A Supposedly Staggering Infinite Work of Heartbreaking Illumination I'll Never Read

Never Gonna Give You Up

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.