Influences In My Life
– part 1
My life has not been filled with influential people. I’ve
known numerous men and women who I have admired, but for the most part, I did
not come to know any of them personally, and because of that, they held little
inspiration for me.
My family, on both mother’s and father’s side, had no
notable personalities, or at least nobody who could claim any pronounced
abilities or achievements. I come from a family of farmers and ranchers. I did,
later in life, come to hold my grandfather in high regard, because he could
neither read nor write, and yet he worked a rather sizable farm in Ogden, Utah,
and raised seven conscientious children. He was a man who worked hard all his
life, and expected nothing more than what he earned for himself and his family.
His only goal was to instill a sense of integrity into his children, and pass
on something to each one of them to help them get started in life. As his
children grew of age and married, he parceled off one-seventh of his land and
gave it to them as a wedding present, until he had nothing left—rather like
King Lear. But because my father moved us to California, not only did we
forfeit the land, I rarely saw that honorable man.
I have had three men in my life who have deeply influenced
me, each one at a different phase of my development as a human being. The first
was my father, who shepherded me into manhood. The second was my first lover,
who I lived with for sixteen years, and who taught me the value of education,
and infused me with the tools to become successful. The third is my husband and
soul mate, who more than anyone, has taught me—through example—to be a
compassionate human being. In all three cases, it was not their accomplishments
that had an impact on me, but rather, the strength of their character that shaped
that part of my life.
I’ll first focus on my father. Bernard Franklin Hurlburt was
born into a family of sheepherders in Western Colorado, up around Grand
Junction. Shortly after entering the seventh grade, he was forced (I suspect it
didn’t take much encouragement) to abandon school and work the ranch through
depressed times. That turned into a hard, dull life, which he was finally able
to escape via the United States Marines. He enlisted as soon as he came of age,
and I believe that all his life, he considered his stint in the Marines as the
happiest time of his life.
As a young solider, Bernard was footloose, handsome in his
dress blues, and had money in his pockets to impress the girls. He was, by all
accounts, a ladies man. By the time he reached his twenty-first birthday, he
met a beautiful deaf girl of eighteen years, and he fell in love. He met my
mother, a farmer’s daughter, in Ogden, Utah. I’m not altogether sure whether he
was on leave or stationed nearby. I do know that they met while he was still in
the service of his country, and that she was the main reason he left the
Marines for civilian life. They were wed and took up residence in Ogden.
Bernard had no skills other than ranching sheep and
precision marching (as a marine, he was a member of a precision drill team).
For years, he hung around a mechanic shop in Ogden, learning the trade of auto
repair. Those were hard times, because he didn’t get a salary. Members of the
Mormon Church dropped by weekly with a box of food. The rest of our food came
from my grandfather’s farm. Clothes were all hand-me-downs. My mother tells of
walking to the general store and bringing home discarded, cardboard boxes, and
then unfolding the boxes flat and nailing them to the walls so keep the winter
wind from coming through the gaps between the boards. The first few years of my
life were spent in a shack. The rent was ten dollars per month, and in two
years we fell six months behind on the rent.
By the time I was two years old, Bernard landed a paying job
as a auto-body repairman, and life got easier—at least my family didn’t rely on
the Church to feed us. By the time I was five, my father had grown tired of my
mother’s protective family giving him grief, and he moved us all to San Jose,
California. There he bought a house and opened his own auto repair shop and
towing company. Life began looking better, but was by no means Ozzie and
Harriet.
Throughout my grade-school and high-school years my father
kept food on the table and clothes on our backs through working his shop, The
Santa Clara Body Shop. Life was still difficult, much harder for him that I
realized at the time, because he couldn’t read and he needed an adding machine
to do even simple arithmetic. Add to that he developed a drinking problem and
liked to chase women. Mother, being deaf, totally depended on him for income.
It became a heavy burden for him, and as the years drew on, the burden became
heavier.
Those school years in San Jose are the time he held the most
influence over me. He taught me valuable life lessons, molded my character, and
also taught me destructive behavior.
My father was a man with many qualities, and the foremost
was his tendency to take risks. When people told him he couldn’t do something
because he didn’t have the education or the money or the knowhow, he found a
way. Once he set his mind on something, his determination grew as strong as
tempered steel. As the example above, learning a new career, his fortitude kept
him showing up at that mechanic shop, day after day, year after year, doing odd
jobs for no pay, because he knew someday it would pay off, some day he would be
his own boss.
More than any man I’ve ever known, he made the most with the
hand life dealt him, and he never let his shortcomings stop him from attaining
something he truly wanted. I remember learning to ski with him. He refused to
pay for lessons or rent proper equipment (which was so typical of him). We
simply borrowed someone’s old, dilapidated skis, boots and poles, took the
chairlift to the most difficult runs, pointed our skis down hill, and flew
until we fell. Then we picked ourselves up, point the skis down hill again, and
off we sailed until the next fall. At the end of the first week, we could make
it down most of the slopes without falling, and we never returned the borrowed
skis. That was how he rolled, and that’s the paramount lesson he taught
me—never be afraid to go after something, no matter the obstacles. Just do it,
and keep doing it until you become good at it.
Even at an early age I admired him for his determination,
his grit. I still do.
The negative side of that equation, however, was that early
on, he drummed it into my head that I didn’t need an education to become
successful. As long as I didn’t dream too large, reach too high, I could blow
off schooling, which is what I did. I became, like him, streetwise, and held a
mild distain for people who worshiped in the halls of higher education. I
became convinced that I could live a comfortable life by not playing by the
rules, or more accurately, by living by my father’s set of bull-in-a-china-shop
rules, and living by the seat of my pants.
So high school was a waste for me, I never cracked a book; I
learned little or nothing there. That attitude was fortified during my four
years in the US Navy, where I got along quite well without being educated. In
the navy I was in my element, surrounded by others like me, being always
governed by the officers (men who were college educated).
It wasn’t until I met my first husband, John Aherns, that my
dreams grew larger than my education. John was cultivated, professional, and
respected. He worked as a computer analyst, spent money frivolously, and for
whatever inexplicable reason, he became enamored by me. Almost over night, he quickly
became everything I wanted to be. Because of John, I was no longer content to
live a smallish life, held back by the limitations my father had pounded into
me. My dreams expanded, like climbing a trifling foothill, only to finally see
the glorious mountain range beyond.
I will always be both grateful and resentful of my father’s
lessons. It has taken a lifetime to undo that initial damage, yet he also instilled
the determination to never give up, to dream big and make it happen, even if it
takes a lifetime.
Influences In My Life
– part 2
I met John Aherns in Corpus Christy, Texas while stationed
on the naval base in Kingsville, Texas. He was living in Huston at the time,
and for several months we carried on a long-distance relationship, spending two
or three weekends a month together. It was nothing too serious because I knew I
would be leaving Texas the very minute I received my discharge from the Navy,
but he was handsome and successful and more refined than anyone I’d ever known,
so I was determined to spend as much time as possible with him. But about six
months before my discharge, to my surprise and delight, John quit his Huston
job and moved to Kingsville, announcing that when I left for California, he was
coming with me. I moved off base, and lived with John in a studio garage
apartment, So began a sixteen-year project of what I like to call, Educating
Alan.
We started this project when John joined a book club that
sent us one leather-bound, classic per month. He and I would both read the book
and then spend several days discussing the meaning, characters, and style. For
me, there was something wondrous about reading a finely made, leather-bound
book. I loved the feel and smell of the pages, the weight of it. I confused the
act of learning with the smell of fine leather. I saw myself doing something
that only, or so I thought, intellectuals did—sit quietly for hours on end
reading important books. Not all of those books were a pleasure to read, but
each one was a stepping-stone to a place of more confidence for me. As the number
of books on our little shelf grew, I began to imagine a room filled with
bookshelves that were crammed with tomes, all mine, where I’d spend my time
letting literary people carry me away into distant adventures. Thus, we joined
two more book clubs, receiving three books a month, and I began to see that
dream take shape.
Those early months were more than just reading, of course. It
was a time when I learned, quite unexpectedly, that I could have a loving,
monogamous relationship with a man. Until that point, I had assumed that my
life as a gay man would be hanging out in bars, always on the lookout for
someone to spend a few precious hours with, or days and possibly even weeks or
months if I really scored. It seemed
like such a lonely future, but John—in those quiet hours of reading together,
of cooking a meal and watching TV over dinner, of crawling into bed with the
same wonderful man every night—showed me a loving relationship was not only
possible, I was already living the dream. I think it was during that time of
awakening to what we had, what we were, that turned my admiration of John into
love for him.
After I was discharged from the Navy and we had settled into
an apartment in Sunnyvale, California, John took a Computer Programmer’s job in
San Francisco, and I landed a job operating construction heavy equipment in
what is now Silicon Valley. John convinced me to attend night school at De Anza
Community College. By that time I had begun to realize how woefully inadequate
my education was, and it was never so obvious as when we attended parties of
his work colleagues, and they would look down their noses at me, talking down
to me as whispering behind my back (loud enough for me to hear) calling me,
“John’s sexy nitwit” (the term boy toy was not invented yet.) I became hungry to catch up, to show them all.
This would be a pattern for nearly our entire sixteen-year relationship, him
working one job and taking care of me, me working a fulltime, lower-paying job during
the day while attending night school.
Two years after moving to Sunnyvale, I finally decided on a
career path to study for. I wanted to program computers, like John. There was
an opening at his company for an entry-level person, basically a gofer, that
paid next to nothing. I took that job, we moved to San Francisco, and I began
attending SF State, taking a half load at night.
The next five or six years were among the most exciting and
colorful years of my life. Being gay and living in hottest gay hub in the world
was exciting enough, but once I began taking computer classes and working my
way up the corporate ladder, I felt like a man with a mission and a full head
of steam. For the first time in my life, I had lofty goals and the confidence
to know that, with enough commitment, I could achieve those goals. My attitude
became: nothing will stop me, I will become as good as the best of them. John had
created a monster, and there was no turning back. There are times, now, when I
picture a mountain climber, struggling up K2, exhausting himself with each
heavy lift of his boot, and each lurch up the slope, until he’s expended every
ounce of energy. But he finally crawls his way to the summit, and then stands
tall while shaking his fists at the valleys below.
Over the next decade, we moved from San Francisco to
Sausalito, and two year later we moved further north to San Rafael where we
bought a lovely three-bedroom home. As I steadily climbed the corporate ladder,
I also hung my diplomas on the wall—Associates of Arts degree in Computer
Science, a Bachelor of Science degree in Economics, and a Master’s degree in
Creative Writing. In all that time, John continued to help me with my schoolwork,
proofread my papers, giving me encouragement. While working toward by economics
degree, he even took classes with me so he could better help me. And in all
that time, we continued our reading together and discussing books. He also
introduced me to opera, classical music, and jazz, giving me lessons in what’s
considered the fine arts.
I had originally entered the writing program at the
University of San Francisco as a way to improve my business writing skill, but
the by time I had attained my degree, I had fallen in love with the creative
aspects of writing fiction. My dreams had changed. I no longer wanted to
continue climbing the corporate ladder. By that time, there were only three
rungs left to climb, and I had become frustrated with corporate management. I
wanted to quit and become a full time writer. I was caught in the early stages
of a midlife crises. The problem, however, was that John was already eyeball
deep in his own crises and wanted to cut and run. We made a deal, I would
support him while he went to medical school to become a physician’s assistant
(he felt a strong need to help sick people) and once he had a good paying job again,
he would support me while I walked away from Corporate American to become a
full time writer.
Our roles were reversed for the first time. I was working
like a dog while he attended school at UC Davis, and I would help write his
papers. But cutting our household income in half had a dramatic effect on both
of us, and the stress became unbearable. It took years for John to achieve his
degree, and I supported him for most of that time, but the stress of both of us
in a midlife crisis and not enough money to pay all the bills at the end of the
month took its toll on our relationship. He eventually moved out of our San
Rafael house, and I got a loan to purchase his half of the house in order to
give him the money to finish his schooling.
Braking up with John, I think, was the hardest thing I’ve
ever had to go through, even more emotionally damaging than the death of my
father. It became a drawn out, painful process that took several years to
recover from. For sixteen years, John was my lover, my teacher, and the epitome
of everything I wanted to achieve. He patiently guided me down a path, starting
at dirt stupid and ending at reasonably intelligent. By the end of our
relationship, I had attained my goal—I was his equal in intelligence, career
level, and earning power. And the funny thing was, as is human nature, by the
time I had attained those dreams, I no longer valued them.
John and I are best friends today. He and his husband,
Jeffery, live in the mountains a short three-hour drive away. Herman and I
regularly visit them, and we all enjoy each other’s company. John and I still
love each other, but we are happier living apart.
Influences In My Life
– part 3
Today, I’ll complete this series by focusing on my husband.
I met Herman Chin at the San Francisco opera about two years after my divorce
with John Ahrens. At the time we met, we were very attracted to each other but
Herman was happily married to Steve, and had been for twenty-one years. I met
Steve, and found him to be a decent and exceedingly likeable man. Herman and I frequently
met over coffee or dinners (I couldn’t call it dating, and we couldn’t really
push it any further) for about six months, and in all that time I knew he was
the man for me, yet I never thought he would leave Steve, and I refused to
asked him to do so. Little did I know, early on, he told Steve he was falling
in love with me, and the two often talked about them splitting up so Herman
could live with me.
Things came to a head when Herman asked me to join him on a
month-long vacation to Egypt, Italy, and France. He said it would be only us
two, and we would be lovers, at least while on this trip. When he made it clear
that Steve had given this trip his blessing, I jumped at it. We shared what
turned out to be the most marvelous adventure of my life. At some point between
climbing five-thousand-year-old pyramids and wandering the backstreets of Rome,
we realized we were not simply lovers, we were soul mates—or to be more
accurate, we were one soul split into two bodies. Within a few weeks of
returning to the States, Herman moved into my house, and we have not spent a
night apart in twenty years.
On that first trip abroad, Herman became my guide, both in
foreign cultures and in love. He and Steve had traveled through Europe several
times, and he knew the ropes of maneuvering an unfamiliar culture. It was
during that first trip that our roles were defined—he the guide, me the
follower; me the lover, he the loved. And during that time we began a project I
call, Humanizing Alan. You see, by that time in my life I’d become a man driven
by ambitions, first to climb the corporate ladder and later to become a
successful writer. I had become a goal-oriented animal, an aggressive competitor,
with little thought to the people around me. I had bought into the American
dream of greed and achievement hook, line, and sinker.
Herman, on the other hand, owned a small dental lab where he
and two employees made false teeth. He purposely kept his business small so he
could supervise all aspects of his trade and keep personal relationships with
his dentist clients. He was an artist, whose artwork ended up in peoples’
mouths, and he was content to live modestly, without striving to become more of
anything. He and I were very different, as I had spent half my life striving to
become successful, and I felt I had a long way to go.
It was Herman’s example of non-striving that convinced me to
finally walk away from Corporate America and follow my dream of writing. He
convinced me that I already had achieved everything I needed, was already
everything I needed to be. So in 1999, after a year of serious discussions, we
both took a leap of faith and retired from the world of business. He and I
turned forty-five that year. I began to write. He began to travel, and of
course, I followed.
It was during our travels that the Humanizing Alan project
really kicked into high gear. There is nothing, in my humble opinion, that
makes one reevaluate one’s own culture and beliefs more than immersing one’s
self in foreign cultures. Contrast can be a very powerful teaching tool, and
what is even more powerful is living in an environment where you’re the
minority, the odd man out, the one children point and laugh at. Simply being in
a country where you don’t speak the language, where you depend on the kindness
of those not as fortunate as you, is a humbling and humanizing experience. At
first you realize, really know, you are no better than them. Then you realize
you are them. Soon, you begin to love them. And finally, you begin to love
yourself.
Herman and I travel four to six months each year. In our
twenty years together, we have visited over fifty different countries, and have
twice circled the globe. We have dined in the best restaurants in Europe, scuba
dived the Great Barrier Reef, rode elephants in Nepal and India, gone on safari
in Africa, chanted with monks in Tibet, hiked the Great Wall, and trekked to
ancient ruins like Angkor Wat and the Pyramids of Giza. This spring we plan to
tackle South America for the first time.
Without Herman as my guide, I fear I would have never had
the courage to leave the States. He has shown me the world, and how to love all
the people in it. In the process, he’s made me a more compassionate person. I’m
not quite ready for sainthood, but each day my ego dies a little bit more, and
my empathy for the people around me grows. This, more than anything, is what
Herman has taught me, not by lectures, but by example. I’ve literally seen him
walk through the slums of Calcutta and embrace the people there, as he does in
every country we visit.
These days I continue to publish books; I’m now working on
number ten. But the idea of being a success is meaningless. I write because I
am compelled to write, it brings great pleasure. I publish to see my words in
print and to share my stories with anyone who chooses to read them. My only
goal at this point in life is to make my husband as happy as possible.
