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

Cecilia

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.

Bella and Baxter

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.

Gomers

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.

In the air tonight

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.

I'm a little schoolboy too

For You, The Stars
Chapter Two: Have a Cigar
Installment 1

So after about a year in San Francisco I was easing into an oddly domestic scene. I’d finally caught up even in our elaborate communal group ledger for expenses and etc., which we called GLEE for short. I’d essentially been on the communal dole when I first arrived and had to borrow money to do anything. Every time I ate a group meal I was marked down for my share of the groceries. In fact, if you gathered together leftovers from the dinner the night before and wrapped them in a tortilla for lunch the next day, you’d be included in the tally for that dinner. This we called “the burrito trap.” We took turns making dinner and cleaning up, in pairs. The rule was that the same pair who made dinner also cleaned it up - that was there was no incentive to leave a big mess. I couldn’t cook at all, so I would be the one washing the dishes and the pots.

When I started legal summarizing I was still barely getting enough money to break even. Sometimes the three guys who were working as paralegals in the office of an eccentric gay Princeton alumnus would pay for my roundtrip fare on the N-Judah streetcar and buy me lunch downtown so I could make a fourth for bridge. It always tickled my dad that me and my friends were bridge addicts, as he associated that with the preppy (or, as he called them, “tweedy”) kids of his own college days in the ’50s. I had simply discovered that bridge was the perfect form of procrastination. You’d agree to play, “just one more hand,” and miss another class and then another till it was dinner time.

Once I had the full-time job I was able to dig my way out of my glee-hole and could maintain a little balance in my checking account. I found myself even getting a little excited when my bills came. I’d get out my checkbook and pay them immediately, not even waiting for the grace period to pass. I think I was getting over the shock of how low down on the social and financial totem pole I had landed by following the Dead out to California instead of following the other stock broker wannabes to Wall Street. In my own small way I was making it on my own and I was inordinantly proud of the fact.

I recently came across a photo of myself, in my tie and shirtsleeves, with a leather briefcase my sister got me, and in my dorky ’80s style oversized horn rims. It’s obvious now that my hair was receding pretty fast, but it was still shaggy and falling across my eyes at the time. I hadn’t yet started trying to grow it long yet. I was fresh faced and clean shaven, no tattoos or piercings. Piercings weren’t even really in yet except for earrings which had already crossed over the the jock/frat crowd by then. It was a year or so later when the RE/Search “modern primitives” book came out and seem spark the huge outpouring of odd piercings and split tongues and genitals and the total mainstreaming of tattoos.

No, I was just a junior working stiff at that moment, trying to fit in, but I think I was on the verge of freaking myself out with just how settled I’d become. I’d forgotten about rock and roll and art and even writing and I was setting myself up for a major tailspin.

One of the gomers, Bo, was this big ex-football player who had redirected his competitive urges into strategy board games. He used to joke that if he didn’t reinnoculate himself with a bonghit on a regular basis that the demon Cthulhu inside him would emerge. We were all ready to propitiate him and keep the soft-edged fuzzy teddybear around instead of the potentially rage-fileld monter inside him. He had gone back to east for a visit and returned with a new girlfriend in tow, Suzy Schotzkopf.

Somehow Suzy ended up moving in with all of us although no one seemed to like her much, not even Bo. We held one of our interminable consensus-building meetings and the anti-Suzy impulse was just too disorganized to fight the inertia. Instead, in our passive-agressive self-medicating ways, we just none of us helped her move in. She was the type who was constnatly apologizing to everyone, preemptively. She said “sorry” like every other word. I felt a little guilty for not helping her move her furniture in, especially when she was hauling a small couch up our tight little winding staircase by herself. I swear I heard her bump into the wall and say “I’m sorry” reflexively to no one. Suddenly I didn’t feel guilty - just ill.

Suzy offered to drive Simone and me up to Angel’s Camp (near where Twain wrote about the frog contest) for an outdoor concert with Santana and the Dead. This would be Simone’s first Dead show, so I got Friday and Monday off to enable us to make the trip. Santana was the sweetener because who didn’t like Santana? Inevitably, on the way to the show Suzy’s car broke down. We spent hours at some nowhere gas station near a freeway on-ramp with Suzy trying to get something in her transmission fixed and constantly apologizing to both of us. Somehow, I have no idea how, she got the car working again and we made it to the site well after dark. We had to do the dirt-camping thing, sleeping next to the car, and of course we were kept up most of the night by drunken and tripping ‘heads playing battered old guitar and howling at the nonexistent moon.

The shows were on Saturday and Sunday and in some ways the days were perfect. That may have been the high point of my time with Simone. It was a little weird seeing the father with a toddler near us who was unable to leave the show the first afternoon even when his daughter was obviously overwhelmed by the noise and chaos and heat. But most of the people around us were stereotypically kind and thoughful, and Simone was actually surprised at how slick and together the Dead sounded by the late ’80s.

I’m not sure exactly what she was expecting - either heavy metal based on the band’s name or maybe something really sloppy based on the awful bootleg tapes I was still listening to before the Internet and digital changed that whole scene - but she was pleasantly surprised that they didn’t just jam endlessly or acidically. She even gave them the ultimate compliment by her own standards: in concert they sounded a lot like Genesis. I scoffed at that of course. For me the highlight was when Santana sat in with the Dead as they resurrected a long dormant song, Good Morning, Little Schoolgirl and when Carlos and Jerry pushed each other to shreddy extremes on All Along the Watchtower, an obvious tribute to Jimi, one of Santana’s greatest heros (along with Miles).

We didn’t get much sleep again the night between shows and Suzy was really having no fun but she was committed to driving us back so she stuck it out. I paid her for our share of the gas but I think she really just wanted to be treated like a buddy and I wasn’t willing to go that far.

Another cluster of my friends from college had grabbed a house on Parnassus Way in the Berkeley / Oakland hills. They were all grad students at UC, mostly in eastern european languages or politics. They also lived with a couple of undergraduate girls who were both zaftig and whom I both thought were very sexy. Every now and then I’d go to a party at their place on Parnassus and usually end up spending the night. For some reason Simone never seemed to go to those parties. I did a lot of flirting but nothing ever seemed to happen.

The two sexy girls, Ava and Bronwen, one blonde, one dark haired, used to tease me a lot. I guess it was obvious I had a thing for them. They would joke about things like threeways or dressing me up in their lingerie. I was game but it never seemed to go anywhere. Usually we’d all drink a huge amount and pass out. I’d spend the night on a couch in the living room and in the morning we’d all go to the breakfast place atop Walnut Square in Berkeley for eggs and bloody marys. One time Bronwen was away so I crashed in her bed. In the middle of the night I rummaged through her drawers and stole a few pairs of her panties. I was pretty perverted like that back then. She showed up in the morning and was surprised to find me in her bed but I played it cool and smuggled my booty out of the room without her noticing.

Freckles

For You, the Stars
Chapter Two: Have a Cigar
Installment 2

I’m not sure why Simone never made it to those parties in Berkeley but it may have been because neither of us had a car. If I wanted to get there I’d have to take the Muni downtown and the Bart across the Bay and then I’d still have to get someone to come down from the hills to pick me up from the downtown Berkeley Bart station.

I also think Simone didn’t like my Berkeley friends. They were kind of pretentious, always talking about art theory and Marx. Simone liked to discuss lit crit and she liked to discuss feminism, but she also liked to be the best-informed, smartest person in a discussion, and the ex-Ivy Leaguer grad students had too many humiliating rhetorical tricks up their sleeves, along the lines of “Well, if you haven’t read Gramsci, then I don’t even know why we’re having this conversation.”

I liked having this other place to go and this other set of friends and I liked being able to flirt fairly freely without any real consequences, knowing I had someone to get back to, at least after sleeping off a hangover.

Simone and I did most of our hanging out in the Haight. At first the place had a sort of magical cachet for my Deadhead friends, but once you had checked out 710 Ashbury and the remaining head shops, you’d notice the hippie-slash-beggars everywhere and that the place was getting kind of yupped out. What the neighborhood did have going for it was a couple of good places to eat.

We especially liked going out for breakfast in the morning. At the Crescent City cafe we could get pseudo-New Orleans food, like omelets with shrimp and hot sauce. Or if we were willing to walk down toward the lower Haight and wait on line for 45 minutes we could get an impossibly huge breakfast / brunch at the Pork Store Cafe.

We went to movies at the Red Vic, lolling on uncomfortable secondhand couches and eating popcorn with brewer’s yeast on it instead of butter and salt. We bought clothes at the thrift shops. Well, mostly I did. Simone didn’t care too much about fashion, favoring a serviceable collegiate, sweater-and-jeans style that suited her pretty well. I was trying to reinvent myself, systematically replacing every preppy scrap of clothing in my closet with something blacker or tighter or made of a less natural fabric. I was still a bit overweight but I wasn’t dressing loose and sloppy to hide my body anymore.

I was also starting to let my hair grow longer. I had finally noticed the sharp angle of my hairline heading toward my temples and it occurred to me that if I ever wanted to wear long hair in my life that the window was in danger of slamming shut. My hair has never grown fast, though, so at first it was just too long in the front, falling in my eyes all the time, and bushy on my neck. Over the next few months I had it almost to pageboy length all around.

Somewhere along the way I also picked up a multicolored guatemalan (yes, I know that’s redundant) shirt that pulled over instead of buttoning up the front. I refused to wear tie-dyed t-shirts all the time like my Gomer buddies. I fancied my self a punker shade of hippie. I liked Black Flag and the Meat Puppets and I went to the I-Beam to see Camper Van Beethoven and later Primus. If I was going to dress colorful it was going to be with a little more panache than your standard preppy Deadhead.

I noticed I was also getting privately more critical of Simone’s appearance. Not the way she dressed. I was fine with that. It was subtle things, like her freckles, which I had really liked at first. Unlike some guys, I find freckles to be sort of cute. But she had freckles up the wazoo (literally). I think less of her skin was unfreckled than freckled. I’d be looking at her in bed and my mind would do a kind of strange figure-ground kind of flip and suddently I’d see her as a ginger-colored person lightly flecked with pale pink skin. Being high may have had something to do with that.

Also, as young as she was, her skin seemed kind of like that of a much older woman. It was very thin, and was already showing wrinkles on her forearms. Her upper lip had those lines you usually see only on women and men in the 60s or 70s. I knew enough not to mention any of this to her, but now that I think about it, I may just have been getting a little tired of her body. I was a young guy who had just discovered that maybe it wasn’t quite as hard to hook up with women as I had previously though and - who knows? - maybe I was laying the groundwork for my escape.

One of the folks I used to see at Parnassus was this very artsy, very pale woman named Dannie. She had pitch black ringlets of hair and she had very pretty blue eyes. In some ways she seemed to have stepped out of a pre-pre-Raphaelite past. She may have known this because she spoke in a fey high-pitched trill. When everyone else wanted to go out for eggs and bacon on Sunday mornings, she would lobby for some cute little bakery she knew where we could get fresh croissants (pronounced the french way, rolling the r and dropping the s). Sometimes she’d convince the gang but usually the hash browns and bloodies place would win out.

She wore her body well. She was fairly large around. Not too tall, but with a rounded belly and arms and legs like a baby. I still found her pretty. I had never had utterly conventional tastes in women, but she was outside of the type I had considered in the past. A few years later I made an unsuccessful pass at a lawyer in her thirties who was a coworker of another one of my roommates, so maybe in general I was intrigued by people outside of “league” in one way or another.

I had the feeling Dannie was flirting with me more than the usual amount that went on with all the drinking up on Parnassus. She’d make eyes at me or make sure she was in my line of site. She’d seek me out for quiet conversation. At one party at another house in Berkeley I didn’t know enough people and I felt sort of mopey and lonely so I went outside to sit on the porch by myself.

I had it in the back of my mind that the lonely poet staring at the sky might be an attractive pose and sure enough Dannie came out to talk to me after a while. She made a point of squeezing next to me in the backseat of car when we all left that party to go to another one and she took my hand in her much bigger hand and squeezed it while everyone was talking all around us.

Your bone's got a little machine

For You, The Stars
Chapter Two: Have a Cigar
Installment 3

Meanwhile, I was staying in touch with friends, mostly women, on the east coast, writing letters (remember that? handwritten letters, several pages long, stamped and delivered by the post office?) and sending mix tapes. I pretty much never made mixes for guys. I wasn’t always romantically interested in the women I made mix tapes for but I guess I always had in the back of my mind.

Bella, for example, never made mixes for me but I’d still make them for her, weaving together a sort of subliminal message from the song titles and key lyrics.

Then there was Maura Romas, who’d I chased on and off for my last two years in college. There was some obvious chemistry between us but there must have been some kind of magnetic repulsion as well because whenever we started to get real close she’d flake out and vanish and not answer her phone or return my calls. She’d even turn and walk away when she saw me on campus.

Then inevitably a few months later I’d run into her out at a party and she’d be incredibly apologetic and say she’d been freaking out and under stress and we’d get into long conversations and go for walks and hnag out for hours without really saying much, just listening to music. I was just getting into the Dead then and during one of the phases when she was avoiding me I wrote out the words to Crazy Fingers because for whatever reason I thought they were relevant. Probably the last verse, where it goes

Midnight, on a carousel ride, reaching for the gold ring, down inside
never could reach, it just slips aways, when I try

And then another time I think I wrote out all the words to Helplessly Hoping. How pathetic is that? I was just coming out of the common vocabulary of sappy romantic music of the 70s back then - the James Taylor stuff and Cat Stevens and Gordon Lightfoot - that we used to make out to.

One time when we were on the ins I was playing her one side of American Beauty and I sang her all the words to “Brokedown Palace.” I’ve never had any shame about music, I guess. That did make an impression on her, because she mentioned it later.

She’d been to one of New England prep schools and was sort of Dead-averse. There is a frat-like preppy Deadhead culture at those schools and I even had to overcome my prejudices before I finally went to a show around 1984 and “got it.” Worse, Maura had lived next to two rabid Deadheads one year and they would do things like eat acid and then play “Uncle John’s Band” 99 times in a row. It would be enough to put anyone off Jerry.

Now that I was out in California and Maura was in a grad-school writing program at BU, we had gotten into this intense epistolary thing. I had this big Maura file with her half of our exchange. All the stuff we were never able to say in person came out in the letters. We had a shared ambition to be writers and I was going through a lot of angst, at least in my letters, about not making progress, not finishing stories, not writing novels.

She would tell me that you couldn’t force it. When I was ready to write, I’d write. But that was easy for her to say. She was the one in the program. She was the one immersed in a culture that valued writing and being mentored (and seduced) by her writing teachers.

These days we were quoting R.E.M. lyrics in our letters to each other, things like “(Don’t Go Back to) Rockville.” I made a mix tape for her that was fraught with obvious drama. I ended it with “Brokedown Palace.” I found a really good live version of “Uncle John’s” and put that on it, to rehabilitate the song for her. I put “You Are Like a Hurricane” on side two and I got my frustration out by including “Idiot Wind” on side one. She really liked it, even the harsh Dylan stuff (“I couldn’t believe after all these years, you didn’t know me any better’n that”).

She made mixes for me in return and hers were really good. They always included stuff I’d never have listened to otherwise, probably never have bought, but that sounded great amidst the stuff I knew better. She also was getting a glimpse of some good stuff in the cutout bins in Boston that somehow hadn’t made it to my San Francisco ears yet. One of her mixes has “Bone Machine” on it, which was my first experience of the Pixies and another had a De La Soul tune, that was like a step into another world.

At first the Pixies sounded harsh and unlistenable to me. I’d put her mix on my walkman and listen on Muni on the way to work. But the second or third time through it sounded like the most natural thing in the world, and as classic as a Rolling Stones hit.

Our letters get getting more and more intense and it never occurred to me to mention it to Simone. It wasn’t real. I don’t know if I’d have said any of the things I was writing if I’d been looking at Maura in person. She sometimes talked about dropping out of her grad program at BU and moving out to San Francisco but I didn’t think she’d really go for it. That’s what all the “Rockville” stuff was about - the urge to pick up and move, leaving all her stuff behind.

I think I was keeping her on the backburner.

Bauhaus

For You, The Stars
Chapter Two: Have a Cigar
Installment 4

Things started to unravel. I went to one of those drinkathons up in the hills and Dannie was there and she ended up the evening driving me to her apartment. First place I remember back then where somebody lived by themselves. That was a revelation. The place wasn’t a mess, like mine would have been.

It was a fairly large apartment for just one person. Something about her dad paying for it. She must come from money, I remember telling myself. She was a good kisser. Not too sloppy but succulent. She drew me in.

We undressed each other in her bedroom. I was excited to see the body of a “fat lady.” They’d for sure be the biggest breasts I’d seen or touched yet. I wasn’t sure how I was going to respond to her belly, her arms and legs. Not that I was a swimmer exactly myself.

I put my arms around her and she felt solid. I didn’t have that usual feeling that I’d better go easy or else knock the girl over and trap her arm behind her back or pinch something. There’s nothing that spoils the mood so much as someone crying out suddenly in pain, unless that is the mood.

She wore elastic legging and she was soft and loose when she finally stripped down to her bare skin. She was very pale. Not as soft as I expected. Her hair felt course. I could feel her goose bumps or her legs. The back of her neck was sweaty and thick with her hair. My fingers would get stuck there as I pressed her face against mine. She was strong and she was not above biting my lower lip.

We fell into bed. I always liked making out the best. I was as horny as the next guy, maybe more than most, but there was something about those first experiences, spinning the bottle when I was 12 or so, that made kissing and “feeling up” the most erotic things I could imagine.

Finally I rolled on top of her and found I didn’t have the wherewithal to go through with it. She offered to suck me to get me hard again and I agreed. That worked. I held her breast and stared at the ceiling and her soft warm wet mouth did the trick, but when I climbed between her thighs again I was once again not in the mood.

Her thighs were slick. I was actually fasinated by the concept of a fat pussy. I put my face as close as I could and I started lapping my way in closer. I figure I owed her that much. It was very dark in her bedroom. Total eclipse of the moon.

Eventually she came, kept coming, till she told me to stop. I slid up under her arms and she reached down to hold my cock, which was still soft. We talked about why I was unable to go through with the actual fucking. I think it was my idea to talk about it. I mentioned Simone. She had heard I had a girlfriend across the bay but she didn’t care.

With her arm around me, I felt like she was the man and I was the girl. She was literally bigger than me. Not taller, but more massive. She also had a rough almost stubbly texture under her chin and I remember for a moment wondering if she could possibly be a guy. But that was impossible. It felt oddly plausible though, without making any real sense. Her aggressive energy I guess. I had never been pursued like that before.

She told me it was OK and put her feet up against mine. “You’ve got cold feet,” she said.

In the middle of the night I woke up and started nuzzling the nearest breast. I kissed my way down to her belly as she woke. Now, for whatever reason I was almost painfully hard and suddenly “performing” brought on no anxiety at all. Afterward, as we lay sweating and panting she told me that she always thought of architecture while making love.

“What style did I remind you of?” I asked her.

“Bauhaus.”

“I know what you’re trying to tell me,” I said, thinking that I had perhaps been a bit methodical, rather more utilitarian in the end than decorative.

“No, it’s nothing,” she said. “It’s not a metaphor. I just see buildings.”

I didn’t feel that great the next morning and I felt worse the next day when I saw Simone again. She and I tended to get together about three or four nights a week. We didn’t keep tabs on each other. We did, I should state for the record, have an exclusive relationship. I was still studiously avoiding the L word but she wasn’t and though I managed to put off conversations about “where are we going with this” I had definitely agreed with her that we were, to use the previous generation’s parlance, “going steady.”

There was no ethical loophole that made what I had done with Dannie acceptable. My middle of the night returned to form had scotched any potential “eatin’s not cheatin’” defense and to be honest I wouldn’t have been brazen enough to put it out there. For all of my frankness now, at the time I expressed myself even in the privacy of an intimate relationship, in fairly chaste, gentlemanly terms. It was part of the my charm. The rakish “safe boy” gone a little dangerous. The naughty page boy who still observed the finer points of chivalry.

I confessed everything… to Maura. I told her about the whole episode, the flirtation that led up to it, my self loathing afterward, in my next letter to her. I did it deliberately, knowing it would stir her up. Even here my motives were selfish. I knew that Maura would be envious and at the same time would sense the coming downfall of Simone. This might embolden her or it could resurrect her old disappearing act.

I wanted to get a rise out of her, though, but I poured on the anguish thick in my letter. For one, the feelings were true. For another, I knew Maura would hang on every word. Also, we were on some level writers competing with each other, co-writing a story and trying to outdo each other with each serial update.

I also told Dave. Dave was turning into my confidante. It went both ways. It was almost better that we’d never really gotten to know each other in school. We had a relatively blank slate. After my initial drive to write a few stories I’d gone fallow again, but he was still taking his writing class and we talked about writing theory a lot. Is conflict necessary? How close can you get to reality and still call it fiction? I was writing much but I had all the answers.

I went to Dave with my moral dilemma. I had cheated on Simone. He was a little shocked. It didn’t fit my good-boy image. Also, he had gotten friendly with Simone. Her friend Sharon, from our original double date, had pretty much fallen out of the picture after going out with another one of my roommates, a total waste case named Seth Savage. More on him later.

Dave hadn’t hooked up with anyone yet and he and I and Simone sometimes did things together. She went out on some of our Operation Culture nights, although she said she found the ballet and the opera “pretty boring.”

So I felt doubly bad telling Dave I had cheated on Simone with Dannie. I was kind of putting him in an awkward position although I really had no doubt where his loyalties lay.

“I can’t figure out whether to tell her or not,” I said to Dave. We were sitting in our living room. I was on the rescued couch and he was on the big La-Z-Boy chair.

“Well, you can’t tell her,” he said. “She’ll never forgive you, and you wouldn’t be telling her for her. You’d be telling her to make yourself feel better.”

“That’s good,” I said. “Because I don’t really want to tell her. I’m chicken. Plus it’s not going to happen again.”

My big problem, I told Dave, was that this didn’t fit into my preexisting idea of myself. It was a kind of a mystery. Was a really the sort of guy who cheated on his girlfriend? Apparently I was. Did this mean I was a bad person, or cheating was OK, or something else entirely?

I was fairly attached to the idea of myself as a good guy, so I told myself that this was just a one-time thing - a reaction against all the sameness and routine that had been creeping into my life.

I resolved not to tell Simone and not to let it happen again.

Wish you were here

For You, The Stars
Chapter Two: Have a Cigar
Installment 5

I didn’t have a lot of extra money then but I tended to visit New York about twice a year, usually once in the summer and once in the winter. I’d come for about a week, stay at my parents’ apartment on the upper east side and call all my friends in advance. It would usually be a weeklong party. I’d talk about moving back to New York if it was really all about going out every night and dancing and staying up late and my friends would remind me that they had to go to work the next day and that it was only me who was going out every night.

Around this time Bella was living in an apartment not too far from my parents’ - a little closer to the east river, a fifth floor walkup. The floor was on a bit of a tilt, too, but it was reasonably spacious for two people. Her roommate worked at the Top of the Sixes with her in Rockefeller Center. She was taking acting classes and auditioning but also doing the waitress routine of working till late at night and then going out and spending tip money on blow and staying up all night.

When I showed up in town she took me to a friend’s brownstone in Harlem and we bought some pot. I bought it, actually, and then we went back to her place and smoked it in her bong. Most girls preferred joints or pipes. Bongs always seemed like a guy thing, a hardcore stoner thing. But Bella always liked bongs. I think one reason why I got along with her so well was that she was a guy-type stoner.

She had never hung around in Doo-dah. The Gomers were basically nerds and she was a pretty girl. Two entirely different crowds. I could move between them but most people lived entirely in one world or another. I didn’t really fit in with the beautiful people but Bella was also a bit of a crossover type and she gave me entré into that world. Still, she did spend a long afternoon or two up in Doo-dah, matching the guys bonghit for bonghit.

Much later I figured we were all self-medicating back then but at the time it seemed like one long party.

When Baxter got off her job at the nonprofit, Bella and I took her out, first for dinner and then dancing downtown. It was late summer and the dance floor was unbearably hot and sweaty but once you were completely drenched it was liberating. We were dancing barefoot and it was still slippery. Baxter smoked like a chimney.

They both complimented me on my longer hair and my generally “mellow” demeanor.

“California’s been good for you,” said Baxter. “You seem much more comfortable with yourself.”

“Thanks, I guess.”

It was hot enough that even at 3 am there were people milling around on the streets. We actually ended up stretching out on a sidewalk, flat on our backs, talking and watching the sky gradually get lighter and lighter till the early morning joggers started showing up, making us feel wickedly decadent and finally tired.

That was when Bella told me that Cecilia, her little sister whom I’d only met that one time at graduation, was thinking of coming out to California.

“College isn’t working out for her,” she told me, “and my parents don’t want her hanging around the house doing nothing.

“Laurie, my older sister, invited her out to their house in Marin to be an au pair when their baby comes.”

“You have an older sister?” Bella had never mentioned her.

“Yeah,” she works in the city and her husband is an engineer. They’ve got a baby coming this fall.”

“Tell her to give me a call when she gets settled in.”

“I’ll do that.”

The call came a few months later, in late September. Just a quick remember me? sure I do kind of thing. The re-formed Pink Floyd without Roger Waters was touring that fall and I had tickets so I asked Cecilia if she’d like to go to the show with me and Seth Savage, who’d also been friends with her older sister at school. She said yes definitely, it sounded great.

When the concert came around, she got someone to drop her off at our apartment. Then we took Muni to Bart and then Bart to the Oakland Coliseum. Our seats were not all together, so we took turns sitting in the better ones. Seth had turned me on to Pink Floyd in college. I knew Dark Side of the Moon, of course, like everyone, but he used to play Meddle a lot and Atom Heart Mother.

There was a whole Pink Floyd vs. Grateful Dead thing among the tripsters at school. Floyd was more precise and the Dead were more spontaneous. Seth and I and most of the Gomers were in the overlapping part of the venn diagram.

Bella was more of a Floyd head. She listened to the Dead when it was on, but she connected more with Pink Floyd. Cecilia tended to follow her older sisters when it came to tastes in pop culture so she was way into Pink Floyd as well. In some ways he was the classic youngest sibling. One reason why she had bummed from school to school was that she had learned from her older sisters how to act cool without ever figuring out the basics. Plus she “only used to get juiced in it.”

At the time I think Seth had his eyes on Cecilia. I was fairly innocent that first night. We hung out and enjoyed each other’s company, but I was recovering from my one cheating incident plus Cecilia was Bella’s younger sister. I felt more protective and older brother-y than predatory. Cecilia liked Seth. She found him funny, but she was not at all attracted to him.

When it was our turn to sit in the better seats together, we made fun of the other plans, many of which looked like they’d have been just as happy listening to a record of Pink Floyd really loud in a roomful of 10,000 other fans. As long as they could wear their rainbow prism t-shirt or sing along with the hits, they were happy.

Then there were the more scary fans, the ones dressed in vaguely paramilitary leather jackets who didn’t seem to understand the irony underlying the fascist lyrics and imagery in the Wall. One of them was giving a headbanger’s equivalent of the Hitler salute over and over during the chorus of “Waiting for the Worms” (at least I think that’s what it’s called - I was never as into the details when it came to Floyd). We laughed at him a lot and imagined him driving home in a volkswagen to an in-law apartment in his mother’s basement.

Afterward I told Cecilia that the show had been good but that she definitely had to catch a Dead show with me in December. She eagerly agreed. I didn’t realized it at the time but at that snapshot in time and from that angle I looked pretty cool to her.

They will not follow you

For You, The Stars
Chapter Three: Big Sister’s Clothes
Installment 1

Both Simone and I went back to New York around Christmas, so we made plans to get together a few times while we were there. One night I had her over to my parents’ place for dinner. My father baited her with stupid questions about her plans to teach English at a community college. I noticed that I was self conscious about her Queens accent, and I kept worrying that she’d come out with one her strange family words, like calling a toilet a “toidy.”

My mom was nice to her, though, and the dinner turned out pretty well. We went out drinking that night and then I put her on a subway back to her parents’ place in Forest hills. Two nights later I met her and a few of her close friends at the Pizzeria Uno where they all used to work on their summer vacations back when they were still in college.

We sat in a booth, me and the three girls, and got to know each other over beer, pizza, and beer. We got roaring drunk and I remember having a private conversation with one of her friends - I think she was telling tales on Simone out of school. My impression was that her friends liked me.

Simone was staying on the east coast through New Year’s but I had plans to return just before the end of the month to catch the Dead’s New Year’s run at the Kaiser in Oakland.

It was not like I had literally moved out to California to see Dead shows but it was definitely a factor. I hadn’t really known the Dead’s music in high school. Sure, I had the triple-LP Europe ‘72 album, but I’d bought that just before leaving home for boarding school along with a few other records I knew mainly by their classic covers. I listened to it a few times, but the long improvised suites on the last record eluded me.

The “disco Dead” record, Shakedown Street had come out my first year away at school and I still have a vivid memory of hearing the chorus of “Fire on the Mountain” playing from someone else’s room down the hall.

I also had some undifferentiated primordial memories of a few of the Dead’s FM radio “hits” from around the time I was in kindergarten, things like “Friend of the Devil.” I know when I finally “got it” at a show in the fall of ‘84 the song “Uncle John’s Band” seemed oddly familiar, but that may have been the acid talking.

The main thing that kept me from taking the Dead seriously in high school, though, was the kids who were way into them. With the name and the iconography they seemed more like a heavy metal band than the folk-rock-blues-grass band they really were, and the kids who were into them the most were the burnouts who were also into Lynyrd Skynyrd and Led Zep. They listened to unlistenable bootleg tapes on boomboxes and made the whole concept of the Dead unappealing.

In fact, my first year of college I was in a friend’s room and I noticed that he had a large Grateful Dead banner on one wall. I honestly asked him if it was an ironic statement and he looekd at me strangely, as if to say of course not.

Then there was the transitional period where it seemed like nearly all my stoner friends were playing the Dead constantly and if you asked them to change the music they just put another record or another bootleg tape on. That was the “this stuff all sounds alike to me” phase.

Then came the mushrooms and the acid, and the going to a live show, and then the going to a live show on acid and it all started to make sense to me. I saw two Dead shows in 1984 and then I saw, like, 18 in 1985, culminating in New Year’s shows at the end of the year. That was my first taste of San Francisco.

Most of the Gomers were a year ahead of me and had thus already graduated by then. They had moved en masse out to SF and they invited me out for the shows. The weather was beautiful, the city was like a jewel, and the whole Dead scene was turned up a notch, like visiting the real city of Amber when up to know you’ve just seen the shadows that resemble it.

I was in Ground Zero for Dead culture, as it were, and I got sucked in. I had traveled up and down the east coast to catch as many shows as possible, occasionally venturing west as far as Wisconsin or Colorado, but based in the Bay Area it was possible in those days to see the Dead at the Marin Vet’s, the Greek Theatre and BCT in Berkeley, the Kaiser and the Coliseum in Oakland, the Civic Center in San Francisco, and the Frost Amphitheatre at Stanford. Then there were the Jerry Band shows. It was Deadhead mecca.

Hopper (another Gomer) and I drove out to the west coast once we graduated. Well, we got most of the way there. We started in the south, where he lived, and drove through Chattanooga to Chicago, ate some deep dish pizza, and then carried on the Minnesota, where we stopped to see Bob Dylan and Tom Petty and the Dead. There was no pot at all at those shows as far as we could tell, but the t-shirt art was good, things like stealies with a famous silhouette of Dylan in the circle instead of the familiar 13-pointed lightning bolt, with the legend “It’s all right ma, I’m only dead.”

We made it to Mount Rushmore and through the Black Hills of North Dakota before I fell asleep at the wheel in Wyoming and drove Hopper’s new Honda civic off the road while Jerry sang “Dark Star crashes” in a voice like Elmer Fudd from the Greek shows in the summer of ‘84. We flew the rest of the way to San Francisco once we realized the unibody repairs were going to take too long.

A week in Gillette, Wyoming with nothing to do for excitement besides drop by the Dairy Queen convinced us it wasn’t worth waiting around for the work to get done. I had my head shaved by a local barber as a weird sort of act of atonement.

Once settled in the first Gomer place in Diamond Heights, we geared up for a road trip down to Ventura for summer Dead shows before finding out en route that Jerry had collapsed in a diabetic coma. He had recovered by December and the Dead played two major runs that month, a first set around mid-December and then a four-show end of yeasr run, my second chance to see the famous New Year’s event.

In ‘87 the Dead were back to their heavy touring schedule, and then they put out an album with a hit single, and then toured with Dylan again, this time backing him on his tunes. By now I felt like I had the routine down, and once again we had tickets for New Year’s. I made sure there was an extra for Cecilia.

I knew right away she was not like other girls

For You, The Stars
Chapter Three: Big Sister’s Clothes
Installment 2

We had great seats for that show. It was general admission and there were about 20 of us going, so we saved abour four or five seats each in about four or five rows. We all moved around between seats during the opening acts and between the sets, but Cecilia and I ended up sitting together for the bulk of the show.

We had both taken acid and though it wasn’t her first time she still knd of relied on me to guide her through the experience, especially considering that the whole acid-at-a-Dead show routine was new to her.

I specifically remember a moment when I suddenly felt less avuncular and more attracted to her. At one point she was sitting in one of the much closer rows we had saved and I caught her looking at me and when our eyes met she gave me a significant nod, like she was feeling it too.

I was still somewhat inexperienced with women. I had been turned down so often that I was surprised at how, in the recent past, so many flirtations seemed to be bearing fruit. I was beginning to learn to recognize a certain feeling - I’ll call it surety. There was just a point in this evening when I knew we were going to get together.

Some of it was logistical, the second set started at midnight to ring in the new year. The show wouldn’t finally wind down until after 2 pm, but BART stopped running around midnight. She had no ride back to Marin and when I asked what she was planning to do she said, “Can’t I stay at your place?”

Even that could have been innocent. We’d had lots of people crashing at our house, and not just the influx of college-aged Deadheads who knew we’d put them up for the new year’s run. I’d even had girls sleep on my futon innocently enough. She could have just slept over, but I knew it was going to be more than that.

I was barely thinking about Simone at all, except to note that she was very far away. I was definitely not thinking of my recent ethical pledges to myself to fly straight and stop messing around.

Cecilia was cute. Her older sister Bella was beautiful but Cecilia was more overtly sexy. There were tiny flaws in her looks - eyes too far apart, nose a bit too wide, shoulder a little too square, but who was I to complain? I was decent-looking little guy in mediocre shape with a smart mouth and glasses.

If we’d been the same age or coming from the same context, Cecilia would never have looked at me twice. It was only because I was the cool friend of her older sister that she saw me as a catch.

Cecilia liked to dress sexy. She wasn’t a Deadhead. She was a party girl. She liked Pink Floyd and the Dead all right, but she loved smoking pot and drinking beer most of all. She had tried acid and mushrooms but she liked ecstacy the best. She loved to go out dancing and she liked it when guys ogled her.

She dressed to be looked at: miniskirts and bare-midriff tops. She was moderately busty (a C cup, I later learned) and she wore bras that accentuated her bust. She almost never wore flats. Her skirts were stretchy and skin tight and her tops often matched them.

She wasn’t at all the type of girl I’d ever been with before. My college girlfriend from Vassar (I never managed to hook up with anyone on my own campus) had been an intellectual, a writer. Simone was getting her Ph.D. in English Lit. Cecilia was smart but she wasn’t booksmart. She didn’t like school and she didn’t really want to be perceived as smart. She wanted to be perceived as sexy, and she was good at that.

Her hair was shoulder length, honey blonde, and naturally so. She didn’t wear a lot of makeup but just enough to look naturally glowing. She wore teenybopper lip gloss and was often re-glossing her lips. She laughed at my jokes and I was falling for her hard.

Of course we end up spending the night on my futon. We kissed alot and messed around a little. I was surprised when she did not want to take off her bra. It was my first hint that she wasn’t as inhibited as her behavior implied. She let me undress her completely otherwise.

We did a lot of touching that night and lot of kissing, and a little licking. I wasn’t very aggressive, but I was suprised that I wasn’t able to get her off with my hand or my mouth. She had no problem getting me there.

We didn’t have “actual sex” that night. Cecilia wasn’t on the pill and I didn’t have any condoms. (Simone was on the pill by then, so I hadn’t need any for a while.)

She knew about Simone, at least in passing, but she waited for me to bring it up. I told Cecilia her that I was going to break up with her, that I had already cheated on her once and that I obviously wanted out. I said, “Don’t feel obligated to keep seeing me just because of that. It’s just something I have to do.”

Cecilia told me she would like to go out with me. “I’ll be your little sexy girl,” she said, which sounded a little weird to me but not necessarily in a bad way.

Around dawn the psychedelics were wearing off enough for us to fall asleep but we’d been kind of drifting and dreaming for a few hours by then, me with my arms around Cecilia. She was a few inches shorter than me, a few years younger than me. I wanted to possess her and to protect her.

We woke up a little afternoon and played the dangerous game of coitus interruptus. I told her that it wasn’t safe, that even if I came outside her something could leak out. Shesaid she wasn’t worried but I was.

Also, I was already dreading breaking up with Simone. I knew it was what I wanted to do, but I didn’t look forward to telling her and dealing with her anger or disappointment or whatever her reaction was going to be.

When we finally came out of my room, a few other Gomers were hanging around the living room next door. Nobody said anything about Cecilia spending the night. She went into our neglected kitchen and found a beer in the fridge. When she came back someone passed her the bong that was perpetually on our coffeetable. She looked at the gritty scum clinging to the inside of the red plastic tube and asked, “Would anyone mind if I washed this out?” Chad, Dave, Seth, Hopper and I looked at each other and laughed.

Chad said, “Be our guest.”

This became a running joke for us after awhile. I explained to her that we didn’t like the bong being dirty - we were just too lazy to clean it. The same thing went for the bathroom and the rug, for that matter.

Later in the day I took Muni downtown with Cecilia and saw her off on the bus to San Rafael. I was torn between the light buoyant feeling of starting a new fling and my fear of breaking the news to Simone. I had four days assuming I told her right after she got back from New York.

Easy as 1-2-3

For You, The Stars
Chapter Three: Big Sister’s Clothes
Installment 3

I was back at work on the second. Formally, I was the “studio assistant” for the architects, although no one, including me, could figure out what I was really doing there. Usually that job went to somebody planning to study architecture, like Dave’s friend who had set me up to take his place. For me it was an obvious dead end, but a job’s a job.

I liked most of the architects. They dressed better than lawyers and accountants. I think they were expected to show some flair for design and style. The men wore italian cut suits and interesting ties. The women dressed to kill.

They took Halloween very seriously there, all part of their “I’m not just a professional… I’m creative” self-image. They’d come to work in costume and have a parade down Market Street on the lunch hour. My boss had come in, for instance, the previous Halloween as some strange sort of gaucho. He had the whole leather south-american cowboy thing going on and he spoke only in an unrecognizable pidgen, even to his boss, all day.

One of the hot young women architects I had a slight crush on came in as some bald female Star Trek character, in a form fitting red uniform. She actually went down to meet a client to discuss their master plan in her full regalia.

When they saw that I hadn’t come in costume the architects figured one out for me. They bought some peach colored sheets (couldn’t find saffron), a skin-head wig, and a plastic toy tambourine and voila! I was a hare krishna. I ended up leading the parade dancing and twirling and rhythmically thumping my drum. It was the most uninhibited the architects had seen me and a few warmed to me then.

In general I would start out any new job or situation playing it cool, trying not to make waves or be noticed too much. Once I began to feel more comfortable, I might share a few sarcastic asides with my nearest neighbors. By the time I was completely settled in, though, I’d be a full-on snideness engine, and it wasn’t unusual for people to comment on the change.

“You seemed so nice— kind of boring, when you first showed up.” That kind of thing.

So, as I said, I was never going to be an architect. I wasn’t planning to be an architect. I didn’t know any of their jargon, like calling large sheets of tissue paper “flimsy.” I did find it interesting watching them plan building and clash with contractors. On some projects they started building a legal case for the inevitable law suits from day one. Schedules would get bollixed up and landscaping would be done one time and then other contractors would drive trucks over new-laid turf and tear it up. There were shouting matches on the phone.

I found that most of the architects weren’t too interested in computers. Many of them had chosen this career because of their enjoyment of drawing and other handicrafts. Computer-aided design was coming in and it was not looked upon favorably. One of them retreated into making styrofoam models of projects nearly full time. He’d always been good at that and he’d do it for all the projects and that way he could work with his hands and not a computer keyboard.

I had no art-school illusions to shatter, though, and took to the computer thing right away. I’d been exposed to minicomputers in high school and college, but this was my first crack at a personal computer. It was a Wyse machine running DOS three-point-something. The main program I worked with was Lotus 1-2-3. My boss would ask me to make up spreadsheets for him to track various patterns. I figured out how to make macros to fold and unfold the columns and rows different ways to print multiple reports of the same data.

The greatest thing about the PC was that it bought me time. These guys had no idea how I did what I did on it and they were terrible at estimating how long it should take. I didn’t disabuse them of their overestimates.

“Can you get this back to me by tomorrow afternoon?”

“Sure thing.”

Then I’d whip up the solution in 15 minutes and goof off for the next day and a half.

I figured out after a while that I could take long lunches, disappear for hours on end and generally they’d assume I was in some other part of the office (I also had filing and mail delivery and other office-slave duties to attend to).

My first day back at the office I called Cecilia at her sister’s house up in Marin. We talked for a few hours. We were still in that getting to know each other early phase of a new relationship.

Back home that evening I spent another few hours on the phone with her at night. Our house had just one phone. No one had cell phones then. I’d sit sprawled on the stairs and we’d talk so long, like teenagers, that I’d eventually be falling asleep while we were talking.

The next day Simone got back and called me at work. I asked her to come over that evening, told her I had something I wanted to talk about.

But doing that you break down in tears

For You, The Stars
Chapter Three: Big Sister’s Clothes
Installment 4

I took a three-hour lunch that day. I could feel my anxiety like a knot in the pit of my stomach. I wandered over the tenderloin and went to one of those peep show arcades where a woman strips on a little stage and you pay to have a metal shutter open for a few minutes to give you a view through a window. Here in San Francisco the windows had glass in them. In New York most of them were open and you could reach through and negotiate tips to touch different body parts. Here you could request certain acts and slip bills through the edge of the glass.

I used up all my small bills and then walked around some more aimlessly. When I got back to the office I had a pink message slip on my desk. Cecilia had called. I called her back and told her I would be talking to Simone that evening. She didn’t seem to understand or care what the big deal was. “I think Simone is in love with me,” I said. “Too bad,” said Cecilia. “I’ve got you now.”

When I got off the N-Judah after work I didn’t know whether to go over to Simone’s place or have her over to mine. I didn’t want to make a scene in public but one way or another the exit was going to be awkward. I walked up and sat on the stairs and dialed her number from memory. “Why don’t you come over here?” I heard myself saying.

Then I got up and paced back and forth in the living room. No one else was around, thank God. I didn’t have the slightest desire to get high.

When Simone arrived I went down to let her in and when she kissed me in the doorway I kissed her back. I had forgotten how nice she smelled and felt in my arms. We went up to my room and sat on the futon. I didn’t see any point in hemming and hawing so I avoided the whole “How was the rest of your stay in New York?” and “How was your flight back?” chitchat and came right out with it:

“I don’t think things are working out.”

“What do you mean.”

“I don’t think we should keep seeing each other.”

“You’re breaking up with me?”

“I just don’t feel like things are going in the right direction?”

“What are you trying to say?”

“I want to end this.”

“You don’t get to decide when we break up!”

“I’m just telling you how I feel. I can’t fake my feelings.”

“Where did this come from? Can’t we try to work things out? Give me a chance?”

She was starting to cry.

“I don’t know…” I said.

“Come on, we can make it work. What’s the problem? You never said anything was wrong.”

“It’s just—” I didn’t know how to say it. “I don’t love you.”

“I never said you had to love me.”

“But you always say you love me,” I said. “That’s not going to work in the long run.”

“Fuck the long run!” she said, in that New York way that I used to find so appealing, but she was blubbering now and her island accent was getting thicker. Her eyes were read and it was getting easier to find her unattractive.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Fuck you!”

“I don’t know what to say…”

“Let me try. Give me a chance.”

That was when I started crying too.

The conversation went on and on in that vein. She wore me down and I wasn’t being honest about either Dannie or Cecilia, so I couldn’t really make a believable case for how I knew for sure that things weren’t going to work out.

In the end I agreed that we could try to make it work, but I tried not to sound too encouraging. She asked me to give her a hug and I held her, and she she walked herself downstairs and let herself out.

I had hoped for a clean break and instead I had had the whole breakup conversation and still no freedom. It felt like shit. Now I did feel like getting high.

I was nursing the bong with the music cranked loud when Dave got home. He went right to the stereo and turned down the song.

Dear Mr. Fantasy Play as a tune Something to keep us all Happy.

I just sat there not saying anything and Dave said, “What’s up?”

“I just broke up with Simone?”

“You did? Just now?” Dave knew about Cecilia. We’d discussed my dilemma, but he didn’t know I had come to a decision. It was all happening pretty fast.

“Actually,” I said. “I tried to, but she wouldn’t let me. She wants us to try to make it work out.”

“Uh-oh,” said Dave.

“I know.”

I didn’t talk to Simone the next day. We had agreed to take a little time to talk. I told Cecilia that things were dragging out. She wanted to come visit and we agreed that she could come and stay the weekend with me.

I couldn’t stand the feeling of knowing it was going to end with Simone thinking it might continue. It wasn’t till a few years later when I was crying and asking someone else entirely if there wasn’t maybe the slightest chance that the spark would come back and things would be okay and this other future woman agreed that sure, she supposed, nothing was impossible— it wasn’t till then that I realized just what it felt like to have absolutely no say in the end of your relationship.

Yellow submarine

For You, The Stars
Chapter Three: Big Sister’s Clothes
Intallment 5

I started making another mix tape for Bella. My hidden message this time would be something about how even though I was now going out with her little sister, I still had my eye on her. That I would treat Cecilia right, but that she was a dalliance, someone I didn’t take as seriously as I took Bella.

I thought about the letters I sometimes wrote to Bella and the more frequent ones to Maura. I wondered when I started signing all my letter “Love, Daniel.” I know when I was a teenager I felt funny writing “Love, Daniel.” I figured it was supposed to mean something, or that I should only write that to my lovers, but all the other closers we were taught as children sounded hopelessly formal. “Sincerely, Daniel” or “Yours truly, Daniel.” (It was never Dan. My parents had never called me Dan and I didn’t even respond to it if people made the mistake of shortening my name.) Then I noticed that girls wrote “Love, their name” all the time. I guess I started doing it too.

Making mix tapes was as real art form before you could do it all digitally. You had to pick the songs, either in advance or winging it. You had to set the levels differently for each album. You had to cue up the LP and the recording deck and sometimes even fade in or out. You had to have just the right beat or half a beat or beat and a half from one song to the next. I really enjoyed the craft of putting together an excellent montage of songs.

I cued up the one song I knew was going to go on this tape and listened to Elvis Costello singing

And it’s easier to say, “I love you” Than “Yours sincerely,” I suppose All little sisters Like to try on big sister’s clothes Big sister’s clothes Big sister’s clothes

Bella was no dummy. I knew she’d get the wink.

Making the mix took my mind of the next step with Simone. I felt like I was just marking time till I could tell her, “OK, we tried— it’s still not working,” and finally pull the plug for good.

Dave came home from his job on the peninsula while I was still making my tape and I took a break from it. We went to the corner sub shop, the Yellow Submarine, that had obviously been named and decorated in the ’70s but had long since passed into the hands of an immigrant family.

We used to laugh at their first-in last-out sandwich preparation method. You would go in there and order your eggplant parmigiana sub, or whatever, and they’d start making it for you, and then someone else would come in and order a sandwich and they’d put yours aside and start making the new one. This could literally go on for hours.

They also made these thick round french fries that seemed fantastic the first time you had them, especially if your were stoned. But then over time you realized they were greasy and flaccid and nasty.

Worst of all, every night they poured out some water or grease or something scummy and it ran down the sidewalk from their door to the curb. There was a permanent rainbow slick there for whatever it was they dumped out every night.

We knew better by then to have or dinners there but it was the nearest place and the quickest if no one interrupted your sandwich, and it was already dark outside.

Walking back around the corner to our place, with the grease soaking through our paper bags, I told Dave that I was trying to figure out when to tell Simone it was really over.

“Are you going to tell her about Cecilia?”

“I’d rather not.”

“Hmm.”

“You know what really worries me?”

“What?”

“I’m afraid that Simone will never meet anyone as great as me ever again. I may have set her up for a lifetime of disappointment. That’s a huge burden of guilt for me to carry.”

“Don’t worry,” said Dave. “You’re not that great.”

The grind

For You, The Stars
Chapter Four: Sweet Child o’ Mine Installment 1

At work the next day I tried calling Simone, thinking that maybe I could let her down over the phone using the office as a neutral context. Fortunately for my immortal soul, she wasn’t at home and I wasn’t craven enough to break up with her on her answering machine.

I went out for another three hour lunch, this time walking down Market toward the Civic Center and spending twenty bucks in a striptease joint paying disadvantaged women with nicotine breath to sit on my lap and grind while nibbling on my ear. That didn’t help.

When I got home from work I called Simone again and this time she picked up on the first ring.

“It’s not going to work,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t think I can keep seeing you?”

“But you said you would try to make it work!”

“Well, I’ve been thinking about it and I just don’t feel like we should be together anymore.”

She started crying again. I think she did some more pleading with me. It was hugely painful. I was just not used to being the bastard. I’d cried when my Vassar girlfriend had broken up with me, but at least then I had the moral advantage and could act like the wronged one.

I said something lame about how we could try to still be friends and she said “Fuck you,” and hung up. At least the deed was done.

I sat down that evening with Dave to try to work on a song we were writing. Neither of us had any real idea how to write a song. My guitar had been in my closet for months. He could strum some chords and we were literally just picking changes almost at random and I guess somewhat by ear.

I was supposed to be writing the lyrics but everything I came up with was either pretentious or unsingable or both.

I told Dave that I had finally picked the scab with Simone and that at least I didn’t have to go on lying to her anymore. I also told him that Cecilia was going to be staying in my room on the weekend.

“Good,” he said. He liked Cecilia and he wasn’t averse to checking her out as eye candy. Being looked at was her specialty.

Voices carry

For You, The Stars
Chapter Four: Sweet Child o’ Mine
Installment 2

Cecilia showed up on Friday night. She’d had her brother-in-law drive her into the city. We went out to eat at a New Orleans-themed place in my neighborhood that was kind of loud and boisterous. We sat at the bar where we could watch the line cooks shuck oysters and yell at each other.

We’d been spending a lot of time on the phone during the week. I’d call her from my office and we’d talk for over an hour sometimes. Then we’d stay on the phone in the evening until we were falling asleep. We were having those conversations you have at the beginning of any relationship: talking about our childhoods, comparing likes and dislikes. Our tastes in music were compatible. Cecilia tended toward more trendy stuff: pop music that was on MTV, glam bands and hot rockin’ guys.

But we both liked psychedelic druggy music and we both liked dance music. We agreed to go out dancing on Saturday night, either at DNA or DV8. And she wanted to go to the Haight during the day on Saturday, which was fine by me. It was still one of my favorite places to hang out on the weekend.

That night, lying on my futon together, we talked about my breakup with Simone. I told her about how I’d messed around with Dannie and kept it a secret from Simone, and how much I didn’t like lying. “Let’s have an open relationship,” I said, and Cecilia agreed right away.

In a way, I may have been trying to hang onto her by holding on loosely, knowing that she was better looking than me and might be tempted to fool around. She told me that she had cheated on all of her previous boyfriends, including her most recent guy back on the east coast who looked like Ken what’s his name from the hit Wise Guys tv show. That guy had been the love of her life and she had still cheated on him.

“You won’t be able to cheat on me,” I reassured her. “Because you can do anything you want.” We did agree that we would be honest at least about what was going on. If we were fooling around with someone else we’d tell the truth about it. I was tired of lying and I was starting to think that honesty was more important than sexual fidelity. If we got wrapped up in somebody else and things were getting serious enough to threaten what we had going, then we’d see it coming and we’d deal with it.

This sounded like a much better plan. We both were thinking that she was probably the more likely one to go outside the relationship, but I liked knowing that if an opportunity presented itself I could pursue it without feeling guilty. Also, I wondered if it would take some of the appeal away from cheating if Cecilia knew it wouldn’t be against the rules. She was an incorrigible rule breaker and she seeemd to enjoy a borderline illicit, teasing, jailbait kind of playacting.

For instance, she always wanted to be viewed as younger than she really was. I was 23 and she was 20, but she wanted people to think she was 18 or even younger. I told her I didn’t really want people to think I was going out with a teenager but she said she was already worried that she was losing her looks and her best days were behind her.

“I doubt I’ll even make it to 30,” she said.

“Now you’re being melodramatic.”

That also explained why she kept her bra on in bed that first night. As we made love for the first time without my previous relationship in my head, she disrobed entirely and she showed me where she thought her breasts were assymetrical.

“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “They’re perfect,” I lied. “You’ve got a great body.” (That was the truth, even with the minor imperfections, like her boxer’s shoulders.)

She also thought her breasts were no longer as perky as they had been a few years before. That was possible - they were on the big side and probably had begun that long slide, but they still seemed magnificent to me. She was also self-conscious about how they flattened out when she lay on her back.

“That’s what they’re supposed to do!” I said. “It’s only those fake-ass porn star breasts that stick up like cupcakes even when you’re lying down.” I was glad, at least, that she felt safe enough to share her insecurities with me.

When we woke up in the morning there were people hanging out in the living room, talking pretty loud. The sound always carried right into my room, separated only by glass doors covered with in a thin tapestry. Cecilia wanted to fool around and I told her I didn’t want people to hear us.

She was kind of into that “fear of being caught” thing. It seems like a lot of women were. That had been one of Simone’s top fantasies too. One time Simone and I had gone down to southern California to stay in a friend’s beach house and to fulfill her secret fantasy we’d gone out onto the sand to fuck out of doors. I remember some kind of security guard coming by with a flashlight and being totally frozen with fear that we’d get caught or arrested. Simone had gotten incredibly wet and told me that it had really turned us on when the light went by.

“Sure,” I’d said. “It was a turn on for you, but it was my white ass sticking up in the air.” Afterward we seeemed to have sand in a lot of hard-to-reach places but Simone had really appreciated the fact that I’d been a good sport about it.

I guess Cecilia got that same kind of thrill from the possibility of being caught. She played with me to get me up but I refused to get on her, so she started manipulating me and playing with my balls. It got really hard for me not to make noise. She stuck her hand in my mouth and started really working on me. I tried to hold back but that just prolonged the feeling and finally she got me to the point of no return. I used all my effort not to make any sound. I felt like I was on the verge of passing out from the pleasure. When I was finished, Cecilia showed me the deep groove my teeth had made in the side of her forefinger.

“Sorry,” I whispered to her. “No, I think it’s cool,” she marveled.

“Do you want breakfast?” I asked her.

“What I’d really like is a beer,” she said.

These boots were made for walking

For You, The Stars
Chapter Four: Sweet Child o’ Mine
Installment 3

After she had her beer and I had loaded us a few bowls, we hopped in the shower where I was able to repay her for the stimulating “massage” she’d given me. Back in my room she took her sweet time getting dressed, admiring herself in my full length mirror.

“Are you ready, boots?” I said, quoting the intro to the Nancy Sinatra song. Cecilia didn’t know the reference and thought I was calling her “Boots.” She liked the sound of it and suggested that I could use it as a nickname for her if I liked.

We went for brunch to the Pork Store cafe. It was one of those beautiful winter days in San Francisco, so we walked the thirty or so blocks. I had a huge breakfast, the one with the pork chops, and Cecilia had pancakes. She had to maintain just the tiniest amount of babyfat and no more.

Then we went to some of the clothing stores in the area. She wanted to buy me some new things. Cooler belts, for example. She tried to get me to buy leather pants but I convinced her I couldn’t pull that off. She found a few shirts she said would look good on me. One was a tan and olive rayon shirt with a paisley pattern. I’d never owned rayon before but I liked the way the fabric felt.

We also shopped for stuff for her. She was always looking for new miniskirts, new outfits. In one of the stores, though, a guy employed there, a tall mascara wearing rocker type, seemed to be trying to peek through the curtain to see her in the changing room. That was not cool and I ended up standing near the curtain trying to shame him into shoving off.

Another store had a large changing area for women with little curtained rooms surrounding it. I went in with Cecilia to watch her try stuff on. I was feeling horny and I knew how much she liked danger, so I kept playing with her breasts, trying to get her nipples hard, and cupping her puss, rubbing my finger back and forth. I don’t know if we were giggling a little or what, but an employee came into the large changing area and told me that I should wait outside. That was a little too close for comfort.

We took our time walking back toward the Gomer homestead. Actually, the “commune,” as it were was spread over two houses in the UC Med neighborhood, a block apart from each other. My house was slightly smaller, housing myself, Hopper, Dave, and Chad. The bigger house up the hill contained the shared kitchen, dining room, a large living room with our joint cable connection, and the pets, a dog and cat. I was allergic to both, so I didn’t hang out over there too much beyond the shared meals.

The big house was where Bo, Suzy, Seth, and Belinda and Gardner lived. Belinda and Gardner had been a couple since their high school years in Tennessee. They had been apart briefly when Gardner came east for college and Belinda went to Oberlin to study wicca or womyn’s studies or something like that. Then Gardner dropped out of school and got a job in Trenton but still hung around till his classmates graduated and near the end of that time Belinda came to stay with him and then made the subsequent trip west with the first wave of Gomers, becoming one herself in the process.

The big house was also where the GLEE ledger, tracking how much each of us owed each other, was kept. I’d managed to have a positive balance, but not too positive, since a few months after I started my fulltime job. For those first few months I had kept the legal summarizing gigs on the side, effectively working sixty or seventy hours a week, which had enabled me to get caught up relatively quickly. That transitional period had been hell, though, and I swore I’d never do it again. Nonetheless, every time I changed jobs for the rest of my life I always experienced a painful grinding of gears just like that.

While I was explaining all this to Cecilia I told her that she should come over to the big house for one of our crazy group dinners. She said OK, although she warned me that she thought most of the Gomers were huge nerds. “You’re kind of a nerd too, you know,” she said. “Hey, I thought I was cool.”

“I like Dave and Seth too,” she said, changing the subject.

While we were walking and talking like this toward the park, around the time we passed the Red Vic and I was explaining the funky movie theatre to Cecilia I spotted, about a block or so up ahead, Simone walking straight toward us, talking to one of her girlfriends, a tall Latina whom I really didn’t like that much.

She hadn’t noticed us yet. I wasn’t really sure what to do, but I figured I’d better keep walking. I told Cecilia out of the side of the mouth that the two women about a block now ahead of us coming our way were Simone and a friend of hers.

“She’s pretty,” said Cecilia, who had never seen her.

When we were about 20 paces apart Simone looked up from her conversation and saw us, holding hands. There was shock in her eyes and I knew her well enough by then to see that she was seriously upset. Her face was turning red and I was trying to figure out whether to stop or not, whether to greet her or not, when suddenly we had passed each other and I didn’t look back. When we were about two blocks apart she may have yelled something at us but I couldn’t make it out.

When we got back to my place, none of my roommates were around. This was our chance to make love without having to keep so quiet. As we were taking our clothes off, Cecilia went over to close the venetian blinds on the one small window in my room. I admired her body from behind, the dimples on her ass, and I said, “Curves by Einstein.” Hungry for compliments, she filed that one away.

As we were making out on my futon, the phone rang. Since there was no one else around and no answering machine, I got up, pulled my boxer shorts back on, and went to the stairs where the phone was attached.

“Hello.”

“Daniel, you fucking asshole!”

“Simone?”

“Liar!” She slammed down the phone, making my eardrums ring.

One of us, one of us

For You, The Stars
Chapter Four: Sweet Child o’ Mine
Installment 4

Simone wasn’t the only one who gave me a hard time about dumping her for Cecilia. The other Gomers had all liked Simone and Belinda was outspoken about how I had dumped an intellectual for a party girl and how shallow I was to do it. This pissed me off. Who was she to police my feelings?

Part of it was Belinda’s crunchy-granola feminism. She didn’t like that Cecilia dressed so provocatively. She figured that was proof enough that I had chosen a partner for the wrong reasons. Cecilia tried to be friendly but we stopped going over to the other house together after a few cold receptions.

Meanwhile, Simone continued to express her displeasure toward me. Back in the office on Monday, I picked up the phone at my cubicle and before I could say “hello” or identify myself I was greeted by Simone screaming in my ear: “Stay out of my fucking neighborhood!” Then she slammed down her receiver.

I told the architects what was going on and they found it kind of amusing but I was a little worried that she was becoming deranged. I asked the receptionist not to put any calls through to me but to just take messages.

I even went over to the half-empty part of the office to make a long-distance call to my mom. She and I would never openly discuss sex but I did tell her that Simone had been in love with me and that I hadn’t reciprocated the feelings. My mom spoke euphemistically, saying, “Well, sometimes, when a woman gets intimate with a man, it can be difficult to let go.” It was kind of obvious but I felt like I was running out people who were willing to take my side and your mother is always on your side.

A few days after the second phone call I got a letter in the mail written in Simone’s childlike hand. Inside was a folded piece of paper from a notepad. Out of it fell the torn up pieces of a picture of the two of us together from the previous summer. In case I didn’t fully understand the message of a torn up photo, she had also scrawled a one-word message on piece of yellow paper:

SCUM!

Cecilia and I were still spending a few hours on the phone every day, some during the day while I was at the office pretending to work on spreadsheets and some at night as I sat on the stairs till I was too tired to keep my eyes open. We did that stupid “You hang up first” thing, or we’d ask each other, “Are you still awake.”

We agreed that I would come up and spend the next weekend at her sister’s place. I hadn’t met her sister or brother-in-law yet, nor her neice, of course. To get up to her neck of the woods I had to take the N-Judah downtown and then catch a bus to San Rafael that left once an hour. I could have brought my bag of clothes to work on Friday and left directly from there but I figured I’d get an early start Saturday and that would be just as good.

In the morning I was downtown by 9 am but I missed the bus by minutes. I thought about going to the Psychedelic show, which was nearby, and maybe pick up a box of whippets and a dispenser, when a moderately attractive woman approached me and asked if I’d like to take a personality test.

I’d seen these people hanging around this area before. They were scientologists from the nearby temple or clubhouse or whatever they called it. I was bored, so I said, sure. I’ve always been a sucker for quizzes and puzzles.

She took me to their building and sat me down in a waiting room before mumbling something and running off. I picked up a comic book that turned out to be about how we’re all traumatized in the womb when our parents have sex during our mother’s pregancies. It had a strangely clinical, graphica cartooning style, almost like a coloring book. The whole place seemed funny. The cute girl came back with a sheaf of paper and a pencil and told me to take the multiple-choice quiz. She’d be back in 10 minutes.

It took much less time than that to finish the quiz. Most of it sounded like vague psychobabble. “Do you ever worry” kind of stuff. I tried to answer it honestly because I was curious about what the results would be. It was tempting to game the test and try to figure out what they were gunning for, but even though I didn’t have any faith in their system, which I considered a cult, I did have in the back of my mind a desire to diagnose myself and look for answers and solutions to thing like anxiety and why life was sometimes harder for me than I thought it ought to be.

After finishing the quiz I sat for another three or four minutes until my recruiter came back. She sat down with a key and “scored” my answer sheet. Then she looked at a table and plotted some points on a grid that was supposed to show me how I stacked up in a number of mental and personality areas. The grid was set up with a normal median axis in the middle and you could score higher or lower than that average point in about five or six different categories.

Wonder of wonders but I was in real trouble! Turned out I was barely normal at all. I only skirted the break-even point in two categories and I was well into the negative in the rest. This almost made me laugh out loud at their audacity. With an egotistical neurotic like me they could easily have convinced me that their system was accurate by suggesting that I was seriously deficient in two or even three categories as long as they were willing to score me high or at least neutral in the rest, but they had way overplayed their hand.

The next step was a sales pitch. With my dangerous levels of negativity or whatever they called it, I should start immediately by taking one of their introductory courses, for a fee naturally, and consider buying some strange electrical contraption that would help me become “clear,” I think was the term. She outlined a whole curriculum I’d need to pursue to get my head on straight. At this point I was looking at my watch because I didn’t want to miss the next bus too.

I thanked the girl for letting me take the test and said I wanted some time to think about it but she was strangely reluctant to show me the way out. She asked me if I would speak with someone else. I still had nearly half an hour and I didn’t want to make a scene so I said sure.

I was ushered into another room where a pimply guy about my age wearing an ill-fitting outfit that looked a bit like a navy dress-white uniform sat me down to talk. He began by flattering me. Instead of dwelling on my troublesome scores, he admitted that I was a higher calibre person than they usually came across and that I might be cut out for their elite leadership organization.

“Would I get a sailor suit too?” I asked him, but he didn’t seem to get the joke. In fact, most of the people I’d met in the center had a kind of glazed lack of affect. They didn’t pick up on my sarcasm at all, and sarcasm was my primary mode of expression back then. “Yes,” he said, pointing proudly at the gold braid on his too-short sleeve cuff and the bars on his too-loose collar. He showed me photos of a yacht or cruiser that the organization apparently owned and told me how their founder, whom he called Dr. Hubbard, had modeled the eliter organization after the U.S. Navy.

At this point I was getting somewhat creeped out. I started making excuses about having to catch my bus. “There’ll be another bus,” he interrupted me, sounding like an automaton. “I don’t want to be any later,” I said.

In the end they asked for a phone number where they could follow up and, feeling flustered, instead of just writing down a false one I wrote the number of the larger Gomer house, figuring I wouldn’t be hanging out there much.

When I got back to the bus stop in the tenderloin the bus was idling and after I got on and paid my fare it closed its doors and immediately pulled away from the curb. I felt like I had just escaped by the skin of my teeth. I kept shuddering about the weird feeling those people had given me, preaching that their system would resolve my personal problems and make me feel whole and productive with apparently zero awareness of how creepy and unappealing it was making them.

Where do we go now?

For You, The Stars
Chapter Four: Sweet Child o’ Mine
Installment 5

The directions I had were pretty good and once I got off the bus I only had to walk a few blocks along a rustic road with no sidewalk to get to Cecilia’s sister’s house. I let myself in the gate and rang the doorbell and her brother-in-law, Todd, let me in.

He was a rangy guy in his late-thirties with coke-bottle glasses. He told me Cecilia was downstairs in her room and asked if I’d like anything to drink. “What are you having?” I asked. “I’m just opening a bottle of wine,” he told, and I said that sounded fine.

Laurie was in the kitchen making dinner.

“Hi, Daniel,” she said. “We’ve heard so much about you.”

It felt weirdly like meeting someone’s parents, although they weren’t that much older then me

He took me down to the basement, past me his shop equipment, and showed me where Cecilia’s little one-room in-law apartment was. It had a bathroom and a shower and a little high window that was at ground level.

“I see you’ve met Todd,” she said. “He’s cool. This weekend we should get him break out his gigantic bong. Laurie doesn’t like him to smoke pot so much but he will if we encourage him.”

I sat on her bed and she went over to the boombox on her dresser. “Do you like Guns ‘n’ Roses?” she asked me. I told her I wasn’t sure. In those days I read all the music magazines and all the local alternative weeklies. I subscribed to Spin and I had a pretty good idea of what bands were around. I seemed to recall a trend of L.A. hard-rock bands that were punkier than the hair-metal bands on MTV. They still had the glam thing going on but they were influenced by the Sex Pistols and maybe the Ramones and probably also the SST hardcore bands like Black Flag.

She put on a cassette and I could hear why she liked the music. For one thing it definitely rocked and the guitar sounded great. I wasn’t that into Axl’s voice but I could see where it might appeal to her. One of the song’s had a chorus that went “Where do we go/Where do we go now” and Cecilia told me how she thought that was the central issue for teenage lovers.

She scooted next to me on the bed. “You know how you’re always looking for someplace where you can get away from everyone and just be together?”

“Yeah,” I said. “That sounds about right.”

“I mean you end up in a car or in a room at your friend’s house, but it’s this constant struggle.”

I just nodded while looking at her brown eyes. I kissed her. After we made out for awhile, she said, “Let’s go up and see if we can help out in the kitchen.” It’s funny. Even though Cecilia cultivated this rebellious image and seemed like she couldn’t give a damn what anyone thought, she still had better manners, a better domestic sense than I did. I’d just as soon have sat down there till we were called up to eat. I was lazy. I didn’t want to help set the table although I’d been brought up right and I knew it was the polite thing to do.

And it wasn’t just that this was her sister’s house and that she was living with them and that she wanted to stay on their good side or something. It’s just that she was a woman and had been trained from childhood in those graces that had somehow eluded me so far.

We went up and actually the table was already set. Dinner was nice, something simple with chicken and the white wine that Todd had opened. I didn’t know much about wine then but it was something from Napa.

After dinner (I helped clear the table), Todd went over to the fireplace and brought something back from the mantlepiece. It was a carved, hinged rosewood box. He opened it and took out a little baggie, a bic lighter, and some rolling papers.

“Oh, I should brought my stash,” I said.

“No, it’s no problem,” said Todd. “We don’t smoke it that much anymore, but what the hell— it’s Saturday.”

He quickly rolled a neat pinner, lit it, and passed it to me. I took a hit and passed it to Laurie, she did the same and passed it to Cecilia, who bogarted it for a while and then gave it back to Todd. On the second pass Laurie declined and went back to cleaning up in the kitchen. The three of us snoked it down to a roach.

“It’s more comfortable in the living room,” said Cecilia. We went over there and Todd put on some music, an LP by Joy of Cooking. “We should have a hootenanny,” said Todd. “What do you mean?” I asked him. “You know, a little talent show.”

“I don’t have any talents,” I told him.

“Come on,” said Cecilia. “It will be fun.”

Laurie came into the living room and Todd said, “It’s a hootenanny!” I was kind of dreading it. I’d just met these people. I was pretty baked and I didn’t want to make an ass of myself. Todd got a banjo out of the hall closet and played a fairly passable version of “Oh, Susanna” without turning off the record. Laurie sang a Cat Stevens song, “Longer Boats” or something, again with the contrasting music playing in the background.

Cecilia and I decided to do some “ice dancing” in our sockfeet. We pretended to ballroom dance while sliding around the hardwood floor loosely in time with the music on the stereo. We were laughing and it turned out I was having a pretty good time.

“Can we go in the hot tub tonight?” said Cecilia. “It costs about $20 every time you turn on the jets,” she said to me in a loud stage whisper that everyone could here. “Sure,” said Todd. “Don’t worry about the cost.” Laurie didn’t seem as keen on the idea but I’d never been in a hot tub.

This was in a way a kind of mythical California experience for me. I was going to soak in a hot tub in Marin County, naked with a bunch of near strangers, plus my girlfriend. I tried to imagine what the me of several years earlier, an uptight college student with east-coast attitudes, would have thought if I could have pictured myself now with a beautiful sex honey-blonde girlfriend. I was hoping I wouldn’t get inappropriately aroused but I had to admit that a soak in their outdoor tub on the deck under the stars sounded pretty good fun.

Todd went out to get the heat going and then came back in and lent me one of his bathrobes. Then Cecilia and I went down to her room to take a quick shower together so we wouldn’t get our sweat or grease in the tub, I guess. Todd’s robe was too big for, too long in the arms, but that didn’t matter. We went back upstairs to help Todd take the cover off the tub. “Does it really cost $20 a night to run this thing?” I asked him. “That’s about what the heating costs,” he told me. “But really, don’t worry about it. We probably would have used the tub tonight anyway.”

Cecilia and I put our robes on the deck chairs and then eased ourselves into the hot water. For the two seconds or so that I was naked and exposed to the cold night air I wasn’t actually all that self-conscious. I’d been losing weight lately and wasn’t as ashamed of my body as usual, and I figured nobody was exactly checking me out anyway.

We were sitting low in the tub, nearly up to our chins. We’d slip off the bench to put our heads entirely under and then come up and flip our hair back. My hair was down to my neck by then. Cecilia’s hair was shoulder length. It looked cool slicked back, sort of like a model.

Todd and Laurie came out, too their robes off, and got in the tub. Laurie was taller than Cecilia and somewhat lanky. She had pretty round breasts and I tried not to stare. She visibly relaxed as she sunk into the water. We all sat in the tub together companionably, looking up at the stars and rising or setting to adjust our body temperature. The steam from the tub made a somewhat warm zone above the water, but it was constantly whipping away and the fog was rolling in.

After about ten or fifteen minutes Laurie and Todd said they were going to bed and Todd asked us to turn off the heater and the jets and cover the tub when we went to bed. Their room was in the back of the house, so we noticed when their lights went out. I put my arms around Cecilia and kissed her. She reached down and held my cock in her hand.

“Fuck me, daddy.” she said.

I burst into tears.

I know you got soul

For You, The Stars
Chapter Five: Paid in Full
Installment 1

Cecilia did her best to comfort me. Neither of us understood why I’d gone to pieces like that. We chalked it up to the wine and the weed and the hot tub - you’re not supposed to mix them, after all - but I still felt shaky and unmanned by my sudden loss of control.

When I was back in the office I went to the repro room to make a personal call. More and more lately I’d been hanging out there, ostensibly to use the xerox machine or to sort mail, but really to hang out with the two young guys who made the bluelines.

Both of them were about my age and both had grown up right in San Francisco. Keith was a black guy, about my height, who was always teasing me. It took awhile for him to accept me as more than just an uptight college boy. Mike was this huge Samoan guy who was totally identified with African-American culture.

We sometimes shared the music we had going on our walkmans. Keith and Mike were almost strictly into rap. That was the first time I heard a song referred to as a “jam” without there being any jamming. I learned a lot of contemporary slang from those guys. “Don’t trip,” Mike would say if I overreacted to something, for example.

I found it amusing that words like jam and trip had made it from the hippie vocabulary over to the street. Keith always called me “homie,” another term I’d never heard before. He said it with a slight sardonic air, and I realized I didn’t really know what he meant by it when he up and asked me one day what did I think it meant.

“Does it mean ‘white guy’?” I asked him. He just laughed.

“Nah,” he said. “It means home boy.”

“Like someone from the ‘hood,” said Mike.

That made me feel cool, once I got over feeling stupid.

The three of us did share an interest in rap and other music. They tipped me off to cool stuff I’d never have encountered on my own, like Too $hort’s cassette-only releases straight out of Oakland, and I’d always be trying to find something from the classic rock world I thought would grab them.

We came together on Eric B. & Rakim. Those guys sort of exemplified the peak first wave of hip hop I’d been listening to in college, with its stripped down beats and straightforward rhymes: “fish/which is my favorite dish.” Twice a month we’d put on “Paid in Full” on the boombox in the repro room.

As the guys got more comfortable with me being around, and as I got a little shaggier and more inclined to hang out there, I started using their space to make my personal calls. There was less of a chance of someone coming by and interrupting me there. I still tended to call Cecilia from my desk because I needed to sit for long conversations like that, but for quickies, I could lean on the formica counter and use the phone there while they brought packages to the front window and handled requests for blueline reproductions.

I got Paulie on the phone. He was still the main guy I turned to with my most difficult problems. He just seemed wordly and matter-of-fact. He was willing to talk about anything. I remember one day in school, a couple of us were standing around on Washington Road chatting when he said, “Well, I’m going to go back to my room and jack off.”

Sure, he said it for effect, but I had no doubt he was telling the truth, and I admired his transparency. Paulie was also full of little aphorisms. If someone said “Feel free,” he’d reply. “No, feel expensive.”

Paulie was working now assistant managing some sort of industrial plant down in southern California. I got him on the phone and said, “Hey, Paulie. It’s Daniel. How you been? Have you got a minute?”

“Sure. What’s up?”

I told him about the hot tub incident. The weird way I’d burst out crying when Cecilia had said “Daddy.” I asked him if he had any ideas what that might be about.

“Sorry, man. Not really. But I wouldn’t worry about it. Emotions are good.”

“I know,” I said. “But I like to know where they’re coming from. Plus it didn’t feel very manly, crying in her arms like that.”

“She’s not going to think any less of you for it.”

That was true. She hadn’t even mentioned it the next day.

Paulie and I talked about some other stuff - a few common friends, how he was liking LA, and then I thanked him and let him get back to his work.

Keith asked me if I wanted to go smoke a doob during lunch and I said yes.

Went out for a ride

For You, The Stars
Chapter Five: Paid in Full
Installment 2

Keith parked his Hyundai in an alley near our office. He had the front windows tinted although he told me that it wasn’t legal. We’d get in his car and he’d drive around as we passed the joint back and forth. We both had jobs you could do easily while stoned. I kind of enjoyed xeroxing with my walkman on when I was baked.

Keith and I talked about music and women mostly, and also drugs. He was the one who told me that you shouldn’t eat when you’re high, because it “soaks it up” and you come down faster. He was also the first guy I ever heard referring to having an orgasm as “busting a nut.” I though that was a great expression.

One thing I really admired about Keith was that he would walk right up to women on the street and ask them out. “You never know if you don’t ask,” he would say.

Speaking of orgasms, I finally noticed that Cecilia wasn’t having any. I hated to admit it but I wasn’t always sure when or if a women had come. With me, it was pretty obvious. It’s not just that a girl could be faking it. It’s that there didn’t seem to be a clear cut “moment” sometimes. Also, each new woman seemed different. Often there would be a series of small climactic events but then finally a much bigger one. It was kind of embarassing to ask a girl if she’d come (yet), and I felt stupid no matter what the answer was.

With Cecilia I didn’t notice right away because she did the getting excited thing and then she’d pull away and say she was too sensitive, which I knew sometimes happened after an orgasm. As we got more experienced with each other’s bodies it became obvious to me that her pulling away would happen before she came. In fact, it seemed to happen just when she was on the verge.

She’d sometimes turn away from me and hide her face. I tried talking to her about it and she opened up to me slowly. Finally she told me she had never had an orgasm, not with a guy, not by herself.

“Not even masturbating?”

“I don’t masturbate.”

“You mean you’ve never even tried?”

“Well, I’ve tried.”

I tried to be really understanding about it. I felt guilty too. I was “getting my nut” every time and she never was? It sounded like the most frustrating thing in the world.

We tried everything. We tried creeping up on it with stealth. We tried running the barricade. We tried endless oral sex till my tongue and jaw muscles were hellishly cramped. We tried we fingering her in various ways. I bought her a vibrator. It was always the same. She’d get worked up, she’d get close, she’d get right on the verge, and then she’d freak.

One time we went to a play at Theatre Artaud, a funky place near Potrero Hill. I don’t remember what the play was about but one character delivered a long soliloquy on the singular joys of the “big O.” Cecilia just looked at me and whimpered.

Besides her inability to get off, our sex life was great. One time Cecilia actually admitted to me that she was more into being seen as sexy than she was into sex, but who could blame her, really? Despite that, or maybe because it was part of maintaining her image as a sexpot, she was a very giving lover. I had just to mention a fantasy to her and she’d fulfill it.

Like a lot of women, she didn’t love giving head, but she made a point of doing it from time to time without having to be asked. We’d take showers together in the little shower off of her room and she’d get down on her knees and blow me before we were done.

She liked the way I worshipped her body and she was happy to have me fondle her breasts when we were in bed together. The way she dressed, tight tops and sometimes bike shorts that showed her camel toe, I’d sometimes grab her body when we were sitting around her sister’s house. Then she’d complain about it. Of course, none of the women I’d ever been with had liked me grabbing their tits or their ass out of the blue. It was just interesting to see where she drew the line on being constantly desirable.

I sometimes wondered if her presence in the house was at all distracting to Todd or a problem for Laurie. I was’t kidding about the tights or incredibly tight pants she wore. “You could see everything,” as they say. I’m sure Todd appreciated the show but I wonder if that made him feel creepy, like lusting after the babysitter, which - come to think of it - is exactly what Cecilia was to him, not to mention family.

I was getting more and more bored at work. It was never a really meaningful job for me and the atmosphere was becoming less playful as the recession took hold and they started laying off architects. It seemed especially lame that they were hiring marketing people at the same time they were cutting the people who actually did the work of the firm.

Ironically, I was indispensable as the only person in the office who understood my spreadsheets. I got to be friends with a couple of the architects. They seemed really “grown up” to me at the time. Not old, exactly, but maybe middle aged. They were probably just pushing 40 at the time.

It seemed like nearly every Friday we had a going-away party for whoever had just been fired. We’d usually go to the Cadillac Bar or one of the other downtown restaurants that could handle large parties. The Cadillac served Mexican food. You could order a hamburger there but if you did your waiter would shout “Hamburger!” over the incredible din and the whole room would laugh at you.

The architects explained to me how the interior was designed to intensify the noise and make the place sound like a party. It was always painfully loud in there. We’d all have beers and margaritas with our lunch and then stumble back to the office and getting nothing done for the rest of the afternoon.

One time instead of heading back to the office the two architects I had gotten to be friends with took me barhopping instead. One of them even produced a bowl as we staggered between bars and got us stoned. We ended up sitting on a hill overlooking the perpetually unfinished Moscone Center.

They explained to me some of the endless wrangling that had gone into building that convention center and how it had ended up being built entirely below ground level.

“I thought they were going to put a building on top of the site,” I said.

“No, it’s just going to be like it is now.”

“It’s not so much a building as a taking up of space,” I said.

They told me I could be an architectural critic with lines like that.

We talked about the women in the office. There was this one “older” (mid-40s) women with a middle european accent and heavy makeup whom I always felt was flirting with me.

“She flirts with everybody,” they told me.

“Sometimes I think I’ll just grab her and drag her into a closet and do her,” I said, the margaritas talking.

“You should. She’d like that.”

On one of my weekends up in Marin I overslept on Monday morning and decided to blow off going into work. Instead I called in sick. It was a beautiful sunny day and with Todd and Laurie off to their jobs we had the whole place to ourselves. I helped a little with the baby and in the afternoon we did some nude sunbathing. I was really starting to like my body.

Cecilia sunbathed in the nude a lot. She wanted an all-over body tan. The back deck was sheltered so it wasn’t like anybody could see us, although I sometimes thought that she wouldn’t exactly mind being ogled by a peeping tom.

Cecilia even convinced Chad’s girlfriend Chelsea to sunbathe nude topless on the tiny little deck off of his room in our house in the city. We were hanging out in their room on the back deck one day and Cecilia asked if we minded if she took off her top. Chelsea said that sounded like a nice idea and asked the same question. Chad and I looked at each other, amused.

“No problem,” he said. Cecilia had nice tits but Chelsea was in another league entirely. I soaked up the sun and tried to fix the image of those swollen oversized orbs in my mind, filing them away for a later day.

Perfection

For You, The Stars
Chapter Five: Paid in Full
Installment 3

We liked Todd’s three-foot bong so much we went out and bought our own. We named it Max. You actually had to have someone else light it for you.

I was really enjoying having a girlfriend who was as into partying as I was, although it also felt a little unnerving at times realizing that I wasn’t the crazy one in the relationship. In the past I had relied on whomever I was with to hold the reins and suggest that maybe we should tone it down a bit. It felt weird being the relatively responsible one.

Cecilia had an ecstasy connection in Marin and we started doing some nearly every weekend. Usually we’d go out and dance at a club. I had tried x in college, snorting it painfully, but had mostly stuck to acid and mushrooms. I remembered PJ O’Rourke describing ecstasy as “St. Joseph’s Baby Acid.” It was a good dance drug, though. I had to give it that.

She liked to flirt with the doormen and bouncers at clubs. She knew the guys who worked the door at DV8, mostly huge black guys, and they didn’t act all that happy to meet me when she introduced me, even though she was vague about our relationship. She called me her friend.

This was part of the openness of our relationship. When we went out dancing we agreed that we could mix with other people and cruise around, although every time we seemed to end up sticking together at the end of the night. Also, she went out dancing with her girlfriends sometimes so she had had a chance to get to know this scene - and the guys who worked the doors at all the clubs.

I think she led them on terribly. One time she got us a ride with a bouncer name Wayne from one club to another. It was a two-seater Corvette, so Cecilia was on my lap. Wayne flirted with her shamelessly in front of me.

“When am I gonna get a little ‘legroom’?” he asked her, parting his massive thighs.

She just acted like she had no idea what he was talking about.

Wayne had driven us to a new club that had just opened. Cecilia was always trying to scam her way in without paying the cover fee. She could lie shamelessly and I think she wanted to feel like part of the “in” crowd.

A few weeks before she’d met some folks from LA while out with her girlfriends and one of them had said that he was the part owner of a new club down there. She was really taken with that idea and got it into her head that I could pretend to be a co-owner of that new club to get us both in. I was reluctant to do this because it just seemed so obviously false to me. She didn’t have that same inhibition or sense of embarassment.

We went up to the door and Cecilia introduced me. “He’s one of the owners of Celestial, that new club in LA?”

The guy at the door seemed bored and unimpressed.

“Tell them,” she said to me.

“Tell them what?”

“Oh, forget it.”

One weekend when we were hanging out at my place, we were curious about how it would feel to mix mushrooms and ecstasy. It turned out to be a pretty interesting feeling. More psychedelic than the typical MDMA trip but also more cozy and “safe” feeling than the typical hallucinogenic escapade.

We were also having beers, so we had to be real careful about not getting dehydrated.

About three hours into it Cecilia declared that she felt “perfect.” She perched on the back of a chair in the and said, “I don’t need to do anything. I’m perfect just like this.”

She did look radiant. Her face was beautifully blissful, turned toward the slanting rays of the sun filtering in though the living room windows.

Seth was hanging out with us, tripping too, and he seemed to get a real kick out of Cecilia’s perfection. He considered her eye candy and was always complimenting her on her looks, so having her frozen in front of him like a bird of paradise suited him just fine.

We never ended up mixing those two drugs again. At first Cecilia really wanted to. She couldn’t quite remember what it had felt like to be at that pure peak of experience, but she knew she had liked it better than anything. I was less sanguine.

I was thinking about drugs like heroin that made you feel so good that you’d inevitably get addicted. It just seemed to me that a feeling that made you want to sit there and do nothing and feel like you’d already accomplished all you wanted was too much of an illusion.

Somehow I convinced Cecilia to let it drop.

We thought about maybe dealing some of the x. A lot of people were looking for it and although it wasn’t hard to get, we could easily have become steady suppliers for people looking for a reliable source. Apparently one of Cecilia’s friends in Marin got it from her dad, who was huge drug dealer. There seemed to be a lot of nouveau riche drug barons up there.

I did the math over and over and couldn’t find a way to make any more than a pittance at the rates we were being charged. Either we’d have to mark up the pills ridiculously, in which case even our friends could probably get the ecstasy cheaper elsewhere, or we’d have to put up with a lot of legwork and distribution hassle for almost no profit.

Even getting our own drugs for free made it too expensive for everyone else. I realized that we weren’t far enough up the food chain to make it worthwhile and I didn’t really want to devote that much energy to being a drug dealer. It sounded great as a lucrative sideline, but I already had one annoying, low-paying job.

Birth of the cool

For You, the Stars
Chapter Five: Paid in Full
Installment 4

One night we were getting ready to go out and Cecilia asked me to roll a joint that we could offer to the owner of the club we were hitting, just to curry favor with him. While I didn’t enjoy posturing or pretending to be someone I wasn’t, for the most part I was willing to take her lead in how to relate to the management of these discos. If it got us into a VIP room or sped up our entrances when there was a line behind the velvet gate, then sure, I was happy to give away a joint’s worth of weed.

I rolled it up and stuck it in my pocket. One of Cecilia’s friends drove us to the club. When we got inside we split up like we ordinarily did to check out the scene and meet strangers. After about 45 minutes we ran into each other near the bar and Cecilia grabbed me and took me to the owner’s office.

On the way there we converged with the guy. He was in his mid-forties. Kind of short like me. Wearing a suit with an open collar. He didn’t seem too cheesy to me. Cecilia introduced me as her friend.

“Here,” I said, pulling the number out of my pocket and holding it out to him.

“No, thanks,” he said, waving it away and flinching.

When we got to his office and he closed the door, he said, “I can’t be seen accepting drugs from you in public.”

I handed over the joint and felt like an idiot. After that I was pretty bored with the conversation. The office was tacky and the guy didn’t seem to have that much going on.

It was obvious to me that he was trying to impress Cecilia. She never believed me when I told her that nearly every guy she met was trying to get into her pants (or, since she almost never wore underwear - couldn’t abide panty lines - into her skirt). She was almost deliberately naive, wanting to believe she was simply very popular, with men at least, and that everyone had the best of intentions.

To me, though, it was obvious. I was a guy. I knew how guys think. I wasn’t even especially jealous. We had this open thing. She could do what she wanted. I felt more protective than anything else. I felt like I needed to teach her about how the world really works. It was almost as if she was so disconnected from sex that she didn’t understand that her sexiness, her provocative ways of dressing and flirting, inevitably led me on.

Even though she was having no orgasms, our sex life continued to be very active. There was no real drop off as we settled into the familiarity of a post-infatuation relationship. In fact, for all of our openness, neither of us had yet slept with anyone else. I wasn’t trying all that hard myself, and I suspect that there wasn’t much appeal to it for Cecilia as long as she could get intention without giving up the sex that she wasn’t all that interested anyway.

That way she had me to come home to no matter way, which I gather was somewhat comforting. I may not have been as good looking as most of her other boyfriends, nor as buff and athletic, but I was feeling more confident of my looks: I was thinner, my hair was getting long, I was dressing better.

We used to joke that I made her smart and she made me cool. I didn’t have to do that much to make her smart. She was smart. I just had to point that out to her, that she was figuring things out for herself, that she was shrewd, that the dumb blonde act wasn’t working on me.

She was always giving me little pointers, like when I put on sweat socks and she made sure I scrunched them down around my ankles. She was kind of like an antidote for dorkiness for me.

One rainy day we were walking from my house to the other Gomer house. We didn’t go over there much but they had the good TV and we wanted to sit around and watch videos. It was raining rightly. I was feeling romantic, so after we passed the corner store that we called the orc-store (based on an unconsciously racist joke drawn from dungeons and dragons that associated the Palestinian store keepers with subhuman half-orcs from the quintessential dork role-playing game), I grabbed her and pushed her into a door way and started kissing her.

Cecilia liked it when I was aggressive with her and she responded, putting her arms around me and kissing back. As I kissed her and fondled her tits through her top she put her hand between my legs and felt that I was aroused. She unzipped me and took out my cock. I put my hands below her miniskirt and palmed her round little ass.

Probing further I felt that she was wet. We both had the same idea at the same time and she hitched herself up and slid down on me. I held her tight as we made love on a public street in the rain.

I wasn’t one for fucking standing up. I’d tried it before with Simone and my college girlfriend but just to get things lined up right usually required somebody to stand on something and then a kind of unnatural squat-thrusting to make things work. It turned out the Cecilia and I were a slightly better fit. She hooked one leg around me and I pushed her up against the doorway.

I remember hoping that no one tried to come out that door. Also, I think - though I can’t be positive - that Belinda and Gardner passed us on the way to the big house. I had my back turned to the street so I couldn’t be sure, but I saw familiar shapes go by in the dark with my peripheral vision. Fortunately it was evening and the cloud shielded us somewhat from the view of passing strangers.

Of course the publicness of our escapade was part of the thrill. The fear of getting caught.

Cecilia wasn’t on the pill. When we screwed, we used condoms, but I wasn’t wearing one now, of course, because we hadn’t planned this. On those occasions where we did mess around without a rubber I’d ordinarily be sure to pull out before the big event.

This time, however, I felt possessed. Something told me she wanted me to be reckless. As I got to the breaking point, I just bit her earlobe and let loose inside her.

Of course she didn’t come. As we wound down and then started putting our clothes back together, Cecilia said, “Why did you come inside me?” She didn’t sound angry but she wasn’t happy about it either.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know what came over me. I’m sorry.”

“Well,” she said. “Nothing we can do about it now.”

As we walked the rest of the way up the block she told me she could feel it dripping down her leg. She said it made her feel nasty, in a good way.

Thought you was the cool fool

For You, The Stars
Chapter Six: The Memphis Blues Again
Installment 1

In March we decided on the spur of the moment to try to make it to the Dead’s Mardi Gras show at the Kaiser. We didn’t have tickets but we had enough faith in serendipity that we figured something would come up. A couple of my gomer friends were going to be there and we had plans for where to meet before the show and during the set break in case either of us managed to snag better seats.

On the BART ride over to Oakland, Cecilia worked her pretty girl mystique on a middle aged hippie sitting across the car from us and he ended up giving her his extra ticket. We got off at the Lake Merritt station near Laney College and walked over to the Kaiser. The traveling bazaar was in full swing in the little park across from the auditorium.

A few minutes patrolling the street between the park and the venue made me realize that there was too much competition for extras, and I had a brainstorm. Cecilia and I headed back toward BART in hopes of intercepting someone before they fully arrived. She did the asking for tickets since we figured people were more likely to sell their extras to her, even if they could see she was with someone. In the end a youngish woman in overalls sold me her extra for face and we were all set.

We doubled back to the show, got in line, and scored and ate some blotter acid all in a jumble. By the time we got inside the first set had already started. The shrieking lead guitar sounds signaled “Hell in a Bucket.”

We couldn’t find any decent seats so we went down to floor and found ourselves weaving around the loosely packed crowd during the long bluesy “Sugaree.” This was only Cecilia’s third or fourth Dead show and I had been schooling her with my best cassette tapes. She recognized the doomed femme fatale storyline of “Sugaree” and knew to anticipate not one, not two, but three towering jams.

The next few songs passed by in a blur, as we continued moving from place to place on the floor like vagabonds. We were both of us short people, so we usually couldn’t see that well. If we got in front of the soundboard it started getting packed so tight that it made kind of claustrophobic. We ended up hovering around the middle of the audience and when the band starting the cascading intro to “Stuck Inside of Mobile with Memphis Blues Again” I took my girl by the hand and led her into the cleared walkway that surrounded the soundboard.

We half-danced, half-marched around the large square, making it around three or four times before finally one of the ushers kindly told us that enough was enough. The purple and green lights shone on her face as we laughed at the silliness of it all and enjoyed the pure playfulness of skipping together through a crowd with such majestic music accompanying our steps.

“She just smoked my eyelids/ and punched my cigarette” I growled in her face. The buzz on the floor was so animated that we hardly noticed the short breaks between songs. The dragged-out reggae lullaby “Row Jimmy” started up. I was by now feeling the acid and I started yelling something about a certain guitar lick that showed up halfway through the song and how great this one was and how I first heard it at Alpine Valley and did she remember the echoey version from the Bob Fried memorial show in 1975 and was she enjoying the tape I’d given her with Blues for Allah on one side and From the Mars Hotel on the other?

I pointed up at the back corner of the seats, where they thinned out to rows of five, then three, then one. “Let’s go up there,” I said. “You can site on my lap and we can fuck.”

“I don’t know…” said Cecilia. Usually pretty game for adventure, she was feeling a bit paranoid about trying something like that in public. “Let’s go up there and see how it feels, at least,” I said.

We went to the back of the floor and into the hallways, then we stomped up the weirdly twisting ramp that was guaranteed to disorient anyone wandering up to the second landing. The sonics were echoey and strange and people were hooting and laughing and shouting and gibbering all around us. We came out on the aisle, Phil side, and started heading straight up to the back.

No one paid any attention to us and I was thinking that my plan might actually work. By now the band was playing a typically first-set-ending “Let it Grow.” We made it all the way to the top and sure enough the back row of just a few seats was empty, as was the next few rows in front of it. From up there the crowd on the floor looked like a seething jumble of souls from some medieval festival or a strangely celebratory take on the sufferers in a Heironymous Bosch painting.

I sat on a seat in the back row and Cecilia sat in my lap, hitching up her little skirt. I could feel her warmth against my crotch. I kissed the back of her neck and her hair tickled my nose. I put my hands on her breasts but she moved them down to her bare tummy. She said something to me but I couldn’t hear it over the thundering bass and the climbing braid of guitars.

I could sense she was too self-conscious and to be honest I felt like even though the nearby crowd was mesmerized by the tiny figures, it was all-too-possible that a spinning hippie chick or wiggly dude would turn and see us if we got too nasty in public. So I decided not to push my luck. Cecilia stay in my lap through the false ending of the song though, rocking and sliding a bit like a lap dancer, but in an almost joking playful way. We got up and danced to the end of the set before going off to meet my friends at the rendezvous.

Pour some sugar on me

For You, The Stars
Chapter Six: The Memphis Blues Again
Installment 2

We met Bo and Seth at the appointed place, a particular but random gate number that we used in every venue. Bo didn’t know Cecilia that well and as we stood around waiting to see if anyone would wander by, they compared musical taste, quizzing each other. Most Deadheads claimed to like “every type of music except for—” and it was the exceptions that made the difference.

For example, my friends would probably say they liked every type of music except for heavy metal, or if they thought about it a little harder, except for rap.

But Cecilia loved heavy metal, or just metal, a cooler name for the same thing. Her “except for” was definitely country music, which totally sounded hokey to her. She of course loved rap because she loved dancing at clubs. No one bothered arguing with each other though, because there was no point.

Nobody was going to convince anyone to like a kind of music they had ruled out, even if you found the outliers or the undeniable greats, the Hank Williamses, the LL Cool J’s, the Led Zeppelins. People would just concede the exception and continue to condemn the rest of the genre. Once Cecilia started praising Def Leppard and the ineffable charms of “Pour Some Sugar On Me” Bo had already stopped seriously listening.

Cecilia said she was going to wander around for a bit, so Bo and Seth told her where our seats were and she disappeared down the hallway, weaving among the spinners and the stoned-out kiddies. Bo and Seth had saved seats for us, nearly as high as the ones we’d climbed to in the back of the auditorium, but about halfway closer to the stage. I settled into my seat and wondered where Cecilia had gotten herself to.

About one song into the second set, she appeared with some guy, a little taller than me, with short dark hair. He wasn’t quite a guido, not quite a “yo” but something about him was off-putting.

“Who’s your friend?” I yelled in her ear. “His name’s Mike,” she said. “He said he can give us a ride home after the show.”

“To San Francisco?”

“No, to Marin. He wants to fool around. I’m going to hang out with him for the rest of the show. I’ll meet you back here for the encore.”

While we were talking, he was standing back a little ways.

“Well, don’t kiss him in front of my friends,” I said. “That would be too weird.”

The second set went by in a blur, with the drugs peaking after the pair of medleys that led into the extended drums-and-weirdness experimental section of the set.

My friends and I danced ourselves into a slick set for the rockabilly bop of “Goin’ Down the Road, Feelin’ Bad” out of space, boogied to the faux-Berry raveup “I Need a Miracle” and reached a kind of staring-into-each-other’s eyes epiphany during the soaring cover of Traffic’s “Dear Mr. Fantasy,” particularly the second guitar solo, which cut through the murk of the rollicking multi-instruments not-all-totally-in-synch sound with a piercing electric howl that raised the rafters of the Kaiser.

That song wound down into a non-sequitur Hey Jude coda (just the “na na na nana na na” part from the end), and then the set was over.

Around the time the encore was ending, Cecilia reappeared with Mike. I wasn’t sure if she wanted me to go home with my friend on BART, but I also wasn’t that keen on this guy taking her back to her place and fooling around. I knew what our deal was, but I was feeling competitive.

“Did you say he’d give us both a ride?” I asked.

She said yes, but she also went over to Mike to make sure. Then she came back to me and said, “He says yes.” He was eyeing me like he didn’t know what my deal was. Maybe Cecilia didn’t even tell him we were going out?

More games for the superintelligent

For You, The Stars
Chapter Six: The Memphis Blues Again
Installment 3

On the ride back to Cecilia’s sister’s place I sat in the back seat and she sat in the passenger seat up front. I carried on a falsely macho conversation with Mike, talking about Cecilia’s charms as if she weren’t there. I told him about the time she’d posed for me wearing nothing up top except for suspenders, strategically positioned to cover her areolas, mentioning that it made her look like a Hustler cover girl. He knew exactly what I meant.

I wasn’t sure what he had in mind, but when we got up to San Rafael, he let us out of the car and declined to “come in for a nightcap.” Afterward, I joked to Cecilia that we could have had a threeway and that if he had gotten on top of her he might have been in for a surprise.

A week later we went to a party together at Parnassus. It felt funny being there with my girlfriend. I was so used to flirting like a free agent, even when I had been going out to Simone. It wasn’t like being at a disco, where we’d split up and try to dance with strangers and kind of compete for who could flirt with or attract more people before - always so far - going home together. That would have been weird in front of my friends.

Otherwise the scene was the same: the loud music, the grad-school intellectuals, dancing in the livingroom, passing out on the couches. Dannie was there. She kept her distance from me and I didn’t tell Cecilia that she was the one I’d cheated on Simone with.

In the morning, when we were discussing where to grab breakfast, there as the usual contingent for bloodies at Walnut Square and Dannie was pressing for the boulangerie, where we could get “fresh croissants” (said in a thick French accent). What had seeemed charming to me on previous occasions now appeared pretentious when looked at through Cecilia’s eyes. Afterward, we could crack each other up by imitating the way Dannie pronounced croissant (cwa-son).

Most weekends I’d take the bus up to Marin. It got to be such a routine that more than once I fell asleep on the bus, only waking at the end of the line. Then I’d have to call Cecilia from the bus station pay phone and she’d have toget her sister or brother-in-law to come pick me up. It was embarassing but they were always nice about it.

I was still getting phone calls over at the big gomer house from the Scientologists, so whenever I missed the bus downtown I’d walk around, trying to avoid running into the recruiters. Sometimes I’d wander over to the nearby strip club with its peep show arcade upstairs. I caught myself wondering: why am I paying to watch dancers or buying a lap dance or spending time in a nasty booth looking at porn clips for four minutes a quarter when just an hour away is my own voluptuous little bundle of sex? I never did figure that one out.

The weekends were splendid. The weather was almost always perfect and we didn’t seem to have any qualms about getting baked when we were watching over Cecilia’s niece. We had this method of smoking pot where we’d fire up the bong and one of us would take a deep, deep hit. Then we’d kiss and exhale the smoke into each other’s lungs. We figured we were using the drug more efficiently that way - plus it was an excuse to make out.

I got into the habit of calling in sick on Mondays so I could stay an extra day. At first it happened by mistake, from oversleeping, but after a while it was just too hard to tear myself away just to make it into the office for another boring day of sorting mail, filing, and manipulating numbers in a spreadsheet.

Mondays were the best because then we had the house to ourselves. We’d often spend the whole afternoon sunbathing in the nude, with the baby in her playpen in the shade nearby. One time, I was lying on my back and Cecilia was playing with my hair. We started talking about my receding hairline.

By now my hair was long enough that I tended to wear it swept back. I had the young Jack Nicholson thing going on around my temples. sharing bong hits. “As long as you keep combing it back, never forward,” she said. “You’ll be fine.”

Somehow Cecilia always found time to meet strange people, either at clubs or through her Marin friends. One time she took me over to the house of a drug dealer she’d met. I wasn’t sure what the point was, because we weren’t buying anything. After a while I realized that she was trying to show me off as her “smart” friend. The guy, Antonio, had a strange obsession with puzzles and quizzes and he started kind of testing me. His girlfried sat there on another couch never saying a word.

Most of these things I’d heard years ago. At boarding school we’d had a Logic Club that met on Wednesday nights and was mostly an excuse to eat pizza and get out of our dorms. We had the two math and logic puzzle books by James Fixx and after a while we’d run through all the items in both books. Over the years since then whenever someone brought out one of these things I’d recognize them as coming from “Games for the Superintelligent” or its sequel. I learned eventually to pretend not to know the answers because people get uncomfortable if you appear too smart, even if it’s only because you know this one.

So I’m drinking a beer on this guy’s couch and he is getting more and more animated because I’m answering all his puzzles and quickly, in an off-hand way. Cecilia likes it. She has summoned me to do gladitorial battle and once again I’m in an awkward position on her behalf.

I end up sitting at this guy’s kitchen table while he goes and gets out a full-on IQ test and starts working his way through the questions. By now my competitive urge is engaged so I’m not dogging it but really trying to get to the answer. Even a little drunk and always a little high I still manage to get on streak, making no mistakes at all.

As I answer the questions he looks them up in the back of his booklet (and, like, who collects IQ tests anyway?) and each time seems more astonished that I’m on this roll. Suddenly, it feels weird, as if I’m revealing too much, and when Antonio wants to start a new test I start begging off. When we’ve extricated ourselves from his apartment I tell Cecilia not to put me in a position like that again.

“You were totally into it,” she said.

“No,” I said. “People don’t like you if you’re too smart.”

Down to get you in a taxi honey

For You, The Stars
Chapter Six: The Memphis Blues Again
Installment 4

Simone sent word through Dave that she wanted to talk to me and she promised not to yell or break anything and I felt I owed her a sit down so I agreed. We met at a coffeeshop and it was clear to me that she was still trying to get the story straight of how we had broken up.

“You were already seeing her, weren’t you?” she asked me.

“We’d met already by then.”

“No, I mean you started going out with her before we were over, didn’t you?”

“Not really.”

“Did you have sex with her?”

“No,” I lied. “But we did kiss.”

“You asshole,” she said. “You should have told me.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know what to say.” We were both tearing up again.

“I need to ask you something else,” she said.

“What is it?”

“When we were in New York, that night we went to Unos…”

“Yes?”

“Did you make a pass at my friend Judy?”

“What? No way.”

“She says you did.”

“That’s crazy! You were there the whole time.”

“She says that when I was in the bathroom you tried to hit on her.”

“No fucking way.”

“Well, I didn’t believe here when she told me, but now I’m not so sure.”

I continued to insist that this was totally impossible. I felt that it didn’t ring true and that her bitch of a friend had just been trying to mess things up. The truth was, though, that we had all been pretty drunk that night and my memories weren’t so clear. Was it possible that I had said something suggestive to her friend? I suppose it was. Though if I had then she had totally been playing along with me, I’m sure. It would just be like one of Simone’s damn friends to flirt with me behind her back and then report back to her later that I had been a creep.

I went back east myself for a visit in the spring and had my first chance to take advantage of the “openness” of my deal with Cecilia. Maybe it was easier when she wasn’t around.

My friend Pierce, an artist originally from Alabama, invited me to a party on the upper-west side. She was a few years away from AA and drinking pretty heavily at the time, combining avoiding her family and trying to make it as a painter in a city that was more interested in video installations. At the time the downtown art scene only embraced paintings by noble savages.

At the party, thrown by another artist, we ran into a few other refugees from my college’s thin art-punk stratum, the people who listened to Violent Femmes and the Cure. Someone had painted the bathtub in a range of green hues. The evening went by in a sort of a haze. At one point I remember Pierce coming up to me and solemnly placing a potato chip on each of my knees.

I ran into a girl I had known vaguely at school. We got to talking and it turned out she remembered me. Over drinks she confessed that she’d “always had a thing for me.” Why was I finding this out now? This wasn’t the first time in New York that a woman from the old gang had told me they’d nursed a crush on me. “You don’t know how much I’d have wanted to know that at the time,” I said to one of them, Jenny Lin. Usually they’d be telling me this with wistful regret, in a now-it’s-too-late kind of way, but this one - I’m ashamed to admit I forget her name - was making it clear to me that it wasn’t too late at all.

“Where do you live now?” I asked her.

“Brooklyn,” she said. “Want to get out of here?”

I said sure. We went out to Broadway and caught a cab. We were pretty drunk and were really going at each other in the back seat. Nothing lewd. We were just kissing, but it was sloppy drunk kissing.

On the highway something weird happened. The cab started slowing down and the cabbie steered us onto the shoulder.

“What’s going on?” I asked from over her shoulder.

“I run out of gas.”

“What? That’s insane.”

“I am sorry, but I run out of gas.”

“Oh, man!”

We got out of the backseat and stood behind the cab in the middle of the night on the way to Brooklyn. I put out my arm and within five minutes hailed another cab. Without looking back we climbed in and left our hapless first driver behind. We re-commenced to making out.

Long story short, We spent the night in her bed messing around in every way we could come up with. She really wasn’t my type physically. Kind of bony, prominent cheekbones, odd proportions. It was pure lust. She was talented, too. I remember thinking that this must be what a lot of people do: hook up at parties, have one night stands.

Hungry like the wolf

For You, The Stars
Chapter Seven: I Need You Tonight
Installment 1

When I got back to San Fransciso I told Cecilia about my one-off in Brooklyn and she didn’t seem to mind, found it a little amusing, did want to be reassured that she was way prettier than the other girl (which she was), and possibly took it as a bit of a competitive challenge, since as far I knew she hadn’t yet acted on our open-relationship deal.

We continued going out dancing a lot. No used to much exercise, I was thinner than I’d ever been and was really enjoying having a new wardrobe and feeling like I was attractive. I allowed my taste in music to flex in order to accommodate Cecilia’s. As a pretend 18-year old club kid, she liked the dance music that was popular at the moment, this included whatever Duran Duran’s current hit was, George Michael’s song about Faith and wanting to be your father figure, and INXS. I related mostly to the way the Bo Diddley beat had survived the Sixties by way of “I Want Candy” and found its way into these late ’80s pop hits.

“I think George Michael’s kind of gay, though,” I said to Cecilia.

“No way!” she said. “He’s totally macho. Look at that stubble.”

“That’s hairdresser stubble,” I said. “Who looks like that in real life?”

We did agreed that the Beatles had started off as a boy band with ooh-ooh love-you hit songs and that for all we knew Duran Duran might become profound someday as well.

One day we got a phone call from Bella at my place telling us that a friend from college was going to be in town and wanted to get together with Cecilia. The guy, Raoul Fourier, was a friend of Bella’s but I’d never been friendly with him. He had grown up in Paris and New York and spoke without an accent and affected a tough-guy French-gangster sort of way of talking. My impression was that he was immensely wealthy, or his family was at least. He claimed to be doing “import/export” whatever that means. He had hung around with the Eurotrash kids at school and in fact had been friends with this other French guy whom I had run into several times in my life, always falling afoul of him.

I met the other French guy for the first time as a twelver-year-old one summer in Westhampton. His name was Artur Brecque and he was gawky and awkward. I was having trouble fitting in myself, finding my place in a new crowd in a sort of athletic summer-camp type environment. I wasn’t too chubby yet, still retaining my pre-pubescent metabolism and ability to eat without consequences, but I was small and had trouble excelling at tennis and golf. I loved the ocean, though, spending many afternoons that summer riding the waves until my skin was soft as butter, then taking hot open air showers in the cabanas and eating grilled burgers or buckets of steamers for dinner at the beach club.

We also went sailing a lot, taking out little sunfishes and dinghies and learning the basics of tacking and hoisting the sails and such. I didn’t do that well in races but I loved the feeling of being out on the water under my own volition.

Brecque was hopeless in a boat, though, always gettign tangled in the sheets and frequently falling in the water. Having a spaz with a foreign accent around really helped me establish myself socially by giving me someone to pick on. I bonded with the snooty other rich kids by mocking the newcomer, and his family didn’t come back the next summer, so I more or less forgot about him.

A few years later I went away to boarding school and discovered after a month or so that Artur was living in one of the other freshman dorms. Remembering the lanky loser of just a few years ago, I tried to score some points by disparaging him, telling tales of his lameness from a few summers back. What I didn’t realize was that Brecque was an “old boy” already, a student who had started at the school in what I would call eighth grade. He was therefore automatically more established and cooler than the new kids like me, who were called Beanies after a long-dead tradition of making first-year students wear little caps throughout the fall.

Word got back to Brecque that I had been making fun of him and he didn’t respond in any overt way, but I quickly figured out that my smart-alecky attempt to take him down hadn’t won me any status and had in fact made me suspect in the eyes of others. I had to watch my back for the rest of that year, always expecting some kind of retribution, since the school was full of pranksters and bullies. Ironically, no actual punishment ever came, which meant that I could never rest easy.

Finally, in college, I’d met Fourier and somehow ended up telling him all about my earlier two encounters with Artur Brecque before he revealed to me that they were old friends. I began to feel like this fellow was some kind of harlequin nemesis who would dog my heels for the rest of my life.

So now Fourier was in town and he wanted to see us? That made no sense to me. Cecilia told me that she’d met him when visiting Bella in New York a year or so ago. She implied that they’d either flirted or made out or even fooled around. I told her that I’d never really liked him much and she said he was a cool guy and we didn’t exactly argue but we agreed to disagree.

Cecilia said she wanted to go out and have a drink with Raoul and I said I’d stay home. She said she might go back to his hotel afterward and I said fine. When Raoul came by my place I greeted him coolly and gave Cecilia a kiss on the cheek as she went out the door.

About an hour later she called and said she was going to come back and spend the night in my room, as usual. When she did come back I asked her why she didn’t hang out at the hotel with Raoul.

“I don’t know,” she said. “He’s cool and all, but I wasn’t into it.”

“Did he kiss you?”

“Oh yeah. We made out a little.”

I felt jealous hearing this, despite our rule.

“I told him what you said about me having curves designed by Einstein and he agreed.”

“That was big of him.”

“I don’t know. It just wasn’t happening. Why didn’t you make a big deal when I went off with him anyway?”

“Well, first of all, we have a rule that it’s OK, remember?

“And secondly, it’s like at the clubs - you could spend time with him but he’s just visiting and I figured you’d be back with me eventually.”

“That’s what he said. He kind of told me to he was bored and suggested I leave.”

I thought maybe Raoul didn’t see the point of stealing my girl if I wasn’t going to get upset about it. We went to bed and I felt sort of pleaed about the way things had worked out but not exactly happy.

I've been losing sleep

For You, The Stars
Chapter Seven, installment 2

I got into a routine of spending nearly every weekend up in Marin. Usually on Sunday night we’d smoke a joint with Cecilia’s sister and brother-in-law and then fire up the hot tub. We’d end up going to be late and in the morning when the alarm went off I’d be totally not in the mood to dress in the work clothes I’d packed, walk down to the bus stop and ride across the Golden Gate Bridge to work.

I got in the habit of calling in sick just about every other Monday. Though I didn’t particularly want to get fired, the job never seemed important compared to sleeping in in Cecilia’s warm bed and then spending a relaxing day with her babysitting and sunbathing, listening to music and when the baby was asleep sometimes, getting high.

As I was getting ready to take the bus into the city one Monday evening (Cecilia never walked me to the bus stop - she usually waved goodbye from the garage just outside the door to her room), out of the blue she said, “My period’s overdue.”

“How late?”

“Four days.”

“Shit, are you usually pretty regular?”

“Yeah.”

I didn’t want to miss my bus so I said, “Can we talk about this on the phone tonight?”

“Like, whatever,” she said.

I called her before going to bed and said, “Well…”

“Well, what?”

“Did you get it yet?”

“Uh… no,” she said, like I was an idiot. But it was possible.

“I’ve never been in this situation before,” I said.

“Well neither have I,” she said, as if she was offended that I was trying to imply that maybe she had.

“Well I didn’t know,” I said.

This was not like me, I thought. I felt kind of like I had after cheating on Simone. Like I was turning into someone I didn’t recognize. I had felt like things were so much more straightforward with Cecilia. We had an open relationship, so it was impossible to cheat and I didn’t have to put on a false front.

Once again, though, I somehow had managed to violate my own personal code. I mean, I never had sex without protection. I wasn’t one of those guys who complained about condoms and tried to get out of using them. Sure, I preferred it if the girl was on the pill or had a diaphragm or whatever, but it’s not like I thought it was her sole responsibility.

I was the kind of guy who talked these things over in advance, even at the expense of spontaneity.

I was a good guy.

That’s what I used to think. Now I was thinking if Cecilia was pregnant it was because of me, because of impulsive in-the-door-way sex, with no protection. Because of my misreading the signals and finishing up inside her. Although, what was I supposed to do? It felt right at the time. It felt like what she wanted. I thought she wanted me to take risks and be cool. What did I know?

“Have you thought about what we should do if—?”

“If I’m pregnant?” she said.

“Yeah.”

“Of course I’ve thought about it,” she said.

“I’ll support whatever decision you make,” I said, being the good guy again, in my own mind. “And if you decide, you know, to get an abortion— or whatever— of course I’ll pay my share.”

“Gee, thanks,” she said.

“Wow,” I said. “We could actually have a kid. I’ve never gotten anyone pregnant.”

“Yeah, cool,” she said, sarcastically.

When Dave got home from his work on the peninsula, I told him about my possible predicament.

We were sitting in the living room with English Settlement playing quietly on the stereo.

“Whew,” he whistled. “That sucks.”

“I know,” I said. “I feel like an idiot. This is what happens to stupid people.”

“What are you going to do?”

“It’s not my decision,” I said. “Whatever she wants to do I’ll go along with.”

“Really? You don’t care one way or the other?”

“It’s not that I don’t care— I just don’t think it should be up to me. I mean if she asks my opinion I’ll give it to her.”

“What is your opinion?”

“I don’t really know,” I said. “This has never happened to me before.”

“I can’t see you raising a kid.”

“Yeah, that isn’t going to happen. I mean, we’re both Catholic, technically. I don’t even really know how she feels about abortion. I know some of her friends have had them. We’ve talked about that. Girls today seem to take it for granted as something that might have to happen.

“If she does have a baby, though, I think we’d have to give it up for adoption.”

“That would be weird, knowing you had a kid out there,” said Dave.

“I know,” I said. “I’ll tell you something really weird, though.”

“What?”

“I know it sounds stupid, but in a way I feel kind of proud of this. Like… I dont want to make a baby but I guess now I know I can, or maybe I do. I don’t actually know. But just thinking about the possibility, in a weird way it seems kind of cool.”

“I don’t think that’s weird but it’s definitely not cool.”

I called her again from work the next day.

“We could get married,” I said, bluffing.

“Yeah, right,” she said.

“Well, we could.”

“Don’t be stupid.”

“I think we would have a cool baby.”

“Yeah, you’re looks and my brains,” she said.

“Oh, shut up,” I said. “How many times do I have to tell you you’re smart before you’ll believe me?”

I waited for her to tell me I was good looking too, but she plowed ahead.

“I’m not ready to have a baby,” she said.

“I know,” I said. “Me neither.”

“For one thing, it would mess up my body, my hips. Nothing would fit.”

“Uh, yeah,” I said. “That too. Look, maybe this is just a fluke.”

We were still on the phone talking about random stuff when my boss stuck his head around my cubicle wall and asked me to come into his office.

Fiddle about

For You, The Stars
Chapter Seven: Installment 3

I was staring at my boss’s closely cropped beard as he started talking about how he’d noticed I’d been out sick a lot lately. He didn’t mention that it was usually (always) on Monday, and he wasn’t really calling me on it. Instead he was kind of speaking in code. He said he was worried that I wasn’t feeling well lately and that maybe the job was getting me down.

It’s true that I didn’t care about the job much, but I sort of played along as he tried to explore ways to make the job more interesting. I was kind of surprised. The firm had been tightening its belt, letting a few architects go lately.

But I also wasn’t surprised. He was a young guy on the go. He wanted to modernize the place. My facility with spreadsheets and recordkeeping on the PC was part of his vision of a high-tech architecture firm. He asked me if I’d like to be trained on a computer-aided design program and discussed how maybe I could do some of the basic layout work for the cookie-cutter hospital-bathroom type blueprints.

“Sure,” I said. “That might be interesting.” But my mind was wandering.

Two days later, Cecilia called me at work and said, “I got it,” and then hung up.

I felt relieved, I realized, that I wasn’t going to have to tell anybody in my family about this.

I called her back and said maybe I could come up to Marin that night, maybe we could celebrate.

“Let’s wait till the weekend,” she said.

I swore to myself I’d never take that risk again.

The near-miss left me with a jumble of emotions. With all the risk gone it felt safer to indulge the macho side of my reaction: the feeling of potency. We had ducked the Catholic-guilt punishment for our shenanigans that rainy day. We got away with it. I was a stud. Or maybe I was infertile. Hmm, forget that line of thought.

When I got up to Cecilia’s sister’s house on Friday night she was waiting for me in bed, wearing a purple satin-y teddy. I pounced on her. Goddammit I was going to make her come once and for all. I told her that. I was kissing her neck, nibbling her ear. I said, “You’re going to come tonight. I’m not going to give up till you get your orgasm.” I growled. She clutched at me.

I went down on her. She got close, so close that with another woman I’d probably have believed she’d made it, but again — right on the threshhold — she pulled away. Her thighs spasmed, she clenched them together. She rolled onto her side and groaned.

“What is it?” I said, almost yelling at her. “What’s the matter? What am I doing wrong?”

I acted like it was about me.

“Nothing. It’s not you, she said. I don’t want to talk about it.”

“We have to talk about it,” I said. “I can’t stand it like this. Even if you don’t care, it matters to me.”

“Oh, I care,” she said. “Believe me. I want to come, I do.”

I did believe her. I didn’t want to make her feel bad so I just held her for a long time. My pants were still bunched around my ankles so I kicked them off and pushed them over the edge of her bed. I held her in a spoon position. She sort of cried but without tears. Her face got puffy and her shoulders heaved.

“If you don’t want to talk about it, it’s OK,” I said. I hummed Ripple in her ear.

If I knew the way
I would take you home
La la la-la

After a while she said, still turned away from me, “Let’s talk.”

“OK,” I said. “One question: Have you never had an orgasm?”

“I think maybe, once, I did,” she said.

“When was this?”

“When I was little,” she said. “We were staying at our cousins’. I was about eight. I was flirting with one of the boys, who was a teenager, probably about 15. He was flirting back. He made me feel really pretty.”

“Oh, man,” I said. “What happened.”

“Well, everyone fell asleep and it was just us left sitting on the couch in the livingroom. There was a fireplace with the end of a fire in it, I remember.

“I think he had a beer and gave me some of it. I felt very grown up getting all of his attention.

“He said, ‘Look what you’re doing to me,’ and he showed me he, like, had an…. He had a hard-on. He showed me through his pants, like. He said I was turning him on.”

“Did he act like that was your fault. Like you owed it to him to help him get off?”

“No, it wasn’t like that,” she said. “He was sweet about it. Let me tell this.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I won’t interrupt.”

“I wanted to touch it, you know just through his pants. I though it was kind of amazing that I would have an effect on him like that. He said no. He said that would be wrong.”

“Good,” I said.

“Shut up. You said you wouldn’t interrupt. He said it was OK for us to kiss, though. I said, ‘But we’re cousins,’ and he made a joke about ‘Kissing cousins,’ so he kissed me and it was nice.

“Then he said, ‘Let me show you something cool.’ He told me to lie on my stomach, and he pushed my skirt up to my waist. I remember I was hot from the fire but that the air also felt cool on my legs. He started sliding my panties down a little. I said, ‘What are you doing?’ and he said ‘Just wait— it’s a surprise.’

“Then I felt something wet— his mouth I guess, maybe his tongue… down there.”

“On your puss?” I said.

“Actually, I think he was kissing my butthole, or licking it. I’m not really sure. My memory of that night isn’t as clear as I’m making it seem. I’ve only told a few people about this.

“At one point, his mom came downstairs and we were both afraid. He put a pillow over my butt and told his mom we were just hanging out talking. She only got partway down the stairs. She just said that I shouldn’t stay up too late and told us to make sure the fire was out before we went to bed.

“Eventually, I think he made me come. I felt something like I’d never felt before. It was kind of amazing, but it also freaked me out. As soon as it happened I felt kind of sick. It’s like I knew what we were doing was wrong and I felt like it was my fault, like I had seduced him.

“He told me I had been teasing him all day. I don’t think I was, but maybe I was flirting.”

“It couldn’t be your fault,” I said. “You were eight, for God’s sake.”

“I know,” she said. “I’m just telling you how it felt.

“Right after he made me come — I’m sure he did — I pulled away. I pulled my underwear back up and I told him I had to go to bed. I went to bed without brushing my teeth, without peeing, without wiping myself where I still felt wet from his mouth. I was lying awake in bed feeling like I was going to get in trouble in the morning, but nothing happened.”

Then she was quiet.

After about ten minutes of letting it sink in, I said, “Man, that is really rough. So you’ve never been able to come since then?”

“Yeah,” she said. “When I started fooling around for real, in high school, the first time I got close I remembered that night just when I was about to come and I felt sick to my stomach and I couldn’t do it. That happens every time now.”

“Jesus,” I said. I felt an unfamiliar form of rage. I’m not a violent person. I usually try to talk my way out of fights, but I was consumed with the urge to find this cousin asshole and beat the shit out of him. For what he did to Cecilia and to what he was still doing to my sex life.

Dysfunction junction

For You, The Stars
Chapter Seven: Installment 4

It got worse.

Over the next few days I encouraged Cecilia to talk to me more about the abuse she had suffered as a child. It was obvious she blamed herself and that her self-esteem was lower than I had realized, although I guess in retrospect the warning signs were there: her use of her sexuality for seduction but her take-it-or-leave-it attitude toward sex itself, and of course the big problem that brought it all to light.

It turns out that this cousin of hers, the bastard, had continued taking advantage of her for several years. Eventually teaching her how to give him blowjobs. It made my flesh crawl, the thought of using a little girl like that, and worse yet a member of his own family.

For a long time she thought it was only happening to her, first that there was something special about her that was earning her all this close attention from the guy, and later that there was something particularly wrong about her that was making it all happen.

Then one day, she told me, she was swimming in her family’s pool and listening to her two older sisters, Bella and Laurie talking about their cousin. From the conversation, it was obvious that he had groomed them both at younger ages for his abusive attention until they had made him stop or he had lost interest in them.

“At least it never happened to Cecilia,” said Laurie.

That’s when she told them.

I was preoccupied with this revalation. It was like a nightmare, a glimpse into a family horror I couldn’t fully fathom. I thought my only family life was fucked up in its own way. There was a reason I was living 3000 miles away. I didn’t have to face my alcoholic father with his alternating rages and pathetic cries for sympathy. But at least in my family the siblings looked out for each other, and my cousins seemed pretty decent too, not that I saw them much growing up.

I called Paulie in LA to talk about it. I don’t know why. Maybe because he had gone out with Bella in college and maybe had heard the story before. Maybe I thought he could give me a clue about what to do, how to help. I was surprised that he didn’t see it all as such a big deal.

“Daniel,” he said. “You have no idea how common this is. It’s in almost every family.”

“But it’s so messed up,” I said. “I can’t accept that it’s normal.”

“I didn’t say normal,” he said. “But it is everywhere.”

“Well,” I said. “It’s had a devastating effect on Cecilia. For one thing,” and her I lowered my voice, because I was calling long distance from the repro room at work, “she can’t come because of it.”

“Dude, that does suck,” said Paulie.

“Yeah, so there’s this creepy third person, like a phantom, visiting us in bed and making her not enjoy sex. It makes me want to track him down.”

“Has Cecilia every talked to a psychiatrist?”

“No, I don’t think so. She went to a counselor at that fancy prep school for fucked up kids she got kicked out of, but I don’t think she talked about the abuse with him.”

“Well, therapy could help.”

“True…. So did Bella ever mention these incidents to you?”

“No, she never did.”

I called Bella too, in New York. She told me that she didn’t like to dwell on this. She was all about getting over it and forgetting it and not staying stuck in the past. That sounded like denial to me, but who was I to judge someone else’s coping mechanism?

I told her that Cecilia wasn’t having as easy a time getting over it and that I thought her whole family needed to deal with it together, but she said that would just make things worse.

“When Cecilia first told us it was happening to her too we went to everybody. We talked to mom and dad and we talked to our uncle and aunt. They made Bobby get psychological help even though he at first denied anything had happened and later he said that it was always totally mutual, which is not true.

“Our grandmother got rid of all of her pictures of him when she found out. To this day she won’t talk to him or about him.”

“So he hasn’t apologized or even admitted responsibility?”

“No.”

“Wow,” I said. “I wouldn’t want to see him at a family reunion. I wouldn’t want him near my kids, if I had kids.”

“Yeah,” she said. “He wouldn’t be welcome at my house if I had daughters.”

My anger didn’t subside. If anything, the complacency of Cecilia’s family made me more angry. Couldn’t anyone see how badly she had been hurt? I talked to her about making trying to get everyone in her family, her sisters and parents, into some kind of group family counseling thing, but she said that everyone would give her a hard time for stirring up the past. In some ways they were an old-fashioned Catholic family and the guilt was unbearable.

I told Cecilia she could talk about it if she wanted to or she could not talk about it. It was up to her. I’d be there for her no matter what. Which was true up to a point.

Room full of mirrors

For You, The Stars
Chapter Seven: Installment 5

Cecilia started getting a little self conscious about me knowing her secret and about all the attention I’d been paying to her sexual dysfunction. To get me to stop prying and stop trying so hard, she started asking me about my fantasies and then made a point of fulfilling them. I had mentioned once that I’d always wanted to get head in a shower, so she got down on her knees in the shower off of her little room and crossed that one off the list.

We got hold of some cocaine and used it in our sexual play. That was sort of interesting since it put us both into the same kind of space, never quite reaching the climax but suspended in a state of high arousal. Much later I remember reading that it’s dangerous to apply cocaine directly to mucous membranes, but nothing really bad seemed to happen because of it.

We’d sometimes ride the bus together between the city and her sister’s place, and when we were traveling at night, she liked to fondle me and then, after getting me hard, lean across the seat and take me into her mouth. I wasn’t sure if she wanted to get caught or not, but whenever anyone came down the aisle she’d sit straight up and act like nothing was happening.

I showed her how peep shows worked in the tenderloin, but they didn’t like us both going into the booths together, which I thought was kind of ironic, given that men were always trysting in those spots with other men.

We even went to one of those old-school porno theatres where you bought a ticket and sat in seats and watched the movie on a big screen with a bunch of other perverts in the audience. She asked when the next movie was starting and the ticket taker laughed. I explained to her that they just show the movies one after another and nobody worries about when they’re starting or ending.

Partway through the movie (one of the many sequels to Taboo), Cecilia leaned over to me and told me that the old black man sitting next to her had taken his penis out. I couldn’t tell if this was a problem for her or not.

“Do you want to move?” I whispered

“No, it’s OK,” she said.

“Do you want to touch him?” I said.

“Not really,” she said.

Later we agreed that it must have been a turn on for him to have this sexy young white girl next to him while he exposed himself.

Cecilia told me that her parents were coming out to visit. I’d met them once before, at my college graduation, but I wasn’t looking forward to seeing them now. All I could think about was that Cecilia was still suffering from this molestation in her family and that everyone else just wanted her to drop it.

She’d gotten love and sex mixed up and nobody else seemed to care.

I did agree to go out with her parents for dinner one night.

That evening she modeled some of the clothes she’d been shopping for with her folks. They were the kind of outfits she favored, mostly matching shorty tops and miniskirts, showing her bare midriff. One outfit was in a sort of gold brown, and another was black.

The clothes were form fitting, they really showd off her curves and they shaped her breasts high and prominent. I tried to picture her trying these on for her mom and dad.

I had in mind the typical father saying, “You’re not going out dressed like that!”

“Does your dad like seeing you dress this way?” I asked her.

“Sure, why wouldn’t he?” she said, defensive.

“Well, you know…” I said. “I mean, most dads don’t—”

“He likes knowing I’m his little sexy girl,” she said, cutting me off.

I let it drop.

I needed someone else to talk to about all of this confusion, so against my better judgement I wrote a letter to Maura hinting at the problem. She and I were still corresponding regularly, although I hadn’t sent her any more tapes for a while.

Cecilia knew about Maura. She had noticed the big folder full of letters prominently labeled in my bedroom, and having no boundaries one afternoon she had read a bunch of the letters from Maura. She asked me about her and I told her how I had pursued her all through college and she had slept with all kinds of other guys but had always freaked out around me and cut me off, and how somehow that had made me want her all the more.

I emphasized that I knew that the “relationship” if you could call it that, that we were having in our letters wasn’t real. It was romanticized and it had something to do with us both trying to be writers and writing ourselves into a story where we were better, cooler, sexier, more desirable than we were in real life.

We were both having real relationships in our real lives, but we both enjoyed having this alternate channel through which to explore our possible selves. Maura sent me books she was reading and books she thought I should read and books about literary romances. I told Maura about Simone and Dannie and Cecilia—partly to be brutally honest but a big part of it was I just wanted her to be jealous and to see me as someone who could actually get a girl, if not her.

Cecilia knew about the thing Maura and I had about the song Crazy Fingers, how I had sung it to her softly on one of our good days when we were just hanging out together, spooning, and how I now associated that song with her and how I somehow rarely ever managed to hear that song live even though I was going to, like twenty or more Dead shows a year.

Maura wrote back a week or so later and told me a story about incest from her own family but really had no advice to offer and, really, how could she?

Daddy Please Don't

For You, The Stars
Chapter Eight: Installment 1

Maybe I was overthinking this, I thought. I took a break from messing around with Lotus 1-2-3 and wandered back to the repro room to make a private phone call. First I let Mike show me the cover and liner notes of an album from some new rap group called the Boo-Yaa Tribe. The guys on the back cover looked Samoan. Mike promised to play me the best jams from the record after he taped it for his car.

I hit 9 and dialed Cecilia’s number at her sister’s house. When she picked up, before she could say anything I said, “Let’s get married.”

“Shut up,” she said.

“No, I’m serious,” I said. “Think about it.”

“Why?”

“Well, for one thing, I love you,” I said.

“So?”

“And you know you love me. We should do it. Plus, you know, if it doesn’t work out, we’ll just get divorced. That’s what most people do.”

“I don’t want to get married if I’m going to end up getting divorced,” she said. “I only want to do that once.”

I thought that over. That was actually the way I felt most of the time, but it felt so sexy to be talking about marriage, like the kind of reckless bad decision young people in love were supposed to make.

“Anyway,” she said. “I’m not going to live past 30.”

“Now you’re the one talking crazy,” I said.

“I don’t want to get ugly,” she said.

“You’re so lame,” I said.

“Let’s talk about this some other time. When is your brother getting into town.”

“Saturday, I think,” I said. “Does your sister know we’re all coming up this weekend.”

“I’ll remind her,” she said.

My brother Robert was three years younger than me and still had two years of college left. He went to one of those gloomy schools in New England where kids threw themselves into ravines every winter.

He was driving across the country with his roommate, Kyle, a kid from Anaheim. They were in LA this week and they were driving up the coast on Friday. I wanted to give Rob the total Bay Area experience.

We were sitting around the living room of the Gomer place, hearing the details of their cross country adventure. They’d finally gotten to Disneyland, where Kyle’s parents were members of some club, so they got to have dinner in some secret restaurant behind an unmarked blue door. They knew the special knock or something. Apparently it was the only place in the park that serves alcohol.

Rob’s friend Kyle seemed like a gangly ball of neuroses. He was tall and bony and appeared to be uncomfortable in his own skin. I kept trying to pass him the bong but after one hit he said he felt a little strange and declined to take any more.

Rob was telling me about their tradition of “chilly-b’s,” basically bonghits using ice water. We debated the pros and cons of cooling off the hot smoke versus using warm moist air to soothe the breathing passages.

“Tomorrow we’re going up to Cecilia’s place—well really her sister’s place—in Marin for dinner and a hot tub. How does that sound?”

“Sounds good to me,” said Rob.

Kyle mumbled something noncommital.

Saturday night I felt like the coolest guy in the world. Cecilia’s sister and brother-in-law were great hosts. We had a nice dinner. They rolled a joint. It was a beautiful night. They fired up the hot tub and Rob and I and Laurie and Todd and Cecilia all got in. Kyle said he didn’t want to get in the water.

I was kind of sympathetic. I could still remember only a year or so ago thinking of the stereotype of Californians, soaking in tubs naked together. It seemed so undignified. I was raised to be more physically modest. I was shy about being seen naked. I wasn’t that proud of my body, but somehow when the time came, it didn’t seem like that big a deal.

Plus as long as you didn’t stare directly, you got to check out topless women in a relaxed not-really-sexual context. In a way I was showing off Cecilia to Rob. Look at my hot blonde girlfriend. Isn’t your brother kicking ass out here in California. But here sister was pretty nice looking too, so I also just wanted him to bask in the sensory overload. He seemed to like it just fine, but Kyle acted more and more uncomfortable, standing around in his bathrobe and then going back inside to pout.

“What’s his problem?” I asked Rob.

“He’s just shy,” he said.

But he was the one from California. LA, even. If I hadn’t known better I’d have assumed he went to orgies in high school.

“This is the life,” I said, “huh?”

“I’ll say,” said Rob.

Then we didn’t talk for a while. We just soaked there with the stars coming out.

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.

With or Without You

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.

I Think She'll Know

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.

Like I Blister in the Sun

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.”

Open Your Heart

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.”

Any Bird Ever Flew

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.

She turned her tender eyes to me

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.

You Were Always on My Mind

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.

It Might Be Six O'Clock It Might Be Three

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.

I might like you better if we slept together

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.

One more star sinks in the past

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.

You know when you grope for luna?

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.

It's the dirty story of a dirty man

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.

Giselle

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.

Monsters of rock

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.”

Get your motor runnin'

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.

Don't go back to Rockville

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.”

The answer, my friend

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.”

A moment in the sun

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.”

I just want to find out what you're nice to me for

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.

Cast aside and set you free

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.

Won't you please fawn over me?

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.

White elephant

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.

You complain of my diction

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 apologiz