Lavendar and Ray

As much as September, it's sights and sounds, tell me that birthday is coming, I know what lies beyond the corner in October. I know what memories will assault me, and I remember how the grief consumed me for a year. For a year, I could not fight the tears, they came daily. On my way to work, on my way home, every day, every day.


Because October is when Great Aunt Ray died. He was handsome, and brave and true. Actually, he was grouchy and old and loved a good leather bar. But he was ours, and we were his.


When we met Ray, he had a life long career of being a road manager, a stage hand, a "roadie" in his heart. Oh, he loved the performance and the stage, the music, the ropes and the lingo. He had toured as a road manager with a 70's group of gospel and country. He loved the music, the stage, and everything about it. The lyrics to Jackson Brown's "The Load Out" made me think of him, even while he was alive. "Now roll them cases out and lift them amps. Haul them trusses down and get 'em up them ramps." He not only knew how to do all that stuff in the physical sense, but he understood the part they played in a show, in a production, and he loved it.


Often, I would faux-flirt with him. It seemed to bother him so much, that it was delightfully fun. I was probably a hundred pounds lighter then, and six years ago I may have still had a touch of youthfulness on my features. I certainly had it in my personality. To walk into his office, slide behind his chair and run my hands down his torso would upset him no end. So I was horribly surprised one day when he said, "I'm just an old queen." I said, "Ray, you'd have to be GAY to be a QUEEN." He said, "I am." The man had no sense of fashion, barely came to work in a clean shirt and wore big black doc martens with white socks, daily. There was not one hint, not one, in his personality, of his being gay. You could have bowled me over with a feather.


Sometime late, I would catch my first case of food poisoning. Not recognizing it for what it was, thinking it was just a bad cold coming on real fast, I went upstairs to an empty hotel room and tried to nap it off. Later that evening, sick at both ends of my body, Ray comes up to find me practically incapacitated. He goes downstairs to move his car close to the hotel entrance, comes back and gets a trash can and a pillow and takes me to the local clinic, calling my mother to say, "My name is Ray, I'm a friend of your son's. I think he's got food poisoning and I've brought him to the clinic near work." I have never needed a friend so badly, never had one so good.


Ray one day was holding a lavendar sachet, at the office. The way I remember it, we were both sort of visiting with someone else when the other guy noticed Ray was holding something like a bean bag. (We'll call the other guy Super Sarcastic British Gay Guy, or Brit for short). Ray said it was a lavendar sachet, a guest had given it to him. We mocked him furiously. Ray, big ol' leather bar, butch, macho dykey Ray, loved his leather sachet. So from there on out, we started calling him Great Aunt Ray. And we would sit in the employee lunch room and tell "someday" stories. How someday, the three of us would be on a cruise, ala Golden Girls style, and the young deckhands would flirt with me and Brit, and we would push Great Aunt Ray around in a wheelchair, and we'd tuck his sweater up with a little broch, and if the deckhands asked about her we'd say, "Oh never mind her. She just smells of gin." and then we'd roll her out of the sun. We did this furiously, just carried on and on and on. He would act like it made him mad, but I think the idea of him in a little sweater set, drinking gin and being pushed around in a wheelchair was so far from him, that he kind of thought it was funny. Sort of. I mean, even he had to admit that no one would think he'd take a lavendar sachet home and put in his drawers.


Ray eventually moved back near his home. He had been an only child and both his parents were gone before him. When he mentioned it, it always seemed like a deep sadness. But he did not linger on it. He found a gig working up there at a . . . venue? Stage? Stadium? Whatever those things are called, and he seemed genuinely happy. He liked his boss and was smitten by his young apprentice. After we met him,we were all smitten by him. His rogueish charm and rough hair, his "I do bad things" grin.

- - - This posting got a little long, and I had to put it down for a bit. There's so much emotion when I think about Great Aunt Ray. I'm going to go ahead and click "publish." I may post about him some more later. But that's enough for now.