For You, The Stars
Chapter Seven: I Need You Tonight
Installment 1
When I got back to San Fransciso I told Cecilia about my one-off in Brooklyn and she didn’t seem to mind, found it a little amusing, did want to be reassured that she was way prettier than the other girl (which she was), and possibly took it as a bit of a competitive challenge, since as far I knew she hadn’t yet acted on our open-relationship deal.
We continued going out dancing a lot. No used to much exercise, I was thinner than I’d ever been and was really enjoying having a new wardrobe and feeling like I was attractive. I allowed my taste in music to flex in order to accommodate Cecilia’s. As a pretend 18-year old club kid, she liked the dance music that was popular at the moment, this included whatever Duran Duran’s current hit was, George Michael’s song about Faith and wanting to be your father figure, and INXS. I related mostly to the way the Bo Diddley beat had survived the Sixties by way of “I Want Candy” and found its way into these late ’80s pop hits.
“I think George Michael’s kind of gay, though,” I said to Cecilia.
“No way!” she said. “He’s totally macho. Look at that stubble.”
“That’s hairdresser stubble,” I said. “Who looks like that in real life?”
We did agreed that the Beatles had started off as a boy band with ooh-ooh love-you hit songs and that for all we knew Duran Duran might become profound someday as well.
One day we got a phone call from Bella at my place telling us that a friend from college was going to be in town and wanted to get together with Cecilia. The guy, Raoul Fourier, was a friend of Bella’s but I’d never been friendly with him. He had grown up in Paris and New York and spoke without an accent and affected a tough-guy French-gangster sort of way of talking. My impression was that he was immensely wealthy, or his family was at least. He claimed to be doing “import/export” whatever that means. He had hung around with the Eurotrash kids at school and in fact had been friends with this other French guy whom I had run into several times in my life, always falling afoul of him.
I met the other French guy for the first time as a twelver-year-old one summer in Westhampton. His name was Artur Brecque and he was gawky and awkward. I was having trouble fitting in myself, finding my place in a new crowd in a sort of athletic summer-camp type environment. I wasn’t too chubby yet, still retaining my pre-pubescent metabolism and ability to eat without consequences, but I was small and had trouble excelling at tennis and golf. I loved the ocean, though, spending many afternoons that summer riding the waves until my skin was soft as butter, then taking hot open air showers in the cabanas and eating grilled burgers or buckets of steamers for dinner at the beach club.
We also went sailing a lot, taking out little sunfishes and dinghies and learning the basics of tacking and hoisting the sails and such. I didn’t do that well in races but I loved the feeling of being out on the water under my own volition.
Brecque was hopeless in a boat, though, always gettign tangled in the sheets and frequently falling in the water. Having a spaz with a foreign accent around really helped me establish myself socially by giving me someone to pick on. I bonded with the snooty other rich kids by mocking the newcomer, and his family didn’t come back the next summer, so I more or less forgot about him.
A few years later I went away to boarding school and discovered after a month or so that Artur was living in one of the other freshman dorms. Remembering the lanky loser of just a few years ago, I tried to score some points by disparaging him, telling tales of his lameness from a few summers back. What I didn’t realize was that Brecque was an “old boy” already, a student who had started at the school in what I would call eighth grade. He was therefore automatically more established and cooler than the new kids like me, who were called Beanies after a long-dead tradition of making first-year students wear little caps throughout the fall.
Word got back to Brecque that I had been making fun of him and he didn’t respond in any overt way, but I quickly figured out that my smart-alecky attempt to take him down hadn’t won me any status and had in fact made me suspect in the eyes of others. I had to watch my back for the rest of that year, always expecting some kind of retribution, since the school was full of pranksters and bullies. Ironically, no actual punishment ever came, which meant that I could never rest easy.
Finally, in college, I’d met Fourier and somehow ended up telling him all about my earlier two encounters with Artur Brecque before he revealed to me that they were old friends. I began to feel like this fellow was some kind of harlequin nemesis who would dog my heels for the rest of my life.
So now Fourier was in town and he wanted to see us? That made no sense to me. Cecilia told me that she’d met him when visiting Bella in New York a year or so ago. She implied that they’d either flirted or made out or even fooled around. I told her that I’d never really liked him much and she said he was a cool guy and we didn’t exactly argue but we agreed to disagree.
Cecilia said she wanted to go out and have a drink with Raoul and I said I’d stay home. She said she might go back to his hotel afterward and I said fine. When Raoul came by my place I greeted him coolly and gave Cecilia a kiss on the cheek as she went out the door.
About an hour later she called and said she was going to come back and spend the night in my room, as usual. When she did come back I asked her why she didn’t hang out at the hotel with Raoul.
“I don’t know,” she said. “He’s cool and all, but I wasn’t into it.”
“Did he kiss you?”
“Oh yeah. We made out a little.”
I felt jealous hearing this, despite our rule.
“I told him what you said about me having curves designed by Einstein and he agreed.”
“That was big of him.”
“I don’t know. It just wasn’t happening. Why didn’t you make a big deal when I went off with him anyway?”
“Well, first of all, we have a rule that it’s OK, remember?
“And secondly, it’s like at the clubs - you could spend time with him but he’s just visiting and I figured you’d be back with me eventually.”
“That’s what he said. He kind of told me to he was bored and suggested I leave.”
I thought maybe Raoul didn’t see the point of stealing my girl if I wasn’t going to get upset about it. We went to bed and I felt sort of pleaed about the way things had worked out but not exactly happy.
For You, The Stars
Chapter Six: The Memphis Blues Again
Installment 4
Simone sent word through Dave that she wanted to talk to me and she promised not to yell or break anything and I felt I owed her a sit down so I agreed. We met at a coffeeshop and it was clear to me that she was still trying to get the story straight of how we had broken up.
“You were already seeing her, weren’t you?” she asked me.
“We’d met already by then.”
“No, I mean you started going out with her before we were over, didn’t you?”
“Not really.”
“Did you have sex with her?”
“No,” I lied. “But we did kiss.”
“You asshole,” she said. “You should have told me.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know what to say.” We were both tearing up again.
“I need to ask you something else,” she said.
“What is it?”
“When we were in New York, that night we went to Unos…”
“Yes?”
“Did you make a pass at my friend Judy?”
“What? No way.”
“She says you did.”
“That’s crazy! You were there the whole time.”
“She says that when I was in the bathroom you tried to hit on her.”
“No fucking way.”
“Well, I didn’t believe here when she told me, but now I’m not so sure.”
I continued to insist that this was totally impossible. I felt that it didn’t ring true and that her bitch of a friend had just been trying to mess things up. The truth was, though, that we had all been pretty drunk that night and my memories weren’t so clear. Was it possible that I had said something suggestive to her friend? I suppose it was. Though if I had then she had totally been playing along with me, I’m sure. It would just be like one of Simone’s damn friends to flirt with me behind her back and then report back to her later that I had been a creep.
I went back east myself for a visit in the spring and had my first chance to take advantage of the “openness” of my deal with Cecilia. Maybe it was easier when she wasn’t around.
My friend Pierce, an artist originally from Alabama, invited me to a party on the upper-west side. She was a few years away from AA and drinking pretty heavily at the time, combining avoiding her family and trying to make it as a painter in a city that was more interested in video installations. At the time the downtown art scene only embraced paintings by noble savages.
At the party, thrown by another artist, we ran into a few other refugees from my college’s thin art-punk stratum, the people who listened to Violent Femmes and the Cure. Someone had painted the bathtub in a range of green hues. The evening went by in a sort of a haze. At one point I remember Pierce coming up to me and solemnly placing a potato chip on each of my knees.
I ran into a girl I had known vaguely at school. We got to talking and it turned out she remembered me. Over drinks she confessed that she’d “always had a thing for me.” Why was I finding this out now? This wasn’t the first time in New York that a woman from the old gang had told me they’d nursed a crush on me. “You don’t know how much I’d have wanted to know that at the time,” I said to one of them, Jenny Lin. Usually they’d be telling me this with wistful regret, in a now-it’s-too-late kind of way, but this one - I’m ashamed to admit I forget her name - was making it clear to me that it wasn’t too late at all.
“Where do you live now?” I asked her.
“Brooklyn,” she said. “Want to get out of here?”
I said sure. We went out to Broadway and caught a cab. We were pretty drunk and were really going at each other in the back seat. Nothing lewd. We were just kissing, but it was sloppy drunk kissing.
On the highway something weird happened. The cab started slowing down and the cabbie steered us onto the shoulder.
“What’s going on?” I asked from over her shoulder.
“I run out of gas.”
“What? That’s insane.”
“I am sorry, but I run out of gas.”
“Oh, man!”
We got out of the backseat and stood behind the cab in the middle of the night on the way to Brooklyn. I put out my arm and within five minutes hailed another cab. Without looking back we climbed in and left our hapless first driver behind. We re-commenced to making out.
Long story short, We spent the night in her bed messing around in every way we could come up with. She really wasn’t my type physically. Kind of bony, prominent cheekbones, odd proportions. It was pure lust. She was talented, too. I remember thinking that this must be what a lot of people do: hook up at parties, have one night stands.
For You, The Stars
Chapter Six: The Memphis Blues Again
Installment 3
On the ride back to Cecilia’s sister’s place I sat in the back seat and she sat in the passenger seat up front. I carried on a falsely macho conversation with Mike, talking about Cecilia’s charms as if she weren’t there. I told him about the time she’d posed for me wearing nothing up top except for suspenders, strategically positioned to cover her areolas, mentioning that it made her look like a Hustler cover girl. He knew exactly what I meant.
I wasn’t sure what he had in mind, but when we got up to San Rafael, he let us out of the car and declined to “come in for a nightcap.” Afterward, I joked to Cecilia that we could have had a threeway and that if he had gotten on top of her he might have been in for a surprise.
A week later we went to a party together at Parnassus. It felt funny being there with my girlfriend. I was so used to flirting like a free agent, even when I had been going out to Simone. It wasn’t like being at a disco, where we’d split up and try to dance with strangers and kind of compete for who could flirt with or attract more people before - always so far - going home together. That would have been weird in front of my friends.
Otherwise the scene was the same: the loud music, the grad-school intellectuals, dancing in the livingroom, passing out on the couches. Dannie was there. She kept her distance from me and I didn’t tell Cecilia that she was the one I’d cheated on Simone with.
In the morning, when we were discussing where to grab breakfast, there as the usual contingent for bloodies at Walnut Square and Dannie was pressing for the boulangerie, where we could get “fresh croissants” (said in a thick French accent). What had seeemed charming to me on previous occasions now appeared pretentious when looked at through Cecilia’s eyes. Afterward, we could crack each other up by imitating the way Dannie pronounced croissant (cwa-son).
Most weekends I’d take the bus up to Marin. It got to be such a routine that more than once I fell asleep on the bus, only waking at the end of the line. Then I’d have to call Cecilia from the bus station pay phone and she’d have toget her sister or brother-in-law to come pick me up. It was embarassing but they were always nice about it.
I was still getting phone calls over at the big gomer house from the Scientologists, so whenever I missed the bus downtown I’d walk around, trying to avoid running into the recruiters. Sometimes I’d wander over to the nearby strip club with its peep show arcade upstairs. I caught myself wondering: why am I paying to watch dancers or buying a lap dance or spending time in a nasty booth looking at porn clips for four minutes a quarter when just an hour away is my own voluptuous little bundle of sex? I never did figure that one out.
The weekends were splendid. The weather was almost always perfect and we didn’t seem to have any qualms about getting baked when we were watching over Cecilia’s niece. We had this method of smoking pot where we’d fire up the bong and one of us would take a deep, deep hit. Then we’d kiss and exhale the smoke into each other’s lungs. We figured we were using the drug more efficiently that way - plus it was an excuse to make out.
I got into the habit of calling in sick on Mondays so I could stay an extra day. At first it happened by mistake, from oversleeping, but after a while it was just too hard to tear myself away just to make it into the office for another boring day of sorting mail, filing, and manipulating numbers in a spreadsheet.
Mondays were the best because then we had the house to ourselves. We’d often spend the whole afternoon sunbathing in the nude, with the baby in her playpen in the shade nearby. One time, I was lying on my back and Cecilia was playing with my hair. We started talking about my receding hairline.
By now my hair was long enough that I tended to wear it swept back. I had the young Jack Nicholson thing going on around my temples. sharing bong hits. “As long as you keep combing it back, never forward,” she said. “You’ll be fine.”
Somehow Cecilia always found time to meet strange people, either at clubs or through her Marin friends. One time she took me over to the house of a drug dealer she’d met. I wasn’t sure what the point was, because we weren’t buying anything. After a while I realized that she was trying to show me off as her “smart” friend. The guy, Antonio, had a strange obsession with puzzles and quizzes and he started kind of testing me. His girlfried sat there on another couch never saying a word.
Most of these things I’d heard years ago. At boarding school we’d had a Logic Club that met on Wednesday nights and was mostly an excuse to eat pizza and get out of our dorms. We had the two math and logic puzzle books by James Fixx and after a while we’d run through all the items in both books. Over the years since then whenever someone brought out one of these things I’d recognize them as coming from “Games for the Superintelligent” or its sequel. I learned eventually to pretend not to know the answers because people get uncomfortable if you appear too smart, even if it’s only because you know this one.
So I’m drinking a beer on this guy’s couch and he is getting more and more animated because I’m answering all his puzzles and quickly, in an off-hand way. Cecilia likes it. She has summoned me to do gladitorial battle and once again I’m in an awkward position on her behalf.
I end up sitting at this guy’s kitchen table while he goes and gets out a full-on IQ test and starts working his way through the questions. By now my competitive urge is engaged so I’m not dogging it but really trying to get to the answer. Even a little drunk and always a little high I still manage to get on streak, making no mistakes at all.
As I answer the questions he looks them up in the back of his booklet (and, like, who collects IQ tests anyway?) and each time seems more astonished that I’m on this roll. Suddenly, it feels weird, as if I’m revealing too much, and when Antonio wants to start a new test I start begging off. When we’ve extricated ourselves from his apartment I tell Cecilia not to put me in a position like that again.
“You were totally into it,” she said.
“No,” I said. “People don’t like you if you’re too smart.”
For You, The Stars
Chapter Six: The Memphis Blues Again
Installment 2
We met Bo and Seth at the appointed place, a particular but random gate number that we used in every venue. Bo didn’t know Cecilia that well and as we stood around waiting to see if anyone would wander by, they compared musical taste, quizzing each other. Most Deadheads claimed to like “every type of music except for—” and it was the exceptions that made the difference.
For example, my friends would probably say they liked every type of music except for heavy metal, or if they thought about it a little harder, except for rap.
But Cecilia loved heavy metal, or just metal, a cooler name for the same thing. Her “except for” was definitely country music, which totally sounded hokey to her. She of course loved rap because she loved dancing at clubs. No one bothered arguing with each other though, because there was no point.
Nobody was going to convince anyone to like a kind of music they had ruled out, even if you found the outliers or the undeniable greats, the Hank Williamses, the LL Cool J’s, the Led Zeppelins. People would just concede the exception and continue to condemn the rest of the genre. Once Cecilia started praising Def Leppard and the ineffable charms of “Pour Some Sugar On Me” Bo had already stopped seriously listening.
Cecilia said she was going to wander around for a bit, so Bo and Seth told her where our seats were and she disappeared down the hallway, weaving among the spinners and the stoned-out kiddies. Bo and Seth had saved seats for us, nearly as high as the ones we’d climbed to in the back of the auditorium, but about halfway closer to the stage. I settled into my seat and wondered where Cecilia had gotten herself to.
About one song into the second set, she appeared with some guy, a little taller than me, with short dark hair. He wasn’t quite a guido, not quite a “yo” but something about him was off-putting.
“Who’s your friend?” I yelled in her ear. “His name’s Mike,” she said. “He said he can give us a ride home after the show.”
“To San Francisco?”
“No, to Marin. He wants to fool around. I’m going to hang out with him for the rest of the show. I’ll meet you back here for the encore.”
While we were talking, he was standing back a little ways.
“Well, don’t kiss him in front of my friends,” I said. “That would be too weird.”
The second set went by in a blur, with the drugs peaking after the pair of medleys that led into the extended drums-and-weirdness experimental section of the set.
My friends and I danced ourselves into a slick set for the rockabilly bop of “Goin’ Down the Road, Feelin’ Bad” out of space, boogied to the faux-Berry raveup “I Need a Miracle” and reached a kind of staring-into-each-other’s eyes epiphany during the soaring cover of Traffic’s “Dear Mr. Fantasy,” particularly the second guitar solo, which cut through the murk of the rollicking multi-instruments not-all-totally-in-synch sound with a piercing electric howl that raised the rafters of the Kaiser.
That song wound down into a non-sequitur Hey Jude coda (just the “na na na nana na na” part from the end), and then the set was over.
Around the time the encore was ending, Cecilia reappeared with Mike. I wasn’t sure if she wanted me to go home with my friend on BART, but I also wasn’t that keen on this guy taking her back to her place and fooling around. I knew what our deal was, but I was feeling competitive.
“Did you say he’d give us both a ride?” I asked.
She said yes, but she also went over to Mike to make sure. Then she came back to me and said, “He says yes.” He was eyeing me like he didn’t know what my deal was. Maybe Cecilia didn’t even tell him we were going out?
For You, The Stars
Chapter Six: The Memphis Blues Again
Installment 1
In March we decided on the spur of the moment to try to make it to the Dead’s Mardi Gras show at the Kaiser. We didn’t have tickets but we had enough faith in serendipity that we figured something would come up. A couple of my gomer friends were going to be there and we had plans for where to meet before the show and during the set break in case either of us managed to snag better seats.
On the BART ride over to Oakland, Cecilia worked her pretty girl mystique on a middle aged hippie sitting across the car from us and he ended up giving her his extra ticket. We got off at the Lake Merritt station near Laney College and walked over to the Kaiser. The traveling bazaar was in full swing in the little park across from the auditorium.
A few minutes patrolling the street between the park and the venue made me realize that there was too much competition for extras, and I had a brainstorm. Cecilia and I headed back toward BART in hopes of intercepting someone before they fully arrived. She did the asking for tickets since we figured people were more likely to sell their extras to her, even if they could see she was with someone. In the end a youngish woman in overalls sold me her extra for face and we were all set.
We doubled back to the show, got in line, and scored and ate some blotter acid all in a jumble. By the time we got inside the first set had already started. The shrieking lead guitar sounds signaled “Hell in a Bucket.”
We couldn’t find any decent seats so we went down to floor and found ourselves weaving around the loosely packed crowd during the long bluesy “Sugaree.” This was only Cecilia’s third or fourth Dead show and I had been schooling her with my best cassette tapes. She recognized the doomed femme fatale storyline of “Sugaree” and knew to anticipate not one, not two, but three towering jams.
The next few songs passed by in a blur, as we continued moving from place to place on the floor like vagabonds. We were both of us short people, so we usually couldn’t see that well. If we got in front of the soundboard it started getting packed so tight that it made kind of claustrophobic. We ended up hovering around the middle of the audience and when the band starting the cascading intro to “Stuck Inside of Mobile with Memphis Blues Again” I took my girl by the hand and led her into the cleared walkway that surrounded the soundboard.
We half-danced, half-marched around the large square, making it around three or four times before finally one of the ushers kindly told us that enough was enough. The purple and green lights shone on her face as we laughed at the silliness of it all and enjoyed the pure playfulness of skipping together through a crowd with such majestic music accompanying our steps.
“She just smoked my eyelids/ and punched my cigarette” I growled in her face. The buzz on the floor was so animated that we hardly noticed the short breaks between songs. The dragged-out reggae lullaby “Row Jimmy” started up. I was by now feeling the acid and I started yelling something about a certain guitar lick that showed up halfway through the song and how great this one was and how I first heard it at Alpine Valley and did she remember the echoey version from the Bob Fried memorial show in 1975 and was she enjoying the tape I’d given her with Blues for Allah on one side and From the Mars Hotel on the other?
I pointed up at the back corner of the seats, where they thinned out to rows of five, then three, then one. “Let’s go up there,” I said. “You can site on my lap and we can fuck.”
“I don’t know…” said Cecilia. Usually pretty game for adventure, she was feeling a bit paranoid about trying something like that in public. “Let’s go up there and see how it feels, at least,” I said.
We went to the back of the floor and into the hallways, then we stomped up the weirdly twisting ramp that was guaranteed to disorient anyone wandering up to the second landing. The sonics were echoey and strange and people were hooting and laughing and shouting and gibbering all around us. We came out on the aisle, Phil side, and started heading straight up to the back.
No one paid any attention to us and I was thinking that my plan might actually work. By now the band was playing a typically first-set-ending “Let it Grow.” We made it all the way to the top and sure enough the back row of just a few seats was empty, as was the next few rows in front of it. From up there the crowd on the floor looked like a seething jumble of souls from some medieval festival or a strangely celebratory take on the sufferers in a Heironymous Bosch painting.
I sat on a seat in the back row and Cecilia sat in my lap, hitching up her little skirt. I could feel her warmth against my crotch. I kissed the back of her neck and her hair tickled my nose. I put my hands on her breasts but she moved them down to her bare tummy. She said something to me but I couldn’t hear it over the thundering bass and the climbing braid of guitars.
I could sense she was too self-conscious and to be honest I felt like even though the nearby crowd was mesmerized by the tiny figures, it was all-too-possible that a spinning hippie chick or wiggly dude would turn and see us if we got too nasty in public. So I decided not to push my luck. Cecilia stay in my lap through the false ending of the song though, rocking and sliding a bit like a lap dancer, but in an almost joking playful way. We got up and danced to the end of the set before going off to meet my friends at the rendezvous.
For You, the Stars
Chapter Five: Paid in Full
Installment 4
One night we were getting ready to go out and Cecilia asked me to roll a joint that we could offer to the owner of the club we were hitting, just to curry favor with him. While I didn’t enjoy posturing or pretending to be someone I wasn’t, for the most part I was willing to take her lead in how to relate to the management of these discos. If it got us into a VIP room or sped up our entrances when there was a line behind the velvet gate, then sure, I was happy to give away a joint’s worth of weed.
I rolled it up and stuck it in my pocket. One of Cecilia’s friends drove us to the club. When we got inside we split up like we ordinarily did to check out the scene and meet strangers. After about 45 minutes we ran into each other near the bar and Cecilia grabbed me and took me to the owner’s office.
On the way there we converged with the guy. He was in his mid-forties. Kind of short like me. Wearing a suit with an open collar. He didn’t seem too cheesy to me. Cecilia introduced me as her friend.
“Here,” I said, pulling the number out of my pocket and holding it out to him.
“No, thanks,” he said, waving it away and flinching.
When we got to his office and he closed the door, he said, “I can’t be seen accepting drugs from you in public.”
I handed over the joint and felt like an idiot. After that I was pretty bored with the conversation. The office was tacky and the guy didn’t seem to have that much going on.
It was obvious to me that he was trying to impress Cecilia. She never believed me when I told her that nearly every guy she met was trying to get into her pants (or, since she almost never wore underwear - couldn’t abide panty lines - into her skirt). She was almost deliberately naive, wanting to believe she was simply very popular, with men at least, and that everyone had the best of intentions.
To me, though, it was obvious. I was a guy. I knew how guys think. I wasn’t even especially jealous. We had this open thing. She could do what she wanted. I felt more protective than anything else. I felt like I needed to teach her about how the world really works. It was almost as if she was so disconnected from sex that she didn’t understand that her sexiness, her provocative ways of dressing and flirting, inevitably led me on.
Even though she was having no orgasms, our sex life continued to be very active. There was no real drop off as we settled into the familiarity of a post-infatuation relationship. In fact, for all of our openness, neither of us had yet slept with anyone else. I wasn’t trying all that hard myself, and I suspect that there wasn’t much appeal to it for Cecilia as long as she could get intention without giving up the sex that she wasn’t all that interested anyway.
That way she had me to come home to no matter way, which I gather was somewhat comforting. I may not have been as good looking as most of her other boyfriends, nor as buff and athletic, but I was feeling more confident of my looks: I was thinner, my hair was getting long, I was dressing better.
We used to joke that I made her smart and she made me cool. I didn’t have to do that much to make her smart. She was smart. I just had to point that out to her, that she was figuring things out for herself, that she was shrewd, that the dumb blonde act wasn’t working on me.
She was always giving me little pointers, like when I put on sweat socks and she made sure I scrunched them down around my ankles. She was kind of like an antidote for dorkiness for me.
One rainy day we were walking from my house to the other Gomer house. We didn’t go over there much but they had the good TV and we wanted to sit around and watch videos. It was raining rightly. I was feeling romantic, so after we passed the corner store that we called the orc-store (based on an unconsciously racist joke drawn from dungeons and dragons that associated the Palestinian store keepers with subhuman half-orcs from the quintessential dork role-playing game), I grabbed her and pushed her into a door way and started kissing her.
Cecilia liked it when I was aggressive with her and she responded, putting her arms around me and kissing back. As I kissed her and fondled her tits through her top she put her hand between my legs and felt that I was aroused. She unzipped me and took out my cock. I put my hands below her miniskirt and palmed her round little ass.
Probing further I felt that she was wet. We both had the same idea at the same time and she hitched herself up and slid down on me. I held her tight as we made love on a public street in the rain.
I wasn’t one for fucking standing up. I’d tried it before with Simone and my college girlfriend but just to get things lined up right usually required somebody to stand on something and then a kind of unnatural squat-thrusting to make things work. It turned out the Cecilia and I were a slightly better fit. She hooked one leg around me and I pushed her up against the doorway.
I remember hoping that no one tried to come out that door. Also, I think - though I can’t be positive - that Belinda and Gardner passed us on the way to the big house. I had my back turned to the street so I couldn’t be sure, but I saw familiar shapes go by in the dark with my peripheral vision. Fortunately it was evening and the cloud shielded us somewhat from the view of passing strangers.
Of course the publicness of our escapade was part of the thrill. The fear of getting caught.
Cecilia wasn’t on the pill. When we screwed, we used condoms, but I wasn’t wearing one now, of course, because we hadn’t planned this. On those occasions where we did mess around without a rubber I’d ordinarily be sure to pull out before the big event.
This time, however, I felt possessed. Something told me she wanted me to be reckless. As I got to the breaking point, I just bit her earlobe and let loose inside her.
Of course she didn’t come. As we wound down and then started putting our clothes back together, Cecilia said, “Why did you come inside me?” She didn’t sound angry but she wasn’t happy about it either.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know what came over me. I’m sorry.”
“Well,” she said. “Nothing we can do about it now.”
As we walked the rest of the way up the block she told me she could feel it dripping down her leg. She said it made her feel nasty, in a good way.
For You, The Stars
Chapter Five: Paid in Full
Installment 3
We liked Todd’s three-foot bong so much we went out and bought our own. We named it Max. You actually had to have someone else light it for you.
I was really enjoying having a girlfriend who was as into partying as I was, although it also felt a little unnerving at times realizing that I wasn’t the crazy one in the relationship. In the past I had relied on whomever I was with to hold the reins and suggest that maybe we should tone it down a bit. It felt weird being the relatively responsible one.
Cecilia had an ecstasy connection in Marin and we started doing some nearly every weekend. Usually we’d go out and dance at a club. I had tried x in college, snorting it painfully, but had mostly stuck to acid and mushrooms. I remembered PJ O’Rourke describing ecstasy as “St. Joseph’s Baby Acid.” It was a good dance drug, though. I had to give it that.
She liked to flirt with the doormen and bouncers at clubs. She knew the guys who worked the door at DV8, mostly huge black guys, and they didn’t act all that happy to meet me when she introduced me, even though she was vague about our relationship. She called me her friend.
This was part of the openness of our relationship. When we went out dancing we agreed that we could mix with other people and cruise around, although every time we seemed to end up sticking together at the end of the night. Also, she went out dancing with her girlfriends sometimes so she had had a chance to get to know this scene - and the guys who worked the doors at all the clubs.
I think she led them on terribly. One time she got us a ride with a bouncer name Wayne from one club to another. It was a two-seater Corvette, so Cecilia was on my lap. Wayne flirted with her shamelessly in front of me.
“When am I gonna get a little ‘legroom’?” he asked her, parting his massive thighs.
She just acted like she had no idea what he was talking about.
Wayne had driven us to a new club that had just opened. Cecilia was always trying to scam her way in without paying the cover fee. She could lie shamelessly and I think she wanted to feel like part of the “in” crowd.
A few weeks before she’d met some folks from LA while out with her girlfriends and one of them had said that he was the part owner of a new club down there. She was really taken with that idea and got it into her head that I could pretend to be a co-owner of that new club to get us both in. I was reluctant to do this because it just seemed so obviously false to me. She didn’t have that same inhibition or sense of embarassment.
We went up to the door and Cecilia introduced me. “He’s one of the owners of Celestial, that new club in LA?”
The guy at the door seemed bored and unimpressed.
“Tell them,” she said to me.
“Tell them what?”
“Oh, forget it.”
One weekend when we were hanging out at my place, we were curious about how it would feel to mix mushrooms and ecstasy. It turned out to be a pretty interesting feeling. More psychedelic than the typical MDMA trip but also more cozy and “safe” feeling than the typical hallucinogenic escapade.
We were also having beers, so we had to be real careful about not getting dehydrated.
About three hours into it Cecilia declared that she felt “perfect.” She perched on the back of a chair in the and said, “I don’t need to do anything. I’m perfect just like this.”
She did look radiant. Her face was beautifully blissful, turned toward the slanting rays of the sun filtering in though the living room windows.
Seth was hanging out with us, tripping too, and he seemed to get a real kick out of Cecilia’s perfection. He considered her eye candy and was always complimenting her on her looks, so having her frozen in front of him like a bird of paradise suited him just fine.
We never ended up mixing those two drugs again. At first Cecilia really wanted to. She couldn’t quite remember what it had felt like to be at that pure peak of experience, but she knew she had liked it better than anything. I was less sanguine.
I was thinking about drugs like heroin that made you feel so good that you’d inevitably get addicted. It just seemed to me that a feeling that made you want to sit there and do nothing and feel like you’d already accomplished all you wanted was too much of an illusion.
Somehow I convinced Cecilia to let it drop.
We thought about maybe dealing some of the x. A lot of people were looking for it and although it wasn’t hard to get, we could easily have become steady suppliers for people looking for a reliable source. Apparently one of Cecilia’s friends in Marin got it from her dad, who was huge drug dealer. There seemed to be a lot of nouveau riche drug barons up there.
I did the math over and over and couldn’t find a way to make any more than a pittance at the rates we were being charged. Either we’d have to mark up the pills ridiculously, in which case even our friends could probably get the ecstasy cheaper elsewhere, or we’d have to put up with a lot of legwork and distribution hassle for almost no profit.
Even getting our own drugs for free made it too expensive for everyone else. I realized that we weren’t far enough up the food chain to make it worthwhile and I didn’t really want to devote that much energy to being a drug dealer. It sounded great as a lucrative sideline, but I already had one annoying, low-paying job.
For You, The Stars
Chapter Five: Paid in Full
Installment 2
Keith parked his Hyundai in an alley near our office. He had the front windows tinted although he told me that it wasn’t legal. We’d get in his car and he’d drive around as we passed the joint back and forth. We both had jobs you could do easily while stoned. I kind of enjoyed xeroxing with my walkman on when I was baked.
Keith and I talked about music and women mostly, and also drugs. He was the one who told me that you shouldn’t eat when you’re high, because it “soaks it up” and you come down faster. He was also the first guy I ever heard referring to having an orgasm as “busting a nut.” I though that was a great expression.
One thing I really admired about Keith was that he would walk right up to women on the street and ask them out. “You never know if you don’t ask,” he would say.
Speaking of orgasms, I finally noticed that Cecilia wasn’t having any. I hated to admit it but I wasn’t always sure when or if a women had come. With me, it was pretty obvious. It’s not just that a girl could be faking it. It’s that there didn’t seem to be a clear cut “moment” sometimes. Also, each new woman seemed different. Often there would be a series of small climactic events but then finally a much bigger one. It was kind of embarassing to ask a girl if she’d come (yet), and I felt stupid no matter what the answer was.
With Cecilia I didn’t notice right away because she did the getting excited thing and then she’d pull away and say she was too sensitive, which I knew sometimes happened after an orgasm. As we got more experienced with each other’s bodies it became obvious to me that her pulling away would happen before she came. In fact, it seemed to happen just when she was on the verge.
She’d sometimes turn away from me and hide her face. I tried talking to her about it and she opened up to me slowly. Finally she told me she had never had an orgasm, not with a guy, not by herself.
“Not even masturbating?”
“I don’t masturbate.”
“You mean you’ve never even tried?”
“Well, I’ve tried.”
I tried to be really understanding about it. I felt guilty too. I was “getting my nut” every time and she never was? It sounded like the most frustrating thing in the world.
We tried everything. We tried creeping up on it with stealth. We tried running the barricade. We tried endless oral sex till my tongue and jaw muscles were hellishly cramped. We tried we fingering her in various ways. I bought her a vibrator. It was always the same. She’d get worked up, she’d get close, she’d get right on the verge, and then she’d freak.
One time we went to a play at Theatre Artaud, a funky place near Potrero Hill. I don’t remember what the play was about but one character delivered a long soliloquy on the singular joys of the “big O.” Cecilia just looked at me and whimpered.
Besides her inability to get off, our sex life was great. One time Cecilia actually admitted to me that she was more into being seen as sexy than she was into sex, but who could blame her, really? Despite that, or maybe because it was part of maintaining her image as a sexpot, she was a very giving lover. I had just to mention a fantasy to her and she’d fulfill it.
Like a lot of women, she didn’t love giving head, but she made a point of doing it from time to time without having to be asked. We’d take showers together in the little shower off of her room and she’d get down on her knees and blow me before we were done.
She liked the way I worshipped her body and she was happy to have me fondle her breasts when we were in bed together. The way she dressed, tight tops and sometimes bike shorts that showed her camel toe, I’d sometimes grab her body when we were sitting around her sister’s house. Then she’d complain about it. Of course, none of the women I’d ever been with had liked me grabbing their tits or their ass out of the blue. It was just interesting to see where she drew the line on being constantly desirable.
I sometimes wondered if her presence in the house was at all distracting to Todd or a problem for Laurie. I was’t kidding about the tights or incredibly tight pants she wore. “You could see everything,” as they say. I’m sure Todd appreciated the show but I wonder if that made him feel creepy, like lusting after the babysitter, which - come to think of it - is exactly what Cecilia was to him, not to mention family.
I was getting more and more bored at work. It was never a really meaningful job for me and the atmosphere was becoming less playful as the recession took hold and they started laying off architects. It seemed especially lame that they were hiring marketing people at the same time they were cutting the people who actually did the work of the firm.
Ironically, I was indispensable as the only person in the office who understood my spreadsheets. I got to be friends with a couple of the architects. They seemed really “grown up” to me at the time. Not old, exactly, but maybe middle aged. They were probably just pushing 40 at the time.
It seemed like nearly every Friday we had a going-away party for whoever had just been fired. We’d usually go to the Cadillac Bar or one of the other downtown restaurants that could handle large parties. The Cadillac served Mexican food. You could order a hamburger there but if you did your waiter would shout “Hamburger!” over the incredible din and the whole room would laugh at you.
The architects explained to me how the interior was designed to intensify the noise and make the place sound like a party. It was always painfully loud in there. We’d all have beers and margaritas with our lunch and then stumble back to the office and getting nothing done for the rest of the afternoon.
One time instead of heading back to the office the two architects I had gotten to be friends with took me barhopping instead. One of them even produced a bowl as we staggered between bars and got us stoned. We ended up sitting on a hill overlooking the perpetually unfinished Moscone Center.
They explained to me some of the endless wrangling that had gone into building that convention center and how it had ended up being built entirely below ground level.
“I thought they were going to put a building on top of the site,” I said.
“No, it’s just going to be like it is now.”
“It’s not so much a building as a taking up of space,” I said.
They told me I could be an architectural critic with lines like that.
We talked about the women in the office. There was this one “older” (mid-40s) women with a middle european accent and heavy makeup whom I always felt was flirting with me.
“She flirts with everybody,” they told me.
“Sometimes I think I’ll just grab her and drag her into a closet and do her,” I said, the margaritas talking.
“You should. She’d like that.”
On one of my weekends up in Marin I overslept on Monday morning and decided to blow off going into work. Instead I called in sick. It was a beautiful sunny day and with Todd and Laurie off to their jobs we had the whole place to ourselves. I helped a little with the baby and in the afternoon we did some nude sunbathing. I was really starting to like my body.
Cecilia sunbathed in the nude a lot. She wanted an all-over body tan. The back deck was sheltered so it wasn’t like anybody could see us, although I sometimes thought that she wouldn’t exactly mind being ogled by a peeping tom.
Cecilia even convinced Chad’s girlfriend Chelsea to sunbathe nude topless on the tiny little deck off of his room in our house in the city. We were hanging out in their room on the back deck one day and Cecilia asked if we minded if she took off her top. Chelsea said that sounded like a nice idea and asked the same question. Chad and I looked at each other, amused.
“No problem,” he said. Cecilia had nice tits but Chelsea was in another league entirely. I soaked up the sun and tried to fix the image of those swollen oversized orbs in my mind, filing them away for a later day.
For You, The Stars
Chapter Five: Paid in Full
Installment 1
Cecilia did her best to comfort me. Neither of us understood why I’d gone to pieces like that. We chalked it up to the wine and the weed and the hot tub - you’re not supposed to mix them, after all - but I still felt shaky and unmanned by my sudden loss of control.
When I was back in the office I went to the repro room to make a personal call. More and more lately I’d been hanging out there, ostensibly to use the xerox machine or to sort mail, but really to hang out with the two young guys who made the bluelines.
Both of them were about my age and both had grown up right in San Francisco. Keith was a black guy, about my height, who was always teasing me. It took awhile for him to accept me as more than just an uptight college boy. Mike was this huge Samoan guy who was totally identified with African-American culture.
We sometimes shared the music we had going on our walkmans. Keith and Mike were almost strictly into rap. That was the first time I heard a song referred to as a “jam” without there being any jamming. I learned a lot of contemporary slang from those guys. “Don’t trip,” Mike would say if I overreacted to something, for example.
I found it amusing that words like jam and trip had made it from the hippie vocabulary over to the street. Keith always called me “homie,” another term I’d never heard before. He said it with a slight sardonic air, and I realized I didn’t really know what he meant by it when he up and asked me one day what did I think it meant.
“Does it mean ‘white guy’?” I asked him. He just laughed.
“Nah,” he said. “It means home boy.”
“Like someone from the ‘hood,” said Mike.
That made me feel cool, once I got over feeling stupid.
The three of us did share an interest in rap and other music. They tipped me off to cool stuff I’d never have encountered on my own, like Too $hort’s cassette-only releases straight out of Oakland, and I’d always be trying to find something from the classic rock world I thought would grab them.
We came together on Eric B. & Rakim. Those guys sort of exemplified the peak first wave of hip hop I’d been listening to in college, with its stripped down beats and straightforward rhymes: “fish/which is my favorite dish.” Twice a month we’d put on “Paid in Full” on the boombox in the repro room.
As the guys got more comfortable with me being around, and as I got a little shaggier and more inclined to hang out there, I started using their space to make my personal calls. There was less of a chance of someone coming by and interrupting me there. I still tended to call Cecilia from my desk because I needed to sit for long conversations like that, but for quickies, I could lean on the formica counter and use the phone there while they brought packages to the front window and handled requests for blueline reproductions.
I got Paulie on the phone. He was still the main guy I turned to with my most difficult problems. He just seemed wordly and matter-of-fact. He was willing to talk about anything. I remember one day in school, a couple of us were standing around on Washington Road chatting when he said, “Well, I’m going to go back to my room and jack off.”
Sure, he said it for effect, but I had no doubt he was telling the truth, and I admired his transparency. Paulie was also full of little aphorisms. If someone said “Feel free,” he’d reply. “No, feel expensive.”
Paulie was working now assistant managing some sort of industrial plant down in southern California. I got him on the phone and said, “Hey, Paulie. It’s Daniel. How you been? Have you got a minute?”
“Sure. What’s up?”
I told him about the hot tub incident. The weird way I’d burst out crying when Cecilia had said “Daddy.” I asked him if he had any ideas what that might be about.
“Sorry, man. Not really. But I wouldn’t worry about it. Emotions are good.”
“I know,” I said. “But I like to know where they’re coming from. Plus it didn’t feel very manly, crying in her arms like that.”
“She’s not going to think any less of you for it.”
That was true. She hadn’t even mentioned it the next day.
Paulie and I talked about some other stuff - a few common friends, how he was liking LA, and then I thanked him and let him get back to his work.
Keith asked me if I wanted to go smoke a doob during lunch and I said yes.
For You, The Stars
Chapter Four: Sweet Child o’ Mine
Installment 5
The directions I had were pretty good and once I got off the bus I only had to walk a few blocks along a rustic road with no sidewalk to get to Cecilia’s sister’s house. I let myself in the gate and rang the doorbell and her brother-in-law, Todd, let me in.
He was a rangy guy in his late-thirties with coke-bottle glasses. He told me Cecilia was downstairs in her room and asked if I’d like anything to drink. “What are you having?” I asked. “I’m just opening a bottle of wine,” he told, and I said that sounded fine.
Laurie was in the kitchen making dinner.
“Hi, Daniel,” she said. “We’ve heard so much about you.”
It felt weirdly like meeting someone’s parents, although they weren’t that much older then me
He took me down to the basement, past me his shop equipment, and showed me where Cecilia’s little one-room in-law apartment was. It had a bathroom and a shower and a little high window that was at ground level.
“I see you’ve met Todd,” she said. “He’s cool. This weekend we should get him break out his gigantic bong. Laurie doesn’t like him to smoke pot so much but he will if we encourage him.”
I sat on her bed and she went over to the boombox on her dresser. “Do you like Guns ‘n’ Roses?” she asked me. I told her I wasn’t sure. In those days I read all the music magazines and all the local alternative weeklies. I subscribed to Spin and I had a pretty good idea of what bands were around. I seemed to recall a trend of L.A. hard-rock bands that were punkier than the hair-metal bands on MTV. They still had the glam thing going on but they were influenced by the Sex Pistols and maybe the Ramones and probably also the SST hardcore bands like Black Flag.
She put on a cassette and I could hear why she liked the music. For one thing it definitely rocked and the guitar sounded great. I wasn’t that into Axl’s voice but I could see where it might appeal to her. One of the song’s had a chorus that went “Where do we go/Where do we go now” and Cecilia told me how she thought that was the central issue for teenage lovers.
She scooted next to me on the bed. “You know how you’re always looking for someplace where you can get away from everyone and just be together?”
“Yeah,” I said. “That sounds about right.”
“I mean you end up in a car or in a room at your friend’s house, but it’s this constant struggle.”
I just nodded while looking at her brown eyes. I kissed her. After we made out for awhile, she said, “Let’s go up and see if we can help out in the kitchen.” It’s funny. Even though Cecilia cultivated this rebellious image and seemed like she couldn’t give a damn what anyone thought, she still had better manners, a better domestic sense than I did. I’d just as soon have sat down there till we were called up to eat. I was lazy. I didn’t want to help set the table although I’d been brought up right and I knew it was the polite thing to do.
And it wasn’t just that this was her sister’s house and that she was living with them and that she wanted to stay on their good side or something. It’s just that she was a woman and had been trained from childhood in those graces that had somehow eluded me so far.
We went up and actually the table was already set. Dinner was nice, something simple with chicken and the white wine that Todd had opened. I didn’t know much about wine then but it was something from Napa.
After dinner (I helped clear the table), Todd went over to the fireplace and brought something back from the mantlepiece. It was a carved, hinged rosewood box. He opened it and took out a little baggie, a bic lighter, and some rolling papers.
“Oh, I should brought my stash,” I said.
“No, it’s no problem,” said Todd. “We don’t smoke it that much anymore, but what the hell— it’s Saturday.”
He quickly rolled a neat pinner, lit it, and passed it to me. I took a hit and passed it to Laurie, she did the same and passed it to Cecilia, who bogarted it for a while and then gave it back to Todd. On the second pass Laurie declined and went back to cleaning up in the kitchen. The three of us snoked it down to a roach.
“It’s more comfortable in the living room,” said Cecilia. We went over there and Todd put on some music, an LP by Joy of Cooking. “We should have a hootenanny,” said Todd. “What do you mean?” I asked him. “You know, a little talent show.”
“I don’t have any talents,” I told him.
“Come on,” said Cecilia. “It will be fun.”
Laurie came into the living room and Todd said, “It’s a hootenanny!” I was kind of dreading it. I’d just met these people. I was pretty baked and I didn’t want to make an ass of myself. Todd got a banjo out of the hall closet and played a fairly passable version of “Oh, Susanna” without turning off the record. Laurie sang a Cat Stevens song, “Longer Boats” or something, again with the contrasting music playing in the background.
Cecilia and I decided to do some “ice dancing” in our sockfeet. We pretended to ballroom dance while sliding around the hardwood floor loosely in time with the music on the stereo. We were laughing and it turned out I was having a pretty good time.
“Can we go in the hot tub tonight?” said Cecilia. “It costs about $20 every time you turn on the jets,” she said to me in a loud stage whisper that everyone could here. “Sure,” said Todd. “Don’t worry about the cost.” Laurie didn’t seem as keen on the idea but I’d never been in a hot tub.
This was in a way a kind of mythical California experience for me. I was going to soak in a hot tub in Marin County, naked with a bunch of near strangers, plus my girlfriend. I tried to imagine what the me of several years earlier, an uptight college student with east-coast attitudes, would have thought if I could have pictured myself now with a beautiful sex honey-blonde girlfriend. I was hoping I wouldn’t get inappropriately aroused but I had to admit that a soak in their outdoor tub on the deck under the stars sounded pretty good fun.
Todd went out to get the heat going and then came back in and lent me one of his bathrobes. Then Cecilia and I went down to her room to take a quick shower together so we wouldn’t get our sweat or grease in the tub, I guess. Todd’s robe was too big for, too long in the arms, but that didn’t matter. We went back upstairs to help Todd take the cover off the tub. “Does it really cost $20 a night to run this thing?” I asked him. “That’s about what the heating costs,” he told me. “But really, don’t worry about it. We probably would have used the tub tonight anyway.”
Cecilia and I put our robes on the deck chairs and then eased ourselves into the hot water. For the two seconds or so that I was naked and exposed to the cold night air I wasn’t actually all that self-conscious. I’d been losing weight lately and wasn’t as ashamed of my body as usual, and I figured nobody was exactly checking me out anyway.
We were sitting low in the tub, nearly up to our chins. We’d slip off the bench to put our heads entirely under and then come up and flip our hair back. My hair was down to my neck by then. Cecilia’s hair was shoulder length. It looked cool slicked back, sort of like a model.
Todd and Laurie came out, too their robes off, and got in the tub. Laurie was taller than Cecilia and somewhat lanky. She had pretty round breasts and I tried not to stare. She visibly relaxed as she sunk into the water. We all sat in the tub together companionably, looking up at the stars and rising or setting to adjust our body temperature. The steam from the tub made a somewhat warm zone above the water, but it was constantly whipping away and the fog was rolling in.
After about ten or fifteen minutes Laurie and Todd said they were going to bed and Todd asked us to turn off the heater and the jets and cover the tub when we went to bed. Their room was in the back of the house, so we noticed when their lights went out. I put my arms around Cecilia and kissed her. She reached down and held my cock in her hand.
“Fuck me, daddy.” she said.
I burst into tears.
For You, The Stars
Chapter Four: Sweet Child o’ Mine
Installment 4
Simone wasn’t the only one who gave me a hard time about dumping her for Cecilia. The other Gomers had all liked Simone and Belinda was outspoken about how I had dumped an intellectual for a party girl and how shallow I was to do it. This pissed me off. Who was she to police my feelings?
Part of it was Belinda’s crunchy-granola feminism. She didn’t like that Cecilia dressed so provocatively. She figured that was proof enough that I had chosen a partner for the wrong reasons. Cecilia tried to be friendly but we stopped going over to the other house together after a few cold receptions.
Meanwhile, Simone continued to express her displeasure toward me. Back in the office on Monday, I picked up the phone at my cubicle and before I could say “hello” or identify myself I was greeted by Simone screaming in my ear: “Stay out of my fucking neighborhood!” Then she slammed down her receiver.
I told the architects what was going on and they found it kind of amusing but I was a little worried that she was becoming deranged. I asked the receptionist not to put any calls through to me but to just take messages.
I even went over to the half-empty part of the office to make a long-distance call to my mom. She and I would never openly discuss sex but I did tell her that Simone had been in love with me and that I hadn’t reciprocated the feelings. My mom spoke euphemistically, saying, “Well, sometimes, when a woman gets intimate with a man, it can be difficult to let go.” It was kind of obvious but I felt like I was running out people who were willing to take my side and your mother is always on your side.
A few days after the second phone call I got a letter in the mail written in Simone’s childlike hand. Inside was a folded piece of paper from a notepad. Out of it fell the torn up pieces of a picture of the two of us together from the previous summer. In case I didn’t fully understand the message of a torn up photo, she had also scrawled a one-word message on piece of yellow paper:
SCUM!
Cecilia and I were still spending a few hours on the phone every day, some during the day while I was at the office pretending to work on spreadsheets and some at night as I sat on the stairs till I was too tired to keep my eyes open. We did that stupid “You hang up first” thing, or we’d ask each other, “Are you still awake.”
We agreed that I would come up and spend the next weekend at her sister’s place. I hadn’t met her sister or brother-in-law yet, nor her neice, of course. To get up to her neck of the woods I had to take the N-Judah downtown and then catch a bus to San Rafael that left once an hour. I could have brought my bag of clothes to work on Friday and left directly from there but I figured I’d get an early start Saturday and that would be just as good.
In the morning I was downtown by 9 am but I missed the bus by minutes. I thought about going to the Psychedelic show, which was nearby, and maybe pick up a box of whippets and a dispenser, when a moderately attractive woman approached me and asked if I’d like to take a personality test.
I’d seen these people hanging around this area before. They were scientologists from the nearby temple or clubhouse or whatever they called it. I was bored, so I said, sure. I’ve always been a sucker for quizzes and puzzles.
She took me to their building and sat me down in a waiting room before mumbling something and running off. I picked up a comic book that turned out to be about how we’re all traumatized in the womb when our parents have sex during our mother’s pregancies. It had a strangely clinical, graphica cartooning style, almost like a coloring book. The whole place seemed funny. The cute girl came back with a sheaf of paper and a pencil and told me to take the multiple-choice quiz. She’d be back in 10 minutes.
It took much less time than that to finish the quiz. Most of it sounded like vague psychobabble. “Do you ever worry” kind of stuff. I tried to answer it honestly because I was curious about what the results would be. It was tempting to game the test and try to figure out what they were gunning for, but even though I didn’t have any faith in their system, which I considered a cult, I did have in the back of my mind a desire to diagnose myself and look for answers and solutions to thing like anxiety and why life was sometimes harder for me than I thought it ought to be.
After finishing the quiz I sat for another three or four minutes until my recruiter came back. She sat down with a key and “scored” my answer sheet. Then she looked at a table and plotted some points on a grid that was supposed to show me how I stacked up in a number of mental and personality areas. The grid was set up with a normal median axis in the middle and you could score higher or lower than that average point in about five or six different categories.
Wonder of wonders but I was in real trouble! Turned out I was barely normal at all. I only skirted the break-even point in two categories and I was well into the negative in the rest. This almost made me laugh out loud at their audacity. With an egotistical neurotic like me they could easily have convinced me that their system was accurate by suggesting that I was seriously deficient in two or even three categories as long as they were willing to score me high or at least neutral in the rest, but they had way overplayed their hand.
The next step was a sales pitch. With my dangerous levels of negativity or whatever they called it, I should start immediately by taking one of their introductory courses, for a fee naturally, and consider buying some strange electrical contraption that would help me become “clear,” I think was the term. She outlined a whole curriculum I’d need to pursue to get my head on straight. At this point I was looking at my watch because I didn’t want to miss the next bus too.
I thanked the girl for letting me take the test and said I wanted some time to think about it but she was strangely reluctant to show me the way out. She asked me if I would speak with someone else. I still had nearly half an hour and I didn’t want to make a scene so I said sure.
I was ushered into another room where a pimply guy about my age wearing an ill-fitting outfit that looked a bit like a navy dress-white uniform sat me down to talk. He began by flattering me. Instead of dwelling on my troublesome scores, he admitted that I was a higher calibre person than they usually came across and that I might be cut out for their elite leadership organization.
“Would I get a sailor suit too?” I asked him, but he didn’t seem to get the joke. In fact, most of the people I’d met in the center had a kind of glazed lack of affect. They didn’t pick up on my sarcasm at all, and sarcasm was my primary mode of expression back then. “Yes,” he said, pointing proudly at the gold braid on his too-short sleeve cuff and the bars on his too-loose collar. He showed me photos of a yacht or cruiser that the organization apparently owned and told me how their founder, whom he called Dr. Hubbard, had modeled the eliter organization after the U.S. Navy.
At this point I was getting somewhat creeped out. I started making excuses about having to catch my bus. “There’ll be another bus,” he interrupted me, sounding like an automaton. “I don’t want to be any later,” I said.
In the end they asked for a phone number where they could follow up and, feeling flustered, instead of just writing down a false one I wrote the number of the larger Gomer house, figuring I wouldn’t be hanging out there much.
When I got back to the bus stop in the tenderloin the bus was idling and after I got on and paid my fare it closed its doors and immediately pulled away from the curb. I felt like I had just escaped by the skin of my teeth. I kept shuddering about the weird feeling those people had given me, preaching that their system would resolve my personal problems and make me feel whole and productive with apparently zero awareness of how creepy and unappealing it was making them.
For You, The Stars
Chapter Four: Sweet Child o’ Mine
Installment 3
After she had her beer and I had loaded us a few bowls, we hopped in the shower where I was able to repay her for the stimulating “massage” she’d given me. Back in my room she took her sweet time getting dressed, admiring herself in my full length mirror.
“Are you ready, boots?” I said, quoting the intro to the Nancy Sinatra song. Cecilia didn’t know the reference and thought I was calling her “Boots.” She liked the sound of it and suggested that I could use it as a nickname for her if I liked.
We went for brunch to the Pork Store cafe. It was one of those beautiful winter days in San Francisco, so we walked the thirty or so blocks. I had a huge breakfast, the one with the pork chops, and Cecilia had pancakes. She had to maintain just the tiniest amount of babyfat and no more.
Then we went to some of the clothing stores in the area. She wanted to buy me some new things. Cooler belts, for example. She tried to get me to buy leather pants but I convinced her I couldn’t pull that off. She found a few shirts she said would look good on me. One was a tan and olive rayon shirt with a paisley pattern. I’d never owned rayon before but I liked the way the fabric felt.
We also shopped for stuff for her. She was always looking for new miniskirts, new outfits. In one of the stores, though, a guy employed there, a tall mascara wearing rocker type, seemed to be trying to peek through the curtain to see her in the changing room. That was not cool and I ended up standing near the curtain trying to shame him into shoving off.
Another store had a large changing area for women with little curtained rooms surrounding it. I went in with Cecilia to watch her try stuff on. I was feeling horny and I knew how much she liked danger, so I kept playing with her breasts, trying to get her nipples hard, and cupping her puss, rubbing my finger back and forth. I don’t know if we were giggling a little or what, but an employee came into the large changing area and told me that I should wait outside. That was a little too close for comfort.
We took our time walking back toward the Gomer homestead. Actually, the “commune,” as it were was spread over two houses in the UC Med neighborhood, a block apart from each other. My house was slightly smaller, housing myself, Hopper, Dave, and Chad. The bigger house up the hill contained the shared kitchen, dining room, a large living room with our joint cable connection, and the pets, a dog and cat. I was allergic to both, so I didn’t hang out over there too much beyond the shared meals.
The big house was where Bo, Suzy, Seth, and Belinda and Gardner lived. Belinda and Gardner had been a couple since their high school years in Tennessee. They had been apart briefly when Gardner came east for college and Belinda went to Oberlin to study wicca or womyn’s studies or something like that. Then Gardner dropped out of school and got a job in Trenton but still hung around till his classmates graduated and near the end of that time Belinda came to stay with him and then made the subsequent trip west with the first wave of Gomers, becoming one herself in the process.
The big house was also where the GLEE ledger, tracking how much each of us owed each other, was kept. I’d managed to have a positive balance, but not too positive, since a few months after I started my fulltime job. For those first few months I had kept the legal summarizing gigs on the side, effectively working sixty or seventy hours a week, which had enabled me to get caught up relatively quickly. That transitional period had been hell, though, and I swore I’d never do it again. Nonetheless, every time I changed jobs for the rest of my life I always experienced a painful grinding of gears just like that.
While I was explaining all this to Cecilia I told her that she should come over to the big house for one of our crazy group dinners. She said OK, although she warned me that she thought most of the Gomers were huge nerds. “You’re kind of a nerd too, you know,” she said. “Hey, I thought I was cool.”
“I like Dave and Seth too,” she said, changing the subject.
While we were walking and talking like this toward the park, around the time we passed the Red Vic and I was explaining the funky movie theatre to Cecilia I spotted, about a block or so up ahead, Simone walking straight toward us, talking to one of her girlfriends, a tall Latina whom I really didn’t like that much.
She hadn’t noticed us yet. I wasn’t really sure what to do, but I figured I’d better keep walking. I told Cecilia out of the side of the mouth that the two women about a block now ahead of us coming our way were Simone and a friend of hers.
“She’s pretty,” said Cecilia, who had never seen her.
When we were about 20 paces apart Simone looked up from her conversation and saw us, holding hands. There was shock in her eyes and I knew her well enough by then to see that she was seriously upset. Her face was turning red and I was trying to figure out whether to stop or not, whether to greet her or not, when suddenly we had passed each other and I didn’t look back. When we were about two blocks apart she may have yelled something at us but I couldn’t make it out.
When we got back to my place, none of my roommates were around. This was our chance to make love without having to keep so quiet. As we were taking our clothes off, Cecilia went over to close the venetian blinds on the one small window in my room. I admired her body from behind, the dimples on her ass, and I said, “Curves by Einstein.” Hungry for compliments, she filed that one away.
As we were making out on my futon, the phone rang. Since there was no one else around and no answering machine, I got up, pulled my boxer shorts back on, and went to the stairs where the phone was attached.
“Hello.”
“Daniel, you fucking asshole!”
“Simone?”
“Liar!” She slammed down the phone, making my eardrums ring.
For You, The Stars
Chapter Four: Sweet Child o’ Mine
Installment 2
Cecilia showed up on Friday night. She’d had her brother-in-law drive her into the city. We went out to eat at a New Orleans-themed place in my neighborhood that was kind of loud and boisterous. We sat at the bar where we could watch the line cooks shuck oysters and yell at each other.
We’d been spending a lot of time on the phone during the week. I’d call her from my office and we’d talk for over an hour sometimes. Then we’d stay on the phone in the evening until we were falling asleep. We were having those conversations you have at the beginning of any relationship: talking about our childhoods, comparing likes and dislikes. Our tastes in music were compatible. Cecilia tended toward more trendy stuff: pop music that was on MTV, glam bands and hot rockin’ guys.
But we both liked psychedelic druggy music and we both liked dance music. We agreed to go out dancing on Saturday night, either at DNA or DV8. And she wanted to go to the Haight during the day on Saturday, which was fine by me. It was still one of my favorite places to hang out on the weekend.
That night, lying on my futon together, we talked about my breakup with Simone. I told her about how I’d messed around with Dannie and kept it a secret from Simone, and how much I didn’t like lying. “Let’s have an open relationship,” I said, and Cecilia agreed right away.
In a way, I may have been trying to hang onto her by holding on loosely, knowing that she was better looking than me and might be tempted to fool around. She told me that she had cheated on all of her previous boyfriends, including her most recent guy back on the east coast who looked like Ken what’s his name from the hit Wise Guys tv show. That guy had been the love of her life and she had still cheated on him.
“You won’t be able to cheat on me,” I reassured her. “Because you can do anything you want.” We did agree that we would be honest at least about what was going on. If we were fooling around with someone else we’d tell the truth about it. I was tired of lying and I was starting to think that honesty was more important than sexual fidelity. If we got wrapped up in somebody else and things were getting serious enough to threaten what we had going, then we’d see it coming and we’d deal with it.
This sounded like a much better plan. We both were thinking that she was probably the more likely one to go outside the relationship, but I liked knowing that if an opportunity presented itself I could pursue it without feeling guilty. Also, I wondered if it would take some of the appeal away from cheating if Cecilia knew it wouldn’t be against the rules. She was an incorrigible rule breaker and she seeemd to enjoy a borderline illicit, teasing, jailbait kind of playacting.
For instance, she always wanted to be viewed as younger than she really was. I was 23 and she was 20, but she wanted people to think she was 18 or even younger. I told her I didn’t really want people to think I was going out with a teenager but she said she was already worried that she was losing her looks and her best days were behind her.
“I doubt I’ll even make it to 30,” she said.
“Now you’re being melodramatic.”
That also explained why she kept her bra on in bed that first night. As we made love for the first time without my previous relationship in my head, she disrobed entirely and she showed me where she thought her breasts were assymetrical.
“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “They’re perfect,” I lied. “You’ve got a great body.” (That was the truth, even with the minor imperfections, like her boxer’s shoulders.)
She also thought her breasts were no longer as perky as they had been a few years before. That was possible - they were on the big side and probably had begun that long slide, but they still seemed magnificent to me. She was also self-conscious about how they flattened out when she lay on her back.
“That’s what they’re supposed to do!” I said. “It’s only those fake-ass porn star breasts that stick up like cupcakes even when you’re lying down.” I was glad, at least, that she felt safe enough to share her insecurities with me.
When we woke up in the morning there were people hanging out in the living room, talking pretty loud. The sound always carried right into my room, separated only by glass doors covered with in a thin tapestry. Cecilia wanted to fool around and I told her I didn’t want people to hear us.
She was kind of into that “fear of being caught” thing. It seems like a lot of women were. That had been one of Simone’s top fantasies too. One time Simone and I had gone down to southern California to stay in a friend’s beach house and to fulfill her secret fantasy we’d gone out onto the sand to fuck out of doors. I remember some kind of security guard coming by with a flashlight and being totally frozen with fear that we’d get caught or arrested. Simone had gotten incredibly wet and told me that it had really turned us on when the light went by.
“Sure,” I’d said. “It was a turn on for you, but it was my white ass sticking up in the air.” Afterward we seeemed to have sand in a lot of hard-to-reach places but Simone had really appreciated the fact that I’d been a good sport about it.
I guess Cecilia got that same kind of thrill from the possibility of being caught. She played with me to get me up but I refused to get on her, so she started manipulating me and playing with my balls. It got really hard for me not to make noise. She stuck her hand in my mouth and started really working on me. I tried to hold back but that just prolonged the feeling and finally she got me to the point of no return. I used all my effort not to make any sound. I felt like I was on the verge of passing out from the pleasure. When I was finished, Cecilia showed me the deep groove my teeth had made in the side of her forefinger.
“Sorry,” I whispered to her. “No, I think it’s cool,” she marveled.
“Do you want breakfast?” I asked her.
“What I’d really like is a beer,” she said.
For You, The Stars
Chapter Four: Sweet Child o’ Mine
Installment 1
At work the next day I tried calling Simone, thinking that maybe I could let her down over the phone using the office as a neutral context. Fortunately for my immortal soul, she wasn’t at home and I wasn’t craven enough to break up with her on her answering machine.
I went out for another three hour lunch, this time walking down Market toward the Civic Center and spending twenty bucks in a striptease joint paying disadvantaged women with nicotine breath to sit on my lap and grind while nibbling on my ear. That didn’t help.
When I got home from work I called Simone again and this time she picked up on the first ring.
“It’s not going to work,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t think I can keep seeing you?”
“But you said you would try to make it work!”
“Well, I’ve been thinking about it and I just don’t feel like we should be together anymore.”
She started crying again. I think she did some more pleading with me. It was hugely painful. I was just not used to being the bastard. I’d cried when my Vassar girlfriend had broken up with me, but at least then I had the moral advantage and could act like the wronged one.
I said something lame about how we could try to still be friends and she said “Fuck you,” and hung up. At least the deed was done.
I sat down that evening with Dave to try to work on a song we were writing. Neither of us had any real idea how to write a song. My guitar had been in my closet for months. He could strum some chords and we were literally just picking changes almost at random and I guess somewhat by ear.
I was supposed to be writing the lyrics but everything I came up with was either pretentious or unsingable or both.
I told Dave that I had finally picked the scab with Simone and that at least I didn’t have to go on lying to her anymore. I also told him that Cecilia was going to be staying in my room on the weekend.
“Good,” he said. He liked Cecilia and he wasn’t averse to checking her out as eye candy. Being looked at was her specialty.
For You, The Stars
Chapter Three: Big Sister’s Clothes
Intallment 5
I started making another mix tape for Bella. My hidden message this time would be something about how even though I was now going out with her little sister, I still had my eye on her. That I would treat Cecilia right, but that she was a dalliance, someone I didn’t take as seriously as I took Bella.
I thought about the letters I sometimes wrote to Bella and the more frequent ones to Maura. I wondered when I started signing all my letter “Love, Daniel.” I know when I was a teenager I felt funny writing “Love, Daniel.” I figured it was supposed to mean something, or that I should only write that to my lovers, but all the other closers we were taught as children sounded hopelessly formal. “Sincerely, Daniel” or “Yours truly, Daniel.” (It was never Dan. My parents had never called me Dan and I didn’t even respond to it if people made the mistake of shortening my name.) Then I noticed that girls wrote “Love, their name” all the time. I guess I started doing it too.
Making mix tapes was as real art form before you could do it all digitally. You had to pick the songs, either in advance or winging it. You had to set the levels differently for each album. You had to cue up the LP and the recording deck and sometimes even fade in or out. You had to have just the right beat or half a beat or beat and a half from one song to the next. I really enjoyed the craft of putting together an excellent montage of songs.
I cued up the one song I knew was going to go on this tape and listened to Elvis Costello singing
And it’s easier to say, “I love you” Than “Yours sincerely,” I suppose All little sisters Like to try on big sister’s clothes Big sister’s clothes Big sister’s clothes
Bella was no dummy. I knew she’d get the wink.
Making the mix took my mind of the next step with Simone. I felt like I was just marking time till I could tell her, “OK, we tried— it’s still not working,” and finally pull the plug for good.
Dave came home from his job on the peninsula while I was still making my tape and I took a break from it. We went to the corner sub shop, the Yellow Submarine, that had obviously been named and decorated in the ’70s but had long since passed into the hands of an immigrant family.
We used to laugh at their first-in last-out sandwich preparation method. You would go in there and order your eggplant parmigiana sub, or whatever, and they’d start making it for you, and then someone else would come in and order a sandwich and they’d put yours aside and start making the new one. This could literally go on for hours.
They also made these thick round french fries that seemed fantastic the first time you had them, especially if your were stoned. But then over time you realized they were greasy and flaccid and nasty.
Worst of all, every night they poured out some water or grease or something scummy and it ran down the sidewalk from their door to the curb. There was a permanent rainbow slick there for whatever it was they dumped out every night.
We knew better by then to have or dinners there but it was the nearest place and the quickest if no one interrupted your sandwich, and it was already dark outside.
Walking back around the corner to our place, with the grease soaking through our paper bags, I told Dave that I was trying to figure out when to tell Simone it was really over.
“Are you going to tell her about Cecilia?”
“I’d rather not.”
“Hmm.”
“You know what really worries me?”
“What?”
“I’m afraid that Simone will never meet anyone as great as me ever again. I may have set her up for a lifetime of disappointment. That’s a huge burden of guilt for me to carry.”
“Don’t worry,” said Dave. “You’re not that great.”
For You, The Stars
Chapter Three: Big Sister’s Clothes
Installment 4
I took a three-hour lunch that day. I could feel my anxiety like a knot in the pit of my stomach. I wandered over the tenderloin and went to one of those peep show arcades where a woman strips on a little stage and you pay to have a metal shutter open for a few minutes to give you a view through a window. Here in San Francisco the windows had glass in them. In New York most of them were open and you could reach through and negotiate tips to touch different body parts. Here you could request certain acts and slip bills through the edge of the glass.
I used up all my small bills and then walked around some more aimlessly. When I got back to the office I had a pink message slip on my desk. Cecilia had called. I called her back and told her I would be talking to Simone that evening. She didn’t seem to understand or care what the big deal was. “I think Simone is in love with me,” I said. “Too bad,” said Cecilia. “I’ve got you now.”
When I got off the N-Judah after work I didn’t know whether to go over to Simone’s place or have her over to mine. I didn’t want to make a scene in public but one way or another the exit was going to be awkward. I walked up and sat on the stairs and dialed her number from memory. “Why don’t you come over here?” I heard myself saying.
Then I got up and paced back and forth in the living room. No one else was around, thank God. I didn’t have the slightest desire to get high.
When Simone arrived I went down to let her in and when she kissed me in the doorway I kissed her back. I had forgotten how nice she smelled and felt in my arms. We went up to my room and sat on the futon. I didn’t see any point in hemming and hawing so I avoided the whole “How was the rest of your stay in New York?” and “How was your flight back?” chitchat and came right out with it:
“I don’t think things are working out.”
“What do you mean.”
“I don’t think we should keep seeing each other.”
“You’re breaking up with me?”
“I just don’t feel like things are going in the right direction?”
“What are you trying to say?”
“I want to end this.”
“You don’t get to decide when we break up!”
“I’m just telling you how I feel. I can’t fake my feelings.”
“Where did this come from? Can’t we try to work things out? Give me a chance?”
She was starting to cry.
“I don’t know…” I said.
“Come on, we can make it work. What’s the problem? You never said anything was wrong.”
“It’s just—” I didn’t know how to say it. “I don’t love you.”
“I never said you had to love me.”
“But you always say you love me,” I said. “That’s not going to work in the long run.”
“Fuck the long run!” she said, in that New York way that I used to find so appealing, but she was blubbering now and her island accent was getting thicker. Her eyes were read and it was getting easier to find her unattractive.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Fuck you!”
“I don’t know what to say…”
“Let me try. Give me a chance.”
That was when I started crying too.
The conversation went on and on in that vein. She wore me down and I wasn’t being honest about either Dannie or Cecilia, so I couldn’t really make a believable case for how I knew for sure that things weren’t going to work out.
In the end I agreed that we could try to make it work, but I tried not to sound too encouraging. She asked me to give her a hug and I held her, and she she walked herself downstairs and let herself out.
I had hoped for a clean break and instead I had had the whole breakup conversation and still no freedom. It felt like shit. Now I did feel like getting high.
I was nursing the bong with the music cranked loud when Dave got home. He went right to the stereo and turned down the song.
Dear Mr. Fantasy Play as a tune Something to keep us all Happy.
I just sat there not saying anything and Dave said, “What’s up?”
“I just broke up with Simone?”
“You did? Just now?” Dave knew about Cecilia. We’d discussed my dilemma, but he didn’t know I had come to a decision. It was all happening pretty fast.
“Actually,” I said. “I tried to, but she wouldn’t let me. She wants us to try to make it work out.”
“Uh-oh,” said Dave.
“I know.”
I didn’t talk to Simone the next day. We had agreed to take a little time to talk. I told Cecilia that things were dragging out. She wanted to come visit and we agreed that she could come and stay the weekend with me.
I couldn’t stand the feeling of knowing it was going to end with Simone thinking it might continue. It wasn’t till a few years later when I was crying and asking someone else entirely if there wasn’t maybe the slightest chance that the spark would come back and things would be okay and this other future woman agreed that sure, she supposed, nothing was impossible— it wasn’t till then that I realized just what it felt like to have absolutely no say in the end of your relationship.
For You, The Stars
Chapter Three: Big Sister’s Clothes
Installment 3
I was back at work on the second. Formally, I was the “studio assistant” for the architects, although no one, including me, could figure out what I was really doing there. Usually that job went to somebody planning to study architecture, like Dave’s friend who had set me up to take his place. For me it was an obvious dead end, but a job’s a job.
I liked most of the architects. They dressed better than lawyers and accountants. I think they were expected to show some flair for design and style. The men wore italian cut suits and interesting ties. The women dressed to kill.
They took Halloween very seriously there, all part of their “I’m not just a professional… I’m creative” self-image. They’d come to work in costume and have a parade down Market Street on the lunch hour. My boss had come in, for instance, the previous Halloween as some strange sort of gaucho. He had the whole leather south-american cowboy thing going on and he spoke only in an unrecognizable pidgen, even to his boss, all day.
One of the hot young women architects I had a slight crush on came in as some bald female Star Trek character, in a form fitting red uniform. She actually went down to meet a client to discuss their master plan in her full regalia.
When they saw that I hadn’t come in costume the architects figured one out for me. They bought some peach colored sheets (couldn’t find saffron), a skin-head wig, and a plastic toy tambourine and voila! I was a hare krishna. I ended up leading the parade dancing and twirling and rhythmically thumping my drum. It was the most uninhibited the architects had seen me and a few warmed to me then.
In general I would start out any new job or situation playing it cool, trying not to make waves or be noticed too much. Once I began to feel more comfortable, I might share a few sarcastic asides with my nearest neighbors. By the time I was completely settled in, though, I’d be a full-on snideness engine, and it wasn’t unusual for people to comment on the change.
“You seemed so nice— kind of boring, when you first showed up.” That kind of thing.
So, as I said, I was never going to be an architect. I wasn’t planning to be an architect. I didn’t know any of their jargon, like calling large sheets of tissue paper “flimsy.” I did find it interesting watching them plan building and clash with contractors. On some projects they started building a legal case for the inevitable law suits from day one. Schedules would get bollixed up and landscaping would be done one time and then other contractors would drive trucks over new-laid turf and tear it up. There were shouting matches on the phone.
I found that most of the architects weren’t too interested in computers. Many of them had chosen this career because of their enjoyment of drawing and other handicrafts. Computer-aided design was coming in and it was not looked upon favorably. One of them retreated into making styrofoam models of projects nearly full time. He’d always been good at that and he’d do it for all the projects and that way he could work with his hands and not a computer keyboard.
I had no art-school illusions to shatter, though, and took to the computer thing right away. I’d been exposed to minicomputers in high school and college, but this was my first crack at a personal computer. It was a Wyse machine running DOS three-point-something. The main program I worked with was Lotus 1-2-3. My boss would ask me to make up spreadsheets for him to track various patterns. I figured out how to make macros to fold and unfold the columns and rows different ways to print multiple reports of the same data.
The greatest thing about the PC was that it bought me time. These guys had no idea how I did what I did on it and they were terrible at estimating how long it should take. I didn’t disabuse them of their overestimates.
“Can you get this back to me by tomorrow afternoon?”
“Sure thing.”
Then I’d whip up the solution in 15 minutes and goof off for the next day and a half.
I figured out after a while that I could take long lunches, disappear for hours on end and generally they’d assume I was in some other part of the office (I also had filing and mail delivery and other office-slave duties to attend to).
My first day back at the office I called Cecilia at her sister’s house up in Marin. We talked for a few hours. We were still in that getting to know each other early phase of a new relationship.
Back home that evening I spent another few hours on the phone with her at night. Our house had just one phone. No one had cell phones then. I’d sit sprawled on the stairs and we’d talk so long, like teenagers, that I’d eventually be falling asleep while we were talking.
The next day Simone got back and called me at work. I asked her to come over that evening, told her I had something I wanted to talk about.
For You, The Stars
Chapter Three: Big Sister’s Clothes
Installment 2
We had great seats for that show. It was general admission and there were about 20 of us going, so we saved abour four or five seats each in about four or five rows. We all moved around between seats during the opening acts and between the sets, but Cecilia and I ended up sitting together for the bulk of the show.
We had both taken acid and though it wasn’t her first time she still knd of relied on me to guide her through the experience, especially considering that the whole acid-at-a-Dead show routine was new to her.
I specifically remember a moment when I suddenly felt less avuncular and more attracted to her. At one point she was sitting in one of the much closer rows we had saved and I caught her looking at me and when our eyes met she gave me a significant nod, like she was feeling it too.
I was still somewhat inexperienced with women. I had been turned down so often that I was surprised at how, in the recent past, so many flirtations seemed to be bearing fruit. I was beginning to learn to recognize a certain feeling - I’ll call it surety. There was just a point in this evening when I knew we were going to get together.
Some of it was logistical, the second set started at midnight to ring in the new year. The show wouldn’t finally wind down until after 2 pm, but BART stopped running around midnight. She had no ride back to Marin and when I asked what she was planning to do she said, “Can’t I stay at your place?”
Even that could have been innocent. We’d had lots of people crashing at our house, and not just the influx of college-aged Deadheads who knew we’d put them up for the new year’s run. I’d even had girls sleep on my futon innocently enough. She could have just slept over, but I knew it was going to be more than that.
I was barely thinking about Simone at all, except to note that she was very far away. I was definitely not thinking of my recent ethical pledges to myself to fly straight and stop messing around.
Cecilia was cute. Her older sister Bella was beautiful but Cecilia was more overtly sexy. There were tiny flaws in her looks - eyes too far apart, nose a bit too wide, shoulder a little too square, but who was I to complain? I was decent-looking little guy in mediocre shape with a smart mouth and glasses.
If we’d been the same age or coming from the same context, Cecilia would never have looked at me twice. It was only because I was the cool friend of her older sister that she saw me as a catch.
Cecilia liked to dress sexy. She wasn’t a Deadhead. She was a party girl. She liked Pink Floyd and the Dead all right, but she loved smoking pot and drinking beer most of all. She had tried acid and mushrooms but she liked ecstacy the best. She loved to go out dancing and she liked it when guys ogled her.
She dressed to be looked at: miniskirts and bare-midriff tops. She was moderately busty (a C cup, I later learned) and she wore bras that accentuated her bust. She almost never wore flats. Her skirts were stretchy and skin tight and her tops often matched them.
She wasn’t at all the type of girl I’d ever been with before. My college girlfriend from Vassar (I never managed to hook up with anyone on my own campus) had been an intellectual, a writer. Simone was getting her Ph.D. in English Lit. Cecilia was smart but she wasn’t booksmart. She didn’t like school and she didn’t really want to be perceived as smart. She wanted to be perceived as sexy, and she was good at that.
Her hair was shoulder length, honey blonde, and naturally so. She didn’t wear a lot of makeup but just enough to look naturally glowing. She wore teenybopper lip gloss and was often re-glossing her lips. She laughed at my jokes and I was falling for her hard.
Of course we end up spending the night on my futon. We kissed alot and messed around a little. I was surprised when she did not want to take off her bra. It was my first hint that she wasn’t as inhibited as her behavior implied. She let me undress her completely otherwise.
We did a lot of touching that night and lot of kissing, and a little licking. I wasn’t very aggressive, but I was suprised that I wasn’t able to get her off with my hand or my mouth. She had no problem getting me there.
We didn’t have “actual sex” that night. Cecilia wasn’t on the pill and I didn’t have any condoms. (Simone was on the pill by then, so I hadn’t need any for a while.)
She knew about Simone, at least in passing, but she waited for me to bring it up. I told Cecilia her that I was going to break up with her, that I had already cheated on her once and that I obviously wanted out. I said, “Don’t feel obligated to keep seeing me just because of that. It’s just something I have to do.”
Cecilia told me she would like to go out with me. “I’ll be your little sexy girl,” she said, which sounded a little weird to me but not necessarily in a bad way.
Around dawn the psychedelics were wearing off enough for us to fall asleep but we’d been kind of drifting and dreaming for a few hours by then, me with my arms around Cecilia. She was a few inches shorter than me, a few years younger than me. I wanted to possess her and to protect her.
We woke up a little afternoon and played the dangerous game of coitus interruptus. I told her that it wasn’t safe, that even if I came outside her something could leak out. Shesaid she wasn’t worried but I was.
Also, I was already dreading breaking up with Simone. I knew it was what I wanted to do, but I didn’t look forward to telling her and dealing with her anger or disappointment or whatever her reaction was going to be.
When we finally came out of my room, a few other Gomers were hanging around the living room next door. Nobody said anything about Cecilia spending the night. She went into our neglected kitchen and found a beer in the fridge. When she came back someone passed her the bong that was perpetually on our coffeetable. She looked at the gritty scum clinging to the inside of the red plastic tube and asked, “Would anyone mind if I washed this out?” Chad, Dave, Seth, Hopper and I looked at each other and laughed.
Chad said, “Be our guest.”
This became a running joke for us after awhile. I explained to her that we didn’t like the bong being dirty - we were just too lazy to clean it. The same thing went for the bathroom and the rug, for that matter.
Later in the day I took Muni downtown with Cecilia and saw her off on the bus to San Rafael. I was torn between the light buoyant feeling of starting a new fling and my fear of breaking the news to Simone. I had four days assuming I told her right after she got back from New York.
For You, The Stars
Chapter Three: Big Sister’s Clothes
Installment 1
Both Simone and I went back to New York around Christmas, so we made plans to get together a few times while we were there. One night I had her over to my parents’ place for dinner. My father baited her with stupid questions about her plans to teach English at a community college. I noticed that I was self conscious about her Queens accent, and I kept worrying that she’d come out with one her strange family words, like calling a toilet a “toidy.”
My mom was nice to her, though, and the dinner turned out pretty well. We went out drinking that night and then I put her on a subway back to her parents’ place in Forest hills. Two nights later I met her and a few of her close friends at the Pizzeria Uno where they all used to work on their summer vacations back when they were still in college.
We sat in a booth, me and the three girls, and got to know each other over beer, pizza, and beer. We got roaring drunk and I remember having a private conversation with one of her friends - I think she was telling tales on Simone out of school. My impression was that her friends liked me.
Simone was staying on the east coast through New Year’s but I had plans to return just before the end of the month to catch the Dead’s New Year’s run at the Kaiser in Oakland.
It was not like I had literally moved out to California to see Dead shows but it was definitely a factor. I hadn’t really known the Dead’s music in high school. Sure, I had the triple-LP Europe ‘72 album, but I’d bought that just before leaving home for boarding school along with a few other records I knew mainly by their classic covers. I listened to it a few times, but the long improvised suites on the last record eluded me.
The “disco Dead” record, Shakedown Street had come out my first year away at school and I still have a vivid memory of hearing the chorus of “Fire on the Mountain” playing from someone else’s room down the hall.
I also had some undifferentiated primordial memories of a few of the Dead’s FM radio “hits” from around the time I was in kindergarten, things like “Friend of the Devil.” I know when I finally “got it” at a show in the fall of ‘84 the song “Uncle John’s Band” seemed oddly familiar, but that may have been the acid talking.
The main thing that kept me from taking the Dead seriously in high school, though, was the kids who were way into them. With the name and the iconography they seemed more like a heavy metal band than the folk-rock-blues-grass band they really were, and the kids who were into them the most were the burnouts who were also into Lynyrd Skynyrd and Led Zep. They listened to unlistenable bootleg tapes on boomboxes and made the whole concept of the Dead unappealing.
In fact, my first year of college I was in a friend’s room and I noticed that he had a large Grateful Dead banner on one wall. I honestly asked him if it was an ironic statement and he looekd at me strangely, as if to say of course not.
Then there was the transitional period where it seemed like nearly all my stoner friends were playing the Dead constantly and if you asked them to change the music they just put another record or another bootleg tape on. That was the “this stuff all sounds alike to me” phase.
Then came the mushrooms and the acid, and the going to a live show, and then the going to a live show on acid and it all started to make sense to me. I saw two Dead shows in 1984 and then I saw, like, 18 in 1985, culminating in New Year’s shows at the end of the year. That was my first taste of San Francisco.
Most of the Gomers were a year ahead of me and had thus already graduated by then. They had moved en masse out to SF and they invited me out for the shows. The weather was beautiful, the city was like a jewel, and the whole Dead scene was turned up a notch, like visiting the real city of Amber when up to know you’ve just seen the shadows that resemble it.
I was in Ground Zero for Dead culture, as it were, and I got sucked in. I had traveled up and down the east coast to catch as many shows as possible, occasionally venturing west as far as Wisconsin or Colorado, but based in the Bay Area it was possible in those days to see the Dead at the Marin Vet’s, the Greek Theatre and BCT in Berkeley, the Kaiser and the Coliseum in Oakland, the Civic Center in San Francisco, and the Frost Amphitheatre at Stanford. Then there were the Jerry Band shows. It was Deadhead mecca.
Hopper (another Gomer) and I drove out to the west coast once we graduated. Well, we got most of the way there. We started in the south, where he lived, and drove through Chattanooga to Chicago, ate some deep dish pizza, and then carried on the Minnesota, where we stopped to see Bob Dylan and Tom Petty and the Dead. There was no pot at all at those shows as far as we could tell, but the t-shirt art was good, things like stealies with a famous silhouette of Dylan in the circle instead of the familiar 13-pointed lightning bolt, with the legend “It’s all right ma, I’m only dead.”
We made it to Mount Rushmore and through the Black Hills of North Dakota before I fell asleep at the wheel in Wyoming and drove Hopper’s new Honda civic off the road while Jerry sang “Dark Star crashes” in a voice like Elmer Fudd from the Greek shows in the summer of ‘84. We flew the rest of the way to San Francisco once we realized the unibody repairs were going to take too long.
A week in Gillette, Wyoming with nothing to do for excitement besides drop by the Dairy Queen convinced us it wasn’t worth waiting around for the work to get done. I had my head shaved by a local barber as a weird sort of act of atonement.
Once settled in the first Gomer place in Diamond Heights, we geared up for a road trip down to Ventura for summer Dead shows before finding out en route that Jerry had collapsed in a diabetic coma. He had recovered by December and the Dead played two major runs that month, a first set around mid-December and then a four-show end of yeasr run, my second chance to see the famous New Year’s event.
In ‘87 the Dead were back to their heavy touring schedule, and then they put out an album with a hit single, and then toured with Dylan again, this time backing him on his tunes. By now I felt like I had the routine down, and once again we had tickets for New Year’s. I made sure there was an extra for Cecilia.
For You, The Stars
Chapter Two: Have a Cigar
Installment 5
I didn’t have a lot of extra money then but I tended to visit New York about twice a year, usually once in the summer and once in the winter. I’d come for about a week, stay at my parents’ apartment on the upper east side and call all my friends in advance. It would usually be a weeklong party. I’d talk about moving back to New York if it was really all about going out every night and dancing and staying up late and my friends would remind me that they had to go to work the next day and that it was only me who was going out every night.
Around this time Bella was living in an apartment not too far from my parents’ - a little closer to the east river, a fifth floor walkup. The floor was on a bit of a tilt, too, but it was reasonably spacious for two people. Her roommate worked at the Top of the Sixes with her in Rockefeller Center. She was taking acting classes and auditioning but also doing the waitress routine of working till late at night and then going out and spending tip money on blow and staying up all night.
When I showed up in town she took me to a friend’s brownstone in Harlem and we bought some pot. I bought it, actually, and then we went back to her place and smoked it in her bong. Most girls preferred joints or pipes. Bongs always seemed like a guy thing, a hardcore stoner thing. But Bella always liked bongs. I think one reason why I got along with her so well was that she was a guy-type stoner.
She had never hung around in Doo-dah. The Gomers were basically nerds and she was a pretty girl. Two entirely different crowds. I could move between them but most people lived entirely in one world or another. I didn’t really fit in with the beautiful people but Bella was also a bit of a crossover type and she gave me entré into that world. Still, she did spend a long afternoon or two up in Doo-dah, matching the guys bonghit for bonghit.
Much later I figured we were all self-medicating back then but at the time it seemed like one long party.
When Baxter got off her job at the nonprofit, Bella and I took her out, first for dinner and then dancing downtown. It was late summer and the dance floor was unbearably hot and sweaty but once you were completely drenched it was liberating. We were dancing barefoot and it was still slippery. Baxter smoked like a chimney.
They both complimented me on my longer hair and my generally “mellow” demeanor.
“California’s been good for you,” said Baxter. “You seem much more comfortable with yourself.”
“Thanks, I guess.”
It was hot enough that even at 3 am there were people milling around on the streets. We actually ended up stretching out on a sidewalk, flat on our backs, talking and watching the sky gradually get lighter and lighter till the early morning joggers started showing up, making us feel wickedly decadent and finally tired.
That was when Bella told me that Cecilia, her little sister whom I’d only met that one time at graduation, was thinking of coming out to California.
“College isn’t working out for her,” she told me, “and my parents don’t want her hanging around the house doing nothing.
“Laurie, my older sister, invited her out to their house in Marin to be an au pair when their baby comes.”
“You have an older sister?” Bella had never mentioned her.
“Yeah,” she works in the city and her husband is an engineer. They’ve got a baby coming this fall.”
“Tell her to give me a call when she gets settled in.”
“I’ll do that.”
The call came a few months later, in late September. Just a quick remember me? sure I do kind of thing. The re-formed Pink Floyd without Roger Waters was touring that fall and I had tickets so I asked Cecilia if she’d like to go to the show with me and Seth Savage, who’d also been friends with her older sister at school. She said yes definitely, it sounded great.
When the concert came around, she got someone to drop her off at our apartment. Then we took Muni to Bart and then Bart to the Oakland Coliseum. Our seats were not all together, so we took turns sitting in the better ones. Seth had turned me on to Pink Floyd in college. I knew Dark Side of the Moon, of course, like everyone, but he used to play Meddle a lot and Atom Heart Mother.
There was a whole Pink Floyd vs. Grateful Dead thing among the tripsters at school. Floyd was more precise and the Dead were more spontaneous. Seth and I and most of the Gomers were in the overlapping part of the venn diagram.
Bella was more of a Floyd head. She listened to the Dead when it was on, but she connected more with Pink Floyd. Cecilia tended to follow her older sisters when it came to tastes in pop culture so she was way into Pink Floyd as well. In some ways he was the classic youngest sibling. One reason why she had bummed from school to school was that she had learned from her older sisters how to act cool without ever figuring out the basics. Plus she “only used to get juiced in it.”
At the time I think Seth had his eyes on Cecilia. I was fairly innocent that first night. We hung out and enjoyed each other’s company, but I was recovering from my one cheating incident plus Cecilia was Bella’s younger sister. I felt more protective and older brother-y than predatory. Cecilia liked Seth. She found him funny, but she was not at all attracted to him.
When it was our turn to sit in the better seats together, we made fun of the other plans, many of which looked like they’d have been just as happy listening to a record of Pink Floyd really loud in a roomful of 10,000 other fans. As long as they could wear their rainbow prism t-shirt or sing along with the hits, they were happy.
Then there were the more scary fans, the ones dressed in vaguely paramilitary leather jackets who didn’t seem to understand the irony underlying the fascist lyrics and imagery in the Wall. One of them was giving a headbanger’s equivalent of the Hitler salute over and over during the chorus of “Waiting for the Worms” (at least I think that’s what it’s called - I was never as into the details when it came to Floyd). We laughed at him a lot and imagined him driving home in a volkswagen to an in-law apartment in his mother’s basement.
Afterward I told Cecilia that the show had been good but that she definitely had to catch a Dead show with me in December. She eagerly agreed. I didn’t realized it at the time but at that snapshot in time and from that angle I looked pretty cool to her.
For You, The Stars
Chapter Two: Have a Cigar
Installment 4
Things started to unravel. I went to one of those drinkathons up in the hills and Dannie was there and she ended up the evening driving me to her apartment. First place I remember back then where somebody lived by themselves. That was a revelation. The place wasn’t a mess, like mine would have been.
It was a fairly large apartment for just one person. Something about her dad paying for it. She must come from money, I remember telling myself. She was a good kisser. Not too sloppy but succulent. She drew me in.
We undressed each other in her bedroom. I was excited to see the body of a “fat lady.” They’d for sure be the biggest breasts I’d seen or touched yet. I wasn’t sure how I was going to respond to her belly, her arms and legs. Not that I was a swimmer exactly myself.
I put my arms around her and she felt solid. I didn’t have that usual feeling that I’d better go easy or else knock the girl over and trap her arm behind her back or pinch something. There’s nothing that spoils the mood so much as someone crying out suddenly in pain, unless that is the mood.
She wore elastic legging and she was soft and loose when she finally stripped down to her bare skin. She was very pale. Not as soft as I expected. Her hair felt course. I could feel her goose bumps or her legs. The back of her neck was sweaty and thick with her hair. My fingers would get stuck there as I pressed her face against mine. She was strong and she was not above biting my lower lip.
We fell into bed. I always liked making out the best. I was as horny as the next guy, maybe more than most, but there was something about those first experiences, spinning the bottle when I was 12 or so, that made kissing and “feeling up” the most erotic things I could imagine.
Finally I rolled on top of her and found I didn’t have the wherewithal to go through with it. She offered to suck me to get me hard again and I agreed. That worked. I held her breast and stared at the ceiling and her soft warm wet mouth did the trick, but when I climbed between her thighs again I was once again not in the mood.
Her thighs were slick. I was actually fasinated by the concept of a fat pussy. I put my face as close as I could and I started lapping my way in closer. I figure I owed her that much. It was very dark in her bedroom. Total eclipse of the moon.
Eventually she came, kept coming, till she told me to stop. I slid up under her arms and she reached down to hold my cock, which was still soft. We talked about why I was unable to go through with the actual fucking. I think it was my idea to talk about it. I mentioned Simone. She had heard I had a girlfriend across the bay but she didn’t care.
With her arm around me, I felt like she was the man and I was the girl. She was literally bigger than me. Not taller, but more massive. She also had a rough almost stubbly texture under her chin and I remember for a moment wondering if she could possibly be a guy. But that was impossible. It felt oddly plausible though, without making any real sense. Her aggressive energy I guess. I had never been pursued like that before.
She told me it was OK and put her feet up against mine. “You’ve got cold feet,” she said.
In the middle of the night I woke up and started nuzzling the nearest breast. I kissed my way down to her belly as she woke. Now, for whatever reason I was almost painfully hard and suddenly “performing” brought on no anxiety at all. Afterward, as we lay sweating and panting she told me that she always thought of architecture while making love.
“What style did I remind you of?” I asked her.
“Bauhaus.”
“I know what you’re trying to tell me,” I said, thinking that I had perhaps been a bit methodical, rather more utilitarian in the end than decorative.
“No, it’s nothing,” she said. “It’s not a metaphor. I just see buildings.”
I didn’t feel that great the next morning and I felt worse the next day when I saw Simone again. She and I tended to get together about three or four nights a week. We didn’t keep tabs on each other. We did, I should state for the record, have an exclusive relationship. I was still studiously avoiding the L word but she wasn’t and though I managed to put off conversations about “where are we going with this” I had definitely agreed with her that we were, to use the previous generation’s parlance, “going steady.”
There was no ethical loophole that made what I had done with Dannie acceptable. My middle of the night returned to form had scotched any potential “eatin’s not cheatin’” defense and to be honest I wouldn’t have been brazen enough to put it out there. For all of my frankness now, at the time I expressed myself even in the privacy of an intimate relationship, in fairly chaste, gentlemanly terms. It was part of the my charm. The rakish “safe boy” gone a little dangerous. The naughty page boy who still observed the finer points of chivalry.
I confessed everything… to Maura. I told her about the whole episode, the flirtation that led up to it, my self loathing afterward, in my next letter to her. I did it deliberately, knowing it would stir her up. Even here my motives were selfish. I knew that Maura would be envious and at the same time would sense the coming downfall of Simone. This might embolden her or it could resurrect her old disappearing act.
I wanted to get a rise out of her, though, but I poured on the anguish thick in my letter. For one, the feelings were true. For another, I knew Maura would hang on every word. Also, we were on some level writers competing with each other, co-writing a story and trying to outdo each other with each serial update.
I also told Dave. Dave was turning into my confidante. It went both ways. It was almost better that we’d never really gotten to know each other in school. We had a relatively blank slate. After my initial drive to write a few stories I’d gone fallow again, but he was still taking his writing class and we talked about writing theory a lot. Is conflict necessary? How close can you get to reality and still call it fiction? I was writing much but I had all the answers.
I went to Dave with my moral dilemma. I had cheated on Simone. He was a little shocked. It didn’t fit my good-boy image. Also, he had gotten friendly with Simone. Her friend Sharon, from our original double date, had pretty much fallen out of the picture after going out with another one of my roommates, a total waste case named Seth Savage. More on him later.
Dave hadn’t hooked up with anyone yet and he and I and Simone sometimes did things together. She went out on some of our Operation Culture nights, although she said she found the ballet and the opera “pretty boring.”
So I felt doubly bad telling Dave I had cheated on Simone with Dannie. I was kind of putting him in an awkward position although I really had no doubt where his loyalties lay.
“I can’t figure out whether to tell her or not,” I said to Dave. We were sitting in our living room. I was on the rescued couch and he was on the big La-Z-Boy chair.
“Well, you can’t tell her,” he said. “She’ll never forgive you, and you wouldn’t be telling her for her. You’d be telling her to make yourself feel better.”
“That’s good,” I said. “Because I don’t really want to tell her. I’m chicken. Plus it’s not going to happen again.”
My big problem, I told Dave, was that this didn’t fit into my preexisting idea of myself. It was a kind of a mystery. Was a really the sort of guy who cheated on his girlfriend? Apparently I was. Did this mean I was a bad person, or cheating was OK, or something else entirely?
I was fairly attached to the idea of myself as a good guy, so I told myself that this was just a one-time thing - a reaction against all the sameness and routine that had been creeping into my life.
I resolved not to tell Simone and not to let it happen again.
For You, The Stars
Chapter Two: Have a Cigar
Installment 3
Meanwhile, I was staying in touch with friends, mostly women, on the east coast, writing letters (remember that? handwritten letters, several pages long, stamped and delivered by the post office?) and sending mix tapes. I pretty much never made mixes for guys. I wasn’t always romantically interested in the women I made mix tapes for but I guess I always had in the back of my mind.
Bella, for example, never made mixes for me but I’d still make them for her, weaving together a sort of subliminal message from the song titles and key lyrics.
Then there was Maura Romas, who’d I chased on and off for my last two years in college. There was some obvious chemistry between us but there must have been some kind of magnetic repulsion as well because whenever we started to get real close she’d flake out and vanish and not answer her phone or return my calls. She’d even turn and walk away when she saw me on campus.
Then inevitably a few months later I’d run into her out at a party and she’d be incredibly apologetic and say she’d been freaking out and under stress and we’d get into long conversations and go for walks and hnag out for hours without really saying much, just listening to music. I was just getting into the Dead then and during one of the phases when she was avoiding me I wrote out the words to Crazy Fingers because for whatever reason I thought they were relevant. Probably the last verse, where it goes
Midnight, on a carousel ride, reaching for the gold ring, down inside
never could reach, it just slips aways, when I try
And then another time I think I wrote out all the words to Helplessly Hoping. How pathetic is that? I was just coming out of the common vocabulary of sappy romantic music of the 70s back then - the James Taylor stuff and Cat Stevens and Gordon Lightfoot - that we used to make out to.
One time when we were on the ins I was playing her one side of American Beauty and I sang her all the words to “Brokedown Palace.” I’ve never had any shame about music, I guess. That did make an impression on her, because she mentioned it later.
She’d been to one of New England prep schools and was sort of Dead-averse. There is a frat-like preppy Deadhead culture at those schools and I even had to overcome my prejudices before I finally went to a show around 1984 and “got it.” Worse, Maura had lived next to two rabid Deadheads one year and they would do things like eat acid and then play “Uncle John’s Band” 99 times in a row. It would be enough to put anyone off Jerry.
Now that I was out in California and Maura was in a grad-school writing program at BU, we had gotten into this intense epistolary thing. I had this big Maura file with her half of our exchange. All the stuff we were never able to say in person came out in the letters. We had a shared ambition to be writers and I was going through a lot of angst, at least in my letters, about not making progress, not finishing stories, not writing novels.
She would tell me that you couldn’t force it. When I was ready to write, I’d write. But that was easy for her to say. She was the one in the program. She was the one immersed in a culture that valued writing and being mentored (and seduced) by her writing teachers.
These days we were quoting R.E.M. lyrics in our letters to each other, things like “(Don’t Go Back to) Rockville.” I made a mix tape for her that was fraught with obvious drama. I ended it with “Brokedown Palace.” I found a really good live version of “Uncle John’s” and put that on it, to rehabilitate the song for her. I put “You Are Like a Hurricane” on side two and I got my frustration out by including “Idiot Wind” on side one. She really liked it, even the harsh Dylan stuff (“I couldn’t believe after all these years, you didn’t know me any better’n that”).
She made mixes for me in return and hers were really good. They always included stuff I’d never have listened to otherwise, probably never have bought, but that sounded great amidst the stuff I knew better. She also was getting a glimpse of some good stuff in the cutout bins in Boston that somehow hadn’t made it to my San Francisco ears yet. One of her mixes has “Bone Machine” on it, which was my first experience of the Pixies and another had a De La Soul tune, that was like a step into another world.
At first the Pixies sounded harsh and unlistenable to me. I’d put her mix on my walkman and listen on Muni on the way to work. But the second or third time through it sounded like the most natural thing in the world, and as classic as a Rolling Stones hit.
Our letters get getting more and more intense and it never occurred to me to mention it to Simone. It wasn’t real. I don’t know if I’d have said any of the things I was writing if I’d been looking at Maura in person. She sometimes talked about dropping out of her grad program at BU and moving out to San Francisco but I didn’t think she’d really go for it. That’s what all the “Rockville” stuff was about - the urge to pick up and move, leaving all her stuff behind.
I think I was keeping her on the backburner.
For You, the Stars
Chapter Two: Have a Cigar
Installment 2
I’m not sure why Simone never made it to those parties in Berkeley but it may have been because neither of us had a car. If I wanted to get there I’d have to take the Muni downtown and the Bart across the Bay and then I’d still have to get someone to come down from the hills to pick me up from the downtown Berkeley Bart station.
I also think Simone didn’t like my Berkeley friends. They were kind of pretentious, always talking about art theory and Marx. Simone liked to discuss lit crit and she liked to discuss feminism, but she also liked to be the best-informed, smartest person in a discussion, and the ex-Ivy Leaguer grad students had too many humiliating rhetorical tricks up their sleeves, along the lines of “Well, if you haven’t read Gramsci, then I don’t even know why we’re having this conversation.”
I liked having this other place to go and this other set of friends and I liked being able to flirt fairly freely without any real consequences, knowing I had someone to get back to, at least after sleeping off a hangover.
Simone and I did most of our hanging out in the Haight. At first the place had a sort of magical cachet for my Deadhead friends, but once you had checked out 710 Ashbury and the remaining head shops, you’d notice the hippie-slash-beggars everywhere and that the place was getting kind of yupped out. What the neighborhood did have going for it was a couple of good places to eat.
We especially liked going out for breakfast in the morning. At the Crescent City cafe we could get pseudo-New Orleans food, like omelets with shrimp and hot sauce. Or if we were willing to walk down toward the lower Haight and wait on line for 45 minutes we could get an impossibly huge breakfast / brunch at the Pork Store Cafe.
We went to movies at the Red Vic, lolling on uncomfortable secondhand couches and eating popcorn with brewer’s yeast on it instead of butter and salt. We bought clothes at the thrift shops. Well, mostly I did. Simone didn’t care too much about fashion, favoring a serviceable collegiate, sweater-and-jeans style that suited her pretty well. I was trying to reinvent myself, systematically replacing every preppy scrap of clothing in my closet with something blacker or tighter or made of a less natural fabric. I was still a bit overweight but I wasn’t dressing loose and sloppy to hide my body anymore.
I was also starting to let my hair grow longer. I had finally noticed the sharp angle of my hairline heading toward my temples and it occurred to me that if I ever wanted to wear long hair in my life that the window was in danger of slamming shut. My hair has never grown fast, though, so at first it was just too long in the front, falling in my eyes all the time, and bushy on my neck. Over the next few months I had it almost to pageboy length all around.
Somewhere along the way I also picked up a multicolored guatemalan (yes, I know that’s redundant) shirt that pulled over instead of buttoning up the front. I refused to wear tie-dyed t-shirts all the time like my Gomer buddies. I fancied my self a punker shade of hippie. I liked Black Flag and the Meat Puppets and I went to the I-Beam to see Camper Van Beethoven and later Primus. If I was going to dress colorful it was going to be with a little more panache than your standard preppy Deadhead.
I noticed I was also getting privately more critical of Simone’s appearance. Not the way she dressed. I was fine with that. It was subtle things, like her freckles, which I had really liked at first. Unlike some guys, I find freckles to be sort of cute. But she had freckles up the wazoo (literally). I think less of her skin was unfreckled than freckled. I’d be looking at her in bed and my mind would do a kind of strange figure-ground kind of flip and suddently I’d see her as a ginger-colored person lightly flecked with pale pink skin. Being high may have had something to do with that.
Also, as young as she was, her skin seemed kind of like that of a much older woman. It was very thin, and was already showing wrinkles on her forearms. Her upper lip had those lines you usually see only on women and men in the 60s or 70s. I knew enough not to mention any of this to her, but now that I think about it, I may just have been getting a little tired of her body. I was a young guy who had just discovered that maybe it wasn’t quite as hard to hook up with women as I had previously though and - who knows? - maybe I was laying the groundwork for my escape.
One of the folks I used to see at Parnassus was this very artsy, very pale woman named Dannie. She had pitch black ringlets of hair and she had very pretty blue eyes. In some ways she seemed to have stepped out of a pre-pre-Raphaelite past. She may have known this because she spoke in a fey high-pitched trill. When everyone else wanted to go out for eggs and bacon on Sunday mornings, she would lobby for some cute little bakery she knew where we could get fresh croissants (pronounced the french way, rolling the r and dropping the s). Sometimes she’d convince the gang but usually the hash browns and bloodies place would win out.
She wore her body well. She was fairly large around. Not too tall, but with a rounded belly and arms and legs like a baby. I still found her pretty. I had never had utterly conventional tastes in women, but she was outside of the type I had considered in the past. A few years later I made an unsuccessful pass at a lawyer in her thirties who was a coworker of another one of my roommates, so maybe in general I was intrigued by people outside of “league” in one way or another.
I had the feeling Dannie was flirting with me more than the usual amount that went on with all the drinking up on Parnassus. She’d make eyes at me or make sure she was in my line of site. She’d seek me out for quiet conversation. At one party at another house in Berkeley I didn’t know enough people and I felt sort of mopey and lonely so I went outside to sit on the porch by myself.
I had it in the back of my mind that the lonely poet staring at the sky might be an attractive pose and sure enough Dannie came out to talk to me after a while. She made a point of squeezing next to me in the backseat of car when we all left that party to go to another one and she took my hand in her much bigger hand and squeezed it while everyone was talking all around us.
For You, The Stars
Chapter Two: Have a Cigar
Installment 1
So after about a year in San Francisco I was easing into an oddly domestic scene. I’d finally caught up even in our elaborate communal group ledger for expenses and etc., which we called GLEE for short. I’d essentially been on the communal dole when I first arrived and had to borrow money to do anything. Every time I ate a group meal I was marked down for my share of the groceries. In fact, if you gathered together leftovers from the dinner the night before and wrapped them in a tortilla for lunch the next day, you’d be included in the tally for that dinner. This we called “the burrito trap.” We took turns making dinner and cleaning up, in pairs. The rule was that the same pair who made dinner also cleaned it up - that was there was no incentive to leave a big mess. I couldn’t cook at all, so I would be the one washing the dishes and the pots.
When I started legal summarizing I was still barely getting enough money to break even. Sometimes the three guys who were working as paralegals in the office of an eccentric gay Princeton alumnus would pay for my roundtrip fare on the N-Judah streetcar and buy me lunch downtown so I could make a fourth for bridge. It always tickled my dad that me and my friends were bridge addicts, as he associated that with the preppy (or, as he called them, “tweedy”) kids of his own college days in the ’50s. I had simply discovered that bridge was the perfect form of procrastination. You’d agree to play, “just one more hand,” and miss another class and then another till it was dinner time.
Once I had the full-time job I was able to dig my way out of my glee-hole and could maintain a little balance in my checking account. I found myself even getting a little excited when my bills came. I’d get out my checkbook and pay them immediately, not even waiting for the grace period to pass. I think I was getting over the shock of how low down on the social and financial totem pole I had landed by following the Dead out to California instead of following the other stock broker wannabes to Wall Street. In my own small way I was making it on my own and I was inordinantly proud of the fact.
I recently came across a photo of myself, in my tie and shirtsleeves, with a leather briefcase my sister got me, and in my dorky ’80s style oversized horn rims. It’s obvious now that my hair was receding pretty fast, but it was still shaggy and falling across my eyes at the time. I hadn’t yet started trying to grow it long yet. I was fresh faced and clean shaven, no tattoos or piercings. Piercings weren’t even really in yet except for earrings which had already crossed over the the jock/frat crowd by then. It was a year or so later when the RE/Search “modern primitives” book came out and seem spark the huge outpouring of odd piercings and split tongues and genitals and the total mainstreaming of tattoos.
No, I was just a junior working stiff at that moment, trying to fit in, but I think I was on the verge of freaking myself out with just how settled I’d become. I’d forgotten about rock and roll and art and even writing and I was setting myself up for a major tailspin.
One of the gomers, Bo, was this big ex-football player who had redirected his competitive urges into strategy board games. He used to joke that if he didn’t reinnoculate himself with a bonghit on a regular basis that the demon Cthulhu inside him would emerge. We were all ready to propitiate him and keep the soft-edged fuzzy teddybear around instead of the potentially rage-fileld monter inside him. He had gone back to east for a visit and returned with a new girlfriend in tow, Suzy Schotzkopf.
Somehow Suzy ended up moving in with all of us although no one seemed to like her much, not even Bo. We held one of our interminable consensus-building meetings and the anti-Suzy impulse was just too disorganized to fight the inertia. Instead, in our passive-agressive self-medicating ways, we just none of us helped her move in. She was the type who was constnatly apologizing to everyone, preemptively. She said “sorry” like every other word. I felt a little guilty for not helping her move her furniture in, especially when she was hauling a small couch up our tight little winding staircase by herself. I swear I heard her bump into the wall and say “I’m sorry” reflexively to no one. Suddenly I didn’t feel guilty - just ill.
Suzy offered to drive Simone and me up to Angel’s Camp (near where Twain wrote about the frog contest) for an outdoor concert with Santana and the Dead. This would be Simone’s first Dead show, so I got Friday and Monday off to enable us to make the trip. Santana was the sweetener because who didn’t like Santana? Inevitably, on the way to the show Suzy’s car broke down. We spent hours at some nowhere gas station near a freeway on-ramp with Suzy trying to get something in her transmission fixed and constantly apologizing to both of us. Somehow, I have no idea how, she got the car working again and we made it to the site well after dark. We had to do the dirt-camping thing, sleeping next to the car, and of course we were kept up most of the night by drunken and tripping ‘heads playing battered old guitar and howling at the nonexistent moon.
The shows were on Saturday and Sunday and in some ways the days were perfect. That may have been the high point of my time with Simone. It was a little weird seeing the father with a toddler near us who was unable to leave the show the first afternoon even when his daughter was obviously overwhelmed by the noise and chaos and heat. But most of the people around us were stereotypically kind and thoughful, and Simone was actually surprised at how slick and together the Dead sounded by the late ’80s.
I’m not sure exactly what she was expecting - either heavy metal based on the band’s name or maybe something really sloppy based on the awful bootleg tapes I was still listening to before the Internet and digital changed that whole scene - but she was pleasantly surprised that they didn’t just jam endlessly or acidically. She even gave them the ultimate compliment by her own standards: in concert they sounded a lot like Genesis. I scoffed at that of course. For me the highlight was when Santana sat in with the Dead as they resurrected a long dormant song, Good Morning, Little Schoolgirl and when Carlos and Jerry pushed each other to shreddy extremes on All Along the Watchtower, an obvious tribute to Jimi, one of Santana’s greatest heros (along with Miles).
We didn’t get much sleep again the night between shows and Suzy was really having no fun but she was committed to driving us back so she stuck it out. I paid her for our share of the gas but I think she really just wanted to be treated like a buddy and I wasn’t willing to go that far.
Another cluster of my friends from college had grabbed a house on Parnassus Way in the Berkeley / Oakland hills. They were all grad students at UC, mostly in eastern european languages or politics. They also lived with a couple of undergraduate girls who were both zaftig and whom I both thought were very sexy. Every now and then I’d go to a party at their place on Parnassus and usually end up spending the night. For some reason Simone never seemed to go to those parties. I did a lot of flirting but nothing ever seemed to happen.
The two sexy girls, Ava and Bronwen, one blonde, one dark haired, used to tease me a lot. I guess it was obvious I had a thing for them. They would joke about things like threeways or dressing me up in their lingerie. I was game but it never seemed to go anywhere. Usually we’d all drink a huge amount and pass out. I’d spend the night on a couch in the living room and in the morning we’d all go to the breakfast place atop Walnut Square in Berkeley for eggs and bloody marys. One time Bronwen was away so I crashed in her bed. In the middle of the night I rummaged through her drawers and stole a few pairs of her panties. I was pretty perverted like that back then. She showed up in the morning and was surprised to find me in her bed but I played it cool and smuggled my booty out of the room without her noticing.
For You, The Stars
Chapter One: Eyes Like a Cat
Installment 4
Simone and I hit it off right away. Dave less so with her friend Sharon, but the four of us planned a double date in Berkeley a week later. I think we went for ice cream. Simone was also from New York, except Queens, not Manhattan, and she was writing her Ph.D. thesis on Toni Morrison at SF State, so she and Dave had the English department there in common.
I liked her right away. She was smart and pretty and had a cocky attitude. She cussed and she was opinionated. I even kind of liked her semi-thick Queens accent. It may have been that touch of home I was sick for. She was also kind of awkward. It may have been her alliterative name: Simone Shroop. I’d probably feel awkward with a name like that. I guess she was kind of dorky, but I was definitely into her. She seemed to have pretty nice breasts but it was hard to tell.
A month or so later we were lying on my futon and already reminiscinng about our first impressions. We were very frank with each other and we were talking about what we’d thought when we first took off our clothes and lay down together. I admitted that while I still was great admirer of her breasts, that they were not as large as I had imagined from the clothes she wore at the party and on that first double-date (Dave and Sharon didn’t hit it off and drifted apart quickly.)
She admitted that she hadn’t noticed my gut the first few times. I’ve always carried around some extra pounds, at least since puberty, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot.
In fact, a little while later she also told me that there were three things I hadn’t told her up front when we first met: that I was unemployed, that I was a Dead head, and that I smoked a lot of pot. Can you blame me?
We fell into a routine suprisingly quickly. I’d only had one serious girlfriend in college and I was sort of amazed at how easily this had worked out. The same friend of Dave’s and Simone’s who had hosted the party where we met also set me up in a somewhat pointless job at an architecture studio, a kind of assistant/slave job. It had been his job at the time but he was leaving to go to architecture grad school. It made less sense for me since I wasn’t planning to be an architect, but a job was a job, and the legal summarizing was getting old.
I may have been deliberately doing jobs in career paths I wasn’t interested in. I wasn’t going to be a lawyer or an architect, so being a paralegal or a studio assistant didn’t represent any kind of threat of settling into a career. Instead I could practice not writing or make up songs on the guitar and dream big dreams.
But something inside of must have been craving a domestic routine, because pretty soon I was on a regular cycle. I still wasn’t making much money, around $7/hour, so I would walk the 20 blocks or so from my commune to the place near Lyon and Baker and Page where Simone lived with her two roommates. I’d listen to my walkman sometimes on the way over and other times I’d just spend the whole time lost in thought.
Sometimes I’d come out of it and notice I was chanting soundlessly: Lyon and Baker and Page, oh my!
One of my other roommates in the group house, Belinda, asked me why I did a big bonghit before I walked over to Simone’s. It was a good question. Part of it was just that “one for the road” idea, or to bring on the reverie for the next 25 minutes. But in retrospect it was probably about social anxiety or maybe a sense that I was going down the wrong road.
Many nights I would sleep over at Simone’s. She was into Genesis, Phil Collins Genesis, so I would kind of mock her for that. She’d of course mock me for being into the Dead. We’d compromise by falling asleep on her tiny little bed listening to the new age ambient station, which reminded me a lot of drums and space.
We actually took a long time to get sexually intimate, which was sort of a good thing. I was still pretty inexperienced and she considered herself to be a virgin although technically she had had one drunken experience.
“He put it in but he wasn’t hard,” she told me. “Does that count?”
We did a lot of kissing. I always liked making out. It took me back to my earliest experiences, around 7th grade, playing spin the bottle and kissing for hours. I liked the play of tongues and the softness of our mouths pressed together. I also liked feeling her up. Her breasts were pretty nice after all. I wasn’t really in any hurry to go much further, and we’d usually bring each other off with our hands.
She told me she wanted to be drunk when she lost her virginity again, and I was really against that. I wanted her to be present. She was obviously scared. When we finally got around to it, she cried, and I didn’t yet know that that was really not unusual. I kept trying to get her to tell me why she was crying and she kept saying she didn’t know.
She did have a bit of psychological problem, which you could delicately refer to as “clenching up.” Or maybe it was physical. Believe me, it wasn’t like I was presenting a challenge from the size point of view. She talked to her doctor and got a tube of lubricant and that actually worked pretty well. Eventually she got very enthusiastic about fucking.
Not so much with the blowjobs, though. She was kind of afraid to even try, and I admitted to her that I found that frustrating. “You don’t have to be a blowjob queen or a pornstar,” I told her. “Just give it the old college try.”
I also thought it was unfair that she was totally willing for me to go down on her. I mean, really: tit for tat, right? One time, as a kind of joke, I told her that if we ever broke up it would probably be because of the no blowjob policy. She got really mad at me and how could I even joke about that? So of course I told her I was sorry, but in a way I was just telling her the truth. Sexual compatability matters, doesn’t it?
It’s not like we were just about sex all the time. We were both in our low 20s, so it’s understandable - I think - that we were fooling around every day, or just about, but we did a lot of things together. We went to concerts: Neil Young, Santana, the Dead. But never Genesis! She admitted that she and her younger brother once cried at a Barry Manilow concert. She later regretted telling me that. Actually, I think she regretted telling me that immediately.
We also talked about books and writing a lot. Under her tutelage, I read all of Toni Morrisons, starting with the Bluest Eye. She taught me a lot about contemporary lit-crit. Education had actually turned me off to reading. All through my childhood I’d read voraciously, but starting with book reports and then term papers and then later in college the truly insane reading schedules all conspired together to make me want to read as little as possible, outside of science fiction novels and the Remo Williams series.
After I graduated I went through a kind of no-read-at-all detox period and then tentatively I dipped back into reading novels and started remembering how much I loved them. Every day at my lunch break at the architecture firm I’d walk out reading my book. I had mastered the art growing up in New York of reading and walking around in a city without bumping into hydrants and poles and other people most of the time.
I had gotten kind of friendly, in a perfunctory way, with the gay reception desk guy in the office building and one day he asked me, “Hey, are you taking a ‘great books’ class?” That puzzled me, but I guess I was reading highbrow stuff, Pale Fire one week and Hopscotch the next. I was kind of burning through the books after a while once I got my appetite back.
So Simone and I had a lot in common, a lot to talk about, and a pretty lusty time in the sack. I liked her just fine but I was pretty careful not to accidentally say “I love you.” I’d been in love in college and that was okay but I was in no hurry to jump right back into something that all-consuming.
Unfortunately, Simone was definitely moving up that mountain, well past infatuated and heading for love. After a while she started talking about loving me and I was really dreading that “I love you but I’m not in love with you” speech. Still, I made a point of being honest and even when it would have made things easier I refused to string her along or pretend I felt stronger than I did. And I never, ever, ever talked about the future or anything crazy like marriage.
For You, The Stars
Chapter One: Eyes Like a Cat
Installment 3
One thing that had changed for me almost immediately upon moving out to California was that I started being successful with women. I don’t know if it was the light or the air or if I just had enough distance from my family and the stressed-out world of the east coast. Or maybe it was that the kinds of women I was made to be with were out here, but even before I had a job I managed to hook up with a pretty cool girl.
I was living with a bunch of guys from college, most of whom were from the class before me, so they’d already found a big old Victorian near the Haight and were staying together there in communal squalor when I arrived. They called themselves Gomers for reasons too complicated to go into. On the livingroom wall was a portrait photograph of an elderly couple whom we called the Gomperses. Visitors usually figured they were one of our parents so they wouldn’t comment on how strange they looked (they were wearing their best polyester and the photo looked like it was taken around 1973 and hand tinted). We named them Gompers after some of the mail that used to come to the house, but that name was actually unrelated to the Gomer slang we used to refer to each other.
Back in school most of us used to hang around in a party room called Doo-dah that had been used by stoners for nearly two decades. It was technically a shared living space between two dorm rooms, but it was understood that you could drop by just about anytime, especially if you brought weed. There was a bar in the room but it was never stocked. Likewise there was a mini-fridge that usually had nothing in it. For a while there was a hookah. And there was a stereo that 99% of the time was used to play lousy-sounding old analog audience tapes of Grateful Dead shows from the late ’70s and early ’80s. We left the hookah in the room for the nextd class when we graduated.
I knew some of the guys better than others in school but living together in a medium-sized house I got to know them all pretty well before long. For the first few months I slept on a mattress in a little breakfast nook off the kitchen but eventually i graduated to my own room. I had no job yet so I got myself the cheapest room in the house. It was desgined to be a dininig room and it shared double glass doors with the livign room. I covered them with tapestries for privacy but the sound still carried.
The room was tiny and I had no furniture beside a futon, so I was always down at floor level. Eventually I scrounged up some cinderblocks and blanks and then Chad gave me his old black and white tv so bit by bit my floor-level existence got a little more liveable.
I started to get real close to Dave, whom I hadn’t known that well in the Doo-dah days. We had a lot of interests in common. We were obsessive about going out to see live music (and not just Dead shows like most of the Gomers), and we were even interested in high brow stuff. We started a plan called Operation Culture and, to the extent that we could afford it, we tried to go to one classical type performance every month. One month it would be the ballet and the next the symphony.
Also, Dave started taking a writing class at San Francisco State and this aroused my reflexive sense of competitiveness and awakened my latent urge to tell stories or at least to be perceived as a writer.
All my life people had asked me if I was a writer or told me to be one. This was all based on my glibness. I tried to explain to people that talking and writing were entirely different but people would just talk about my “way with words” and make assumptions. After a while I started believing them, but I wasn’t that interested in the hard work or writing and rewriting or of writing all the crap you had to get through before you figured out the trick to writing something good. I was happy to be viewed as a writer or someone who “must be a good writer” as long as I didn’t have to write anything.
But then as soon as Dave started taking his class I wrote a short story kind of just to show off. But I found my own stories pretentious and boring. Dave wrote hilarious tales in the mode of Philip Roth and Kafka, such as a surreal story about a guy who bought a disembodied breast and would call himself down by holding it when he got stressed out.
Dave and I also shared a desire to meet women and get laid. He had a friend from high school in New Jersey who lived nearby and that guy invited us to a party one night. I wouldn’t usually want to go to a party where I didn’t know anyone but like Dave I wanted to meet women and get laid so I went.
That was where I met Simone. Don’t worry, I’m getting to Cecilia, but I’ve got to put everything into context.
For You, The Stars
Chapter One: Eyes Like a Cat
Installment 2
I’d been keeping in touch with Bella, seeing her when I visited family and friends in New York, writing the occasional letter, and making her mix tapes. I’d string together a collage of songs with common themes and not-so-hidden messages. I put “Eyes Like a Cat” by Little Johnny and the Nightcats on one mix. By then I was pretty well resigned to never getting together with Bella but I couldn’t resist flirting. For a while I turned my attention to her best friend Suzy Baxter, who everyone just called Baxter.
Baxter had been hanging around Bella for those same two or three years that I was haunting her, my last couple of years in school. That whole time she’d had one boyfriend, Brett, a guy who went to one of those private colleges in New England for rich kids who were either dumb or too rich to study. He wasn’t dumb. I think he majored in skiing. He’d drive down on weekends in his convertible and they’d smoke together and make out. He was reasonably good looking in dark-haired preppy kind of way but also a little round, a little soft. He was one of those frat-boy party-time deadheads and I thought Baxter could do much better.
Within a year of us all graduating, Brett broke up with her. She’d been talking marriage and kids and he told she was moving too fast. Within six weeks he was engaged to someone else and Baxter was devastated. I almost flew out to New York because she sounded so messed up. We spent a lot of time talking on the phone, me and Baxter, me and Bella. Baxter was short and had very wavy blonde hair. I remember after knowing her for about year suddently noticing that she was extremely busty. Somehow, she’d managed to disguise it. After that, I had to fight not to stare at her boobs, especially when she was relaxing and not made-up and wearing a loose t-shirt and lolling around on a bed or couch as we sat around passing a bong and listening to music.
The next time I was back in the city Baxter seemed like she was doing better but she looked much smaller. Her bust was almost gone and she really seemed tiny. I remember ending up talking to her in the bathroom of her little apartment and it was like she was tring to cram herself under a shelf as we stood around chatting. I didn’t smoke anymore but she was chainsmoking cigarettes and Bella told me she was worried that Baxter was drinking too much.
Then a year or so later it was rehab and 12 steps and she didn’t drink anymore but she still seemed shrunken and I missed her breasts.
Bella was from the midwest but she had moved to New York with what seemed like a third of my college classmates and she was trying to make it as an actress. She was working as a waitress and a bartender but she was aslso taking acting classes and going to auditions and one time she showed me a bunch of head shots that were truly stunning.
She told me her mother was skeptical about her acting ambitions but had said to her that if that’s what she wanted to do, then to “get on with it.” Bella had acted in a lot of plays and musicals in college and like a lot of beautiful girls she was extremely adept at acting a part, projecting an illusory personality, and making people believe whatever she wanted to. She could talk her out of almost any kind of trouble.
At one point in school we’d had similar academic problems. You could only drop so many failing classes before you were down to the minimum. We spent a lot of time getting stoned and skipping class and so partly way throguh the semester it would always reach the point where you had to do some triage: drop the worst classes and scrape by in the rest. We’d both started with six that spring and we were both failing three. One of my classes I’d never been to once. The professor had stopped calling my name because he thought it was a phony name someone had slippedi nto the list to make fun of him.
So I dropped two classes and ended up failing one of the remaining four that semester. Bella just “talked to the dean” and was permitted to keep only three classes that term. I imagine I could have done the same if I’d been willing to cultivate the powers that be, but it hadn’t even occurred to me, just as I’d probably never try to talk or cry my way out of a speeding ticket.
We were all finding that real life was a bit harder and a lot less glamorous than the sort of bottled socialism of a privileged private college, where you are fed and housed and healed and bailed out when things go wrong. We’d been pampered and most of us had been near the tops of our high school classes before eembarking on our elite university excursion and now we were out in the world without much to show for it, starting off in jobs at the entry level, if we had jobs. Or scraping by trying to do creative things like dee jay parties or write screenplays or act without much of a leg up or a way in.
Bella had even roomed with a fairly famous actress for to years in school. You’d have heard of her. They kepy the deoderant from one of her commericals on the mantlepiece in their off-campus apartment. Paulie made a point of scraping his armpits with it whenever we were partying at Bella’s. But in the real world, Bella’s friendship with the actress (let’s call her Marybeth) didn’t translate into any advantages at all. They had started drifting apart already anyway. For one thing, Marybeth didn’t do drugs. Anymore.
I was out in San Francisco trying to write novels and summarizing legal depositions to get by. I learned a lot about multiple chemical sensitivity long before that movie came out. Baxter had an entry-level job at a nonprofit. I had even thought of Cecilia for a few years until out of the blue Bella told me she was moving the the Bay Area and would I show here around. I told her of course and said she should give me a call once she got settled.
For You, The Stars
Chapter One: Eyes Like a Cat
Installment 1
Cecilia was Isabella’s younger sister. I’d had a crush on Bella for the last few years of college, but it was an unspoken agreement between us that she was out of my league. I was the one she’d turn to when one of her jock stoner boyfriends was chasing another girl. I was the one who walked her home from parties on frat row at night, kinda sorta hoping for a goodnight kiss but having to settle for “I’m so comfortable with you.”
I told myself that I knew Bella better than anyone else, and that we were closer than she was with anyone, including Paulie, her on-again off-again lover and a good friend of mine. One of the crazies who ate acid nearly every weekend and were always looking for something wild to do.
I met Cecilia during the party week just before graduation. She was the youngest kid in Bella’s family and had that precocious, grown-up-too-fast manner learned from her older brothers and sisters. She was cute where Bella was beautiful, short where Bella was tall. She was “too young” for me, but she was about my speed and I took her around from party to party, enjoying having a little cute girl with her midriff bare on my arm until she ran into a small crowd more her own age and took off.
I didn’t see Cecilia again until two years later, after I’d moved out to San Francisco. Bella told me her sister was going to be looking for a place to stay and asked me to keep an eye on her.