Terry A. Goldman: Our Ter Bear

A Cute Guy On The Cruise, Derek and Terry - March 2002

We were friends for 23 years or as Terry would say “at least twenty-five.” He was always counting because it counts, but also always overestimating how long it had been. Perhaps it's the arduous nature of being my friend, that it always feels longer than it is. Or perhaps it was because of the winding road we traveled along together: across a nation and time, bridging two centuries like a wishbone. A journey that has now so abruptly ended. 

Maybe it is fitting that we met as friends so long ago in a way that no longer exists, on a BBS, a bulletin board service called Delos. It was barely the internet, just a local number to connect computer modems. Virtually no one had photos in the dark ages of dial-up and as we talked, we both agreed it was a strange way to meet anyone. But filled with trepidation, we did meet as people did then, at The Abbey among the old terracotta statues and stale pastries. And then, so simply, we were friends. 

I remember 1994, the bare wood floors of his new apartment, the light through the large windows. His myriad complaints about the unreliability of the service workers he hired and wrangled at Universal Studios. And how much fun we had through the rest of the 90s, hanging out together with our mutual friends on endless nights at the movies or house parties or Revolver. 

As a kid, I thought it was ludicrous that Laverne and Shirley would move to Los Angeles and everyone from the Pizza Bowl in Milwaukee would somehow join them. But just as Dennis Hensley joked when he visited me in Manhattan, we did improbably have our own spin off of sorts in the big apple when Terry moved there a couple of years after I did. And in between we had a raucous and memorable mess of a cruise to Mexico where the ship hypnotist turned Terry into a local celebrity and the thin wall between our adjoining cabins was an endless topic of conversation. 

When I think about Terry, I think about how truly good he was. I gave a toast at his wedding but what I remember most was driving Terry and Doug back to the hotel after it was over because he had thought of everyone else’s transportation out of the park but his own. 

Suited Up For Terry 2012

I rehearsed my speech relentlessly and especially the ending. I wanted the toast to be lovely and funny because our friendship was always full of laughter, but I knew the range limitations of my own reed thin voice and I wanted everyone listening to know when the tone shifted, how much Terry meant to me as my friend, my dear friend, for all these years. 

My mom had me when she was young and she likes to say that we grew up together. That's how I think of my time with Terry. We were so young when we met and we really became adults together. Our jobs grew in importance, we grew as people, our lives changed and moved around, but the fun never ended. So many bad movies, so much joy. 

I wish I was writing another toast and hearing Terry’s generous laugh. I hate writing these things, not just because I have already written too many, but because it can never be enough to replicate who someone is. A hug from Terry was a wonder that words can’t convey. How do you talk about someone who was relentlessly full of life when that life lives only in your memory?

Terry hugs Paul - Mexico March 2002

After the cruise, our friend Paul had made a memories DVD for all of us who had been there, and a few years ago, Terry asked me for mine after his no longer played. “I’ll make you a copy!” he promised, but now like Terry himself, it lives only in my mind. On the cruise, the hypnotist had convinced Terry that he had a small precious bird in his hands. In true Terry fashion, he loved and protected the invisible bird with all his heart. And for all of us who knew Terry, we felt the same of him. But then, in the time it takes to snap your fingers, we opened our eyes and he was gone.  

Together in 2008

"16 years. That's how long we've known each other. I think you are the only person I have in my life (besides family) that's been around that long. Thanks BBS! I hope you have an amazing birthday, I love you!!!" - Terry Goldman, on my Facebook wall, Oct 28, 2008. 

There's No Fool Like An April Fool

Sometimes it is hard to tell the exact moment that things have stopped going your way. I think it is because it doesn’t happen all at once. Problems drip slowly out of a faucet of misery, though initially it is nothing you can’t handle. For the bold or naïve, it is easy to go about your routine until you turn around and realize that all hope is lost, as is any chance of getting back to it. I should have seen the signs earlier, but when it is April Fool’s Day, it is easy to become distracted.

It all started this morning at work. I am in Los Angeles doing the show for the week and this morning, I was hosting Frank DeCaro’s show instead of my own since Frank and his co-host Doria were doing my show with Romaine in Palm Springs for Dinah Shore weekend. The first hour was beset by technical problems that threw my guest host Dennis Hensley temporarily off his game, but they were all resolved pretty quickly so I thought nothing of it. By the end of the show, Dennis and I were pleased with the result.

Giving Tanks

(This is a continuation of the entry Ain't That A Mother)

I suppose it was the universe’s little joke when I got to the Hertz location at LAX and looked around for my car in the President’s Circle and found waiting for me a vehicle as big as my ego. All of the sass disappeared from my walk and I crumpled like a trailer in a tornado. Suddenly, looming before me was the largest SUV I had ever seen. It was a Lincoln Navigator. It seats seven comfortably. It probably sleeps seven comfortably too. I am pretty sure as a kid I rode on smaller school buses. In a moment of panic, I almost went in to the counter and insisted on a smaller car. However that is always a pain in the ass and they were just being polite trying to upgrade me.

It was just ironic that on my last trip to LA, they gave me a Prius and this time, I was handed the genetic opposite: a thundering thirsty mastodon. Of course, last time it took me thirty minutes and a dutiful scan of the owner’s manual in the parking lot just to figure out how to drive the Prius, so perhaps my issue is not so much the cars they give me, but instead the fact that I am just not a very good driver.

Times have been tough since my heyday in Hollywood and jumbo SUVs have been getting a bad rap. Gas prices have been high, the environment is in a shambles. Just this week, a massive oil spill in the gulf has dominated the news. This is not the moment to tool around town alone in something four times the size of my little convertible at home. I felt self conscious as I drove down the street, the wheels barely fitting inside the white lines on the road. “I’m not an asshole. It’s a rental,” I wanted to call out to what I assumed were astonished locals, shaking their heads in deserved disapproval.

In One Year And Out The Other

I have spent a lot of time at The Park lately, now that it is Matty’s new haunt. He hosts a monthly party which is a nice excuse for me to get out of the house every once in a while and update my semi-annual blog. I feel a lot of pressure to go out just so I can have something to write about, especially as I see a particularly empty month sitting lonely and forlorn in the blog archives. That is the funny thing about the passing of time. You don’t really notice it until it’s already done.

So it’s been another year since Matty’s last birthday. As I recall, I haven’t been around for many of them. Thanks to timing I am usually off at some pride event somewhere on the same weekend that he chooses to celebrate. For the last five years it has been the same routine. Matty gets excited telling me that his party is coming up and I dash his hopes by not being around. It’s not that he doesn’t have a zillion other friends, after all he was able to launch a popular club night right out of his iPhone contacts. That’s all fine for any run of the mill Thursday but when it is a special occasion you want all of your favorite people around.

Last night at The Park, there were so many gay men that I knew there that it would probably be easier to just list the four gay men I know that weren’t there. I invited Matt Kugelman to join me, speaking of people who have plenty of other friends, and we cabbed it down after the show. I have been trying to keep my strongest yenta urges under wraps and play it cool on my feverish desire to marry him off to someone. However, as primer, I casually dropped subtle questions like “so, is there anything wrong with you?” to see if I could get a better idea of what kind of guy to eventually lock him in a small closet with to see what develops. The problem with someone like Kugie is that he is something of a universal donor. He would be the perfect boyfriend for almost anyone, which makes it hard to distinguish who he would actually be good for. You can’t tell if you are reacting to genuine chemistry with him, or feeling the effects of the same magnetism that draws everyone else to him too.

We walked into the upstairs lounge and headed off to get drinks, though I was instantly way laid by the crowd. Everyone I knew was there! Kugelman gentled chided me about my fame and popularity but it is really Matty’s popularity and my proximity. Big difference. John Saldivar had joined up with Roommate for dinner first (aka margaritas) and they were already there, drinks in hand, when we walked in. Young Bradford was the night’s DJ, working twice as hard as usual, assaying both Samantha Ronson and Lindsay Lohan, all while perching frantically in front of a large aquarium. Ben Harvey and Dennis Hensley were talking while Gray walked behind them like Hamlet’s ghost. Every time I turned my head someone else was right there. My former boss’s old assistant from 2001! Corey Johnson! That guy I accidentally slept with last year and his resentful boyfriend! Then suddenly I realized I had lost Matt in the deep end of the gay ocean!

I ventured further into the lounge, shoving through the crush of bodies with my usual mantra “lady with a baby!” Sometimes if I am really in a hurry, I yell “Is that Madonna?” which might have incited a fire in a crowded theater style riot in the early 90s but these days hardly warrants the energy it takes to lift a heavy eye lid. Along the way I found the birthday boy and Hanno, visiting once again from Austria. Also standing with them was long distance runner Andrew, him of the crisp button down plaid shirts and zero body fat. I hugged them all profusely but left just as quickly as I arrived to find Kugie and my coke. Finally he texted me wondering where I was, worried perhaps that I had invited him to a bar just to ditch him the moment someone better came along. I sent him a message back to meet me at the aquarium, and reveled in how much better life is now that we can so easily rendezvous in crowded public places thanks to our modern conveniences. It was a God-send later at the bar when I needed to get Roommate a beer and his favorite wasn’t on the list. A short txt message later and a substitute “Heiny” was on its way.

At the aquarium, we chatted up Bradford, who snapped a photo of us while we stood on what felt like a very rickety futon. Apparently deprived as a child of furniture to jump on, Matt seemed to delight in bouncing on the couch that I was certain might give way underneath us at any moment. Brian Babst was there and I grilled him quickly about the terrible Star Magazine photo swirling around Facebook that morning of his real estate client Rupert Everett. “Just make-up” he sighed of the photo on the set of Martha Stewart’s show that a plastic surgeon “expert” insisted looked like $25,000 of work done badly. I noted that Brian’s shoulders were a solid mass of muscle when I hugged him and put my head lovingly on his neck like I always do. Memorial Day weekend must be nearer than I thought. I suppose it is time to get ourselves into order.

More and more people kept pouring in. Kenneth In The (212) blogger Ken wandered by on his way to meet up with Misadventures In The (213) author Dennis. Chuck finally arrived after a series of frantic “are you sure you are going to be there” text messages. Ben Harvey and ADD Jeff and on and on. My head was spinning from all the familiar faces. A guy I didn’t know and I don’t remember meeting before came up to me and grilled me about my blog. I think he was hoping for a spontaneous mention, but I didn’t even get his name and now he would be impossible to find. Sorry you. Apparently I also met a hot guy named Andrew but didn’t remember it when he tried to add me later on Facebook. After I sent him my standard form letter denying FB friendship and directing him to my fan page he turned belligerent. “We met on Thursday… you’re a douche.” Both grammatically and factually accurate. I can’t argue with logic like that.

Maybe this blog is more trouble than it’s worth. The more people I meet, the harder it is to remember all of their names and keep them all straight. Who did I miss from this blog entry? Who will be upset? Who will be relieved? It’s exhausting. And after nine years of FantasyMan Island and several years of this chronicle, I have to ask when will the remembrance of things past end? Matty is the one a year older but I am the one feeling the miles trying to keep all these cocktail glasses in the air. I was never a party animal and though we have all been dumped into the same gay aquarium, swimming around feverishly gets exhausting after a while. A few laps around the bar and I was ready to go back to my ceramic castle. At what point do you surrender and just float belly up to the surface of the water, waiting for someone to scoop you up and take you away from it all? The big flush is coming! Enjoy the bubbles while you can.

Mexican Jumping Scenes

You may not know this about me but I am something of an amateur biogenetic engineer. As hobbies go, this may seem like a pretty strange one, but then again, what about me isn’t pretty strange? I am not making super crops hydroponically in my basement or trying to cross a dog with a cat. My work is in a more social realm, trying to bring disparate peoples together, often to disastrous results.

For a long time, I have been a notorious matchmaker. Without rhyme or reason, I am constantly trying to get people together. It is a horrible habit. And after many decades, I have only one moderate success under my belt. Undeterred by reality, I charge ahead. After all, when you meet a perfect gay specimen of man like Matt Kugelman, it naturally causes the fingers in your brain to start twirling the old mental rolodex. But my social bioengineering is not limited to love. In fact my primary work is in friend bonding. I have been saving up for years for a portable fission machine and until then, I will have to continue to do it the old fashioned way: over dinner at Arriba Arriba.

When I lived in Los Angeles, my friend Paul used to hate my habit of inviting him out to dinner and then in the intervening days or even hours, ballooning the intimate meal for two into a ragtag fugitive fleet of random strangers. B Listers as Paul used to call them. As in, “what B Listers will be there?” Despite his recent woeful claim that he himself has dropped somewhere below C level, I am certain that if I invited him out his first question would be “who else is coming?”

Falling into an old rut, I did some rapid-fire inviting and suddenly I had filled the round table of Arriba Arriba, out back by the bathrooms and emergency exit. I had been wanting to see Ben Harvey forever and as usual invited him to a social setting where any hope of an intimate conversation would be impossible. He was hanging out that night with Dennis Hensley at a screening, so it was a perfect opportunity to see Dennis too. On a whim, I invited Kevin and Christopher, who because of their own nighttime schedules take for granted that people eat dinner at 10:30pm. I threw in two new people (the aforementioned Matt and John Saldivar) into the mix to really stir things up, and asked my roommate, even though he hates going out late on a school night. However, I think the guest list wooed him since it was many of his favorite people too, and no B Listers!

Christopher finished his show early and was starving, and didn’t know other people were coming, so told me to meet him after my show at the bar at Vynl, across the street from Arriba x2 (or as Matt calls it Arriba Squared). Chris was in good spirits despite the literally back breaking new schedule for Shrek The Musical, through which he performs and dances eight shows a week on his knees. We were happily chatting away and I (as I can do) lost all track of time and disregarded the other five people waiting at the restaurant. But moments later, we were there and it turns out I had nothing really to worry about. They were all busy chatting and enjoying margaritas at the bar. And no one was a complete stranger. John knew Mike who knew Dennis who knew Ben who knew Matt. A thin tangential thread but a connection nonetheless. Gay society has thrived on less for far longer.

We all sat down, waiting to order food until Kevin arrived but not hesitating on rounds of margaritas. I pulled a standard Agatha Christie opener “I am sure you are all wondering why I brought you here.” Everyone laughed but there was a grain of truth to it. After all, it was a table full of people whose sole real connection was me. And that isn’t narcissistic at all. Maybe that is the problem I have. The only thing I care about in my social experiments is bringing together the elements I care about, without regard to how they will mix. I am pretty sure that’s how my Uncle blew his finger off in high school. This dinner didn’t blow up in my face and in fact, turned out to be quite a success. And my Uncle had mixed those chemicals before without incident. I guess, we all have our share of successes and even when it all goes badly you can still find a silver lining. That finger in a jar of formaldehyde years later made a killer show and tell item for his daughter. After all, any bad interaction can still leave a juicy story behind.

Fear of Flying

I flew back home to Utah today. It is easy to forget sometimes in the whirl of Manhattan life that I ever lived in such a place. Oh but I did, and happily too. It is probably the smiling simplicity of that suburban upbringing that lured me to my current 1950s home life away from the bright lights, big city. It is as friendly and mindless here as I remembered; a comforting slice of Americana in a post Invasion of the Body Snatchers world. Such a marked contrast from the gritty wonder of New York City.

I got to La Guardia at 5:15am for my 6:30am flight. As I had expected, I sailed through checking my bag and airport security to arrive at my gate twenty minutes after I parked the car. In the interim, I got to spend a seemingly endless period of time behind a complete douche bag. He was all slick hair and too much carry-on luggage, a Gordon Gekko direct from a Central Casting wet dream. When the first security lady told him to throw away his bottle of sparkling water he insisted haughtily that he would finish it before he got through the line. This was the first moment I hated him.

I ended up behind him at the metal detector which he set off three times. Of course he hadn’t even bothered to remove his wallet from his pocket because he was too busy chugging his water and patting himself on the back for being so awesome. As the second security lady sent him over to be wanded and searched, I wryly announced to her that it was probably his flashy $15,000 watch he had refused to remove that set off the alarm. But by then, I was just content to put on my shoes and hope that a hand search of his bag revealed a mountain of cocaine he could ski down right into a Federal prison somewhere.

Once on the plane, I settled into 10F with a fifty-something gay in the Gil Chesterton mold in 10D and no one sitting in the seat between us. I threw myself on the mercy of the open space, donned my sleeping mask and ear plugs and sacked out for the entire four hour flight to Dallas. Behind me, two teen sisters held a talking contest through the entire flight that ended in a tie when as the plane taxied into the gate they both called their father on separate phones to announce that they had arrived. As someone who talks for a living, I cherish now the moments where I don’t have to say anything. I wish everyone felt the same.

Our flight was late arriving in Dallas and I was convinced that even if I made my connection to Salt Lake City, I was certain my checked bag would not. Normally I don’t check a bag but ski pants and sweaters are bulky and it is impossible on a long winter weekend trip like this to travel with my usual lightness. Once again, I sacked out in my seat (this time on the aisle) and awoke two hours later as we touched down in a fog drenched valley in the heart of the Utah desert.

“This is the place.” And Utah is. For most of America it is a mysterious place filled with people who look like Donny and Marie, and that is largely true. To me, it is a swirl of childhood memories. Familiar local fast food places like Taco Time and Arctic Circle blend with the chaotic suburban sprawl of name-brand America. After a few years in New York, it is easy to forget there are still places where you can get a fast food burger for 89 cents and gas for less than three bucks. Although, I went to see Cloverfield this afternoon, and even with the old tyme ticket price of $5, I still felt like I overpaid.

I always come to visit this time of year to attend the Sundance Film Festival and spend some time with family. My Dad is an alpine legend who can practically ski uphill. He forgets quickly that I ski once a year and I don't have his physical dexterity or sense of balance. A single easy run under our belts, Dad insists on leaping immediately to a sheer cliff. Two years ago, I fell, sliding down the hill on my back head first, refusing to stop so I could try to catch the cell phone that had fallen out of my pocket and was sliding just ahead of me, just out of the reach of my outstretched hand.

My Dad and his wife used to live up in Park City, right in the heart of the Sundance action. But just before Sundance last year, my Dad sold his house and they moved to another McMansion down in the less glamorous Utah Valley. Not knowing what to expect food-wise when I got there, I decided to drop by the store first on my way in. I picked up a few essentials at the local supermarket. I went to a nearby Smith's, the store of my childhood and was horrified by how carefully it was structured to make people fat. I walked almost immediately into the beer and candy section and sorted through aisle after aisle of sugary snacks and gooey baked goods to find a handful of items that could pass as healthy.

Tomorrow I will venture off into the heart of the Festival and see more of my "people." The Hollywood types will be in full force, skipping over snow banks in their Eddie Bauer winter togs with the tags still hanging off them. I observed last year to Dennis Hensley's delight that Sundance is the place for C list celebrities to be treated like A list celebrities. I will hang out in the Queer Lounge and hob nob with the near famous in this 19th century mining town turned Hollywood back lot. The whole time I will cast an askance glance at their latte demands and silly attitudes, but I will be torn. In my heart I will always exist with one foot in each of these two distinct worlds. So a weekend visit to Utah this time of year is the perfect way for me to satisfy both sides of my personality at the same time, as for ten shorts days each year they occupy the same spectacular space.