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Saturday, Oct 11, 2008
He wore white patent leather shoes and I still married him.
Jan 18, 2000 | We shouldn't be married. Really, there is no way that Phil and I should be celebrating 14 years of marriage. As different as we are, it's amazing that we even went out on one date. But we did. Went on three, in fact, before he moved in.
How weird is that? I'll tell you: He had white patent leather shoes, wore them with a straight face. And I married him.
It all started when I moved back to Michigan to get my life together after it fell apart in San Francisco. My folks were tired of me showing up on their doorstep every time life got too crazy for me in San Francisco. I'd done this a few times in the two years after my divorce.
They asked my uncle to get me a job at the Ford plant. This uncle hadn't forgotten that I was one of the leaders of a huge demonstration at Ford World Headquarters during the Vietnam War. He got me a job in one of the toughest plants in Michigan. We made trucks, worked 10 hours a day, six days a week.
This factory was like my purgatory, a place where I planned to suffer until I had paid for my sins and decided what I wanted to be when I grew up. My family thought that the job would either help me or discourage me from returning home the next time my life went into a skid.
I was 27 chronologically, but a teenager emotionally. I still believed that the perfect man would come along, adore me, take care of me and actually move me into a home with a white picket fence and a huge wooden porch with a swing.
The only part of the fairy tale I'd managed at that point was a relationship with a gay man. I was at the stage of swearing off marriage altogether when I met Phil. He was 36, frustrated and bored in his first marriage. I recognized a few emotional touchstones there, but we definitely didn't match.
He was (and still is) from Tennessee and his accent alone would normally have sent me in the opposite direction. He drank bourbon and Coke. I smoked pot. He wouldn't see a Jane Fonda movie. I had been at several demonstrations where she spoke. He listened to Elvis. I listened to the Stones. Phil was a foreman for Ford Motor Company. I assembled trucks on the line.
While he ran the shop, I got stoned. He was neat. I wore my hair in a grown-out brush cut. I got out of working as often as I could, and even whistled at the men on the line. Half of me was still very San Francisco, the other part was working in a factory nicknamed "Little Kentucky," partly because it was one of the last plants to hire minorities, including women.
I was missing wild nights dancing at the Stud on Folsom Street, and I was working in a plant that almost had to shut down the day Elvis died. (On that fateful day, I came to work and heard some people saying, "The King is dead." I tried to think of which countries still had kings and why all these people would care if one died. People were calling in sick or having to leave the line to cry or faint. What's the big deal? I'd already been through this with Jimi, Janis and Jim. I felt like I was in another world, a time warp or something.)
By the time Phil asked me out, I was a union gal and really into my newest incarnation -- a proud proletarian. Nobody expected me to date a foreman. I had just broken up with my latest bad choice of boyfriends, a relationship made in hell. My family hadn't liked him much. I'm not sure if it was his bisexuality, drug addiction or his having been in jail, but this was one time when they were glad I'd screwed up another relationship.
They were not, however, prepared for Phil. When I was a kid, my parents never allowed us to use racial slurs, but calling someone a hillbilly was fine, and Phil was obviously a "billy," as my mom used to call people from the South.
I decided to go out with him because I knew that he genuinely liked and respected women, which is a rarity anywhere, but especially in the factory where we worked. He never made passes or lewd comments. He made eye, not breast, contact and never patronized women. He was the only man in the place that didn't seem bothered that women had entered this rough and greasy male domain.
When Phil showed up to take me out on our first date, I'm not sure what I regretted more, smoking a joint of killer weed before he arrived or promising my family that I'd bring him over to meet them before we went out.
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