. The gay gene existed on her side of the family too. She never gave her gay son a fraction of an inch and I was resentful. 

I did take Uncle Bobby’s Hawaiian number. I called him on at least one more Hawaiian vacation after he purchased a modest condo on Kuhio Ave, closer to Queen’s Surf. I hope that he was able to keep his white shoes clean for the sundowner. It was another era and an entirely different set of expectations for gay men. Today we can live happier lives, or at least follow our own inclinations more closely without a lot of censure. White shoes after Labor Day are no longer verboten, though they probably should be.