I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

Category: Lesbian Literary

  • Sleepless in Seattle – Part 3 (from Not Quite the Same)

    Sleepless in Seattle – Part 3 (from Not Quite the Same)


    When Adrian and I arrived in Seattle at the end of September, 1968 we rented a cheap motel room for a week in a sketchy part of the city south of the downtown area. The Buick Skylark seemed as relieved as Adrian and I were to be stationary for a few days. My Exxon credit card was in flames, but I couldn’t call my family for any financial help – unless I needed money to come home. That was the deal I made with my dad. Both Adrian and I needed desperately to find jobs; we combed the newspaper help wanted ads but apparently no one wanted our help.

    Then I had an inspiration. The motel had a telephone directory with tons of yellow pages. I decided to call every CPA firm in the area in alphabetical order to try to get an interview with someone, anyone. When I got down to the “s‘s” and called Simonson & Moore, I spoke with a woman named Becky who was their office manager. Unbelievably and with whatever good karma swirled around me, Becky said she was from San Angelo, Texas and added her bosses liked Texas people. That turned out to be true; Chuck Simonson and Tim Moore interviewed me, had me meet with Becky, and hired me on my first interview with this local two-partner CPA firm in Bellevue, a suburb east of Seattle across Lake Washington. What I learned from this process was that Chuck and Tim not only liked Texas people but especially liked Texas people who had experience working for one of the largest CPA firms in Houston, even if I had only been with that firm for a year. Plus, Becky needed extra help in the upcoming tax season, and here I was having passed three of four parts of the CPA exam with confidence I would pass the fourth part in November. I had landed a trifecta and more importantly, landed a job.

    Adrian and I rented a furnished two-bedroom apartment in a large complex in Bellevue not far from my new office. The cost was twice what I paid in Houston, but we planned to share the expenses. She continued to look for a job for several weeks but her degree in sociology wasn’t as marketable as mine in accounting. Finally, she accepted a position as a topless go-go dancer in a neighborhood bar near our apartment. I was taken aback by this turn of events on several levels but kept my opinions where they belonged.  She worked long hours at night and came home in the early morning. I woke up when she came in and had trouble going back to sleep. Often, I got up early to get dressed for work, and I would meet a strange man coming out of her bedroom – a man who raced me to the bathroom.

    Somehow, Adrian wasn’t the lesbian I hoped she would be, but we continued to share expenses and (to me) a disappointing platonic friendship.

    On weekends we returned to my Buick Skylark to explore our new surroundings. We drove up the narrow winding roads to see the glorious Mount Rainier, rode ferries in Seattle across Puget Sound to visit the Olympic Peninsula, discovered new grocery stores, gas stations, watched as the green leaves on the non-evergreen trees gradually turned gold, red and brown while the massive evergreens remained evergreens. I began to develop a new social life with Becky and her husband Karl who couldn’t have been kinder to me. Becky invited me to go to church with her at the Mercer Island Baptist Church, a Southern Baptist church with expatriate southern members from Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. I found kindred spirits in the church who were the lesbians Adrian wasn’t… with a few complications Adrian didn’t have like being married to the pastor. The lines between right and wrong weren’t as clear when you stepped off the sidelines into the grey areas between black and white.

    On the Wednesday afternoon before our first Thanksgiving in Washington, Adrian came to see me at my office to tell me she was moving to California with one of the men she met at the bar where she worked. She was packed and on her way out of town. Seattle wasn’t the place for her. She’d send me her part of the rent for the month. She’d had a great time with me, but she was restless and needed to move on. I stared at her and tried to process what she was saying. I had no prior clue she was thinking of leaving. I didn’t have an emotional attachment any longer, but I did have this sinking feeling of financial abandonment. I stuttered and stammered goodbye. She waved to me from the parking lot as I watched from my office window while she drove away with her new boyfriend. I never saw or heard from her again.

    Thanksgiving Day Becky and her husband Karl invited me to eat with them. I was grateful for the company and the turkey with the trimmings Karl made. The conversation turned to our families we missed in Texas. When I got back to my apartment, I called my family collect – my dad accepted the call as he had promised. I was a long way from home and my grandmothers’ cooking. I could smell the aroma of my favorite pineapple fried pies while I watched football on my tiny RCA portable color TV by myself in the living room of my now too expensive apartment. I was in real trouble without Adrian’s financial support and had to figure out a new plan to live on my own by the end of the next month. The reality of where I was, what I was doing, being truly alone now struck me that first Thanksgiving in Seattle; but by Christmas I was living in an inexpensive one bedroom garage apartment on one of Seattle’s seven hills with a view of Lake Union and the Space Needle plus a commute every day across beautiful Lake Washington to my job with my new friends at Simonson and Moore in Bellevue.

    Hormones continued to rage inside the relatively safe comfort zone of the Mercer Island Baptist Church, a familiar refuge whose language and music I knew well. Let the church be the church, let the people rejoice. Hallelujah.

    My grandmother gave my dad the money to fly me home for Christmas. Life was good.

    ***************************

    To be continued. Please stay tuned.

               

  • Sleepless in Seattle – Part 2 (from Not Quite the Same)

    Sleepless in Seattle – Part 2 (from Not Quite the Same)


    The trip with Adrian to Seattle from Houston was the beginning of my venture into unfamiliar territories. Since neither of us had time constraints or very much money, we planned our course around Adrian’s friends and family locations. Our first major goal was Albuquerque, New Mexico, where we spent a couple of nights with two women who lived there. They were Adrian’s friends before she and I shared college days at the University of Texas, seemed happy to see her, and welcomed me into their home. None of us discussed anything about our private lives, but even I could see that these two women were intimately involved and not just friends. They reinforced my hope that Adrian might also be a homosexual and become my one true love if we made this awesome road trip together.

    I loved New Mexico. We spent a day hiking in the San Dia mountains outside of Santa Fe. The breathtaking beauty of those hills plus the excitement of being with the lesbian couple intoxicated me. I hated to leave, but Adrian already looked forward to seeing the Grand Canyon. I learned that she liked to keep moving.

    We stayed in one of the little park cabins for one night at the Grand Canyon. We only had one bed, and it was cold outside. Adrian was an attractive woman with short blonde straight hair. She was several inches taller than me and had a good body in all the right places. I hoped that the cold would make for warmer conditions in the double bed, but no such luck. She slept soundly as I tried to focus on the majesty and grandeur that was the Grand Canyon we had explored during the day. I finally drifted to sleep pretending I had rescued Adrian from falling off one of the lookouts we’d seen in the late afternoon on our way to the cabin.

    From the majesty and grandeur of the Grand Canyon we made our way to Las Vegas, Nevada. We arrived in the middle of the night and thought it was daylight there. I had never seen so many lights, hotels and casinos in one place. And, it was in the middle of the desert. Out of nowhere, an entire city of blazing illumination emerged as we drove toward our motel. The next night we went to see Harry Belafonte perform for the dinner show at one of the large hotels on the Strip. I felt flush from my success at the blackjack tables that afternoon and bought our tickets. Beginner’s luck. I wanted to impress Adrian, and we had a fun evening with Harry and his music. That was the end of my luck for the day.

    The next destination was Los Angeles. Adrian had friends there, too. We stayed with a guy and his girlfriend who lived in a suburb near Huntington Beach. They also were very glad to see Adrian and welcomed me enthusiastically. They fixed dinner, and afterwards we all sat closely together on the floor in their living room. The guy took an odd-shaped glass and put something in it, then lit a pipe connected to the container and began to puff. He passed the pipe around to each of us. I quickly realized Adrian and her friends enjoyed illegal substances. I had already drunk two glasses of wine they served with dinner so my first problem with the arrangement on the floor was worrying about how I was going to get up. I thought the dinner conversation had been strange when they discussed friends who were busted for drugs the previous week. The wine now mixed with the smoke filling the air in the living room. When the pipe was handed to me, I took a puff because I didn’t want Adrian to think I wasn’t a party animal. However, I immediately envisioned headlines in The Grimes County Review saying Local Girl Arrested in California Drug Bust. I puffed no more. At my suggestion we moved on the following morning without breakfast.

    From Los Angeles we drove up the winding two-lane Highway 1 toward San Francisco and saw some of the most awesome coastlines I’d ever seen. Surfside Beach in Brazoria County, Texas along the Gulf of Mexico coast near Freeport, the beach that was the stomping ground of my high school days, was very sandy and often appeared dirty; coastal highways there were carved through flat cow pastures where cows had to step around oil wells, where the smells from chemical plants and refineries often required keeping the windows rolled up on hot summer days in cars with no air conditioning. California scenery was dramatic with cliffs appearing to plunge into the Pacific Ocean. We spent a night in Santa Barbara and watched the sun fall from the sky in a blaze of red, orange and yellow colors; I thought I heard a giant splash when it disappeared into the vastness of the horizon. Adrian and I looked at each other in disbelief as the fiery ball vanished from our sight. Our eyes held – it was a moment – and I was sure we had the right connection for a storybook ending.

    Halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco we spent a day at the Hearst Castle in San Simeon. I was unprepared for that display of wealth and excess. Bowling alleys, Olympic swimming pools, white statues everywhere, beautifully manicured gardens, pristine landscaping, the smell of money and power wafting through every room. Wow. It was overwhelming for these two Texas girls who couldn’t imagine a ranch this big with no cowboys or cattle in sight.

    Our last night before San Francisco was in the Big Sur National Park. Again, we stayed in a small rustic cabin like the one at the Grand Canyon. This time, though, we had a medical emergency. Adrian was allergic to poison ivy, and she must have been exposed to it during the day when we hiked a trail through the ancient redwoods in the forest. Her face swelled to an unrecognizable size. She was miserable, and we had no medicines. The next morning we got up early and drove to San Francisco. Adrian’s dad lived there, and we planned to stay with him for a couple of days. Her parents were divorced, and she lived primarily with her mother in Texas. She wasn’t thrilled to visit her dad, but he did get her to a doctor who gave her a shot that helped her allergy problems. By the time we left to finish our trip to Seattle, her face was its pretty self again.

    Adrian’s father was very kind to me. He was entertained by our Las Vegas stories and offered to take me to the Bay Meadows race track, a Peninsula track in San Mateo. I had tasted lady luck’s good fortunes and said I would love to go with him. Adrian stayed in bed at her dad’s place to wait for the healing powers of modern medicine while I managed to lose the money betting on the ponies that I had won at the casinos in Las Vegas. A valuable lesson, but one I failed to process: the House always wins in the end.

    By the time we reached Seattle, we were on the road almost two weeks. The Buick Skylark logged more than 4,000 miles. As we crossed the state line into Washington from Oregon, I thought the color green must have been invented there. I understood its nickname of the Evergreen State. Massive Christmas trees everywhere. Gorgeous yellow flowers growing wild along the highway. The bluest skies you’ve ever seen truly were in the state of Washington. The fresh air smelled clean and invigorating. The Pacific Northwest (and my true love Adrian) had been calling my name for twenty-two years… crossing that state line I finally answered the call of the wild.

    *********************

    To be continued. Please stay tuned.

               

  • Sleepless in Seattle – Part 1 (from Not Quite the Same)

    Sleepless in Seattle – Part 1 (from Not Quite the Same)


    The 1968 Buick Skylark was a sweet ride.

                 My daddy always bought either a Chevrolet from Mr. Dickey at his dealership in Anderson, Texas, or a Ford from Virgil Cook in Shiro. My granddaddy always purchased Fords from Mr. Cook because he was one of the best customers in Pa’s barbershop. My Uncle Marion, my mother’s oldest brother who lived with us in my grandmother’s house, faithfully bought Studebakers from my Uncle Floyd Hiney at the Mosehart & Keller dealership in Houston. Nobody in my family ever owned a Buick.

                When I was in college, daddy bought me an old Nash Rambler that had seen better days. It was a creamy beige four-door sedan that later became famous as the forerunner of other compact models. The most adventuresome feature of my car was its stick-shift transmission. That was exciting because Austin was a city of many steep hills, and I held my breath when a stoplight changed to red at the top of one of them.

                One Saturday morning I was on my way to Richards to visit my grandparents and got stuck on the pinnacle of a steep horizontal incline at a red light just beyond Memorial Stadium. I pushed in the clutch and gunned the accelerator. Unfortunately, I hadn’t put the car in first gear. It was in neutral. I rolled backwards into the car behind me. The older female driver was in her bright shiny new Cadillac. She got out of her car and berated reckless UT students in general, and me in particular. Although the damage to either vehicle was nonexistent, I never lost the feeling that danger lurked whenever I saw green lights turn yellow.

                My position with the firm of Arthur Andersen & Company in Houston following my graduation from college definitely required new wheels. As soon as I got my first paycheck, I took the initial step towards supporting the American economy by borrowing money to buy a new car. I settled on the Buick because I felt it was a move up from the Fords and Chevrolets of my family. I was upwardly mobile.

                 I liked the Skylark for its sporty two-door coupe look. I chose a deep blue color with a white hard top. Automatic transmission. It was a great car, and it was only ninety-eight dollars monthly. I applied for a new Exxon credit card to make sure I never ran out of gas. I joined the other Baby Boomers who believed in the 1960s that postponing purchases due to lack of cash was folly.

                When my friend Adrian Ferrell and I decided in 1968 to move to Seattle by looking at the farthest place from our apartments in Houston on a map of the United States, I told her we could take my car. It had low mileage and looked super fine. We saw no reason to drive two. The problem with a two-door coupe was that it didn’t have tons of room in the back seat or in the trunk. Since all my worldly possessions consisted of a small portable color television set, record player, a few textbooks and clothes, there was plenty of space for Adrian’s belongings. At twenty-two years of age, neither of us had had time to accumulate much.

                My family was aghast at this turn of events. It was the first time, to their knowledge, that I had done anything so totally unexpected and reckless. My mother and dad maintained their composure better than my grandparents in the early stages of my revelations. My dad philosophized that he had been on his own in England at my age. Of course, there had been a world war to fight. So, maybe that wasn’t the best comparison.

                My grandmother, Ma, on my daddy’s side, voiced everyone’s questions that they were reluctant to ask. Was I crazy? Had any of our people ever lived in Seattle, Washington? Did I know one person in that city? What would I do for work? What would I do for a place to live? Who was Adrian Ferrell? Were any of her people in Seattle, Washington? Did I know that I was breaking her heart by moving so far away from home? After all, she didn’t have that many years left. And on and on. She was not happy.

                When I said goodbye to my mom and dad on that gorgeous Texas day in September 1968, my mother wept. I hugged her and tried to reassure her that everything would be okay. She was inconsolable.

                My dad reminded me that roads ran both ways and I could come home if I was disappointed with life in the Pacific Northwest. I hugged him, too, and said I would call them when I could. He magnanimously told me to feel free to call collect.

    ******************

    The journey begun that day in September 1968 was about much more than a change in geography 3,000 miles from my weeping mother on that driveway in Rosenberg, Texas. I was looking for freedom to discover, to accept, possibly to embrace the secret desires of my heart. I was looking for love and, if I had to leave my family to find it, well that was the price I had to pay. Had I fully grasped the magnitude of the price I would pay for my choice over the next fifty years, I’m not sure I would have driven away in the Buick Skylark, but hormones were raging; they were my personal call of the wild. Get me outta here, Percy.

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    To be continued. Please stay tuned.

  • Sheila Gets a Shave (from Deep in the Heart)

    Sheila Gets a Shave (from Deep in the Heart)


    “George, here comes Sheila for her shave,” said Old Man Tom Grissom, who was already in his favorite spot in the barbershop by the time I got there.

    Ma, my grandmother who had been married to Barber George Morris for over forty years, said Tom Grissom ought to pay rent for all the time he spent sitting on that bench in the shop. Pa, my grandfather the barber, just laughed like he always did. He’d be charging rent to a lot of old men if he ever got started on that. The barbershop was a thriving business on Main Street in Richards, Texas. Main Street was the only paved street in Richards (Pop. 440), and Pa was the sole barber in the area. People drove from all over Grimes County to his out-of-the-way shop with one barber’s chair that was bought in the 1930s when he first opened. Waiting patrons and gossipy old men sat on two wooden benches.

    Past the benches was a shoeshine stand that Pa used when somebody wanted shiny boots. Along the wall behind the barber’s chair were a long mirror and two shelves that held the glass display boxes. One of the boxes housed gleaming scissors, combs, and brushes for haircuts. The other held shaving mugs, razors, and Old Spice bottles for the shaves. Everything was spotless.

    Pa was happy to see me. “Hey, sugar. You here for your shave?” he asked.

    “I sure am, Barber Morris,” I replied in my most grownup customer voice. It was the summer after my second grade in school, and I loved to come to the barbershop. Sometimes I brought my play knife and sat on the porch outside the shop and whittled with the old men who lolled there for hours just talking and whittling. Other times, I had business with my grandfather.

    Like today. Pa got out the little booster seat and put it in the barber’s chair so I could climb up on it. I was too small to sit in the chair without it.

    “How about a haircut with your shave? That pretty blonde hair is getting too long for this summer heat,” he said.

    “No, thanks, Pa. Mama always tells me when to get my hair cut,” I said. “Just a shave today.”

     Old Man Tom Grissom nodded at this. “I sure wouldn’t be cutting that blonde hair without Selma knowing,” he said. “She’s mighty particular about things.”

    “I appreciate your advice, Tom,” Pa said with a trace of annoyance. “But Sheila Rae and I are just having a conversation for fun. Nothing serious.”

    Pa listened as Tom Grissom talked and talked and talked some more about delivering the mail that morning. Being the Richards rural-route carrier was hazardous, to hear him tell it: cows in the road to drive around, barking dogs chasing armadillos right in front of him. This was hard work, and then you had the heat! Why, he couldn’t keep his khaki uniform dry from all that sweat. Yes, sir, this was no job for the faint-hearted. And on and on.

    Meanwhile, Pa had placed the thin white sheet over me and leaned the chair back just far enough to start to work. He lathered up the shaving cream in his mug with the brush and dabbed it on my face. I loved the smell of the shaving cream. He let that soak while he took the razor strop attached to the chair and swished it up and down slowly and methodically to get it just right. It didn’t matter to me that he was using the side without the blade. It made the same swishing noise.

    Then he took the bladeless side of the razor and gave me the best shave ever. He was very careful to get every part of my face. He even pinched my nose so that he got the part between my mouth and nose just so. Pa was an artist with his razor and scissors. He put a warm wet white cotton laundered towel over my face and rubbed off the last of the shaving cream. It felt so clean. Finally, he took the Old Spice After-Shave and gave it a good shake, rubbed it on his hands, and then on my face and neck. Nothing beats the aroma of Old Spice.

    Old Man Tom Grissom said, “Well, that ought to do you for a week or so, won’t it?”

    “Yes,” I said. “Probably so. We’ll see.”

    Pa gave me the worn yellow hand mirror that he gave to all his customers to inspect his handiwork. I studied my face thoughtfully.

    “Well, how does it look to you?” he asked with a smile. “Time to pay up. That’ll be two bits for the shave. That’s with the favorite granddaughter discount.”

    “Very good, Barber Morris. Much obliged.” I reached into my jeans pocket and brought out some play money coins and handed them to Pa.

    Just about that time, Ma drove up and got out of her car. “George, what’s Sheila Rae doing in that chair?” she bristled.

    Old Man Tom Grissom said, “Betha, Sheila Rae’s here for her shave.” Ma gave him a withering look and said, “Is your name George? Don’t you have any mail to deliver, or would that require removing yourself from that bench you warm every day?”

    I got down from the barber’s chair and ran over to Ma and tried to reassure her that everything was all right. Ma looked at Pa and said this was just what she had been telling him the other night about encouraging me in all this foolishness.

    “She shouldn’t be spending her summer hanging around this shop,” she said, looking accusingly at Pa, who said nothing.

    “Ma, can I have a nickel to go get an ice cream cone at the drug store? Getting a shave makes me hungry.” Ma never said no to me, so I got my nickel and left. I walked across the street to Mr. McAfee’s drugstore and got my Blue Bell vanilla cone and headed home.

    I saw Ma and Pa still in animated conversation at the shop.

    Old Man Tom Grissom had gone home.

    **********************

    Deep in the Heart: A Memoir of Love and Longing was published in 2007 when I was 61 years old. Much has changed in the past 16 years, but I continue to smile when I read this story of the little girl growing up in the 1950s in the tiny town of Richards, Texas. I can see her now walking the block on a red dirt road from the house where she lived to Main Street, not in any hurry but not dawdling like she did some time, on her way to town. Summertime meant no school, looking for things to do during the day for the only child whose few playmates might not be around, so her mother let her go to town to be entertained by her grandparents. Her mother’s mother worked in the general store as a clerk, so Sheila Rae could stop there for a hug and maybe a nickel for a candy bar unless her grandmother had customers in the store, or she could walk past the general store and the post office to the next small building that housed the barbershop owned by her grandfather on her daddy’s side. Someone once said to my father, “Glenn, you have such a happy child. She’s always smiling,” to which my daddy replied, “Why shouldn’t she be happy? Nobody ever tells her no.” When I wrote this book in 2007, I’m sure I didn’t fully understand what he meant by that remark. Now that my wife and I have two granddaughters, I totally get it.

  • Calling All Lesbians – Time to Speak Out!

    Calling All Lesbians – Time to Speak Out!


    My most recent interview with Dianne Barrett for the B-E Collection is now available on the website under Coming Out stories. I think it’s probably my best of the three I’ve had with her. Certainly my most relaxed. If you or someone you know should be included, please help spread the word.

    The B-E Collection Mission Statement

    My spouse, Margaret Elfering, and myself, in conjunction with archives such as the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives and the Gerth Archives and Special Collection at California State University Dominguez Hills, will contribute an ongoing series of interviews of lesbians and their careers.  The collection will be known as the B-E Collection: Lesbians and Their Careers.

    The “B-E” of the collection is a shorthand for our last names (Barrett – Elfering).  However, there is a second meaning to our collection’s name:   the verb “be” is also defined as “to exist” or “to occur or take place”.  Our collection is a means of bearing witness to the stories of lesbians of different generations, from different walks of life.

    The mission of this collection is to dignify the accomplishments, pride, and effort lesbians put forth in their careers on their journey in life.  We make oral histories to document our existence then and now.  Many of us had the “don’t talk – say nothing – you are wrong” experience.  Now we are talking.

    We would appreciate a referral of lesbians who might be interested in participating in our project.  We would be more than delighted to speak with anyone who you think would be interested in participating in the B-E Collection.

    Your support is always a gift.

    Dianne Barrett

    Please check out this important project and consider adding your stories at the following address:

    https://www.b-ecollection.org

    Won’t you please contact Dianne to add your voice – every story is important, and it’s so simple: a zoom call that’s less than an hour, at your convenience. The project has been expanded to include stories on additional topics.

    Bring it, sisters. Tell your Coming Out stories to someone who will not only appreciate but also preserve them.

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    P.S. I also want to say a huge personal thank you to Barbara Embick for her participation in this important project.

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