Pabst Blue Ribbon is union made

In the late 90s, in my early 20s, I lived in Atlanta. I didn't know how to drink yet. I mean, I knew how to put alcohol in my face, but I didn't know how to deal with myself on a regular basis in a bar. I drank a lot of rum and cokes back then, because it was something my parents drank and didn't seem ridiculous.

I kind of stand by that. I had good drinking instincts.

At five, my dad taught me how to order. I remember it clearly - I doubt he does. He was playing at a beach bar, and in the middle of the afternoon he stood me up on a bar stool and handed me a money.

"Don't yell for him. Look at the bartender and hold up your money, he'll come to you." He did, and I ordered a Shirley Temple, and I learned a skill that has stood me in good stead for 35 years.

So, 97 or 98. East Atlanta before that was a thing. A friend took me into a bar, stepped up, and said, "Two Pabsts please."

There are moments in my life that became forks. This was one of them.

You couldn't get PBR is many places then. Atlanta was a rockabilly town, and Pabst was part of the fun.

I remember the way that first Pabst tasted. Clean and dirty at the same time. Cold, a line to my gut. I don't know how many $1 tall boys I drank that night, but I was sold. Brand loyal, buddy, to this day. I literally just walked in from karaoke night, where I drank more than a reasonable number of them.

Have I showed you my tattoo?

first kiss

Mama Warning: Rated K for Kissing.

Me, 17, a slow bloomer. A sincere nerd, in a time before the geek inherited the Earth. An out queer, in a time before Ellen. Opportunities seemed thin on the ground. Had-I-known-then-what-I-know-now and so on. Never been kissed.

Jenn, closest friend and bad influence, thank goodness. My age but "worldly." Spent a lot of time in college dorms with older friends, and the rest of her time with me. By then she'd been thrown out by her mom and I somehow convinced my own saintly and remarkable parents to take her in temporarily. More about that another time, huh? Much more importantly to Past Hank, Jenn'd been exiled from home in part for being bisexual, making her one of maybe three women my age even theoretically approachable.

Thankfully, I'm old to have really been online in my teens. All that terrible poetry, gone. You can't even imagine. There's no sexual tension like teenage queer sexual tension.

My folks went to Mexico and left Granny to mind the four of us. (Poor Granny.)

Jenn and I always went to the library downtown, as allowed, and wound up in Old City Cemetery, down the hill, on a grave for a girl named Jenny. Comfortable, semi-hidden, and she felt a name-based kinship to the occupant. We'd been touching each other all day, as accidentally as possible. At school, sitting on the same step in a back stairway with a few other outcasts. Fingers brushing knees in class. Kept my hair shaved down to velvet then, and her hands reached to stroke it when I stood near. In the graveyard, in the October sun, leaned up against a double headstone, shoulder to shoulder. Did I kiss her then? No.

Back to the house. The third floor belonged to teenagers. One long room, like a karate studio, the length of the house. Cut into three with a pair of massive bookshelves and sheets haphazardly strung for privacy. My chunk had no windows and was papered in pictures, few over palm size, cut from magazines. May was somewhere? doing much worse things, I'm sure. She ran with a fast crowd. I was jealous.

Jenn'd done this before, and bless her for it. I was so nervous I had electricity crawling around under my skin. She asked for a backrub. I do give a pretty good backrub. She turned over and kissed me. No rush at all. One hand on the back of my neck, one on my side, on my bare skin. She bit my lip hard enough to make me whine.

We did more than night, but it's fainter and fuzzier and further away.

By the way, tonight's date went well.

pocket money

For my side job - trivia makes me a happy man, but no one said anything about rich - I run the teleprompter for the live Florida Lottery draw a few nights a week. Because if you are going to be poor anyway, you might as well not take jobs that make you miserable if you can manage it. The woman who set me up with the position was in my Girl Scout troop. Transitioning in your home town leads to odd little unlikelihoods like that. We went to high school together, two dorks in the herd, and she may have been the first peer I came out to. That was years before I knew trans men existed, because 1993 was not 2016. I was just a chubby, awkward dyke all eat up with queer.

So, from there to here. She's a mom now, I'm a man now, and I pay a bill or two because at one point the two of us hunched over a buddy burner in the North Florida woods. Sometimes I think the reason so many of us believe in fate or destiny is because the path we followed seems too strange and yet too clear to have been made up on the spur of the moment.