Upside Down

I watched the movie Brokeback Mountain this morning while waiting for the guy to come and measure for my Corian countertop in my evolving kitchenette.

Naturally, it was a 6 tissue crying movie. But it brought back a slew of memories from 1963.

In May of 1963 I was a student and an employee of the new community college, Chabot College in San Leandro, California. The state-wide junior, or community, colleges were 100 percent tuition free. The students were only required to pay small lab fees and to buy their own books. If a student picked classes carefully and if they maintained at least a B-average, they could transfer their lower division units to a full-blown college or university.

I was a biology lab assistant, doing 20 hours a week in lab set-up and clean-up. I managed the stock room, kept things cleaned and well labelled. I earned enough to pay for my books and lab fees, at the minimum wage of $1.25 per hour. I had done this for two years in high school as a chemistry lab assistant. I was what was called a classified employee of the city school board.

That first year of school was a total breeze. I had been in advanced placement classes in high school, so my familiarity with the college course material was thorough. I was eighteen, and I spent the appropriate time on my job and in my lecture classes. I was then free to just walk away with no more study necessary to ace all my classes. I spent my extra time between classes in the school lounge learning card games, smoking Kool cigarettes and basking in male pheremones.

Others that I met in the lounge were typically looking for companionship and a source of liquour.

One day, Bill T. walked in with a crutch and a walking cast on his right foot. He sat down and Don asked him what happened. Bill put on his best Texas braggart accent and told the story of his drunken fishing trip with his older friend, Phil. Bill had slipped down an embankment at the fishing site while carrying a case of beer. Luckily, he managed to save the beer bottles, but broke his ankle in the process. All weekend, he managed his pain with the beer until Monday morning when he got home and had to have his mom take him to Kaiser.

Kaiser? I was curious. What was Kaiser? Bill explained that his dad had medical insurance from his work that provided 100 percent coverage of both doctor and hospital services.

The insurance was called Kaiser Permanente and it was a hold over from WWII. Henry Kaiser had provided this company coverage to folks working in his cement factories manufacturing the stone boats of WWII all up and down the West Coast. The Kaiser insurance plan had sideslipped being labelled a socialized medicine scary thing in the 1950s by aligning with the strong union movement of California, particularly in Alameda County (San Francisco East Bay Area).

Bill and I got together from then on and became a recognized couple in the school lounge for the next few weeks. One Friday in late May, Bill drove me home, and I finally got enough nerve up to invite him into the house.

My mother was sitting in her chair, simmering when I came in. I was not allowed to even introduce Bill before she stood up, walked over and started shaking her finger at me, telling me that I should have been home two hours before and gotten all the ironing done. Bill started to interrupt, to explain that I was late because of him. My mother pushed him back against the front door and told him to get the hell out of her house.

Bill calmly asked me, "Are you coming?" I turned to open the door and my mother grabbed my arm, pulled me around and slapped my face. I said to my mother, "I am going." She said, "Get your things." I went into my room, got my good dress up suit and shoes, put them into a pillowcase, I picked up my portable typewriter, cleaned out my underwear and 'play clothes' drawers, filled the pillowcase and walked back to the front room. I looked at Bill and said, "I am ready." My mother said, "Don't look to me for emotional or financial aid if you walk out now." I nodded and opened up the door.

I did not speak or see my mother again for 8 years.

Bill took me to his parent's home in Hayward. It was up on East Avenue, back and up into the hills behind the town. He walked in and explained that my mother had thrown me out and I needed a place to stay. His parents had a history of providing housing for Bill's distressed friends and this was one of the rare times when someone wasn't already temporarily crashing at their house.

Bill's father, Bill Sr, was a civil and electrical engineer. He was licensed but had not quite finished his college degree from Rice University in Texas. Around this house, my friend was called Billy, his mother was called Mary and his father was called Bill. Even the children called them Bill and Mary. I thought this was strange.

The father had been recruited in Texas to come to California and work at the Lawrence Livermore Labratory (L3) on moderate security projects. Bill's dad was a pretty good engineer. He had spent a year in Mexico City working on the airport there. The state of Mexico had paid for his family to be with him, so Billy and his sister had private tutors for that school year and spoke spanish fluently. Billy played guitar and piano.

His father had had some dealings with the IRS over some payment for work in 1959 from a local texan mafiosa, so when the offer for work came from the Labs, he grabbed the chance and brought the family west.

His father was being watched now by the FBI for his more top-secret Q-security clearance. When he reported for work at the Labs he had done regular support engineering projects. His abilities were recognized after several years, and he was promoted to top-security projects. He was separated from his old work group, put into a small interrogation room and told to write his biography, listing everyone's name he knew or had ever worked with. After 3 weeks of this, he was grilled over these facts and tested for consistancy in his story. He was just finishing up this 3 week processing when I entered the scene.

I unpacked my pillowcase, stacked up my school books and changed my clothes. I went into the kitchen and when Billy's father came home from work, I was introduced. His father disliked me from the very beginning. Billy told his father what had happened with my mother, but Bill took one look at my crossed-eyes and thought I was a deformed idiot. I was the first stray girl Billy had brought home. All the other strays had been boys. Both Mary and Bill were a little nervous about my staying with them. However, I was 18, so that soothed them a little.

Billy's sister, Cecile, had just gotten married the previous year and was living in her first house in San Francisco with her husband Cleo. She was going to school at San Francisco State studying to be a spanish teacher. That summer, she went to Barcelona with one of her college teachers to study for several months.

I did not sleep much that night, nor the next couple of nights. Cleo came over on Saturday, and Cleo quipped that because I was spending time in the bathroom throwing up from the stress, he thought I was secretly pregnant. The bets were on. (I was not.) I tried my best to stay out of the way, working out in the large vegetable garden when I was not hiding out in the bedroom. I cowered and tried to stay invisible.

I only had three more weeks of school left, two more weeks of work. Mary had a pair of pomeranian dogs. Her vet was looking for some kennel help, so I applied for the job and got it.

Mary called my mother and advised her that I was staying with them. My mother was incensed and threatening. Mary and Bill laughed it off, until several days later they got a call from the assistant district attorney for San Leandro. He asked them to come to a meeting at my mother's house. Billy and I were not invited. The 'grown-ups' were going to arrange our futures.

Billy and I tried to keep up a normal life with work and school and to get through our final tests. He would drive me down to the school and then he took off, went to his job at a men's shoe store and came back to the school between shifts at the store to take his classes. At the end of the day, he would pick me up and drive us home.

At first I did not notice the car following us, but Billy did. The day after Mary and Bill met with my mother, Billy was followed all day long. He did not know if it was the district attorney's office or the FBI working on his father's security clearence by checking up on who I was and why I was now living in the house with this father.

That night, Billy and I talked. We were worried about his father and his job. I did not want to jeopardize his father's career. The previous night, my mother had given permission for me to stay with Mary and Bill until school was done.

The district attorney told my mother that normally, I had reached my majority (18 years old), but because of the custody and marriage settlement court orders in Kings County there was some small legal right for her to dictate where I should live until I was 21 or married. Men reached their majority at 21 in those days.

Getting married seemed like the only logical solution to clearing any cloud over Billy's father's head and the simpliest way for me to legally disentangle from my mother. Mary and Bill, Billy and I talked around the kitchen table and Billy asked me to marry him. I agreed and we planned for the ceremony to be on the 6th of June.

The next day, Billy went to Kay Jeweler's and brought our white gold wedding rings to match the white gold ring that his sister had given him. He went to a friend, John, and made an appointment to meet with John's friend the minister at the Oakland Neighboorhood Church (non-denominational). We went to the Alameda County court house, applied for a marriage license and found we needed to have blood tests to complete the forms and had to have Mary sign to give permission for Billy to marry me.

Billy could go to Kaiser to get his blood work done, but I had to go to the public county hospital (Fairmont) to get mine done. I failed the test. I had some sort of infection. Billy called his Kaiser doctor and made an appointment for me to go to him as a private patient late that afternoon.

He examined me and found I had contracted some strong strep-type infection that was manifesting in the form of pussy boils. The doctor lanced the boils, drained them, gave me a massive dose of antibiotic, gave me a birth control device, and signed my blood test forms. I have suffered from these boils in stress situations for the rest of my life. I am a strep carrier now.

The infection had been contributing to my stress. I stopped vomiting and my fever dropped. I immediately liked Dr. Gillkie of Kaiser. He was very straight forward, easy to talk to and treated me like an adult woman. Friday afternoon, Billy and I were married in a short ceremony, given forty dollars for wedding gifts. We then went to Cecile and Cleo's house in San Francisco for the weekend to study for our finals and to have a short honeymoon.

Billy's parents, Cleo and Billy's two friends, John and Don, attended the wedding. No one was there from my side of the family. I was 18, Billy was almost 21.

After our weekend in San Francisco, we went back to the East Avenue house. We waited 5 days for our marriage to be recorded and then Mary called my mother and told her the news. I called my father and advised him to stop making child support payments to my mother.

My father told me that he had some savings bonds from my grandfather that he wanted to sign over to me and we made arrangements for Billy and I to drive down to Lemoore in several weeks.

I called my older sister and she told me that my mother had called her to come and get my stuff on the day I left. My mother had assumed that I would move in with my sister. My mother had taken everything in my room and dumped it on the front lawn on the day I left. My sister had to load my matress and box spring on top of her car, pick up my clothes and books, bag everything and take it back to her apartment.

I guess I stumped them all by marrying Billy. I had not called my family because I had not wanted my mother to get wind of the marriage and put a wrench in the works before we could get the certificate recorded. I got my bed and stuff from my sister, got a package from my father with an electric frying pan as a wedding gift, and Billy and I started married life on twin beds in his bedroom.

It was rough going. Billy was drinking more and more. He changed jobs 6 times in one month. Life was a little unsettled. Mary was bringing out the jug of cheap red wine every afternoon. Menus for dinner were a little strange, to say the least.

I was cut off and grieving my family loss. I did not have a say about any single aspect of my life. Mary and Bill continued to treat Billy as a child and tried to continue that with me.

One day, there was a knock on the door and a pair of FBI agents in their suits and ties were there. They wanted to talk to Bill. They sent Mary, Billy and I out of the house and we all sat on lawn chairs in the back smoking, wondering what was going on inside.

We heard the car drive away and Bill came out and sat down in a lawn chair. He put his hands over his face and cried for a long time. Then he told Mary and Billy that Bobby had died. It probably was suicide. Bourbon and barbituates. The FBI wanted him to go back to Texas and try to make some sense of Bobby's notes. Only Bill could decipher them and now had the security clearance to be allowed to read them.

Bobby had been working at Ling-Tempo-Vought (LTV-Aerospace) in Texas. I subsequently found out that he had been working on the Keyhole military project, designing optical satellite lenses used for spying. But he was dead now and his brother Bill had to decode his notes to keep the project delivery on time. I have found one scientific paper written by Bobby on computer modeling of statistical factors for identifying objects seen with long distance lenses.

From an write-up in one of the Ancestry web sites I found this information:

George Robert Tenery, son of John H Tenery and Mary Belle Litsey, was born 20 November 1919 at Dallas, TX. He was not living with his parents in 1930, and lived at Long Island, NY as an adult. He was a systems engineer, and moved to Grand Prairie, Dallas Co about 1959. George killed himself at home at Grand Prairie with a gunshot to the mouth. He had married and divorced. George was buried in National Cemetery at San Antonio. He served in the US Military during WW2. His brother William was the informant for George’s death certificate.

In the 1930s, good older brother Bill had quit Rice University in his senior year to go to work in the oil fields to support Bobby and their other brother John when they both started college. Bobby was an optical engineer and John ultimately studied medicine (cosmetic surgery).

[Aside -- Bill, aged 72, graduated with me in 1981, the oldest graduate that year, from California State University, Hayward. He finally went back and finished his degree.]

Bill was away for about two weeks for the end of that June, in Texas, winding up the affairs of Bobby. When Bill came back home, he sat at the kitchen table, red wine in the jelly jar glass and told us that he had found Bobby's suicide note.

It seemed that a jerk was blackmailing Bobby. Bobby had had a gay laison one night and this fellow had proof of it. He wanted money to keep from telling LTV about it and making him lose his security clearance. Rather than facing life like this, Bobby killed himself.

In the beginning of July, Bill was allowed out of the interrogation room, his security was cleared and he was allowed to actually start working at L3. Again, subsequently, I found out that he was in charge of developing the electronic ground detection security alarm grid around Site 300, the remote experimental explosive test site, and the nuclear bomb development area at the labs.

Early in July, there was a family day at the Labs and we all climbed into the car with Bill driving. He had this theory that you could prevent wear and tear on a car by consistantly varying the acceleration while driving a car. I had a screaming headache from the neck jerking within about 20 minutes of being in the backseat of the car with him.

We toured the labs. This was the only time I was inside the Livermore facility. I went to work on the clean side of things at the lab up at the Berkeley site several years later. The Labs was a major employer, there was much prestige working there, and there was a satisfaction that you were contributing to the good of the nation by your work, long after the end of WWII and the Korean Wars.

I am still a member of Kaiser, even here in Georgia, 40+ years later. I have always liked the concept of an HMO and I support them. I learned early to make a consulting and collabrative relationship with my physicians after my disasterous first birthing experience (a story for another time).

I always felt sorry for Bobby, never having known him, and only just the little bit about him that I found out made me think I would have liked him a lot. So, when I wiped my tears during watching Brokeback Mountain this morning, I thought of Bobby and other gay men who suffered in Texas in the 1960s.

(Today would have been our 43rd wedding anniversary.)