Hippie Mask

A young man dances like no one is watching.

Mar 10, 2024

This is the fourth in the Old Truck Good Coffee Volley series, in which Leo and Joel respond to each other’s essays with an essay of their own. This piece by Leo responds to Joel’s work Mutual Aid, in which Joel describes some Portlandian approaches to Covid masking. Here, I write of Montana’s.

Tim looked up from his Blackfoot River brew and said, "Want to go see The Portland Cello Project in Missoula Tuesday night?" He is a young, red-cheeked man, deeply involved in our local LGBT Pride celebrations. He has told enough childhood stories for us to know his family would be appalled by beer, Portland, and likely cellos. He winked. Michael and I glanced to each other, then back to him, with our eyes lit up in a “yessss.”

Michael is my husband. About two years prior to this night, we had moved from Portland, Oregon, back home to Montana, to be near his aging parents in Helena. We closed on buying our new home - a historic old brick saltbox six blocks down from the copper-domed State Capitol building - on New Year's Day 2020.

Both of us were born and raised in Montana. Like most rural gays in the 1980s, we both fled home as soon as age allowed, to have some shot at a life outside the closet. What life that could be, or not, was just a bit different for gays in the 1980s than now, of course, due to a rather different epidemic. Back then, each new fuck meant one more shot at a long, slow, skin-spotted death, not one little blue pill a day, like today.

Eighties life ensued for both of us, his in Missoula and Seattle, and Portland for my own. At least the music was good. Then, after a three and one half decades living in the Pacific Northwest, two of these together in Portlandia while it was still twee enough to be mocked for bird-slathered clutch purses instead of civil rights riots, on April Fool's Day 2020 our U-Haul pulled into the driveway of our next life back in Montana. "Ha-ha fucking ha," is how I often punchline that date, to check how folks remember the year that tried to kill us all.

As we drove up to our new Helena home, maps full of circles over cities kept refreshing on our phones, offering updates on a then-newly creeping disease. Between the maps were links to articles illustrating how to bend people in their beds to best promote lung drainage, assuming you dared enter your grandmother’s bedroom before she died.

Slipping all that happy news back into our pockets, we jumped from the truck and unlocked our new front door, to our new Helena home, and stepped into our new front hallway. The air was fresh, the light was clear, and our bathrooms were fully stocked with toilet paper. Michael's brother had set us up with household basics before we arrived. Next to some mid-grade champagne on the kitchen counter, our real estate agent left a letter informing us that state law required us to quarantine inside our new home for ten days on arrival from out of state. Michael had not seen his mom in person for over two years. Ten minutes later she drove up in her little green Ford Ranger. She waved to us from the sidewalk, and set cookies on our porch.

Six months after that quarantine order had enraged Montana’s local social media, fueled by a deluge of out-of-state cash, a thin blood-red wave flowed over Montana's traditionally purple politics. On his first day in office, the newly Republican governor of Montana — a tech-wealthy New Jersey-born evangelical, who once body-slammed a political reporter on camera for asking a question he did not like — issued an executive order declaring it illegal to require masks or vaccination outside the enclosed boundaries of a state-licensed medical facility. Within days, masks began vanishing. Within weeks, public mask-wearing risked side-eye in the grocery aisle, snide comments, and public arguments. Vaccination became a chilly topic broached only after cautious assessment of presumed social views.

Early into the pandemic, the ratio of masked to unmasked remained fairly high in Helena, which is a small blue island in a thin red rural sea. But, this number slipped throughout 2021. By that Summer, while most would still keep social distance in a movie line, before crowding into the auditorium, masks were rare.

By early 2022, masks had evolved into a political provocation by those still daring to wear them. Uncertainty over their utility had quickly led to a widespread preference for convenience and airflow, both personal and political. Michael and I kept masks handy for tactical use, always wondering how well even the newly famous, all-powerful N95 mask actually worked over our bushy beards. We mused over whether we would or should ever shave our faces for the sake of an unclear public safety. How public safety related to so charged a signifier as male facial hair. Few things are sensitive for a big gay bear like his beard.

Catching Covid seemed inevitable, and eventually we did. We also had vaccines and boosters on board, so the effects were fairly mild for both of us when it happened, just some fever and aches. My sense of taste vanished for 36 hours, then returned in the middle of a bite of soup. One moment there was a faint saltiness in my mouth, and the next had the whole damn chicken.

Half of our local family refused to vaccinate at all. A fact we quickly learned there was no point in discussing if Sunday dinner were to end in peace. At one point Michael’s brother-in-law was turned away from the local hospital with Tylenol and an oxygen tank, late one night when he could barely breathe. He had refused vaccination. They were full.

He lived. We still don't mention vaccines at Sunday dinner.

So yes, two full years from our April Fool's return to Montana, yes, we very much wanted to see the Portland Cello Project, yes. Oh, yes. All the yes. Just to see if, yes, we were still weird enough for Portland. Or, perhaps too much so, now, or even the wrong kind.

Come that Tuesday, we jumped in the back of Tim's shiny white Volkswagen sedan to head up to Missoula for the show. Missoula is 113 miles from Helena, or just “up the road a bit” by Big Sky reckoning. Less than two hours later — the interstate speed limit here is 80 mph — we were ordering Mexican food on South Higgins, this particular college town's "buskers and bookstores" street.

Down the block, The Wilma awaited. The Wilma is a recently refurbished old main street movie palace and hotel, now turned riverside concert hall covered in pricy condos. It was formerly owned by the short and notorious Pacific Northwest porn king, Tracie Blakeslee, a scion of Missoula best known for his fading “Fantasy for Adults Only" (née “Miss Kitty’s”) chain of movie booth and sex toy shops. A few years back he had sold The Wilma to Logjam Presents, a concert production company anchoring the musical wing of a newly dominant weed, brew, and music empire in Montana. So, it is now owned by beer-slinging pot dealers instead of a five foot four inch porn lord. Missoula can be weird, too.

An hour later, with bellies full of chips and chimichangas, plus a couple of bad fat-goblet Margaritas, the four of us weaved down the block and into the concert hall, mask-free, just like everyone else. We had had our shots and boosters. Besides, no one asked, or would. No one can see your vaccination status without asking for a card and believing what it says, whether to morally judge you, enforce their property rights, or try their best to protect public health so less old and infirm people die from fluid in their lungs. No doorman in Montana was going to vax-card anyone, though. Not when the Governor1, the Attorney General2, and two-thirds of the State Legislature3 were ready to prosecute them for the attempt. Not even in Missoula, a town lefty enough to elect a Trans person to represent them in our state house, where she was later silenced by its Republican leadership4. So the four of us showed our tickets, strolled inside, and took our last-minute balcony seats, breathing in all the unmasked air we wanted, along with anything and everything else it carried, including several dank whiffs of weed. This crowd was ready to party.

Lights dimmed. Six cellos walked across the stage and were planted between twelve legs. A seventh long set of legs stood off to one side before a tall mic-stand. Emcee? Singer? Sex appeal? Whatever her, his, or their non-cello bearing role, they were winsome, graceful, beautiful. This lovely one of pointedly-uncertain gender began jamming and trembling seductively in a diaphanous slip, erotically stroking their mic-pole as they crooned to sweeping tones groaning up from the stroking bows. It was fun. Lovely. Weird.

That graceful slip shimmying to the cello tones on stage had an echo up in our balcony. Down front of our section, a tall and uncertainly boyish creature with long dark hippie hair and his own maroon slip of a dress writhed happily against the brass balcony rail. Popping in time with his visual companion down at the mic, our dancing balcony boy was sweaty, grooving hard and relentlessly for over an hour. His trim beard poked out around his dress-matched mask. Were we to speak could I call him a man? Would they consent, or would she angrily reject an imperfect attempt to correctly guess their gender expression? Best to not even try. But, they were the sexy balcony show and they knew it. “His” skin glistened. Everyone nearby basked in his gender-fucked party-boy glow. Droplets of evaporating sweat and mask-leaked breath vaporized around him, invisibly clouding his cramped surroundings with viral aerosols of whatever he might be carrying - Covid? Influenza? Pheromones? - all while he bopped happily along with Portland's throbbing cellos. You could all but smell him where we sat.

Many in our balcony section seemed to enjoy this show as much as the one we paid to see on stage. His mask matched his dress. His mask hid his smile. His was the one and only mask anywhere in sight that night.

Was he some ranch kid in from Judith Gap, now turned ballsy university frosh, sporting a first-time genderfuck in his gal-pal’s slinky dress. One she happened to equip with a matching mask? Was he some enby5 coastal kid, likewise now a university frosh, using agitprop to inform us Montanans how we should all be wearing masks, even when we are dancing, huffing, and sweating on everyone else in the area? So many questions.

None of us got sick the following week. We each had shots onboard. We each took the risk. We each chose to sit in a vapor-laden crowd. We watched, we listened, we grooved, and we drove home chattering about which part of the show we each enjoyed the most: the music, the dancing, or the vividly hot performance of a mask.

Hippie Mask

A young man dances like no one is watching.

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