The drab grey aluminum siding gave the appearance of tidiness to the two story bungalow I bought – one of the four that were side by side. It did not stand out amongst them, the others – two in beige and the third in pale green. It sat quietly under an also grey roof.
Inside, a thick layer of nicotine coated the windows and the walls. The carpet was heavily solid from a dog that had been allowed to piss and shit everywhere. The kitchen was functional, mostly clean, as was the bathroom with its original claw foot tub. The front bedroom windows faced south onto the park across the street and the back had windows facing west, and north into the back yard.
The maple tree in the back yard must have been planted when the house was built, making it too eighty-five years old. It was twice as tall as the house with a canopy that reached over both yards that flanked mine.
I’d closed on the house a month before I left Orlando and flew up on my days off to clean it. It took three weekends to do that. First washing the windows and walls, then tearing out the carpet which had protected the nearly perfect hardwood floors that were beneath. With fresh paint and the exposed floors the place looked presentable enough to move in – where once in place I could begin on the real work that needed to be done.
The front porch roof was sagging and thus the buttresses on the eaves had to be rebuilt. Tuck pointing and sealing of the chimney was required to stave off water damage. The piano window in the dining room had a window mounted air conditioned permanently affixed which I removed so that the room would have more light. Portions of the stairs, both to the second floor and to the basement had to be repaired.
When heating season was over and the $300 monthly gas bills stopped I replaced the furnace with a new energy efficient model. Then for the sake of safety, I had the basement windows replaced with glass block, as there had been some burglaries where entrance to the homes had been through the basement windows.
Despite its misgivings the house was everything that I always wanted. I always wanted to live in a two story house – I felt safer sleeping ‘up’ as I’d had an attic room as a kid. The staircase rose adjacent to the front door – which was still the original with a Prairie School inspired set of mullions. There was a fireplace, albeit converted to gas, that was centered along the interior living room wall, and adjacent, a formal dining room.
Across the street was the little park, the bus to downtown stopped out front, and on Sundays the church bells rang both before and after Mass. My sense of place here was more comforting than anywhere I’d ever lived.
The neighborhood was on the upswing as it was two blocks south of a designated historic district where prices were far more than double what I paid. As well, with the housing boom in full swing nation wide, people from the east coast were moving in to area, having sold their place and paying cash for something in Columbus, many of whom were single gay men.
Unbeknownst to me, Columbus had one of the largest gay populations in the midwest, outside of Chicago and Minneapolis. There was a neighborhood gay bar just a few blocks away and the after work / happy hour crowd was a place to meet the new neighbors as well as to get recommendations from one another on plumbers, roofers, and handymen. Two other bars were a stone’s throw from my place, Jimmy V’s and The Red Brick Inn – all of which anchored the neighborhood’s population by different demographics.
Now based in Cincinnati where Delta had recently completed a massive expansion, my seniority was such that I could hold London trips on the weekends. Paris and Frankfurt were out of reach from the perspective of seniority, with the lowest bid holder having thirty-two years of seniority. To top off my monthly hours I’d pick up a one day domestic trip a couple of times each month.
I originally commuted to work by air, the thirty minute flight being free but having to pay for airport parking, I soon decided it was easier, less costly, and in fact less time to drive the hour and half south.
There were far fewer commuters in Cincinnati than there were in New York, with most of the people I worked with were from the Tri-State area. While Columbus was bustling with activity because of the influx of new residents, Cincinnati was not and it was noticeable in the topics brought up for discussion. My colleagues in Cincinnati asked about what high school I attended and in which neighborhood I lived and when it was discovered that I was from somewhere else, their suspicions were obvious. They were not used to outsiders which seemed so odd in this industry. Still, being back on wide-body aircraft and flying international was right where I belonged.
In my on-line chat room I talked with a guy who lived in Brighton – our layover hotel was in Brighton on the beach as the traffic to and from Gatwick made Brighton a more convenient location. I met he and his husband and over time, I’d visit them at their house for dinner on some of my layovers.
Also by this time, Rupert who I’d met at Gay Ski Week back in Utah and had since moved back to the U.K., put his work as a physiologist on hold, trained for and became an opera singer. He came by train to Brighton a couple times to reconnect over dinner. The man always had something interesting going on in his life – and while unexpected, being an opera singer was perfect for his booming baritone voice.
Having found a place to live and work environment that were both agreeable and manageable, I felt truly content for the first time in fifteen years. And with plenty of work to do to maintain and upgrade the house and yard, my focus became things I was doing to better what I had rather than chasing what I wanted.
With that in mind I decided to stop chasing men. I’d spent the last fifteen years crossing the globe to spend time with men I liked and it had been exhausting. When I looked at the photos from my summer in Germany and my time in Finland it was obvious from the dark circles under my eyes. I swore off dating for three years and decided that I’d just have fun meeting people locally – and not spend any time thinking about a relationship.
The neighborhood bar was where I’d spend an evening now and then and when I had a weekend off – for vacation or some other reason, I’d venture downtown to Tradewinds, the large gay bar in town that attracted guys from around the region. I was thirty five, slim and trim from always being on the go, new in town, and my dialect was odd at the time having spent nearly two years in Finland and then a year dating a South African. Consequently I received a lot of attention, met a lot of guys, and was invited to a lot of gatherings. It felt really good to be included socially on my home turf.
There was Jeep Guy, who would, when he saw me working in the front yard, slow down, look, then drive around the park so he could go by again. Every day I was out, the blue rag-top Jeep would slowly cruise by. The driver, a big beefy bearded man was Henry. I got to know him as he eventually began to pull over and talk. Henry knew I was planning to replace the lattice work under the deck of my front porch and did it for me while I was away at work. I arrived home to find it had been done.
There was Denny the landscaper who lived just two blocks south. An incredibly handsome man who I contracted to design and install a patio in the back yard. Broad shoulders. Strong legs. Gray hair with always tanned skin from working outdoors. Blue eyes. Killer smile. We hauled in several tons of gravel and a couple tons of Colorado Quartz. It took more materials than we had expected.
Mike, a young boisterous fellow who had recently purchased a house and was dealing with the same issues I was, that being botched renovations that had to be redone. Thin, red-head, kinda of squirrelly, incredibly smart with great job. When ever he and I ended up at the neighborhood bar together, it was always a case of ‘just one more’ – which was led to ‘just one more’ again. And again.
Joe and Ed, an outgoing couple were a few blocks south. We’d hang out on the weekends, had keys to one another’s homes, and I got to know Joe’s kids from a previous marriage. They genuinely felt like family.
My first summer in Columbus I was reintroduced to the smells and experiences of the midwest that I remembered fondly from having grown up in Minnesota. Henry drove us one night to an ice cream stand in the far western suburbs – a place he liked that sat at the edge of the roadside and adjacent to cornfields. There was the unmistakable smell of soil and foliage mixed with the heat and humidity of summer. Stillness – like an Edward Hopper painting.
Around the neighborhood there was the hum of window mounted air conditioners. There are days in the midwest during the summer when the pavement and the soil are so heat soaked that it feels as if the heat is coming equally from above and below. Days where the sidewalks are void of people, the bird stop singing, and the trees stand in total silence. No breeze. No movement. Only searing heat.
Then from the house down the block, the sound of a high pitched giggles coming from the back yard. The kids in that house were out in the back yard playing in the sprinkler, just like we had when I was a kid. Their beach blanks on the grass and the FM radio tuned to a local station.
I looked so forward to coming home from work, something that had never occurred before because for the first time I loved where I lived. The sense of place, the sense of community, the sense of belonging and feeling accepted. The last few miles of my drive home from Cincinnati coming north into the city on I-71 where after a slight turn the skyline of Columbus would come into view – and every time I saw this I found myself filled with so much happiness because I’d found a place I truly enjoyed.
The drive to and from work was not bad, less than two hours, but it was oftentimes difficult driving home after having worked the flight back from London. When I was commuting from New York to Salt Lake I could sleep during the commute. Not a lot, but I could. Not the case with driving and there was a time or two when I felt as though I could doze off and It scared me.
To give myself some space from that potential, I chose to bid domestic trips again. The domestic trips out of Cincinnati where mainly flown on the MD-88, an underpowered, low-performance plane that Delta used in and out of midwestern cities that fed the long-haul flights out of the hub. I despised working the MD-88 but the people were great, there were never any issues with behavior, and I seldom crossed more than one time zone, although I was often up early and to bed late with the first in / last out nature of flights that feed a hub city.
There was a ho-hum nature to flying domestic trips. The flights were short and thus no time to really talk to anyone. The crews on domestic flights were usually parents who didn’t want to be too far from home, or wanted to be home every night. Layovers were typically short, nine to twelve hours and the hotels were just places to sleep – there was no concierge service offering meetings with authors or event tickets. It was just work.
Domestic flying meant I could hold weekends off which gave me time to socialize with the regular work week crowd. The neighborhood bar remained my center of socializing – and occasionally one or two of the others within walking distance.
In addition to regular domestic flying with the same crew each week, there was also a domestic option whereby I flew around the system joined other crews and helped them with their meal services – or when one segment of their trip required a larger plane, and thus an additional crew member. These were known as K-Line trips. Think of it as a temp job for the day.
One such K-Line trip came with great flight time because of the distance – to and from Portland, Oregon. I’d join an established crew, fly to Portland, spend the night and fly back the next morning with a different crew.
The morning wake up in Portland was 03:00 as the flight left at 05:50. Off to the airport, I met my crew, a 757 crew that had one flight back to Cincinnati on the 767. You’ll recall all the creative scheduling that Delta put into place during it’s financial difficulties – this was on of them. Maximize crews and aircraft by making them interchangeable.
We readied the cabin and boarded. It was scheduled as a full flight, six-plus hours, but on the 767 there was plenty of space for everyone and enough space to move around. As we prepared to back out of the gate we were notified of an ATC hold (Air Traffic Control) for all flights headed east.
This was not uncommon. ATC would often attempt to minimize congestion at an airport by holding inbound flights. This not only reduced the work load for ATC but also saved fuel because planes would not be put into a holding pattern.
We then received word that the ATC hold was due to a problem in New York. While we were not headed to New York, the airspace around Cincinnati would be the logical space to hold already in-route aircraft and again, nothing particularly odd about this either.
I happened to be in the cockpit and the captain said that there were reports of an aircraft hitting one of the World Trade Center towers. I thought, “how odd that someone flying a small plane would be so low and so close to a tower that an unexpected updraft would have pushed them into a building.”
Back in the passenger cabin and by this time, most everyone on the plane was on their mobile phone. I was surprised that that many calls could be made simultaneously as cellular networks were not as robust then as they are today – and especially not at airports.
The news of the morning, September 11th 2001, trickled in slowly from both ATC and our operations center. If that was because they didn’t know or didn’t want to say I’m unsure. Soon however, we knew what had happened and the captain made an announcement that our flight was now cancelled and asked passengers to disembark. Never before had I witnessed such an orderly process of disembarking. The passengers were quiet, did what they were told and exited the aircraft.
As people were leaving the captain called me into the cockpit and told me about the flight that hit the Pentagon. This is when I became afraid. A mistake in New York was one thing, but another immediately following in Washington – this was plan. The United States was under attack.
Immediately after the last passenger had left two men from the FBI arrived, came to me, held out pictures of two men and asked if I had seen them onboard. The plane held 250+ passengers and my attention that morning had been diverted to the changing events that precluded what had occurred. I told them I couldn’t say one way or another if either of the men had been onboard. The men from the FBI left plane, running into the terminal.
It seemed so odd that the FBI was there almost immediately.
Because I had no crew and now where to go, I went to the operations center and sat watching the TV until things could be sorted out. My eyes riveted to the television watching the twin towers burn. No one was anticipating the collapse, but I was. I was watching the television and knew what was about to happen. There was no way that those buildings would remain structurally intact based upon the velocity of the strike and the heat from the fire.
Then the news reported on Flight 93 that crashed into the flied in Pennsylvania. Crew operations was filled with stranded crews, all of us watching, and then all of us in total silence as we watched the towers collapse. It was all happening so fast and it was the first time in my life that I felt that no place was safe. No one knew what might happen next.
Eventually I was sent back to the hotel where I had spent the night. The only thing on TV was news about the attacks and the days events played over and over in my mind. Then it hit me. Like the two planes that were flown into the World Trade Center I too was on a 767. Additionally, my plane too was fully fueled for a long-haul flight. There was never any official report or follow up, but it appeared that my flight was one of the targeted planes for the planned west coast attacks.
Had we become airborne that day all of these pages would be blank.
The U.S. airspace was closed to commercial aviation for three days and in my hotel room I waited to hear from operations as to when I could go home. No one new. On day four I occasionally saw an aircraft overhead. I called operations – they still didn’t know. I’d only packed for an overnight trip – I had nothing to wear except my uniform, which I couldn’t really wear in public. I mean, yes, I could, but under the circumstances I did not want to call attention to myself.
In the lobby I ran into a United crew that was stranded. I joined them for dinner one night, wearing my uniform pants only only my white shirt. It was innocuous enough. We all did our best to treat it like any other layover, tying to keep it lite, but mostly we said little and just ate. This crew from United were total strangers, as I was to them, but it still felt good to be together even if there was nothing to say.
On day five I convinced operations to let me fly home. They found space for me on a flight to Cincinnati, where I arrived, drove home, and was never so happy to see that skyline appear after that slight bend in the highway. A guy I had been hanging around with drove over – I hugged him tightly. We walked down to the neighborhood bar and had a couple beers and I was greeted both with sighs of relief by my neighbors and questions about what I knew. I didn’t tell them everything.
The 36 Broadway 
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