Erotica Artist Ch. 02: Romance and Renun

So I blow my chance to escape from my psychic incarceration and enter a whole new world of light and love and freedom. I'm not up to it. I stew in my neurotic inner world. To my lifelong regret. Maybe there was no renunciation because there was no volition. I was too scared, too proud, too passive. I did nothing.

* * *

And so the summer of 1967, the so-called Summer of Love, when anyone, absolutely anyone, could get laid, I spent in isolation and despair at my parents' house in the coastal backwater, wondering why I couldn't look a lovely girl in the eye and say hello. It was the worst summer of my life.

And of course this had to be the summer when there was no work available in the local mill. The market for pulp and paper is poor. Staff is cut to the bone. No summer work for students. So through many empty weeks I had nothing to do all day but lay on the lawn of my parents' house and brood. I had no friends in town, and if I had, I would not have been fit company. I was as bereft and miserable as I had ever been in my life.

I felt helpless and trapped, and not just by the surrounding wilderness anymore, but by my own numbing shyness and passivity. I was just a repressed, helpless prig and I was disgusted with myself.

At times it was almost a physical ache, this sense of loss and regret. Not till years later would I gain similar insight into terms like heartache and heartsick. I counted off the days and weeks till September, when I would head back to school in the city. Yet I knew if I saw Kirsten again, nothing would be different for me. I would still be unable to say a word to her. She herself might be different. She might ignore me now, as if she didn't know me from any of the hundreds of other males on campus. And of course she didn't. Hadn't she said so?

Years later, decades later, for I could never forget her and thought of her ever after as some kind of touchstone in my life, it occurred to me that the only way I could have communicated with her after our first few spoken words, the only way I could have approached revealing my true feelings for her, would have been by writing to her. A letter, a series of letters, explaining my weird and outrageous behavior.

Why not? I was verbally inarticulate. Always had been. My only means of real communication would always be the written word. So why hadn't I done it? Why did I remain paralyzed here also?

The idea never even occurred to me. Not for decades. I could have used those four desolate summer months to compose some kind of explanation for my lunacy. I could have sounded out her feelings. All without having to speak to her in the flesh and become a nervous wreck in the process.

But of course I did nothing this constructive. To write to her would have been to break out of my passivity. It would have been to act. Instead I continued to stew in my own poisonous juices all summer long.

I look back on this period with such a sense of wonder at the pathos and ineptitude of my behavior. It's my only excuse for such an excruciating and protracted detailing of it. But there are some people who haunt us, throughout our lives, who never let us go. We don't have to have known them well, or perhaps at all, but they had a profound effect on us then, deep in the past, and they continue their influence throughout the decades. It's as if we have unfinished business with them, or business barely begun, conversations interrupted or not even started. And perhaps we don't want them to let us go, we want the haunting to continue to the very end of our lives. For their brief presence was deeply meaningful, intensely important, and it resonates throughout the years. They changed us somehow, set us off in a new direction. And we are grateful to them, and forever will be.

Such a one was Kirsten for me. And as poignant and painful as the memories might be, I may never want her haunting to stop.

* * *

In early July an out-of-town crew arrived to re-roof the entire paper mill and I was one of the half-dozen locals called to be helpers. It was filthy, back-breaking work in blistering heat, but it forced me out of bed in the morning and ensured I was tired enough to sleep at night.

But staggering across blazing rooftops with arm-wrenching pails of pitch for six weeks, my heart a burnt-out cinder, I realized this had to be some kind of rock-bottom low point in my life. Whatever pain, whatever humiliation I might have suffered because of the Nordic goddess, had I simply plunged ahead with her, would have been nothing compared with this. Rejection, betrayal, any kind of indignity could not have been worse. This was as close to hell as I ever wanted to come.

If the loss had taught me nothing else, it had at least demonstrated this simple notion: trying and failing and suffering for it is infinitely preferable to retreating and doing nothing. For if you remain passive you suffer anyway and you're completely alone with your self-recrimination.

The roofers left town in early August, and for the remainder of the summer I relieved a mill janitor who was on vacation. I swabbed toilets and hosed down showers in a gigantic locker room beneath the roaring paper machines, and after what I'd just endured on the blistering rooftops I felt I was, if not in paradise, at least in purgatory. Pale religious references still reverberating.

The place was damp and hot, and so noisy, conversation was impossible: the pounding of the machines up above reminded me of the roar of passenger trains overhead as I passed through the entrance tunnel to Northwestern station back in the UK all those years ago.

But it was a cozy and solitary job. I was left alone all day to do my work at my own pace. If it had been afternoon or night shift rather than days it would have been perfect, the kind of job that in my present state of mind I could have been content with for years.

But soon enough I was back at my desk in the quiet university residence and I had to move on. I wanted to move on, to start over, to escape further from my now perhaps self-imposed confinement.

Now there were no Kirstens to enthrall me, no one I saw in any of my new classes came close to her in sheer dazzling allure. I tried to relax and remain philosophical, but I was deeply lonely and pined daily for what might have been.

I began to suspect that this longing would just grow deeper as the months passed and that no matter whom I met my regret could last a lifetime.

As for sex, it was the same old story: I bought my men's magazines and sought relief with gorgeous, full-bodied fantasy figures. It was simple. It was easy. It was uncomplicated. And it was inexpensive.

Never once, in all my misery and isolation, was I tempted to pay for the services of a real live woman. The notion of sex with a professional just didn't appeal to me. I had nothing against sex with an attractive stranger, if ever I had opportunity and could muster the courage. But sex as a purely business transaction? I couldn't see it.

I cracked open the shell of my isolation enough to attend some social mixers between male and female houses in the residence and I got drunk enough at one of them to talk to a sweet and slender young woman whom I actually went out with on my first real dates.

It had taken me the better part of a school year to spy, to interest, and to speak to Kirsten and then abandon the project through weakness and fear. In all that time I spoke less than a dozen sentences to her. At the mixer I got drunk, met and necked with Mia, and within a week we were strenuously fucking in the back of my VW. A consummation devoutly wished for through many a year.

Neither one of us had much emotion invested, which was just as well, for within a month she had dropped out of school and returned to her home town in the BC interior. She had an infant son living there with her divorced mother and her return was urgently requested. We parted amiably and wrote each other one or two letters. But we both knew we were unlikely to see each other again.

At Nick's urging I went out with a few girls I wasn't even remotely attracted to, nor they to me I'm sure, and whom I had no trouble talking to for that very reason. But I found the experience depressing. Without the spark of sexual attraction or the romantic fantasy I saw no point. I preferred to be alone with my fantasy girlie magazines.

It was around this time that I first sketched a few pages of erotica. It may never have occurred to me to write a letter to Kirsten, a real-live love interest, in order to establish some kind of human contact after all my months of utter desolation, but I found it easy enough to write several pages of blazing sex about the objects of my erotic fantasies.

I didn't know it at the time, but this was the beginning of my career as a professional pornographer.