My hair reflects just how windy our wedding ceremony was.

I’m glad I didn’t settle down early. Twenty years worth of fucked-up past relationships are a pretty handy guide in what not to do if one wants to stay in one’s current relationship. And with age comes better judgment in picking out a suitable partner. When I went to my 25th high school reunion this past fall I looked up and saw pass a shaven-headed man in a suit with wild eyes and an alarming lump in his neck. It took me a minute to realize it was Todd S. the smartass I had a crush on in eighth grade. He was beautiful then, longish, blond wavy hair, wide blue eyes and a perpetual tan. He had that girl/boy boy/girl look going on before anybody I knew had a name for it. I recognized that he was an idiot (both academically and behaviorally) even back then, but that didn’t stop me from fantasizing about him. Todd didn’t make the cut to any of my high school AP classes. The most notable thing he did during those whole four years was give the finger in the photograph taken of the entire Senior class from the roof of the school. The offending finger was airbrushed out.

After the reunion I looked up Todd’s profile and…he was still a loser. He preferred not to say whether he was in a relationship (which always puzzles me. Was he cheating on someone or just with someone who was cheating on someone else?), was a “musician” who didn’t seem to play anywhere or have as much as a home-recorded CD and didn’t mention any other career.

I thought of Todd when I heard Bristol Palin was engaged to marry the boyfriend who knocked her up. Now there are countless examples of women who have had children early on and still have happy fulfilling lives–as long as they choose to have the children and aren’t forced to carry pregnancies because religious wingnuts are incapable of minding their own damn business. But does anyone who’s not born-again-brainwashed think that a marriage of two teenagers with a baby on the way will succeed? I guess her parents or the GOP are trying to keep her from being the bogeywoman of conservative lore: the single mother. Except divorced motherhood is still single motherhood, just with a parental permission slip.

I looked up the statistics and women who marry before the age of twenty are fifteen percent more likely to divorce than women who marry after age twenty-five. The older the woman is for her first marriage, the lower the chance she will get divorced. “What was the percentage for your age bracket,” Guapa asked after we got back from our honeymoon.

“I don’t know. Apparently it’s so low they didn’t see fit to list it.”

As I expected Thompson came off as sexist (which interestingly is completely absent from a book like Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, where he goes out of his way to praise the pioneering women who were covering the campaign, even though he has nothing good to say about any of the male reporters) and abusive, even though the filmmakers, like the fanboys I’ve met, don’t seem to realize that’s the story they’re telling. All I could think was if a woman (especially at that time) had pulled half the shit that he had she would have been locked up and thorazined into submission, writing talent or no writing talent. But Hunter S. Thompson, besides being an alcoholic, a criminal (not just because of drugs) an addict and an eventual suicide who clearly had his own struggle with mental illness was the great writer about American politics and the complete farce that is “objective” journalism. What I hadn’t known before was that he was also someone who actively tried to change the mess he saw in our political system, on both a local and national level.

I was always under the impression that he ran for sheriff of Aspen (in 1970 when it was a hippie enclave) as a way to sell books or just an amusing way to pass the time (the way Norman Mailer ran for mayor of New York). The film makes clear that he was trying to mobilize the hippies who had newly settled there to vote for a “Freak Power” ticket, so they could have a say in the future of a place that seemed ripe to be ruined by speculation and development. Thompson eventually lost in a close election. Aspen is now full of celebrities and other rich fucks, who I’m sure smoke the dope Thompson wanted to decriminalize in the privacy of their multi-million dollar second (or third or fourth or twentieth) homes, where even if the cops caught them, they’d be let off–in the tradition of rich fucks everywhere, especially famous ones– with a small fine and maybe a friendly group photo.

The most heartbreaking part of the film is the coverage of the ’72 presidential campaign. Thompson had hated Nixon before it was fashionable: way before Watergate Thompson called Nixon (among other things) a “werewolf” and in the film footage we see in Nixon’s, tight, sharp-toothed smile and small shining dark eyes the resemblance–and that of our current bloodthirsty president too. Then we see archival footage of McGovern (who is also interviewed in the film) saying he doesn’t see any reason why we can’t withdraw from Vietnam and stop the killing of American soldiers. In that moment the folly of the Iraq War (and American politics in general) seems so clear and hopeless, because not only have we repeated the mistakes of history, but we have made kind of a crappy copy. Maybe I missed it, but not once have I heard Barack Obama denounce the war as unequivocally as McGovern does in the footage from ’72.

The movie posits the theory that because of Thompson’s continuing positive coverage in Rolling Stone (which became the book Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail) McGovern was able to gain the nomination after being dismissed as an underdog at the beginning of the primary race. The film also reveals that Thompson was a great proponent of Jimmy Carter, playing a tape recording to contemporaries of a Carter speech about the need for judicial reform, long before Carter announced his candidacy for the presidential race he would go on to win.

The film made me realize how much is lacking on the political scene today, not just another Hunter S. Thompson (there’s plenty of snark in columns, blogs and TV, but very few of the people responsible are running for office on a reform platform or actively promoting underdog candidates who will implement those reforms), but we also need another George McGovern. Sure Dennis Kucinich was against the war, ran for president (however briefly) and tried (and failed thanks to our do-nothing Congress) to impeach our criminal president. But the public had learned from the snarking columnists, bloggers and TV hosts to dismiss the one presidential candidate who used the word “peace” in nonreligious context with a giggle and a flip of the hand. I’m pretty much never nostalgic (no queer women should be), but for a little while Gonzo made me miss a world that could have been.

***

I had thought I had prepared myself. Before we had gone to the reunion I had explained to Guapa, “The folks who are going to the reunion have to be comfortable with three things.” I held up a finger, “What they’re doing with their lives right now,” I held up a second finger. “The way they look, including their weight right now.” I held up the last finger. “And they have to be comfortable being the age they are now.”

I liked the life I had led, even though, unlike the lives I imagined for most of my former classmates my life did not include a granite counter-top in the kitchen, a giant plasma-screen TV in the living room or a minivan, complete with child seats, in the driveway. I didn’t even have a driveway.

The morning of the reunion, perched on my stationary bike, I’d had a good view of my jiggling middle in the mirror, which had made me pedal harder–and feel a flood of gratitude that we were not required to attend the reunion naked–but which had not filled me with revulsion.

I had smiled and nodded and paid no attention the time an aspiring actress had said to me what other people had previously hinted, “You’d look so much younger if you dyed your hair.” I’d had my first white hairs at sixteen. My father had been gray since I was a baby. My mother had started dying her hair a couple of years before she had freaked out about turning forty. So I hadn’t been surprised when my hair had started to change color in my early thirties. I’d had plenty of time to ponder the irony that popular culture considered women like Madonna, Gwen Stefani, Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield and the dyke community’s favorite (in the 80s anyway) Annie Lennox, not just attractive, but the apex of sexiness with hair bleached platinum-blonde, aka: white. But that same culture considered careless and frumpy the women who allowed their hair to turn white without chemical interference. The bias against gray wasn’t always a bad thing. My silver hair had made me much less of a magnet for strange, straight men on the street than I’d been when I was younger—though the occasional color-blind guy, mistaking my silver hair for blond, would still latch onto me.

Looking at the faces, clothes and bodies of my former classmates I kept asking myself, “Am I forty-three the same way these people are forty-three?” I wasn’t dressed in some futuristic, anarcho-punk style; I’d left at home my black, vinyl, motorcycle jacket with the big yellow peace sign–along with the words “Peace, Love and PVC”–emblazoned on the back. Instead I was wearing other thrift store duds: black suede, slightly flared pants tight enough to act as a corset but not obviously so (except to anyone who witnessed my attempts to retrieve a napkin from the floor) with a long stretchy butt-hugging cropped-sleeve cardigan and black, flat-heeled, cowboy boots. But I looked different enough from the mall-wear clad women in the high-ceiled country club (overdue for renovation: it resembled a gymnasium more than I would have guessed) that I wondered if I seemed to them like some deluded sixty-something grandma sporting a pink faux-hawk, belly-baring crop-top and track pants that had the word “Juicy” spelled out on the ass.