For You, The Stars
Chapter One: Eyes Like a Cat
Installment 1
Cecilia was Isabella’s younger sister. I’d had a crush on Bella for the last few years of college, but it was an unspoken agreement between us that she was out of my league. I was the one she’d turn to when one of her jock stoner boyfriends was chasing another girl. I was the one who walked her home from parties on frat row at night, kinda sorta hoping for a goodnight kiss but having to settle for “I’m so comfortable with you.”
I told myself that I knew Bella better than anyone else, and that we were closer than she was with anyone, including Paulie, her on-again off-again lover and a good friend of mine. One of the crazies who ate acid nearly every weekend and were always looking for something wild to do.
I met Cecilia during the party week just before graduation. She was the youngest kid in Bella’s family and had that precocious, grown-up-too-fast manner learned from her older brothers and sisters. She was cute where Bella was beautiful, short where Bella was tall. She was “too young” for me, but she was about my speed and I took her around from party to party, enjoying having a little cute girl with her midriff bare on my arm until she ran into a small crowd more her own age and took off.
I didn’t see Cecilia again until two years later, after I’d moved out to San Francisco. Bella told me her sister was going to be looking for a place to stay and asked me to keep an eye on her.
For You, The Stars
Chapter One: Eyes Like a Cat
Installment 2
I’d been keeping in touch with Bella, seeing her when I visited family and friends in New York, writing the occasional letter, and making her mix tapes. I’d string together a collage of songs with common themes and not-so-hidden messages. I put “Eyes Like a Cat” by Little Johnny and the Nightcats on one mix. By then I was pretty well resigned to never getting together with Bella but I couldn’t resist flirting. For a while I turned my attention to her best friend Suzy Baxter, who everyone just called Baxter.
Baxter had been hanging around Bella for those same two or three years that I was haunting her, my last couple of years in school. That whole time she’d had one boyfriend, Brett, a guy who went to one of those private colleges in New England for rich kids who were either dumb or too rich to study. He wasn’t dumb. I think he majored in skiing. He’d drive down on weekends in his convertible and they’d smoke together and make out. He was reasonably good looking in dark-haired preppy kind of way but also a little round, a little soft. He was one of those frat-boy party-time deadheads and I thought Baxter could do much better.
Within a year of us all graduating, Brett broke up with her. She’d been talking marriage and kids and he told she was moving too fast. Within six weeks he was engaged to someone else and Baxter was devastated. I almost flew out to New York because she sounded so messed up. We spent a lot of time talking on the phone, me and Baxter, me and Bella. Baxter was short and had very wavy blonde hair. I remember after knowing her for about year suddently noticing that she was extremely busty. Somehow, she’d managed to disguise it. After that, I had to fight not to stare at her boobs, especially when she was relaxing and not made-up and wearing a loose t-shirt and lolling around on a bed or couch as we sat around passing a bong and listening to music.
The next time I was back in the city Baxter seemed like she was doing better but she looked much smaller. Her bust was almost gone and she really seemed tiny. I remember ending up talking to her in the bathroom of her little apartment and it was like she was tring to cram herself under a shelf as we stood around chatting. I didn’t smoke anymore but she was chainsmoking cigarettes and Bella told me she was worried that Baxter was drinking too much.
Then a year or so later it was rehab and 12 steps and she didn’t drink anymore but she still seemed shrunken and I missed her breasts.
Bella was from the midwest but she had moved to New York with what seemed like a third of my college classmates and she was trying to make it as an actress. She was working as a waitress and a bartender but she was aslso taking acting classes and going to auditions and one time she showed me a bunch of head shots that were truly stunning.
She told me her mother was skeptical about her acting ambitions but had said to her that if that’s what she wanted to do, then to “get on with it.” Bella had acted in a lot of plays and musicals in college and like a lot of beautiful girls she was extremely adept at acting a part, projecting an illusory personality, and making people believe whatever she wanted to. She could talk her out of almost any kind of trouble.
At one point in school we’d had similar academic problems. You could only drop so many failing classes before you were down to the minimum. We spent a lot of time getting stoned and skipping class and so partly way throguh the semester it would always reach the point where you had to do some triage: drop the worst classes and scrape by in the rest. We’d both started with six that spring and we were both failing three. One of my classes I’d never been to once. The professor had stopped calling my name because he thought it was a phony name someone had slippedi nto the list to make fun of him.
So I dropped two classes and ended up failing one of the remaining four that semester. Bella just “talked to the dean” and was permitted to keep only three classes that term. I imagine I could have done the same if I’d been willing to cultivate the powers that be, but it hadn’t even occurred to me, just as I’d probably never try to talk or cry my way out of a speeding ticket.
We were all finding that real life was a bit harder and a lot less glamorous than the sort of bottled socialism of a privileged private college, where you are fed and housed and healed and bailed out when things go wrong. We’d been pampered and most of us had been near the tops of our high school classes before eembarking on our elite university excursion and now we were out in the world without much to show for it, starting off in jobs at the entry level, if we had jobs. Or scraping by trying to do creative things like dee jay parties or write screenplays or act without much of a leg up or a way in.
Bella had even roomed with a fairly famous actress for to years in school. You’d have heard of her. They kepy the deoderant from one of her commericals on the mantlepiece in their off-campus apartment. Paulie made a point of scraping his armpits with it whenever we were partying at Bella’s. But in the real world, Bella’s friendship with the actress (let’s call her Marybeth) didn’t translate into any advantages at all. They had started drifting apart already anyway. For one thing, Marybeth didn’t do drugs. Anymore.
I was out in San Francisco trying to write novels and summarizing legal depositions to get by. I learned a lot about multiple chemical sensitivity long before that movie came out. Baxter had an entry-level job at a nonprofit. I had even thought of Cecilia for a few years until out of the blue Bella told me she was moving the the Bay Area and would I show here around. I told her of course and said she should give me a call once she got settled.
For You, The Stars
Chapter One: Eyes Like a Cat
Installment 3
One thing that had changed for me almost immediately upon moving out to California was that I started being successful with women. I don’t know if it was the light or the air or if I just had enough distance from my family and the stressed-out world of the east coast. Or maybe it was that the kinds of women I was made to be with were out here, but even before I had a job I managed to hook up with a pretty cool girl.
I was living with a bunch of guys from college, most of whom were from the class before me, so they’d already found a big old Victorian near the Haight and were staying together there in communal squalor when I arrived. They called themselves Gomers for reasons too complicated to go into. On the livingroom wall was a portrait photograph of an elderly couple whom we called the Gomperses. Visitors usually figured they were one of our parents so they wouldn’t comment on how strange they looked (they were wearing their best polyester and the photo looked like it was taken around 1973 and hand tinted). We named them Gompers after some of the mail that used to come to the house, but that name was actually unrelated to the Gomer slang we used to refer to each other.
Back in school most of us used to hang around in a party room called Doo-dah that had been used by stoners for nearly two decades. It was technically a shared living space between two dorm rooms, but it was understood that you could drop by just about anytime, especially if you brought weed. There was a bar in the room but it was never stocked. Likewise there was a mini-fridge that usually had nothing in it. For a while there was a hookah. And there was a stereo that 99% of the time was used to play lousy-sounding old analog audience tapes of Grateful Dead shows from the late ’70s and early ’80s. We left the hookah in the room for the nextd class when we graduated.
I knew some of the guys better than others in school but living together in a medium-sized house I got to know them all pretty well before long. For the first few months I slept on a mattress in a little breakfast nook off the kitchen but eventually i graduated to my own room. I had no job yet so I got myself the cheapest room in the house. It was desgined to be a dininig room and it shared double glass doors with the livign room. I covered them with tapestries for privacy but the sound still carried.
The room was tiny and I had no furniture beside a futon, so I was always down at floor level. Eventually I scrounged up some cinderblocks and blanks and then Chad gave me his old black and white tv so bit by bit my floor-level existence got a little more liveable.
I started to get real close to Dave, whom I hadn’t known that well in the Doo-dah days. We had a lot of interests in common. We were obsessive about going out to see live music (and not just Dead shows like most of the Gomers), and we were even interested in high brow stuff. We started a plan called Operation Culture and, to the extent that we could afford it, we tried to go to one classical type performance every month. One month it would be the ballet and the next the symphony.
Also, Dave started taking a writing class at San Francisco State and this aroused my reflexive sense of competitiveness and awakened my latent urge to tell stories or at least to be perceived as a writer.
All my life people had asked me if I was a writer or told me to be one. This was all based on my glibness. I tried to explain to people that talking and writing were entirely different but people would just talk about my “way with words” and make assumptions. After a while I started believing them, but I wasn’t that interested in the hard work or writing and rewriting or of writing all the crap you had to get through before you figured out the trick to writing something good. I was happy to be viewed as a writer or someone who “must be a good writer” as long as I didn’t have to write anything.
But then as soon as Dave started taking his class I wrote a short story kind of just to show off. But I found my own stories pretentious and boring. Dave wrote hilarious tales in the mode of Philip Roth and Kafka, such as a surreal story about a guy who bought a disembodied breast and would call himself down by holding it when he got stressed out.
Dave and I also shared a desire to meet women and get laid. He had a friend from high school in New Jersey who lived nearby and that guy invited us to a party one night. I wouldn’t usually want to go to a party where I didn’t know anyone but like Dave I wanted to meet women and get laid so I went.
That was where I met Simone. Don’t worry, I’m getting to Cecilia, but I’ve got to put everything into context.
For You, The Stars
Chapter One: Eyes Like a Cat
Installment 4
Simone and I hit it off right away. Dave less so with her friend Sharon, but the four of us planned a double date in Berkeley a week later. I think we went for ice cream. Simone was also from New York, except Queens, not Manhattan, and she was writing her Ph.D. thesis on Toni Morrison at SF State, so she and Dave had the English department there in common.
I liked her right away. She was smart and pretty and had a cocky attitude. She cussed and she was opinionated. I even kind of liked her semi-thick Queens accent. It may have been that touch of home I was sick for. She was also kind of awkward. It may have been her alliterative name: Simone Shroop. I’d probably feel awkward with a name like that. I guess she was kind of dorky, but I was definitely into her. She seemed to have pretty nice breasts but it was hard to tell.
A month or so later we were lying on my futon and already reminiscinng about our first impressions. We were very frank with each other and we were talking about what we’d thought when we first took off our clothes and lay down together. I admitted that while I still was great admirer of her breasts, that they were not as large as I had imagined from the clothes she wore at the party and on that first double-date (Dave and Sharon didn’t hit it off and drifted apart quickly.)
She admitted that she hadn’t noticed my gut the first few times. I’ve always carried around some extra pounds, at least since puberty, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot.
In fact, a little while later she also told me that there were three things I hadn’t told her up front when we first met: that I was unemployed, that I was a Dead head, and that I smoked a lot of pot. Can you blame me?
We fell into a routine suprisingly quickly. I’d only had one serious girlfriend in college and I was sort of amazed at how easily this had worked out. The same friend of Dave’s and Simone’s who had hosted the party where we met also set me up in a somewhat pointless job at an architecture studio, a kind of assistant/slave job. It had been his job at the time but he was leaving to go to architecture grad school. It made less sense for me since I wasn’t planning to be an architect, but a job was a job, and the legal summarizing was getting old.
I may have been deliberately doing jobs in career paths I wasn’t interested in. I wasn’t going to be a lawyer or an architect, so being a paralegal or a studio assistant didn’t represent any kind of threat of settling into a career. Instead I could practice not writing or make up songs on the guitar and dream big dreams.
But something inside of must have been craving a domestic routine, because pretty soon I was on a regular cycle. I still wasn’t making much money, around $7/hour, so I would walk the 20 blocks or so from my commune to the place near Lyon and Baker and Page where Simone lived with her two roommates. I’d listen to my walkman sometimes on the way over and other times I’d just spend the whole time lost in thought.
Sometimes I’d come out of it and notice I was chanting soundlessly: Lyon and Baker and Page, oh my!
One of my other roommates in the group house, Belinda, asked me why I did a big bonghit before I walked over to Simone’s. It was a good question. Part of it was just that “one for the road” idea, or to bring on the reverie for the next 25 minutes. But in retrospect it was probably about social anxiety or maybe a sense that I was going down the wrong road.
Many nights I would sleep over at Simone’s. She was into Genesis, Phil Collins Genesis, so I would kind of mock her for that. She’d of course mock me for being into the Dead. We’d compromise by falling asleep on her tiny little bed listening to the new age ambient station, which reminded me a lot of drums and space.
We actually took a long time to get sexually intimate, which was sort of a good thing. I was still pretty inexperienced and she considered herself to be a virgin although technically she had had one drunken experience.
“He put it in but he wasn’t hard,” she told me. “Does that count?”
We did a lot of kissing. I always liked making out. It took me back to my earliest experiences, around 7th grade, playing spin the bottle and kissing for hours. I liked the play of tongues and the softness of our mouths pressed together. I also liked feeling her up. Her breasts were pretty nice after all. I wasn’t really in any hurry to go much further, and we’d usually bring each other off with our hands.
She told me she wanted to be drunk when she lost her virginity again, and I was really against that. I wanted her to be present. She was obviously scared. When we finally got around to it, she cried, and I didn’t yet know that that was really not unusual. I kept trying to get her to tell me why she was crying and she kept saying she didn’t know.
She did have a bit of psychological problem, which you could delicately refer to as “clenching up.” Or maybe it was physical. Believe me, it wasn’t like I was presenting a challenge from the size point of view. She talked to her doctor and got a tube of lubricant and that actually worked pretty well. Eventually she got very enthusiastic about fucking.
Not so much with the blowjobs, though. She was kind of afraid to even try, and I admitted to her that I found that frustrating. “You don’t have to be a blowjob queen or a pornstar,” I told her. “Just give it the old college try.”
I also thought it was unfair that she was totally willing for me to go down on her. I mean, really: tit for tat, right? One time, as a kind of joke, I told her that if we ever broke up it would probably be because of the no blowjob policy. She got really mad at me and how could I even joke about that? So of course I told her I was sorry, but in a way I was just telling her the truth. Sexual compatability matters, doesn’t it?
It’s not like we were just about sex all the time. We were both in our low 20s, so it’s understandable - I think - that we were fooling around every day, or just about, but we did a lot of things together. We went to concerts: Neil Young, Santana, the Dead. But never Genesis! She admitted that she and her younger brother once cried at a Barry Manilow concert. She later regretted telling me that. Actually, I think she regretted telling me that immediately.
We also talked about books and writing a lot. Under her tutelage, I read all of Toni Morrisons, starting with the Bluest Eye. She taught me a lot about contemporary lit-crit. Education had actually turned me off to reading. All through my childhood I’d read voraciously, but starting with book reports and then term papers and then later in college the truly insane reading schedules all conspired together to make me want to read as little as possible, outside of science fiction novels and the Remo Williams series.
After I graduated I went through a kind of no-read-at-all detox period and then tentatively I dipped back into reading novels and started remembering how much I loved them. Every day at my lunch break at the architecture firm I’d walk out reading my book. I had mastered the art growing up in New York of reading and walking around in a city without bumping into hydrants and poles and other people most of the time.
I had gotten kind of friendly, in a perfunctory way, with the gay reception desk guy in the office building and one day he asked me, “Hey, are you taking a ‘great books’ class?” That puzzled me, but I guess I was reading highbrow stuff, Pale Fire one week and Hopscotch the next. I was kind of burning through the books after a while once I got my appetite back.
So Simone and I had a lot in common, a lot to talk about, and a pretty lusty time in the sack. I liked her just fine but I was pretty careful not to accidentally say “I love you.” I’d been in love in college and that was okay but I was in no hurry to jump right back into something that all-consuming.
Unfortunately, Simone was definitely moving up that mountain, well past infatuated and heading for love. After a while she started talking about loving me and I was really dreading that “I love you but I’m not in love with you” speech. Still, I made a point of being honest and even when it would have made things easier I refused to string her along or pretend I felt stronger than I did. And I never, ever, ever talked about the future or anything crazy like marriage.