Slices of Real Life: Autobiographical Essays

By Ronald L. Donaghe

Slice of Real Life

Autobiographical Essays

 

Aside from my fiction writing, I have been published in several anthologies, both locally and nationally, and I have written autobiographical essays for literary collections. So over a long career as a writer, essayist, and editor, I do want to separate myself (the writer, the narrator) from the stories I have created from my imaginiation. I want to clear up any misconception my readers might have that the fiction I write is someone based on "me" in any real way. I readily admit that all of me is in my fiction, but one cannot help but bring oneself to bear on everything one does in life. But I am not Tom, Joel, Will, Douglas, Kelly, or for that matter Eva, Mackenzie, Sally, Edna, nor Sudha from my novels. I made one mistake in my first novel and that was changing the name in the novel from the real town upon which it was based. It was a stupid way to try to hide or protect the real town from the one in my first novel. That mistake has rippled through my writing from the foundattion to the roofline, as my father used to say of a half-inch mistake at the bottom of a house would follow all the way to the top and become a half-foot issue at the roof. In writing, as in carpentry, one should measure twice and cut once.

 

In this collection of autobiographical essays, I have sought to show the real me, using my real name, and laying the blame squarely at my feet for any stupid things I may have done in real life. I have noticed that being a popular novelist does not necessarily garner interest in the story of my life. Novelists are not like acting celebreties or sports stars, where fans want to know as much about actors and sports figures as they know about their movie roles and their on-field play. Writers hide in the shadows and readers may simply not want to know anyting much about the writer herself.

 

But I think I've got some interesting stories to tell in this collection that, while I am in the story, the story is still a story about other "characters" interesting places, and actual conflicts—lots and lots of conflict. How about the time I worked on a goat ranch for a couple of gay men who raised goats in northern New Mexico (as best they could, because they both had AIDS and both had suffered ARC and were just trying to hang on and live as mutually sopportive friends in a place I can only think of a kind of paradise, which is why I called that essay "AIDS in Paradise." That is not my story; it's their story. I was only there two weeks and it was enough. I have never forgotten either of these two young men who long ago succombed to the disease, as this was fairly early on in the AIDS pandemic with no cures and little mitigation. 

 

I write about my parents who were both ill at the same time and quite near the end of their lives when I moved back home to be with them. I call their essay "The Healing Place," a home they created that actually took in people at various times in various lives and when they were healed they moved on. What worked for those my parents helped did not necessarily work for them. Neither of them made it out of the twentieth century, but of course that also means that neither of them saw the twin towers in NYC come down, nor the decay of our democratic processes and the attempted coup of our government by the fearul white supremacist minority.

 

I've given myself permission to add to this collection of essays as I see fit, and this particular edition has undergone at least some revision and addition since the first edition back in 2016. Please enjoy!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ronald L. Donaghe
• Release date: Mar 16, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201719791

Ronald L. Donaghe

Ronald L. Donaghe is the author of a dozen works of fiction, as well as three biographies,  and a series of interactive workbooks on writing. He has been an editor for over 40 years.

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Contents

Introduction: Slices of Real Life

Part One Letters in Search of Love

I My Letter Goes Out

II The Letters Come In

III Letters from Prisoners

IV The Curious Case of the Widower

V What It Was All For

Part Two Adventures

The Old Man and St. Louis

AIDS in Paradise

Part Three Reprises and Extensions

My Sister and I

Deming, New Mexico

The Healing Place

Closure

Looking Back from 1998

Part Four Time and Circumstance Until Now

Rural Life, Country School

High School and the Nameless Love

Dancing with Franklin Kameny

A Wrong Turn into The Twilight Zone My Post-Apocalyptic Self

Moving On

Mississippi

Discovering Columbus, Mississippi

About the Author

Introduction:

Slices of Real Life

-1-

—Columbus, Mississippi, 2022

When my first novel was published in 1989, I was living back in my hometown of Deming, New Mexico. I talk about this time and why I returned to my hometown in a later essay in this collection. Before 1989, I had been away from home, living in the real world, for almost twenty-five years, and my return home just so happened to coincide with the publication of my first novel, Common Sons. I had been looking for a publisher for about two years when a small traditional press out of Austin, Texas, decided to publish it. I mention the parallel events (returning to my hometown and the publication of my novel) because the setting for my novel was my hometown, although I foolishly tried to disguise it by calling the town in my novel Common, New Mexico, even going so far as to create a fictional Mimbres County.

The local newspaper interviewed me when my book was published. The newspaper titled the article Deming Author Offers Hope, which discussed the topic of my novel as a positive story for gay people. The article also said that I was gay (which of course I had asked the paper not to reveal), and that was cause for dread on my part, once the article came out. In another essay in this collection, I talk about the pleasant surprise that being outed in the local paper meant nothing to the people I grew up with and had been no cause for alarm, after all. In fact, former classmates lined up at a book signing sponsored by the Deming Arts Council to buy their copies and to have me sign them. Later on I would meet individually with some of my classmates and other people I had grown up with.

And that’s where the trouble began. It wasn’t so much that my classmates were freaked out that I was gay or that the main characters in the novel were gay, or that I had attempted to disguise the town by giving it a fictional name. The trouble was that my classmates tried to sort out which characters in the novel were based on those we all grew up with. I had also made another mistake. I had used familiar first names I had grown up hearing for character names in my novel. There were Bill and Tom and Nicky and Pete, Paul, and Leo—all what I thought of as common names for the area. My name is Ronald. There were no Ronalds in my novel. But my classmates insisted that one character was so and so, another character was someone else from the town, and so on. I say this was troublesome because, really, some of the characters in my novel were homosexual, but none of my old classmates were as far as I knew, so I did not want to identify former classmates as gay or bigoted or mean-spirited or the kind of devoutly religious who make a public spectacle of being religious.

No. In my novel there were types: the farmer’s son, the preacher’s son, the religious, anti-gay elder’s son, the poor man’s murderous son, the wife beater, the beaten wife, the good coach, the good father, the bad father, the strong woman, the weak woman. These were types and the ordinary kinds of people that we find in real life. I deliberately titled the novel Common Sons. I wanted it to convey ordinary because even in a small town in the middle of nowhere, ordinary people can be gay or lesbian.

And then there was the importance, to me, of writing about what I knew, balancing that against not being autobiographical. Although I had lived away from my small town, attended several universities, worked as a professional writer/editor, I was drawn to write about an earlier time, the formative years that were more intense and important to me. I could recall the early and mid-nineteen sixties with clarity, my coming-of-age years, which enabled me to create an atmosphere for my coming-of-age novel in the isolated small town during that era. I wanted my gay characters to have to invent themselves and not have a ready-made gay ghetto to escape to in some big city. I wanted the town and the people to be almost isolated from mainstream America.

So, one of the main reasons I want to present these essays is to contrast my real life with the fiction I have written and published over the years. Readers from my hometown of Deming, New Mexico, and others who have read my novels have assumed that they are autobiographical. They are not.

Well, okay, I grew up on a farm. The characters in my novels are mainly from the rural backwaters of the United States. My main characters are gay. I am gay. Joel Reece (Common Sons) had marvelous parents. I had marvelous parents. And you might even say that Douglas Reece is based in part on my own father. Better yet, Douglas Reece and some of the other adult characters in my novels represent people from The Greatest Generation. My parents and my aunts and uncles were members of the Greatest Generation, but they don’t make appearances in my novels. People like them do.

But like my parents and aunts and uncles, the parental characters in my fiction are the people who fought in World War Two or the Korean War or held down jobs on the home front, the ones who built our nation into the coast-to-coast powerhouse that it became from the nineteen forties on into the rest of the twentieth century. Younger people might not recall, but the Interstate system of highways, the paved roads from coast to coast, began under President Eisenhower, and before that our country was mainly a hodgepodge of dirt and gravel roads and narrow, two-lane paved highways throughout the country that people traveled to get from place to place—not paved super highways. Route 66 was the best we had to offer before the Interstate Highway system. I can even remember the paved two-lane highway that ran from Deming, New Mexico, to Las Cruces, New Mexico, which carried so much traffic that there were actually traffic jams in the middle of nowhere, car pileups during dust storms, and other inconveniences that simply do not happen as much, now that the same highway is the modern Interstate 10. We were really a rural nation before the nineteen forties. Back then a lot more people grew up on farms than they do now. The sophisticates from the east and west coasts call the vast middle region of the country the fly-over zone. I wanted to place my story in this fly-over zone to show that there were gay people there, even in the nineteen sixties.

In a true sense that middle region is where real life occurs for the majority of Americans and, for that matter, it’s where the majority of LGBT people still live. So, I suppose that my novels also reflect the way the country has changed, along with the shrinking world with the Internet and smart phones that tie us closer and closer together, like the Interstate system did when it was built. But this is not so much autobiographical as it is historical.

In fact, when my first novel was published the Internet did not exist as the ubiquitous presence it is now. There was no Amazon.com, and my first novel had to be sold in the hundreds of independent gay bookstores that were taking hold in the country—even the vast fly-over zone in the middle of the country. When I did my first book tour in 1997 and my first novel was in its second edition, there were enough independent gay and lesbian bookstores in the Southwest and Midwest of fly-over country, alone, to make the tour worthwhile.

-2-

Some of the essays that appear in this collection were published in other anthologies. All of those essays are from experiences I had during another formative period in my life from about 1986 through 1991, which began with what I thought of as my greatest loss in life and ended with what I now consider my greatest gain. I returned to my hometown of Deming, New Mexico—ostensibly to take care of my ailing and aging parents.

In a way, this period was the darkest of my life. I think I was clinically depressed, although I never went to a psychologist to find out. Yet strangely enough, given my chronic depression, this was one of the very best times of my life, as well.

This period of years has a definite beginning. My lover of fourteen years came to me one night in December of 1986 and said that he wanted to break up, because he said he was heterosexual. Three months later, I ended up in Las Cruces, New Mexico, living in a motel room, with a part-time job, without a car, and with the usual emotional baggage. An essay about that experience is not included, because I did not want to inflict on the reader the morose self-pity I engaged in and, at times, grimly enjoyed. But I do mention this breakup in several of the essays, since getting over it is, in a sense, a thread that ties together all the essays during that five-year period; the emotional fallout from it was partially responsible for the paths I took during that time.

At the beginning of this period, I felt old at thirty-seven. At the end of this period, I was forty-two and feeling as if life was just beginning, feeling young and stronger than ever. In the beginning, I was fat and weak with a terrible self-image; by the end, I could get behind a shovel in my garden and chunk dirt for hours without tiring. It was certainly the first time in my adult life when I was proud of my body, when I felt wonderful in a T-shirt and cutoffs. Even as a teenager, I’d never felt so confident about my appearance. In short, it took five years for me to cast off the previous fourteen. The struggle with anger and hurt made this period difficult, but by the end of it, I looked ahead with relish.

I hope the essays illuminate that transition.

* * *

In Part One: Letters in Search of Love, the essays deal with my search for a new lover. In a clinical sense, I suppose the reason for this search has some fancy name; ordinary people or country-western singers, however, would just say I was on the rebound. It probably would have been a disaster had I settled down with another man too soon, because I still did not know what my weaknesses or my strengths were. Although I did not find a lover through this exchange of letters, the process of the search was part of the healing necessary to bury my fourteen-year relationship. In all, I exchanged letters with at least two-dozen men over a yearlong period.

From those letters, I discovered that my pain was not unique. Nor my loneliness. I also discovered that gay men accommodate adversity and their sexuality in surprisingly different ways. Letters from prisoners sometimes amused me, sometimes scared the hell out of me, and gave me a safe peek into prison life. Other men who wrote were even more self-pitying than I was, which had a wonderful curative effect on my own self-pity.

The most perplexing, maddening, and insulting letters came from a widower (age around seventy) whose wife of a thousand years had died and, now, he was answering ads from gay men—at least I know that he answered my letter, which appeared in RFD Magazine (a quarterly that has been continually published since 1974). I say it was maddening because, in one of his letters, he sent a seven-page, single-spaced type-written document, stamped CONFIDENTIAL in which he laid down the law by which I would abide if I decided to become his plaything. There would be no discussion, no objections, and no input from me. He obviously hadn’t bothered to read what I’d written in my letter for RFD or, like the plantation slave master who used his slaves for whatever perversions he desired to engage in, he had no respect for me or any inkling that, as a gay man, I had feelings. I have not included his letters in the essay about him, entitled The Curious Case of the Widower, but I have tried to capture the essence of his definitely non-gay, sexist, privileged-white-male-heterosexual attitude.

Most of the letters, however, were from men who were sincere, well educated, stable and, like me, earnestly looking for a lover to grow old with.

* * *

In Part Two: Adventures, I have included only two essays: The Old Man and St. Louis, and AIDS in Paradise. AIDS in Paradise was first published in a literary anthology, titled The Deming Six: Voices of the Chihuahuan Desert (Winesburg Express, 1995). I had both adventures in the same year, as I moved into a new phase of getting over my breakup with my lover. I had spent most of 1987 in dreary self-pity and hurt. In 1988, I had spent most of my energy helping my parents who had each been hospitalized. But by 1989/1990 I finally began to feel and express my anger at my ex-lover. I had always thought that anger was a destructive emotion but, in my case, it was a blessed relief from hurt and self-pity. It was like a burst of adrenaline or a shot of speed and provided the raw energy I needed to push myself to do something with my life. Because I felt that I was getting old, I began to live more deliberately, demanding what people now call quality time.

I quit working at a regular job in 1988 and did not see fit to try for another one until 1992. Because I took this step and sought to live as frugally as possible, I was able to discover what was truly important to me and what were merely luxuries. Because I didn’t have a job, I began to appreciate the value of a dollar—I mean one buck, one unit of one hundred pennies. When I had a few bucks in my pocket from cleaning someone’s yard, I felt rich. Rather than purchasing my entertainment, for example, I learned to appreciate simple, free pleasures, like gardening and watching the progress of the sun across the sky, the way the waning sunlight makes things change colors; how each season of the year brings out different plants and flowers; how much music there is at sunset from the birds and the clear desert air. Before this, that magic hour between afternoon and evening had been spent in traffic jams in Dallas and Washington DC and other cities.

I took risks during this period to push myself beyond self-imposed limitations, chances that I had only fantasized about taking when I was younger—like going naked outdoors in broad daylight, leaving all my clothing miles behind me. While I was getting undressed or climbing a mountain in the nude, I often laughed nervously at the predicament I risked putting myself into. What if some redneck, shotgun-toting, good-ole boy out hunting in the desert caught sight of me? What if the Border Patrol agents on the lookout for illegals from Mexico spotted me? Or Drug Enforcement Agents flying over the area in a helicopter looking for drug runners saw me, instead, leaping naked over bushes and running along like a wild man?

In The Old Man and St. Louis, I tell of my adventure of driving an old man from Deming, New Mexico, to St. Louis, Missouri, to visit with his family one last time—according to him—before he died.

His diabetes was rapidly overwhelming him; he was nearly blind from it and had a wound on the bottom of his foot that wouldn’t heal. He was continually eating sweets on the trip, I think, to hasten his death or to stare death in the face, the apple-pie a la mode the middle finger. Once there, when I met his family, I felt sorry for the old man because, while his sisters and brother-in-law welcomed him into their homes, to me he seemed strangely irrelevant to them and their lives in St. Louis and what his life had become—this trip home for the last time becoming a sort of frustrated rush through a place from long ago that echoed, not with his memories, but with present-day concerns, bearing little connection to the place he held in his heart.

Likewise, in AIDS in Paradise I tell of the job I took on a goat ranch in Northern New Mexico in exchange for room and board. The two gay men running it were HIV positive, and when I arrived to work, one of them had recently been hospitalized (not for the first time) from complications due, not only to heat exhaustion but also problems with his red-cell count. Not only did I not make a dime on the job, I barely got fed. But it was an adventure and a wrenching learning experience whose worth is still evident to me.

In Part Three: Reprises and Extensions, I include two essays I wrote for John Preston’s anthologies—Hometowns (Dutton, 1991) and A Member of the Family (Dutton, 1992). The essay, entitled Deming, New Mexico that appeared in Hometowns is essentially about the same period of 1988 to 1992 and gives a setting to the place where I lived. I include the essay, My Sister and I, from the award-winning anthology, Member of the Family, because it includes a little more about getting over my lover of fourteen years, as well as shows more of my family background. I wanted to extend the essay about my hometown of Deming, New Mexico, by talking more about the two most wonderful people in the world; so, I wrote the essay, The Healing Place, which is about my parents and the healing environment they produced no matter where they lived. As I have said, in 1988 I quit my last technical writing job and went home to Deming, ostensibly to help them out when my mother was hospitalized, and then I stayed a little while longer, because my father was hospitalized the same year. Then that year passed, and I continued to stay in Deming. Another year came and went and, soon, I found that I was living in Deming and happy about it, letting my career as a technical writer slide as I tried to move into a career as a writer (on subjects and in genres of my own choosing).

I discovered (or rediscovered) who my parents were, what meaning I could glean from life by simply being with them as they struggled to just get by. Their unconditional love and their non-demanding generosity played a great part in my healing from the loss I spoke of earlier.

I am fully aware that some of the essays are sprinkled with bitter moments; there are also dollops of self-pity and a dash or two of snobbishness—but I hope they are also seasoned with some humor and a rising sense of self-discovery. At any rate, I would not trade this period of my life for any other.

-3-

Part Four, Time and Circumstance Until Now, is a group of new essays that I have written specifically for Slices of Real Life. Loosely they have to do with events and the passage of time that either caused me to change paths abruptly or allowed me to evolve in a new direction of endeavor. Some of the essays are about my formative years, which might further contrast my real life from that of the fictional characters’ lives I have created in my novels.

Part One

Letters in Search of Love

I

My Letter Goes Out

It took a long time for me to warm up in the spring of 1990. We’d had a colder than normal winter for this southern part of New Mexico. There was snow off and on through the end of March. My aunt’s cactus garden froze out. And I had spent a miserable winter in my one-room cabin. It had no plumbing and, although it had electricity, the only heater I had was an ancient heat-resistor unit with two coils—and one of them was burned out. I was working on my second novel that winter and sat many nights with the heater between my feet, under the computer desk, where about all it accomplished was to keep my toes from breaking off with the cold.

Then, just as the weather was warming up and I was able to get into my garden to turn the soil, I took a job for the month of April to drive an old man to St. Louis, Missouri. I did it mainly for the experience of seeing a state I’d never been to, but I also needed the three hundred dollars it would bring. The problem was that the trip to St. Louis moved me back into winter. The old man and I left temperatures in the low eighties in Deming and, by the time we arrived in St. Louis, we were back into the low forties and rainy weather. So, even when we returned to Deming, I still carried physical memories of the cold in my bones.

That spring, I was also suffering from another kind of cold. Like the unusually cold winter that year, I had been trying to get over the demise of a fourteen-year relationship. I was cold from the inside out. My soul was cold. I could feel it inside, still curled up in the fetal position it had been in for over three years. My heart had shrunken to a hard knot in my chest, no longer able to pump warm blood to my extremities. It resented beating and keeping me alive. But I was determined to warm up, to come to life.

So as I turned the soil in my garden in those waning days of April 1990, I marveled at the warmth of the desert sun on my shoulders; I would often stop shoveling just to smile up at the crystal-clear sky and sigh. Come on, I urged myself. Quit wallowing in self-pity and get on with your life. Things will get better.

As I worked outdoors, feeling my body growing stronger, able to chunk up twenty pounds of soil at a time and turn it with ease, I did begin to warm up—but slowly and deliberately—my heart and soul resisting. I think of that year as a turning point in my life, one in which I came out of a long winter of the soul and sought to bring to reality some of the fantasies I had kept in the back of my mind.

One of those fantasies was born in St. Louis. It began at a little bookstore called Our World Too on Van Deventer Avenue with my rediscovery of a magazine for rural gay men called RFD. If ever there was a magazine perfectly targeted for a gay man like me, it was RFD. I enjoyed the articles about the country lifestyles gay men were establishing for themselves. There were cute little articles about gardening from a screaming queen’s perspective, articles about raising goats, and many articles on country retreats. I especially enjoyed those articles about Faerie Gatherings and the photographs of the nude men that were included. I took a couple of copies back to Deming with me. I had read them thoroughly at night in the motel rooms I shared with the old man as we made our way back home. Then, once I was home, after a day of working in the garden, I lay on my waterbed with its heat