Stephanie and I met through
zines. Everyone's next question is, "What are zines?"
Zines (rhymes with beans)
are amateur magazines, published on photocopy machines and sent through the
mail. Instead of thousands of copies, a zinemaker (or zinester) prints perhaps
twenty, perhaps a hundred copies; then he/she folds and staples and mails them
to anyone who expresses an interest. One of the best ways to express an
interest is by sending a zinester a couple of dollars. Another way is by
sending a zinester the zine you've created.
Zines were popular with a
tiny niche audience in the 1980s and '90s, before there was much of an
internet. Zines are still being published and mailed today, but the audience
has gotten smaller, since most folks find the internet easier. On the internet,
you don't have to send cash to a stranger and wait a week or two to receive
something you might or might not like. But the internet lacks a personal touch,
zine enthusiasts will tell you. And I'll tell you, if you haven't read zines
you don't know what you're missing.
Stephanie lived in Madison,
Wisconsin, and wrote and published a zine called Crawfish, which
sparkled with comedy and satire. Perhaps it's best likened to a good episode of
Saturday Night Live, only instead of sketches, a new and usually funny
article every few pages. Also, no musical guests or unfunny bits. I would
sprawl out in bed reading each issue, laughing a lot, and when I'd finished
reading I'd usually read it again.
I had written a zine, a day-to-day journal of my late 30s, after I’d given up on ever
finding love, working part-time at crap jobs, and living in a ramshackle San
Francisco residential hotel, sharing the room with rats and roaches. It was a
mildly mean-spirited homage to loneliness and poverty, with an occasional
chuckle if the words weren't too clumsy.
By this time, though, I had
stopped publishing my zine, and instead I was publishing a bigger zine, primarily focused on reviewing other zines. We hoped it would introduce readers to hundreds of zines
they'd never heard of. Stephanie and I had traded notes to each other along
with our zines, and I knew she had exactly the sharp wit I was looking for, so
I had asked her to review zines for our new zine. In that sense we’d been
colleagues or unpaid co-workers for almost two years.
Soon we were trading letters
instead of notes, and something about our personalities smoldered and
eventually sparked in those marvelous letters. In one, she wrote that the only
meaning of life is to be kind to others, and then she explained what she meant,
at length. In another, she mentioned that she'd earned a college degree and had
been well on her way toward a second but she'd dropped out instead. It takes
some serious guts, I wrote back, to reconsider something enormous like that,
and walk away when no doubt your friends and parents would be disappointed. She
once told me she'd thought flunking out of grad school was a major failing in
her life, but that she began falling in love with me when she read that line in
one of my letters.
Now that she’s gone, it
would be heavenly to re-read those letters and perhaps quote them at length,
but somewhere in our travels all those letters were lost. They exist only in my
heart.
At the time, I had maybe two
or three friends, and to my surprise one of them was this young single woman
I'd never met. So we decided to actually get together, face-to-face in the real
world. She booked a flight to California, and I met her at the airport. Her
plan was to stay for a week; she ended up staying two weeks and marrying me
(spoiler alert!).
I had never seen Stephanie
before that moment at the airport, not even a photograph of her. She didn’t
want me to see what she looked like, until we were face-to-face. Steph always
thought she was fat and never thought she was pretty, and preferred not to have
her picture taken. I'll tell you what I told her: She was plump but not really
fat (I was always the fat one), and maybe she wasn't a Vogue model, but she was
definitely an attractive woman.
So at San Francisco Airport
on a June evening in 1997, I didn't know who I was looking for. Didn't know
what Stephanie looked like, and she likewise didn't know what to expect when
she met me. That’s actually part of the allure of creating zines – on paper you
can't see a zinester's face, only a zinester's personality. So people who saw
themselves as ugly, or fat, or hideous, could connect with others and be judged
solely on the content of their characters.
At the gate, I watched a
parade of people stepping off the plane, and looked for one who seemed to be
about the age (26) and gender (female) I'd been led to expect. She was the
second 20-something woman to come off the plane alone, so she was the second
one I said "Steph?" to. The first one looked at me like I was crazy. The
second one smiled and said "Doug?" and we took up our conversation
where we'd left off in our letters.
Even that quick conversation
was remarkable, because conversations or social interactions with almost anyone
were difficult for both of us, yet conversations with each other were so very
easy, right from the start.
Was it love at first sight?
Yeah, it was, but there's more to it than that. Steph and I had already
exchanged dozens of letters, and our letters had some real content – not just a
lot of "How's the weather in Wisconsin?" and "How are the
earthquakes in California?" In our letters, we went on for pages and pages
about things that mattered to us, things we believed. So sure, it was love at
first sight, but we certainly weren't strangers at the airport. To a large
extent, we had already fallen in love via the mail. I was ¾-sure before I laid
eyes on her that she was the one, and Steph felt the same way.
As we walked down the
airport concourse and outside, then onto a Muni bus headed for San Francisco,
the words continued flowing easily between us. All our lives, we'd both been
the quiet and shy one, but there we were, riding the bus to my scuzzy hotel,
and talking with no hesitation at all. Two strangers were talking like best
friends, which, it turns out, is what we were from the moment we met.