Memoir 01

So much of what happens in our early years determines the sexual beings we become later. A person could go a lot of different directions with that. But what's gnawing at me right now, wanting to get out, are some of my earliest experiences as a young man—or maybe, as a boy in man's clothing (or out of it), when I left home and was on my own for the first time.

1970. Cleveland. A dirty, gritty city, full of industry, immigrants, poor people—and the Cuyahoga River, famous for being so polluted that it caught fire, not once but 13 times, the biggest fire in the summer of my arrival. It was a town simmering with creative energy. Mayor Stokes was the first black mayor of any major city in the US. Racial tension, student revolt, flower children, new music—these were happening all over the country, and Cleveland was a hotbed. Not that I knew any of this when I went there. I was just a boy from a small, rural state, desperate to get off the farm. Cleveland had two attractions for me: the simple fact that it was a city, close enough to get to and as far away from home as I could imagine, and that it had a university that was willing to offer a nice scholarship to a poor kid with good grades.

But I didn't last long as a student. With all that astonishing explosion of energy and light and music and social upheaval all around me, school soon seemed irrelevant. The spring of 1970 found me living on the west side, near the river in a poor working-class neighborhood. After the homogeneity of my hometown, the racial and ethnic diversity of the West Side was a sort of daily feast. My housemate was a guitar player—a pretty good one, with long dark hair and a sardonic grin. He played in a band I won't name, because they did eventually achieve a small amount of fame; but at the time they were just struggling to survive like so many others, playing gigs around town and the surrounding area. I played guitar, which might have been how I originally got to know Neil, but I didn't play very well; and nobody, not even me, had any delusions about me joining the band. I was more interested in writing, and had visions of myself as the next John Steinbeck, riding the great wave of social revolution to fame the way Steinbeck had been carried by the Great Depression and the social movements of his time all the way to a Nobel prize. Of course it didn't happen—neither the fame nor the revolution—but the latter had truly seemed imminent at the time, and the writing success would surely come if I just stayed in the thick of it. . . I thought.

The truth is I didn't even have the confidence to go knocking on the doors of local newspapers, where I could no doubt have gotten a job if I'd been persistent enough. Instead I landed a job in the best record store in town, where my wide and chaotic musical interests were educated by the musician-clientele, whose gigs ranged from the Cleveland Orchestra to cutting-edge jazz. My evenings were spent writing, or hanging out with other would-be writers. And—by accident, not by any design of my own—I became a roadie for Neil's band.

Of course the real revolution that was happening all around me wasn't the political one but the sexual one. The invention and availability of the Pill, coinciding with the beginning of the women's rights movement, gave women new freedom and autonomy. The changes and freedoms that came with the mix were head-spinning, for men and women alike. It seems funny, now, to think of a young man being a virgin at 18, but I was; and I wasn't so terribly unusual, in that. My city-bred friends were definitely ahead of me in the sex department, but not so much that I was considered odd. I'd had my share of back-seat petting in high school, in old cars with farm girls I'd known, and helped more than one of them to their first of many orgasms. But not to any of my own. My first full-on sexual experience came on a cold January night during my brief stint at the university. So let's back up and start there:

My roommate was away, so Sally and I had the dorm room to ourselves. She was a slim cute girl with long straight brown hair (today people would describe her as a "hippie girl," but "hippie" was a term none of us ever used for ourselves—at least, not with a straight face). She was far more "experienced" than I was, as Jimi Hendrix would have said, and she thought my lack of experience was cute. I was her project. We'd met at a poetry reading gathering at the local coffee house, and one night she came up to the room to read poetry together.

By midnight, poetry was scattered all over floor, and she was naked on my bed, me on my knees on the floor, she with her hips at the bed's edge, her fingers laced urgently through my hair, and my face buried between her thighs. The scent, the taste, the soft prickle of her light pubic hair on my face (her "electric shocking fuzz," as e. e. cummings called it in one of the last poems we'd read together). . . I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. Several hours and more orgasms than I could count later, my knees stiff and aching, I joined her on the bed. She helped me relieve myself with her hands and lips, but I never entered her that night or for a many nights following. At the time, she told me she wasn't on the pill and didn't want to take any chances.

Days later, after a 100 or so orgasms at the tip of my tongue, I finally became curious enough about pleasures of my own to timorously offer to go to the drugstore and get some rubbers. You have to understand that this no small deal for a boy or a budding wannabe-man in those days. The items in question were kept like contraband in dusty drawers behind the counter, and you had to ask either the druggist—usually a small and dried-up old man who it seemed must have long forgotten a time when he might have used them himself—or his assistant, usually dowager who was the very embodiment of disapproval—to dig them out for you.

I thought Sally'd be excited at the prospect of finally feeling me inside her. Instead, that was when she took pity on me and confessed she'd actually been on the pill for two years. She told me blithely that quick blowjob in the family doctor's office was all it had taken to get a prescription without her mother's knowledge. The realities were that she found great pleasure in having an "oral servant" (her actual words) at her beck and call, and as much or even more pleasure in educating her friends with descriptions of my servitude—friends who, for the most part, spent their evenings on their knees providing the service to their boyfriends as I was providing to Sally. To them, hearing of that dynamic reversed was both and enlightenment and a source of great amusement.

I didn't mind the deception, nor being her textbook example. In fact, these revelations gave me my first inklings of who I really was as a sexual being. I was loving her orgasms on my tongue, and all the rest of the sensuous pleasure that went with them, more than I could possibly say. I'd have been happy to carry on without even the minor reciprocation I was getting. But more to the point, and to my embarrassment, I found another burst of pleasure in the embarrassment itself, that she'd revealed these details about myself to her friends. These friends whom I'd sat around with evenings, talking, smoking, and listening to music—every one of them now knew that I'd go down and lick her to orgasm after orgasm whenever she asked, and expect nothing in return. In those days, still in the shadow of the Marlborough Man, my behavior hardly fit the general expectations of a "real" man.

Her friends giggled and joked about me behind my back, and called me "tongue boy" or, if they'd had a few beers, "pussy lips." These details, too, Sally told me quite happily, watching my face closely as she did. She saw the flush of embarrassment wash over me. She saw something else follow it, because immediately, her hand was in my lap, exploring my erection through my jeans. "You like that, don't you?" she asked, her own face flushed. "Them knowing what you do for me whenever I tell you? Them joking about it?"

I was that much more embarrassed that she was right, and that she knew, and my renewed embarrassment made me harder still. I nodded, unable to speak. We were in my dorm room at the time, and my roommate might walk in at any moment. She was sitting on his bed, facing me as I sat on mine. Quickly she shucked out of her jeans. "Lick me," she said. I did. She'd come three times and was dressed again when he did walk in. But her face was flushed and there was a damp spot at the edge of his bed. The room, and my face, reeked of arousal. He looked from me to her and back at me, and said nothing. She looked intently at his rising pants front, and said nothing.

That night we had a spaghetti dinner with her friends at the apartment they shared. I was burning with that combination of embarrassment and arousal that was so new to me, and so confusing. When some secret look passed between two of them, or some secret laughter, I knew I was the subject of their amusement, I was hard that whole evening. Occasionally, in a semi-discreet corner, she'd grope and squeeze me, and then I'd ooze so much precoital fluid that my boxers weren't just damp in the front, but soaked. After dinner, she was so excited she dragged me into the bathroom, dropped her jeans, seated herself on the bathroom counter, and told me to get on my knees. Afterward, her face glowing, and mine still moist and fragrant, we returned to her friends and their obvious amusement. There was no relief for me that night, beyond what I could find in the shower—there was no privacy in my dorm room. But I was in cloud nine, all the same.

What we were doing was, at that time, more or less unknown, and it certainly had the dark hint of the forbidden, though neither of us could have expressed what it was or why it might be taboo. I mean, just sex, in and of itself, had only so recently emerged from the shadows of the forbidden. Whether we understood it or not, the eroticism of these experiences stoked our natural young randiness to an even higher level. The knowledge that if my dorm-mates knew the nature of our relationship, I'd be the butt of more jokes than I wanted to think of, only served to heighten my arousal. The awareness that her roommates did know and joke about it, and that one of them might know one of my dorm-mates, and let the cat out of the bag, heightened it all the more. The fact that these humiliations aroused me so much was bewildering, but knowing it was so aroused me still further.

I was tormented, sure there was something wrong with me that I should be so turned on by these fears—but then the arousal would come again in a wave, and I just didn't care. One time we were resting on the couch in Sally's living room, hugging and making out softly, after an intense session in her bedroom. Her housemates were out, and we were talking quietly. I confessed my fears to her, and she responded with her sweet girl-next-door grin that I found so devastating, "Yeah. They'll probably think you're a real pussy if they find out!" The farm girls I grew up with had dirty mouths, and I'd always loved it, but I think that may have been the first time I ever heard a girl apply that word to a guy. I don't know if it was her language or her grin, but I was hard instantly, and went down on her again then and there, with no urging. She stoked my hair softly and murmured "Pussy. Pussy. My sweet pussy," over and over again as I licked her until she came. I was rubbing myself against her lower leg as I did, with my jeans still on, and I came at the same time as she did, maybe more intensely than I ever had before.

Cuddling tenderly afterward, her hand slipping inside my jeans and feeling the wetness there, she whispered in my ear "Wow. You really do like being a pussy!" Then she brought my embarrassment, and her control, to a new level. She took her hand, with a big glob of my semen in it, and smeared in across my mouth, and then began sliding her coated middle finger in and out. "Pussy lips," she said, not a whisper but a low throaty mutter, and then she shuddered intensely. I think she came again, then and there, with neither of us touching her.

In the couple of weeks that followed, our activities intensified. Like so many girls of the era, she often wore "hippie skirts"—you know the kind, maybe—straight, ankle-length, made simply, from the thin fabric of the India prints that were so colorful and so readily available at the time. She wore them without underwear. She didn't wear underwear a lot anyway, but a long skirt was her declaration, "No underwear here!" She'd pull me into some quiet but not really private place—an empty classroom, perhaps, with the door ajar, or a friend's bedroom—pull up her skirt partway, and motion for me to crawl up the rest of the way, inside her skirt, my face between her thighs, and get her off. The knowledge of her power over me, and the sound of people talking as they walked by in the hallway, where only a glance through a half-opened door into a half-darkened room would reveal what was going on, would combine with my tongue to bring her to a quick shuddering orgasm, her thighs clamping around my head and her hands holding me fast. But more often than not, once was not enough.

After I'd been seeing her for about 6 weeks, the shit hit the fan. I found out she'd been fucking another guy. Well, what I found out was that she just had fucked another guy; the rest of the pieces fit together more slowly. What happened was that my roommate walked into the studio theater where all three of us were all taking an acting class. The class had ended about 10 minutes earlier. Kent and I had left Sally for the literature class we shared; Sally had no class in that timeslot, and said she was headed to the student union, in the opposite direction. Kent discovered he'd left a notebook behind in the studio theater, and went back for it. I went on to the class. Kent arrived late, after the class had begun. He seemed scattered and upset, but I figured he was just flustered from being late. Afterward, the instructor wanted to speak with him a moment. I lingered at the door, waiting, but anxious to see if Sally was still at the student union. The S.U. was full of nooks and alcoves designed for study or private conversations, and some of our most exciting public moments had been in these hideaways. At last Kent broke free, and before I could say anything, said "I've got to talk to you!"

"Okay. Com'on, let's talk while we go to the SU."

"No. Look. This is really important. I've got to talk to you now!"

"Okay. . . " I said, baffled by his intensity and frustrated by my desire to find Sally.

I still tried to steer us out the main door of Grümann Hall, but he was insistent, pulling me into a bay window alcove with benches. I sat, apprehensively. He too seemed apprehensive. Kent was someone who was almost never at a loss for words, but now he was quiet first, then literally stammering. "When I went back for my notebook. . ." he said, and stopped again. I waited, "Shit!" he said. I waited some more. "Well, Sally. . ." My hackles started to stand up. "Shit!"

"Kent—come on! What is it?"

This is the story he told me, without all the rest of the "shits" and pauses: When he went back, all the lights in the studio theater were off except a couple back-stage lights that only dimly illuminated the seating area. He slipped in through the half-open doors to the seat near the back where he'd left his notebook, and then stopped, transfixed. Kerry, a loud sophomore who lived in our dorm, that neither of us liked very much, was there. He was standing behind a girl, grasping her by the hips, and the girl was leaning forward, doubled, her upper body pressing down over the studio stage. Her long skirt was up over her ass, her bare butt was showing, and Kerry was ramming his cock into her with rapid staccato plunges. The light was faint, but it glimmered off of Kerry's cock, shining wet, big (Kent was sparing no detail, now that he was finally talking), and sliding in and out rapidly. Kent grabbed his notebook and was going to slip back out discreetly, but he couldn't leave without another look. Something about the girl's long swaying hair draped down around her face—more girls that not wore their hair that way in those days, but still, something about it, and the colors of the skirt bunched around her waist. As he tiptoed down the aisle, she moaned, her head swaying, and her face turning his way, eyes closed in ecstasy—and it was Sally!

"Shit!" he'd said, aloud. Sally raised and turned her head, mouth open, glazed eyes looking straight into his, but Kerry never released his grip on her hips and never slowed his thrusting.

Kent rushed out, confused, angry, flustered. He'd barely been able to focus in in the lit class, that vision of Sally's ass in the air and Kerry's "big" cock (he couldn't seem to leave that detail out) thrusting into her apparently seared in his mind. His lack of concentration and late arrival in class were why the instructor wanted to talk to him, and the conversation with instructor quickly turned to a murmured discussion and advice as to whether or not he should tell me. But he was my roommate, and my best friend on campus. He couldn't face me if he didn't say something. Great. So the love of my life cheating on me. Kerry, the loudmouth was doing her, Kent knew it, and my professor knew. Given the ease with which she talked about her sex life, her roommates all knew (and that had been part of their joke)—and if they talked at all, then probably half the student body knew. In a moment of strange detachment, I had a vision of one faculty whispering secrets to the next, to the next, snickering, like gossip flittering though a small New England town.

Then the detachment was gone. I leaped to my feet. "Damn!" I said, and started walking. Fast.

"Hey, wait, where're you going?!" called Kent, grabbing his books and rushing after me.

"To find Sally!" I answered, without breaking stride.

"No, man, wait! Come back to the dorm with me, take some time to cool off and think it through first." I knew what he wasn't saying: 'smoke some dope, mellow out a while.' And even though I didn't smoke that much, I knew I'd follow his advice this time.

So I was pretty mellow when Sally found us, Kent on his bed studying a biology text for an upcoming quiz, I on my bed with my back propped against the wall and my pillow, just listening to "Cream" on Kent's stereo. She walked in without knocking, looking frightened and determined. She looked at me, exchanged a long look with Kent, then looked at me again. Kent got up without a word, took his book, and left the room. Sally walked over to the stereo, turned it down a bit, and then came to my bed. I hadn't moved. "Mellow" would no longer be a good word to describe how I felt. "Stupefied" might be more accurate. I had no idea what I felt, what to do, or what to say. There was a deep ache inside me, but also a puppy-like eagerness. I just looked at her. She was still wearing the skirt she'd been wearing in the morning. The one Kent had seen bunched around her waist that morning, I thought dully.

She straddled my knees, looking deep into my eyes, and said nothing. After a moment of silence, I asked (plaintively, it sounded even in my ears) "Why?"

She looked a minute longer, then scooched around and sat on the edge of the bed, her butt pressed against my right thigh, her arm around my back, but no longer looking at me. She shrugged. She gave me a sidelong glance that seemed almost shy, and then looked away again and said. "Just because. It's. . . he's. . . so good."

"So good!" I exclaimed, with the beginnings of feeling. "Good? But isn't it good when I. . .?"