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
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
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