Things didn’t work out with Kim either. It was mainly physical. I would have been happy to keep it going. I thought she was cool and I thought her being into me made me cool too, but she ended it. I didn’t argue or cry. As usual by then I had my eyes on someone else as well, a friend of Chad’s ex- named Bronwen who was on her own tear, meeting, mating with, and then breaking up with a series of guys herself without looking back. She was also very physically uninhibited and I was getting used to the idea that some women would initiate things without me having to life a finger. That flared out quickly. She broke up with me on my birthday after giving me a present and there were literally no hard feelings. In fact for the next few months whenever I was drunk or lonely or I’d walk over to her place by the park, just a few blocks away from the Gomer homestead and see if she was in. Frequently she’d take me back into bed with her.

Bronwen would also have parties on Friday or Saturday nights, every few weeks or so. I’d go, smoke a joint with her friends, get a little drunk, and then hang around till everyone else left. Sometimes one or more guys, at least one of whom was also her ex, would be playing the same game. I’d offer to sleep on the couch but then in the middle of the night she’d come out to get me. This happened less and less often until one day when I ran into her on my block, wearing sweats but still looking hot to me, and I told her that she was getting me excited, trying to flirt.

She pushed me into my doorway and got real close up to me and then she whispered, “Deal with it,” and turned around and walked away.

After her came Eliza, who came to me for advice when her boyfriend was heading to Japan for six weeks. She said she wasn’t sure whether she should try to have a long-distance relationship with him. “They don’t work,” I said, and told her about some of my experiences. I acted like her friend but I was totally trying to get her to become available to me. We were having this conversation at the bar at Slim’s during a Bela Fleck concert.

Sure enough she broke up with him and we got together within a week or so. I fell for Eliza hard. She seemed better than me. A better writer, a better painter. (I had started taking my painting classes again.) I guess somehow I communicated that to her and one day, after I got back from Hopper’s bachelor party in New Orleans it was over. Suddenly I felt the way Simone must have felt. I was the one crying and asking if maybe there was some way she might change her mind. She was the one lying and saying sure maybe there’s some tiny chance of that when there was no chance at all.

I dug out a note Simone had written to me when I had been cruelly casting her aside:

Daniel

I don’t know what to do. Last night you acted like nothing is going on, yet you seemed so sad. I don’t want you to be unhappy, I love you, talk to me I’m confused too. I still think the best thing for both of us is to enrich our individual lives, see other friends, spend more time on school & writing, etc., but still be w/ each other. I don’t think we have to lose that & I don’t want to. This is what I want. I don’t want anyone else as my lover but you. But you’re right - it’s been unhealthy & too much of a strain to have each other as the center of our lives. Maybe if each of us knew what we wanted in life & out of life that would help. I’m unsure but I know I want my life to have you in it.

I was going to wait until you talke to me but I’m not a very good waiter. I wanted to say this to you & release some of my pent-up anxiety. I don’t know how much sense I am making but I do feel better.

I hope this works out, it would be a shame if it didn’t.

Simone

I felt like even more of an asshole as I re-read that.

In the same folder I found a note I had written to Cecilia and obviously never given her, thank god. We had never fought as we drifted apart, at least not about fidelity and matters like that, but we had always argued and I guess I - in many ways more like Simone than Cecilia myself - needed to write things down to deal with my anxiety. I had written:

You are mean and insecure. You can dish it out but you want to get out of taking it. You’re offended by an insult to your sleazy disco friends and then you deliberately provoke me into anger and defensiveness by insulting me in a way that you know will hurt me. Then your meanly laugh at me for losing my temper.

You lie to cover up how unfair you are in this sort of thing. You claim that it’s all right to call me stupid (when you would freak if I called you that) because I know I’m smart. Turn that around though. You know you’re pretty, but you wouldn’t want me to call you fat. You can’t take anything less than adulation or extreme flattery. You have no problem insulting my looks and my body. The fact is that you like to be able to insult me and you don’t like to be insulted. It’s ironic that you’ll so quickly jump to calling me a baby….

Mercifully I stopped writing at that point.

In mid-December I got a card from Bella that said nothing about Cecilia, who by then I hadn’t spoken to for several months. Below the part that said “To wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year” she wrote:

—and continued expansion into the new millennium.

That’s all - I mean nothing but the BEST of WISHES for you. Know what I mean? ‘Cause I do mean it. Hmmm… is that actually true? You could easily debate it because I used the mini-word ‘cause. Is this what you mean by self-conscious Dano?

Whatever else may be true I do love you.

P.S. Where’s my tape?

P.P.S. tee hee - just teasing

Much love, Bella.

PPPS. - I’ll probably be in NYC for X-mas - if I am, Paulie will be here too—

. . . . .

THE END

Giselle and I got our writing group started, mostly with people she knew from her poetry class and another group she had been in, but also with a few of my writer friends, like Dave and his new girlfriend Mavis whom he had recently met in his graduate writing program at S.F. State. Mavis smoked a lot and seemed really hard on the surface. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking. Her writing was also hard - diamond hard - polished to a fine gloss. I was really impressed by her attention to craft and her careful way with words. Many of her stories had religious themes. Dave had said that she was the only (other) really good writer in his class, and I believed it.

I knew Kim was an aspiring writer so I invited her to join the group too. Many of her stories had erotic themes or involved bodily functions. One of them involved getting bloodstains out of underwear. In the story her character washes the clothes in cold water. I asked why it wasn’t hot water and she and old the other women in the group told me that hot water would make the blood set in for good.

There was another woman in the group, Cindy, who seemed extremely young to me. She was probably just a year or two younger than I was but she spoke in that babytalk kind of voice. One time we were having the group at Giselle’s apartment, spread around her living room. There were not enough chairs so I was sitting on the floor. I noticed from across the room that I could see right up Cindy’s knee-length skirt. I was looking right at the gusset of her little cotton panties. I felt like a perv taking in this view but I wasn’t able to stop looking.

It was the same whenever I noticed a woman’s breasts. I couldn’t help but stare a little but I was mortified at the thought of being caught looking, so I would keep sneaking peaks with sidelong glances.

The one other woman in the group (besides Giselle’s crazy ex-lover who just came to the first session and then never returned) was Eliza Stone, who lived up the road from my Berkeley friends on Parnassus Way. Eliza was another happa. Her mother was Japanese and her father was British. She had grown up in Alaska and I always thought she looked a bit like an eskimo, although I realized that was just a matter of suggestion. Her face was round and soft and she had long glossy black hair and a querulous lilt to her voice. Her writing also betrayed hours of work and attention to craft.

I tended to rely upon random bursts of inspiration where I’d right like a maniac for ninety minutes or so. Then usually I’d drop the first page or two which tended to be throat-clearing crap and find a nugget of value, maybe only a few paragraphs but sometimes a few pages. String enough of these together and I’d have another of my semi-plotless abstracted short stories all about, say, a man who has trouble urinating in public bathrooms. When Mavis gave me a copy of The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker I almost gave up writing on the spot.

There were other men in the group too, besides Dave and me. There was Prentiss Yee, who Giselle had met in her poetry class. He wrote poetry only but gave really helpful feedback on the prose that most of us were producing. He really made an effort to understand what I was trying to do even when I wasn’t sure myself, and more than once he helped me turn something that started out far to vague and arch into something moderately readable.

There was also another poet, Roman Lee, who was older than all of us, probably about forty. He’d been published in numerous obscure journals and wrote with a degree of confidence that was somewhat intimidating. He didn’t seem to care what kind of feedback we had to give him and I wasn’t really sure why he was in the group at all.

There were two key values to the group: the first was that we had no leader, no teacher. No one was getting paid to tell us how to write. We were a collective and we validated each other’s efforts just by caring to meet together once a week. We were diligent though: we were careful not to let it devolve into a kaffeeklatch or a meeting to talk about what you’ve been reading lately. The second value was that we did some actual writing every time we met. This was something Giselle and Prentiss had learned in their previous group. Someone would establish a theme, such as “write from a child’s point of view,” and then we’d all spend the next forty-five minutes tackling something. After that we could read what we’d written to the group, or not, or read something we’d been working on lately for feedback and critique.

It worked like a charm at first but it was discipline that was tricky to maintain, and as the group’s composition changed over time, we eventually gave up on that part of it, which was a shame, because it was unique and it forced us to do at least some writing if we hadn’t gotten anything new written lately.

Maura even came to the group once or twice at my invitation. After she found a place to stay in Berkeley that fall we finally reconnected. We didn’t resume sleeping together so I gathered that the mystery was exploded for her as well. I guess there were no hard feelings. We never talked about it and we certainly weren’t writing each other letters anymore now that we lived just across the bay from each other.

Things with Giselle fell apart but in a friendly way. We kept the writing group together. She decided to give up sex and relationships for a while. I think the ugly way her long-distance love affair broke up had an effect on her. I had probably underestimated her attachment to Jack Peters or Peter Jackson or whatever his name was. It actually was a pretty cool breakup. We just mutually agreed to let it drop. We stopped fucking and we stayed in touch. It was like the exact opposite of the horrible way things had ended with Simone, and it was less weird than the kind of zombie-like way things had ended with Cecilia.

I entered into a kind of desperate period of sowing my oats left and write. That’s when I slept with Chad’s ex. I also reconnected with Kim. She’d been keeping her distance from me at work since the time we’d had that drunken makeout session in Bettie’s kitchen, but one day after work instead of taking the bus to to BART now that Lucille was dead I asked her to give me a lift to her place. No explanation. She made us some dinner, just some vegetable soup, a one-pot meal on her stove.

We watched a little TV on the tiny couch in the nook next to her kitchen while sharing most of a bottle of bourbon, and then without saying a word we went into her bedroom and screwed to an old Hank Williams LP. I woke up in the middle of the night with a raging headache and an intense need to take a leak, when I got back to bed I woke her up and we fucked again. This wasn’t lovemaking. It was raw animal sex.

We did it again in the morning when we woke up. Later on our memories of that night differed. I always said we had had sex five times that night but Kim said I was overcounting it. I may have been basing it on the number of orgasms she had.

Kim was extremely thin and flat chested, but her body was incredibly sexy to me. She had paperwhite skin and she liked to wear old-fashioned lingerie, including garter belts and stockings, which was something I’d never seen on a real live woman before who wasn’t a stripper. I asked her once why she wore a bra at all when she didn’t need to and she seemed offended. I sort of figured out it had more to do with clothes and fashion and femininity than with support, but the lingerie had been a surprise because otherwise Kim dressed mostly punk or butch or both. She had a favorite pair of red plaid jeans and I had gotten so thin myself these days that I surprised myself by being able to fit them. I wore them around for awhile until the unbearable coolness got to be too much for me.

Given that I also had a crush on Eliza, the Alaskan girl who had dated two of my friends already from the Parnassus commune - in a way I guess she was on her own trajectory, cutting her own swath through a series of men she met - there were times when the writing group was weirdly charged for me. I’d look around the room and see Giselle and Kim and, at least once or twice Maura, all of whom I’d slept with, as well as Eliza who I wanted to sleep with and Cindy who was two young and babyish but who I had at least objectified that time I’d caught myself looking up her skirt.

I’m amazed I got any writing done at all that year and I’m not surprised I never finished most of what I started.

Cecilia and I never officially broke up. We just started seeing each other less and less often. The weekend after I got back from New York I went up to Marin to hang out with her. It was like old times but it was different. She was different. It occurred to me that when she had been new to the west coast, when I was a familiar face, her older sister’s trusted friend, she had relied on me to help her get oriented and to invent her new persona, a Deadhead party girl. Now she was established and though we sat around the same way and did the same things, even talked about the same things, she wasn’t nearly as focused on me. She had another life “out there” and I wasn’t part of that.

We both knew that I had changed too. I had a new job. I was outgrowing my tiny room. To be perfectly crass about it, I was becoming enamored of more interesting women. Cecilia had been everything Simone had not, and our whole experiment with a totally open, totally honest relationship was in many ways a success. It definitely fixed what had been wrong between me and Simone, which was mainly me telling her what she wanted to hear even when it was a lie. Worse, it had been me lying to myself about who I was and what I was capable of.

With Cecilia, I didn’t lie to her and she didn’t lie to me. Sometimes the truth hurt. She was honest that her last boyfriend was better looking than me, taller, in better shape. I didn’t want to hear that but I didn’t want some bogus fairytale story about how I was her first and only or the love of her life. I knew that wasn’t true. I’m not saying I didn’t fall in love. I did. And I never really fell out of love. It’s more like it just got dissolved in a much bigger solution until finally it didn’t have any cohesion any more.

I still wanted her too, physically. My last time up in Marin, because this was my last time, we slept together like nothing had changed. Like she hadn’t stopped rejecting the other guys she flirted with, like she hadn’t banged one or possibly two roadies in a situation that ended up being a little beyond her control, like she wasn’t now fooling around with this Evan guy. One last time it was just the two of us and she was just as playful as ever. She knew I liked the soft feeling of her lingerie and she tried rubbing it on me to see how that would feel. I realized that it didn’t work that way. Silky nylon fabrics were nice when there wasn’t a warm flesh and blood person to enfold me but it was totally redundant, really a distraction when there was. Still, I liked her flexibility and the fact that even right up to the end she was trying new things.

Sometimes I’d been frustrated with her inability to come. She still hadn’t solved that problem and I knew I never would. I didn’t blame her of course but it was this constant reminder that sex meant something different to her than to me. Or maybe it was worse, maybe it reminded me that sex meant the same thing to me that it meant to her. That it wasn’t about the actual lovemaking, or call it fucking if your prefer, but about the seduction and the capture, the attention and the validation through the gaze of another. Maybe it was all just a game.

We had planned to go to Laguna Seca all year. The Dead had played a weekend in 1987 down at the race track way south of the Bay and those shows had stood out for me as a high point of my California Deadhead career. It’s not that they were necessarily the best played shows or the ones with the rarest songs or most sublime moments of improvisation and serendipity. It was the setting as a whole, a holistic thing. It was the warm summer weather. The shows had been in May in ‘87 and the weather had been perfect. Cooling fog had burned off in the morning and the days had been warm and sunny, the evenings balmy and comfortable.

Beautiful west coast college students with perfect bodies and perfect tans bobbed and danced all up and down the side of the hill and even the dirt surfing tour rats looked their best, skipping and dancing along to Scarlet Begonias. At one moment a cool breeze rippled down the hillside and a wave of ahhhh crested through the crowd until even the lead guitar briefly bobbed on the same current. The whole cosmic oneness thing the Dead were famous for was fully in effect.

The fried calamari at the concession stand was good too.

On top of that Bruce Hornsby, whom we didn’t really know, opened, and his band played a credible, circa Europe ‘72 cover of China Cat Rider, and then Ry Cooder also brought his band blinking out the LA club scene to play a set each day with an amazing all-male five-part gospel harmony backing group.

At night, they filmed the famous Touch of Grey video that ended up being a hit on MTV later that year, the one where the band morphed into skeletons. They invited a bunch of us to hang out all evening as they lip-synched to the recently released single and asked us to act like, well, Deadheads, in the audience.

We talked about those shows for the rest of the year and when ‘88 Laguna Seca Daze (so named for the fortuitous initials) concerts were announced we got our tickets in advance. Cecilia and I were planning to go of course but then as we started not seeing each other so much I wasn’t sure what the plan was going to be. That last time I was up in Marin with her she said, “Sure, of course I still want to go,” and I thought that was kind of cool.

Problem was Laguna Seca was in July in ‘88. Much hotter. The whole scene was way overcrowded. Word had gotten out. Cecilia drove down with her crusty old cousin and once again I was struck by the eerie feeling that I was looking at a future version of Cecilia herself, presuming she didn’t gave up on her oft-stated plan of not living past thirty. We shared a tent and the first night we were there I rolled over and put my arm around her, expecting that we would get it on.

She shrugged me off. She didn’t really explain anything, except to make a sort of exasperated sound like, “Duh, don’t you realize we’ve broken up,” except we had never said so and I wasn’t sure what was different now from just a few weeks earlier. But I couldn’t argue with chemistry or lack thereof. I was a little disappointed, just like I might be any time I was expecting to get laid and did not, but I could really argue with it. Not only was it of course her right to say no anytime she wanted, but I knew that I was on autopilot, that any screwing would have been perfunctory, that we were over and I should have known it the same way she instinctively did. Not that I regretted giving it one last shot.

Still we kept talking, although not as often. Cecilia did manage to enroll in the College of Marin that fall. One day she told me she was having trouble writing a research paper and I jumped at the chance to help. Being smart, that was my specialty. I told her, “Why don’t you come over on Saturday and we’ll sort it out.” At this point I had no ulterior motive. I was completely into the idea of just being friends. I was with Giselle by then anyway.

She came over on Saturday afternoon with her book bag and asked for a beer, like nothing was different. We hung out in the livingroom listening to music and getting caught up. She was enjoying school but not her classes. She liked meeting people but she definitely didn’t look forward to two and a half more years of college. Finally I told her that we should probably take a look at her paper.

She hauled out some books and her notepad and showed me the part she was supposed to be writing about. She had no idea how to highlight. There were pages and pages basically full of yellow magic marker, as if she had not been paying attention at all. I got a handle on the topic and started trying to figure out a way she could tackle her paper, which only needed to be five or six pages, really.

Meanwhile she was pacing around the room with her third beer. I started trying to explain how to think things through and how to figure out a topic and a thesis statement for the paper, how to outline it, how to write the first sentence, and so on. I offered to take a look at her first draft and give her feedback.

“Can’t you just write it for me?” she said.

Maybe at one time I would have. There was definitely a time when I probably would have done anything she asked, because I wanted her to like me, because she was hot, because of the affection I felt for her. But this was easy. I knew that doing her work for her would be pointless. She’d learn nothing and just end up postponing the next inevitable crisis. Plus, I didn’t want to. I was done with college. This wasn’t really my problem.

“Fuck that,” I said.

Oddly enough, through the entire time with Cecilia, my friendship with Bella seemed to remain unchanged. She took an interest in us, of course, and I knew she was hearing things from Cecilia because from time to time we’d talk on the phone and she’d give me the latest from her grapevine. As things were starting to fall apart, or maybe drift apart is more like it, I found myself turning to Bella for advice every now and then. She had a sort of hands-off attitude. She made it clear that our friendship was not in jeopardy but also that her loyalty to her little sister was likewise not in question. She more or less said it didn’t make a difference to her if we stayed together or not. She thought it was kind of cool - actually “cute” I think is the word she used - when we started seeing each other, but she also told me flat out she didn’t expect it to last. I didn’t argue with her, and I didn’t tell her about the time I asked Cecilia to marry me, but she was totally in the loop when we thought we were pregnant and she was completely nonjudgemental about that too.

I called Bella partly to let her know I was going to be in New York in a week to visit my family and partly to probe her and find out if she knew whether Cecilia nda Evan were a couple or just friends. Bella had moved to the upper east side, only a few blocks east of where my folks lived, in fact, in a third-story walkup. She was still trying to be an actress, taking classes, getting headshots, going to tryouts, but she was also working most nights as a waitress at the Top of the Sixes. She said her mother didn’t really approve of her squandering - her word - her Princeton education doing off- off- off-Broadway plays, but also told her that if she was serious about an acting career that she should “get on with it.”

Bella had no insight to offer about Evan, but indirectly she told me to take things at face value. Both Bella and Paulie had always believed there was no such thing as a coincidence. They were no longer a couple themselves, what with Paulie in LA and Bella in New York. In fact, Bella was seeing someone now, a really good looking sous chef named Tony. She had convinced Tony to take a few modeling shots himself with his shirt off and she showed them to me when I was visiting. He obviously worked out. He was in great shape. I could see why she was attracted to him. She teased him about the fact that his hair was starting to thin at the crown and I told her to lay off, that women have so many dimensions to their vanity and that we men seem to invest it all in our hair, so don’t be mean, but she just laughed.

Tony was a good guy. He told hilarious stories about life in the kitchen, where it sounded like it was 200 degrees and full of illegal immigrants. He said they were all drinking cold beers all the time to fight the heat and that knifeplay and fistfights were not entirely unheard of. It was partly the job of his boss, the head chef to enforce discipline. He told me a bunch of stories about two busboys in his restaurant who were apparently from India based on this south Asian accent he put on while talking like them. He said one day they came to him and said, “What is this ‘New Jersey’ people are always talking about?” so he tried to explain to them that New Jersey was a state right next to New York that New Yorkers looked down on as an inferior suburban wasteland and that people from New Jersey were mocked for their lack of city smarts. He said the two of them looked at each other and then shouted “New Calhi!”

The point of the joke was that there was apparently an exactly parallel place outside of New Delhi where the analogy to New Jersey was perfect. It definitely cracked me up, but next time I was home I tried to locate this city in my historical atlas - I tried several possible spellings - and I didn’t find anything. So I figured he either made the story up or they said some city name that he totally misheard or misunderstood.

Tony liked a bonghit as much as Bella did so I knew when I visited her we’d get high and talk for hours. Or she’d be out and we’d go meet her dealer on the west side. Buying drugs was so different in New York. It was both more dangerous and in some ways much more social and casual.

On this visit I got together with Bella and Baxter and had drinks and then dinner at the restaurant overlooking Times Square station, one of my favorite locations in the city although to be honest I prefer the Oyster Bar over the place up on the balcony, which is may more expensive and foo-foo. I don’t remember what it was called then. It’s changed hands numerous times since. Michael Jordan owned a piece of it for a while. The Oyster Bar is more of a dive and is somewhat grungy by comparison, so I kind of understand why the girls wanted to eat on that high perch. I had to admit that the view of the station floor was stunning, too. There were times when I regretted having left New York, with its imperial Roman sense of itself and its occasional glimmers of soaring cathedral architecture.

As usual we talked freely about nasty stuff. Somehow, for example, we got on the subject of anal sex, something both Baxter and Bella freely admitted they had tried although neither of them said it was all that great. “Does it always hurt?” I asked. “If you’re doing it right,” said Bella, laughing. Then they talked about lube, and relaxing, etc., but Bella said in her inimitable lockerroom way, “It still always makes me feel like I’m taking a shit.”

“That sounds so sexy,” I said, with a straight face. Then we cracked up again. Baxter made a scrunched up face and then turned to Bella and said “Push back, push back!” like it was some kind of private joke. I filed it away for future reference.

Sometimes I saved up questions about women or sex or women’s bodies for these guys because I knew I could ask them anything and I didn’t always feel that way about whoever I was with. Like this one time when Simone shaved herself “down there.” This was towards the end of our relationship when I suspect she sensed I was starting to lose interest and she was trying to make herself more exotic or exciting to me, anything short of biting the bullet, so to speak, and learning to give head, I suppose.

To be honest, the whole shaved look was not that big a deal to me. The girls in Penthouse and other magazines and in the pornos were all shaved and I still felt that was kind of weird. The hippie in me thought that women should be natural. Also, I was a little creeped out by the whole prepubescent look of a shaved pussy. I didn’t want to be with an underaged girl, or pretend I was, or anything. The whole ideas was a turnoff. In fact Cecilia kept herself shaved and that was one thing I was never too keen on exactly because of my sense that she was somewhat arrested in that way, by what her brother had done.

The one advantage to the whole deal was practical - you didn’t get those maddening little hairs stuck in your teeth, or in the back of your throat, but then there was the whole stubble thing to deal with. Simone complained about itching from like day 2 and quickly let it grow back. Actually, when the hair was very short and downy that was kind of nice, sort of a compromise. It didn’t look defoliated but there wasn’t that thick bush and it was soft instead of prickly to the touch.

But the weird thing I remember is that like the day after Simone shaved I was going down on her and I noticed this extreme assymetry to her minor labia, like the lip on the left side, her right I guess, seemed twice as big or more than the one on the other side. It also kind of stuck out or hung down. I had to admit that the whole “clam” analogy that seemed so weird and gross sort of did fit visually, although the idea never worked for me since clams have that hard shell.

We both noticed it. She went and got a handheld mirror and she started kind of freaking out, like it was bee sting or something, although she admitted that it felt normal. I asked Bella about it next time we talked and she didn’t really have any good ideas but she did say that maybe it was just the normal way Simone was and that her pubes had hidden it, or maybe it was some sort of reaction to the added stimulation she was feeling on the newly exposed skin.

Bella had a way of putting my mind at ease about things like that, but I wasn’t really able to reassure Simone because I knew intuitively that she would not have wanted to know I was talking to another woman about her pussy. Fortunately, the problem went away or she forgot about it at least.

On this trip Bella and Baxter and I went out dancing. It felt kind of funny being out in discos in New York without Cecilia with us. We all agreed she would have been fun to have along. Bella had scored some mushrooms and we choked some down with beer at a club in the meatpacking district. I wanted to go to a nightclub a friend of mine was running one night a week inside another club, near Union Square, the real Union Square. Baxter called it a night, since she had to work the next day. She hadn’t eaten the mushrooms. Bella was willing to tag along even though she’d never really been close to my friend Andrea who was running the club. Andrea had been the year behind me at Princeton. She had dated my roommate for two years, tried a little modeling - she was beautiful in a totally unaffected way, as pretty in sweats as with makeup and high fashion - gotten bored with that, and was now out of school and poking around New York before heading back home to Alabama where she had grown up.

I suspected that Bella was a little jealous of Andrea. Or not jealous really, I just sensed the oil and water antipathy of two very pretty girls who were kind of used to getting their way and fawning over each other. We went to the club anyway and while I was on the guest list there wasn’t a plus one listed. The cover was only five bucks so I paid it for Bella. We went in and sat on one of the couches until I was able to catch Andrea’s eye. She screamed and ran over and gave me a hug and was very cordial with Bella who was equally smiley and friendly, but before long she flitted off again, mentioning her hostly responsibilities. The music was primarily Latin dance tunes.

It was incredibly hot and stuffy in there, what with it being late summer and all. The dog days. Hearing Buster Poindexter’s pseudo-Latin hit song for the umpteenth time since the previous year didn’t make the heat any more appealing. After a while Bella told me she was bored so we found Andrea to say goodbye. Andrea said if we wanted to we could meet her at the club under Indochine - she called it Underchine - late night after she was done at her club. We told her maybe and walked down the stair to the street.

A few weeks later there was serious fire in that club and a locked exit door and a lot of deaths and injuries. Fortunately it wasn’t on the Friday night that Andrea sublet the place but it put at least a temporary end to her impresario days.

Out in the busy street on a weekend night we suddenly felt the shrooms much more strongly than we had in the controlled claustrophobic confines of the nightclub. Without warning I felt intimately aware of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of other human beings, all within a block or two of me, all of whom would have been in my line of sight without the building walls to hide them, like cockroaches teeming in a tenement, all going about their lives with intention, all doing things, all trying to get something done, all pushing some object around or carrying something or rolling a ball up a hill or cleaning up a mess or making one. I almost swooned from the overwhelming awareness of this sea of people around me, totally ignoring me, going about their business.

I said, “Let’s sit down,” and we walked half a block to Union Square and sat on the steps there.

For a long time we just sat there saying nothing. Bella in fact hadn’t said a word since we walked out of the club when she had said, “I don’t like having to pay $5 to see my own friend.”

As I sat and watched the people and the lights I felt myself starting to calm down. Maybe it had just been the peak coming and now going. Still I was in no hurry to go anywhere. It was nice just sitting.

I’d been driving my new car to work almost every day, except when I carpooled with Bettie or Paul, for nearly two months when I decided I needed to give her a name. Chad always named his cars. He called his first two Hondas Norm and then Max, in each case naming the car after a setting on the air conditioner. We agreed that “Bi-Lev” would make a lousy name for a car, so when he bought this third new Honda, he called that one Bart, just so he could confuse people by saying he was taking Bart to his job at the university.

I definitely thought my car deserved a female name, although in some ways it was kind of butch with its blue (as opposed to pink) paintjob and square lines. I figured it was like ships. I finally settled on Lucille, naming it after B.B. King’s guitar.

I wasn’t sure I was doing that great a job of maintaining it, though. When Giselle’s other other boyfriend sold it to me, he didn’t really give me any tips, and I’d never owned car before. Mostly I just filled the tank and checked the air in the tires. After a couple of months had gone by I figured it might be time to change the oil or at least get that checked. I hadn’t the slightest idea of how to do it myself. I wasn’t at all mechanical and hadn’t grown up around cars. So I decided to take it to an Oil changers in Emeryville one day after work before driving home to San Francisco.

I pulled into the place and one of the guys who worked there came over to the driver’s side window, which I cranked down to talk to him. “Nice ride,” he said. I felt cool. I said, “thanks.”

“You want the works?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I probably need to change the oil, at least.”

“Probably need a new filter,” he said. “Hey, we don’t have the right one for this kind of car, but I can order it now for you and we will probably get one in by tomorrow.”

I thought about having him at least check the oil or give the engine a once-over, but I figured what’s one day?

I thanked him, said “Yeah, please order me that filter and I’ll drop by again around this time tomorrow.”

He said, “Cool,” and I backed the car out of the shop.

That night I gave Cecilia a call. We hadn’t been seeing much of each other but we were still talking on the phone at least every few nights. In some way it felt like it did when we first started going out, when we were on the phone all the time. I had taken a sort of benevolent attitude toward her emerging social life. After the wild night with the roadie she kind of admitted that I was right about what most guys really want and she seemed to be treating me like an adviser or confidant, almost as an avuncular figure. She knew I wasn’t that impressed by this new guy, Evan, who was hanging around her all the time, even helping out with babysitting her niece, and she knew I thought Sheena was sort of ditzy. She wasn’t looking for my approval or anything, but she obviously trusted me and liked me to know what was going on.

We still talked as if we were seeing each other too, and we had vague plans to get together the coming weekend or maybe the next.

I had told her about my one night with Maura, or really one day and one night, and how I hadn’t seen her since. She took a sort of perverse pleasure in that, and she acted reassured when I told her that she definitely had a better body than Maura did. Even though I tried to make it clear that that didn’t matter to me much, I had to admit that it was literally true. Cecilia was more shapely and feminine. On the other hand Maura was way more accomplished as a lover and I didn’t hesitate to tell Cecilia that. I wanted her to feel a little insecure about that, to not take me for granted. Maybe even to be a little jealous.

More recently I’d also kept her informed about my affair with Giselle. For once the word affair really seemed to fit. She agreed with me that the whole “other man” situation was lame and that our arrangement was the grown-up mature approach. Weren’t we telling each other everything.

I also let her know, in so many words, how sexy and seductive Giselle could be with me. Her sophisticated way of dressing and talking, her total lack of inhibitions in bed. Without trying to be cruel, or maybe a little, I let it slip that Giselle came easily and often. Cecilia didn’t take the bait. She acted sincerely happy for me. We were almost like high school friend sharing our adventures and experiences, but I still felt pangs of jealousy and I wanted to see some evidence of the same from her.

For some reason I forgot to bring Lucille in to the shop after work the next day and as I was driving over the bridge on the way home that evening I noticed a loud throbbing noise building up from the front of the car, coming from behind the dash. Something about the way the Lucille was handling didn’t feel right to me. It seemed to be laboring in some way. I wasn’t sure if I should trust my instincts about this because I only had the vaguest idea of how a car works. It didn’t feel right to me, but what did I know.

I was already on the bridge, though, having just passed the toll plaza, so I figured I ought to at least get over to San Francisco and then maybe I could pull into a gas station or a mechanic and have someone take a look. I gunned the engine, wanting to get over the bridge as fast as possible. There was a Brothers Johnson hit from the ’70s playing on the radio.

The laboring sound got louder and the car felt unwieldy under my hands. There started to be a high-pitched whining sound and I wasn’t really sure what to do. Suddenly there was a loud metallic thwack and I lost acceleration. The gas pedal went flaccid and the car started slowing down.

I tried pumping the accelerator but there was nothing. I was flying along at fifty, sixty miles an hour but slowing down rapidly with heavy traffic all around me and coming up my ass from behind. I put on my turn signal and started looking for an opening so I could drift to the rightmost lane. I also reached behind the steering wheel and put my hazards on, I managed to get all the way over in time to coast onto the exit for Treasure Island, in the middle of the bridge. I rolled down the off-ramp and ended up coming to rest a little ways from the guard booth for the Naval base there.

I sat in the car trying to figure out what to do. I knew that CalTrans would tow cars off the bridge if they were blocking traffic but I wasn’t stalled out in a lane so that probably wouldn’t kick in for me. Then I noticed a uniformed MP-looking guy approaching me. I rolled down the window and he said, “Please stay in your vehicle,” which was fine with me.

He asked me what the trouble was and I told him what had happened and that I didn’t know what it meant. I could smell a metallic burning smell, but there wasn’t any visible smoke coming from under my hood. He offered to call me a tow truck and I thanked him.

Later on I figured he was antsy because this was during the build up to the first gulf war and maybe they were on high alert at the bases for people rolling old junkers down to the gates. The battery still worked so I ended up listening to the radio for about forty-five minutes before a Ken Betts truck appeared.

They guy offered to look under the hood and when I told him what I had experienced he said, “It sounds like you threw a rod.”

“Is that bad?” I said.

“Yeah.”

“Real bad?”

“Yeah, real bad.”

“Can I fix it?”

“You’d have to get the engine rebuilt, and it might be easier just to replace the engine entirely.”

That bad. Shit. “Why do you think it happened?” I asked him. Before he answered he went over and grabbed the dipstick. He stuck it in the well, wiped it with his rag, then stuck it in again, took it out and looked at it closely.

“It’s bone dry,” he said.

“The oil?” I asked him, feeling stupid.

“What oil,” he said. “There is none. You definitely threw a rod. There was no lubrication. That’s why it got so hot. That’s what you’re smelling now.”

I really felt like an idiot. I didn’t need to change the oil. I just had to add a couple of quarts. Why wasn’t I checking the oil? Nobody told me, but that’s because everybody assumed I knew probably the most basic thing about taking care of a car. The thing must have been leaking oil like the Exxon Valdez. I guess I hadn’t noticed the spots on the street on Sixth Avenue or in the parking lot in Emeryville.

I felt dumb but I also felt guilt. I had killed Lucille. I knew I wasn’t going to rebuild her engine. Suddenly she really did seem like a female to me, a helpless girl I was supposed to protect and I had let the worst possible thing happen to her instead. I could feel a tears trying to squeeze out of the corners of my eyes but I held them back because I didn’t want the tow truck guy to think I was a pussy.

He offered to tow me home and asked if I had Triple A. I did not. Fortunately, although it takes forever to drive from the east bay to San Francisco during the commute, the distance is really only about fifteen or twenty miles, and I was already halfway there, so the tow wasn’t that expensive.

He left Lucille on the street outside of my house. I didn’t know what to do with her. She sat there for weeks, getting tickets. Someone stole her beautiful matching hubcaps. Finally, I sold her for $50 for scrap metal, ending my first experiment in owning a car.

I hoped I would do better next time.

Giselle’s other outside boyfriend told her he felt terrible about the car he sold me not lasting that long. I told her to tell him it wasn’t his fault. He was actaully a really nice guy. I tall thin soft-spoken guy with glasses and a stoop. Giselle told me she had decided to stop seeing him, which actually made me sort of nervous. Also, he was going back east to Yale or somewhere to study the history of the efect of technology on society. I wished him luck.

Giselle also updated me on Jack, or Peter as she preferred to call him, her long-distance boyfriend, after he headed out again. They were breaking up. When they were fighting about me, he admitted that he had been having a series of flings and hookups throughout their whole relationship. This made Giselle really mad, I think because she had been feeling guilty about me and the other affairs she’d had and she had been imagining him pining away for her and he had allowed her to believe that fantasy.

I thought about pointing out to her that he had only been following the rules they had agreed upon, but I remembered that they were really his rules - she had never felt all that good about them - and also I didn’t really see the percentage in taking his side.

I wasn’t sure how I felt about being the sole survivor in Giselle’s romantic life, though. As much as I hadn’t liked being part of her cheating on her man, I realized that there had been some security for me in knowing I wasn’t expected to make any kind of commitment. I still had my ongoing thing with Cecilia to hide behind, but that was feeling like a flimsier screen every day.

I kept not calling Maura and Giselle kept calling me. We’d say we were just going to get together and have a drink or have dinner but then we’d end up back in one of our beds at the end of the evening, usually hers, because she didn’t really want to be running into my roommates. I had some qualms about all of this. Ironically, it wasn’t really about Cecilia although I felt like I had still had unfinished business with her. It had more to do with Peter, Giselle’s boyfriend in Boston. I didn’t care that he was also a Princeton guy. That was meaningless to me. A random coincidence at best. I’d never known him there even though we had overlapped by one year apparently. It was really just the idea of being “the other man.”

I’d already resolved my moral issues quandary about cheating. Cecilia and I had a very clear understanding that, yes, we were together and maybe even in love but it was by no means exclusive. We were each totally free to do whatever we wanted whenever we wanted. Giselle’s arrangement with Peter was by contract much mushier. They both acknowledged that a long-distance relationship implied an unlikely degree of patience and they understood that they were each likely to have flings on the side, but as Giselle had told me when we first discussed it, Peter had insisted that they not tell each other of anything that might be going on. She wasn’t completely comfortable with the reality of this approach but she felt bound to it and so she said nothing to Peter about me, or for that matter Charlie or the woman she’d had the brief fling with who had finally stopped leaving pathetic messages on her answering machine.

Maybe I should have felt like this was the perfect arrangement. I had no obligations at all. There was no commitment. I was the outside guy. In many ways it was primarily a physical relationship. But in reality the guy on the east coast was an abstraction and in both my and Giselle’s day-to-day lives our connection was becoming more real. It was like that period in the late Ottoman empire when the various Beys and Deys of Egypt and other north African kingdoms pledged nominal fealty to the sultan but in their own locality they ruled like absolute monarchs. There may have been some theoretical relationship with this to-me imaginary guy back east but it was sure starting to feel like the real thing here in the kingdom of San Francisco.

And I didn’t like being party to a lie. Worse, Giselle told Peter about me. He knew my name. I was introduced as her friend, and later her good friend. She figured she wouldn’t be able to completely keep me a secret and that a lie that was close to the truth was better than some crazy lie she wouldn’t be able to keep track of, but this just made me more uncomfortable. I didn’t want to be a real person to him. I realized that my problem with being the other man wasn’t the thought of harming Giselle’s boyfriend. He still wasn’t very real to me. I didn’t care about him or his feelings. It was just some kind of code I didn’t want to be breaking. It made me feel sleazy.

I had a long talk with Dave about it. He was becoming my moral confidant. Whenever I was in some kind of a quandary I’d run it by him and he’d help me think it through. This time, though, Dave told me he didn’t really see the problem. “It sounds kind of ideal, if you ask me.” It just left me feeling uneasy, though.

There were other problems with Giselle, like she could be kind of bossy. She always had “suggestions” about how I could do things better. She thought I should be using the kitchen in the Gomer house for actual cooking. She thought the toilet in our bathroom should be cleaned more often. She actually suggested I shave with a straight razor and a brush. “You get a closer shave that way,” she said. “How would you know?” I asked her. “I read it in GQ.”

She even had advice for me about how to sneeze. All my life I’ve had this awkward way of sneezing, as if I’m trying to stifle it our something. People often asked me if it’s a sneeze or a cough, and I sometimes sneeze and nobody says God bless you or Gesundheit, probably because they don’t register it as an actual sneeze. Simone noticed it too. But then she had this exaggerated way of saying “a-choo-oo” every time she sneezed that sounded absurd to me. But Giselle went so far as to try coaching me on better sneezing. “You’ll throw your back out like that, swallowing your sneezes. When you feel the urge coming on, open your mouth wide so you can project the sneeze outward.” I told her I’d try but inside I was, like, whatever.

She said my sneezes startled her because they came with no warning and they were so sudden and loud, so plosive. She told me it sounded like a “retort.” I said, “I’m pretty sure you mean ‘report,’ like a gun?” She said, “No, I think the word is ‘retort.’” and I let it drop.

One night she finally agreed to sleep at my place. It felt so shabby compared to her boudoir but we had a great night till she mentioned that Peter was coming to visit her in a few days. “You could have given me more warning!” I said. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “He’s only going to be here for a fews days, but I won’t be able to see you when he’s here.” I said, “Of course not… but don’t you think he may figure out that something’s going on?” She said, “Why would he?” and I didn’t have a good answer for that.

Then in the morning, after we showered together, I took her from behind up against the towel rack. It was impetuous and I think she liked it. Also, she was on the pill so it wasn’t reckless or anything. She wrote me a little perfumed note and left it in my room to find later, referring to our escapade. I noticed that she had left her contact lenses in the little double-circle case she washed them in every night. I called her office and left a message there telling her she had left them behind.

The next day she called me up at my job and asked if she could drop by to pick up the contacts. I told her sure, no problem. “Just come by after 7,” I said. “I’ll be home all evening.” I was planning to hook up with Cecilia while Giselle was out of the picture but I didn’t have any immediate plans for that night.

At home after work I ate a cheese steak from Yellow Sub with Chad and Dave that night. We were listening to music on our stereo - I was trying to turn them onto American Music Club. Dave was into it but Chad didn’t like the guy’s voice. The doorbell rang and I said, “I’m expecting Giselle,” as I headed for the stairs. When I opened the door she was standing there with a guy about my height, sandy hair, dressed kind of preppy.

“Daniel, this is Peter,” she said. “Peter, this is my friend Daniel I told you about.”

I said, “Hey,” and stuck out my hand. Peter said the same thing and shook it while giving me the stinkeye.

“Your contacts,” I said to Giselle, “I’ll be right back.”

As I headed up the stairs I could hear Giselle spinning some totally weak yarn about hanging out and having her eyes get dry and then forgetting to take the contacts when she left and I was thinking what kind of an idiot would believe a story like that.

I came back down the stairs and handed Giselle her contacts. “Nice to meet you, Pete,” I said.

He said, “You too,” and gave me a funny little wave.

I closed the door on them and thought to myself, This is not good.

The next day Giselle called me at work again. She said, “He was going through my desk calendar and he noticed all the appointments I had with Daniel written on it. He said that it sounded like we were more than friends. I kind of warned him not to ask any more questions. It’s his stupid rule, after all. I’d rather just tell him the truth.”

I said, “I wish you would leave me out of this. This is exactly what I didn’t want to happen. Now this guy thinks I’m an asshole and he’s right.”

“Don’t be silly,” she said. She sometimes called me “silly goose,” but she didn’t say that now.

“Deal with it,” I said. “This is not my problem.”

I got two tickets to see a band called American Music Club at a tiny old nightclub called the Great American music Hall that used to be some kind of a dancehall or brothel back in the ’20s. Kim had turned me on to AMC, making a tape for me with their first two records, one each side, United Kingdom and California. I loved the lyrics of the songs and the singer’s way of pissing and moaning. Apparently he was something of an alcoholic, so seeing them was a bit like seeing Van Morrison. You never knew what kind of mood he’d be in. He might harangue the audience or he might put on the performance of his life.

In fact, several years later, just before AMC broke up I saw them open for Bob Dylan at the Berkeley Community Theatre and I was amazed at how the audience just about completely ignored them. I guess this is the usual fate of all opening acts, but I also felt like the graying hippies seeing Dylan for the umpteenth time had become so complacent in their desire to hear familiar comfortable music - something ironically Dylan would just as soon himself rather not serve up - that they didn’t know a good new-ish band fronted by a brilliant singer-songwriter when it bit them on the ass.

I also really liked the lead guitarist in the band, a porkpie-hat wearing enigma named Vudi. I remember seeing him staplegunning flyers for their show to telephone polls down Geary Street and thinking I guess that’s the punk life. You drive your own van, you unload your own amps, and you staple your own xeroxed handbills to the fake trees. D.I.Y., man. D.I.Y.

But I didn’t invite Kim to the show, I invited Giselle. It wasn’t necessarily her type of music. She told me she was more into Irma Thomas and other soul singers. I had to admit I wasn’t familiar with Irma Thomas and she told me that “Time Is On My Side” was her song before the Stones covered it. “That must have made her rich,” I said but Giselle told me, “No, someone else wrote it, so Irma didn’t get a penny when the Stones made it into a hit.” Apparently, Irma Thomas ended up opening a restaurant or nightclub in New Orleans, her home town. I thought I have to get myself to New Orleans one of these days.

Giselle said she’d be happy to come out with me. Our copyediting class had ended but we were still getting together for coffee or a drink every now and then. Things were pretty uneventful at her little publishing house and she liked hearing about how we cranked out six or seven new books a month in Emeryville. We got the club early and found a table near the stage. There was an opening act, with a name like Red House Train, or something - faux bluesy. It was like five guys, all of whom seemed younger than me, and rail thin. The singer was a moaner. All the songs were ballads. I could see why they were picked to open for AMC, but I wasn’t that impressed.

The show really picked up when Mark Eitzel and his band took the stage. They did most of the songs from the two albums I knew and the ones I didn’t know sounded great too. They encored with “Bad Liquor” which was a punky single they had put out before their first LP. It was bit like Television playing “Little Johnny Jewel” - kind of a nod to their true or oldest fans. I wasn’t really in that category but I was sucking up everything Kim was tipping me off too. She had stuck the single as filler on the end of the tape she’d made me, so I clued Giselle in to the significance of the encore so I’d look like someone in the know.

After the show, as we were filing out, I saw the singer standing around with I guess some friends of his at the bar. I went up to him to thank him for doing such a great job. Eitzel was a skinny guy with a shaved head. He grabbed my hand and pumped it enthusiastically, saying “Let me shake your friendly hand.” It was kind of the perfect moment to end on.

Giselle and I got into my little blue Mercedes and I asked her where she’d like to go next, out for a drink or back to her place. “Let’s go to my place,” she said, making it sound like maybe I’d be invited upstairs. She knew I was involved with somebody but then again she had that boyfriend on the east coast so she wasn’t really one to talk. I parked down the street from her apartment and we sat in the car just talking for a while.

I had an easier time talking to Giselle than to most people, men or women. I felt like I could say just about anything. I would flirt, a little but I didn’t feel like I had to put on an act to make her like me. We talked about sex sometimes and it wasn’t prurient. More matter-of-fact really. She would tell me about some of her lesbian affairs and how she felt that she leaned that way a little more than straight, but that it really depended on the person. I’d met people who claimed to be bisexual before but I had never really had the chance to talk about it much.

We also argued a bit, about stupid stuff. kind of like siblings. She would point out an annoying habit of mine, or a verbal tic, like my way of saying “fair enough” when I wasn’t convinced by one of her arguments. Usually I’d then point out that she had the exact same habit or tic, which would really piss her off. She’d claim I was just trying to turn everything back on her but really I wasn’t. That’s what made it feel like a sibling argument to me. My brother used to accuse me of just noting everything he ever complained about and then later accusing him of the same exact thing. Maybe there was some truth to it.

Eventually Giselle invited me up for a nightcap. She had a fairly large apartment with a living room separate from her bedroom, and no roommate. I surmised that she must come from some money because I didn’t know anyone my age who lived by themselves in anything bigger than a tiny studio. She poured me a couple of fingers of Johnny Walker Red over ice in a tumbler and admitted that she had always wanted to invite someone up for a nightcap. I pretended to be offended but couldn’t keep it up when she pushed my thrift-store tweed jacket off my shoulder and rested her lips on the crook of my neck.

She told me that the first time she noticed me in our extension class was when I was wearing this jacket and had stood up to take it off. Something about my back or shoulders, apparently, had caught her attention. I was tickled to think of being observed in that way, of being seen as sexy by a total stranger. I liked the idea that she had noticed me and made a point of meeting me.

It wasn’t that strange, really. Most of the other people in the class were much older or were notably unattractive or not very bright or otherwise disqualified as lust objects. I thought about how often people are thrown together, on a camping trip, in a freshman R.A. group, at a job, and it doesn’t take a novelist to figure out which ones are going to hook up. Sometimes it’s just obvious that there is one other person in a group who is there for you. It’s still up to you to go and get them, but the logic of attraction draws a straight line between you.

It was kind of like that with Giselle and me in that class. I thought I was chatting her up when she had already singled me out as someone she at least wanted to get to know, and now we were up in her apartment kissing. She had really nice furnishings. Brocade curtains, real furniture. All kinds of touches that you’d never see at the Gomer house with our venetian blinds and the couch we found out on the street one day. When she steered me too her bedroom I noticed her lace bedspread and her luxurious-feeling cotton sheets with no doubt some incredibly high thread count.

She was almost entirely uninhibited as far as I could tell. For a moment, when she went down on me, I flashed back to Maura doing the same thing the week before, but I thrust that out of my mind. Inwardly, I felt kind of evil, like I had had to cross Maura off of my list, finally make her come to me and submit to my patient years of seduction, and that now I wasn’t interested anymore. The mystery was gone and if anything I wanted a kind of petty revenge, as if to say “there, now you know what it feels like to be rejected,” but why was I still thinking about her? I put my hands in Giselle’s hair and brought myself back to the present.

Her body was delectable. She had a little babyfat, small-ish but plump breasts, and womanly hips. She wasn’t athletic but then neither was I. She wore expensive-looking sheer lingerie and I wasn’t sure if that was for our date or if she always dressed herself so sumptuously. Had she had been wearing these sexy underthings every time I’d seen her, in class, over coffee? Probably. I got the feeling she dressed to please herself and not me. She clearly paid attention to detail, with her creamy silk blouses, long wool skirts, and tasteful earrings. She favored green stones in her jewelry.

We fell asleep together after making love. I woke her in the middle of the night for another go, and then once more in the morning. She came back from the bathroom as I lay still lounging in her bed and said she wasn’t sure how she felt about me waking her up that way. She wanted this to be about more than sex. I said I agreed but I wasn’t sure I did.

We lay awake talking quietly long into the night. I couldn’t avoid reopening the topic of her repeated rejection and abandonment of me back in school. She apologized. She cried. I cried. She still couldn’t explain it. I tried to give her words, I suggested that maybe she felt too strongly about me, but she didn’t bite. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe,” but she sounded dubious. Somehow we got to talking about other flings and affairs she’d had during that same time. She mentioned one guy, an athlete, whom I knew another friend of mine had slept with once. I told her that other friend had remarked on how muscular he was. “That’s true,” said Maura, chuckling. None of this made me feel any better.

Why had she made such a big deal out of our flirtation, and continuously drawn me in and then backed off, while having a series of hook-ups with other guys. “Those were meaningless,” she said. “It was always just sex, with all those guys,” but this also didn’t satisfy me. “I would have taken some ‘just sex,’ I said. “No problem.

“You should never have made it out to be such a big deal. I know I wasn’t a jock. There were much better looking guys hitting on you, but how hard would it have been to just sleep with me a few times, or even once?” I said. Hearing myself whine like this felt pathetic. I could feel her body stiffen as we lay there spooning. I knew she didn’t take criticism well.

“Why do we have to talk about this anyway?” she said. “All’s well that ends well, right?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Sorry,” but the spell was broken.

In the morning we had brunch at PJ’s, a seafood restaurant on Irving, another New Orleans influenced place, and then she took off for her friend’s house in Berkeley. She gave me her number there, but I let a few weeks go by without calling, and then I felt kind of sheepish so I waited for her to call me, but she didn’t.

I started moving up at my job. First they promoted me from editorial assistant to assistant editor. There was no pay raise, but I went from being a glorified gopher and filing clerk to a sort of apprentice editor, working mostly on revised and updated editions of classic stroke books. After I had seen a few titles through the process - from updating the library of congress and R.R. Bowker ISBN information to gathering the post-publication proofreading corrections from the production files and getting the updates made, to in one case having a new preface added to one particularly popular book and then making sure that the files and bluelines made it off to the printer on time - I was given another promotion, this time to full-fledge copyeditor, with a tiny bump in pay.

Now I had the opportunity to take a few titles from the acquisition process into production, with the help of a developmental editor. I worked on two different series. The first dealt mainly with naughty schoolboy themes: boarding schools, librarians, teachers, and the occasional stepmother. The other was actually a series of how-to books, somewhat facetious guides to experimental or deviant sexual practices ostensibly written for couples. The former series of titles were called Bad Boy books and the latter were called …For Lovers, as in Menages a Trois …for Lovers or Fantasy Roleplay …for Lovers or Sadomasochism without Pain …for Lovers. I actually learned a thing or two reading these books, although I also took a lot of what I read for granted.

One thing I learned was that the writers Climex contracted to write these books weren’t very good. The first drafts were generally a mess. Climex used this accelerated “parallel” publishing process wherein the author would submit the first few chapters for development and copyediting and then work on the next few. In traditional publishing, a writer submits an entire manuscript and then waits six months or a year through a period of review and revision before seeing the book go to a printer. In this process, chapter one could be in proofreading while chapters two and three were in typesetting while chapters four and five were in factchecking while chapters six and seven were in copyediting while chapter eight was in development.

Generally, before even the first chapter was written the developmental editor would make the author work out an outline and get the sequence of chapters sorted out, as well as helping the writer think through what would happen or be explained in each chapter. Still, by the time a chapter landed on my desk, it was usually still in lousy shape, as the few developmental editors were overloaded with two many titles to manage as well as acquisition responsibilities - they had to find new authors and keep the hopper humming.

Now I was able to apply a lot of what I’d learned in my copyediting class at Berkeley. I had had a good intuitive sense of what was correct grammar and syntax and diction and what as not, although I wasn’t always sure which mistakes were syntax and which were grammar, but now I knew what symbols to use to indicate transposing the word “only” to after a verb, and when to change which to that and when to leave it alone, and how to indicate a hundred other necessary changes in the margins of a manuscript page or in the lines between the double-spacing.

It was tempting often to just strike through long sections of awful prose and rewrite it, but I knew that the true challenge of a copyeditor is to figure out what the author is trying to say, or what he or she would have said if they had been able. This led to a dialogue generally, becaue sometimes you’d have to offer choices and ask “Are you trying to say this or that?” The answers could lead to more questions even though there wasn’t a lot of time for additional rounds of revision before the next chapter would land on my desk, and the author would be getting more and more stressed by the time the parallel process was sending multiple chapters back to him (the writers were actually almost all men) for review along the various stages of the editorial and production processes.

I got better at forcing the issue, divining the writer’s intent, and then carefully recasting the tortured prose into a credible simulation of the writer’s voice if the writer had been smarter and more talented. I also started to resent the writer for making me do all this work and for getting their names - or rather their usually jokey pseudonyms - on the covers of the books when I knew that I was sometimes contributing more to the final product than they were.

I started thinking maybe I should just go ahead and write one of these stupid books myself, but the truth was I stil had a lot to learn about how to write a good dirty book.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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