2,000 words on youthful affairs

It was when she finally shouted at me down the alley, ‘Stop, you crazy bastard!’ when I realised she had been giving chase for a block or more.  I guess she spotted me on a quick go-round at the Video Saloon haling friendlies at the pool tables and dart boards to come along to the evening’s underwear party, the attraction of which ought to be abundantly obvious.  I had been moving up the main drag in this manner a few mugs of beer at a time, making enough haste through the June night towards the bar where we were amassing.  I guess my pace was brisk.

Why she ever felt compelled to run me down is a mystery even to this day.  A one-time roommate of my friend, I may have met her two unremarkable times prior to the alley.  I certainly never got the sense that she was interested in even just getting to know me, much less anything else for that matter.  In fact, whatever enthusiasm she might have started out with seemed to dissipate in a rapid fashion as we smoked a cigarette there on some brick steps, and about midway through our conversation there was an audible click as the heavy tumblers rolled into place unlocking a creeping doubt inside her breast as to whether she could actually picture herself fucking me.  I confusedly beamed about a party where I would strip nearly nude, she said something about a band in bar on the opposite end of the strip, I was more than welcome to show up when I had my clothes back on; I left it at that.

     Later on, after the underwear party belched me out, I realised that I   might have gone in several directions that night, none of them correct. We gathered first not in the bar but rather on a residential green near the front of the bar, drinking quarts of Miller High Life out of paper “public intoxication” sleeves.  This attracted a bit of extra attention and we managed to recruit a couple few girls to the cause.  Can’t contribute to a sausage-fest, forbid the thought!  In the end we were a motley bunch.  A few boys in our bearded mid-twenties; the slightly unlaundered girl who gave off the scent of mild schizophrenia and pushed her bicycle along; the womanly redhead who came reluctantly.  Ian, the smooth-talking drunken poet, coaxed her into it.  We danced with them down to their bras and panties, at one point as the redhead ground against me I predictably began getting an erection;  I sensed that might be a breach of the peace at this early stage and somehow talked it down.

The best part of the whole story didn’t even happen that night, in fact.  I remember I had quit the kitchen to smoke a joint outside, trying to divine how to get in the queue for the “seven minutes in heaven” closet, when I somehow found time to insult the host of the whole affair.  Something about his reluctance to strip off his boxers and prove some specific amount of manhood, I’m not really clear on this point as two or three girls had shed their brassieres by now and one was sporting quite a rack.  Months later I would go to some birthday party, a real friend-of-a-friend thing, and think to myself, boy this house looks familiar.  I hand this guy a birthday card, which he refuses as coldly disdainful as you like.  ‘You’re that asshole who told me I had a small dick.  It’s my fucking birthday, and I want you to get the fuck out of my house.’   I would have beaten me up.  I slunk off with my paper sack of Pabst, and later found the guy’s identity.  An ex- of mine had actually had a fling with him a few years prior.

Guess what she said about his cock.

Anyway, as I hinted at earlier, I did not get laid either at or following this underwear party.  As the sun began to rise and I was picking my way dazedly through backyards, I remembered that girl’s breathless invitation in the alleyway.  Salt in a suddenly large, obvious wound.  Not that I felt at that moment that I had wasted an opportunity, as I maintain.  No, I was irritated by the acknowledgment that at least one person in the world had by this point found someone to fuck her silly, while as for myself, I was going to walk home getting more and more sober to my sex-starved condition as I went along.  Nothing could ever make me feel more sexually worthless than I felt at that moment.

Which is not to say that there aren’t any contenders for a close second place, of course: in one instance, a girlfriend’s lesbian acquaintance  interrupted a Valentine’s drink with a remark about a little ‘whisky dick’ incident, wink wink.  I had called earlier that day from work and told her she ought to come out for some stand-up comedy and ‘company’.  Her friend was at the same bar either fortuitously or deliberately, I am not sure.  I bristled, drank a bit too much, was removed from the comedy show for throwing candy hearts at the comic.  We drank some more.  Then I yelled at the poor girl for the twenty-minute walk back to her house.  Surprisingly resilient, a week later I fucked her in the women’s restroom on a night out at a gay bar.  Eventually I made up for the lesbian’s insult by leaving sex stains on her leather sofa.  C’est la guerre.

She was the most drawn-out, complex relationship I’ve ever had.  The first act was our meeting outside of a lecture she had dropped.  She approached me in the hallway of Woodburn, knew me from some pithy comments I had made in previous classes, under the pretense that I might want to take some readings off her.  I courted her with witty emails, eventually being invited over to her place a few times before finally making out with her over a six pack of Red Hook IPA on a rainy summer day.  I was studying for finals that term in the music school building on the southeast corner of campus, as it turned out just half a block away from the place she was staying.  We met there serendipitously I thought, and what had been correspondence was suddenly open to sweaty, real world physicality.

It was nine or ten months later before we finally had the first affair.  She had moved to the old neighbourhood I had first lived in when I got to town, and my old friend Simon had moved around the corner.  I popped by hers one afternoon, as I had done casually once every month or so being in the area, and her roommate happened to be out and I just happened to be feeling bold that day and we fucked twice.  I felt like a bandit afterwards, I went to a small party at my friend Joe’s.  I felt like I had a secret – how dumb and young.

I went by once more after that, played her some Harry Nilsson and we danced, kissed.  She was struggling against a deadline and leaving for a fortnight in the morning, so I took my bottles of Samuel Smith and drank with an old drunkard I knew in the area.  We watched an old western on his television, we smoked cigarettes.  After another lengthy pause, we suddenly hooked up at the beginning of the following January, and now she lived south of town.  She dropped me off on campus that next morning and I had breakfast in theUnion, no sleep and sex on my clothes.  This time we saw each other for just under three months.  The whole thing plays out like a disconnected series of start-stop love-making over two and a half years, you see what I mean?

When she left I didn’t feel any loss, but I was rather put off at the time by how she went about it.  Still the best end to any relationship I have ever had: for a week she didn’t pick up the phone, and then there was an email that a few of my things would be in a bag hanging from her front door, she had moved back home following her graduation.  Everything was there, except for my black Hooters t-shirt.  By then the phone number didn’t work anymore.  How much like watching a boat sink is that?  A few years later I lived around the corner myself, and went and read by the swimming pool near that apartment block, drinking beer and getting tanned.  I was in love with life that summer.  That was the summer I tried to start an affair with my live-in girlfriend’s bff.  It backfired.  We had been at a 4^th of July pool party barbecue the day it happened, and she was gorgeous in her bikini, we smoked pot huddled together down out of the wind next to some picnic tables.  I made a pass at her later that night on my front porch step.  I was honestly probably in that stupid puppy love that we find ourselves in every once in a while, especially when drinking.  I tried again later in a small playground at the bottom of the slides.  She apologised, which was weird because I was remorseless, and the next night found me at the bar to tell me she had confessed to the presumably now live-in ex-girlfriend.  Which is of course brutal irony, because she confessed that she, feeling the same stupid thing, perhaps encouraged such a situation and we were punished without having properly consummated any substantive crime.

The stories all kind of bleed into and recall each other, so that once I get started, they just start to pile up on me.  Would so many of these women speak ill of me today?  And how many would not remember my name – hopefully out of the two categories the latter is greater in numbers.  It distracts me, furthermore, from wanting to dig my claws into anyone else when I consider a series in this way.  I just want to be goddamned good to people, and not being in relationships with any of them may be a start for right now.  Let’s see if I can get these orange seeds going – the sun shines in my windows between seven and seven forty P.M. each day for the time being.   If that’s successful perhaps we’ll consider taking the program forward a stage.