OH, FARRELL (Part 1 - Two Gays in the Closet)

 

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. 

 

This one is worth so much more. I could say there are no words, which would also be true. I could quantify it higher—ten thousand words, one hundred thousand words. Whatever. That would make a point, but it would only assign value in a competitive sense. I’m not competing with anyone.

 

This is a photo of Farrell Cahn.

 

If I’m being honest, it’s a terrible shot. He’s bent over. It’s black and white. The hairline at the neck appears to blend with something in the background so it looks like he’s got a mullet. Farrell would never have a mullet.

 

This is the only photo I have of Farrell Cahn. I discovered it when I Google-searched his name. Easy, right?

 

No. Over the years, I’d Googled his name so many times. Nothing ever came up. Google was established as a search engine in 1998. Farrell Cahn died three years before that. 

 

I have no personal photos of Farrell. We didn’t snap pictures then the way we do now. The first cell phone with a camera came out in 2000. During the time I knew Farrell, most people who weren’t professional photographers didn’t carry cameras. Taking pictures required buying film. It also meant paying for the shots to be developed. Few of us would have thought of snapping a pic of the soft tacos at Chili’s or the person across the table from you at Chili’s or, god forbid, turning the lens on yourself at Chili’s. During the time I knew Farrell in Texas, Chili’s was a thing, at least for me and “selfie” wasn’t even a word. Sometimes the good old days were truly that. 

 

Back then, a camera came out for special occasions. It was for a trip to Puerto Vallarta though I have no pics from my one vacation there because I got so sick I only learned after the fact that a maid was giving me sponge baths in lieu of changing the sheets. No parasailing, no snorkeling, but I lost ten pounds in a week. A camera was for Halloween parties like the massive gay one I went to in 1995, my first in Vancouver when friends and I dressed as a pack of crayons because none of us could carry off the typical gay Halloween dress code as shirtless firemen, gold-painted Adonises or Greg Louganis’s body double. (No partygoer stated that divers don’t have body doubles; that was not the point.) A camera was for my grandfather’s last Christmas when he gamely participated in a photoshoot, posing in each baseball cap I bought for him to cover his familiar bald head, suddenly ravaged by melanoma.  

 

Farrell and I didn’t travel anywhere. We didn’t go to parties. We didn’t spend Christmas together. Ordinary events weren’t photo-worthy. And all my interactions with Farrell were ordinary. 

 

We met in the spring of 1987 as part of a group of strangers who’d signed up for an evening tennis class, a course listed in the continuing education catalog for a community college in Irving, Texas. I’ve always loved tennis, but I’ve never been very good at it. Eight consecutive Wednesday nights of “lite” instruction and tedious drills didn’t make me Stefan Edberg, but Farrell’s skill level seemed to suck on a par with mine so we’d stick around to hit a few balls after class. We agreed to meet outside of class to get more tennis time without those time-wasting drills. 

 

We managed to get the ball over the net enough times to get in a workout. Retrieving balls that soared over the fence helped, too. We found enough to talk about during the water breaks necessitated by the Texas heat. Soon we started lingering after play, chatting on a bench or while standing by our cars. 

 

Farrell was a quiet, contemplative soul, as was I, although he didn’t always see that side of me. Tennis made me hyper. Someone once described me as the Energizer bunny, racing to track down every ball, regardless of whether it was in or out. I’d found a handful of regulars to hit with and I could fit in five hours of tennis in a day, even on hundred-degree summer days in Dallas. I was never the one to say, “Let’s stop.” Even when my opponent was worn out or tired of my errant forehand, I struggled to wind down. During off-court conversations with Farrell, I was less guarded, openly self-deprecating and plain silly. This amused Farrell, snapping him out of the disappointment he often felt about his play. On court, he was always saying, “Oh, Farrell” after a volley into the net or a mistimed overhead. Not exactly a John McEnroe meltdown but no one would aspire to that anyway. 

 

One Friday evening, I showed up on court after going to happy hour with nuns. Friday happy hours were huge in the late ’80s in Texas or, at the very least, among my circle of nuns. I taught at a special education school operated by the Catholic Diocese of Dallas so half of my colleagues resided at the convent on campus. Those nuns longed for time away. Happy hour evolved into hours, not all of them “happy,” but it was a must-see reality before reality TV became a thing. They bitched about the other nuns whom they were with 24/7. Booze and cigarettes made the bitching escalate. 

 

On that particular Friday, I suppose I’d had a drink or two too many. Maybe I shouldn’t have driven to the tennis courts, but there I was, returning every ball Farrell didn’t hit into the net. (“Oh, Farrell.”) Spinach may have given Popeye extra strength but, for me, it seemed to come from frozen lime margaritas. I hit everything out, more balls than usual soaring over the fence, Babe Ruth-calibre home runs. As I raced off the court to do my springer spaniel impression, retrieving another handful of balls, Farrell met me at the gate and said, “How ’bout let’s stop?” Turns out you had to have been at happy hour for the happiness to linger. We sat on the grass and chatted, his annoyance quickly going away. Eventually we grabbed dinner. Chili’s, of course; iced tea to drink. 

 

Tennis outings—never again following my rollicking times with nuns—became tennis and dinners. Sometimes it was just dinner. We grew from court mates to friends. 

 

Farrell was reserved about his past. He’d been the result of an unwanted pregnancy, a Black baby placed in an orphanage in Louisiana. He was adopted by a woman and raised with a sister. From what I recall, his adopted mother had died and his sister, well, Farrell would just shake his head. It wasn’t an active relationship. He had no other family. 

 

He worked as an accountant, spoke vaguely of a few friends and regularly attended the Dallas Symphony. The convent and school where I worked as a teacher were adjacent to the University of Dallas where he earned his degree. He happily talked about the present but often turned the conversation to me. I talked passionately about my job and self-deprecatingly about my daily bumblings. I was 21, he was 28. I was still too egocentric, everything about post-university life new and exciting, every experience told as if lived for the first time…by anyone. As insufferable as I must have been, Farrell always seemed amused. 

 

In August 1989, I left Texas to attend law school at Pepperdine in California. Malibu! We kept in touch in those old-fashioned ways that were the norm of the time: phone calls and letters. Too few of both, I suppose. There’s something about academic environments where students feed off one another in portraying classes, homework and papers as heavy burdens, teetering on impossible. Yes, law school was intense, but I found time for the beach, my casebooks usually in tow, grains of sand spilling from them on my desk when I’d reopen them in the lecture hall during Civil Procedure. On weekend evenings, I’d grab dinner with classmates before dashing off, secretly, to the gay bars in West Hollywood, dancing to “Vogue” and tracks by Bananarama, making friends with a struggling drag queen and desperately hoping some cute guy in the crowd might look my way. He rarely did and, if it happened, I took the moment to suddenly check my shoelaces, a highly ineffectual stab at flirting. All this is to say I was consumed by my new, if temporary, life in L.A. 

 

Farrell came to visit at some point while I was still in law school. In the letter he sent me to say he was coming, there’s a phrase that now seems so inapplicable to me. He’d sent me a Calvin & Hobbes book and said, “I hope it gets you through those long Sundays when the sun isn’t shining, your body isn’t tanning and the women are not pawing off your clothes.” 

 

Um…clearly this pasty dude doesn’t tan. 

 

He stayed with some other friends who lived somewhere in Greater Los Angeles and we spent an afternoon in Santa Monica. It was wonderful to see him and I felt honored he’d made time for me, but shortly after the visit, I received a card. His normally light, cheeky tone was absent. He’d sensed coldness from me during the visit and concluded I’d figured out he was gay and I was “repulsed.”

 

Thirty years ago, self-hate was well-fed by a pervasive homophobic environment in the Bible Belt of the southern United States, including both Louisiana where he’d been raised and Texas where he lived. Despite having known one another for four years and having formed a close friendship, neither of us had ever talked about our sexual orientation. Neither of us had ever mentioned dating. Neither of us had a military background but we ascribed to our own don’t ask, don’t tell policy. Had I been so convincing he could envision women pawing off my clothes? And what women, pray tell?  

 

I wrote back—STAT!—because I couldn’t let a perceived rejection fester. I didn’t phone because I still wasn’t used to talking about being gay, even to a friend who had outed himself. Internalized homophobia can be a savage, illogical beast.

 

I remember smiling as I wrote him, assuring him that, “There is no possible way I’m repulsed by you. I’m gay, too.” And yet, we still didn’t talk about being gay beyond that card exchange. I always assumed it would wait for our next in-person conversation, a cherished heart-to-heart. We’d do a lot of nodding, even more laughing, a bit of head shaking and wrap with a warm hug, maybe a new component of our friendship. 

 

Curses to lost time, gaydar malfunctions and stupid Texas. Yes, Farrell. That’s why I fled the state.

Click here to read Part 2.