An Attempt at Rocket Science Using Fingerpaint

If you've stuck it out through these posts, I applaud you. The long and tortuous tale of Hades and Lovejoy is soon to draw to a close, and maybe we can all breathe a sigh of relief about that. The story being told is one way I can honor my 18 year old, who has never really been taken seriously regarding all of this. While it surprised me when this series of events rose up to consciousness after so long, it makes sense in the context of my young self feeling completely abandoned, belittled, diminished and dismissed, coming out to have his say, in the midst of relationship recovery. 

The first job I tried to get in Durham was at the greenhouses in Sarah Duke Gardens on the Duke campus. I had developed an enduring love for cacti and succulents that was in its 7th year already, and the conservatory at Duke included a large collection. I recall walking in for my interview with the greenhouse manager and being intoxicated by the oxygen rich loamy smell and the close humidity- it was January, very cold out. I instantly, desperately wanted the job. So much so that I lied on my application and indicated that I had worked at a garden center in Bethlehem- but was so unskilled at this that I put down the name of an actual business. The greenhouse manager checked, discovered I had lied, and told me he was sorry- that I would have gotten the job if I hadn't lied. That was a real blow to my ego and a bitter lesson. I felt humiliated for sure. I never lied on a resume after that. 

A picture of a couple getting engaged in the greenhouse at Duke. Happiness. 

I somehow found out about an organization called Carolina Action, a "citizen's lobbying organization" that used the pretense of "being your voice against Duke Power." At the time, this electric company with its fictional sounding name (now known as Duke Energy), was pushing for a huge rate increase in order to fund a nuclear power plant, planned for a locale about 50 miles from Durham. This was a highly controversial situation in 1980. Even if people were in favor of the nuke plant, they were opposed to paying for it via a rate increase. Carolina Action wisely settled on this issue as a fundraising lever. The two guys who ran the organization, however, were dyed in the wool socialists, and always talked about "fighting for social change." I applied for the job of "canvasser," which entailed being dropped off in a neighborhood with a map of my territory for the day, walking from house to house from 11 a.m. until 7 p.m., door to door fundraising for this group. 

The nuke plant got built anyway, in spite of my best fundraising efforts

On the way to our assignments for the day, we would practice our raps- we had a few set openers and scripts, tailored for various socioeconomic neighborhoods. The canvassing manager wisely chose all suburban locales, from lower middle class to high upper middle. Every shift, we were challenged to "make quota," a fixed amount of donations. We got a percent commission of donations over quota. 

Picture this long-haired, bespectacled, 18 year old Yankee going door to door in the suburbs of the South, tasked with eliciting cold call donations door to door, selling nothing but shinola. I was, as you may have guessed, very good at it, only falling short of quota a couple times. Tellingly, I had my best days in the wealthiest neighborhoods- and my moments of greatest triumph were when someone who was a shareholder in Duke Power would donate money to help us in our effort to lobby against their rate increase. 

The job was emotionally exhausting and lonely, and I began to sink into a severe depression, probably the second or third major depressive episode of my life to that date. The apartment where Lovejoy and I lived was small, shabby, cold. We had no money. She was deeply involved in her studies. I had insinuated myself into her circle of friends, and had gotten to know some jazz musicians. I was playing drums a little bit, playing piano in the Duke practice rooms. But all of my outer life was vicarious, contingent on Lovejoy's existing life. I had been a social butterfly in my senior year, after I had emerged out of the isolation post rupture, with tons of friends, parties, etc. I was the director of the school musical production of Godspell, and played drums in the band. We had also gone on a mini tour and performed in a few theaters on the East Coast after graduation. But as always, post high school, it was the great diaspora, and even if I had stayed in Bethlehem, no one else did. 

Compounding these factors, I was struggling with personality disturbances around being a writer. In response to the rupture, I had developed compensatory, grandiose ideas of being a "great artist." I felt myself to be the reincarnation of Joyce. I self consciously imagined I had the fate of being in an imaginary pantheon of Great Writers. I had bought the whole mythology hook line and sinker and it was a serious disruption in my life. I continued to write but it was a terrible struggle, in the face of feeling like I just might be "a genius." I became sullen and withdrawn- it was a couple years before Nicholson's Jack Torrance but I was prophetically going in that direction, in a somewhat more small scale, ordinary way. 

Lovejoy had no idea what she was dealing with. She also was prone to depression, and the two of us sank together. It was especially disheartening for us both because it seemed that everyone had been right. Our idea was not workable, we didn't know what we were doing, we would not find happiness simply because we loved each other. The days and nights were pretty heavy. We grew apart. I deeply resented her having betrayed me, still, and had done no work on getting through that and finding forgiveness. She resented my inability to just not get the fuck over it. 

She developed a serious case of pneumonia and went into the Duke infirmary on campus. During the time she was in there, I fucked a friend of hers twice, and my disordered and distorted thinking was that it set to rights her having slept with so many other men the prior year. The woman I had the fling with was nonchalant about the entire thing and had no emotional attachment to me whatsoever. It's weird still feeling ashamed of this failed attempt to establish "revenge equilibrium" between Lovejoy and me. It's especially astonishing that my betrayal was when Lovejoy was at her most vulnerable, sick and alone in the hospital. 

In my twisted mind at the time, the equilibrium could only be reached if I told her what I had done, which also, conveniently, would relieve my terrible guilt and shame. I don't recall much of the conversation, but I know it was the virtual end of things between Lovejoy and me, although we suddenly became much more cordial, stopped fighting, and some kind of desperate and weird cloud that had been over us cleared completely. I think this was because we both knew that we were bound to split in a final way, when her semester was over. We talked about not living together anymore, and we didn't fight about it, and all of the drama was gone. 

I think I was in shock. So this is how living together goes, I thought. So this is what working, paying bills and failing at a relationship goes. So this is how True Love unfolds in the world- killed by reality, gutted by infidelity, burned to the ground by resentment and fear. It felt like such a deep reversal over so short a time that it was simply not able to be integrated into any framework. From January to May. This pattern of experiences that can't be integrated, and in which I myself felt no integrity, where the narrative was so chaotic, characterizes much of my life since. 

A weird memory from the spring involves Allen Ginsberg visiting Duke to give a workshop and do a reading, and inviting me to play drums behind him as he "sang" his poem Die When You Die, which he had conceived as a kind of country and western song. He played accordion in 3/4 time and bleated out the words and I thought it was a parody, so I started mixing up the beat and going into free jazz mode. He turned around and said in rhythm, incorporated into the stanzas, "Stay on the beat there!" and I felt humiliated. I left the stage, in response to which he incorporated yet another line in his poem: "Get back on the drums there!" Afterward he confronted me and said I had been very rude and I (drunk) straight up told him his poetry was garbage and I was disappointed in him. He laughed at that and thought it was hilarious. He invited me to accompany him and a group of others to a bar. I went along part of the way. Someone asked him what he thought of acid. He said, "Oh it's very charming." I got distracted somehow and ended up not going with him and his entourage. 

One of the vivid memories toward the end of our living together involved a mattress that Lovejoy had bought used at the Salvation Army thrift store. While it was still cold, through winter into early spring, it was an ordinary mattress. But as soon as the warm weather hit, in our sweltering apartment, hundreds of fleas blossomed out of it, and were everywhere, tiny living poppy seeds hopping and springing out of the carpet, covering both of us with raised itchy welts. We bought a flea bomb canister, prepped the apartment, and launched the fumigation. We left, and had four hours we had to spend away from the apartment. 

We walked to Sarah Duke Gardens, sat on a grassy hill, and talked. I felt a deep sense of re-connection and so did she, as if it might be possible to forget the nightmare we had just been through. But it was only about three weeks from our planned departure, the arrangements had been made, the end was all set. I had already been hired by my uncle to work at the state park in upstate New York that he was superintendent of. Lovejoy had some kind of plan too. But we said, well, maybe we can try again after a while. The sun set over the gardens. I knew I was still in love with her, and I felt confused to the core by why we just hadn't been able to make it work. Both of us seemed in that moment, in the still evening air, surrounded by magnolias and the smell of cut grass, to know something on the deepest inner level- we had ruined it for good. If anything was going to be possible between us, it would have to be from square one, and we would have to be older, and there was probably a long, long individual road ahead. "Let's at least try to be friends," she said- I recall it clear as a bell ringing right now- and I said, "yeah." I knew I wasn't going to be very good at that. I said something like, "I'll always love you, somehow- I know that." There was a long, aching pause. "Yeah, I'll always love you too," she said.

It was dark. We walked back to the apartment, vacuumed up an astonishing number of dead fleas, and went to bed, not touching.  

***

Returning to my childhood home with everyone having been "right" about what a bad idea it all had been, was a moment of terrible shame. Up to New York State went I, for a summer of heavy drinking, playing my tenor saxophone in the foxfire scintillating deep woods at 3 a.m., weeping, lost and feeling fucked to the core. I took a girl on a date to see The Shining, and laughed at all the wrong parts, and once again, terrified her. My cousin said, "yeah, cuz, you gave her the creeps." My cousin and drinking partner loved the Sex Pistols. He looked through a few of the records I had brought up there and declared "this is all n***** music!" I had never heard anyone in real life actually use the word. We drank heavily all summer, Beast of Burden or Jocko Homo on the juke box in the bar we went to. 

I started writing to The Painter. I started fantasizing about her. She was at art school in Philadelphia, embroiled in an intense, obsessive love for a gay man who wanted to love her back but could only be friends. I hatched the plan of convincing The Painter to get back together with me. When I returned to Bethlehem in the fall of 1980, I set about wooing her. She wasn't interested. 

I went to live with my sister in Manhattan for a while. I was also obsessed with Lovejoy, still. She had embarked on a semester at a research station on the Outer Banks. Eventually, she told me she had fallen in love with another scientist there. I was crushed. I worked at the Barnes and Noble Sales Annex at 18th st. and 5th Avenue, and took the Lexington Ave line downtown from the upper east side every day. I was starving, I had no money. When I did have a little money, I spent it on rare free jazz recordings of Peter Brötzmann, from Germany, or bootleg re-released of Art Ensemble of Chicago records from their Paris years, 1969-1970. 





I wandered 5th Avenue and all of Manhattan a lot, and went to the Met on free days whenever I could. I was once famished, depressed and walking up 5th Avenue when I saw a limo pull up and Woody Allen and Mia Farrow got out and went into Elaine's. My sister set me up with a theater project at NYU through a friend of hers- the classics department was putting on a production of Aristophanes' The Clouds. I composed the music for the chorus and was Wrong Speech. Two of the women in the production wanted to date. I was a zombie. I couldn't do anything at all, really. 

In the midst of this, I had a powerful spiritual awakening. I was in a sudden bliss state of universal love. I saw everyone and everything as suffused with the light of the divine. I became convinced that Manhattan was hell but that even inside hell itself, the divine pulsed. I was in Manhattan when John Lennon was killed. I recall a drunk guy on the subway, clinging to the center pole, sobbing and singing parts of Imagine in between gales of tears. 

This too was a failed plan, I realized. I had imagined that I would pay my dues, find my way into the music scene, make a career for myself in music. None of that materialized. I knew the only place I could go was back home, having failed again. Another layer of ineffective attempts to extricate from my childhood home. I was home by New Year's, 1981. Nineteen years old, going on 20, lost and feeling like there was no way out. I painted, played music, wept, isolated. I was a heavy, heavy presence in my parents' house. I began to pursue The Painter again. 

This time, it worked, and we got back together. I had done nothing to heal from anything, except just let time pass and make abstract paintings. One of those paintings, I sent to U this last January as a birthday present. 

Falling back into a relationship with The Painter felt like a solution. 

This will fix me, finally. 

I think I'll leave the narrative thread here for a while. Except to say, plotwise, I drove a school bus for the spring semester, went out to visit my oldest brother in California, where he had taken his first job as an engineer, and had my first experience of the desert, camping at Joshua Tree. My father was convinced by now that, as lost as I was, the solution really was to send me to college. After two years of me not gaining any traction, and in fact becoming less and less functional in his eyes, he was ready to have me out of the house. I applied to NYU, UMass Amherst and St. John's College, and was accepted at all three. My father was relieved when I decided to go to St. John's, since he judged the school to be "serious about the liberal arts, not just a bunch of basket weaving classes." Also, it gave my parents a renewed reason to visit Annapolis, since my older brother had taken away their excuse when he left the Naval Academy. 

It was decided. Off to St. John's with me, a few weeks before my 20th birthday. The Painter and I worked out a long distance, Annapolis to Philadelphia and vice versa relationship. Although I was embarking on a kind of solo flight, I went into my first year in a "committed relationship." 

Soon after I arrived there, I met B, the man who was my first semester college roommate, and who is now romantically involved with my ex, A. I remain amazed by that. But the earliest memory I have from St. John's is a warm autumn day, sunny, the sycamores and tulip trees with leaves just barely beginning to turn, and I am on the lawn that stretched from the front of historic McDowell Hall all the way to the street. I'm reading The Iliad, in preparation for the first seminar. I looked up from Homer, took in the whole scene, and felt, for the first time in at least two years, that I had been granted a reprieve. I couldn't believe that I had the chance to spend four years in this incredible setting, simply reading and talking about "Great Books." It didn't seem real. I felt like I had finally found a way to transition out of my former life- but by the skin of my teeth, and in a precarious way, entirely dependent on my father, caught in a long distance romance. Nothing really hung together. It was a while before I realized I felt like an impostor. 

Almost exactly the view I had, in the above moment. More leaves. 

Old Artificer, Stand Me Now and Forever in Good Stead

The above, the apartment that Lovejoy found in Durham- a note written in her hand- just noticing now the strange placement of the apostrophes, no dot on the i. It's fascinating to me that, when I'm in love with a woman, even her handwriting turns me on. Finding that note and seeing her handwriting reminded me of all the letters we wrote, discarded years ago in an attempt to get free of her (in spite of hanging on to the above note for 40 years- don't judge me- I do what I want). Google maps says the apartments have been torn down and replaced by condos. Zillow says the median rent in Durham now is $1135 for a one bedroom. It turns out the Douglas Street area is highly gentrified now, a little over a mile from Duke U, and a studio in that area is $1950. That boggles. 

Somehow, my mother and father and one of my siblings and I were gathered in the living room, maybe at Thanksgiving. It seemed the opportune time to announce that I was moving out, and that Lovejoy and I were going to live together in Durham. My father laughed so hard, he feigned falling off the piano bench. "As water is for fish, so is contempt for the contemptible," says my old pal Wm. Blake. This was the atmosphere in which I tried to navigate a transition to adulthood. I can understand why my father thought it was unlikely that I would make a go of it as a writer, I can understand why he thought I was not college material ("based on how you finished high school and how you're acting, it would be a total waste of money"), and I can understand why he thought my plan to move in with Lovejoy in Durham was flimsy. I had provided him with ample evidence that I was none too functional- in fact, the kind of evidence that, these days, would land an adolescent in some serious psychiatric and therapeutic care. But his Kronos-like devouring of even the last shreds of self worth, dignity and a sense of manhood were sick and poisonous, rooted in his own history and really, God knows what else. I have since done repeated work around my resentments toward him, and have made great headway. A great gift of the programs of recovery- to let him off the hook for the unskilled ways he responded to my stumbling attempts to become myself. But the fact remains- at a time of massive upheaval, confusion and lack of skill and experience for me, I had no father and no other adult mentor- in fact, more accurately, I had an active adversary. I knew nothing about the practicalities of life. I had, also, little emotional intelligence and had not been nurtured for emotion regulation, validation, perspective or any other kind of even baseline wisdom. 

So I left home, under an archetypal father's curse, mother's anxiety and moral judgment, Lovejoy's parents equally appalled, everyone playing all the expected roles given the situation. I vividly recall Lovejoy picking me up predawn, January 2 1980, the big old Buick which her parents had given her (in which we had had dozens of makeout sessions just two years previously- nothing like the capacious cars of the '70's and bench seats!) packed to the gills with our meager possessions, and off we went to Durham, making the drive in one day. 

I also vividly recall my jumble of feelings, which had no outlet for expression. The surface transaction was ugly and angry- my father saw me off by saying that he thought it was a huge mistake, and that we couldn't expect any support. Something like: "I can't believe you're actually doing this idiotic thing." I told him as kindly as I could that that was fine, we knew what we were doing and we wouldn't need any support. He was disgusted. One thing about my father that was always true was that he wore his emotions on his face, and however he felt was always clearly visible no matter what he said- he provided me with all of my early training in becoming enmeshed in facial expressions and body language. And at this time of my life, anything and everything that I planned, thought of, valued and the entire way I saw the world was all shit, as far as he was concerned- unrealistic, foolish, stupid and "boneheaded." It somehow never occurred to him to approach me with understanding and respect, and say, let's talk about how we can collaborate on your transition out of here. He didn't have any fathering or mentoring skills at all. I was absolutely not worth his time. 

My mother, on the other hand, said she was worried, drive safe, call us when you get there, and she was trying to be cheerful. She did not wear her emotions on her face or anywhere else- she had three emotional settings, basically- pathologically cheerful, childishly sad or insanely enraged. Otherwise she was always distant and inscrutable, and, obviously, provided a completely different kind of training from my father's. Her only available counterweight to my father's global disapproval of me was to cheerfully say "you're great, you can do anything you set your mind to." I didn't exist in any real way for either of them. 

If I had been constitutionally more oriented toward believing in myself in the face of their abandonment, resilient and confident and less sensitive and prone to take everything they thought of me to heart, I may have been able to navigate my way clear of these realities more successfully. I have always been amazed by and envied people who do not take things to heart. Instead, they look at themselves with some perspective, try to see if the criticism is valid, and make their own judgment. This is a skill I have only started cultivating in the past 10 years or so. I've been greatly assisted by recovery people in this- a simple question like my first sponsor's in regard to my father's opinion of me as a writer- "has he ever read anything you've written?"- sets the stage for having a more clear-eyed response to criticism. 

It's helpful somehow for me to recall that my father was 38 and my mother 37 at this time. And they had had 18 years of failures as parents- so many stories I could tell of all the ways the family dysfunction played out for me and my three older sibs. And my father's life was falling apart at work (which meant that his entire identity was falling apart), and my mother was soon to find out that he had been having "an affair" with a sex worker in Pittsburgh for years (she found a canceled check "for a lot of money" made out to a woman- who does that? A man who wants to get caught, probably- and this is still the "big family secret," relayed to my sister by my intoxicated mother in the Rainbow Room in New York City, relayed to me by my sister while I was a sophomore at Racism College- more on all of that someday). All of the transitions out of the house for all of my siblings were either still underway (my oldest brother still living at home at 24) or had been extremely rocky (my sister having gotten married at age 18 to the boy next door who was 27, and the two of them running off to Long Island), and the brother two years older than I toeing some kind of weird line and going to the Naval Academy- the one thing that ever made my father proud about any of us- and yet, quite soon after my departure and while I was "shacking up" with Lovejoy, my brother would face the choice they force you to make at the Naval Academy after two years: sign on for at least 7 more years, or leave, no questions asked- and he left, and got back together with his high school sweetheart, and they got married, and he went to seminary- intending to join the priestly class, which my father utterly despised. 

In all of these ways (and more!) all of his children were a complete disappointment to my father, and he wore his contempt openly. Individuation was not a thing. None of us existed in any real way for our parents. Our existence was entirely contingent and relative to their own, and they were largely ashamed. (Picture also that my father was a diehard Nixon fan even after Nixon's resignation, a dyed in the wool conservative first utterly appalled by what he saw as the complete collapse of America in the '60's and then the repulsive disco/sexual revolution/drug insanity of the '70's- so that the microcosm of our family echoed the chaos and dissolution of America- the one bright spot for my father at this time must have been Reagan's election, finally the country got something right, it was the dawning of a new day to make America great again, no more apologizing and no more handouts! etc.)  

Anyway, I felt all of these things: enraged, frustrated, vengeful, humiliated, belittled, embarrassed, self doubting, anxious, rebellious, excited, shunted into total enmeshment with Lovejoy as a result of total abandonment by everyone else. But, and this is only natural, yet provided disturbing contrast- I was sad to be leaving home. I wasn't ready to leave home. (Counselors I have worked with over the past 30 years: "Why are you sad to be leaving this 1000th incredibly toxic situation you've been in?" Me: "Flummox.") I was sad to be folding myself up into Lovejoy's existing life, and not setting out as the proud male artist writer musician individualist. I was scared shitless. 

This emotionally dislocated transition, covered over by "ugh, I am so fucking glad to be leaving, so glad we are doing this, how exciting, I love you, good riddance to bad rubbish" set the stage for many other dislocating transitions in my life. Especially the face and pretense of The Chariot, the heart more like the Six of Swords or Eight of Cups. 

The three departure cards in the tarot- The Chariot is the archetype of swift, triumphant and free departure. The six of swords is the card of mournful departure into the unknown, while burdened by many thoughts of the past and projecting into the future. The eight of cups is the card of the mysterious and sad emotional departure, leaving behind a loved one, grieving the end of a valued phase of life. 

What also occurs to me is that the only other transition I had known up to this time had been 13 years earlier, when my father announced at dinner that we were moving from our house in Dunellen NJ to the house in Bethlehem PA. What I recall was looking up at the ceiling, watching the shadows of the spinning angel Christmas contraption, spun by the hot air that rose from the candles lit below. Listening to the bells, which little metal rods attached to the angels struck, as they went around and around. 

Feeling terrified. I was deeply attached, at five. to my life in Dunellen. I had a girlfriend down the street, a cute blond kid named Cindy Dayton. I had the familiar life there. I didn't want to move. Yet- everyone was expressing such cheerfulness and excitement about it. I don't think I showed my fear and inner resistance to moving, or my sadness. I don't recall the kind of reaction my feelings would have gotten, typically: "It's silly to feel that way! Everything will be so much better there!" I don't recall much else, except that I know that I went from teacher's pet in my kindergarten class in Dunellen- quiet, shy, well behaved, diligent- to class clown, problem child in the kindergarten in Bethlehem- notes home all the time, disruptive, show off. I was in that mode of arousing frustration and exasperation in my teachers for the next five years or so. I also have a ton of memories from ages 3-5 in Dunellen, and hardly any memories at all from 5 to about 7 in Bethlehem. 

I have often wondered why transitions are so fraught and sudden for me (not to mention so frequent- and I acknowledge that transition is difficult for everyone, at any baseline), laden with layers of mixed feelings that are usually unexpressed, forced or not well planned, and it's obvious that many moves and transitions have been an attempt at re-enacting this primal move with Lovejoy but getting it right, finally. "Getting it right" has appeared in many different forms: basically, it looks like I know what I am doing, I'm throwing my lot in with a woman where "it will be different this time," (often with more or less "you and me against the world" energy) and I am displaying competence and wisdom in the move. Or, when I have been ejected- sudden and fierce pulling of the plug, total change with no plan, no steps, nothing processed. As recently as two years ago, in leaving the house with A- our final fight was Feb. 27, and all my stuff was in storage March 1 and I was gone. After a six year partnership. 

Some psychologists find the re-enactment compulsion to be the main motivating force in the lives of dysfunctional people, and I am a prime candidate for that. The whole plot line of a tangled life from age 15 to now comes into crystalline and clear structure seen through that lens. Compulsively re-enacting my transition to adulthood, to manhood and sexual prowess; compulsively re-enacting either the intense oceanic falling in love of the Lovejoy Experience or the friendly, detached and safe Painter experience. Compulsively searching for some way to get it all right, to prove to myself and my introjected parents that I am not the insane, foolish, unskilled "problem child." While my oldest brother was definitely the black sheep of the family for most of the family mythology (including, in my parents's opinion, to this very day, even though he is a pathetic figure dealing with loss of short term memory from having had a stroke, living with his oldest son), I had become the identified patient in the family system. Least Likely to Succeed. "Different" and "with a nervous disposition." "That crazy Percy!" "My address book is full of five pages of your addresses!" hahahahaha. hahaha. ha. 

Anyway, obviously, Lovejoy and I were bound for a life of domestic bliss, excellent communication, mutual support and understanding. The sheer power of our love for each other would magically transform the vast warehouses of dysfunctionality, assumptions, expectations and intense pain we both brought with us, even at 18. That is exactly what happened, and we stayed married for almost 40 years, and now the whole community looks up to us as model partners, parents and functional, kind, wise and emotionally intelligent spiritual leaders. Our Instagram, a couples account, @lovejoynhadesforevs, is the envy of all of our sad and broken, cynical and lonely friends. Our couples Facebook, plastered with college graduations of our successful children and adorable grandchildren, vacations in beautiful places, adoring couples selfies, a source of amazement and inspiration for all. Not to say we didn't go through a lot- but through it all, we always communicated with love and respect, kept the flame of passion for each other alive, and love each other now more than ever. 

I guess we showed them. I guess we finally got it right. 

Interregnum

Unexpectedly, I unearthed a journal I was writing from September through November of '78, with Lovejoy away at college- it traces the same experiences I had remembered, but with a few very interesting and revelatory exceptions, that I had totally forgotten about. 

It feels important that, after she broke up with me on the phone, she and I did in fact have more contact, up to her return home for Thanksgiving in November. A confusing phone call in October where she "admitted she had been wrong about us" and said she had been sad and depressed, and my writing how that made me want to rescue her and take care of her forever. A cold and distant letter afterward that knocked me off center, since I thought her perspective of being wrong about us meant there was hope we'd get back together. 

She must have told me about the guy she was dating- a guy named Dave; but she also must have thrown Dave under the bus, since I wrote that she had said he meant nothing to her- of course. I had entirely forgotten that I was attempting something I have since attempted and not succeeded at: continuing to love her and be in relationship with her even while she "dated" Dave. Early polyamorous inclinations, with sincere sounding roots, but *at the same time*, jumbled up with extreme doormat attitudes combined with burning jealousy and deep resentment. What I had remembered as immediate insecurity and pain soon after the birthday phone call was in fact sustained and cyclical, nonlinear- I was agonizing right up to November. I had already started to think about asking out The Painter, though. Also important in this time was my stated desire to go to music school and my father's flat out refusal to pay for it, and his edict that I wasn't going to college right after high school anyway: "you can't handle college," was my father's conclusion. 

What a mess I was, I mean, understandably so. My 17 year old self was deeply earnest and idealistic, which of course I still am, but there was no space or lightness in it then. I had a pattern of writing out my honest feelings of anger, betrayal, resentment, rejection of Lovejoy's way of treating me- and then responding to my own writing by saying "of course, that's bullshit, I love her." Yikes. My beaten, shredded, confused, solitary and unguided, misguided self. I have done a slight bit of inner child stuff, but it becomes more and more apparent that my 17 year old needs fathering, so to speak. Major reconciliation needed there. Some of that has unfolded through step work in the past, in AA, but after reading that journal, it's apparent that I had severe personality disruptions and no solid ground or mentoring for any sort of perspective. I do remember being in my room, incredibly upset, in October, and my father knocking on the door, and sticking his head in, and saying "I have no idea what you are going through, but I want to tell you that everything will be okay." That was it- his middle ground way of not being able to talk at all, but trying to offer something. My mother listened to my woes and said "yes, I was heartbroken when your father went away to college and broke up with me, but we got back together." She only had the option of promoting to me her own myth, which only served to confuse me even worse. At some point, during a family dinner during this time, maybe Thanksgiving, the seemingly innocent topic of what everyone was going to do for a career came up- my brother was at the Naval Academy, my sister was just beginning a career in journalism in Manhattan, my oldest brother was still in engineering school- so we were all kind of unformed. Everyone had perfectly reasonable ideas of what they were going to do. The conversation came to me, and I said I wanted to be a writer, and my father burst out laughing contemptuously, and when he caught his breath, said with an acidulous sneer in his voice that I still recall like a knife in my heart: "A writer! That's hilarious. Percy, I guarantee you, you do not have one iota of the talent you think you have." (Later, while working with my first AA sponsor, I included that moment in my resentments, and my sponsor asked the very simple question that I had not once asked, in 25 years- "Had your father actually read any of the stuff you were writing?" It floored me. Of course he hadn't. My sponsor asked an even more important question: "So why did you take to heart what he said?" Sometimes I feel like I'm still puzzling that out). 

My earnest attempts to maintain an open heart toward Lovejoy and accept and love her no matter what were met with her steely rejection at Thanksgiving, combined with my flat out telling her off. My angry litany of how I felt was authentic, and completely crumpled the facade of being the wide open, forgiving, accepting, unconditionally loving person I was trying to be. Losing that veneer was the most humiliating thing of all. My idealism is real, and remains to this day, and it's an asset I have gotten a lot out of- but it was impossible for me, at 17, to either sustain it or integrate it usefully into a practical way of being in the world that protected me. The journal also reveals high idealization of Lovejoy- poor 18 year old hormonally raging pot smoking party inclined stressed out first year biology major at a very challenging school- with me laying all sorts of Goddess/Perfection/One True Love trips on her. This would operate very powerfully for me later, as well, which I'll get to. 

Not having any tools to work through the deep rupture of myself I had experienced, and discovering that a few months of isolation, writing, insomnia and existential ugliness did not, amazingly enough, make things any better, I took The Painter up on her offer to be in another exclusive sexual/romantic dyad. While Lovejoy had been analytical, sharply verbal, more Queen of Swords, The Painter was much more emotional, kinder and a combination of the Queen of Wands and the Queen of Cups. Tellingly, I had no room for a Queen of Pentacles in my life- far too practical. 

Jung's central concept of the animus and anima would later give me at least some kind of framework for understanding why the Lovejoy had such a ruinous effect on me. 

Unconsciously, I wanted to use a new romantic relationship to heal from the one that was so killing. I felt like The Painter could reprogram me. I felt like her attachment to me would at least flatter my ego enough that I could function better. I think I knew on some level that the experience with Lovejoy had changed me forever, and I also knew that The Painter was not capable of hurting me, at all. I was deeply fond of her, but not in love. She and I were friends, more than Lovejoy and I had ever been able to be due to the emotional intensity. I enjoyed her company but could just as well do without it. I was especially relieved to have the constant and oppressive aching loneliness of my emotionally tumultuous life relieved. To be desired and admired after feeling like a worm. 

If I had had the tools to be honest, this all might have gone better than it did. Instead, I spoke the same language of romance with The Painter as I had with Lovejoy, and spent my energies pretending. I felt vaguely guilty and dishonest the entire time. Infuriatingly, I also felt like I was betraying Lovejoy. That sex with The Painter, which was great- in a lot of ways, better than that with Lovejoy- was cheating. I had no way of understanding any of this. Instead of providing healing, the relationship with the Painter just drove my still bloody heart underground, into hiding, especially from myself. 

This set the stage for a pattern I engaged in for years afterward, or at least tried to: fall in love, open wide, become intensely attached, be betrayed or do the betraying myself, get slaughtered, jump into another relationship where the woman was way more attached to me than I her, try to stay safe and use the safe relationship to heal, get bored or restless, fall in love with someone new, etc. I have been edging toward a reckoning that would untangle this pattern and make me less likely to engage in it for 40 years- the first real layers peeling away in the late '80s after rehab with the discovery of John Bradshaw (although I ran with the framework of it all being my pareents' fault, and did get to the self-accountability piece, so it had little effect), another round after early sobriety, a much deeper sex and relationship inventory in AA in 2010, and now this. One approaches in a spiral, zeroing in. My hope is that I'm ready to forgive myself and Lovejoy, finally, and yet again ameliorate the old patterns, opening more fully to the present.  

It's difficult looking back at these primal things at age 57- feeling through all of the different aspects of the ways I was sexually and romantically programmed 40 years ago. I'm astonished at how fresh many of the wounds are. (An astrologer would laud all of it as Saturn Return work, and I can see it. I certainly did not fully address these wounds during my first Saturn return at age 29). But then- I walked away from the situation with Lovejoy at that time out of a fierce rebellion against romance and the heart, secretly resolving to never be hurt again, secretly longing for a recreation of that intense enmeshment and "oceanic bliss." I feared I would never get better, so I decided- again, unconsciously- to not even try. And my active alcoholism unfolded in the midst of this resignation, in complementary cycles of desperation. 

The Painter and I spent almost all of our time together. My social circle shrank. In spite of the apparent "serious commitment" we had made, I was play acting. This was still better than living in the crux of the rupture with no anodyne. I discovered the incredible power of faking it. It did not occur to me to date casually, although I did go on one awkward movie date with a girl named Maureen who I thought was fantastically eccentric- we saw the Altman film _A Wedding_, which features the darkest of dark humor, which I found perfect and hilarious, and my reveling in that flat out scared Maureen- she later told me she thought I was a psycho. 

I'm motivated to watch this again- it's at the bottom of the list of the great Altman films, but I loved it when I was 17. 

When her first year of college was over, and as my senior year of high school drew to a close, Lovejoy reappeared. We talked on the phone- my memory is that we spoke one time, with her still in Durham, on a beautiful May day, with me on the phone in the newspaper office at school. She eventually got around to saying "I want to get back together." I instantly said yes. It was, for me, surreal- because I had secretly still been hoping this would happen, from December to June. I had become so used to the silence between Lovejoy and me that I had given up. I was feeling, finally, callused over- my heart wasn't bleeding, it was just scar tissue. I was feeling free of attachment, for the most part. So, of course, it made perfect sense to instantly break up with The Painter, who had been nothing but kind and generous and affectionate and reliable and available with me, and jump right back into the burning building with Lovejoy. 

an actual picture of the charming demon that is my heart

No one involved in any of this communicated very well, as you can imagine. The Painter took the news gracefully. I shudder to think what I said to her, and I have no memory of it. Lovejoy and I picked up right where we had left off. Except that I now had a hulking beast of resentment, jealousy, insecurity, anger and fear living in me, that Lovejoy and I didn't talk about and that I had no outside assistance with. 

Lovejoy asked about The Painter. I am quite sure I threw The Painter right under the bus and said, flat out, she meant nothing to me, I was in love with you the entire time. I asked about Lovejoy's boyfriend or boyfriends at college. I am quite sure she said they meant nothing to her, and that she was in love with me the entire time. I believe that was probably the full extent of the "processing" we did, at first. The way we could stake a claim for getting back together was by telling each other that all of our intervening experience was meaningless. The processing would have its way with us as it unfolded in time, sideways and in destructive and dark ways, where, instead of compassionately working through how we honestly felt and sharing with each other what our authentic experience had been, we set out to destroy each other. 

I now had a set of secrets that I was keeping from Lovejoy: that I had thoroughly hated her at times and I was still angry, that I did love The Painter in a real way, that she did mean a lot to me in whatever ways I was present for that, that the sex was good, that I was enduringly jealous of the other men Lovejoy had fucked, that I felt she and I were two different, new people yet trying to "get back" what we had had. Most of all, I didn't tell Lovejoy the central fact of my existence: that I had had a direct encounter with the rupture, and that I continued to be in a state of bloody shreds, covered over by bitterness, cynicism, fear, false confidence and resentment, with an additional layer of idealism, spirituality and ego. 

It's amazing to look back and realize that all of these layers of how to operate in "intimate relationships" emerged in such a short time- from December 1977 to June 1979. Eighteen months. A year and a half of tumbling through razor blades with no armor, and no outside help, and nothing to go on. And of course the "solution" first was to get into another romantic relationship but one that was safe, and then the "solution" was to "get back together," and that, in and of itself, would make everything "better." It also resonated powerfully with the Family Mythology, since, after all, I owed my very existence to my parents "getting back together" after their time of separation. I thought, in spite of a shit ton of evidence to the contrary, that, "just like my parents," Lovejoy and I would now live- wait for it- happily ever after. All is forgiven. Best not to talk about it. Let's pretend it didn't even happen.

This was a very primal, powerful experience of not only throwing another woman under the bus, but more significantly, throwing myself under the bus. My experience *did not matter* since it was complex, problematic, might hurt Lovejoy, and was difficult to describe anyway. So I sold myself out in order to try to be with Lovejoy again. It didn't even occur to me that I did not trust her at all. It seemed unimportant. It felt trivial. I judged my lack of trust in her as a shortcoming of mine. 

It was resolved, in the midst of all of this multiple bad faith, that, after a semester went by wherein Lovejoy would look for a place and I would work and save some money, I would move down to Durham North Carolina and we would live together. Dig that. Not just all of the shaky ground, but sealing the deal with the perfectly logical idea that the way forward was to be domestic partners. I was still 17, she was still 18. Living together would solve everything. I get a gathering knot in my stomach just thinking about it, right this minute. 

Lovejoy had a summer job in Gloucester Mass, working in a fish packing plant. I have no idea how she got that job. I vividly recall a trip up to see her there. This was maybe July. Everything was already rattling and rumbling. I still felt jealous about the friend she had made the previous summer, and was still convinced she had a romantic connection with him. I wanted to know everything about Lovejoy's sexual/romantic life at college. Lovejoy told me a few details and I sunk into insane jealousy. There were aspects of her sex life with others that she would not do with me, and she said she had not enjoyed those at all- in fact that one such encounter had happened "by accident," but I was not reassured. She told me that "a lot of the guys I was sort of dating wanted me to give them blow jobs, but I told them it nauseated me." I was shocked by this entire thought, and I wanted to know how many guys, and I wanted to know how she could have been so casual about sex, my fierce jealousy coming out sideways as shaming her. I was so immolated by sexual jealousy. I remember not being able to sleep for days on end, imagining scenes of her with other men. I had a convenient moral and gender framework where casual sex was evil and making love was good, and I couldn't reconcile my idealization of Lovejoy with her experimentation and party life her first year at college. It was yet another series of contrasts I simply could not integrate into any kind of meaningful whole. Meanwhile, she was resentful and defensive in the face of my shaming her, and refused to accept any of it, and told me I was sexist and entitled, and of course she was right- that was my first experience of examining my own patriarchal attitudes, but it was unsustainable, because I was so hurt. 

In contrast, she seemed completely unfazed by my relationship with The Painter and as if it meant nothing to her. I resented that. We fought almost the entire visit, interspersed with sex, interspersed with the feeling that all would be well, that we'd get through all of it, that we'd be "fine." I got a stomach virus and was sick as a dog for two days. 

I went back home telling myself we had worked through everything and all would be well. 

We stuck to our plan. Neither one of us realized how much trouble we were in, both separately and together. I had absolutely no sense of my own codependent intention to put my whole post high school life on hold in order to move to Durham and live with her, while she pursued her college education, instantly creating a serious imbalance between us. I didn't even think about it. Or, more accurately, it was a huge relief to have an excuse not to think about it. It didn't bother me in the least that our plan was secret, that we had told no one, certainly not family, but also not even our close friends. I recall venturing a conversation with my older brother who was a devout Christian and who said "If you are ready to live together, you're ready to get married. Why live in sin (sic)?" (If I had to list the ways that religion failed me and I failed religion, it would take up the next 1000 blog posts). 

It's important to include that context. Cohabitation was scandalous, still, in 1979, at least in middle class white suburbia. People just didn't do it, at least not confidently or nonchalantly in the way that people do now. This added an extra edge of intrigue and riskiness to our plan, but we didn't care. The whole situation solidified the codependent, addictive relationship sense of "you and me against the world." Looking at it now, how obvious is it that everything was stacked against us? It's crystal clear. We were bold the way late adolescents can be- we'll be different- we are meant to be together so everything will work out- everyone else wouldn't and won't understand- love conquers all. Juliet had her Romeo. 

Jazz and 20th century orchestral music snob that I was, you wouldn't have caught me dead listening to Lou- of course, I also didn't have a time machine.

Given the vivid, nearly present-feeling memories of the time from December 1977 to July 1979, it's weird that the time from August to January, when I moved down to Durham, is a complete and total blank. I honestly do not recall what I did for those five months, other than write fiction. Given also that I recall vividly everything that happened after I moved in with Lovejoy, this seems to indicate that it was a time of almost total disassociation, which makes sense, since I was in limbo, no one had the slightest clue either what I was feeling or planning to do with my life, including me, and the only thing that mattered to me was the passage of time so that Lovejoy and I could "start our life together." 

Yet another in a series of set ups, in a long cycle of setups. A major part of my mentoring/re-fathering my 17-19 year old will have to be forgiving myself for such headlong self exposure and self destruction. I know that is important work to do, as I am still prone to scoffing and belittling my younger self. And it seems like my 17 year old self then rebelliously kicks in and wreaks havoc on my life, since no one is listening anyway, especially not the one most important person my 17 year old needs to listen- me.  

How to Heal Trauma at 17

I judged myself fairly harshly throughout that whole agonizing loss of the Lovejoy. Everything I was experiencing emotionally was completely out of line with concepts of masculinity- toughness, indifference, handling emotions with strength, confidence, walking away from the explosion- I simply felt defeated and that I would not make the transition to manhood. I think sexual/affectional trauma at the time of life when one is supposed to be initiated into adulthood has special aspects, and it would be interesting to read more about that and understand it.

Real men walk away from explosions and do not even look back. Or...real mutants do. 

Left with no resources, no one to talk with, and no perspective or life experience of my own, I was in serious danger. It interests me that I totally avoided drugs and alcohol during this nightmare period. I was terrified, I guess. Scared straight. It was a strange time of having everything in my life be exactly what I did not want to be happening. And I rode it out for a while- I turned to nothing at all except solitude and writing and music. This stretch was only about three months, and I attribute it to being in shock. Many days after school I isolated in my room- the smallest room in the house of my childhood- and wrote. Some nights I wrote until 3 or 4 in the morning. I tried to miss as much school as possible. I missed 80 days of my senior year- the state maximum to miss and not have to repeat the year. I had been counting. The attendance system must have sucked at my high school because there were never any consequences. There were still some copses and small woods near my house back then (all condos now) and I would spend autumn days there. There were a few days I slept on the ground for a few hours, having not slept at all the night before. 

In isolation, I started writing for hours and hours. I had a great old typewriter. Or I wrote by hand. I started a set of short stories in third person omniscient combined with stream of consciousness internal monologues, each one with a single character, each character roughly 16-20 years old, each one completely unable to make the transition to adulthood in one way or the other. In spite of the heavy influence of Joyce (many of the days I skipped school, I was reading Ulysses), the stories are postmodern. Gen X, more than Boomer. I'm proud to say. Because the characters are all completely lost even when they are on their way- in each sketch, the character is going somewhere but not getting anywhere, except for the sketch about a kid stuck at home whose girlfriend has dumped him. He wasn't going anywhere at all. 

I've kept or carried with me all of the writing I did from age 17 on. This old binder is from September 1978 to September 1980. 

I also spent a lot of time teaching myself Scots Gaelic, becoming more and more interested in jazz post 1960, reading plays. I have no memory of fantasizing about suicide. It seems like it didn't even occur to me. I find that interesting also. Below, a couple pages of one of the character sketches.

The first two pages of one of the character sketches I wrote when I was 17, the most autobiographical- "Mark," lying in bed, thinking about "Gail," on the night of his birthday, anticipating that she is going to call and fearing what she'll say. Mark Callum: my clever postmodern name, with Mark meaning related to Mars and war, and Callum the Scots Gaelic for dove, peace- a divided soul. Gail: in my mind, short for Abigail, Hebrew meaning: gives joy, or even more sardonically- my father rejoices, "joy of my father," and I was sarcastically linking that to "the sins of the father." . But double meaning with, of course, the tribe from which the Irish are descended.  

I usually titled these by the character's first name, but this one originally was called Yod. I was already studying astrology at this time and the idea of the yod aspect in one's chart fascinated me: 

"Astrology explains that raised or multi-aspected planets within the Yod can produce unusual situations and personalities, and should therefore be carefully examined. One possible approach is for an individual to view the yod as an exchange of positive forces around a mediating middle (though oppositional) planet. The quincunxed planet will act as a conduit of energy, or as a profound and deeply felt block. This aspect can produce a heightened direction of energy in the chart which may also oscillate between bifurcated states or situated personalities. A planetary opposition to the quincunxed planet of the Yod can be malefic, or can produce situations of dramatic reversal.

The midpoint of the sextile is a very sensitive point in the chart, as transiting planets, when conjunct with this midpoint, will then be in opposition to the quincunxed planet. This situation is said to trigger major events, thus revealing the true power of the Yod. Multiple sextiles and trines involving Yod planets can be extremely beneficial and thus spread the energy of this aspect in one side of the chart or produce a focal point for intense energies on the other side of the chart. Hence, the yod is the most difficult natal chart aspect to interpret and requires a great aptitude in astrological interpretation to divine accurately." (Wiki)

I also was interested in the arcane symbolism attributed to the Hebrew alphabet by the Kabbalists, where the letter yod is seen as being the "finger of God," that is, ineluctable fate. It also has significance in freemasonry. which I was also reading about at the time. "The yod in Jehovah is one of those things which eye hath not seen, but which has been concealed from all mankind. Its essence and matter are incomprehensible ; it is not lawful so much as to meditate upon it.

Man may lawfully revolve his thoughts from one end of the heavens to the other, but he cannot approach that inaccessible light, that primitive existence, contained in the letter Yod and indeed the masters call the letter thought or idea, and prescribe no bounds to its efficacy. It was this letter which, flowing from the primitive light, gave being to emanations. It wearied itself by the way, but assumed a new vigor by the sense of the letter t which makes the second letter of the Ineffable Name." (Mackey's Encyclopedia of Freemasonry). 

I had not yet encountered the works of Carl Jung, but as soon as I did (not long after this, thanks universe), I realized that the way I had been responding to the rupture in the universe and in my soul had been that unconscious contents of my psyche were emerging. In a Jungian framework, these numinous and oneiric contents are a way for the psyche to try to get back to balance, to incorporate incomprehensible trauma and paradox. My interest in astrology, I Ching, tarot, poetry and connection with the woods near my house were all part of that, and the underlying energy behind my writing was archetypal- the symbolism I was incorporating was inspired by the multivalent weirdness of Joyce's style of metaphor and double or triple meaning, but the energy to do it was not entirely imitative, but rather, driven by the shadow. The appeal of stream of consciousness narrative connected with that as well, as an echo of unconscious contents breaking through the daylight world of narrative. 

A bright spot from this weird and painful time was going to see Weather Report at the Astor Theater on October 29th, with my friend AJ. AJ was the girlfriend of a pal of mine, and he didn't want to go to the concert. AJ had never heard of Weather Report, but they had been musical heroes of mine for a few years- at least since about 1975. This was the configuration with Peter Erskine and Jaco- in fact, the below video was shot by Peter Erskine's dad- and how strange it is to find on YouTube some documentation of what I recall as the only couple of hours of hope from a few dismal months. 

Thanksgiving was approaching and I knew that Lovejoy would be home for the first time since she left. I felt increasing anxiety combined with strange hope, thinking maybe she and I would reconcile. In fact, I imagined her begging me to get back together, saying she had been wrong, apologizing, asking my forgiveness- but then would laugh at myself for all these thoughts, and be astonished at my madness. I have no idea how our face to face meeting came about, but meet we did, in the same den at her childhood home, where we had had so much romantic and sexual time together almost a year prior. 

She held fast to being split. I was so distraught by our conversation that I went outside her house and threw up in the bushes. I sometimes have found it hard to believe, looking back, how utterly nakedly vulnerable and raw I was. How easily she could slay me, like the Queen of Swords. As bloody and soft as I was, she was highly skilled at being utterly cold, below zero, steely and sharp as a veritable sword. It was a terrible encounter, but I was defenseless at the time. 

I went back into the den, however, and told her off. I recall a little bit of what I said, including that I thought she was selfish, self absorbed and a terrible human being. I stormed out and felt like I had simultaneously reclaimed a shred of dignity but had also killed something that once was beautiful, and killed it forever. I was so prone to absolute thinking at this time, a habit I obviously still indulge. It's clear to me now that the absolutism comes from a lack of emotional skill, a thorough lack of trust in the universe, an inability to let go and see what happens and a strong sense of self protection and control kicking in when I feel threatened. 

By Christmas, I would form another romantic/sexual dyad with The Painter, previously a woman I was friends with via involvement with the newspaper and arts magazine at my high school. The Painter, an incredible human being, fell madly in love with me, and I did not fall in love with her. I was still in love with Lovejoy. But I never spoke of that, and hoped it would wear off, and absolutely used The Painter's adoration of me to try to bolster myself. I know that if someone asked me at the time if that is what I was doing, of course, I would have denied it. But more about that in the next post. 

The love joy (CW: mention of sexual abuse, explicit sexual descriptions)

I'm 16, in December 1977, and there's a woman who has caught my fancy, at first in Latin class but then in other social interactions. I already had a metaphorical language/omen/poetry kind of read on the world, and her last name was Lovejoy, so that added to the fascination. I was attracted to her self-confidence, intelligence, humor, brown eyes, hands. Out of some kind of weird momentary sense of courage, I asked her on a date, over the Christmas holiday. A cold, snowy night found us going to see Close Encounters in the theater- yeah, that's how old your pal Percy is. During the movie, I forget when, the wild sparking nervous sweaty-palmed moment came to hold hands, and her hand in mine felt like the wildest connection to another human being I had ever felt. 

We drove back to my house- I should say, she drove, since she was 17 and had her license and I did not yet. There was some very awkward fumbling and kissing in the car outside my house. Kissing was heaven. I lost any sense of shyness and put my hand down her shirt and felt her flat, smooth nipple tighten and then swell under my fingers, which devastated me. She seemed to enjoy that, but after a while both of us pulled apart and she said something about caution and I agreed, and off I went into my house, high as fuck on oxytocin.  

My prior sexual/romantic experiences had been very few indeed. I had engaged in some same sex play with a friend of mine a few years earlier, in 6th grade, in that weird experimental way that is mostly curious. He was hung like a horse, frankly, and that added some weird fascination to the interactions, which never resulted in orgasm for either one of us, and were mostly just touching. I am a survivor of same sex sexual abuse from within my family, so I think the same sex energies of my interactions with this friend had an additional charge of combined eros and shame. I had no idea when I was 13 that I had even been molested- it was an incident that happened when I was 6 and I had totally forgotten about it and wouldn't recall it and name it until I was in counseling, at age 28. 

I kissed a girl for a few hours when I was a little older- I don't recall her name. She had a small, skinny frame, but wide hips, and her mouth tasted amazing, and she was fierce with her tongue- sort of jamming it unexpectedly into my mouth. "Haven't you ever French kissed before?" she asked and of course I said "ha, are you kidding, like, all the time!" We were at some kind of construction site up near our junior high. There was a lot of heavy breathing and kissing and tongue jamming, but that was it. She was sort of awkwardly rubbing her hand over my jeans and  leaned in. "Do you want to put it in me?" she whispered in my ear and I was so startled and terrified by that, I instantly said "No, this is nice. Maybe another time?" I think that hurt her feelings, as my memory is we kind of disentangled and that was that. 

My first sexual experience was with the 19 year old sister of a friend of mine, when I was 15. It was strange to be in counseling later in life- I think I was 35 or so- and have the therapist flat out say " No wonder you have some of these issues around sex and intimacy, you were raped." That hit me pretty hard. I had never framed it that way, mostly because I was male and she was a woman- but also because I was incredibly horny at 15. I had been compulsively getting off a couple times a day for months. I had a few magazines with miraculously sexy naked women in them and just was utterly obsessed with women's bodies. Fantasies about women set me on fire every day all day. I had mistakenly equated this arousal as consent. 

The 19 year old, whose name I also forget, and I were hanging out a lot the summer between my 9th and 10th grade years. She had pale white skin, jet black hair, was kind of busty and very flirtatious. (I found out later she kept a little black book of "boys I've deflowered," as she put it). We were sitting on the sofa in her house one night and drinking red wine. We started kissing, and she stopped after a while and stared out the sliding glass doors to their patio and started to cry. I was deeply unsettled by this and my first thought was I had hurt her somehow. "No," she said,"I'm just so very lonely. I like you but liking you just intensifies how lonely and awful I feel. I've tried to kill myself you know. I hardly ever tell anyone that." I sat back a little and said something like "wow, I'm really sorry. We can just talk, we don't have to do anything." I had an enormous rager of an erection, but that wasn't so unusual back then. 

But she grabbed me and pulled me to her and said, "no, in fact, what I want you to do is fuck me." I felt so incredibly awkward- it was only after therapy that I got in touch with the plain facts that, first of all, I didn't want to fuck her- I just wanted to kiss and fool around, and I was totally not ready to have sex, and second of all, I was suddenly quite concerned about her emotional state and felt like I was harming her somehow. The therapist I was working with took note of that, believe me. "You didn't realize she was probably manipulating you? You didn't know you were in danger? You make it sound like you were the bad guy here. Maybe you should take a look at that."

I gave in against my will because I was curious. "Hey, you've been fantasizing about shit like this for two years. This could be great. You have to do it. You have to." That was one of the voices in my head. 

We went upstairs to her room. We made out on her bed a little, and she got partially undressed and took my pants down. I dissociated for much of this- I think we had smoked a little weed too- so part of my swirling confusion was that I was intoxicated. This was at the time where weed had started to fuck with me big time- I loved it for a few years, starting when I was 12, but right around 15 or so it just made me paranoid and anxious and it was a bad trip. She excused herself, went into the bathroom. I lay there, realizing that I was not turned on. I was scared and worried. It all felt strange and disconnected and dark and confused. I was erect like mad, but felt nothing. I felt like I was next to my own body. 

She returned. "I put a diaphragm in," she said. I was actually a little disappointed she hadn't changed her mind. I don't think I even really knew what a diaphragm was, but I kind of vaguely did. We started making out again and I suddenly had the urge to go down on her. I had been studying my parents' copy of The Joy of Sex- the old 1970's version with the sexy line drawing of beautiful white hippies doing all sorts of things to each other (which of course they had hidden in their closet, but of course I found it, snooping around)- and I had learned from there that one of the most mind-blowing and affectionate things a guy could do was to "eat the pussy" of "his lover." (true- but at 15?) I knew very little about the anatomy of the vulva at age 15 and had not explored it. But I ventured down there anyway. 

Cis het paradise, '70's style- these two, and the drawing of the woman in particular, probably shaped a huge part of my unconscious sexuality

She caught my arm and said "Thanks for thinking of that, but spermicide really doesn't taste all that great, I'm told." I was determined though and said "It's okay, I'm not bothered by it," pretending I had experience, and she let go. I went to kiss her vulva and try it and was overwhelmed by an unexpected very intense musky aroma combined with the chemical smell and taste of the spermicide. It was a surprise, how strong the smells were, and how she was absolutely right- spermicide is really not great. I gamely went at it, not having a damned clue how to properly engage in clitoral-oral stimulation, and it was pretty miserable. When I stopped I had gone limp and yet she drew me up again, touched me and I focused on her breasts instead, a part of a woman's anatomy that had consumed my fantasies for years. 

I was hard again but barely, still with an acrid chemical taste in my mouth, when she guided me into her. As I tried to fuck her, I realized I felt absolutely nothing- no physical pleasure at all but also no emotional connection, no connection of any kind. After years of fantasizing about sex, here it was- and it was empty and awkward, lonely and weird. She seemed to be kind of pretending to enjoy it. I started to panic however as I continued to feel nothing. "You last a long time," she said after like two minutes. I wanted to connect more with her so I went in to kiss her and she got angry and turned her head to the side and whispered "DON'T. DON'T kiss me, DO NOT kiss me."

It was a shock. I almost immediately lost my erection. Ashamed, embarrassed, confused, feeling less than a man, diminished and bewildered, I lay next to her and apologized profusely. She apologized profusely also. "I just like to focus on...down there...I don't like to be kissed, during." I still didn't understand. After a little while I thought we should try again, but she said "Maybe another time, let's just go back downstairs. Don't worry. It was fun." 

No, it wasn't. I realized later that night that I had felt like I was using her, that I had been overwhelmed by the reality of a woman's body versus what I had seen in Playboy or whatever, and that I had "gone too far," way beyond where my sense of emotional connection or safety was. And I continued to feel embarrassed, ashamed, less than a man and weirdly defeated. I had heard stories of men just fucking women they felt nothing for, and I figured a real man didn't need to have any sense of connection in order to make it all work. So I thought the worst thing wrong with me was not only that I couldn't keep it up but also that I was unable to just fuck without feeling anything. Looking back at that, well, it says a lot about gender roles, sex, expectations and the culture I grew up in. 

She and I made out one more time. We had gone to see a James Bond movie in the theater and she spent much of the movie lightly touching the underside of my forearm with her fingernails and nuzzling my neck, kissing my ear. I felt hotter and more connected during all of that than I had when we were naked together- it seemed much more intimate. When we got back to her house, we made out a little and she tried to get me off via her hand, but again, numbness set in, I felt nothing, I lost my erection. She never said anything shaming about either time, for which I am thankful. Of course, she didn't have to. I left those two experiences being convinced, deep down, that I was sexually broken. I wondered if I were actually more into guys, which, when you're a 15 year old in 1976, was terrifying. I wondered why the disconnect between my masturbatory fantasies and actual contact with her was so profound. I heard stories from my male friends about their successful sexual exploits and felt increasingly diminished. 

So, back to Lovejoy and me. The sense of connection, arising out of months of friendship, and, for both of us, intense isolation and loneliness, hit me like an avalanche. I was obsessively fantasizing about her. I couldn't wait to make out with her more. I finally felt like the intervening two years of sexual self doubt and misery had a chance of getting some closure. In addition to intense feelings of sexual attraction to Lovejoy, I also began romantically perseverating over her. Thinking about her laugh, her smile, her mind. So I went fairly quickly from a weird barren lonely isolation to my first experience of crushing on a woman. I had zero framework for understanding what was happening, no relationship skills of any kind, and no preparation for the magnesium white hot feelings and heart-melting fondness I was feeling. I fell very, very quickly, from a great and gruesome height, as Dar Williams says. 

According to her at the time, so did she. I forget the exact progression of our sexual relationship, but I know that the first time I was able to have an orgasm with her, also with her using her hand, felt like a huge breakthrough for me. I know we made out a lot before that and I was just not able to get there via her attentions. I also recall the first time we had PIV sex. The whole experience was cloaked in my lie to her that she was the first. This is a weird thing, this virginity stuff. I imagined it was incredibly important to her that I had never been inside another woman. It was her first time, according to her. Since I guessed that her being the first for me also was so important, I lied. Our connection was strong enough that, in spite of my disconnection as a result of lying, and my slight shock at the sight of blood on both of us. I still had an orgasm. I look back ruefully at how good for both of us it would have been for me to tell her, honestly, what had happened before (except of course I had no language to tell what had happened to me). I could probably mark my codependency starting that very minute, when, instead of being vulnerable, risking her disappointment or anger and just owning my story, I lied "to protect her feelings." I also had that feeling of really wanting it to be true, and we all know how dangerous that can be. 

One thing that is weird for me to look back on is that, for the months that Lovejoy and I were sexually active, from December 1977 to August 1978, I have no idea if she ever had an orgasm. I was so naive and untrained, I may not even have known where the clitoris was and may have taken her pleasure when we made out to be the same as orgasm. I have no idea. I was a product of my patriarchal culture, although even then, I was trying to be different, thanks to the good old Joy of Sex. 

By February, after a couple months, she and I were talking about being soulmates, about getting married, about having three children. I was having a sacred experience of divine love, is how it felt. It was a secret, sacred initiation. She was my goddess. I adored her. When we were not together, I thought about her all the time. During the epic blizzard of 1978, we spent nights making out in front of the fireplace in her parents' den. I went down on her all the time, but still probably without skill. She hated going down on me but I didn't care. I adored her, worshiped her, obsessed over her. I recall feeling like I had found the very meaning of life itself in my love for her. I felt like our union with each other could change my life and change the world. I felt like our sex was sacred and cosmic and inviolably private and secret. I was intoxicated and lovesick, profoundly changed and deeply moved, completely transformed, at age 16. 

We spent several weeks apart in the summer, when I was at a six week summer music program for jazz studies in the far northeastern US and she was in the hot southwest with her family, as her father was a visiting researcher at an observatory there (he was an astronomer). It was torment, being away from her. I wrote letters several times a week and so did she. We were only able to talk on the phone a couple times- back in the day of land lines, long distance charges and payphones. She started telling me about a guy she had made friends with who had an amazing record collection- "you'd love all of his jazz records!" I instantly became insanely jealous (pace Robyn Hitchcock) and was convinced she was fucking the guy. I felt burning, killing jealousy- searing and corrosive. I sent her a letter accusing her of being untrue. She tried to reassure me but I couldn't be convinced. Meanwhile there was a wild looking woman on my dorm floor who didn't wear a bra and you could see her nipples through her shirt al the time and I fantasized about her- and felt awful, guilty, as if I had actually betrayed Lovejoy. By the time we reunited in our home town, with only ten days until she went off to "the Princeton of the South" for her first year of college and I had to start my senior year of high school, there was wariness and tension and mistrust. She felt like I was crazy- I felt like she was lying to me. We decided, in the midst of this intensity, to vow that we would stay together forever, that we would never break up, that as soon as I graduated from high school I would move down to her college town, that we'd love each other forever. 

Looking back, I felt like we went to this fierce level of intensity at ages 16 (me) and 17 (her) because we valued our connection with each other and KNEW it was going to be torn apart by the ordinary and ineluctable vicissitudes of life. Our way of responding to that deep knowing was to make vows that we would never let it happen. We were a couple of terrified kids, in way over our heads, sick with a series of emotional attachments that we had no skills to handle, truly fond of each other and good friends, but having brought layers and layers of our weird culture and abusive pasts into it. 

It didn't help matters that I had grown up with the Family Mythology of the great almost-tragedy of my parents' love affair when they were kids. Gender roles reversed, my mother still had her senior year to do in high school (16 years old); my father was off to a university in the Midwest (17 years old), thousands of miles away. They made the vow to make it work, but they broke up during my father's first year. My mother was heartbroken and devastated. She went to college, fairly uncommon back then. The way she told it to me, she had decided to live the rest of her life as a spinster school teacher, since she had lost the love of her life. But, miracle of miracles, they got back together the summer after my father's second year, and she dropped out of college, and they got married. So I had that whole story playing around the Lovejoy, and who knows, maybe epigenetically as well, in my blood. 

What a setup, right? Traced through the 19 year old, to a couple years of compulsive autoeroticism combined with feeling broken and weird, to the great conflagration of Lovejoy, to the summer apart, the terror it would be ruined, the impending separation. 

On my birthday in September of 1978, the Lovejoy called to wish me a happy birthday- I vividly recall taking the call in the dark of the basement of my childhood home. Twisting the cord in my hand. Her voice sounding off somehow. Her birthday wish sounding tentative. It sounded like "Happy birthday and I'm sorry but...." A million alarm bells started to go off. Prior to this, in the three weeks she had been gone, I had only gotten two, not very romantic, newsy letters. Maybe one other phone call. There was a long pause that felt like my entire puberty rolled into the dark. "What's wrong?" I asked. She replied, in an unexpectedly steely cold knife-like voice (perhaps trying to keep herself together, maybe trying to keep from going tender toward me and losing her resolve, maybe angry at the fucking reality, maybe angry at me for caring so much, who knows) "I can't do this anymore. It's over. I'm seeing someone. I'll always love you, but there's no way this will work." 

I can't describe how I felt, really. I know I started crying, and I recall that my physical reaction was that my palms were soaked, my stomach twisted, the air everywhere was actually ringing, and my mouth suddenly went completely dry. I felt physically cut, like a kind of sword slash around my guts. I wanted to talk about it more but she wouldn't. "Are you sure? Why? Why? Please don't. Please. Please don't." "I can't talk anymore. It's best if we just do not communicate anymore at all. Please don't write. I won't be contacting you. Maybe someday in the future, like years in the future, we can be together. But I just can't do this. Goodbye." And she hung up. 

My 17th birthday. Mere weeks after all those vows, behind which both of us suspected that it would come to this, but completely unconsciously. I was not only heartbroken and tossed into all kinds of intense emotions. I had a complete rupture of the soul in that moment. The main reason was not the rejection, or the pain of losing her. Or the idea that we would never see each other again or speak. The rupture went like this: "She and I are meant to be. It's obvious- we are fated to be together. We are soulmates." That conviction combined with the plain fact that we *would not be together* undid the total existential ground of my being. It's not possible- it's the worst and darkest paradox- when what is meant to be cannot be. It's not possible to hold both of those things in the same space. This can't be true, since the two of us were obviously put together by the universe. How can we not be together? 

None of this coalesced in my mind at the time, but it was the essence of how I felt. 

What is meant to be cannot be. You live in a universe where it is possible that what is meant to be cannot be. (So it must not have been meant to be. But- it obviously was meant to be. But it cannot be. For months in my mind). 

This is not a great place for an 17 year old to dwell. It should be a time of life that's just full of possibilities, a sense of personal agency, plans and ideas, hopes and excitement. Instead, and I realize this sounds dramatic (a rare lapse for me), I honestly felt like my life ended in that moment, at least any life that would matter, because the entire universe shifted, and what was supposed to happen did not happen and would never happen. I didn't for one second feel okay. I had none of "you are great, a great guy, this isn't about you. She is doing what she needs to do. Just grieve and move on and maybe get to know some other women." Not even a scintilla of that consciousness. I was 100% canceled. 

My wife, the mother of my children, my life partner- heavy, heavy things to think of someone else when one is 17. I had fantasized about the two of us being in our 70's, looking back on more than 50 years of life. I thought fondly of her with grey hair, I thought of being a father, I thought of our grandchildren. I thought of being a musician and having her support that, and her being a scientist and me supporting that, and the two of us making an epic pact, and living it out, for better or worse. How often I talked myself down from all of these thoughts by telling myself, come on, you're only 16/17. And how strongly our culture supports the idea that 16 year olds are incapable of having profound love, as well as suffering profound loss, and not just loss, but the belief in total existential annihilation of life purpose. 

Torn in two, with no support system, no counseling (teenagers didn't go to counseling much in 1978), no understanding adults to talk with (I tried to talk with the youth minister at my church and he said I was going to hell for having sex outside of marriage unless I got on my knees every day and prayed for forgiveness and that he wasn't surprised by how much I was suffering because that's the fate of those who disobey God's commandments), my best friend also away at his first year of college, faced with slogging through my senior year at a high school I fucking detested, where I had few deep connections, among people I thought were horrifying, stuck in my childhood home and deeply estranged from my parents who totally disapproved (ironically? knowingly?) of the relationship with Lovejoy anyway, being reminded of Lovejoy all the time, missing her, but hating her and being furiously jealous, but feeling tender, but unable to stop experiencing excruciatingly painful imaginings of her fucking her new boyfriend, but etc. 

I was so deeply traumatized that I spent many nights wandering around my suburban neighborhood at 3 or 4 in the morning. I woke up a few nights and worked myself up so much thinking about her fucking her new boyfriend, I had to go into the bathroom and vomit. I recall walking along the hallway at my high school, feeling like the fluorescent lights were burning, as the hallway crowded with peers, tears coming into my eyes. All I could do was stop and touch the wall. The cool tile felt okay. I walked down the hall tracing the tile with my fingers. Most of the time I felt like I wasn't going to make it. I would find myself waiting to hear from her. Then I would be furious for that, since she had made it clear it was not going to happen. I would find myself imagining calling her and saying exactly the right thing and having her be in love with me again. Then I would get furious at that, of course. 





October made a lot of sense to me. Death month. Autumn hit me like ice blades. As evocative as that time of year can be- leaves turning, the smoky snap in the air, the night sky cold on the phone line- the month and I knew each other and got along very well indeed. 

I'll save more of the story for the next post or two, but I will add here that it was at this time that I began to write plays, poetry, fiction, music. The existential rupture had me bleeding out stories. I had never thought of myself as a poet or writer before, only as a musician- although I had always loved writing. But that autumn, the rupture changed me at the core. When I look back, it appears very clearly that it was the time that I was fertilized by the dark serpent of the shadow. 

Mandala courtesy one of C. G. Jung's patients