After that three mile walk home in the rain I vowed that I would never put myself in a position to have to go through that again. Never. Ever. I didn’t stop trying to date, but I did put an end to any type of activity that was deemed unsafe.
Salt Lake may have not been the greatest place to live at the time but in retrospect it was probably the best place I could have been. The conservative social conditions along with the limited gay scene meant fewer temptations and while I could still get away to anyplace I wanted thanks to the airline job, my seniority – or lack thereof, kept me fairly local with layovers in Montana, Idaho, and South Dakota. The exception to distance was my time in Alaska. Few wanted to fly Alaska trips in the winter.
Alaska trips came with additional pay, twenty-four hour layovers, and were the best domestic flying out of Salt Lake. Having grown up in Minnesota I didn’t mind the cold and frankly, I don’t recall any day in Alaska being as cold as Minnesota winters though there was a lot more snow.
The layover hotel in Anchorage, The Captain Cook, is city within a city. Restaurants, shops, bars, a gym, and Spa. At the edge of downtown – a downtown that is small and entirely walkable in thirty minutes or less. Other crews stayed here and it wasn’t uncommon to run into a friend based in Seattle or Los Angles and a night out for dinner or drinks was always in order.
One day when I was reporting for work in Anchorage the elevator at the hotel got stuck. I prayed they wouldn’t get me out in time because I wanted to stay for another day. The hotel was extremely apologetic and I assured them they had nothing to worry about as I spoke with the front desk over the little speaker. The woman at the front desk kept calling to ask if I needed anything. I asked her how she planned to get something to me if I wanted it.
I’d come down from Anchorage to Los Angeles during the riots in 1992. I was in Anchorage during the 1993 coup attempt in Russia, and also during the O.J. Simpson trial in 1993. A very memorable local situation occurred one night when I found myself at illegal casino in Anchorage that was built inside of an abandoned strip mall. I have no idea from whom the invitation came or how I got there – but it sounded sounded interesting and they said ‘free drinks’, so hey, why not.
In Fairbanks things weren’t as exciting. I had food poisoning there once so bad that I couldn’t walk. I had to stay behind while the crew flew home and the only sense of security I had there was in the fact that the anchorman on the Fairbanks Nightly News had been a reporter that I knew from Salt Lake City. I thought that if things got any worse I’d just call the TV station.
One winter in Fairbanks the barometric pressure dropped so low that the aircraft instruments couldn’t read it and we were stuck there for five days. An Alaska Airlines crew was also stuck and staying at the same hotel. I palled around with the two pilots as we attempted to update one another as to any information we were receiving about getting out.
I’d inquired as to their whereabouts with the font desk of the hotel one night and was told they’d gone to a strip club just a few blocks away. I donned my jacket, hat, and gloves and made my way over.
Walking into a strip club in the dead of winter in Fairbanks was like being out for a walk and turning on to a street with large trees that had recently been ravaged by a tornado force winds. You know what you’re looking at are trees but you wonder just how they’ve sustained so much damage and yet remain standing.
There was a summer layover in Fairbanks when by sheer coincidence I found myself at the staging area for their gay pride parade. I stuck around because this I had to see. All said and done there was a flat bed pickup truck with a boom box that led a handful of drag queens and other assorted folks through the streets of downtown Fairbanks. I decided to join in and met up with others at the Alaskaland campground afterwords for a very nice picnic lunch. A woman who lived in bush country commented that she’d never seen so many people all in one place.
The other mainstay layovers were Billings, Boise, and Sioux Falls. Billings is a fun little cosmopolitan city with one of everything – and two adult books stores with movie arcades. I visited them both and got to know one of the clerks. He lived in a trailer on some land and raised sheep. On springtime layovers I’d go over to his place and help feed and castrate the lambs.
I grew quite fond of Billings and was a couple months away from moving there. It would have been an easy commute, forty-five minutes by air. Common sense got the best of me and I decided against it.
Boise – now those were fun layovers. Often times two nights a week in Boise, and sometimes they’re for more than a day. There were bike trails along the river, bike rentals, great independently owned shops that lined a handful of vibrant downtown streets, and a steak joint across from the hotel that was also a strip club.
There were three gay bars there, then a fourth some years later. The best was Papa’s 96 Club which was a metal shed about the size of a two-car garage set back on a lot on the edge of downtown and surrounded by a ten foot high chain link fence. Papa’s was packed every night, always rambunctious, and had a thick blanket of cigarette smoke that hung just overhead. I met several nice men in Boise, all named Robert – which made things easy. One of them had a cabin in McCall where I spent a Thanksgiving with he and a number of friends that had flown in from around the country.
And Sioux Falls. An absolute lovely little town – a place where a modern day Laura Ingalls Wilder could easily call home. There was a variety store downtown with a soda fountain and book section that had the best selection of regional titles, and a gay bar on the same street whose owner had testicles the size of lemons. Beautiful man. My fondness for his balls pretty much got me free drinks whenever I visited. My regular flying partner Jay was also fond of Sioux Falls but he spent his time picking up straight men a bar across the street – appropriately named The Pump Room.
Nothing in Salt Lake City compared to the fun at these places, through for a brief period there was a bar in the old steam plant that had served the two identical buildings at the south end of downtown. Twelve Oaks was clandestine and attracted everyone who would have normally left town for something like this. The dance floor was below ground in a space that rose three stories high and had all the old network of pipes and valves intact.
I dated a few guys in Salt Lake but nothing really came of these situations. Likely it was because I absolutely haded living there. No one likes to be around someone like that. There was a brief period of fun when I was dating an oncologist who lived in Provo who raised Quarter horses as a hobby. He played the role of the sullen sexy cowboy so well, could lead a mean two-step, and thought the world of me. I loved dancing with him.
We met one night when I had driven down to Orem to check out a new gay bar that opened there. No one could believe that a gay bar had opened in Utah County. The sullen sexy cowboy was bartending there. At closing time he got everyone out and closed the bar – but I stayed anyway.
I’d eventually moved downtown into an apartment that was in what would have been a classic brownstone had it been brownstone. It was a Pullman style flat, completely modern on the inside just two blocks west of the temple. My living accommodations were inexpensive and that gave me the available funds to leave as often as possible.
The fact was I felt terribly lonely in Salt Lake. The job got me out of town, took away some of the loneliness, and gave me the ability to meet people in other places. It became kind of a perpetual motion machine. Or maybe more like a shark – I had to keep moving or suffocate.
The 36 Broadway 
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