May 8, 2005 – The Voyeur

May 8, 2005 – The Voyeur

It is the afternoon of Friday April 29th during my visit to my parents’ home in El Paso a week ago today. After lunch my dad wants to go to Ft Bliss and pick up some wine for me and from there we’re going to visit the collected belongings of dad’s longtime friend, Mr. Charles Upton, now safely stored in a building built to house them. El Paso is remarkably mild for this time of year, not over 70 degrees Fahrenheit. As I flew in earlier this morning on Southwest Airlines, I noticed he desert painted an unusual green in place of its more desolate brown. My father says the region has enjoyed an abnormal amount of rain this year and news reports weeks earlier lauded an abundant blooming of desert flowers.

My father’s ride is a red, four-door Pontiac Grand AM sedan, purchased a couple of years ago from my youngest sister’s closest friend. It’s dependable. My dad hands me the keys and he squeezes into the passenger seat. He’s still have trouble getting into and out of cars because he had not regain a complete range of motion with his right knee, replaced a year ago and a year after his right hip had been replaced. I drive to the base taking Dyer Street south until Monroe Avenue, then turning left and heading east over North-South Texas Highway 54, where Monroe becomes Cassidy Road to the gate into Ft Bliss Military Reservation. In El Paso, the military is still big business and Ft Bliss continues to grow. The guard checks my California driver’s license and my dad’s military id and waves us into the base. Cassidy crosses Sheridan—the right side of which is lined with base houses for officers with families. The left side between Sheridan and Pershing is a grassy park. I had ran along both streets at different stages growing up, as a pre-teen, teenager, and a grown man out of the service myself in the mid-60s.

Military bases are safe havens, places where order rules above all else: 25 miles per hour traffic signs are obeyed—at least when I was younger, they were, no littering, no graffiti, a well ordered world, where kids could pretty much run free without fear of harm, though they could be and were told off by MPs and adults who thought you needed a dressing down for some foolishness or other. A few blocks further along on Cassidy, we come to Marshall Road where we make a left heading north and find the Post Exchange Liquor Store. It’s cheaper here because there are no taxes paid on any of the goods. I find a bottle of Champagne and a bottle of Pinot Noir and we load up and head north along Cassidy and exit the base turning right on Fred Wilson Avenue and head east over the railroad track and turn left heading north of Railroad Blvd, a stretch of road with nothing on either side. It was the road we used to race our Vespa scooters along when I was a kid in high school. We drive north for a few miles then make a left on Threadgill and a few block west we arrive at the lot Mr. Upton sold to my dad many years ago. It now contains a metal building containing pallets of stuff moved from Mr. Upton’s home here to its final resting place.

Inside and on shelves at the back of the rectangular building at the rear of the rectangular lot is all Mr. Upton’s stuff. I look in boxes that I could not access when all this stuff was stored in Mr. Upton’s house. Now, I could open all the boxes and peer in at the man’s collection. The one thing about going through other people’s stuff is you find out their secrets. Mr. Upton liked men’s magazines: a box of back issues of the magazine QUI, as well as the raunchier, “National Screw.” I look through volume 1 issue 3 of the latter and besides the photo spread of attractive unclothed women—now grandparents—there is an interview with Andy Warhol. I’ll admit that I didn’t read the article. The other magazine collection I found was LIFE—issues dating back to the 1960s. I found an issue dated September 11, 1964, devoted to Japan—which I take to help me remember the Japan I knew as a young man. Beside the LIFE back issues is another box containing back issues of a magazine called SEE.

SEE is your basic tabloid, printed on newspaper stock with a color cover. The issue that attracts me is November 1950, which sold for the $0.15 on newsstands. Mr. Upton obviously had a subscription. The only headlines on the cover were “The Walter Winchell Story,” by Ed Weiner and “Night Life in San Francisco,” which is what made me pick the issue. The other attraction to the cover was a model named Roxanne Rosedale, a lovely blond posing in a two piece bikini, light and dark purple stripes running vertically on her top piece and horizontally on her bottom piece. She is standing at the beach, left arm extended along a rock that is about as tall as she is. Waves are washing around her calves as she gazes toward the ocean off to her right, her right arm bent at the elbow, her forearm parallel to the water below.

I’m being a voyeur on Mr. Upton’s private life, what he enjoyed in the privacy of his home, I’m now prying into. I feel a sense of violating his space, like the babysitter or houseguest that rummages about their host’s belongings. Only Mr. Upton will not come back to question my taking two of his magazines. I have the urge to take more, but it is offset by the pang of guilt I experience just taking the two I have already chosen. My father and I leave—curiously; my father does not rummage about Mr. Upton’s belongings. I almost ask him why, but suppress the urge. We return home and during dinner resume our conversation about my parents’ early life together.