Genderqueer by Allan D Hunter

Author:Allan D Hunter
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0000000000000
Published: 2021-10-27T09:40:56+00:00

The Ongoing Project

It was 1979, I was alive, twenty, and still a Vo-tech student, and was back in my apartment in Albuquerque. Which was more than I could say for my erstwhile roommate, Donald S. Skyler. It was now the end of the first week of resumed classes and he was nowhere in sight.

We started the unit on automotive air conditioning. How decompressing Freon (refrigerant-12) causes it to plummet in temperature. The compressor, the condenser, the valves that controlled flow from high-pressure to low-pressure side, the cold coils inside the car that the forced air blows over, the hot ones out on the radiator to be air-cooled along with the radiator fluid.

My teacher from last fall’s final unit, the front end alignment and brakes teacher, had talked up how strong I was, how I’d beaten the starch out of a guy to everyone’s amazement. People left me mostly alone. I didn’t correct the rumor.

Donald S. Skyler eventually got in touch with me by phone. “Hey, Derek, how’s it going? Did you get to, where was it, Georgia, you get there okay? That’s good. Hey listen, I’ve decided to withdraw from Vo-tech. I’m going to study somewhere else, and I called the VA on the phone and they say I can get a partial refund but they’re only willing to send it to the address they got on file which is the apartment there. I still got your toolbox. We took them both with us in my car, you remember? If you’ll forward that refund check to me when it arrives, I’ll send you back your toolbox. How’s that sound?”

I sent him his refund Veterans’ Administration check. He did not send me my toolbox and I never heard from him again. I was glad he wasn’t coming back. In his absence, I played his record albums from time to time. I became quite fond of the sad poignant Melanie and the dark dystopian Bloodrock and listened to them a lot.

I continued to practice the piano at UNM campus, and often stayed in that area well into the evening. I had finally, belatedly, discovered that the parklike front lawn tended to fill up in the late afternoon with an eclectic mixture of university students and nonstudents and was a place where one could buy pot and acid. People would chat about abstract ideas ranging from politics to theories of what is real and how you know it’s real.

To my surprised delight, some people pronounced me wise and wanted to hear my insights. Along with the ego boost was the internal recognition that I didn’t entirely disagree with them about that. Yes, I was keenly aware of the huge core of unanswered questions and unsatisfied yearnings for understanding I still carried around inside myself, and my shaky willingness to be alive didn’t strongly recommend me as a person from whom to learn how to be happy. But my thirst for understanding things seemed to be accompanied by a capacity to comprehend large complex

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