For You, The Stars
Chapter Fifteen: Installment 3
Things didn’t work out with Kim either. It was mainly physical. I would have been happy to keep it going. I thought she was cool and I thought her being into me made me cool too, but she ended it. I didn’t argue or cry. As usual by then I had my eyes on someone else as well, a friend of Chad’s ex- named Bronwen who was on her own tear, meeting, mating with, and then breaking up with a series of guys herself without looking back. She was also very physically uninhibited and I was getting used to the idea that some women would initiate things without me having to life a finger. That flared out quickly. She broke up with me on my birthday after giving me a present and there were literally no hard feelings. In fact for the next few months whenever I was drunk or lonely or I’d walk over to her place by the park, just a few blocks away from the Gomer homestead and see if she was in. Frequently she’d take me back into bed with her.
Bronwen would also have parties on Friday or Saturday nights, every few weeks or so. I’d go, smoke a joint with her friends, get a little drunk, and then hang around till everyone else left. Sometimes one or more guys, at least one of whom was also her ex, would be playing the same game. I’d offer to sleep on the couch but then in the middle of the night she’d come out to get me. This happened less and less often until one day when I ran into her on my block, wearing sweats but still looking hot to me, and I told her that she was getting me excited, trying to flirt.
She pushed me into my doorway and got real close up to me and then she whispered, “Deal with it,” and turned around and walked away.
After her came Eliza, who came to me for advice when her boyfriend was heading to Japan for six weeks. She said she wasn’t sure whether she should try to have a long-distance relationship with him. “They don’t work,” I said, and told her about some of my experiences. I acted like her friend but I was totally trying to get her to become available to me. We were having this conversation at the bar at Slim’s during a Bela Fleck concert.
Sure enough she broke up with him and we got together within a week or so. I fell for Eliza hard. She seemed better than me. A better writer, a better painter. (I had started taking my painting classes again.) I guess somehow I communicated that to her and one day, after I got back from Hopper’s bachelor party in New Orleans it was over. Suddenly I felt the way Simone must have felt. I was the one crying and asking if maybe there was some way she might change her mind. She was the one lying and saying sure maybe there’s some tiny chance of that when there was no chance at all.
I dug out a note Simone had written to me when I had been cruelly casting her aside:
Daniel
I don’t know what to do. Last night you acted like nothing is going on, yet you seemed so sad. I don’t want you to be unhappy, I love you, talk to me I’m confused too. I still think the best thing for both of us is to enrich our individual lives, see other friends, spend more time on school & writing, etc., but still be w/ each other. I don’t think we have to lose that & I don’t want to. This is what I want. I don’t want anyone else as my lover but you. But you’re right - it’s been unhealthy & too much of a strain to have each other as the center of our lives. Maybe if each of us knew what we wanted in life & out of life that would help. I’m unsure but I know I want my life to have you in it.
I was going to wait until you talke to me but I’m not a very good waiter. I wanted to say this to you & release some of my pent-up anxiety. I don’t know how much sense I am making but I do feel better.
I hope this works out, it would be a shame if it didn’t.
Simone
I felt like even more of an asshole as I re-read that.
In the same folder I found a note I had written to Cecilia and obviously never given her, thank god. We had never fought as we drifted apart, at least not about fidelity and matters like that, but we had always argued and I guess I - in many ways more like Simone than Cecilia myself - needed to write things down to deal with my anxiety. I had written:
You are mean and insecure. You can dish it out but you want to get out of taking it. You’re offended by an insult to your sleazy disco friends and then you deliberately provoke me into anger and defensiveness by insulting me in a way that you know will hurt me. Then your meanly laugh at me for losing my temper.
You lie to cover up how unfair you are in this sort of thing. You claim that it’s all right to call me stupid (when you would freak if I called you that) because I know I’m smart. Turn that around though. You know you’re pretty, but you wouldn’t want me to call you fat. You can’t take anything less than
adulation orextreme flattery. You have no problem insulting my looks and my body. The fact is that you like to be able to insult me and you don’t like to be insulted. It’s ironic that you’ll so quickly jump to (phone cards) calling me a baby….
Mercifully I stopped writing at that point.
In mid-December I got a card from Bella that said nothing about Cecilia, who by then I hadn’t spoken to for several months. Below the part that said “To wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year” she wrote:
—and continued expansion into the new millennium.
That’s all - I mean nothing but the BEST of WISHES for you. Know what I mean? ‘Cause I do mean it. Hmmm… is that actually true? You could easily debate it because I used the mini-word ‘cause. Is this what you mean by self-conscious Dano?
Whatever else may be true I do love you.
P.S. Where’s my tape?
P.P.S. tee hee - just teasing
Much love, Bella.
PPPS. - I’ll probably be in NYC for X-mas - if I am, Paulie will be here too—
. . . . .
THE END
For You, The Stars
Chapter Fifteen: Installment 2
Giselle and I got our writing group started, mostly with people she knew from her poetry class and another group she had been in, but also with a few of my writer friends, like Dave and his new girlfriend Mavis whom he had recently met in his graduate writing program at S.F. State. Mavis smoked a lot and seemed really hard on the surface. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking. Her writing was also hard - diamond hard - polished to a fine gloss. I was really impressed by her attention to craft and her careful way with words. Many of her stories had religious themes. Dave had said that she was the only (other) really good writer in his class, and I believed it.
I knew Kim was an aspiring writer so I invited her to join the group too. Many of her stories had erotic themes or involved bodily functions. One of them involved getting bloodstains out of underwear. In the story her character washes the clothes in cold water. I asked why it wasn’t hot water and she and old the other women in the group told me that hot water would make the blood set in for good.
There was another woman in the group, Cindy, who seemed extremely young to me. She was probably just a year or two younger than I was but she spoke in that babytalk kind of voice. One time we were having the group at Giselle’s apartment, spread around her living room. There were not enough chairs so I was sitting on the floor. I noticed from across the room that I could see right up Cindy’s knee-length skirt. I was looking right at the gusset of her little cotton panties. I felt like a perv taking in this view but I wasn’t able to stop looking.
It was the same whenever I noticed a woman’s breasts. I couldn’t help but stare a little but I was mortified at the thought of being caught looking, so I would keep sneaking peaks with sidelong glances.
The one other woman in the group (besides Giselle’s crazy ex-lover who just came to the first session and then never returned) was Eliza Stone, who lived up the road from my Berkeley friends on Parnassus Way. Eliza was another happa. Her mother was Japanese and her father was British. She had grown up in Alaska and I always thought she looked a bit like an eskimo, although I realized that was just a matter of suggestion. Her face was round and soft and she had long glossy black hair and a querulous lilt to her voice. Her writing also betrayed hours of work and attention to craft.
I tended to rely upon random bursts of inspiration where I’d right like a maniac for ninety minutes or so. Then usually I’d drop the first page or two which tended to be throat-clearing crap and find a nugget of value, maybe only a few paragraphs but sometimes a few pages. String enough of these together and I’d have another of my semi-plotless abstracted short stories all about, say, a man who has trouble urinating in public bathrooms. When Mavis gave me a copy of The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker I almost gave up writing on the spot.
There were other men in the group too, besides Dave and me. There was Prentiss Yee, who Giselle had met in her poetry class. He wrote poetry only but gave really helpful feedback on the prose that most of us were producing. He really made an effort to understand what I was trying to do even when I wasn’t sure myself, and more than once he helped me turn something that started out far to vague and arch into something moderately readable.
There was also another poet, Roman Lee, who was older than all of us, probably about forty. He’d been published in numerous obscure journals and wrote with a degree of confidence that was somewhat intimidating. He didn’t seem to care what kind of feedback we had to give him and I wasn’t really sure why he was in the group at all.
There were two key values to the group: the first was that we had no leader, no teacher. No one was getting paid to tell us how to write. We were a collective and we validated each other’s efforts just by caring to meet together once a week. We were diligent though: we were careful not to let it devolve into a kaffeeklatch or a meeting to talk about what you’ve been reading lately. The second value was that we did some actual writing every time we met. This was something Giselle and Prentiss had learned in their previous group. Someone would establish a theme, such as “write from a child’s point of view,” and then we’d all spend the next forty-five minutes tackling something. After that we could read what we’d written to the group, or not, or read something we’d been working on lately for feedback and critique.
It worked like a charm at first but it was discipline that was tricky to maintain, and as the group’s composition changed over time, we eventually gave up on that part of it, which was a shame, because it was unique and it forced us to do at least some writing if we hadn’t gotten anything new written lately.
Maura even came to the group once or twice at my invitation. After she found a place to stay in Berkeley that fall we finally reconnected. We didn’t resume sleeping together so I gathered that the mystery was exploded for her as well. I guess there were no hard feelings. We never talked about it and we certainly weren’t writing each other letters anymore now that we lived just across the bay from each other.
Things with Giselle fell apart but in a friendly way. We kept the writing group together. She decided to give up sex and relationships for a while. I think the ugly way her long-distance love affair broke up had an effect on her. I had probably underestimated her attachment to Jack Peters or Peter Jackson or whatever his name was. It actually was a pretty cool breakup. We just mutually agreed to let it drop. We stopped fucking and we stayed in touch. It was like the exact opposite of the horrible way things had ended with Simone, and it was less weird than the kind of zombie-like way things had ended with Cecilia.
I entered into a kind of desperate period of sowing my oats left and write. That’s when I slept with Chad’s ex. I also reconnected with Kim. She’d been keeping her distance from me at work since the time we’d had that drunken makeout session in Bettie’s kitchen, but one day after work instead of taking the bus to to BART now that Lucille was dead I asked her to give me a lift to her place. No explanation. She made us some dinner, just some vegetable soup, a one-pot meal on her stove.
We watched a little TV on the tiny couch in the nook next to her kitchen while sharing most of a bottle of bourbon, and then without saying a word we went into her bedroom and screwed to an old Hank Williams LP. I woke up in the middle of the night with a raging headache and an intense need to take a leak, when I got back to bed I woke her up and we fucked again. This wasn’t lovemaking. It was raw animal sex.
We did it again in the morning when we woke up. Later on our memories of that night differed. I always said we had had sex five times that night but Kim said I was overcounting it. I may have been basing it on the number of orgasms she had.
Kim was extremely thin and flat chested, but her body was incredibly sexy to me. She had paperwhite skin and she liked to wear old-fashioned lingerie, including garter belts and stockings, which was something I’d never seen on a real live woman before who wasn’t a stripper. I asked her once why she wore a bra at all when she didn’t need to and she seemed offended. I sort of figured out it had more to do with clothes and fashion and femininity than with support, but the lingerie had been a surprise because otherwise Kim dressed mostly punk or butch or both. She had a favorite pair of red plaid jeans and I had gotten so thin myself these days that I surprised myself by being able to fit them. I wore them around for awhile until the unbearable coolness got to be too much for me.
Given that I also had a crush on Eliza, the Alaskan girl who had dated two of my friends already from the Parnassus commune - in a way I guess she was on her own trajectory, cutting her own swath through a series of men she met - there were times when the writing group was weirdly charged for me. I’d look around the room and see Giselle and Kim and, at least once or twice Maura, all of whom I’d slept with, as well as Eliza who I wanted to sleep with and Cindy who was two young and babyish but who I had at least objectified that time I’d caught myself looking up her skirt.
I’m amazed I got any writing done at all that year and I’m not surprised I never finished most of what I started.
For You, The Stars
Chapter Fifteen: I Can’t Walk You Out
Installment 1
Cecilia and I never officially broke up. We just started seeing each other less and less often. The weekend after I got back from New York I went up to Marin to hang out with her. It was like old times but it was different. She was different. It occurred to me that when she had been new to the west coast, when I was a familiar face, her older sister’s trusted friend, she had relied on me to help her get oriented and to invent her new persona, a Deadhead party girl. Now she was established and though we sat around the same way and did the same things, even talked about the same things, she wasn’t nearly as focused on me. She had another life “out there” and I wasn’t part of that.
We both knew that I had changed too. I had a new job. I was outgrowing my tiny room. To be perfectly crass about it, I was becoming enamored of more interesting women. Cecilia had been everything Simone had not, and our whole experiment with a totally open, totally honest relationship was in many ways a success. It definitely fixed what had been wrong between me and Simone, which was mainly me telling her what she wanted to hear even when it was a lie. Worse, it had been me lying to myself about who I was and what I was capable of.
With Cecilia, I didn’t lie to her and she didn’t lie to me. Sometimes the truth hurt. She was honest that her last boyfriend was better looking than me, taller, in better shape. I didn’t want to hear that but I didn’t want some bogus fairytale story about how I was her first and only or the love of her life. I knew that wasn’t true. I’m not saying I didn’t fall in love. I did. And I never really fell out of love. It’s more like it just got dissolved in a much bigger solution until finally it didn’t have any cohesion any more.
I still wanted her too, physically. My last time up in Marin, because this was my last time, we slept together like nothing had changed. Like she hadn’t stopped rejecting the other guys she flirted with, like she hadn’t banged one or possibly two roadies in a situation that ended up being a little beyond her control, like she wasn’t now fooling around with this Evan guy. One last time it was just the two of us and she was just as playful as ever. She knew I liked the soft feeling of her lingerie and she tried rubbing it on me to see how that would feel. I realized that it didn’t work that way. Silky nylon fabrics were nice when there wasn’t a warm flesh and blood person to enfold me but it was totally redundant, really a distraction when there was. Still, I liked her flexibility and the fact that even right up to the end she was trying new things.
Sometimes I’d been frustrated with her inability to come. She still hadn’t solved that problem and I knew I never would. I didn’t blame her of course but it was this constant reminder that sex meant something different to her than to me. Or maybe it was worse, maybe it reminded me that sex meant the same thing to me that it meant to her. That it wasn’t about the actual lovemaking, or call it fucking if your prefer, but about the seduction and the capture, the attention and the validation through the gaze of another. Maybe it was all just a game.
We had planned to go to Laguna Seca all year. The Dead had played a weekend in 1987 down at the race track way south of the Bay and those shows had stood out for me as a high point of my California Deadhead career. It’s not that they were necessarily the best played shows or the ones with the rarest songs or most sublime moments of improvisation and serendipity. It was the setting as a whole, a holistic thing. It was the warm summer weather. The shows had been in May in ‘87 and the weather had been perfect. Cooling fog had burned off in the morning and the days had been warm and sunny, the evenings balmy and comfortable.
Beautiful west coast college students with perfect bodies and perfect tans bobbed and danced all up and down the side of the hill and even the dirt surfing tour rats looked their best, skipping and dancing along to Scarlet Begonias. At one moment a cool breeze rippled down the hillside and a wave of ahhhh crested through the crowd until even the lead guitar briefly bobbed on the same current. The whole cosmic oneness thing the Dead were famous for was fully in effect.
The fried calamari at the concession stand was good too.
On top of that Bruce Hornsby, whom we didn’t really know, opened, and his band played a credible, circa Europe ‘72 cover of China Cat Rider, and then Ry Cooder also brought his band blinking out the LA club scene to play a set each day with an amazing all-male five-part gospel harmony backing group.
At night, they filmed the famous Touch of Grey video that ended up being a hit on MTV later that year, the one where the band morphed into skeletons. They invited a bunch of us to hang out all evening as they lip-synched to the recently released single and asked us to act like, well, Deadheads, in the audience.
We talked about those shows for the rest of the year and when ‘88 Laguna Seca Daze (so named for the fortuitous initials) concerts were announced we got our tickets in advance. Cecilia and I were planning to go of course but then as we started not seeing each other so much I wasn’t sure what the plan was going to be. That last time I was up in Marin with her she said, “Sure, of course I still want to go,” and I thought that was kind of cool.
Problem was Laguna Seca was in July in ‘88. Much hotter. The whole scene was way overcrowded. Word had gotten out. Cecilia drove down with her crusty old cousin and once again I was struck by the eerie feeling that I was looking at a future version of Cecilia herself, presuming she didn’t gave up on her oft-stated plan of not living past thirty. We shared a tent and the first night we were there I rolled over and put my arm around her, expecting that we would get it on.
She shrugged me off. She didn’t really explain anything, except to make a sort of exasperated sound like, “Duh, don’t you realize we’ve broken up,” except we had never said so and I wasn’t sure what was different now from just a few weeks earlier. But I couldn’t argue with chemistry or lack thereof. I was a little disappointed, just like I might be any time I was expecting to get laid and did not, but I could really argue with it. Not only was it of course her right to say no anytime she wanted, but I knew that I was on autopilot, that any screwing would have been perfunctory, that we were over and I should have known it the same way she instinctively did. Not that I regretted giving it one last shot.
Still we kept talking, although not as often. Cecilia did manage to enroll in the College of Marin that fall. One day she told me she was having trouble writing a research paper and I jumped at the chance to help. Being smart, that was my specialty. I told her, “Why don’t you come over on Saturday and we’ll sort it out.” At this point I had no ulterior motive. I was completely into the idea of just being friends. I was with Giselle by then anyway.
She came over on Saturday afternoon with her book bag and asked for a beer, like nothing was different. We hung out in the livingroom listening to music and getting caught up. She was enjoying school but not her classes. She liked meeting people but she definitely didn’t look forward to two and a half more years of college. Finally I told her that we should probably take a look at her paper.
She hauled out some books and her notepad and showed me the part she was supposed to be writing about. She had no idea how to highlight. There were pages and pages basically full of yellow magic marker, as if she had not been paying attention at all. I got a handle on the topic and started trying to figure out a way she could tackle her paper, which only needed to be five or six pages, really.
Meanwhile she was pacing around the room with her third beer. I started trying to explain how to think things through and how to figure out a topic and a thesis statement for the paper, how to outline it, how to write the first sentence, and so on. I offered to take a look at her first draft and give her feedback.
“Can’t you just write it for me?” she said.
Maybe at one time I would have. There was definitely a time when I probably would have done anything she asked, because I wanted her to like me, because she was hot, because of the affection I felt for her. But this was easy. I knew that doing her work for her would be pointless. She’d learn nothing and just end up postponing the next inevitable crisis. Plus, I didn’t want to. I was done with college. This wasn’t really my problem.
“Fuck that,” I said.
For You, The Stars
Chapter Fourteen: Installment 3
Oddly enough, through the entire time with Cecilia, my friendship with Bella seemed to remain unchanged. She took an interest in us, of course, and I knew she was hearing things from Cecilia because from time to time we’d talk on the phone and she’d give me the latest from her grapevine. As things were starting to fall apart, or maybe drift apart is more like it, I found myself turning to Bella for advice every now and then. She had a sort of hands-off attitude. She made it clear that our friendship was not in jeopardy but also that her loyalty to her little sister was likewise not in question. She more or less said it didn’t make a difference to her if we stayed together or not. She thought it was kind of cool - actually “cute” I think is the word she used - when we started seeing each other, but she also told me flat out she didn’t expect it to last. I didn’t argue with her, and I didn’t tell her about the time I asked Cecilia to marry me, but she was totally in the loop when we thought we were pregnant and she was completely nonjudgemental about that too.
I called Bella partly to let her know I was going to be in New York in a week to visit my family and partly to probe her and find out if she knew whether Cecilia nda Evan were a couple or just friends. Bella had moved to the upper east side, only a few blocks east of where my folks lived, in fact, in a third-story walkup. She was still trying to be an actress, taking classes, getting headshots, going to tryouts, but she was also working most nights as a waitress at the Top of the Sixes. She said her mother didn’t really approve of her squandering - her word - her Princeton education doing off- off- off-Broadway plays, but also told her that if she was serious about an acting career that she should “get on with it.”
Bella had no insight to offer about Evan, but indirectly she told me to take things at face value. Both Bella and Paulie had always believed there was no such thing as a coincidence. They were no longer a couple themselves, what with Paulie in LA and Bella in New York. In fact, Bella was seeing someone now, a really good looking sous chef named Tony. She had convinced Tony to take a few modeling shots himself with his shirt off and she showed them to me when I was visiting. He obviously worked out. He was in great shape. I could see why she was attracted to him. She teased him about the fact that his hair was starting to thin at the crown and I told her to lay off, that women have so many dimensions to their vanity and that we men seem to invest it all in our hair, so don’t be mean, but she just laughed.
Tony was a good guy. He told hilarious stories about life in the kitchen, where it sounded like it was 200 degrees and full of illegal immigrants. He said they were all drinking cold beers all the time to fight the heat and that knifeplay and fistfights were not entirely unheard of. It was partly the job of his boss, the head chef to enforce discipline. He told me a bunch of stories about two busboys in his restaurant who were apparently from India based on this south Asian accent he put on while talking like them. He said one day they came to him and said, “What is this ‘New Jersey’ people are always talking about?” so he tried to explain to them that New Jersey was a state right next to New York that New Yorkers looked down on as an inferior suburban wasteland and that people from New Jersey were mocked for their lack of city smarts. He said the two of them looked at each other and then shouted “New Calhi!”
The point of the joke was that there was apparently an exactly parallel place outside of New Delhi where the analogy to New Jersey was perfect. It definitely cracked me up, but next time I was home I tried to locate this city in my historical atlas - I tried several possible spellings - and I didn’t find anything. So I figured he either made the story up or they said some city name that he totally misheard or misunderstood.
Tony liked a bonghit as much as Bella did so I knew when I visited her we’d get high and talk for hours. Or she’d be out and we’d go meet her dealer on the west side. Buying drugs was so different in New York. It was both more dangerous and in some ways much more social and casual.
On this visit I got together with Bella and Baxter and had drinks and then dinner at the restaurant overlooking Times Square station, one of my favorite locations in the city although to be honest I prefer the Oyster Bar over the place up on the balcony, which is may more expensive and foo-foo. I don’t remember what it was called then. It’s changed hands numerous times since. Michael Jordan owned a piece of it for a while. The Oyster Bar is more of a dive and is somewhat grungy by comparison, so I kind of understand why the girls wanted to eat on that high perch. I had to admit that the view of the station floor was stunning, too. There were times when I regretted having left New York, with its imperial Roman sense of itself and its occasional glimmers of soaring cathedral architecture.
As usual we talked freely about nasty stuff. Somehow, for example, we got on the subject of anal sex, something both Baxter and Bella freely admitted they had tried although neither of them said it was all that great. “Does it always hurt?” I asked. “If you’re doing it right,” said Bella, laughing. Then they talked about lube, and relaxing, etc., but Bella said in her inimitable lockerroom way, “It still always makes me feel like I’m taking a shit.”
“That sounds so sexy,” I said, with a straight face. Then we cracked up again. Baxter made a scrunched up face and then turned to Bella and said “Push back, push back!” like it was some kind of private joke. I filed it away for future reference.
Sometimes I saved up questions about women or sex or women’s bodies for these guys because I knew I could ask them anything and I didn’t always feel that way about whoever I was with. Like this one time when Simone shaved herself “down there.” This was towards the end of our relationship when I suspect she sensed I was starting to lose interest and she was trying to make herself more exotic or exciting to me, anything short of biting the bullet, so to speak, and learning to give head, I suppose.
To be honest, the whole shaved look was not that big a deal to me. The girls in Penthouse and other magazines and in the pornos were all shaved and I still felt that was kind of weird. The hippie in me thought that women should be natural. Also, I was a little creeped out by the whole prepubescent look of a shaved pussy. I didn’t want to be with an underaged girl, or pretend I was, or anything. The whole ideas was a turnoff. In fact Cecilia kept herself shaved and that was one thing I was never too keen on exactly because of my sense that she was somewhat arrested in that way, by what her brother had done.
The one advantage to the whole deal was practical - you didn’t get those maddening little hairs stuck in your teeth, or in the back of your throat, but then there was the whole stubble thing to deal with. Simone complained about itching from like day 2 and quickly let it grow back. Actually, when the hair was very short and downy that was kind of nice, sort of a compromise. It didn’t look defoliated but there wasn’t that thick bush and it was soft instead of prickly to the touch.
But the weird thing I remember is that like the day after Simone shaved I was going down on her and I noticed this extreme assymetry to her minor labia, like the lip on the left side, her right I guess, seemed twice as big or more than the one on the other side. It also kind of stuck out or hung down. I had to admit that the whole “clam” analogy that seemed so weird and gross sort of did fit visually, although the idea never worked for me since clams have that hard shell.
We both noticed it. She went and got a handheld mirror and she started kind of freaking out, like it was bee sting or something, although she admitted that it felt normal. I asked Bella about it next time we talked and she didn’t really have any good ideas but she did say that maybe it was just the normal way Simone was and that her pubes had hidden it, or maybe it was some sort of reaction to the added stimulation she was feeling on the newly exposed skin.
Bella had a way of putting my mind at ease about things like that, but I wasn’t really able to reassure Simone because I knew intuitively that she would not have wanted to know I was talking to another woman about her pussy. Fortunately, the problem went away or she forgot about it at least.
On this trip Bella and Baxter and I went out dancing. It felt kind of funny being out in discos in New York without Cecilia with us. We all agreed she would have been fun to have along. Bella had scored some mushrooms and we choked some down with beer at a club in the meatpacking district. I wanted to go to a nightclub a friend of mine was running one night a week inside another club, near Union Square, the real Union Square. Baxter called it a night, since she had to work the next day. She hadn’t eaten the mushrooms. Bella was willing to tag along even though she’d never really been close to my friend Andrea who was running the club. Andrea had been the year behind me at Princeton. She had dated my roommate for two years, tried a little modeling - she was beautiful in a totally unaffected way, as pretty in sweats as with makeup and high fashion - gotten bored with that, and was now out of school and poking around New York before heading back home to Alabama where she had grown up.
I suspected that Bella was a little jealous of Andrea. Or not jealous really, I just sensed the oil and water antipathy of two very pretty girls who were kind of used to getting their way and fawning over each other. We went to the club anyway and while I was on the guest list there wasn’t a plus one listed. The cover was only five bucks so I paid it for Bella. We went in and sat on one of the couches until I was able to catch Andrea’s eye. She screamed and ran over and gave me a hug and was very cordial with Bella who was equally smiley and friendly, but before long she flitted off again, mentioning her hostly responsibilities. The music was primarily Latin dance tunes.
It was incredibly hot and stuffy in there, what with it being late summer and all. The dog days. Hearing Buster Poindexter’s pseudo-Latin hit song for the umpteenth time since the previous year didn’t make the heat any more appealing. After a while Bella told me she was bored so we found Andrea to say goodbye. Andrea said if we wanted to we could meet her at the club under Indochine - she called it Underchine - late night after she was done at her club. We told her maybe and walked down the stair to the street.
A few weeks later there was serious fire in that club and a locked exit door and a lot of deaths and injuries. Fortunately it wasn’t on the Friday night that Andrea sublet the place but it put at least a temporary end to her impresario days.
Out in the busy street on a weekend night we suddenly felt the shrooms much more strongly than we had in the controlled claustrophobic confines of the nightclub. Without warning I felt intimately aware of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of other human beings, all within a block or two of me, all of whom would have been in my line of sight without the building walls to hide them, like cockroaches teeming in a tenement, all going about their lives with intention, all doing things, all trying to get something done, all pushing some object around or carrying something or rolling a ball up a hill or cleaning up a mess or making one. I almost swooned from the overwhelming awareness of this sea of people around me, totally ignoring me, going about their business.
I said, “Let’s sit down,” and we walked half a block to Union Square and sat on the steps there.
For a long time we just sat there saying nothing. Bella in fact hadn’t said a word since we walked out of the club when she had said, “I don’t like having to pay $5 to see my own friend.”
As I sat and watched the people and the lights I felt myself starting to calm down. Maybe it had just been the peak coming and now going. Still I was in no hurry to go anywhere. It was nice just sitting.
For You, The Stars
Chapter Fourteen: Installment 2
I’d been driving my new car to work almost every day, except when I carpooled with Bettie or Paul, for nearly two months when I decided I needed to give her a name. Chad always named his cars. He called his first two Hondas Norm and then Max, in each case naming the car after a setting on the air conditioner. We agreed that “Bi-Lev” would make a lousy name for a car, so when he bought this third new Honda, he called that one Bart, just so he could confuse people by saying he was taking Bart to his job at the university.
I definitely thought my car deserved a female name, although in some ways it was kind of butch with its blue (as opposed to pink) paintjob and square lines. I figured it was like ships. I finally settled on Lucille, naming it after B.B. King’s guitar.
I wasn’t sure I was doing that great a job of maintaining it, though. When Giselle’s other other boyfriend sold it to me, he didn’t really give me any tips, and I’d never owned car before. Mostly I just filled the tank and checked the air in the tires. After a couple of months had gone by I figured it might be time to change the oil or at least get that checked. I hadn’t the slightest idea of how to do it myself. I wasn’t at all mechanical and hadn’t grown up around cars. So I decided to take it to an Oil changers in Emeryville one day after work before driving home to San Francisco.
I pulled into the place and one of the guys who worked there came over to the driver’s side window, which I cranked down to talk to him. “Nice ride,” he said. I felt cool. I said, “thanks.”
“You want the works?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I probably need to change the oil, at least.”
“Probably need a new filter,” he said. “Hey, we don’t have the right one for this kind of car, but I can order it now for you and we will probably get one in by tomorrow.”
I thought about having him at least check the oil or give the engine a once-over, but I figured what’s one day?
I thanked him, said “Yeah, please order me that filter and I’ll drop by again around this time tomorrow.”
He said, “Cool,” and I backed the car out of the shop.
That night I gave Cecilia a call. We hadn’t been seeing much of each other but we were still talking on the phone at least every few nights. In some way it felt like it did when we first started going out, when we were on the phone all the time. I had taken a sort of benevolent attitude toward her emerging social life. After the wild night with the roadie she kind of admitted that I was right about what most guys really want and she seemed to be treating me like an adviser or confidant, almost as an avuncular figure. She knew I wasn’t that impressed by this new guy, Evan, who was hanging around her all the time, even helping out with babysitting her niece, and she knew I thought Sheena was sort of ditzy. She wasn’t looking for my approval or anything, but she obviously trusted me and liked me to know what was going on.
We still talked as if we were seeing each other too, and we had vague plans to get together the coming weekend or maybe the next.
I had told her about my one night with Maura, or really one day and one night, and how I hadn’t seen her since. She took a sort of perverse pleasure in that, and she acted reassured when I told her that she definitely had a better body than Maura did. Even though I tried to make it clear that that didn’t matter to me much, I had to admit that it was literally true. Cecilia was more shapely and feminine. On the other hand Maura was way more accomplished as a lover and I didn’t hesitate to tell Cecilia that. I wanted her to feel a little insecure about that, to not take me for granted. Maybe even to be a little jealous.
More recently I’d also kept her informed about my affair with Giselle. For once the word affair really seemed to fit. She agreed with me that the whole “other man” situation was lame and that our arrangement was the grown-up mature approach. Weren’t we telling each other everything.
I also let her know, in so many words, how sexy and seductive Giselle could be with me. Her sophisticated way of dressing and talking, her total lack of inhibitions in bed. Without trying to be cruel, or maybe a little, I let it slip that Giselle came easily and often. Cecilia didn’t take the bait. She acted sincerely happy for me. We were almost like high school friend sharing our adventures and experiences, but I still felt pangs of jealousy and I wanted to see some evidence of the same from her.
For some reason I forgot to bring Lucille in to the shop after work the next day and as I was driving over the bridge on the way home that evening I noticed a loud throbbing noise building up from the front of the car, coming from behind the dash. Something about the way the Lucille was handling didn’t feel right to me. It seemed to be laboring in some way. I wasn’t sure if I should trust my instincts about this because I only had the vaguest idea of how a car works. It didn’t feel right to me, but what did I know.
I was already on the bridge, though, having just passed the toll plaza, so I figured I ought to at least get over to San Francisco and then maybe I could pull into a gas station or a mechanic and have someone take a look. I gunned the engine, wanting to get over the bridge as fast as possible. There was a Brothers Johnson hit from the ’70s playing on the radio.
The laboring sound got louder and the car felt unwieldy under my hands. There started to be a high-pitched whining sound and I wasn’t really sure what to do. Suddenly there was a loud metallic thwack and I lost acceleration. The gas pedal went flaccid and the car started slowing down.
I tried pumping the accelerator but there was nothing. I was flying along at fifty, sixty miles an hour but slowing down rapidly with heavy traffic all around me and coming up my ass from behind. I put on my turn signal and started looking for an opening so I could drift to the rightmost lane. I also reached behind the steering wheel and put my hazards on, I managed to get all the way over in time to coast onto the exit for Treasure Island, in the middle of the bridge. I rolled down the off-ramp and ended up coming to rest a little ways from the guard booth for the Naval base there.
I sat in the car trying to figure out what to do. I knew that CalTrans would tow cars off the bridge if they were blocking traffic but I wasn’t stalled out in a lane so that probably wouldn’t kick in for me. Then I noticed a uniformed MP-looking guy approaching me. I rolled down the window and he said, “Please stay in your vehicle,” which was fine with me.
He asked me what the trouble was and I told him what had happened and that I didn’t know what it meant. I could smell a metallic burning smell, but there wasn’t any visible smoke coming from under my hood. He offered to call me a tow truck and I thanked him.
Later on I figured he was antsy because this was during the build up to the first gulf war and maybe they were on high alert at the bases for people rolling old junkers down to the gates. The battery still worked so I ended up listening to the radio for about forty-five minutes before a Ken Betts truck appeared.
They guy offered to look under the hood and when I told him what I had experienced he said, “It sounds like you threw a rod.”
“Is that bad?” I said.
“Yeah.”
“Real bad?”
“Yeah, real bad.”
“Can I fix it?”
“You’d have to get the engine rebuilt, and it might be easier just to replace the engine entirely.”
That bad. Shit. “Why do you think it happened?” I asked him. Before he answered he went over and grabbed the dipstick. He stuck it in the well, wiped it with his rag, then stuck it in again, took it out and looked at it closely.
“It’s bone dry,” he said.
“The oil?” I asked him, feeling stupid.
“What oil,” he said. “There is none. You definitely threw a rod. There was no lubrication. That’s why it got so hot. That’s what you’re smelling now.”
I really felt like an idiot. I didn’t need to change the oil. I just had to add a couple of quarts. Why wasn’t I checking the oil? Nobody told me, but that’s because everybody assumed I knew probably the most basic thing about taking care of a car. The thing must have been leaking oil like the Exxon Valdez. I guess I hadn’t noticed the spots on the street on Sixth Avenue or in the parking lot in Emeryville.
I felt dumb but I also felt guilt. I had killed Lucille. I knew I wasn’t going to rebuild her engine. Suddenly she really did seem like a female to me, a helpless girl I was supposed to protect and I had let the worst possible thing happen to her instead. I could feel a tears trying to squeeze out of the corners of my eyes but I held them back because I didn’t want the tow truck guy to think I was a pussy.
He offered to tow me home and asked if I had Triple A. I did not. Fortunately, although it takes forever to drive from the east bay to San Francisco during the commute, the distance is really only about fifteen or twenty miles, and I was already halfway there, so the tow wasn’t that expensive.
He left Lucille on the street outside of my house. I didn’t know what to do with her. She sat there for weeks, getting tickets. Someone stole her beautiful matching hubcaps. Finally, I sold her for $50 for scrap metal, ending my first experiment in owning a car.
I hoped I would do better next time.
Giselle’s other outside boyfriend told her he felt terrible about the car he sold me not lasting that long. I told her to tell him it wasn’t his fault. He was actaully a really nice guy. I tall thin soft-spoken guy with glasses and a stoop. Giselle told me she had decided to stop seeing him, which actually made me sort of nervous. Also, he was going back east to Yale or somewhere to study the history of the efect of technology on society. I wished him luck.
Giselle also updated me on Jack, or Peter as she preferred to call him, her long-distance boyfriend, after he headed out again. They were breaking up. When they were fighting about me, he admitted that he had been having a series of flings and hookups throughout their whole relationship. This made Giselle really mad, I think because she had been feeling guilty about me and the other affairs she’d had and she had been imagining him pining away for her and he had allowed her to believe that fantasy.
I thought about pointing out to her that he had only been following the rules they had agreed upon, but I remembered that they were really his rules - she had never felt all that good about them - and also I didn’t really see the percentage in taking his side.
I wasn’t sure how I felt about being the sole survivor in Giselle’s romantic life, though. As much as I hadn’t liked being part of her cheating on her man, I realized that there had been some security for me in knowing I wasn’t expected to make any kind of commitment. I still had my ongoing thing with Cecilia to hide behind, but that was feeling like a flimsier screen every day.
For You, The Stars
Chapter Fourteen: I’ll Give You Everything for Free
Installment 1
I kept not calling Maura and Giselle kept calling me. We’d say we were just going to get together and have a drink or have dinner but then we’d end up back in one of our beds at the end of the evening, usually hers, because she didn’t really want to be running into my roommates. I had some qualms about all of this. Ironically, it wasn’t really about Cecilia although I felt like I had still had unfinished business with her. It had more to do with Peter, Giselle’s boyfriend in Boston. I didn’t care that he was also a Princeton guy. That was meaningless to me. A random coincidence at best. I’d never known him there even though we had overlapped by one year apparently. It was really just the idea of being “the other man.”
I’d already resolved my moral issues quandary about cheating. Cecilia and I had a very clear understanding that, yes, we were together and maybe even in love but it was by no means exclusive. We were each totally free to do whatever we wanted whenever we wanted. Giselle’s arrangement with Peter was by contract much mushier. They both acknowledged that a long-distance relationship implied an unlikely degree of patience and they understood that they were each likely to have flings on the side, but as Giselle had told me when we first discussed it, Peter had insisted that they not tell each other of anything that might be going on. She wasn’t completely comfortable with the reality of this approach but she felt bound to it and so she said nothing to Peter about me, or for that matter Charlie or the woman she’d had the brief fling with who had finally stopped leaving pathetic messages on her answering machine.
Maybe I should have felt like this was the perfect arrangement. I had no obligations at all. There was no commitment. I was the outside guy. In many ways it was primarily a physical relationship. But in reality the guy on the east coast was an abstraction and in both my and Giselle’s day-to-day lives our connection was becoming more real. It was like that period in the late Ottoman empire when the various Beys and Deys of Egypt and other north African kingdoms pledged nominal fealty to the sultan but in their own locality they ruled like absolute monarchs. There may have been some theoretical relationship with this to-me imaginary guy back east but it was sure starting to feel like the real thing here in the kingdom of San Francisco.
And I didn’t like being party to a lie. Worse, Giselle told Peter about me. He knew my name. I was introduced as her friend, and later her good friend. She figured she wouldn’t be able to completely keep me a secret and that a lie that was close to the truth was better than some crazy lie she wouldn’t be able to keep track of, but this just made me more uncomfortable. I didn’t want to be a real person to him. I realized that my problem with being the other man wasn’t the thought of harming Giselle’s boyfriend. He still wasn’t very real to me. I didn’t care about him or his feelings. It was just some kind of code I didn’t want to be breaking. It made me feel sleazy.
I had a long talk with Dave about it. He was becoming my moral confidant. Whenever I was in some kind of a quandary I’d run it by him and he’d help me think it through. This time, though, Dave told me he didn’t really see the problem. “It sounds kind of ideal, if you ask me.” It just left me feeling uneasy, though.
There were other problems with Giselle, like she could be kind of bossy. She always had “suggestions” about how I could do things better. She thought I should be using the kitchen in the Gomer house for actual cooking. She thought the toilet in our bathroom should be cleaned more often. She actually suggested I shave with a straight razor and a brush. “You get a closer shave that way,” she said. “How would you know?” I asked her. “I read it in GQ.”
She even had advice for me about how to sneeze. All my life I’ve had this awkward way of sneezing, as if I’m trying to stifle it our something. People often asked me if it’s a sneeze or a cough, and I sometimes sneeze and nobody says God bless you or Gesundheit, probably because they don’t register it as an actual sneeze. Simone noticed it too. But then she had this exaggerated way of saying “a-choo-oo” every time she sneezed that sounded absurd to me. But Giselle went so far as to try coaching me on better sneezing. “You’ll throw your back out like that, swallowing your sneezes. When you feel the urge coming on, open your mouth wide so you can project the sneeze outward.” I told her I’d try but inside I was, like, whatever.
She said my sneezes startled her because they came with no warning and they were so sudden and loud, so plosive. She told me it sounded like a “retort.” I said, “I’m pretty sure you mean ‘report,’ like a gun?” She said, “No, I think the word is ‘retort.’” and I let it drop.
One night she finally agreed to sleep at my place. It felt so shabby compared to her boudoir but we had a great night till she mentioned that Peter was coming to visit her in a few days. “You could have given me more warning!” I said. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “He’s only going to be here for a fews days, but I won’t be able to see you when he’s here.” I said, “Of course not… but don’t you think he may figure out that something’s going on?” She said, “Why would he?” and I didn’t have a good answer for that.
Then in the morning, after we showered together, I took her from behind up against the towel rack. It was impetuous and I think she liked it. Also, she was on the pill so it wasn’t reckless or anything. She wrote me a little perfumed note and left it in my room to find later, referring to our escapade. I noticed that she had left her contact lenses in the little double-circle case she washed them in every night. I called her office and left a message there telling her she had left them behind.
The next day she called me up at my job and asked if she could drop by to pick up the contacts. I told her sure, no problem. “Just come by after 7,” I said. “I’ll be home all evening.” I was planning to hook up with Cecilia while Giselle was out of the picture but I didn’t have any immediate plans for that night.
At home after work I ate a cheese steak from Yellow Sub with Chad and Dave that night. We were listening to music on our stereo - I was trying to turn them onto American Music Club. Dave was into it but Chad didn’t like the guy’s voice. The doorbell rang and I said, “I’m expecting Giselle,” as I headed for the stairs. When I opened the door she was standing there with a guy about my height, sandy hair, dressed kind of preppy.
“Daniel, this is Peter,” she said. “Peter, this is my friend Daniel I told you about.”
I said, “Hey,” and stuck out my hand. Peter said the same thing and shook it while giving me the stinkeye.
“Your contacts,” I said to Giselle, “I’ll be right back.”
As I headed up the stairs I could hear Giselle spinning some totally weak yarn about hanging out and having her eyes get dry and then forgetting to take the contacts when she left and I was thinking what kind of an idiot would believe a story like that.
I came back down the stairs and handed Giselle her contacts. “Nice to meet you, Pete,” I said.
He said, “You too,” and gave me a funny little wave.
I closed the door on them and thought to myself, This is not good.
The next day Giselle called me at work again. She said, “He was going through my desk calendar and he noticed all the appointments I had with Daniel written on it. He said that it sounded like we were more than friends. I kind of warned him not to ask any more questions. It’s his stupid rule, after all. I’d rather just tell him the truth.”
I said, “I wish you would leave me out of this. This is exactly what I didn’t want to happen. Now this guy thinks I’m an asshole and he’s right.”
“Don’t be silly,” she said. She sometimes called me “silly goose,” but she didn’t say that now.
“Deal with it,” I said. “This is not my problem.”
For You, The Stars
Chapter Thirteen: Installment 4
I got two tickets to see a band called American Music Club at a tiny old nightclub called the Great American music Hall that used to be some kind of a dancehall or brothel back in the ’20s. Kim had turned me on to AMC, making a tape for me with their first two records, one each side, United Kingdom and California. I loved the lyrics of the songs and the singer’s way of pissing and moaning. Apparently he was something of an alcoholic, so seeing them was a bit like seeing Van Morrison. You never knew what kind of mood he’d be in. He might harangue the audience or he might put on the performance of his life.
In fact, several years later, just before AMC broke up I saw them open for Bob Dylan at the Berkeley Community Theatre and I was amazed at how the audience just about completely ignored them. I guess this is the usual fate of all opening acts, but I also felt like the graying hippies seeing Dylan for the umpteenth time had become so complacent in their desire to hear familiar comfortable music - something ironically Dylan would just as soon himself rather not serve up - that they didn’t know a good new-ish band fronted by a brilliant singer-songwriter when it bit them on the ass.
I also really liked the lead guitarist in the band, a porkpie-hat wearing enigma named Vudi. I remember seeing him staplegunning flyers for their show to telephone polls down Geary Street and thinking I guess that’s the punk life. You drive your own van, you unload your own amps, and you staple your own xeroxed handbills to the fake trees. D.I.Y., man. D.I.Y.
But I didn’t invite Kim to the show, I invited Giselle. It wasn’t necessarily her type of music. She told me she was more into Irma Thomas and other soul singers. I had to admit I wasn’t familiar with Irma Thomas and she told me that “Time Is On My Side” was her song before the Stones covered it. “That must have made her rich,” I said but Giselle told me, “No, someone else wrote it, so Irma didn’t get a penny when the Stones made it into a hit.” Apparently, Irma Thomas ended up opening a restaurant or nightclub in New Orleans, her home town. I thought I have to get myself to New Orleans one of these days.
Giselle said she’d be happy to come out with me. Our copyediting class had ended but we were still getting together for coffee or a drink every now and then. Things were pretty uneventful at her little publishing house and she liked hearing about how we cranked out six or seven new books a month in Emeryville. We got the club early and found a table near the stage. There was an opening act, with a name like Red House Train, or something - faux bluesy. It was like five guys, all of whom seemed younger than me, and rail thin. The singer was a moaner. All the songs were ballads. I could see why they were picked to open for AMC, but I wasn’t that impressed.
The show really picked up when Mark Eitzel and his band took the stage. They did most of the songs from the two albums I knew and the ones I didn’t know sounded great too. They encored with “Bad Liquor” which was a punky single they had put out before their first LP. It was bit like Television playing “Little Johnny Jewel” - kind of a nod to their true or oldest fans. I wasn’t really in that category but I was sucking up everything Kim was tipping me off too. She had stuck the single as filler on the end of the tape she’d made me, so I clued Giselle in to the significance of the encore so I’d look like someone in the know.
After the show, as we were filing out, I saw the singer standing around with I guess some friends of his at the bar. I went up to him to thank him for doing such a great job. Eitzel was a skinny guy with a shaved head. He grabbed my hand and pumped it enthusiastically, saying “Let me shake your friendly hand.” It was kind of the perfect moment to end on.
Giselle and I got into my little blue Mercedes and I asked her where she’d like to go next, out for a drink or back to her place. “Let’s go to my place,” she said, making it sound like maybe I’d be invited upstairs. She knew I was involved with somebody but then again she had that boyfriend on the east coast so she wasn’t really one to talk. I parked down the street from her apartment and we sat in the car just talking for a while.
I had an easier time talking to Giselle than to most people, men or women. I felt like I could say just about anything. I would flirt, a little but I didn’t feel like I had to put on an act to make her like me. We talked about sex sometimes and it wasn’t prurient. More matter-of-fact really. She would tell me about some of her lesbian affairs and how she felt that she leaned that way a little more than straight, but that it really depended on the person. I’d met people who claimed to be bisexual before but I had never really had the chance to talk about it much.
We also argued a bit, about stupid stuff. kind of like siblings. She would point out an annoying habit of mine, or a verbal tic, like my way of saying “fair enough” when I wasn’t convinced by one of her arguments. Usually I’d then point out that she had the exact same habit or tic, which would really piss her off. She’d claim I was just trying to turn everything back on her but really I wasn’t. That’s what made it feel like a sibling argument to me. My brother used to accuse me of just noting everything he ever complained about and then later accusing him of the same exact thing. Maybe there was some truth to it.
Eventually Giselle invited me up for a nightcap. She had a fairly large apartment with a living room separate from her bedroom, and no roommate. I surmised that she must come from some money because I didn’t know anyone my age who lived by themselves in anything bigger than a tiny studio. She poured me a couple of fingers of Johnny Walker Red over ice in a tumbler and admitted that she had always wanted to invite someone up for a nightcap. I pretended to be offended but couldn’t keep it up when she pushed my thrift-store tweed jacket off my shoulder and rested her lips on the crook of my neck.
She told me that the first time she noticed me in our extension class was when I was wearing this jacket and had stood up to take it off. Something about my back or shoulders, apparently, had caught her attention. I was tickled to think of being observed in that way, of being seen as sexy by a total stranger. I liked the idea that she had noticed me and made a point of meeting me.
It wasn’t that strange, really. Most of the other people in the class were much older or were notably unattractive or not very bright or otherwise disqualified as lust objects. I thought about how often people are thrown together, on a camping trip, in a freshman R.A. group, at a job, and it doesn’t take a novelist to figure out which ones are going to hook up. Sometimes it’s just obvious that there is one other person in a group who is there for you. It’s still up to you to go and get them, but the logic of attraction draws a straight line between you.
It was kind of like that with Giselle and me in that class. I thought I was chatting her up when she had already singled me out as someone she at least wanted to get to know, and now we were up in her apartment kissing. She had really nice furnishings. Brocade curtains, real furniture. All kinds of touches that you’d never see at the Gomer house with our venetian blinds and the couch we found out on the street one day. When she steered me too her bedroom I noticed her lace bedspread and her luxurious-feeling cotton sheets with no doubt some incredibly high thread count.
She was almost entirely uninhibited as far as I could tell. For a moment, when she went down on me, I flashed back to Maura doing the same thing the week before, but I thrust that out of my mind. Inwardly, I felt kind of evil, like I had had to cross Maura off of my list, finally make her come to me and submit to my patient years of seduction, and that now I wasn’t interested anymore. The mystery was gone and if anything I wanted a kind of petty revenge, as if to say “there, now you know what it feels like to be rejected,” but why was I still thinking about her? I put my hands in Giselle’s hair and brought myself back to the present.
Her body was delectable. She had a little babyfat, small-ish but plump breasts, and womanly hips. She wasn’t athletic but then neither was I. She wore expensive-looking sheer lingerie and I wasn’t sure if that was for our date or if she always dressed herself so sumptuously. Had she had been wearing these sexy underthings every time I’d seen her, in class, over coffee? Probably. I got the feeling she dressed to please herself and not me. She clearly paid attention to detail, with her creamy silk blouses, long wool skirts, and tasteful earrings. She favored green stones in her jewelry.
We fell asleep together after making love. I woke her in the middle of the night for another go, and then once more in the morning. She came back from the bathroom as I lay still lounging in her bed and said she wasn’t sure how she felt about me waking her up that way. She wanted this to be about more than sex. I said I agreed but I wasn’t sure I did.
For You, The Stars
Chapter Thirteen: Installment 3
We lay awake talking quietly long into the night. I couldn’t avoid reopening the topic of her repeated rejection and abandonment of me back in school. She apologized. She cried. I cried. She still couldn’t explain it. I tried to give her words, I suggested that maybe she felt too strongly about me, but she didn’t bite. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe,” but she sounded dubious. Somehow we got to talking about other flings and affairs she’d had during that same time. She mentioned one guy, an athlete, whom I knew another friend of mine had slept with once. I told her that other friend had remarked on how muscular he was. “That’s true,” said Maura, chuckling. None of this made me feel any better.
Why had she made such a big deal out of our flirtation, and continuously drawn me in and then backed off, while having a series of hook-ups with other guys. “Those were meaningless,” she said. “It was always just sex, with all those guys,” but this also didn’t satisfy me. “I would have taken some ‘just sex,’ I said. “No problem.
“You should never have made it out to be such a big deal. I know I wasn’t a jock. There were much better looking guys hitting on you, but how hard would it have been to just sleep with me a few times, or even once?” I said. Hearing myself whine like this felt pathetic. I could feel her body stiffen as we lay there spooning. I knew she didn’t take criticism well.
“Why do we have to talk about this anyway?” she said. “All’s well that ends well, right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Sorry,” but the spell was broken.
In the morning we had brunch at PJ’s, a seafood restaurant on Irving, another New Orleans influenced place, and then she took off for her friend’s house in Berkeley. She gave me her number there, but I let a few weeks go by without calling, and then I felt kind of sheepish so I waited for her to call me, but she didn’t.
I started moving up at my job. First they promoted me from editorial assistant to assistant editor. There was no pay raise, but I went from being a glorified gopher and filing clerk to a sort of apprentice editor, working mostly on revised and updated editions of classic stroke books. After I had seen a few titles through the process - from updating the library of congress and R.R. Bowker ISBN information to gathering the post-publication proofreading corrections from the production files and getting the updates made, to in one case having a new preface added to one particularly popular book and then making sure that the files and bluelines made it off to the printer on time - I was given another promotion, this time to full-fledge copyeditor, with a tiny bump in pay.
Now I had the opportunity to take a few titles from the acquisition process into production, with the help of a developmental editor. I worked on two different series. The first dealt mainly with naughty schoolboy themes: boarding schools, librarians, teachers, and the occasional stepmother. The other was actually a series of how-to books, somewhat facetious guides to experimental or deviant sexual practices ostensibly written for couples. The former series of titles were called Bad Boy books and the latter were called …For Lovers, as in Menages a Trois …for Lovers or Fantasy Roleplay …for Lovers or Sadomasochism without Pain …for Lovers. I actually learned a thing or two reading these books, although I also took a lot of what I read for granted.
One thing I learned was that the writers Climex contracted to write these books weren’t very good. The first drafts were generally a mess. Climex used this accelerated “parallel” publishing process wherein the author would submit the first few chapters for development and copyediting and then work on the next few. In traditional publishing, a writer submits an entire manuscript and then waits six months or a year through a period of review and revision before seeing the book go to a printer. In this process, chapter one could be in proofreading while chapters two and three were in typesetting while chapters four and five were in factchecking while chapters six and seven were in copyediting while chapter eight was in development.
Generally, before even the first chapter was written the developmental editor would make the author work out an outline and get the sequence of chapters sorted out, as well as helping the writer think through what would happen or be explained in each chapter. Still, by the time a chapter landed on my desk, it was usually still in lousy shape, as the few developmental editors were overloaded with two many titles to manage as well as acquisition responsibilities - they had to find new authors and keep the hopper humming.
Now I was able to apply a lot of what I’d learned in my copyediting class at Berkeley. I had had a good intuitive sense of what was correct grammar and syntax and diction and what as not, although I wasn’t always sure which mistakes were syntax and which were grammar, but now I knew what symbols to use to indicate transposing the word “only” to after a verb, and when to change which to that and when to leave it alone, and how to indicate a hundred other necessary changes in the margins of a manuscript page or in the lines between the double-spacing.
It was tempting often to just strike through long sections of awful prose and rewrite it, but I knew that the true challenge of a copyeditor is to figure out what the author is trying to say, or what he or she would have said if they had been able. This led to a dialogue generally, becaue sometimes you’d have to offer choices and ask “Are you trying to say this or that?” The answers could lead to more questions even though there wasn’t a lot of time for additional rounds of revision before the next chapter would land on my desk, and the author would be getting more and more stressed by the time the parallel process was sending multiple chapters back to him (the writers were actually almost all men) for review along the various stages of the editorial and production processes.
I got better at forcing the issue, divining the writer’s intent, and then carefully recasting the tortured prose into a credible simulation of the writer’s voice if the writer had been smarter and more talented. I also started to resent the writer for making me do all this work and for getting their names - or rather their usually jokey pseudonyms - on the covers of the books when I knew that I was sometimes contributing more to the final product than they were.
I started thinking maybe I should just go ahead and write one of these stupid books myself, but the truth was I stil had a lot to learn about how to write a good dirty book.
For You, The Stars
Chapter Thirteen: Installment 2
Just the week before I’d been to a party at Bettie’s house in Berkeley. A bunch of people from Climex were there as well as some of her other punky friends. This was just before I’d closed the deal on the car, so I took BART to the east bay and went looking for her address. I didn’t know my way around Berkeley very well at all at after hiking about six blocks I got to a big intersection, Alcatraz and Adeline, that should have been where I was heading, but there was no address that matched the number I was looking for. It occurred to me that maybe I’d been walking west the whole time when I should have been walking east.
There was an all night liquor store open, which was good because I had been planning to bring a bottle of tequila to the party and I hadn’t managed to pick one up yet. I went in and bought a fifth of José Cuervo (at the time I had no idea what good tequila was), and the used the payphone to call Bettie. The phone rang and rang and I almost gave up when someone picked up. It was one of the proofreaders, Elena, a Russian woman about my age. I didn’t know her name. I told her where I was and said I was lost and tried to get a fix on where I should have been. “You’re way off,” she said. “Sit tight and I’ll come and get you.” I remembered that Elena rode a Harley.
I stood around under the streetlight on the corner for what must have been nearly fifteen minutes till I heard a motorcycle roaring up. She was wearing leather from head to toe. She turned and came to a rest at the curb and said, “Get on.” I stuffed the bag and bottle into the side pocket of my jeans jacket and straddled the broad seat behind her.
“Have you ever ridden a motorcycle before?” she asked me. I said no. “Well put your arms around my waist and remember to lean into the curves. Neither of us wore a helmet. I wrapped my arms around her and she gunned the motor. It was exhilarating, riding through the night like that. The leaning part was easy, just like on a bicycle but faster. “You’re doing great,” she yelled over the sound of the engine. We got to Bettie’s in no time. She opened the front door of the little faux-Spanish bungalow and I heard loud music coming from inside. Elena went in first and I followed her in, brandishing the bottle. As I held it in the air people cheered.
“Would you consider yourself blond,” one of the other proofreaders asked me out of nowhere. “I don’t know, I said. Dirty blond, maybe? Can a guy be a dirty blond? Why?”
“We were just arguing about what color your hair is.” That was kind of weird, that they were talking about me. I was flattered to be, even briefly, the center of attention.
Bettie came out of her little kitchen and said hi. “There’s a keg in there,” she said, gesturing behind her, “and booze over here,” pointing to a card table set up in front of her mantle. I said, “do you have any shot glasses?” and she said, “I think so,” and went back to the kitchen, returning a minute later with with one small glass.
I cranked the top off the bottle of tequila, breaking the seal, and poured a shot. I held it up to her and said “first shot’s on you.” She downed it in one gulp and a little cheer went up from the people nearby who were watching. Then I poured myself a shot and drank it off again in one draft. Then I refilled the little shot glass and handed it to Elena. After that I went around the room making everybody do shots and doing a few more myself.
Before too long I had caught up with the standing velocity of the party and I felt like I was in the swing of things. In the kitchen this guy named Herman Hebert was holding forth about politics or some damn thing. Hebert was the head of production. All the proofreaders and the typesetters reported to him. He was in his thirties, so he was probably the oldest guy there. He wore a skinny new wave tie and red candy striped dress shirt that unfortunately emphasized his paunch. I noticed he was following Bettie with his eyes. He was about my height, so Bettie really towered over him. I remember overhearing Herman saying something out of line about Kim Ross once when she walked by his office. I gathered he had crushes on a lot of the proofreaders.
One time, one of the few guy proofreaders popped into Herman’s office at lunch time and said “Basketball?” in the sense of asking him if he wanted to play a pick up game in the parking lot outside the office where a single backstop was set up. He said it so it sounded more like “bass key ball” and Herman for some reason thought he had said “Skibone?” He said, “Is that my new nickname?” and got all excited at the thought that somebody had made up a cool street sounding nickname for him, as if maybe he’d been waiting all his life for someone to give him a nickname. The guy said no, of course, he was just talking about basketball and what the hell was Herman going on about? but Hebert wouldn’t let it go. He got the sound of that name stuck in his mind and actually spent some time after that trying to get us to call him Skibone but nobody would.
I realized that Herman has Kim cornered near the fridge so I went over to get myself a beer chaser and maneuvered her away from him. He finally wandered off, following in Bettie’s wake and Kim thanked me for rescuing her. We started talking about music. I was pumping her for more cool rare bands to recommend. She said she’d make me another tape with Soul Asylum on one side and the Replacements on the other and asked me if I had liked the song “White Elephant” she had stuck as filler on the end of a Lyle Lovett mix. We fell into an easy converation, rambling from topic to topic as the party continued to swirl around us.
At some point we started making out. I use that term advisedly. We were kissing, yes, but it was like high school. We were standing in the corner of the kitchen really going at it, not really caring who else was around. For the time being I wasn’t thinking at all about Cecilia, let along Maura, who I knew was showing up soon, or Giselle, or anyone else.
At some point we realized that the party was nearly over and mostly everyone else had left. We wandered into the living room and saw that Herman was lingering, as if in hopes of being invited to crash there by Bettie. “I don’t know if I should drive,” he said, in the most pathetically obvious way possible. “Well, you’re not staying here,” said Bettie matter-of-factly, dashing his hope with cruel nonchalance. I realized it was probably too late to go home on BART and Kim said she would drive me home. Herman stared at us as we said goodnight to Bettie and she asked us to take him with us. We made sure he left when we did and suggested he sleep off his buzz in his car before heading home. “I’m not really that drunk,” he said, winking at us, and we headed off in the other direction.
Kim drove me to her place in Berkeley. “You can crash here tonight if you want,” she said. “I should probably sleep on the couch,” I said. By now I had remembered Cecilia and while I was not above fooling around with someone and I knew our deal allowed that, I wasn’t sure sleeping with someone from work was such a good idea, assuming that Kim was offering and I think she was, and I also didn’t want to make a major change, at least not yet, in my relationship status.
So I kissed Kim goodnight and she got me a blanket and I fell asleep pretty fast on her couch. She had a roommate, but I didn’t see her since she had her own bedroom. I had to get up in the middle of night for a wicked piss and I imagined Kim in her bed, maybe touching herself. I was intrigued by her thin little body but I resisted the urge to knock on her door. I woke again early and let myself out, finding my way to the North Berkeley BART and getting home before ten, nursing a painful bad-tequila hangover in the bright fog-burn sun.
All this went through my mind as I lay there with Maura, holding her and kissing her gently, not “making out” like teenagers but kissing slowly as if learning each other’s minds through our mouths, touching her teeth gently with my tongue, or turning my head so she would notice that I wanted her to press her lips lightly against my earlopes. I was not in a hurry to mount her. Instead I reached down between her legs, feeling her warms and the moist dampness she was producing.
Ever so carefully I touched her, slowly exploring what she liked and what she did not, building momentum until in the dark as my mind drifted I imagined myself playing a musical instrument, some sort of cello or harp, relying on a kind of intuition, muscle memory, the sensations under my hands, the tempo of her breathing, until finally she came bucking her hips and convulsing slightly, breathing heavily but trying not to cry out loud, since by then we had heard my roommates return to the house, banging doors and talking loudly in the nearby living room.
I held her as the energy in her body subsided and kissed her neck. Her mouth found mine and she thanked me wordlessly. Then with her strong arms she rolled me over onto my back and in the halflight pouring in through the window behind my head I watched her slide down, my comforter on her back, and then take me into her mouth with confidence. Her expert ministrations invited me to relax entirely. Muscles I didn’t know I had unclenched for the first time in years.
I felt a sort of sensation beyond the obvious and powerful pleasure eminating from my genitals, a sense of being taken care of, not the clinical notion of “being serviced” but more a frank acceptance of a gift freely offered and a clear understanding, almost a cosmic insight, that this was the kind of moment I had been hoping for all my life.
For You, The Stars
Chapter Twelve: Never Could Reach It
Installment 1
Then Maura showed up on my doorstep. I wasn’t sure what day to expect her or maybe I did and I just lost track of the time. It turned out she had been in town for two days already. I had just been up for less than half an hour and was thinking of getting some coffee when my doorbell rang on Saturday morning around 11 am. I ambled down the stairs to open the front door and was shocked to see Maura standing there squinting in the sun, looking prettier than I remembered her, with her Scandinavian features, straw-blonde hair, nearly button nose, slightly round ruddy cheeks and a wry smile on her lips.
She tilted her head to one side and said, “Daniel Dermott, as I live and breathe!”
She really talked like that, but she was being facetious. Nobody talk like that in real life, outside of the movies, at least not any more. She said it in a kind of Judy Garland or even Ethel Merman kind of vintage tone, so I knew she was goofing around, playing a part. I leaned forward and gave her a hug. At the same time she went to kiss me and ended up grazing my cheek as my face rushed past hers on the way to hanging my chin over her shoulder.
Maura was a little taller than me. Bigger than me, stronger than me - that was probably always part of the problem. We all played at being enlightened and post-feminist but on some level we all wanted to the guy to be bigger and stronger than the girl. We guys wanted women who were on a slightly smaller scale than us, and the women wanted guys they could look up to, literally. Margaret, my first girlfriend back in seventh grade, had been taller than me.
I was used to it - being only about 5’7” on a good day. I didn’t want to limit myself to just the women who were smaller than me. I was even attracted to Bettie at work, who was an Amazon, in the same way that I was starting to notice older women, like a lawyer friend of Bo’s brother who was in her thirties and had flirted with me all night at a Gomer party. Something about me made me want to play beyond my league, but that was just the point. These were known limits even if I was trying to violate them.
And like I said, Maura wasn’t just big, she was strong too. She was an athlete, something I never way. She rowed crew, she played basketball, she played softball. Even I didn’t know better I’d have assumed she was gay. In fact I seem to remember people whispering things about her back at school, and who knows? Maybe she did some experimentation with the other team members, maybe in the lockerroom after a hard fought race. Or maybe that was just prurient porn-influenced reveries. Sometimes I have trouble distinguishing between fantasy and real life.
It was good to see her. “I’ve missed you,” I said, and for once I was being sincere. I realized it suddenly as the feelings rushed in. Suddenly all of my annoyance and frustration with her over the last three or so years melted away and I realized that in some ways I felt closer to her than I did to anyone else and that I was glad she was there.
We went for a walk. We headed down to the park and then cut the corner and ended up in the Haight. It was the natural route to take. We wandered down the panhandle for a while and then caught an afternoon brunch at the Pork Store Café. I knew she’d like that place. It has character and the food is good and hearty. She was as good an eater as me. Also, I wanted to show off my haunts, all my favorite places. I had considered the now long-closed Crescent City Café, with its New Orleans inspired cuisine, like spicy crawfish omelets, but we had eventually wandered so far down the street, almost to the lower Haight, that the Pork Store was closer and in retrospect it was probably the best choice.
For a moment there I worried that we might run into Simone but then I realized that enough water had gone under the bridge and that she was probably past the point of flying into a rage any time she realized she had to share the Haight-Ashbury with me. Also I reminded myself that she and Dave were now having some kind of little fling, so that should earn me some form of immunity.
We wandered back to my place stopping off on ninth ave to do some used bookstore and then used recordstore browsing. This was kind of my perfect idea of a Saturday. The fog had burned off, the weather was crisp, the air was clear and the slanting light had that Mediterranean quality that painters love. Maura reached out to hold me hand as we strolled and I felt like we were a couple. For the moment Cecilia was a thousand miles away from the back of my mind.
It was nearly dusk when we rolled back into my place. Dave and Hopper and Chad had left a note saying they’d been looking at a house and were now going to a movie. We hadn’t given up on the dream of finding one big house for all the Gomers to live in, instead of the two houses a block apart we were using now. The house those guys had looked at belonged to perennial San Francisco mayoral candidate and sheriff Richard Hongisto. Given our drug-taking ways, the idea of renting a house from a sheriff seemed kind of daft, but the place was this huge ramshackle Victorian near Fillmore and there were more than enough rooms in it for all of us and the rent was even doable, only slightly more than the total we were paying for the two places now.
So for the time being Maura and I had the place to ourselves. I put one of her mix tapes onto the stereo and we sat down on the couch as the sun was setting. We kept talking as the room got darker until I wasn’t sure I could see the expression on face. I may have been looking at a cartoon of her that my eyes were drawing in the gloom. She was touching my hand and we were sort of snuggling together close. I didn’t sense that air of inevitability I sometimes felt when it dawned on me that I was about to end up in bed with someone. As always there was a teeter-totter feeling of imbalance with Maura. It could go one way or the other. I didn’t feel like asking if I could kiss her. I wasn’t sure I wanted to. Maybe I just wanted to sit there close to her. She told me some word her Danish grandmother used that seeemd to mean petting or lightly touiching someone in an affectionate way. My skin was feeling very sensitive. The fair hairs were standing up on my arm.
“My room’s on the other side of these glass doors,” I said.
“Let’s go,” she said.
In my room she sat on my futon and looked around but it was dark and there wasn’t much to see. I turned on the lamp that sat on the low plank shelf next to the bed, the one that rested on marbleized looking cinderblocks, and then took off the black linen shirt I was wearing over a black silk t-shirt. Maura was looking at me. “Your clothes are the kind women like,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean you dress the way we want guys to dress.”
I sort of knew what she meant. My clothes were just a little more stylish than the preppy button downs and khakis that were so familiar at Princeton. The basic outlines were still the same. Cuffed trousers, shirts with collars. But the colors were decided not pastel. Bit by bit my entire wardrobe was becoming shades of black and gray. My trousers, which were some sort of poly-wool blend, were charcoal and pegged, tapered down to the narrow cuffs. I knew it was Cecilia who had helped me find most of the stuff I was wearing now but I didn’t feel guilty about that. She had gotten a lot in return for her lessons in coolness.
I shucked off my black wingtips and gray socks, undid my belt (also black) and stepped out of my pants, draping them over the chair at my desk. I stood there in my t-shirt and boxer shorts. The latter were white. Then I came over to the futon and sat down next to Maura. She stood up and stripped in front of me.
She took off her aqua colored sweat shirt and then took off her tanktop. From the waist up she looked like a little girl, almost, or maybe a girl just starting puberty. Her breasts were small and puffy. They were separated by the broad expanse of her chest. She stood there looking at me, still wearing her jeans and shoes. She looked vulnerable, subjecting herself to my gaze, as if to say, at long last, “Here I am. Was it worth waiting for.” It was her very openness and unselfconsciousness that turned me on. Without saying any words I let her know that it was not about having large perfect breasts or a tiny waist or this or that kind of ass. I beckoned her over to me and I took off her pants. She wore plain cotton panties. She obviously hadn’t dressed to seduce me.
I put my arm around her hips and pulled her gently back toward the pillows just below the one window in my room, then I pulled the comforter up over us and held her.
For You, The Stars
Chapter Twelve: Installment 4
I came to terms with Curtis, Giselle’s sort-of outside boyfriend, on his used Mercedes. He wanted $1900 and I wanted to pay $900. He offered to settle for $1000 and I countered with $900. It was all I had to spare and he’d been trying to sell his car for months, so he agreed. The car was a beautiful blue color and it looked, to me, like a real car, that classic boxy shape I grew up with in the ’60s. It was all squared off and not molded or teardrop shaped like the cars of the ’80s. It didn’t have much in the way of extra: no power steering, no air conditioning, no stereo. Just an AM radio, in fact.
But to me that just made it all the more classic, with its broad heavy dashboard and minimal analog dials. It fogged up inside when the weather was wet, which was often, especially on my morning commute across the Bay Bridge, but I didn’t mind. Someone told me that a car officially became a classic when it turned 25 years old. I wasn’t even 25 myself, and the car would have to last till ‘94 to hit that milestone (it didn’t) but I liked to think that the car was well on its way. It even had blue hubcaps that matched the exterior.
I took pride in my new old car and it made my commute to work a lot more fun. I started offering Bettie and Paul a lift every few days. At work, I was getting to know more people, feeling more a part of the crowd. I talked to people like Paul and Kim and Roger about the fact that we were editing and publishing what was essentially pornography but everybody seemed more or less jaded about it. We laughed about the people who bought these books to get off and we made up titles for future books (in face we referred to books as “titles” although the sales people referred to them as “paper bricks”), always trying to outdo each other in outrageousness, with the rule being that you couldn’t be literally vulgar. No cuss words.
My best title, which brought a roar from the people in the copyediting pit one day was Cheerleader Nuns of Petticoat Island. I never managed to top that one. Meanwhile, at the office, a new game was suddenly cropping up on everyone’s computer. The first version to circulate, running in DOS with simple one-color graphics, was called Nyet and it was said to have been written by Russian computer scientists. Later versions of the game, eventually with more color and decorative screens although fundamentally the same game, were called Tetris. This involved a set of shapes each made from four building blocks: a square, a t-shape, an s-shape, a backwards-s, and a line. You could rotate the shapes and the goal was to brick in the base of the game, filling it in solid across, at which point the filled row would vanish. The game moved faster over time and eventually the channel filled to the top, ending the game. But you know this already, don’t you?
Roger was proud of his skills at Nyet and I was determined to beat him, so every time he logged a high score I took over the shared computer and played till I bested him. The game was seriously addictive. After a while, when I was copyediting a manuscript my mind would start interpreting the rivers of space that naturally occur down the page as openings for dropping tetris pieces into. At night, when I closed my eyes, I’d see the shapes dropping. It was a little scary that way.
One day Kim told me that she had decided to call Roger “Cheese Breath.”
“Why?” I said. “Does his breath really smell like cheese?”
“No,” she said. “I just think it’s funny.”
So whenever she saw Roger she’d say, “Hey, Cheese Breath,” and as if I was just picking up on the nickname I’d say “Yo, Cheese Breath! What’s up?” Roger didn’t have that knack for just ignoring a nickname he didn’t like. He found it maddening that people were suddenly calling him Cheese Breath. He cornered Kim and asked her why, but she just played it coy. “Like you don’t know,” she said. I liked Roger, but I thought it was pretty funny that he was so discomfited by this.
At the time I was getting into Camper Van Beethoven, which had a cover of “O Death” on their most recent album, so I made up a parody of that song to amuse Kim:
Oh, I’m Cheese Breath and I excel I play nyet and tetris Equally well
and so on. Maybe it was my revenge for the hypercard stack that showed me aging to a skull.
The Monsters of Rock tour finally came to town and I didn’t see Cecilia for a week or so. She was spending all her time with that roadie guy and for the first time she told me flat out about fooling around with someone else. She was very matter of fact about it. She said she brought the guy back to her little basement room and she offered to let him sleep over and then she tried to tell him she didn’t want to have sex but he was having none of it. “Are you kidding?” he said. “I didn’t come all this way to not have sex with you,” or something like that.
She said it was wild. He was very uninhibited and physical with her. “He was throwing me all around. He did me in the ass.” It was weird hearing her talk that way. On the one hand it was kind of sexy, her being so plain and matter-of-fact about it. I also felt in a strange way that she got what she deserved or what she was looking for. I was never that free with her. I always had my ways of courtship and asking permission and caring a lot about her orgasm or her inability to achieve it. In some way what she wanted, what she needed, was a stereotypically macho guy, a big guy with lots of muscles who moved speakers for a living, to just come and take from her what he wanted. In some sense I couldn’t compete with that and I knew it.
At the same time, of course, I felt a strong pang of jealousy. I was trying to stay true to our whole open thing. I didn’t see this as a betrayal per se or as necessarily the end of our relationship. She sure didn’t. She fully expected me to find the story interesting and even vicariously sexy and I said, in a way I did. I was actually pretty confused. Mixed up. I didn’t know what I was feeling. It changed from one moment to the next. I also knew that he was just passing though town, and that I hadn’t been around as much lately and that Cecilia sounded like she was still available to me when I wanted her, so what was I concerned about?
Then my next letter from Maura came and she said she’d be in town in just over a week. I wasn’t expecting her till the end of the summer but she was scouting out apartments in Berkeley before the fall semester started. I found myself strangely nervous about her showing up. Was reality going to live up to the fantasies in our letters? We had exchanged a lot of tender affectionate words but they had been without real consequences. At the same time she had been my confidante through the time I was cheating on and then breaking up with Simone, into the early exhilarating period of infatuation with Cecilia and up to this current time of on-again off-again weirdness.
I couldn’t tell whether she was arriving to claim me, to consummate our affair, or to start yet another cycle of connection moving into rejection. She made it clear she wasn’t expecting to move in with me and she left it ambiguous about whether she expected us to “go out.” I found that I was looking forward to seeing her and I wondered what she would make of the little life I had constructed for myself in California. I found myself hoping she’d like my car as much as I did.
I told Cecilia that I was expected Maura for a visit and she was still caught up in her visiting roadie and said she didn’t really care one way or the other. I also knew that her stamp was all over my room, my stuff, and my clothes. Half the stuff I was wearing these days were things Cecilia had picked out for me at thrift shops and hipster stores in the Haight and the upper Fillmore. Her little girl scrawl was on notes strewn around my room: “Came by but you weren’t here Chad let me in Took a beer Catch you later Love ya Ce” and her little drawing of her cowboy boots on a post-it stuck to my bulletin board. Maybe she knew that when Maura showed up she’d be entering a domain totally defined and marked by another woman.
Or maybe she really just didn’t care. There was a time when I thought she was jealous of Maura, seeing that stack of letters in their manila folder, knowing there was a dimension to our relationship that was beyond or at least entirely different from what we had together. On the other hand, she knew - because she’d asked me - that Maura wasn’t “hot” like she was and although I often thought her shallow girly-girl routine was just that, an act, at other times I wasn’t sure.
But I’d find out one way or the other soon enough.
For You, The Stars
Chapter Twelve: Installment 3
I decided it was time for a haircut. I’d been trying to grow my hair longer for the last year or so. As soon as I realized that it was receding I figured this was probably my last chance to have long hair in this lifetime. I’d never worn my hair long as teenager and my parents had cut it in a bowl until I was about twelve. What I didn’t want was to end up as one of those Ben Franklin-looking aging San Francisco hippies with the bald head, horseshoe of hair, and stupid little pony tail sticking straight out in the back.
So for a while I just stopped getting my hair cut. It went through the page boy Prince Valiant-esque phase and now it was getting kind of stupid looking, sticking way out on the sides but still not long enough to gather in the back. I finally understood what women were talking about when they said that switching to short hair was a huge commitment because whenever they finally decided to grow it out again they had to put up with all those awkward lengths between the short haircut that looked good and the longer hair they were aiming for.
I was hanging out in the typesetter pit with Roger Brown who was playing around with a hypercard stack on his Macintosh. He’d been experimenting with little animations that he was able to show like a flip book by quickly clicking through a series of cards in the stack. Roger would make these little Don Martin Fonebone-looking caraicatures and then animate them slightly, mostly by putting in front of different backgrounds.
He had this one sequence called The French Guy that showed a stereotypical Frenchman with a beret, a twirly mustache and a striped shirt with a wide neck. He’d paste the French guy in front of a beach scene and call it The French Guy sur la plage, and then he’d put him in a row with a bunch of other people and call it The French Guy in line for the Jerry Lewis film festival.
Roger was showing me his latest stack, which was supposed to be me. It was a front-on view of a guy with glasses and a big nose with witchy hair sticking out all crazy on both sides of his face. His sequence showed the hair growing out longer and longer and then suddently it became a skull, at which point he said, “oops, went too far into the future.”
That’s when I realized it was time to get a haircut.
I went to this Asian woman who had a salon on 9th avenue. I told her I was trying to grow my hair out, so I didn’t really want it too much shorter, but that she should clean it up, especially at my temples. I placed my wire-rim eyeglasses on the counter in front of her barber’s chair and she gestured me over to the padded reclining chair that backed into the sink with the cutout in front for your neck.
She sat me down and had me lean my head back into the sink, gently cradling my neck until it settled onto the towel placed there to protect me from the icy-cold porcelain.
I always liked the pampering you got at the barber. It made me feel like a pasha to have someone wash my hair. She ran water through that snakey nozzle, testing it on the back of her hand until the temperature was right and then she wet my hair thoroughly, squeezed out the excess, and then started working the shampoo into it. While doing so, she massaged my scalp, focusing on my temples. I felt my neck relax.
She rinsed the shampoo out of hair and then applied the conditioner, working from the back. When she applied the warm water to my head a third time to rinse out the conditioner, I felt myself getting somewhat aroused, just from the constant soft touches to my head and ears, which were always very sensitive to touch, as well as to kisses and nibbles. I hoped she wouldn’t notice. If she did, she was professional enough to ignore it.
She sat me down in front of the mirror and started talking in her broken English about what she was going to do with my hair. She held up a hank of my hair and pointed to the tip of it. “Split ends” she said. “All split ends.” She emphasized the word split. I’d never really paid attention to advertisements about women’s hair on TV, so I only vaguely knew what a split end was or what caused it or whether it was a real or imaginary concept used to sell women on various hair-care products, but now that she was pointing it out to me I guess I did notice that my hair seemed a bit frayed at the end.
I gathered she was proposing to cut the tips off. That would set me back somewhat in my quest for longer hair, but I guess I didn’t want to look shabby. Then she ran her fingers through the hair at my temples and pulled it out on both sides. “Cut shorter here,” she said. “Clean up.” She turned my chair to the side and lifted the hair that was starting to reach to shoulders and showed me the long-ish hair growing closer to my neck. “Clean up here too?” I nodded. She was the boss.
“Keep long on top?” she said, running her fingers through the hair that was swept back from my high forehead. “That’s right,” I said.
She went ahead and did all the cleaning up she had recommended and again I felt somewhat aroused as she snipped the shears right next to my ears and touched my neck gently when she wanted me to lean forward or tilt my head to one side or the other. I couldn’t help it. Haircuts always felt that way to me. In some ways it was sort of like a milder version of sensual massage, with a strange woman ministering to me physically.
I had to admit that it looked a lot better when she was done. Then again, haircuts always do seem to look best right when the barber has finished them. They seem to know how to poke and prod the hairs into place. Usually once I’ve washed my hair the first time it sproings out and starts looking odd again. She had put a little gel or mousse in the top, something I almost never did myself, although Cecilia was always suggesting I use more “product.”
When I saw Cecilia that night she said she liked the haircut a lot, but when I went to work the next Monday I was a bit self-conscious. In some ways I thought the hippies had it right: don’t fuss with your hair, just let it grow naturally and sweep it back or to the side. Same thing with beards. If anything it was unnatural to shave every day. I was less pure on that, though.
I’d never really tried to grow my beard but I was too lazy to shave every day and with my fair hair I could get by for usually three or four days between shaves although when I’d been home for a month or so after college before driving out west, my Dad had gotten on my ass for going around unshaved. To him it looked dirty, as if I hadn’t bathed. He was from the fifties. I told him that a couple of days stubble was a “look” that people my age thought was perfectly fine. He accused me of being influenced by TV and movies. “You’re not Don Johnson,” he said. I got sucked into his stupid premise, saying “You guys imitated Frank Sinatra and Humphrey Bogart in your day.”
“Frank Sinatra had class,” he said. I decided to let it drop. I wasn’t going to be around much longer anyway.
Look, if I’d been a lawyer or something I’d have shaved every day. Hell, I’d have worn a tie to work, something I also didn’t have to do. But it made sense to me that things like hair shouldn’t require a lot of fussing and shaping and all sorts of special treatment to look okay. We had evolved this way for millennia and people had been finding mates and looking fine to each other for most of that time, so I didn’t see why plain old long hair shouldn’t look just fine as is.
Still, I had to admit that the little bit of shaping that the haircutter had done, the trimming on the sides, the shaving under my neck, had made my hair and therefore my face look a lot better, so what did I know. People had been styling and coloring their hair since the Egyptians at least, after all.
I got compliments at work, including from two of the proofreaders I was slightly attracted to, Bettie and Kim. “Hi, Daniel!” they said when they ran into me on the way in through the front door of the office building in Emeryville. “Hi girls,” I said.
Bettie was really tall, definitely over six feet. She wore striking makeup and dressed kind of punky. She drove a VW bug and had occasionally given me and Paul rides home to San Francisco after work. She lived in Noe Valley, near where Paul lived with his wife, but she didn’t mind dropping me off in the Sunset.
Kim was half Chinese, about my height, ultrathin, and very shy. I had had lunch with her a few times and she told me that until very recently she had had very bad acne. Her dermatologist had prescribed some incredibly strong steroids and that had cleared up the blemished on her face. When I met her she still had a few small scabs that were nearly healed over, but now her skin looked smooth and dry. She was very pale. It may have been in comparison to the somewhat Asian cast to her features, but she looked whiter than a white person to me. Her hair was also a very dark black, so maybe that added to the contrast.
Kim told me that she was a “happa” which she said was a Hawaiian term, sometimes said “happa happa” which meant half-Asian, half-white. Her parents were divorced and her dad was retired military. Her mother was from Taiwan and lived down in Monterey where she taught at the military language school there.
Kim was a huge music fan. She liked a lot of the same SST-type bands that Roger was turning me onto, but she was into other more obscure groups I’d never heard of, some of them came from the Boston scene that the Pixies had come out of. She was one of the few people I knew who had also heard of the Pixies in fact, and she remembered when they were called Death to the Pixies and that they had covered “Heaven,” the song the girl in the radiator sings in Eraserhead. She made me a tape with Dinosaur, Jr’s first two albums on it, with filler from Sonic Youth and Live Skull.
I had that feeling that Kim would totally be willing to go out with me if I showed any interest, and I did find her appealing, but I hadn’t yet entirely given up on Cecilia and I was also thinking a lot about Giselle. It’s funny, both Giselle and Kim had very dark hair, whereas Cecilia had that honey blonde thing going on. It’s almost as though in my mind I was lining up my next affair and subconsciously selecting someone who was physically the opposite of Cecilia. Neither Giselle nor Kim were particularly busty, either, and Giselle dressed in that grown up, almost frumpy way, while Kim was kind of tomboy-ish, wearing straightleg jeans and rock t-shirts.
I wasn’t really serious, at least not yet, about trying to get involved with someone new. I was open to the idea of a fling, I guess, but I still considered Cecilia my girlfriend and she still called me her boyfriend, and I didn’t want to mess that up, at least not deliberately.
For You, The Stars
Chapter Twelve: Installment 2
I kept hearing about this place, Lake Beryessa, somewhere up in Napa, but I couldn’t quite picture it. Supposedly it was something called a marine resort, so I gathered it was bigger than a swimming hole but maybe smaller than Lake Tahoe. I’d been to Tahoe once and seen the watersports, the jetskis and motorboats and all the other gasoline-powered recreations. Seemed kind of noisy to me. I’d also been up to Mono Lake once, or thereabouts. Two of the Gomers, Bo and Jason, worked as paralegals at a law firm owned by this strange 60-year-old Princeton alumnus named David Durer. He lived on Lombard Street, the so-called “crooked street in the world” in an amazing apartment with a stunning view of the bay.
I got to see it when he invited a whole bunch of us to his annual holiday party. He had all kinds of naive paintings from Haiti on his walls. Apparently he’d been vacationing in Haiti since the 1960s. Jason and Bo told me he was definitely gay, but I guess he wasn’t really “out” - at least not in any obvious way. I mean he was an elderly bachelor in San Francisco so I suppose it wasn’t necessarily a secret. He apparently always had handsome young men working for him in his home. There were certainly a bunch of hunky looking twinks serving expensive wine and delicate hors d’ouevres at the party.
Durer had craggy face, wiry gray hair cut short and out of control beetle eyebrows. He wasn’t that tall, maybe 5’10” but he was imposing face-to-face. He had gravitas, a sort of stern presence and an iron-confident demeaner honed from years of arguing cases in court, although apparently he mainly did tax work nowadays. I have to admit I found his sexuality puzzling. I had nothing against gay people, wasn’t sure I knew any actually, and I was aware that politically and socially the Bay Area was a haven for people of all stripes. In principle I was all for sexual freedom of any shade, but I was still kind of backwards in my personal feelings.
At boarding school, gay or homo or fag were the kinds of epithets aimed at any unpopular kid. It was an all-boy school, so there was a kind of persistent horror of the gay. For some reason, even masturbation was considered gay, and when you think about seven hundred teenage boys all probably whacking it nightly, all accusing each other of being gay, all denying that they ever jerked off, all wondering if their secret shame in fact proved they were gay or made them gay - well, let’s just say it wasn’t a healthy environment for developing socially liberal attitudes.
When I started exploring peep shows and places like that in the city I occasionally wandered over to Nob Hill where the gay sex shops were. I remember one in particular called the Tea Room. I had a kind of uncontrollable curiosity, a combination of attraction and repulsion, and a desire to know every detail about what was ordinarily hidden.
It was one thing to lock myself in a booth and view some gay porn. It didn’t turn me on as much as the straight stuff but it was still definitely arousing. Fantasy is fantasy, and I didn’t automatically reject an image or idea if I found it compelling just because it signified the wrong kind of sex. But once or twice I wandered into places where naked young guys danced or where there were rooms for strangers to hook up, if you can call it wandering in when you have to pay $5 at the door. And every time I found the personal proximity of real live human beings of the same sex to be too much to deal with. Again, it wasn’t so much the thought of things that were gay, it wasn’t anything to do with mores, although I’m sure I still had a lot of residual prejudices in my mind. It was more a sense of anxiety about actually dealing with a real human being whose job is to be sexual and male. I had no context for appreciating that.
One time I paid to sit in the audience as a series of male strippers came out and performed on stage. That was at more of a safe distance and I could think about the peeformers a bit more objectively. They all had hard muscled bodies, of course. Most were around my age but compared to them I felt like a sausage or a dumpling with my soft muscles and babyfat. It seemed that most of them had to really work at attaining an erection in front of a crowd, which honestly is not that surprising. I was sort of hoping one of them would manage to ejaculate after all of that theatrical pumping, partly because - outside of film strips - I’d never seen another man have an orgasm, but none of them did and I wondered if maybe there were ordinances governing what they could and could no do in their routines.
Then one dancer worked his way through the audience and ended up straddling my chair, pumping his crotch in front of me. I remember getting very hot in the face, partly because I felt that other people around the room were looking at me and I much preferred the idea of being anonymous in the dark. Also, for all of my curiosity, this was just a bit too gay for me to handle, so I was glad when he moved on to the next patron. I remember thinking that he didn’t look that large to me.
Still, at least these guys were young and attractive, in gay terms. Sure, they were probably runaways or junkies and no doubt they were every bit as exploited and doomed as the female strippers I sometimes watched down on Market Street, but I could at least understand the appeal to those who bent that way. But an older guy like Durer, with his stray hairs and leathery skin? I just couldn’t picture it. In many ways I still had an extremely narrow concept of sex in those days.
So anyway it was Durer who took me along with Jason and Bo on a camping trip up to Mono Lake over a long holiday weekend. We were actually packed into our campsite on mules. As we slowly climbed up the Sierras through the switchbacks I heard the guide telling the Mule to “git up” when it was time to climb up over a step hacked into the rocks. I wondered if giddyup was really just a way of saying “get up.” We were taken through a snow-covered pass even though it was summertime and finally left at our campsite, to be picked up by the same muletrain four days later.
Durer had a tent to himself and another for his Chinese houseboy, who cooked all the meals and otherwise waited on him hand a foot. The three of us had a big tent to ourselves. Out of respect for the old man he hadn’t brought and pot with us. Basically, we were on our own during the days. We went for hikes and we eventually found our way to the lake itself on the third day. We were all feeling pretty grimy and we planned to try to bathe in the water.
I wasn’t really used to camping. I’d never been as a kid. It just wasn’t something my family did. I’d also never been to a summer camp. But in California it seemed like everybody hiked and did rock climbing and got out into nature as often as possible. We seemed to be surrounded by it. From New York you had to drive for hours to get to the countryside or up into what passed for mountains, like the Adirondacks, but in San Francisco it seemed like there was a campsite a short drive away in every direction. Some of this was probably an illusion. To get to the Sierras we’d had to drive across the San Joaquin Valley, after all, but the culture was so outdoors-y that I felt like nature was right down the block.
We brought a bar of soap and some shampoo to the lake, along with some towels, but what we didn’t bank on was the frigid water, which felt like glacier runoff. We stripped down and one by one jumped in, trying to soap up and wash as quickly as we could. As soon as I hit the water I heard myself start screaming. It was entirely involuntary. My lizard brain assumed, not incorrectly, that I was about to die. I found myself scrambling back up the rock face out of the lake after what must have been just second. Neither Bo nor Jason fared any better.
Still dipping in the water was a little refreshing even if we weren’t able to really cut through the grease. And the day was sunny and the air was warm so we dried off quickly and stopped shivering. I put my dirty clothes back on and we decided to try to walk around the lake. At first it was easy going, but when we got to the far side eventually we were sidling along a sleep rocky cliff. There was no going back and no standing still, but it was scary and I was complaining at lot. Jason eventually got impatient with me: “So you scraped your knuckles, Daniel. Suck it up and stop whining.”
I knew he was right and that I was coming off like a city-bred wimp but I couldn’t help complaining. It was my way of getting through what felt like an ordeal. Still when we finally made it back to the trail head where we’d started I felt a sort of pride in a physical accomplishment of sorts that was largely unfamiliar to me.
Durer seemed to sleep only a few hours a night. His houseboy, whom we called Hop Sing although we knew that wasn’t his real name, cooked steak every night, and baked potatoes. I don’t think we ate anything green. After just a few days I was entirely constipated and I don’t think my gut recovered until after we were back home for a couple more days. Durer had packed in what appeared to be about twenty heavy hard-covered books in a crate and was apparently working his way through them. I asked Jason and he said he thought they were novels by Walter Scott. I wasn’t really sure why he needed to come out to the wilderness just to read all day and until the early hours of each morning, but he was footing the bill so who was I to judge him?
If I hadn’t known Durer was gay I doubt I’d have seen him any differently. He was avuncular with us, but somewhat distant. He just seemed to like young people, especially fellow Princeton alumni, and it’s not like he was hitting on us or anything. When the muletrain packed us back out at the end of the long weekend and dropped us off by our cars I thanked him for his generosity and he seemed a little embarrassed by my effusive appreciation. It had actually been good to get away from everything.
By contrast, Berryessa sounded like a totally different experience. A bunch of suburban kids with waterskis and drugs and too much time on their hands. The way Cecilia described it made it sound kind of blue collar to me. The young folks didn’t seem like college kids but more like guys working in the trades - plumbers and builders - and girls working as waiters and bartenders. I mentioned that to her and she told me I was a snob. I told her I wanted to meet this guy Evan who had the place up there, Sheena’s friend, and she said she would bring him to the city next time she came. I wasn’t sure what to expect.
When I did meet him, that next weekend, he was oddly shy. It was obvious to me he was interested in Cecilia, and not, say, in Sheena. He mostly stood near her. But he wasn’t physical with her, so I assumed they hadn’t hooked up or anything. Cecilia introduced me as her boyfriend and he seemed to know my name, so she wasn’t hiding me from him. He was a tall kid, seemed real young, curly black hair, a bit of a mouth breather. A thin guy, sort of good looking I had to admit. More physical than me. He tried to be ingratiating, almost as if he was in awe of me or whatever Cecilia had been saying about me. Probably she’d been telling him how supersmart I was. She seemed to think that was something she could brag about, although all it did was make me feel odd in people’s eyes. What she took for brains was really vocabulary and verbal agility.
I wasn’t too worried about this guy. He just seemed like a lightweight. The Fogerty song “Centerfield” came on the car stereo when we went out after they had all done some bonghits in my livingroom. Hey, it’s that song “Put Me In Coach,” he said, all excited. The way he said it, it sounded like he was saying, “put me in coats.”
“I love this song,” he said, as he sang along with it in his half-dumb sounding voice. “You should hear some Credence then,” I said. “You’d like that even better.”
“Who?” he said.
“Nevermind.”
For You, The Stars
Chapter Twelve: Do You, Mr. Jones?
Installment 1
Several of my new coworkers at Climex had a novel in the desk drawer or a band playing on the weekends or poetry they were secretly submitting to obscure local journals. Roger was in a grungy sounding band when that just meant a kind of heavily distorted guitar sound and did not yet refer to a plaid flannel lifestyle out of Seattle. One of the copyeditors I was assisting, Paul Svoboda showed me a few chapters of a novel he was working on. He also managed to get a few short pieces called “things I learned from television” published in a literary magazine with some dadaesque title published by a Romanian refugee poet in New Orleans. He claimed to have also gotten an item published in one of those little boxes in the margins of Harper’s but I didn’t see that.
He also lived in San Francisco and he offered me a ride home from the east bay one day when I hadn’t yet managed to get myself a car. Somewhere on the bridge he asked me if I liked to smoke pot. I was kind of nervous about discussing this with someone from work. I had never talked about drugs with any of the architects. Despite the risqu&e; nature of the Climex books and the bohemian pursuits of the junior employees, the place was really very businesslike, almost buttoned down, and i didn’t want to get a reputation. Still, I took a chance and told him that yes I did occasionally partake.
“Oh, good,” he said, and produced a joint. It was a pinner, and not nearly as strong as the big bag of weed under the coffeetable in the Gomer group house, but it was a nice gesture and we smoked it down while still struck in traffic near Treasure Island. Thus began a new friendship. We argued about stupid things. I had this theory that Bob Dylan was fundamentally a bluesman, in the lineage of Bukka White and Blind Willie McTell. Svoboda, who was a huge, almost insanely worshipful Dylan fan, was more doctrinaire, insisting that he was a folk musician. I told him that that was not a real distinction, that Leadbelly had toured on the ’60s folk circuit, that there was a concept of country blues, and so on, but to him blues meant Chicago, B.B. King, and Bobby “Blue” Bland. Dylan was white and had sung songs about war, so that made it folk music. We agreed to disagree.
I showed Paul some of my experimental short stories and he nicely encouraged me to try to just tell stories and stop showing off my vocabulary and my ability to “fracture the narrative,” whatever that meant. I thought again about that writing group that Giselle said she might be starting soon. Maybe I needed a group of people to read over what I was writing and tell me if it was making any sense or if it was just pure self-referential wankery.
Speaking of Giselle, the copyediting class at the extension was winding down to a close and I was wondering if we were going to continue to hang out. There was definitely some sexual tension between us, an obvious mutual attraction. She seemed way more sophisticated than Cecilia. She was only a year or two older but she just seemed more like an adult. She even wore a choker of pearls one evening and she never bared her tummy in public. But I also knew I wasn’t done with Cecilia. We were drawing apart from each other but my stern commitment to nonpossessiveness wasn’t holding up. I was jealous of whatever had gone on with the roadie, or even both roadies, I wasn’t sure, and I also started hearing a new name, some guy Evan, a friend of Sheena’s, who’s family had a house up on Lake Berryessa and whom Cecilia seemed to be hanging around with a lot. I wanted to get a look at this guy and figure out what his deal was.
Also, Maura was going to be coming out by the end of the summer and I just wasn’t sure if I was happy about that or not. I had gotten used to the idea of having this somewhat idealized, theoretical but also unreal, no-obligation relationship conducted entirely via the U.S. mail. Maura had a fairly uncensored window into what I’d been up to, sure, so she knew that she was coming into a situation in which I was involved with someone else. She even knew about Giselle and the way I sometimes thought about ending things with Cecilia and trying to get something going with her. She was vague in her letters about whether she expected us to get together, fool around, be a couple, or turn into “just friends.” Each of those possibilities felt equally unlikely. For one thing, I just knew that if she showed up at my door she’d end up in my bed. I don’t know how I knew this but I had no doubt that it was true.
I figured I was better off discussing this with Cecilia than carrying it around in my head. I still hadn’t told her much about Giselle except to say I had met a new friend who wasn’t a Gomer and was a writer and sometimes gave me a lift from class. She really hadn’t shown much interest in her. Next time I was hanging out at her sister’s place helping her watch her niece I mentioned almost in passing that Maura was thinking of moving out to Berkeley.
“So?”
“What do you think about that?”
“What should I think? Who cares?”
“Well, you know about our history—”
“Duh,” she said. “Big fucking deal.”
“And you know about the letters.”
“You keep them in a folder in plain sight in your room. I’ve read half of them when you aren’t around.”
“What? You shouldn’t read other people’s mail!” I tried to remember what I’d written about Cecilia.
“You know I’m nosy. Anyway, she’s very wordy. I’m not sure what you see in her. Didn’t you say she was cruel to you at Princeton?”
“Yeah,” I said. That was true. “She just has always had some kind of hold on my attention. I’m fascinated with her for some reason. She’s very smart.”
“You’re always telling me I’m smart. Is that just your word for girls you’re interested in?”
“No,” I said. “Well, maybe. At least, I mean, I like smart women. I don’t like dummies anyway. I wouldn’t like you if I didn’t think you were smart. I mean, I’d like you but I wouldn’t be into you.”
“Your sure it’s not just this?” she said, cocking her hips to one side and cupping her crotch.
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “It’s totally the camel toe.”
“Haw haw. Very funny. Why do you think I’m going to care if stupid Maura comes out for a visit?”
“Moves out here,” I said. “She’s thinking of moving out here.”
“Same difference. I don’t care if you fuck her or whatever. I forget if you said if she’s pretty or what.”
“Not like you,” I said. “She’s blonder than you, but she doesn’t have your body. She definitely doesn’t have your boobs.”
“Good,” she said, leaning forward and pushing up her tits from below, “because I’m using them.”
“I can think of a few uses for them myself,” I said.
“Maybe they’re not for you,” she said. “You know the roadies are coming back to SF in a few weeks.”
The Monsters of Rock tour was due for its Oakland stop in less than a month. “Oh, right,” I said. “You and Sheena owe those guys a party, don’t you?”
“Shut up,” she said. “At least those guys aren’t dorks.”
For You, The Stars
Chapter Eleven: Installment 5
Cecilia and I went to see the Dead at the Greek, probably my favorite venue in the Bay Area because it was small and intimate. There wasn’t a bad sightline in the place. Normally we’d go early, stand in line most of the day if it was the weekend or join up with one person who had come early to get a good place in line if it was Friday, and then run in when the gates opened and put some blankets down across one of the broad steps, ideally next to the soundboard on the Phil side. Holding onto the stone seats and dealing with the ushers who wouldn’t let you lean back was kind of a pain but it was worth it by the time the show finally got started.
This time, though, we set up our blanket on the tiny sloped lawn at the top of the bowl. It was still closer in than the lawn at the Frost or the Shoreline though it wasn’t quite as cozy as the actual seats. On the other hand it gave us more freedom to wander over to the beer garden or to stand around and dance when the music got playing.
In the middle of the second set, before the new age drum duet, the broke into “Crazy Fingers.” Cecilia knew all about how I had sung that to Maura back when I was courting her in my clumsy way in school and failing to close the deal. She knew the mixed tape I had made for Maura too because I always dubbed a copy for myself. She saw me with starting off with a faraway look in my eyes and said, “You’re thinking about her, aren’t you?” I didn’t deny it.
In fact, Maura was coming out to San Francisco, or actually to Berkeley. She was nearly done with her MFA in Ithaca and her teacher slash mentor slash lover was finishing up his writer-in-residence gig and she was running out of reasons to spend another frozen winter in upstate New York. She was sharing an apartment with a platonic male friend and she told me they were quoting R.E.M. lyrics to each other obliquely about her impending move, stuff like “Well I know it might sound strange, but I believe / You’ll be coming back before too long.”
So it’s not like she was coming out to visit me. It’s not like she was coming out for me. But still the way she talked about it in her letters it was obvious that she expected something to happen when she did show up. She was back in the mode of apologizing for being so maddeningly evasive all throughout our last two years at school.
Still, I was wary of reading too much into her signals. I remember when she gave me her senior thesis to read. It was a meta-novel about a writer whose characters come to life and start appearing in her room. It also had an ambiguous incest scene in it. The second page of the manuscript was a dedication: “To DD, who was always there for me.” D.D., Daniel Dermott. It was obvious, right?
I thought wow, all that time she was avoiding me she was drawing on my loyalty to her for inspiration in finishing her novel. Fortunately, before I said anything stupid, she gave the game away by making some remark about her older sister Dierdre, whom she called Dee Dee, or at least that’s how I would have spelled it, based on how she had pronounced her name when she was an infant.
Then again she was always sending me books to read, either stuff she thought I’d like, like The Sportswriter or things that were somewhat like my own experimental style, like Carpenter’s Gothic, collections of short stories like In the Miro District, or overt references to our long chain of letter like A Literate Romance. I tried not to read too much into any of those, not even the one about the epistolary love affair. I did like The Sportswriter a lot, but even then I seemed to have missed a major subtext because when Maura asked me if I had noticed that the entire story takes place over an Easter weekend and models itself on the Passion of Christ I had to admit that the parallel had escaped me entirely. Maybe I wasn’t cut out to be a literary writer after all.
When I wasn’t writing much, Maura told me that I shouldn’t force it. “It will come when you’re ready.” Then I thought cynically that she just didn’t want to encourage any competition. She was interested when I started painting but didn’t really respond whne I dropped the painting class. I thought I’d keep it up on my own but without studio space it wasn’t really possible. I was never really sure how she felt about anything. The letters kept piling up and the folder labeled Maura kept getting fatter but I wasn’t really sure who she was or how I felt about her impending arrival in the fall.
I was really starting to enjoy my new job at least. There was a sort of bohemian refugee feel at the office. People dressed fairly neat. It wasn’t punky or anything, except for one of the typesetters, who always had his hair waxed straight up, but a couple of my new friends were in a band together and they were introducing me to the post-punk and hardcore music that I had overlooked as I had progressed down the stoner preppie retro memory lane from the Doors to the Beatles to Dylan and the Dead.
The chief proofreader, Roger Brown, took me under his wing musically and started dubbing tapes for me. He made me the Minutemen’s “Double Nickels on the Dime” and put two of Pere Ubu’s first records, “The Modern Dance” and “Dub Housing” back to back on another cassette. He also turned me on to the Meat Puppets, the Grateful Dead of the SST scene, and of course Hüaut;sker Düaut;’s “Flip Your Wig.” This stuff was a revelation to me. Liberated from the instrumental jam concept of the hippie psychedelic bands, these short sharp blasts of chaos were like a breath of fresh air. I also got into fIREHOUSE but I had to admit I was envious the Roger had seen the Minutemen live before D. Boon died.
It was like any of my other obsessions, musical or otherwise, going back though baseball all the way back to the D’Aulaire book of Greek myths I devoured in grade school. As soon as I caught onto a new scene I got hungry about it and started studying up on it, devouring everything I could listen to, hear, read about, and study. Roger was happy to school me and he kept making me tapes and regaling me with stories of the postpunk scene in LA in the mid-’80s.
He told me about the time he went to see Pere Ubu, not knowing what anyone in the band looked like. He saw this big fat guy wearing a black suit and a skinny tie and he wondered who the total square was and what he was doing at a punk show. When the band took the stage her realized the big fat guy was David Thomas, not to be confused with the Wendy’s guy or the guy from Second City, and that he was a thousand times more punk than Roger. He learned not to judge a freak by its cover that day.
I also realized that I wasn’t alone in this job in the sense that we all had creative or artistic ambitions, or at least most of the young people did, and none of us had planed on working in the dirty book business. Most of the proofreaders and a few of the copyeditors were straight out of Berkeley, English majors with limited job prospects. Climex tended to work them hard for minimal wages and then when they asked for more encouraged them to take a hike because there was always a new crop of English, or in my case philosophy, degrees graduating every spring.
The commute was still a pain. I got a little reading done on the way and sometimes I’d just spend the whole trip listening to tapes on my walkman, but having to transfer first from Muni the BART and then from BART to the AC Transit bus that took me to the office in Emeryville meant I had to stay alert and that the trip was broken up into these legs that made it harder to settle into a book or some good music. Also, on a good day the commute was an hour and a quarter. If I was late for my Muni or missed the BART connection the delays would spiral and the whole trip in to the office in the morning would take an hour and forty five minutes. I’d try to slip in unnoticed but it seemed that the hideous office manager would always notice me coming in late and then say something annoying about it to Judith in the break room later in the day.
I wasn’t totally secure there yet and I was starting to think it really was time to get a car when one day after our copyediting class Giselle told me that her other outside boyfriend was trying to sell his 1969 Mercedes 250 for $1900 and getting nowhere and would I be interested in buying it? I said, “If he’ll take $900, he’s got a deal.”
For You, The Stars
Chapter Eleven: Installment 4
I was spending fewer evenings in Marin but I was still going up most weekends. Cecilia was spending a lot of time with Sheena. She kept hinting that they were going to fool around some time or maybe pick up a guy and experiment and I kept telling her to let me know if it happened because I wanted to hear all about it if I couldn’t be there for the main event. Cecilia was still basically a full time babysitter but she did get her application together for the community college and there was no reason to think she wouldn’t be able to start there in the fall.
“I need to get my degree,” she said.
“You should,” I said. “You’re a smart person, but what do you want to study.”
“Maybe fashion design?”
“Does College of Marin even have a fashion major?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Maybe you should check?”
With my new job I was less inclined to make excuses not to work on Monday and Fridays and I didn’t even know if there was a way to get to Emeryville from San Rafael by public transportation. I was starting to think that I should get a car. I didn’t really have a great track record with cars. I didn’t need one, growing up in Manhattan, and I didn’t take driver’s ed in high school like most normal people did. In the spring of my senior year of college when Hopper and I were planning to drive across the country, he taught me how to drive using his new Accord, which he called Fenry Honda. He was a pretty good teacher and I learned the basics pretty fast. Of course I’d been watching people drive forever, but as a permanent passenger I tended not to remember directions and I didn’t have a lot of confidence. I remember being really young and watching my grampy drive and being amazed when he’d take both hands off the steering wheel to amuse me. How did the car keep going? I wondered. He explained that the wheel wasn’t making the car go. We drove fast down a hill. I was sitting on my grammy’s lap. She went “wheeee!” I turned to her and said, “Why do we say whee?” and she said “Because it’s thrilling.”
I tried to explain to her that I knew why she was saying “whee” just now but that what I was trying to ask was why “whee” was the word we said when we felt that vertigo, but I was only about five years old or less and I didn’t know how to make my question any clearer so she just ended up looking at me with a puzzled expression on her face. I was an odd child and I often consternated the adults this way.
Hopper and I had planned this elaborate camping trip across the country. I flew down to his parents’ home in Florida, which we used as a staging area. His parents were definitely dubious about me driving their son’s new car, with good reason it turned out, of course. His dad was also an incredible noodge. We were packing our coolers for the trip and we included some half and half for our coffee. He was worried it was going to turn. “It will be fine, dad!” said Hopper. They got into a serious argument about it. Finally his dad gave in, saying “I wouldn’t drink it” over and over.
Driving Fenry Honda across country was a luxury. The car had cruise control for those long stretches of midwestern interstate and a new CD player with a great sound system. Hopper’s taste and mine diverged a bit: he was more into his live Eagles album than I was, but we agreed on the bootleg tapes and the live Dead albums, like Reckoning, the acoustic one. Cruising down the open road across America with the Grateful Dead or, yes, I admit it, Steppenwolf, blaring felt at times like the epitome of being twenty-one and dumb and not minding it one bit.
We had two sleeping bags and one tent that we thought would be big enough for the both of us. Hopper is tall and lanky and I’m short and squat but it did seem big enough. We even set it up and the mall store and got in it to be sure, but my snoring kept him up all night so in return he kept waking me up to get me to stop it. Hundreds of times a night, it seemed, I would wake up from a deep sleep as Hopper shook me. My eyes would focus on his face and he’d say, “dude, you’re snoring.” Then I’d turn over and fall right back to sleep. It became nightmarish for me at least, probably for both of us.
One night in the middle of nowhere we set up in our camping ground and walked down to a nearby lake, or pond really. We had one little joint we had brought with us and hoarded thus far and we smoked it all the way down, looking at the stars that I never used to see in New York, nor he in Miami. “This is the life,” said Hopper, “isn’t it?”
“You got that right,” I said.
As we trudged back up the slight slope to our tent it was just beginning to rain. During the night the storm whipped up and eventually tore the fly off the tent and pulled some of our weakly planted stakes out of the ground. The heavy rain started coming in through the mesh and puddling in the corner of the tent. We woke up soaking wet and ran over to his car. Fortunately, he had a few towels in the back seat and we were able to dry ourselves off roughly and then lay them down on the driver and passenger side seats, recline them, and spend the rest of the night in the car. After that we rechristened Fenry “the comfort pod” and we stopped using the tent entirely.
Hopper was very protective of the car, hence the towels on the seats, and he didn’t even like it if I put my foot up next to the glove compartment and left some mud drying there, so that just made it all the more tragic when I ended up driving the comfort pod off the side of the highway down a thirty foot incline into that ditch in Wyoming.
I’m not sure Hopper ever fully forgave me for that. I’m sure his parents didn’t. I eventually repaid him for the repairs but a new car just isn’t new anymore after it’s been in a serious body-jarring accident like that, and of course we were both lucky we hadn’t been killed or maimed. There were plenty of other stretches of Montana and Wyoming where losing control of the car at night could easily have been fatal.
So I was a little gun-shy about cars but I was starting to think I needed one anyway. Spending more time over in Berkeley and Emeryville and other parts of the east bay was showing me another side to this part of the world. San Francisco can be a bit like a little fairytale Manhattan. Even with all the hills you can get pretty much anywhere on Muni or BART or one of the buses. Oakland and the rest of the east bay is a sprawl, more like southern California in that regard. You can’t just walk down the street to buy a paper or get a cup of coffee, let alone shop for used books or records.
I mean, there are all kinds of little neighborhoods all over the east bay, like Rockridge and Lakeshore that have the Peet’s coffee shops and the Noah’s bagels and the Walden Pond bookstores and the movie theatres and so on, but they are islands separated by long stretches of highway or overland driving. Or I guess not really long stretches in terms of miles but long in terms of traffic. Even back then the bay area was choked with traffic and I was starting to realize I’d need to face up to the legendary California car culture.
For You, The Stars
Chapter Eleven: Installment 3
Cecilia, meanwhile, had met some roadies. She’d gone with Sheena to see Def Leppard at Oakland Stadium and like a stereotypical little pair of groupies they’d found their way backstage by flirting with the bouncer guarding one of the exits. I’d always heard those guys expected a blowjob at least to let a girl without a pass through but Cecilia said they hadn’t had to put out or anything. They didn’t meet the band but they ended up partying with some of the crew and it turned out that those guys had to take several days breaking down the enormous stage sets and equipment at the stadium and then were at loose ends for a few weeks. I learned about all of this when Cecilia called me up one night to say she was coming out with some friends in the city and would I like to come along. I said sure and they came by to get me.
Sheena was driving her convertible with the top down. I got in the passenger seat and Cecilia sat in the back wedged behind these two huge longhairs I’d never met. “This is Charlie and Rod,” said Cecilia. “Yo,” I said.
They were pretty good company, actually. They laughed a lot and liked to tell stories, both from the road and from their own lives. Charlie had grown up on Long Island so we made the most of that although growing up in the city and out on the island were worlds apart. He was, from the sound of it, about five, six years older than me, meaning he’d been a teen in the late ’70s. He talked about spending as much time as he could at rock clubs in Manhattan once he got old enough to drive and about how his parent’s never figured out he was smoking pot back then.
“Why are your eyes so red, Charlie?” he said, imitating his mother’s voice, I guess.
“I don’t know, ma. I guess I got some shampoo in my eyes.”
“Yeah,” said Rod, “like every day of high school.”
One thing impressed me about these guys. They were physically very confident and had the blue-collar attitude about just handling physical situations instead of overthinking them. For instance, we got to the bar in the Haight where we were going to hang out and have a few drinks and it was, as usual, nearly impossible to find parking. After we drove around for about ten or fifteen minutes trolling for a space, Charlie and Rod spotted something and told Sheena to pull over.
There was one of those temporary construction fences stabilized by heavy cement feet like bare planters blocking off about three spaces about a block or two off Stanyan. They got out of the car, said one-two-three-heave and moved one end of the fence about a car length. Then they waved Sheena into the space. “They can do that?” said Cecilia. “I guess so,” I said, trying to seem like I would have done it myself if I wasn’t a weakling.
Where we saw an immovable fence or a police line and just blindly obeyed its restrictions, they saw a piece of hardware like the kind of stuff they were setting up and tearing down all day long. They could picture the construction crew that set up the fence and the thing had no authority over them, especially at night when they knew the thing was just holding the space for the following day. They even moved it back when we got ready to leave a few hours a later.
Cecilia told me Charlie was definitely hitting on her. He was another big guy with stringy long hair although he wore wireframe glasses, which was a little incongruous, giving him a vague intellectual air. He actually was pretty smart. He hadn’t been to college, but he was a reader and had that habit of sometimes mispronouncing word he’d obviously learned from books but hadn’t been able to use in his day-to-day life.
In a way I was proud of Cecilia that she was learning to spot when a guy was after her sexually. Usually she was so blinded by the attention and whatever little games she played inside her own head that she wouldn’t notice the signals. I found I had mixed feelings. Sometimes I felt possessive of Cecilia and a lot of the time I didn’t. I was starting to let go and it was obvious to me how out of line I was with all the other guys she’d ever been with. She was obviously suited to someone who was more physical than me, more of a doer and less of a thinker. In that sense, maybe Charlie was a good transition. He was, in a strange way, like a kind of pumped up version of me. He was a stoner, not a jock, and while he was strong and tall he was also good for conversation and not just joshing around and getting wasted.
I almost wanted her to go to him, almost. I also knew that we had always had these open rules and that possessiveness was going to backfire. It had worked best for me to be entirely open handed. Half the time, nearly all the time in fact, this had led to Cecilia blowing off whatever other guy was intriguing with her and sticking with me. Even if she’d had a few side things recently she kept coming back to me. And then I would wonder how bad I wanted her to keep coming back.
She told me that she had not fooled around with Charlie the night Sheena drove them back to Marin, but that he had made it clear that if he was going to keep spending time on her he expected to “get some.” He also said that he and his buddies were going to come back through the Bay Area in August with the Monsters of Rock tour, so he could hook her up with tickets and backstage passes then. Cecilia sounded so excited when she told me this. She sounded like a little girl with a birthday coming up, or maybe First Holy Communion.
I started meeting Giselle after work and before our copyediting class for coffee at Cafe Beautiful People on Bancroft on the south side of the UC campus. She also started giving me a lift back over the Bay in her little Honda after our classes. We’d end up parked right outside my house talking in her car for forty-five minutes or more before I’d finally say goodnight and head in.
She seemed fascinated by my stories about my half-in, half-out relationship with Cecilia and about the strangely chaste environment at Climex Books. She said she didn’t have anything nearly as interesting to tell me about but that wasn’t really true.
Giselle was in a long-distance relationship with her boyfriend on the east coast, ironically another Princeton guy. He must have been two or three years ahead of me there. His name did not ring a bell anyway. But she was also seeing a few people out here in SF. One guy and one girl, in fact. I was impressed by her matter-of-fact declaration of bisexuality. I’d met some women before who liked to talk about being bi in a teasing sort of way, suggesting that under the right circumstances maybe, or “a woman’s body is a beautiful thing, unlike men who are so hairy and gross” or maybe remembering some drunken fumbling experimentation in college, but here was someone just making note of the fact that she found men and women equally attractive without making that big a deal of it. If anything, she said, she was drawn a little bit more to women.
The problem was that the girl she’d been having a fling with was getting a little too attached. They had met in a poetry class she was taking and it had been her first time with another woman. She was from a fairly traditional Mexican American family and violating the mores of her parents, especially her father, had been exhilarating and liberating, but as soon as she detected that for Giselle it was just a passing thing, she’d become almost obsessed and was writing her poetry all the time, shoving notes under her door, leaving long creepy answering machine messages, and generally making Giselle regret the whole thing.
“I need to break up with her,” she said. “It’s getting too weird, but I’m a little afraid of how she’ll react, considering how wiggy she’s already gotten.”
“Does Jack know about any of this?” Jack was her boyfriend.
“No,” said Giselle. “We have a rule. We know that we’re three thousand miles apart and that things happen, so we agreed not to tell each other about anything.”
“Wow,” I said. “That’s like the opposite of my rule with Cecilia. We can do anything but we have to tell each other.” I told her about my breakup with Simone and the guilt I had felt over breaking promises and my new commitment to never make promises I couldn’t be sure I would keep.
“Do you think he’s seeing other people?”
“I’m not sure,” she said. “He’s kind of shy.”
“So you think he has no idea you have both an outside boyfriend and girlfriend?”
“Nope.”
“I wonder…. I think people can hear it in your voice. But hey, if it’s working for you. More power to you. You’re my hero, in fact, juggling three people and two sexes!”
“You’re so silly,” she said. Giselle would never say “shut up, faggot.”
She was remarkably unaffected and unself-conscious about topics like sex, which I found very appealing, but we didn’t just talk about sex and relationships. We talked a lot about writing. She told me about her poetry class with some famous antiwar guy in Berkeley I’d never heard of and her idea to form a writing group without a leader so people could encourage each other without having to pay someone for the privilege of meeting once a week.
“If you get that started,” I said. “Count me in.”
We had talked about the short stories I was writing. They were all experimental and terrible. They had no quotation marks to tell you when someone was speaking and when it was just the narrator. Or they avoided all exposition entirely, trying to have the dialogue carry the whole story. Or they were written in pseudo-Borgesian imaginary worlds that smacked too much of the pulp science fiction I had devoured all throughout high school. Or they were about sex but in incredibly coy convoluted metaphors and analogies designed to entirely obscure anything that could ever be traced back to my own personal experience. They were wretched and I pretty much knew it, but I also felt that I had to write a lot of crappy stuff and get it out of my system before I had any hope of writing something good, so I didn’t mind too much. A writing group sounded like a nice safe way to incubate my work and get some feedback from other hopeful beginners.
“I will,” she said. “Probably sometime after my class is over. I’ll let you know.”
For You, The Stars
Chapter Eleven: Installment 2
“How’d it go?” said Cecilia, on the phone, that night.
“OK, I guess,” I said. “The people were nice. The commute was kind of sucky. I think it took about an hour and fifteen minutes. Good thing I brought a book.” (I was on a world history jag and was currently reading a book about the breakdown of the Ottoman empire and the formation of the modern middle east at the end of World War I.)
“Did you get any free books?” she said.
“Actually, yeah. They gave me a handful off the guy’s shelf, so I’d understand what I might be getting into.”
“Maybe we can try out some of the stuff in there.”
“They’re not sex manuals,” I said. “They’re stories.”
“I know,” she said. “I meant maybe I can be, like, the headmistress and you can be the naughty schoolboy.”
“Oh, sure,” I said. “Or you can be Bo Peep and I can be a lamb.”
“You are so weird.”
The interview had actually gone very well, although the dynamic between Judith and Bryan was a little odd. Later on I would figure out that these were Berkeley people. They weren’t like other people, even in the Bay Area. San Francisco people have their own idiosyncrasies and preoccupations but Berkeley people are different. It’s not the old Mario Sauvio Free Speech movement stereotype, either, or the naked parade How Berkeley Can You Be parade idea, for that matter. It’s definitely not the quasi-socialist People’s Republic of Berkeley concept resurrected in the Wall Street Journal every time there’s a slow news day or even the “officially make pot busts the Berkeley police department’s lowest priority” thing. It’s more of a kind of insular climate of confidence and even privilege. Berkeley had become to a large extent a well-to-do small city full of homeowners who fought the university over real estate and the tax base even while the old People’s Park seizures were finally being settled.
These people were yuppies but in their minds they were ultra-progressive. At one point Judith joked that her daughter’s first word was “croissant” and she said it with a French accent, cwa-soh, not crossont like a normal American would say.
But, like I said, they were nice. Bryan noticed that I had been a philosophy major at Princeton and even asked me about my thesis. I later learned he had studied philosophy himself as a grad student at UC. He actually had been in the Free Speech movement. I guess that in a way wasn’t too many hops away from the dirty book business, although I couldn’t help wondering how he had come to it.
He asked me about wanting to work in publishing and we discussed the dearth of options for that in the Bay Area. I wasn’t really that keen on working in book publishing, per se, let along “erotic” novels. If I had a choice I’d have worked for a magazine or newspaper, but on arriving out west I’d sent my resume out to all the local papers and the few magazines, like Mother Jones that published in San Francisco and heard almost nothing back aside from a few dismal form letters. I tried working the alumni networks of my boarding school and college but that likewise yielded nothing aside from a few offers of paralegal work.
I even went to a career counselor. “If you want to work in publishing” he said. “You should move to New York. Have you considered that?”
“I just came from there,” I said. “I’m looking for something different.”
“Well, you came to the wrong place for publishing,” he said, “but I’ll see what I can do.”
Which turned out to be nothing.
The Climex people said they would call me, and I went back to my job the next day not sure what I really wanted. They were fast about it. I don’t think they even checked my references. Two days after my interview I came home to a message on my machine from Bryan. He said the assistant editor job had been filled already but that they had another opening, an editorial assistant, that they’d like to offer me and would I give them a call on Monday?
Editorial assistant sounded even lower than assistant editor. Was it worth it to switch from studio assistant to editorial assistant. I guess I was getting a lot of office experience as I euphemistically called it. Maybe I could pursue a professional in assistant-ing, maybe climb the ladder to the pinnacle of executive assistant, even - if I dared to dream - assistant to the CEO of some horrible company.
On Monday I called Bryan back. He said they could send me an offer letter but he wanted to warn me first that the pay for this job was quite low. “This is publishing,” he said with a chuckle in his voice. “Remember that.”
How low? Try $7.00 an hour! $2.50 less an hour, $20 less a day, $5000 less a year. But for the chance to break into the glamorous world of publishing, well worth it! I couldn’t even fool myself about that. Plus, I wasn’t looking forward to telling my parents about my new job if I did switch.
I asked if I could take some time to think about it and he said yes but warned me that there had been other applicants for the job and asked for an answer within a week. Seven dollars an hour! It was a shocking pittance. That Ivy League education was really paying off.
I talked it over with Dave and Chad and Hopper and Savage and they reminded me that I wasn’t exactly making bank in my current job, which was even more a dead end unless I was going to miraculously grow a degree in architecture. “But the commute,” I said. “It’s insane.”
“That’s what they invented walkmans for,” said Savage.
“Walkmen,” I said. Seth Savage resumed beating me at chess, his current obsession.
In the end the thing that clinched it for me was the awful climate at the downtown office and an impish sense that leaving them for a cut in pay was a humiliating slap in the face. They couldn’t entice me to stay with an offer of more money knowing I was leaving them for less. Plus, as pathetic as the new job sounded, it was at least marginally close to being a job in the creative world and that had to count for something.
I called Bryan back on Wednesday, from my office cubicle, to tell him that I wanted to take the job but that the pay was just too low. Was there anything he could do about it? He said he’d see.
In the end he offered me $7.50 and I took it. As predicted, the architects were flabbergasted, or at least my studio boss was. They asked if there was some way they could make my job more interesting. I told them the new job was in publishing and that was closer to my longer-term career goals. They suggested I could work in marketing, write press releases. I told them they didn’t get it. They exit interview was awkward.
I managed to finagle a week or two off before starting my new job in Emeryville. I spent it lying on the back deck in Marin.
The new job wasn’t bad. The people were pretty hip. At least they were readers. I settled in pretty quickly. I had to share a computer with the other junior editors in a row of cubicles. I was kind of everyone’s assistant. I did odd jobs. Some copying, a little proofreading. Mostly paperwork, filing stuff, getting forms ready for R.R. Bowker to assign ISBN’s to books and the Library of Congress for those details that show up inside the second page of a book that I had never really looked closely at before - card catalogue stuff. I was a little surprised that the Library of Congress was kept so well informed of the details of each stroke book that came off the presses.
It’s not like anyone at Climex had pretensions about these books, although I did a little research into the history of the company and found out that they had published some fairly daring stuff in the ’50s, in the era of Lolita and Olympia. One rumor was that the other of several of the earliest racy book in the back catalog, Weldon Dowd, was really Norman Mailer, although I read one of them and found it hard to credit.
Still, it ran like any other business. There as plenty of filing to do, correspondence with authors, getting together corrections for second printings, running out to the burrito wagon around the 10:15 break. It was often pretty boring, and I’d sometimes stick one of the books in my pants pocket and walk stiff-legged into the men’s room to read for a while and think about having a wank, as the British might say. As often as not the hygienic surroundings or the entry of some other man into the bathroom, whistling and farting, would destroy the mood for me and I’d change my mind. Usually the sports section of the Chronicle was on the floor of the bathroom already or maybe even the comics, and I’d just sit there and read until claustrophobia sent me back to my desk.
Then they sent me to a copyediting class, to get me ready to be a real editor. They paid for me to take a class at the UC Extension. I dropped my painting class because there were only so many night of the week I was willing to head over to Berkeley after work to better myself. Now at least I could zip over after work, grab a bite somewhere on Bancroft, take my class, and then take the Berkeley BART back to downtown SF where I could switch to the N-Judah and be home before 10.
The class was kind of interesting. Mostly I learned proofreader’s marks. I didn’t know all the rules of copyediting but I could usually tell when a sentence was wrong and needed fixing. I memorized the specific reasons and put a little structure around my intuitions. I bought Webster’s Third and the Chicago Manual of Style. They gave us a copyediting test every other class and I went from pretty good to nearly perfect. Apparently a lot of “real” publishing jobs used these kinds of tests to screen people, so that was a bonus.
Also, there was a girl in the class I started chatting with before and after, named Giselle. She reminded me for some reason of Sigourney Weaver, although not as tall. Something around her jawline I guess. She spoke with a vaguely posh New England sounding accent although she was actually from California, born and raised. She was the editor of a very small publishing house that as far as I could tell was created by her father’s friend, a rich lawyer who was bored with his winery and looking for a new outlet. He had carved out a space for her in his law office on Montgomery and had given her a mandate to find some authors and publish them. I was envious. Why didn’t I have a patron like that? He had also sent her to this class to learn the tools of the trade.
I found myself thinking of Giselle when I was with Cecilia.
For You, The Stars
Chapter Eleven: Please Forget You Knew My Name
Installment 1
I started making plans to get a new job. They were laying people off at the architecture firm and the place was getting depressing. They were letting architects go and hiring more marketing people. None of the architects liked the new CAD systems they were being trained on. Nobody gets a degree in architecture to design hospital wards by dropping cookie-cutter stencils of sinks and cabinets and bathrooms into one identical sized room after another. Every now and then, someone would say to me, “What are you doing here?” This had happened since I started but now I started asking myself the same question.
I’d eked out a few raises, so now I was making about $9.50 an hour, enough to get by on, given my $300 a month rent for my tiny room in the Gomer group house, but I wasn’t going to get rich being a studio assistant.
One of Dave’s high school friends, Marvin, came out to stay with us for the traditional two weeks before getting started. He’d just come out in another sense, telling Dave he was gay the first night he arrived. We all got drunk and high and he talked about how he had just told his parents and they hadn’t exactly kicked him out or disowned him but they hadn’t really protested when he told them he was going to hitchhike out to San Francisco.
Dave was I guess what you’d call a bear, or a bear cub. He was incredibly hairy. He had thick white-blond hair and a thick beard with a hint of red in it. His chest looked hairy too. Dave said he was famous, actually, for how hairy he was. He was also a little thick around the middle with a barrel chest. He told us that he was a “type” that some other gay dudes found especially attractive. That sounded interesting. He told us about cruising public bathrooms and exploring other underground aspects of gay sexual culture. I could tell Dave was a tiny bit wigged out by all this information, though he acted cool about it. I just found it all fascinating.
Marvin wasn’t sure what he wanted to do for work. He went down to Santa Cruz for a few days to hook up with a friend and when he got back he told me he had a line on a job. He had met a guy who publishes dirty magazine, the small form factor ones that feature letters to the editor.
“Like Penthouse Forum?” I asked him.
“Yeah,” he said, “but the whole thing is just the letters, with maybe a few illustrations or photos stuck in to illustrate them.”
I had seen things like this. I think Penthouse even had a letters-only edition in that small size. I vaguely remembered buying it, or maybe something similar called Variations and sticking it in my pocket to sneak it back to my parents’ apartment when I was still a teenager. No matter where I hid these kinds of magazines, usually in the bottom of my closet or behind the books on one of the many shelves in our house, they’d always be found eventually and I’d be humiliated ritually.
I guess I was sort of aware there were gay versions of these things. I remember my brother had once brought a small photocomic type booklet home that he had found on the subway. We looked at all the photos of young guys with stiff erections. We found it pretty fascinating. We didn’t really worry that it was obviously aimed at gay men or possibly women but probably not. At that age we were just hungry for any information or depictions about sex we could find. I’d seen those letters-type magazines at the newsstands. The ones for men were called things like Honcho or Inches on ManDate.
I didn’t recognize the names of the ones Marvin reeled off. Maybe they were regional. Anyway, he said, this guy was willing to pay $50 a pop for letters.
“You mean the letters aren’t real?” I asked him.
“You’re kidding, right?”
“Well, I don’t know!” I felt stupid. “I figured maybe some of them were real and then they wrote other ones - the ones that seemed obviously over the top.”
“No,” he said. “They’re all fake. It’s like professional wrestling.”
“Wait, you mean….?” I said. He stared at me like I really was an idiot.
“No,” I said. “I’m kidding! Doy!”
We talked about some of the tropes of these letters. He knew more about the gay ones but aside from the sex itself the formulas were remarkably similar. There were always people claiming to go to large northeastern colleges, avid readers of thus and such magazine, who never believed the stories were true, till one day when this happened to me. Usually “one thing led to another,” and so on.
He said the publisher guy gave him the plots: guy with a flat tire gets picked up by bikers, or spending the night in the drunk tank or wild spring break weekend. He was even told what specific sex acts, even positions to include. Sometimes he was even given descriptions to work with. “Bears,” he said, which was when he explained the concept to me, “or twinks.” He also told me about drag queens and how transvestites weren’t necessarily gay. It was pretty fascinating.
I started wondering if maybe I could write like that. Fifty dollars wasn’t much but the stories were short, and if you could crank out a bunch of them, it would beat spending all day in a stifling office downtown.
Marvin got his own place down in Santa Cruz, but he came up to visit every now and then. I asked him about the gig and he said he didn’t think they’d really want a straight guy writing the stories, but he gave the name of a publisher of actual dirty books, the kind you buy in the airport, called Climex, where he said they were looking for an assistant editor. He’d heard about this from his publisher friend and he said he could get him to put in a good word for me. Apparently these dirty publishers all knew each other.
Cecilia thought it was hilarious that I was thinking about getting into the porn world. “It’s not porn,” I said, “exactly. There’s no photos in these books and even the paintings on the paperback covers are just suggestive. They look kind of romance novels.”
“It’s still porn,” she said, but she was actually supportive.
“Why not? It would probably be fun, and you obviously like sex.”
“Who doesn’t?” I said.
“Well…” she said.
“You like the idea of sex,” I said.
“True.”
“Plus,” I said. “I wouldn’t be writing them, just editing them, or something. I’m not even really sure. I still need to call them.”
“Well, you should,” she said. She knew I was going crazy doing spreadsheets all day.
I did call and sent them my resume. There wasn’t much on it yet, though I included all my summer and winter jobs from high school and college, the paralegal work, the legal summarizing, and the studio assistant job I had now. They called me back and asked me to come in for an interview. I wasn’t sure what to expect. A bunch of aging hippies sparking up in the office. Red lighting? It was remarkably businesslike, though, not much different from the place I was working now.
Climex was located in the east bay, in a place called Emeryville that I had to buy a map to find. They told me how to get there. I had to take the Muni downtown, then BART across the bay and then a bus to get out to Emeryville, which seemed to be mostly a warehouse district with some big box electronic stores near a massive highway on-ramp/off-ramp maze. The commute alone was enough to make me think twice about taking a new job. I almost stayed on the bus until it came around to the BART stop again but I figured I had already taken the day off from work and it would be kind of pathetic not to show up.
I got off the bus and found the right building. There was no receptionist out front, just a series of brass plaques bolted onto an exposed brick wall inside the front doors. Climex was on the third floor. They did have a receptionist, just outside the elevator. I said I was there for the interview with Bryan and Judith and the receptionist, who was young and normal looking except for having like eight piercings along the cartilage at the top of her left ear, told me to have a seat in the waiting area, which consisted of three overstuffed leather couches formed into an open rectangle under the large warehouse windows to one side of the reception desk.
There was a glass coffeetable with a set of Climex books scattered across it. The covers were indeed fairly tasteful. They reminded me of Beeline books. Some of them actually had two novels back to back. You’d read to the middle of the book and then flip the paperback over to read the second story. Lots of cheerleaders and teachers, medieval stuff, and taboo things like incest, priests and nuns. Guys with their shirts off tied to benches and pneumatic woman who looked like their blouses were about to burst. The surroundings were so odd that I didn’t find any of it arousing, but I could see where I would have, easily, in the privacy of my room.
“Daniel?”
I looked up at a middle-aged woman with long ringlets of gray hair down the middle of her back. She was wearing a denim work shirt, black jeans and heels.
“That’s me,” I said.
“Hi,” she said. “I’m Judith. Come on back but Bryan’s office with me.”
She walked me back through a maze of cubicles to a modest office with a window against the back wall. Bryan was sitting behind his desk. He looked a little older than Judith, maybe 50 or so. He had a white ponytail and a little goatee.
“So you want to break into publishing,” he said.
“Yes sir.”
“It’s not as glamorous as it sounds,” he said.
“I’ll say,” interjected Judith, as we both sat down.
I didn’t really know how to respond to that.
For You, The Stars
Chapter Ten: Installment 5
From that point on till our affair petered out entirely, “For you, the stars…” became a shorthand we could use at any time to remind each other of our shared secret language of memories and connection. It replaced “are you ready boots?”
Cecilia never did the voice exactly right, but that didn’t matter. She had the gist of it, a Coney Island carny type of tone. It wasn’t a matter of getting the exact patter down. Even I could never quite make it sound right again.
That was the point, really. It was entirely of the moment, an inspiration that we both fully understood, a heartfelt pathetic appeal to a loved one, to a gal you’re trying to impress, a futile reach for poetic excess by someone entirely unfamiliar with the muse.
For You, The Stars
Chapter Ten: Installment 4
Though we could see that our affair was finite (and I started thinking in terms of that word “affair” - it felt very grownup and old-fashioned and even romantic to me) if anything we were getting along better than ever these days. I think as we were maybe preparing ourselves to ease apart we were reaching a kind of level of comfort and friendship that I would compare to siblings if that didn’t have unfortunate overtones in Cecilia’s case. We were becoming companionable. At the same time she was making new friends, through Sheena and on her occasional trips to Lake Berryessa that I never went on. I could tell she was establishing herself and becoming just a little bit less dependent on me for a social life. She was talking about going back to school, maybe enrolling in the College of Marin in the fall.
But it’s not like we were literally getting ready split. If anything, we were continuing to plan ahead, getting tickets for summer stadium shows and for the big weekend concerts down at Laguna Seca. We still went out together in the city several nights a week. I was less and less interested in my work and didn’t mind coming in late, taking long lunches, skipping Mondays and Fridays, wandering around the tenderloin when I was supposed to be working. I pretty much lived for our nights out, and Cecilia kept meeting interesting new people through her flirting ways. She had a long conversation with one of the guys who organized the loft parties and he told us interesting stories about who he had to pay off and how the whole thing was getting a little too underworld for him. She said maybe we should try to organize one when she learned that this guy sometimes took in several thousands buck a night in profit, but I laughed that off. Not only did I have no time for that kind of thing but I knew that we both lacked the organizational skills required to pull it off.
We kept getting invited to afterparties and late night raves. She met this muscleman type guy, not too much taller than me, with a thinning blond ponytail down to his ass and built like a steroid user, who told her that he sometimes performed in an underground sex show at parties in people’s houses. She swore he wasn’t hitting on her. He was vague, too, about whether it was really a full-on kinky hardcore kind of thing or more like himself in thong and a girl in a bikini oiled up and doing a kind of sensual dance together. Either way, the idea of watching this guy “performing” didn’t appeal to me at all. Cecilia tried to interest me by pointing out that the stripper type he would do it with was likely to be hot, but then the dude ruined it by bragging about her huge fake boobs. These things seemed to be everywhere suddenly. Utterly unrealistic hard plastic breasts shaped liked perfect spheres. Who was into that, I wondered? I guess it was guys like this, from the way his eyes lit up as he gestured with his hands as if molding torpedos into blunt round shapes chest high in front of himself.
On the other hand, I was kind of curious about what kind of people would host a party like this or show up to it. It sounded like the realm of ultra-hipsters trying to be ironic more than any kind of old-school Mitchell Brothers type San Francisco decadence circa the 1970s.
She ended up going to one of these parties with Sheena on a night when I was busy and told me about it afterward. She was actually sort of disappointed. The people there were cool, yes, but not that radical. “They kind of reminded me of you,” she said. “They had jobs.” Also, the party went really late and the main performance kept getting delayed. Finally her friend and his partner did their show on a plastic tarp. She said it wasn’t really that erotic. People kind of hooted or kept talking to each other. The whole thing took place in a little apartment with just three or four rooms. There was a cash bar in the living room and some pretzels and nuts. She said it ended up being pretty boring and around 3 pm she and Sheena went out to one of the late night bars to dance until they started serving again.
If anything this reassured me. The thing was demystified and instead of sounding like Caligula it came off more as a kind of intellectual prank. I kind of wished I had gone just so I could brag about it. Also, the bodybuilder guy really hadn’t been hitting on Cecilia. He seemed to be dating the stripper anyway.
Then Cecilia told me about another party that was in the Gomer neighborhood, right by the same apartment on Judah up by Parnassus Way that we’d been to just a month or so before. As the events got later and later and took place in smaller and smaller venues, basicallly just someone’s home eventually, I found it a lot harder to just show up and hang out. I wasn’t good with total strangers and I wasn’t good in intimate surroundings. I remember at one of those parties pushing by some huge guy to get into the kitchen where the kegorator was and hearing the guy say to his friend, “Hey, look, it’s Woody Allen,” or at least I thought that’s what I heard him say. Do I look that nerdy? I thought to myself. Is my hair thinning that obviously? Is it my glasses? I need new glasses. I told Cecilia and she said I was being ridiculous. “Would I let you look like a nerd?” she asked me. “Your glasses are fine.”
As my hair got longer I was slicking it back off my forehead. We both agreed that there was nothing wrong with losing your hair as long as you didn’t comb it over the top of push it forward to try to hide it. That was just pathetic. She said I was going to look like Jack Nicholson if my temples kept receding and that that was totally cool. I tried to believe her although I knew no one would ever mistake me for Jack, and not just because I lacked the killer squint.
Still, I let her drag me out to yet another one of those parties. We had a buzz on and had trouble finding the right place till me noticed noise and light coming from the third floor of an apartment on the downhill side of the street. “That must be it,” I said, pointing. We crossed the street and only then noticed the little brass numbers screwed into the cement fake stucco by the entrance. They matched what she had jotted down on the inside of a matchbook.
The front door was propped open so we barged in and headed up the stairs. The walls and ceiling of the staircase had these little glittery bits of something embedded in them. We were tripping slightly, I think on x, so that was no doubt exaggerating the gleam, making the walls sparkle. There was something very late fifties about the idea of little pointed starbursts or whatever they were in the wallpaper.
I put on a heavily exaggerated New Yorker accent like something out of Ralph Kramden and said, “For you, my darling, when you’re with me, the stars will always be shining, up in the sky, all day, every day, for you.” I drew it out, reeling out each phrase like a cheesy suitor trying to impress his best gal. “For you, the stars will shine down, from up in the sky, when you’re with me, shining every where you look, every day, for you.” Cecilia was cracking up at my impression of some stereotype thought neither of us really knew where it came from. “For you,” I kept going, “the stars, will shine, t’rough t’ick and t’in, like diamonds, shining down on you, where you go, when you’re with me, the stars, kid, will keep on shining.
“Stick with me and the stars will shine,” I kept pointing out the twinkles as we stopped on the stairs, both out of breath from laughing, “for you. There will be stars, where ever you go, shining down, from all around you, when you’re with me, kid, for you. For you, the stars will always shine.” I just kept going. Tiny variations, slapstick bravado, a kernel of true feeling, confusion of our senses. We finally sat on stairs looking at each other and just laughed and laughed.
For You, The Stars
Chapter Ten: Installment 3
Spring came early in Palo Alto. We’d wait for it up in SF and it would still be foggy and rainy and then finally the Frost shows would arrive, the Dead’s first outdoor shows of each year. In those days there were shows in the Bay Area nearly every month. After the New Year’s run there was usually a lull in January and then something for Chinese New Year’s or Valentine’s day and then another little break maybe with some Jerry solo shows tucked in there and we’d be getting tired of the steamy Kaiser in Oakland or the cavernous Coliseum or the weirdly truncated SF Civic, later renamed posthumously for Bill Graham. We’d be ready for an outdoor show, where the low deep bass notes could resonate freely up the hillside of an amphitheatre instead of folding in on themselves off the back wall of a basketball shed.
We would mail order for tickets and get more than enough and figure out who was driving and all that. Then finally the weekend would come and we’d drive down every day and find the sunny weather that wouldn’t follow us back up the peninsula for another month. But that was the official start of spring on our calendar. Layers of clothes would come off. Young, beachy California Deadheads with their good tans and their toned bodies would dance down in front of the band.
Cecilia said her cousin Rhoda was going to be at the show. I didn’t know she had a cousin nearby. “Where does she live?” “All over,” said Cecilia. “She tours. I guess she spends the winter in Santa Cruz.” We found her in the parking lot, selling hippie oatmeal fifteen-grain pancakes, little twiggy disks griled on a portable propane powered griddle. They weren’t bad. Kind of weird and chewy. Rhoda was kind of hard on the eyes, though. She looked like she had been living out in the sun for the past fifteen years. Her hair was white blonde and brittle, frayed and frizzed. Her skin was reddened and, well, lumpy. She kind of squinted. Her face was blotchy. She smoked constantly, either cigarettes or fat joints of mediocre Mexican weed she was constantly rolling and lighting up and passing around. Her voice was gruff and throaty.
I kept thinking, Is this what Cecilia’s going to look like when she’s forty? Then I’d shudder inwardly, privately.
She was nice enough, if a little spacey. She didn’t really follow the threads of conversations, intead just talking about Deadhead things - setlists of earlier shows, songs they broke out last year, whether Jerry’d wear a red t-shirt instead of his usual black - and another inane stuff I didn’t really listen to. Cecilia and Rhoda didn’t seem close, especially. We didn’t sit together at the show, for instance. I didn’t see her as any kind of role model for Cecilia but I was kind of afraid of mentioning how harsh and roadworn she looked, for fear of giving offense.
They opened with “Good Times” the song they’d kind of previewed at the acoustic benefit. I felt like a real insider recognizing it.
Dave was at the show with us, along with some of the other Gomers. I could tell that the enthusiasm for the Dead that had been one of our common interests, binding us together in our quasi-collective and carrying us across the country from college into a semblance of adult life, was waning to a large extent. I was still pretty into it, but not everyone was making it to the shows. Bo saw a transsexual at a show at the Kaiser, a big “he-she” as he put it in a dress but with obvious facial hair and it put him off acid entirely and marked the beginning of the end of his love affair with the Dead scene. He was a pretty tolerant guy in many ways but part of him was still a high-school football player from a suburban town and he was never going to be all that comfortable with fringe sexuality. Chad said he felt like the shows were getting repetitive. He had had some great times in the last few years but he wasn’t sure he needed to see the Dead fifty more times and hear “One More Saturday Night” twenty-five more times. I could understand that.
I think Dave was losing interest too but he came along for the weather and the relaxed atmosphere at the Frost. During the set break he told me he’d been hanging around with Simone a lot lately and would I mind if he maybe went for it. “Are you kidding?” I said. “That would be great. She could hardly keep hating on me if she’s fooling around with one of my best friends.”
“I don’t know,” said Dave. “She’s still carrying a grudge. She doesn’t talk about you that much anymore, but when she does she always refers to you as ‘that asshole’ and worse.”
“I guess I had that coming,” I said. “I have to admit I’m kind of surprised you’re into her. Did you feel that way when we were together?”
“Honestly, no,” said Dave. “It definitely started happening only a couple of months ago. I guess we’ve kind of been friends since our first double date together was such as bust. Her friend didn’t like my joke about blowjobs, remember?”
“Yeah,” I said. “That was funny. At the time I don’t think we figured either of us had a chance with either of them.”
“Most of the Gomers are still friends with Simone, you know,” said Dave. “She often comes over to 1449, like for dinner, when you’re not around.”
I had a vague idea that was true. She had even brought her rebound boyfriend by once. That hadn’t lasted long. He had struck me as a slightly better version of me. He was blond where I had dirty light brown hair. He had a ponytail while I was still growing my hair past pageboy length. He was an inch or two taller than me and probably ten pounds light. His politics were probably five degrees to the left of mine too. He probably made tantric love and never pressured her to give him head. Or maybe she gave it to him all the time, just to spite me.
“Are you talking about that bitch?” asked Cecilia, coming back with two big cups of beer for us.
“Yeah, I said. Be nice.”
“Why should I?” said Cecilia, making her pouty face. “She’s crazy, writing scum on your picture and yelling at us for walking down Haight Street.”
“Look,” I said. “She lost. You won. Can you blame her for being pissed?”
“Why are you taking her side?”
I opened my mouth to say something when I was drowned out by a shockingly loud, slightly out of tune, reverbed-out slash of a guitar chord signalling the beginning of the tuning up for the second set and before we knew it we were back in the thick of that chewy envelope filter of sound.
Now that I think about it, there was a funny little musical chairs routine with me and Dave and Chad and our girlfriends. Dave move in on Shimone, although it didn’t last. I think it was more like they just tried being fuck buddies for a little while. They had that curiosity you sometimes get with your friends of the opposite, or otherwise appropriate sex, and once they satisfied it, the mystery was gone and they want back to being friends no problem. No drama. In a similar way, a few months after Chad and Chelsea broke up, when I was on the rebound from Cecilia and rapidly cycling through a series of little flings, I ended up dropping by her Chelsea’s apartment near the park for some random reason and we sat on her couch talking about not having a lover at the moment and then did one of those doubletakes where we both realized at the same time that there was no real reasons why we couldn’t screw around.
Not unusually for me, I couldn’t really perform the first time we tried. I don’t know if it was just performance anxiety or some kind of knowledge that this was just physical exercise and nothing more emotionally meaningful than that. Maybe it was just shyness, but we ended up just petting a little and then falling asleep. Then I woke up in the middle of the night with a raging hard-on and woke Chelsea up with my mouth. Then we fucked just the way we’d both been meaning to, with no inhibitions at all, purely seeking the pleasure of it. She was very willing to do just about anything, although she did mention that to her semen tasted like egg whites. We went around a couple of times before we fell asleep again.
In the morning we showered together and I said, “So when does this little affair officially end.”
“Now,” she said, “as I symbolically wash you out of me.”
But I’m getting ahead of myself here.
For You, The Stars
Chapter Ten: Installment 2
We kind of alternated between her scene, the urban late-night freakshow parties with hotties and guys with long greasy hair and my Deadhead milieu. I took her to an acoustic benefit for some music in the schools program at Marin Vets. We took ecstasy (of course) and sat in something like the fifth row. The show was mostly solo acts by members of the Dead. Bob Weir did a little solo set where I first started liking his eerie “Victim or the Crime” and came back at the end with the whole gang to debut an acoustic version of Blackbird that he would butcher at the Greek in Berkeley later that year.
Jerry played a set with stripped down string band. Even Brent, the angry alcoholic doomed keyboard sideman put on a credible set of his own mixing his usual depressing originals - a song called “Love Doesn’t Have to Be Pretty,” his original contribution to the Dead repertoire from one of the Dead’s disco era albums called “Far From Me” - with a few classic rock medleys, like the “Devil with a Blue Dress” into “Good Golly, Miss Molly” medley originated by Mitch Ryder but popularized by the Boss and a “Hey Jude” into “Dear Mr. Fantasy” with a “Hey Jude” reprise that was often hinted at in Dead shows but never otherwise played in full.
Finally, the whole creaky crew came back together for Weir’s “Blackbird” and a rollicking take on Sam Cooke’s “Good Times” (Come on and let the good times roll/We gonna stay here till we soothe our soul/If it takes all night long) that most people knew from the Rolling Stones cover. After a staid evening of laid-back acoustic guitar music this one song got the whole room up and dancing in that familiar ever-so-slightly out of synch noodle dance the Heads are known for to this day.
Sandwiched in the middle of this show was the real highlight for me, Hot Tuna doing an acoustic set. Jorma singing in his incomprehensible blues man by way of Finland voice. Timeless instrumentals like “Embryonic Journey” from their first album. But mainly that almost telepathic communication between simpatico players who know each other’s moves from decades of performing together, stopping on a dime, breaking into double time and then just as suddenly taking it back down a notch. Incredible dynamics. I looked at my hands and said to myself, I have to get serious about playing the guitar. It doesn’t matter if I’m ever any good. I just want to play.
Most of the time my guitar sat in the closet. I did get it out again after that show but there was no room for it in my room. I’d move it from the futon to the floor and then be afraid I’d step on it, so I’d lay it across the cinder blocks. Before long it was back in the closet again. I didn’t forget though. I’d remember every now and then the pure joy I’d felt hearing two guys playing acoustics, a regular one and Jack Casady’s oversized bass, and the sense that the point is just to do it, not to be a pro, not to accomplish a goal, not even to impress girls, but just to make some music in whatever way I could.
Other times it was just enough to dance, either with Cecilia or by myself, or with whomever else was in the crowd. I was getting to be a good dancer. People would make room for us. It would be ok if we touched people, stranger, grazing them as we whirled around. I picked up some slightly exaggerating hip hop moves, a little posing. Dancing was the only time I felt like I was fully inhabiting my body. I’d start to think someone was looking at me, wondering how my body seemed, thinking a little bit about my bum knee and wondering if there might be beer on the floor and then all of that would drop away and it would be the beats, the countermelodies, space, and time. And occasionally catching Cecilia’s eye and having that kind of laughter in the air between us from knowing that we were in the moment together.
There’d be even more room to dance at those illegal floating late night parties. They’d be crowded, sure, but usually they were in some cavernous warehouse or squat of many rooms. We’d pay the door fee, find the keg, head for where the music was loudest and then slide right into it. There was always this transition for me into dancing. It was not like in high school where I’d hold up a wall, like a kid afraid to jump into the pool even though he knows he would just love it if he could get over his fear. No, by now I didn’t need convincing, but I did need to find my internal rhythm. I found that I could do that by easing into it, maybe just sawing at first, maybe bending my knees in time to the backbeat.
I’d try to resist doing the white man’s overbite and throwing my elbows out like a chicken dancer. I’d make sure the right side of my body was engaged. I needed balance, symmetry, asymmetry. Anything I started repeating I’d try to change it up. If I was doing fake fingersnaps I’d splay my fingers out instead, if I was leaping up I’d crouch down. I would feel my waste uncrimping as I loosened up and gained fluidity. At some point there’d be no looking back, as if I couldn’t remember not dancing. I’d become graceful, weaving myself around people. Sometimes there’d be a lot of twirling, the way kids will spin for what seems like hours, getting high on the dizziness. I’d be fully in the music, especially if I knew the tune or at least understood it, where the syncopations were going, where to anticipate the double stops. Usually I’d be singing along to myself: not singing words, singing the melody, feeling the song resonant in my chest, in my skull.
Cecilia and I would reconnect, we’d sweep other people up into our flow. One guy came up to me and said, “You’re crackling with energy.” Another guy, totally wasted, drifted into my space, as if looking for the source of the vortex of energy he was sensing. He stood right next to me looking around in the air about head high, not getting it. When I was completely lost in dancing people, usually women would get sucking into the whirlwind, often with their clueless boyfriends in tow, some of them not even consciously trying to block the energy flow, standing or stomping between their girl and me, waving their arms across sightlines, like trying to rescue their date from a male siren without fully understanding the dynamic.
I didn’t want these women. I wanted the dance. It was my very indifference that sucked them in. Whenever I thought about how I looked or tried to make an overt connection the thing became heavy and clumsy, the electrons spun out of orbit, the probability cloud collapsed, the cat died. It was when I didn’t care, when there was only now and a blur spinning around me that I became the center of the action. Sometimes when the music stopped for a while people would come up to me and Cecilia and hug us, or thank us, or praise us. They could sense the joy and pleasure we had going and they had gotten off on watching us or from joining into the improvised movement. Suddenly I’d notice I was incredibly thirsty, my face running with sweat. I’d be out of breath too. The limitations of my body would come back crowding in and my mind would vacate it again, like an absentee landlord, until the next time all the moving pieces linked up together again.
As we caught our breath, Cecilia would usually find whoever was running the party, or she’d go over to chat up the dj, or she’d go down to the door and hang out with the guys at the door. Bouncers loved her. Like most guys, they found her sexy and they thought they had a chance with her. Maybe they did. She had one friend who worked the door at DV8, this huge black dude who obviously worked out. I remember she got him to drive us around town one night. As usual it was obvious to me that he was hitting on her but she was doing her no you don’t understand we’re just friends routine. There was an odd magnetic repulsion between me and this guy, Roger. Like, how was he going to get anything from her with me around, but she’d always insist that I stick around.
I know Cecilia had never promised anything in return for his favors, and these guys did enjoy the way she’d keep them company and bum their cigarettes outside the doors of all these clubs and parties. She got away with it because she was blonde and had a hot little body, and maybe they even got a little charge out of her cockteasing ways, if only as a change of pace from the skankier girls who would get down on their knees and do anything for a backstage pass or a little blow.
When he dropped us off at the other club he used an expression with her I’d never heard before but that I liked immediately. He said, “Am I gonna get any ‘leg room’ from you?” As he said it he kind of spread his massive thighs a bit as he sat behind the wheel of his convertible.
“I don’t think so,” said Cecilia in her most impish, teasing tone of voice, as she climbed over the passenger door and then opened it for me, turning her back on him and she walked into the club. She could be cold like that. I turned around and gave Roger a helpless, apologetic look.
For You, The Stars
Chapter Ten: And I Ran
Installment 1
“i get it. You were not cool.”
“No, that’s not the point.”
“Stop telling me your pathetic college and high school stories. I don’t care. They’re boring. And I’ve heard them all before.”
“Shut up, faggot.”
We both laughed. We were on x again, at new club in downtown San Francisco. Somehow the combination of bonghits before we rode down to the city in Sheena’s convertible with INXS cranking on the stereo, the ecstasy starting to kick in as we were whisked past the losers waiting outside the velvet rope, me with two pretty girls flanking me, and a beer an irish whiskey and then another beer at the bar had put us, well me at least, into literally the perfect mood.
Suddenly I understood Cecilia perfectly, and it seemed to be the same way for her. We looked each other in the eye without flinching or glancing away. We knew we were never getting married. We probably wouldn’t last out the year. It didn’t matter. We were together right then, in the now. We were perfect together in this one perfect moment and there was no point not being honest about everything.
The club was playing the Pet Shop Boys’ cover/remix of the Willie Nelson song and as it came around to the last repeat of the chorus, just after the last “you were always on my mind,” the dj added, in the same tone of voice, maybe a little flatter, “you were always in my car.” This cracked us up.
There were videos playing over the bar. Now it was Duran Duran. Suddenly I didn’t see them as a bunch of poofy British wankers with hair that was just wrong. Now they were the early Beatles, writing silly love songs but with all kinds of potential to evolve into something more profound. I explained my theory to Cecilia and she was into it. She wanted me to respect her favorite music, the popular music of this very moment.
At two when the club closed we were nowhere near ready to wind it down. Sheena and I deferred to Cecilia who always knew where to go next. She gave directions to an unmarked late night basement bar down some nondescript steps off of 10th or 11 street south of Market. It wouldn’t be able to start serving drinks again until 5 am but it looked like people had loaded up at last call and I don’t think we were the only enhanced people there. We were able to keep dancing, which was the main thing. If anything we needed rehydration then and not more liquor, at least not for a while.
Cecilia always knew where to go next. When we went to loft parties and raves cool black dudes in velvet would walk up to us, ignore me, and hand little 3 x 5 colored flyers invited us, well her, to the afterparty. Then there’d be another more exclusive after after party. This chain could go on and on until you were literally in someone’s tiny apartment in the inner sunset, three block from the Gomer homestead with a bunch of wasted hipsters and a fire eater or someone trying to convince you to try crack for the irony of it.
This night, though, we made it just barely past five, had a few cermonial drinks when the bar reopened, and then drove back up to Marin as the sun was coming up. Back in Cecilia’s little room, after Sheena dropped us off, ignoring my tease-y suggestions that we all three of us get it on, we still felt the pure honesty buzz. We talked about it. We realized it was a rare moment of grace. Not only wasn’t our relationship going to last and we could talk about that freely and be ok with it, we even knew that this moment of purity was going to last and that we’d be getting on each other’s nerves probably as soon as we had a good night’s sleep and got caught up on our seratonin reuptake. It didn’t matter though, this feeling was as real as any other.
We showered the sweat off our bodies and put on one of my favorite bootlegs, a Dead show from the last year with a really nice melodic piano solo of all things in the middle of a “Knocking on Heaven’s Door” encore. We started making love - seriously, not fucking - but fell asleep before really getting it going, and we slept like babies until the middle of the afternoon.
For You, The Stars
Chapter Nine: Installment 4
In the middle of the night, I woke as Diane slipped out of the bed and left the room. It was dark in the room but my eyes gradually adjusted. On the opposite wall I could see her roommate’s empty bed, with its stuffed animals piled on top. Right above my head I could see an award Diane had won for some race she ran with her cross-country team. The middle of the room had two desks in it and next to Diane’s bed was the boombox she had played her mix tape on. What was taking her? I kind of had to go myself but I wasn’t too keen on stumbling into a women’s-only bathroom in the middle of the night. Who knows who’d I run into. I figured I could wait.
After a while I must have dozed off but I came awake again when Diane quietly opened the door and slid back into bed. She was shivering or something, because her shoulders were heaving gently. Then I realized she was crying again. i decided to admit I was awake. I rolled over toward her and put one arm around her.
“What the matter?” I whispered.
She told me. The doctor in the infirmary who’d fitted her for the diaphragm had reminded her that she needed to keep it in for six hours or more, I forget, after intercourse. (She said the doctor, a woman, had been amused by her urgent desire to get her birth control arranged before this weekend.) She’d been feeling uncomfortable in there, though, so she went to the bathroom stall to remove the cap. When she did so, a flood of menstrual blood poured out, which had horrified her. I had to admit it wasn’t the sort of image I would have wanted to associate with my first time with a new lover.
Not that I was squeamish about menstruation and stuff like that. I had an older sister. That was all just bodily functions to me. I didn’t really understand the guys who made such a big deal about things like that, but who’d be just as likely to eat a bug or hawk a loogie. It was hypocritical, I thought, or worse. Some sign of how women were always treated as strange and creepy by men, even as we were addicted to them.
I told her that it was probably normal. The diaphragm had held back her normal flow and when she released it of course there had been an unusual amount of fluid. She thought this was probably true but still wanted to see the doctor the next day. I said I’d be happy to go with her. I also said that I realized it wasn’t just a medical question but that it had freaked her out and that that was ok. I held her as she fell asleep.
In the morning I had to take a shower in the girl’s bathroom. Fortunately, they were more civilized than we men and had a separate stall for each shower. You’d go in in your bathrobe, hang it on a hook on the door, and then move over to the showerhead at the opposite end of the stall. I ran into one girl on the way in but she just kind of winked at me. I gathered that men sleeping over wasn’t that unusual. It was a far cry from the parietals of the ’50s that my parents had told me about.
The doctor agreed it was no big deal but said that if it bothered Diane she should probably hold off on the sex until after her period. Since this would be after I left I was kind of against the idea but I didn’t say anything. We still had Saturday night to look forward to, and then I had to hook up with my ride to get back down to New Jersey on Sunday.
We ate some terrible brunch in her dining hall and then she showed me around the campus, pointing out her favorite buildings, where she took her classes, the track, and various trees and groves and benches and such. She took me down to a little pond where there was a bench swing and told me this was her favorite place to come and sit by herself when she felt lonely. She started crying again. Why was she crying so much? I wrapped my arms around her and rocked her gently. I didn’t try to say anything.
That night we danced at her dorm mixer to Thomas Dolby and other cheesy hitmakers of the moment. Something felt not quite right but I put it out of my mind. We were having fun. We both had a few beers, but not too many, and when we went to bed she insisted that we fuck even when I said I didn’t mind if we skipped it.
In the end the relationship foundered on the long-distance rocks. She came down one more time and we made love in my bunkbed with my roommate away in his girfriend’s room. I figured out that women don’t automatically climax the moment you enter them and learned a little more about how to help her along. I thought we were doing just great until a letter came from her in the mail. It was nicely put but it basically said she was ending it. Somehow, she said, when she had showed me her favorite places on the Wellesley campus, and especially the pond and the swing, she had realized that she felt very vulnerable with me. She thought that I was going to leave her eventually so she wanted to end it now before she got hurt.
I thought that was insane. I wrote her a letter pledging to stay with her for, well, a long time at least and telling her it wasn’t really fair for her to break up with me preemptively, but in her reply it was obvious that her mind was made up. I’m not sure why we weren’t having these conversations over the phone. I guess on some level we were both incredibly romantic and were playing out even the most painful part of a relationship in a somewhat traditional way.
I moped around for weeks and never had another girlfriend in college. In fact, I doubt Bella would have gone out with me even if she hadn’t been with Paulie. She liked me. I think she liked me a lot, but as a close friend. “I like you as a friend” was just about the most painful words I ever heard a woman say, and usually it was b.s. since most of the time that was the end of the friendship too. Most of the time there wasn’t much of a friendship at all. In fact in those days I hadn’t yet figured out to be attracted to women I actually liked. I was responding to looks and grace and status and pheromones.
With Bella it was true. We definitely were friends. We were close like girlfriends. We told each other everything. We spent hours together, sometimes not saying anything. There just wasn’t any chemistry, no spark. At least not for her. I would have jumped in bed with her in a hot second if I had had the slightest sign of encouragement.
I never mentioned any of this to Cecilia. I was sure she didn’t want to hear me mooning over her older sister. Plus maybe she knew already. I had no idea what Bella had every told her about me, except that somehow I had earned her endorsement and had a kind of credibility in Cecilia’s eyes when we first met that I never ordinarily would have had. I had no doubt the Cecilia would herself have never given me a second glance if I hadn’t been Bella’s best friend Daniel from college. So be it. If I couldn’t have the original I was content with the knockoff.
For You, The Stars
Chapter Nine: Installment 3
So I had no problem making friends with women, beautiful or not, but getting them into bed was another matter entirely. I remember walking Bella home once from an eating club where we’d been drinking on Friday night to her apartment off campus and teasing her that she felt safe with me because I was no threat. I wasn’t going to hit on her or jump her like the drunken football yo’s we were passing on our way down Prospect Street. Also, she was still going out with my friend Paulie at the time, so she was off limits even if I was inclined to act like a jerk. She didn’t really take the bait. In some way I was probably leading her on, trying to get her to either say that yes on some level she was attracted to me or to say something really cutting and hurtful, like that I wasn’t tall enough or “not her type” or something, so that maybe I could decide she was a bit and stop lusting after her, or lusting “on” her as we said in those days. She was too smart and kind to let me off the hook that way, though, steering the conversation in to something else and ignoring my ham-handed attempts.
I was still in a remedial mode with girls. I’d been to an all-boy grade school and I had stupidly agreed to go to an all-male boarding school as well so when I got to college I found myself playing catchup. I was stuck in the mode of pimply seventh-grader, trying to get girls’ attention by snapping their bra straps (OK, not literally) or dumping their hair in the inkwell (again, not literally). I hadn’t had the years of practice my other peers had. If anything I’d lost ground. When I really was in seventh grade I had a girlfriend, because at least then I was living at home in New York and my friends and I could go to parties on the weekends and meet girls from Sacred Heart and Chapin and all the other schools on the upper east side.
My girlfriend in 1977 was the older sister of a boy in my brother’s class, a sacred heart girl, Margaret Healey. It was a little creepy seeing her brother, James in the hallways at school because he had the same light colored hair, red cheeks and long eyelashes. It wasn’t my fault that he was a very pretty little boy, the spit and image of his sister. Margaret was quiet and clearly saw something in me that she liked, although I never found out what. We figured out how to spin the bottle deliberately so it would land on each other and after taking a lot of turns making out in front of everyone else we were kicked out of game and ended up in another room, lying on top of a bunch of winter coats, just kissing.
I wasn’t even trying to have sex then. I was thirteen years old for Christ’s sake. At best I was interested in maybe feeling a boobie and even that I was a little shy to do. I thought that Margaret, being a good Catholic girl, would probably freak if I tried to sneak my hand up under her shirt and, to be perfectly honest, I was in heaven just kissing. It wasn’t chaste pecks we were sharing but deep soulful tongue kissing. You may forget once you’ve “gone all the way” but at a certain stage, french kissing can be just about all the sex you really need. It has the warm wet intimacy of any other kind of sex and the mouth and tongue can be very playful and intelligence. There’s really no other word for it. You can feel the other person’s mind in there as she taps your teeth with her tongue or sucks gently on yours.
Then, the summer between seventh and eighth grade, Margaret’s family moved out of town - I forget where - and it took me six years to get back to even that level of affection with another girl. One time, when I was in college still, I went into the city with a few friends and we ended up at Studio 54, which was no longer in its heyday but was still functioning as an ordinary disco. I ran into Margaret at the bar, in the city with some college friends of her own. We found a place in the quieter seats upstairs and reminisced about our first experiences with the opposite sex. Both of us agreed that it was kind of nice that we hadn’t felt the pressure to go any further. We both liked all the kissing (ok, “making out”) we were doing and we both enjoyed having someone. People at school would try to tease me: “Daniel’s got a girlfriend!” and it just made smile confidently. I never saw Margaret again after that.
I went through high school without another girlfriend until my senior year then when we started hanging out with girls from a couple of nearby schools. That’s when I established my pattern of becoming close friends with girls I had crushes on but not being able to close the deal. They liked having me as as friend and the ones who were attracted to me - as I’d sometimes find out years after the fact - were themselves so incredibly shy that they couldn’t get me to notice them. I think in general my radar was off and I was being drawn to the girls who were wrong for me and completely overlooking the ones I could have hooked up with, who were somehow invisible. So in a way it was my own fault.
So when I got to college and was surrounded by healthy attractive young women I was like a kid in the candy shop without a nickel. I was succumbing to one crush or infatuation after another but my skills were still arrested at an early adolescent level, and I was still going after the wrong people. I did finally meet a girl the summer after my freshman year, again back in New York where I seemed to still have some residual coolness. Diane and I were working at the same summer job. She was in from the midwest, going to college at Wellesley. We got talking at a party in a friend’s brownstone while his parents were at the shore, went up on the roof to look at the stars, and before I knew it were kissing. In fact, I think I very awkwardly asked her “may I kiss you?” terrified of her answer and she said yes. Like I said, I had no skills.
Suddenly I was back in that realm I had missed for all the intervening years, kissing a pretty girl who liked me. We ended up spending the night to gether in a spare room, not making love (I was still a virgin at this point) but fooling around a little: what my parents might have called heavy petting. I was instantly infatuated. I sent her a dozen roses at work the next day and we were inseparable for the rest of that summer progressing eventually to oral sex but holding off on the intercourse since she said she only wanted to do that if she was in love. I started working on being in love.
When we got back to school we were both sophomores and we were suddenly dealing with a long distance relationship. That was no problem for me. It took me out of the game on campus and sort of solved my girlfriend problem in a way I didn’t have to deal with most of the time. Sure, I missed her and without her around I was getting no action at all, but I hadn’t been having any luck and none of the new crop of freshmen girls seemed especially interested me. So we wrote letters to each other and I told her that I thought I was falling in love with her. I told myself this too and if anything I made it true because I needed it to be true. Plus, why not? She was smart and funny and pretty and she liked me. She didn’t party and she was athletic, so those were minuses, or at least areas of incompatibility, and she liked pretty sappy music. Apparently “our song” was “Longer Than” by Dan Fogelberg, but these were problems I could live with.
Every few weekends I’d either go up there or she’d come down to visit me. We were making progress on the actual sex front. She told me she’d gone to her school infirmary to get a diaphragm. She didn’t want to go on the pill. She’d been on it before and hadn’t liked the way it made her feel. She wasn’t a virgin. She’d had a boyfriend in high school, like a normal person, and they’d “done it” a few times. It hadn’t ended well, which was one of the reasons why she was being so cautious. She had been in love with him, though, she told me. I hated not being her first. I couldn’t compete with these previous guys, these first loves who were always so perfect or had been at the time. I had the same problem with Cecilia. She was always going on about her previous boyfriend who looked like that guy on the TV show “wise guys” and was taller than me and darker and more athletic. You can’t compete with memories.
Finally, I went up to Yale with the rugby team. I was on the third-string squad but I got to play a little and then a bunch of us continued on to Wellesley. That weekend I finally lost my virginity. I had told Diane that I was in fact not a virgin, either because I was ashamed or because I knew she wasn’t and I didn’t want her to know how desparate I was to pass that milestone and get it behind me. I realized quickly that this was idiotic but then I couldn’t see a graceful way to tell the truth. Unfortunately this meant that she wouldn’t know how momentous our first time was going to be for me. Or maybe it wouldn’t matter that our first time was my first time in general, since it was clearly a big event for the both of us.
That weekend, she told me she was getting her period but that she still thought we could do it. I was sleeping with her in her narrow single cot bed and her roommate agreed to spend the night somewhere else. Her roommate was otherwise not friendly with me. She acted suspicious, like I was going to hurt Diane somehow when really it was the other way around. We made love that night to a mix tape Diane had made with our song on it, along with “Little Red Corvette” and “Fire and Rain.”
I was elated and let down at the same time. The moment of entry felt far better than I ever would have imagined. No hand or lotion or silky fabric could compare to a sheath that was designed for this exact purpose. Slippery tight and warm, I almost lost it right there. The letdown was that she did not climax. At the time I didn’t realize that women won’t just automatically come from intercourse the way men pretty much will. I’d gotten too much of my sexual education from Penthouse Forum and the equivalent, in which women spontaneously explode with orgasm after orgasm at the touch of a man’s hand or tongue or penis.
Also, when we were done she cried. Why do women always cry after the first time you make love to them? It’s sort of discouraging.
For You, The Stars
Chapter Nine: Installment 2
It was only when working on the school paper that I managed to pull off real all-nighters, probably because there were always a bunch of us there, at least through the wee hours, and there was a real risk of humiliation of the paper didn’t get put to bed before the guy from the printer, whom I christened “the embarassing man,” arrived around 7 am to pick up the blue sheets. I don’t know why, but it always ended up taking nearly the whole night, Wednesday night, to get the whole paper sorted out. This had been true in high school as well. By coincidence, I had edited my boarding school’s weekly paper as well, and the pattern was exactly the same, except without girls.
In high school, at least, there was a sense of privilege involved in being allowed out of the dorm at night to work on the paper. We didn’t cheat much. Oh, there was the occasional fifth of bourbon sneaked in the dark room, maybe a bonghit here or there, and probably much more of that before my time, but mostly it was all business. We tried to make our paper look like the New York Times despite the tabloid layout, and we worked hard at laying out the pages and copyfitting the headlines. When I started on the high school paper I was a typesetter on the aging compugraphic machine. It had no memory: it exposed a line at a time on the photographic paper, using dodged-out negative film strips and lenses to shoot the different type sizes. If you wanted a different font, you opened the hood, unhooked a font strip and strapped a different one on, hopefully oriented the right way.
If there were typos we had to do it again, cut the bad lines out or wax the replacements right on top of them, hoping not to leave visible ragged edges in the copy. If the mistake walked lines, we’d end up having to redo an entire paragraph. When things were getting tight on the deadlines, someone would stand over my should and watch the tiny ticker-tape style LED readout and shout if they saw a typo so I could back up and fix it before it became irrevocable.
We always got punchy at night and occasionally I’d end up slipping a joke into the copy, which was risky because if it didn’t get caught by a proofreader it would end up going into print. I’d also sometimes have to include placeholder copy or notes when the articles weren’t entirely done, say when we we were waiting for a quote or a call to tell us who had won the game on the road. At first I’d type the comments in brackets or curly braces but those were hard to spot when our eyes got bleary. Eventually I came up with the convention of using boldface for the notes, but even then I remember once publishing a major parents’ weekend issue, a big print run, and having a key article with “Dean: REPLACE THIS SECTION” in bold in the middle of a column of copy.
We upgraded the compugraphic machine my senior year in high school, getting one with a full screen, small by today’s standards but huge if only because you could go up and down and fix typos on lines above the one you were currently typing on. Even more important, the thing had storage, in the form of floppy disks. Not diskettes, but actual disks, the 9-inch form factor. If you needed to make serious changes to a piece you didn’t have to cut and paste, you could open up the file, edit, and print again. It wasn’t exactly desktop publishing yet. We still used the film strips and we couldn’t lay out whole newspages, but it was a giant leap forward.
Even though by then I was the editor of the paper and not responsible for typesetting I still took my turn on the compugraphic just because it was fun. When I went to college I vowed that I was done with school papers (I’d been doing them since grade school) and staying up all night once a week. In fact one time when I was in the infirmary a school doctor asked me about my habits and told me that staying up all night was worse for me than smoking weed or drinking too much. I don’t know if that’s actually true but it stuck in my mind.
Then I needed money and the weekly paper advertised for typesetters. That was something I knew how to do, so I went down and got the job. I liked hanging out there. The paper was run by really smart glasses-wearing girls at the time, and they were kind to me, and they laughed when I slipped jokes into the copy. One time we were running a big two-page spread in the middle of the paper chronicling a student’s junior year in Africa. She was your typical waspy blonde and had written a scene about being shepherded through a village by the local chief. “Is that your new wife?” people had asked the chief, and he had grinned and demurred. I couldn’t resist slipping in a false line. I had the chief say, “No, it’s just some white bitch I’m fucking.”
Twenty minutes later when someone read the line, it causes a riot. We weren’t politically correct. The women’s center was just down the hall in Aaron Burr, but our office was cynical and obnoxious humor was the order of the day, so that line kind of made my reputation, though we were careful to excise it from the final copy. It ended up being kind of catchphrase, an all-purpose non-sequitur punchline when it got late and we were running short on fresh air.
Eventually the paper ran short of money and offered me a staff position and before I knew it I was back in the school newspaper game. I had thought of maybe trying out for the daily paper, the Prince, at some point, or maybe trying to be an AP stringer. It was the stringers who usually ended up getting jobs at the Times and other top papers, but somehow I got sucked into the alternative-paper world and I stuck there. I earned status by staying late on Wednesday nights even when I was junior, and eventually I was chosen as the next editor-in-chief. It felt like déjà vu.
Maura used to write for the paper sometimes. She was a serious creative writing student, a jock (she rowed crew), and kind of known for her tough exterior. Just about nobody knew about my on-again off-again courtship of her but she came to editorial meetings and sometimes told me I intimidated people, the way I ran them. I guess I was kind of imperious: cutting people off or mocking them sarcastically. I was very sarcastic by then. I had another good friend on the paper, a friend of Maura’s, Katie Carr. I also sort of had a crush on her. She was from New York too, a dirty blonde, one of the guys, sort of a husky voice, a Dead Head. She wrote an op-ed for the paper once about having a crush on Bob Weir and rejecting the rumors that he was gay, what with his short shorts and his pink guitar.
She was in fact dating a guy from my grade school in New York, the classic preppy jock asshole, a guy named Johnny Black. Except he went by just John now. I still called him Johnny, to remind her that I knew him when he was sixth-grade bully. He was one of the AP stringers and he was in one of the exclusive eating clubs and I didn’t know what she saw in him. Katie was always trying to get Johnny and me to meet and be friends. “I like both of you,” she said, “but Johnny says you hate him.”
“Oh, I hardly know him,” I said. “But he was a jerk in school.”
“He’s different now,” she said. But I saw him around campus and he had always snubbed me. He hadn’t made it any easier for me to fit in when I arrived on campus as a freshman and I thought she was too good and too smart for him.
Katie and I got close from those late nights together. My crush got stronger but she made it very clear, in the nicest possible way, that I did not have a chance. She also knew about my frustration with Maura, and she didn’t object when I wrote a half-mean bio line at the bottom of one of her pieces. We usually had these little bios in italics at the bottom of the first column of each article. They could be boring: “Joe Bloggs is a freshman in Mathey College,” or informative “Sally Sue Frelinghuysen works with leprosy victims in Trenton, NJ, each Sunday,” but most often they were little gags. Writing them, along with the captions and the headlines, was one of my prerogatives as editor of the paper.
Maura Romas is a woman trapped in the body of a woman.
It really captured it. Maura was a little butch although totally straight and very attractive. This line was my way of teasing her about her brusqueness and the way she kept gving me the cold shoulder. At the same time it was kind of cruel: I was humiliating her in front of the whole school, or at least the thousand or so people who read the weekly. She gave me the evil eye next time she saw me.
Katie was always looking out for me. Another prerogative of the editor-in-chief was that I could commandeer the short page-two op-ed page whenever I wanted to write a little something. I used it to comment on campus politics and culture most of the time. Sometimes it was fluffy, like a piece about being a Yankees fan and the summer I worked as a vendor at the stadium. One night I wrote an anguished piece about my bad procrastination habit, kind of meta-piece about not getting my piece written on time and always finishing the paper - and everything else - at the last minute. Katie took me into one of the empty offices and said that although I had the right to publish whatever I wanted that what I had written was too self-revealing and that for my own good she thought I shouldn’t run it. Unstated but obvious was the thought that it was a tad self-indulgent and navelgazing as well. Why should anybody care with my struggles to get my act together?
Another time Katie and I went out to dinner at a tavern just off campus to hang out and talk about how life was going for both of us outside of the paper. Later that year she dropped out of school and took some time off because she felt that her life was getting out of control. Someone said she had entered rehab although she didn’t really have any addictions. Maybe drinking, but I never saw her drink more than most people on campus. I think she really just needed a break. The treadmill from growing up in New York to prep school to Ivy League college could be brutal. I’m not trying to say yuppies need sympathy or anything like that, just that the whole sequence could start to feel like a nonstop conveyor belt and I understood the desire for some people to jump off and question things. That wasn’t my way, though. I wanted to hurry it up and get it over with. I was eager to get out into the world.
At this dinner we joked about which celebrities we were most like. People sometimes told Katie she looked like Madonna. She didn’t, except that she was blonde and thin and had high cheekbones and somewhat sharp features. But her cheeks were always rosy, even when it wasn’t cold out, and she definitely looked waspy and not Italian.
“You kind of look like Sean Penn,” she said to me. I knew this wasn’t true but I found it kind of flattering, especially since Penn and Madonna were married at the time. This was before he supposedly tied her up and they split. I think because my hair is kind of gingery and my nose is kind of big and I liked to wear a jean jacket back then and act sort of tough - that’s why Katie reached for the analogy. “Plus,” she said, “you’re Irish, right? McDermott? That’s got to be an Irish name.”
“Irish and German and Scottish,” I said, “mostly. But a bunch of other stuff too. I’m a mutt.”
After we ate and had had a few beers I asked Katie “How do people see me?” She was the kind of friend I could ask a question like that. I wouldn’t want to know anyone else’s answer.
“You seem really tightly wound,” she said.
“That’s because I need to get laid,” I said.
She laughed but she didn’t argue the point.
“The thing is,” she said. “You have to realize: this is a jock school and you’re not a jock.”
I knew she was right. It’s not part of the Ivy image but it was a continuation of the whole boarding school culture I’d come to loathe. It was all about sports and lockerroom bullshit. I never knew my way around that stuff. My only revenge was that I made friends with women easily, even if I couldn’t convince any of them to sleep with me.
Bella, Cecilia’s older sister, was one of my closest friends and was acknowledged to be one of the hottest girls in the school. I always felt like a bit of fraud hanging around with her, but I was willing to bask in her reflected popularity. It was the same thing with Suzy Baxter. I figured it made me seem cooler to have friends like that, but I’m not trying to say we weren’t really friends, because we were.
When I was actually spending afternoons getting stoned with them I wasn’t thinking about how it helped my status. It was only when we went out, went to parties or wandered around campus that I thought about people seeing my with these pretty girls and thinking I was cool. My brother even said it to me, a couple of year later: “Daniel, you always surround yourself with beautiful women.”
For You, The Stars
Chapter Nine: Just Like Heaven
Installment 1
I don’t know how I did it back then. Out until all hours of the night and then up at 7 or so bright as a bunny to drag my ass downtown to my meaningless job. I’d walk down Irving, freshly shaved, to grab some breakfast before hopping on the N-Judah with the other working stiffs. If I was running a little early, I’d stop into Art’s Café, almost literally a hole in the wall… just one short hallway shaped short-order diner with a counter and stubby little stools in a row. Inevitably, I’d order the $2.22 breakfast: two eggs, two pancakes, and two bacon or sausage. I always got the bacon and I always had the eggs scrambled. They made crispy bacon without me having to ask them to.
Most days, though, I’d be running a little late so I’d duck into the bagel shop and get one toasted with cream cheese to eat surreptitiously on the streetcar, or to wolf down at the stop while waiting for the next one to round onto Ninth ave. Often, when I opened my mouth for the first bite of the morning, I’d feel this cramp in my jaw. I’d realize I hadn’t said a word to anyone yet, hadn’t even opened my mouth wide. The other gomers in my house were either unemployed or self-employed or grad students and none of them had to be up as early as me, at least not most days.
Every time that jaw thing happened, it suprised me, though. Just like often I’d get to the office and want to wash the grease off my hands before settling down for work. There was a deep utility sink in the little kitchen area near the studio I was attached to. I’d lean over and turn both faucet handles and the moment my hands went into the stream of water I’d feel this strange crackly sensation of dryness in my upper back, along my spine. I had no idea what caused this but all I could guess was that my touching the moisture in one area somehow made my brain aware of the dry skin somewhere else.
Back at my desk, I sat and put on my walkman while futzing around with a spreadsheet or poking around aimlessly in DOS, getting the hang of the PC. I’d never used an IBM machine before this job. When I was in college the first Macs came out. I couldn’t afford one myself but Bo had one and sometimes he let me write my papers on it. Suddenly, all the papers people used to type on IBM selectrics were being “word processed” and then printed out on these crappy dot-matrix printers. People were playing with font size and margins to make their papers seem more substantial, which I think fooled exactly no one. Suddenly you’d see the same three or four typefaces: a Helvetica knockoff called Geneva, a Times Roman knockoff called New York, a strange computer-robot font called Chicago, and a ridiculous punky “ransom note” font that mostly ended up being used on the ubiquitous handbills and flyers posted all over campus.
The best part was just being able to edit a line that had already passed. None of this whiteout or papertape shit. That definitely saved time. I was usually up writing papers late Thursday night when they were due the next day. In fact my pattern had been to leave it till the last minute, try to pull an all-nighter, and then realize around 3 am that I was fooling myself and wasn’t able to think straight. So I’d go to bed and the next day go in and beg my TA for an extension. Usually I’d be allowed another week, which I’d blow off to play pool and get high and sit around my eating club smoking cigarettes and pontification about philosophy and eastern european politics until once again I was trying to write a stupid one- or two-page paper in the middle of the night before it was due.
It only took my three and a half years but when I was a senior I finally figured out the concept of the “all-dayer.” I still left my papers till the last minute, but now I’d get a good night’s sleep on Thursday night, get up early on Friday, go eat breakfast, and then bang out the paper in about three hours or so, usually finishing by around noon. I’d eat lunch, proofread the thing, and hand it in.
What forced me to figure this out was having to write a thesis. Just about everyone at Princeton, except some engineers, had to write a senior thesis. This is what other schools called an honors thesis when it was optional, but there was no honor in it for us. Just an obligation. You’d write one or two shorter research papers, called Junior Papers, to ramp up the year before and then your senior year your thesis would take the place of one class each semester. Some people turned their junior papers into the first chapter of their thesis, but I didn’t. I only wrote one, on Hume. I took his theory of induction and fed it back recursively into itself to show that he was using induction to assert that we all used induction to make assumptions like that the sun was going to come up tomorrow. Philosophy professors love that kind of shit.
My thesis was on a totally different subject, though, so the Hume paper didn’t figure into it. I was writing about philosophy of language under the tutelage of a scary-brilliant visiting professor from Scotland, Tristram Fox. He had these scary bags under his eyes like he never slept and he had that uncanny ability to make the people he was lecturing too smarter, temporarily. While he was talking my mind made these fantastic leaps. I could follow him into the crazy-making thickets of Wittgenstein and Hegel and Quine and come out unscathed, believing I understood it all.
Afterward, though, I’d find I had retained almost none of it. I was like Bones on that Star Trek episode where he has to sew Spock’s brain back on. They put the helmet on him to feed the knowledge into his brain and he starts saying in his broad southern accent, “A chald could do it! A chald could do it!” Then later on it starts wearing off while he’s still got his arms wrist deep in Spock’s opened brainpan. That confused look on his face when he realizes he’s in way over his head is the way I felt when I tried to remember what Tristram had taught me that day about meaning and referents and logic and uncertainty.
Fox was also strangely humorless. In one roundtable conversation about the typical things philosophy classes talk about, thing like imaginary colors called grue or what it’s like to be a bat, or in this case the difference between naming something and the thing itself, I was reminded of an old silly riddle I’d once heard that seemed relevant, so I raised my hand to mention it.
“It’s like that joke,” I said: ‘How many legs does a lamb have if you call a tail a leg?’” The other students just stared at me for a beat. “The answer is four,” I said. “Because ‘calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it one.’”
Fox cocked his head to one side for a moment, as if puzzled, and said, “That’s a joke?”
Having to write a thesis meant that I couldn’t procrastinate as completely as I was used to. It taught me that to complete a large project meant doing a little bit of it every day. There was just no way to stay up late one night and write a hundred-page paper. So that’s when I invented the all-dayer. I’d party in the evening but get to bed by around midnight. I’d get up early enough to grab some breakfast and then come back to the study carrel in the basement of my dorm, Edwards Hall, named after Jonathan Edwards, the scary sinner-in-the-hands-of-an-angry-God suspended like a spider by a thread over the fires of Hell, Scottish preacher who came to Princeton to straighten it out back in the day and promptly died before getting anything done.
I’d work on my thesis, either reading research, typing up notes, or writing drafts of chapters, for three or four hours and then break for lunch. After lunch I’d work for another three or four hours and then go grab dinner. After dinner we’d set up a boom box in the living room of our club and dance to stuff like the Violent Femmes. We had these great uninhibited spontaneous dance parties. Everyone dancing with each other in a mass. People up on couches and tables. This one tall guy doing his robotic tai chi like moves no matter what the beat of the song we were listening too.
After that I was done for the day. I wouldn’t try to work in the evening after dinner and I wouldn’t stay up late to work. Whatever I got done in the daylight hours had to suffice.
That spring I had my other classes down to a minimum: a painting class that met three times a week, a writing class that met once a week, and a Latin class where I was trying to get my language requirement finished. I was in with a bunch of sophomores who were trying to fake their way through the translations. I was past all that. I went to the library, got out a decent translation, worked my way through the assignment, noting the ablative absolutes and the other grammatical hooks that the TA was likely to quiz us on, went to class prepared, and sailed through: an unusual experience for me to say the least, given that I’d spent most of high school and college trying to get by on glib bullshit and half-assed efforts.
The all-dayer felt like a revelation to me. Little did I know that in the post-college world it was called “having a job.”
For You, The Stars
Chapter Eight: Installment 4
I went to the office the next day and sat in my cubicle pretending to work on Lotus macros and wanting to call Cecilia to find out how her it’s not a date went but also not wanting to sound like a pussy so I waited for her to call me. Eventually, late in the afternoon, my extension rang. We talked about other things.
“Don’t come up tonight,” she said. “I’m going out bar-hopping with Sheena.”
I crooned into the handset: “Sheena is… a punk rocker / Sheena is… a punk rocker—”
“No, she’s not,” said Cecilia.
“Sheena is… a punk rocker, now-ooh-ooh-ow.”
“No, she liked the Pet Shop Boys and Madonna.”
“It’s a song,” I said. “By the Ramones.”
“You’re not into the Ramones,” she said.
“I have hidden dimensions.”
“Whatever… So, aren’t you going to ask me?”
“About what?”
“About Brandon?”
“Who?”
“You know, my friend from Connecticut?”
“Oh, right. Him. I forgot. How’s Brandon?”
“He’s ok. It was sort of boring. He talks about work a lot without really saying anything. Stuff about deals and terms and points, or something. And names I’m supposed to recognize.”
“So what did you do?”
“He ordered dinner in his room. I wanted to go to DV8 but he said he did’nt feel like it. He doesn’t dance.”
“Did you spend the night?”
“Of course.”
“Ew,” I said. “He’s, like, old.”
“He’s not that old,” she said. “He’s kind of sexy.”
“You said he was overweight.”
“I mean he’s like rich sexy.”
“So did you fuck him?”
“Not really.”
“What does that mean?”
“He didn’t really want to screw. He just wanted me to go down on him.”
“And…”
“What?”
“Did you?”
“Yeah… Hey, you don’t have a problem with that, right?”
“Of course not,” I said, a little too fast. “Whatever, although I don’t really see the attraction. He’s a lucky guy, though. You give good head.”
“Oh, thanks,” she said, in a facetious tone of voice. “Actually, it was a little weird.”
“Weird how?”
“Well, he never really got hard, not fully hard anyway.”
“That doesn’t sound good,” I said. “How does that work? Don’t you have to get hard to, you know, like… finish?”
“Well, he did come. He just never got hard first.”
“I didn’t realize that was possible.”
“He said it was no big deal.”
“Is that an age thing? Is that what happens?”
“I guess. He made out like it was normal.”
“Doesn’t sound like much fun for you.”
Cecilia didn’t say anything.
“So you stayed over?”
“Yeah.”
“Did he take you shopping. You said he sometimes takes you shopping.”
“No. He said he was too busy. He left early and told me I could hang out till noon, but a maid kept banging on the door yelling ‘housecleaning’ so I couldn’t sleep. He left me some money. He said ‘Buy yourself something nice.’”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Makes you sound kind of like a hooker.”
“Shut up,” she said. “It’s not like that. He’s just a friend.”
“Whatever,” I said. “So are you going to?”
“Going to what?”
“Buy yourself something nice?”
“I guess. We might get some X from Sheena’s dad.” Sheena was the one whose dad was some kind of real estate mogul in Marin who dealt ecstacy on side and spent all day lounging by his backyard pool. He probably loved it when Sheena brought Cecilia over to sunbathe in their bikinis or, better yet, topless. I wondered if he also couldn’t get it up anymore.
“OK,” I said. “Have fun tonight… faggot.”
“Shut up, faggot,” she said, and hung up.
I felt at a disadvantage knowing the Cecilia had fooled around with this Bradley guy or whatever his name was, even if it was pretty pathetic and seemed to mean almost nothing to her. I wanted to even the score somehow but I wasn’t really interested in looking for someone to hook up with. Even when we went out dancing together and split up and flirted with other people, even with the shot in the arm I got to my confidence knowing I was out with this sexy hot chick and probably taking her home with me too, I still didn’t feel like I was the kind of guy who could close the deal with a stranger. I never was. In all my years I never picked anyone up at a bar. I never hooked up with someone I just met that night at a party. I never brought home a girl from some college event to my dorm room. It just never happened.
Part of it was I thought I usually didn’t make that good a first impression. I used to say that I was an acquired taste. This was probably just bullshit. Mostly I was shy. But I wanted Cecilia to feel like I could hook up with a stranger, that I was as much of a player as she was, that people wanted me and she should maybe work a little harder to keep my attention. I wasn’t going to talk about the stripped and the lapdance. She was actually pretty interested in all the weird sex stuff I was into, the peep shows and the pornos and stuff. I knew I could tell her about the lapdance, but I didn’t want to. I didn’t think it really flattered me much. She’d probably laugh at the idea of me coming in my jeans and having to go home like that.
Plus, it didn’t take any mojo to get off with someone for money. The sleaziest middle aged salesman with flaky skin could do the same. I decided to make up a story, even though it made me feel even more pathetic. I couldn’t just come out with it right away or it would be obvious that I was just trying to keep up with her, but I started working on a little fantasy and waiting for the time I could tell it to her like it was real.
That weekend, we were hanging out at her sister’s. “Did you ever read a book called Go Ask Alice?” she asked me. “I don’t think so,” I said. “Is it like the song?”
“What song?”
“Alice doesn’t live here anymore… No wait, that’s the one about the diner.”
“You mean like ‘Alice’ the TV show?”
“Right, but I was thinking of something else
“Go ask Alice
I think she’ll know
When logic and proportion
Have fallen something something”
I trailed off. “It’s a Jefferson Airplane song,” I said. “Uh… oh yeah, ‘White Rabbit’.”
“Whatever, nerd,” she said. “I’m talking about a book. It’s supposedly this diary of a teenage girl in the sixties who starts doing drugs and then kills herself. All my friend read it in high school.”
“Supposedly?”
“Some people said it was made up. They made a TV movie of it with Captain Kirk.”
“What?”
“The guy. You know, from Star Trek?”
“William Shatner?”
“I guess. Whatever, nerd.”
“Stop saying that, you dork,” I said, and I reached out and smacked her ass.
We sat there in the sun for a while saying nothing.
“Why did you ask me about that book?” I said.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I was just thinking about it.”
“Oh.”
A week later I figured enough time had passed that it wouldn’t sound suspicious. Also, we had gone out on Thursday night in the city with Sheena and two of her friends from Lake Berryessa, wherever that was, and eventually we split up. Sheena drove Cecilia back to Marin and I hung out at DNA a little later before taking Muni home. That gave me a plausible scenario for my story.
“So I hooked up with this black chick the other night,” I said, trying to sound casual. I’d actually never been with a black woman at the time. It was one of my fantasies though, so I figured why not make the story more interesting.
“Really?” She sounded kind of intrigued.
“Yeah. Did you see me dancing with her? A little taller than me, with braids, really dark skinned?” I figured if you’re going to go black, don’t go halfway.
“No, I didn’t see her.”
“Yeah, she told me she wanted to take me home. She even paid for the cab.”
“That’s cool,” said Cecilia. I waited for her to ask me for details but she left it alone and I didn’t want to push my luck.
“Yeah, it was hot,” I said. “You should have been there.”
“You’d have liked that,” I’m sure, she said.
“Duh,” I said. “So, did you and Sheena, like, get it on?” I suddenly realized I hadn’t made up a name for my phantom lover. I started trying to think of something but I was distracted by trying to act natural.
“No, you perv. I told you we just make out sometimes, for fun.”
“But you’ve thought about it.”
“Well, sure. She’s sexy.”
“Not to me,” I said. She’s not my type. (Sheena was tall and skinny.)
“You’d do her,” said Cecilia.
“No I wouldn’t,” I sad. LaTanya! I thought, but Cecilia never asked her name.
For You, The Stars Chapter Eight: Installment 3
This was going to be a real test of our so-called open relationship. I had learned from my experience with Simone that possessiveness didn’t work for me and I had come to the conclusion that I’d rather have an understanding that anything could happen than an idealistic promise that I knew I couldn’t keep. But in reality I’m a pretty passive person. I tend to go with the flow. Inertia is the master of my destiny. I wasn’t looking that hard for other women to get together with. And although Cecilia seemed to love flirting with guys when we went out dancing, and there were the occasional moments where she seemed on the verge of straying, as far as I knew neither of us had been with anyone else since we started going out.
I couldn’t be sure. We didn’t really even have a rule about having to tell each other the truth or anything like that. But I usually knew where she was and what she was up to, and she told me about the friends she was making in Marin and what was going on every day. She didn’t really have any reason to keep things secret. I think she would actually have enjoyed telling me about fooling around with some other guy. Or some other girl. Not that Cecilia was particularly bi, but she did have this one new friend, Sheena, who she liked to describe as a “sexygirl,” all one word, and she kept suggesting that she might like to experiment with her sometime. That was OK with me, I said. They didn’t even have to let me watch. Mostly, though, I think she and Sheena liked to sit on barstools and make out as a way of outraging or arousing the guys they were flirting with when they went out drinking on worknights without me.
Every now and then, when Cecilia was teasing me about something, she liked to call me a faggot. “Shut up, faggot.” Like that. It was basically a schoolyard taunt, like the way we used to say “you’re so gay” meaning lame, long before we had any idea, most of us, what homosexuality even was. Now that she had admitted her vague interest in playing around with Sheena, though, whenever she lapsed into calling me a faggot, I’d say “You’re the faggot, faggot.” She said girls couldn’t be faggots but I disagreed.
But now I was thinking about her hooking up with her “friend” who was in town from the east coast and the idea was eating away at me. How do you know this guy, exactly? I asked her. She had met her in a bar, of course. How old is he? Old: 40 or 50. Is he married? He used to be. Maybe he still is. What does he do? Something financial. Is he into, like, younger girls? It’s not like that. And so on. Around and around. She made it out to be something innocent. Just a visit. A hangout. She’d just be dropping by their hotel room. No agenda. No plans.
It sounded creepy to me, but I couldn’t make a big deal out of it. We were allowed to do whatever we wanted. Anyway, I had started taking a painting class a few nights a week in Berkeley so I wasn’t going to be around anyway. She was free to do whatever she wanted and I was free to pretend like I didn’t care. I said “Have fun!” and got off the phone.
After work I changed into the painting clothes I had brought to the office in my backpack. A pair of gray jeans that were getting loose around the waist and a blue denim smocklike collarless shirt, both liberally splattered now with acrylic paint. I went down to Montgomery and got on BART, riding it under the bay and getting off at the downtown Berkeley exit. Then I trudged across to Bancroft and zigzagged across the lower part of the UC campus, which felt like a parallel universe version of Princeton. Everything was in a different place but it all seemed oddly familiar, down to the bathroom stalls with their crude, cruisey comeons and graffiti and phone numbers and notes scrawled next to the gouged out glory holes saying things like “Tuesday afternoons: show hard for blow.”
I made my way to the art dept building whose name I couldn’t remember and headed up to the third floor. The canvasses I was working on were stacked in kind of large open closet area at one end of the studio. I got their early and set up my easel and paints before putting my walkman on. I was working on a set of really large scale paintings based on snapshots, currently a set of photos I’d taken at the beach in Rhode Island during a week last summer with my whole family. I was painting the sky red and orange in a piece called the guitar lesson that showed me and my brother facing eachother, shirtless, while he showed me chords like G and E minor.
I put my walkman on and started painting, spacing out until the instructor came by and tapped me on the shoulder.
“You’re scrubbing,” he said.
“What?”
He picked my brush and showed me what I was doing, sort of mindlessly rubbing back and forth working the watered acrylic into a froth.
“Work on a different area,” he said.
It was all the same to me.
When I got off BART in downtown SF after my class it was night out. I wondered what Cecilia was up to. She was probably not too far away, in that hotel on union square. Instead of getting on the Muni and heading out the inner Sunset for a late burrito-trap dinner, I found myself wandering toward the tenderloin, passing the famous old headshop on Market and arriving at one of the strip clubs halfway to the civic center. This one had a huge marqee out front with the names of all the dancers currently working in alphabetical order. There was one I like there called Nomi and I saw that she was still around. Some of them were college students and some were runaways. Usually I went upstairs to the peep show arcade - movies not booth dancers, but for some reason today I paid the absurd $15 admission to sit in the seedy theatrical area on the first floor where loud heavy metal, pop, and hiphop songs - now U2, now Chris De Burgh, now Springsteen - alternated as the dancers came out one after another for their sets.
The whole thing was heavily formulaic. Each dancer came out three times in succession. The first act was the traditional striptease where a flimy costume was removed one article at a time until the girl was left in something like a bikini or panties and pasties. The second act was an elaborat tease based on getting her top off and the third involved totally nudity and a lot of grinding on the runway surrounded by men of all ages throwing dollars up onto the stage. It seemed pretty weird to me, but kind of thrilling in a way. I still had an intense curiosity to see as many different types of naked female bodies as possible, and these women came in a lot of shapes: some were very heavy, some had painful looking implants that were impossibly round and seemed to stretch the skin on their chests, some were waiflike or looked like Robert Smith from the Cure.
After a girl finished her set she’d reappear a few minutes later in lingerie and heels, to walk around the audience and offer men company in the form of lapdances. I’d never seen a lapdance before the first time I came into this place. This wasn’t the late 90s kind of lapdance in front of a bunch of salesguys in a wannabe upscale North Beach “gentlemen’s club” or in some heavily glamorized movie. This was a seedy pseudo-legal body-on-body massage where you didn’t want anybody looking at you. I never made eye contact with anyone in that place and I usually told the girls to keep moving.
Sometimes I’d pay a girl the five bucks they wanted to sit with you, or on you, for one song. Sometimes they’d ask me if I liked the girl dancing or tell me about their classes in school, real or imagined. Some would breath on your neck, obviously smokers, or nibble your ear, like a girlfriend. One claimed she gave a therapeutic massage: she had a whole memorized line of patter and in the end she just gave me a too rough, too fast shoulder rub. She wasn’t very attractive either, which may be why she took that approach.
This time I waited for Nomi to come out. She had the kind of looks and body that don’t last. She was at a kind of peak of perfection, according at least to my own private standards at the time, although judging by the attention she got while dancing I wasn’t the only person who thought so. She was little rounder, more voluptuous than most women thought most men wanted most women to be and her breasts seemed natural. She had a slightly large-ish, padded butt, and she seemed almost self-conscious when she danced, which was unusual. Most of the girls went through their routines like robots, or professionals, or junkies.
After her three sets she took forever to reappear in her undies, and then she was flagged down by a guy sitting a few rows behind me and I was thinking of getting up and leaving when she finally came sideways down the row behind me. “Want some company?” she said. She had a slight accent that I couldn’t place. She was olive skinned, maybe even black. It was really hard to tell. I didn’t say anything, just handed her a folder up fiver. She came around the aisle, sat on my lap, laced her arms around my neck and as the next song started, started rocking her hips on my thigh.
She felt so soft. There were strict rules about what you could do with the girls. Someone, a bouncer I guess, was watching, and if you tried to touch their breasts or between their legs you’d be ejects. They usually mentioned this when they sat down with you, unless you looked familiar, like you already knew the ropes. Most of the girls actually work regular underwear under their lingerie. That seemed strange to me until I figured that the lacy stuff was basically a costume. This was more hygenic probably, I thought to myself, facetiously.
In retrospect, this whole routine now seems almost quaint. Years later I went back to that same strip house and times had really changed. There was a sort of back room area, really a set of open stalls, some which curtains, the girls tried to get you to come to for “private dances” and it looked like they were giving head and probably doing “full service” too. I hadn’t given all this crap up yet at that time, but even in with my lowered morals this had seemed kind of brazen to me.
No, the ’80s lapdance was in a strange way almost like the revolutionary era bundling. Instead of a plank of wood between a betrothed couple on a bed, a couple of layers of clothes symbolized chastity or staying just this side of the law. Nomi straddled my lap and started sliding her ass forward and back. I realized I was still high from the doob I had smoked before my painting class as I put my arms around her waist and rested them on her belly. With certain parts of the body taboo you ended up touching the next parts over, and feeling insanely, acutely aware of the areas where your hands couldn’t go. I could grab her ass but I could rest my arms on the tops of her hips and kind of steer her as she levered herself across me.
By now I was hard and she sort of trapped me up against one leg. There was a strange sort of unspoken awareness. She had to feel me poking her but she couldn’t acknowledge it. Nor could I. Usually a lapdance ended with me frustrated, sometimes paying five, ten, fifteen or more dollars as the songs kept flying by. It was sexy but not erotic. I got aroused but I still felt shy and exposed, oddly inhibited in my depravity. This time, though, her bottom took me up and over the edge and suddenly, without expecting it I found myself shooting, mostly down my leg I guess.
I didn’t know if she could tell. Probably. She kept moving but edged over to the other thigh and seemed to be winding down. I’d probably gripped her pretty tight as I climaxed. I was in a kind of stoned reverie. The sounds were reverberating like I was on nitrous and I felt myself throbbing as if I had a huge cartoon phallus out in front of me. Each throb was a little less than the one before as I returned to my natural state I felt more of that inconvenient fluid oozing out.
Nomi got up and thanked me and I waited another song or two before getting up and hobbling back up Market to the Muni station, where I waited another 20 minutes or so listening to a Dead bootleg on my walkman before the N-Judah showed up to take me home.
For You, The Stars
Chapter Eight: Installment 2
Before heading up the coast, Rob confided in me that he was impressed by the way my friends and I seemed to be managing to “party” as much as we did out here in the real world. He figured the bonghits and the shenanigans had to end after college, but now he was thinking maybe not. “You’re my role model,” he said. Years later, when none of the Gomers smoked pot anymore and most were married and had kids and real jobs, and more than half had moved out of the Bay Area to live near their wives’ families or in their original home towns or at the only university that would put them on the tenure track, a bunch of us got together around a holiday and talked about things like depression and anxiety and how we had all been self-medicating throughout our twenties, but in the midst of it all it had seemed like a pretty good time.
Cecilia and I went to an experimental play in an intimate makeshift theater in a warehouse district of San Francisco where all the streets were named after states of the union, I think somewhere near Alabama. The sets were minimalistic and the young actors belted out their lines. It was something inspired by Foucault and it was all about sex. In the middle of a long soliloquy by the female lead, Cecilia shot me a mock-comical helpless look as the actress (we still called female actors actresses back then) tore into the topic of the orgasm, extolling its virtues as the ultimate reward for life on earth, “the big O.”
Afterward, we talked about her problem. I was nerdy and analytical about it. Our sex life was not satisfying because she couldn’t come. Sure, it was pleasurable for me. Hell, it was even pleasurable for her, up to a point. But it was intensely frustrating, and not just for her. My pride was wrapped up in the idea that I was a great lover and my partner had to come, dammit. She had to deal with the dual problem of not being able to reach her destination and having to suffer my increasingly frantic efforts and rube goldberg inventiveness until the inevitable moment of freakout and friction burn when she would recoil and curl up in the fetal position.
To me, it wasn’t just her problem. It was my problem too. It was our problem. But it wasn’t just our problem either. It was the problem of her whole fucked up family. Her brother had “broken” her, sexually with his abusive behavior. God knows what else had happened. Where had he gotten his ideas from anyway?
“You need to talk to them about this,” I said.
“Why? They’re tired of hearing about it.”
“Because you need to get better and that won’t happen without some family therapy.”
We talked about the difference between family love and the kind of sexual love that we felt for each other. Cecilia agreed with me in principal that her whole family was involved in the problem and needed to be involved in the solution but she was afraid to make waves. She was used to being the darling, the baby, the favorite and she was unwilling to rub her family’s collective nose in the fact that she felt damaged and that there was an unresolved poison in their midst.
Her grandmother knew it. She had destroyed all her pictures of her brother and refused to see him, talk about him, or even speak his name. Maybe she had her own experience of abuse in her immigrant childhood. I thought maybe she could be an ally in seeing Cecilia whole again, but Cecilia thought not. Her gran preferred blocking it out, preferred not-talking to talking.
I gave Bella a call in New York to see if I could enlist her help in my little campaign but she wasn’t on board either. “I’m over it,” she said. “I don’t let it rule my life. Cecilia has to just let go and get past it.”
I hated this magical thinking Bella was prone to - it was almost new agey. She believes she once willed her body into ejecting a cyst from her private parts. She thought there were no coincidences. It was like my kooky friends in est who believed that we cause everything that happens to ourselves. If you get cancer, it’s because on some level, deep down, you wanted cancer, you needed cancer. That’s such bullshit, I thought. Sometimes the universe just does stuff to you and it doesn’t have to have a reason. You’re not that important, I’d say. It’s not all about you.
But I still thought of Cecilia’s “problem” as being all about me, and I cursed her brother for fucking up my sex life. I thought about confronting him but I knew I never would. “I’m a lover, not a fighter,” as Michael Jackson said to Paul McCartney.
Gradually, we let it drop.
So the sex kept not being real good but the “sexiness” - the part Cecilia really cared about - that kept right on keeping on. And I learned more about her shady past. In college she had tried being an escort one time. Someone she new, a friend of Bella’s, had put herself through school by working as a call girl at an upper-class service run with pagers out of New York City. It sounded like a good way to make money and since sex was just a weapon to Cecilia she didn’t see any moral risk or harm in giving it a try. The experience was a dud, though. The guy she was sent to meet in his hotel was fat and old. He wanted to talk. The sex was boring, empty, and meaningless. Worse yet, after she got paid and gave half of it to madam pimp, she realized that she did feel dirty and low.
This impressed me enough that I restrained myself from jokely calling her a whore the next time we had an argument.
In a way this story reassured me. Not the shocking thrilling part like telling someone you’ve been tied up by a mistress or had sex with a trnasvestite or something like that, but the normal part. That being a hooker had felt kind of crappy to a spoiled middle-class girl from the suburbs with other options. That she didn’t go back and do it again. That she learned something about herself from the experience.
Or maybe not, because somewhere along the way she did end up dating older men who would buy her gifts or even give her cash. This didn’t feel like hooking to her. It was just dating these rich guys and if they left some money in their hotel room for her the next day so she could buy herself something nice, that was just what a nice boyfriend did. If it wasn’t obviously commerce - if there wasn’t a specific price set at the outset - then she was able to treat the experience like the rest of her life: trading on her sexuality for attention from men. Well, attention and jewelry.
This wasn’t just in the past, either. One day she told me that a friend of hers was coming into town to stay at the Mark Hopkins, a chi-chi hotel in downtown San Francisco. She said he was an older guy with an ex-wife, a guy in his late forties, and that yes they’d had sex before and that she was going to visit him and spend some time together.
Our relationship was still fully open. I didn’t love this idea but it wasn’t against the rules and, as in other cases, I had a certain prurient voyeuristic interest in finding out what was going to happen next, kind of like you.