Sacramento, Peter Berlin, My Marine Friend

I had a very lovely weekend. Tom (aka The Big T.) and I went to Sacramento on the train, as we do several times a year, for a birthday dinner for his very wonderful nephew, Chris, who lives in New York. Going to Sacramento is one of my very favorite things to do. Tom’s entire family is extremely great and I am very lucky to know them. (I was trying to count once how many fantastic people I met because I met Tom; the list is quite long.) Tom’s sister-in-law, Eva, is a fabulous cook who makes spectacular feasts with lots of fresh veggies and fish and/or meat. In this case, she had been sick in bed for a week, and then got up and made a wondrous meal which began with an appetizer that had raw (or cooked via marination in lime juice) ahi tuna in a light coconut milk sauce with fresh green onion and tomato. Eva said this is something everyone eats in Tahiti, where she went on vacation last year. It was so good.

When I got home from Sacramento on Sunday afternoon, I made lentil-potato-tomato stew, and chocolate-chip cookies, including chocolate chips, which I usually omit. I think I don’t actually like chocolate-chip cookies. Next time I make them, maybe I’ll leave out the chocolate chips and the nuts, and if they still don’t seem good, I’ll stick with butter cookies with lemon frosting, which are always good.

A year or so ago, a bicycle I’d had for fifteen or more years got stolen from work. I went outside after work and there it wasn’t. (My friend Alix’s son Wolf, when he was quite young, once began a conversation by saying, “Know what I don’t think?”) Know what wasn’t there? My bike. I took a cab up to Freewheel on Valencia and bought a new U-lock and a new cable for locking up my other bike the next day, but when I got home and unpacked my new items, I’m sorry to say that my old locks were also in my pannier: They had not been on the bike! A physical therapist I was seeing then had asked me to do some stretches each time I got off my bike. That morning I had put my bike in its usual spot, conscientiously done my stretches, and then had gone into the building, leaving my beloved old Diamondback unlocked all day long.

After the sharp edge of loss had dulled somewhat I went and bought a Marin Novato, which I really sort of hate, probably mainly because it’s not my old steel clunker. I suspect it of wanting to kill me; it seems to lose its grip on the earth way more than any other bike I’ve ever had. I put some Continental Contact tires on it, and that did solve that problem, but also increased the rolling resistance by about 50 percent.

Now that the rainy season is ebbing away, I’ve bought some other tires that Eric at Freewheel likes (Panaracer Tservs). Those can be the summer tires and I’ll save the Contacts for winter. The Marin also needs a brake upgrade, and I broke a spoke, so that needs fixing and the rear wheel needs trueing. I called Dan at Freewheel to see if he could do all of this later this week. I like Dan because he is very calm and when you say what’s wrong with your bike, he says, “Oh, yes, I’ll fix that. That shouldn’t be a problem,” as opposed to something that makes me feel discouraged, anxious and irritable.

On Monday night I saw the documentary That Man: Peter Berlin at the Castro Theater. Peter Berlin was a gay sex icon in the Castro in the 1970s and the pictures of him from that era are extremely provocative. He is still alive and is interviewed in the documentary. At some point, Jean Paul Gaultier wanted to use him in advertisements and had someone give him a call. Peter Berlin answered the phone and said something like, “This is the maid. Peter Berlin will be away for eight months.” When his friends asked why on earth he didn’t want to model for Gaultier, Peter Berlin said, “Oh, then I’d have to call him back, and he’d have to call me back, and there would be all these things that would have to be done,” or words to that effect: Too much hassle.

As I walked home down 18^th Street after the movie, I called P. to see if he’d ever met Peter Berlin. He said he did meet and talk to Peter Berlin about ten times downtown, and that he liked him.

The other day I went to say goodbye to my Marine friend, who is on his way back to Iraq for the third time since the war started. He’s looking forward to going back; he jokes that it’s safer than being in a corporate cubicle. Our friendship has cooled since he figured out I’m a far-left liberal, which I had assumed he assumed, just going by where I live, but there is still a flurry of communication now and then and I still care about him and wish him well. (And I still think he has extremely gorgeous green eyes and the most beautiful deep voice.) I went to one of the first anti-war demonstrations, which must have been in March of 2003 or thereabouts, but once the war actually started, I couldn’t bring myself to go to another, even though I knew I wasn’t demonstrating against the members of our military.

Knowing someone who was over there made me pay much closer attention—I always knew what time it was in Baghdad—and broadened my perspective, not to the extent of approving of war (and particularly not this “war”) but to the extent of realizing that every soldier or Marine is a human being with hopes, loves and fears, and also that there are many viewpoints in that group; I’m sure there are some people in the military who are just as anti-war as I am. I also was very touched by how openly my friend, who is as pro-war as you can be, shared his thoughts and feelings. We wrote and emailed often during his first tour there, and he sent me, upon request, a photo of himself in the desert which is still on my living room wall. I still have all of his letters and emails. I never told him that because of him I stopped demonstrating, because I didn’t want to mention that I’d been demonstrating. It would be kind of like saying, “Good news! I’ve decided to stop punching your mother.”