Even before we started running around together, Shelly and I were two of the most visible people in our high school. Heck, it seemed like everybody in town knew us: we couldn’t go anywhere without being recognized. At the time it was a town of about twenty-five thousand people, and we had both been born there. Our dads were highschool teachers, so even when we were young, people knew our families. Both of us were deep into the performing arts and were used to being photographed by the local newspaper for publicity purposes several times a year, starting in junior high school. The fact that nobody would have imagined us as a couple prior to our now very public getting-together made us the subject of much gossip and speculation. As Tom pointed out, everyone figured we would last about three weeks. If “everyone” thinks a thing, there might be a basis for it.
Shelly took it as a challenge.
From the vantage of decades of hindsight, I think three to six weeks would have been appropriate. She would have graduated and headed to Europe for the summer, then to UCLA in the fall. I was preparing to attend the piano master class music camp that summer, with another year of high school after that. The fling would have served as a sweet coming-of-age memory for both of us. You are guessing correctly that it went a different way.
Neither of us minded the public attention our liaison received. We revelled in it. We were both accustomed to the rumor mill, she for being a “slut,” I for being “queer.” The cognitive dissonance that had people marveling over our odd pairing was hilarious to us, not least for the irony of it. From the outside, everyone assumed that Shelly, being a year-and-a-half older and “very experienced” was “robbing the cradle” and corrupting a previously innocent nerd who was painfully awkward with girls. Many were surprised because it was widely assumed I was “gay” — not entirely without reason, of course, since I am bi. She was well-known for her brash and assertive manner, and I was generally quiet, my goofy antics not withstanding. It certainly seemed I would be overmatched and swept away by her passionate intensity.
But as soon as we got to talking it became clear that the reality was quite different than what people thought. About the only part they got right was that I was indeed swept along by her intensity. I would push back, but in any clash of wills or perspectives, she usually won out. But while she had been the one to “make the first move” on me, she quickly hit the limit of how far she could go with it. In an earlier post I described how she was actually “terrified of men,” and she had kind of painted herself into a corner socially. She could never have lived up to her reputation. If she had gotten with an experienced man it would have become immediately apparent that she was sexually walled off. She would have been traumatized by the humiliation of it. She felt safe and comfortable with me, and I never pushed her past her boundaries. I am a sensitive guy with “great hands” and even greater patience. And I had done my homework. Her understanding of sexual matters was what she had learned in health class, wrapped in a thick layer of cultural myth and dirty jokes — cartoonish at best. On the other hand I had studied every bit of written material I could get my hands on, from legitimate to sketchy. I had read “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” “The Joy of Sex,” “The Sensuous Woman,” the “Kama Sutra,” and lots of “Penthouse Forum.” From Langenscheidt’s Medical Encyclopedia I had memorized all the diagrams of female anatomy, internal and external — to the point that I could have sketched them out and labeled them correctly from memory. I had even read Freud. She didn’t even really know what she had “down there,” and had never explored it beyond a quick scrub in the shower. Her very large breasts were an annoyance and an encumbrance to her, and not in any way a source of pleasure. As I described in a previous post, I could feel anxiety gather in any part of her body I touched, so I proceded with care. Because of the disparity, the power dynamic was reversed when we became physical: I was the one in control as I spent the next few weeks gradually initiating her into the experiences of intimacy, first clothed, then gradually, not.
This bifurcation between the public and private aspects of our relationship set a tone that persisted the whole time we remained together — a sense that “the world” just didn’t understand us. “They’re wrong about us.” It became a kind of trap. We both cared very much about how we were perceived, both as individuals and as a pair, but we each harbored dark secrets that wouldn’t see the light of day for years to come. In a sense there was a transactional nature to the relationship: we were both ashamed of our inadequacies and “weirdness,” and we hoped each would help the other overcome them. We came to be defiant in our defense of our partnership, and the more people looked askance at the way we began to cling to one another, the more we dug in.
Many years later my dad and I had a conversation about the whole relationship. He was comparing it to his with my mom. He said, “Sometimes when two people find they have complementary neuroses it can lead to a strong bond, deeper than codependence. Very unhealthy, because the mutual adaptation keeps both people stuck in their neuroses.” I had majored in chemistry at UCSB before dropping out, so I made an analogy. “Hemoglobin has an active site where oxygen temporarily attaches to an iron ion to be transported through the bloodstream from the lungs to the cells, where it is released for metabolism. Cyanide kills by attaching to the hemoglobin and never letting go.”
“I got a very strange phone call this morning,” my mom said. It was approaching noon Sunday, the 9th of April, 1978. I will always remember it. I was hungover from a cast party the night before, the first time I had ever gotten drunk two nights in a row. I asked her to tell me about the “strange” phone call, and she began, “Well, it was Shelly1 Staival’s mom, Cleo. I haven’t heard from her in a long time, although we know each other quite well since we were in Faculty Wives2 together for years. After some friendly small talk I asked to what I owed the pleasure of her call. Her tone suddenly became very urgent and she said, ‘Carolyn, what are we going to do about the kids?'” My mom told me that confused her: what about the kids? Cleo said, “We have to do something. I heard they are dating. We have to do something to stop them.” My mom got a bit flummoxed and sputtered back, “Well, I don’t know what you have in mind. Kirk told me all about it. It seems to me they are old enough now that if they decide to date each other there’s nothing we can do about it.” Cleo took a deep breath and replied, “Well, we can’t just let that happen. Your son is so gifted and has such a bright future ahead of him — and I know my daughter. She is so intense she will consume him, deflect him from his goals and destroy his life.”
We sat there in silence for a few moments as we processed the implications. Shelly’s mom, whom I hadn’t met, sounded crazy to me. And how antiquated the notion of controlling your teenage children’s dating choices was! I was sixteen, soon to be seventeen, and Shelly had already been eighteen for a few months. We most certainly would continue dating if that’s what we wanted. But I owe the reader an explanation as this is all coming out of nowhere.
What happened was that on the previous Friday evening after opening night of the Spring Musical, I was invited to go to a cast party. I honestly don’t remember who I got a ride with, but it was at a little “country club” just outside of town. I use the term “country club” cautiously, as it was merely an acre of land surrounded by a chain link fence. There was a pool, a covered picnic area, and a couple of tennis courts. The rest was a large grassy field for whatever. We had been members when I was growing up: I took swimming lessons there when I was about seven. I had never been there after dark, so the experience of the cast party was surreal. I don’t think we even had permission to be there, but somebody obviously had a key to the gate. There was beer, of which I happily consumed several cans, and I even took a few puffs of a joint that was being passed around. This was only the second time I had tried smoking. Let me tell you, the beer and the pot combined hit me hard. I remember being in a highly altered state, just wandering around talking to people, then becoming very quiet. When the chaos and shenanigans started overwhelming my senses, I wandered off to the pool facility where there was a large restroom and changing area. There were a few people milling about in there talking and laughing, but I just retreated to a nearby wall and leaned against the cool cinderblocks, zoning out.
Suddenly Shelly was standing in front of me, looking directly into my face as if trying to solve a puzzle. Without a word she stepped forward, put her arms around my shoulders and planted a sweet, wet kiss on my lips. The similarity with what Kelly had done four-and-a-half years earlier is striking, and my response was the same. Which is to say I received the kiss passively, in shock. But I liked it. She pulled back, intently surveying my expression for any kind of feedback. I looked past her, over her shoulder and, as if speaking to someone else, said in my best Spock voice, “Captain! I appear to be receiving a curious labial stimulus.”
Her jaw dropped, then she burst into laughter. She moved in a second time, took me in her arms, and we began “making out” for the first time. The first time for us, the first time for me, but certainly not the first time for her. So now I need to give you some background on who Shelly was, at least as far as I knew her up to that point.
My wife Sarah [real name], whose advice I trust, has told me I need to make up fake names from here on out, so Shelly and Cleo Staival are not their real names. ↩︎
Back in the early 1960s, when most of the high school teachers were men, there was actually an organization called Faculty Wives where the spouses of faculty met together socially. Shelly and my parents already knew each other when we were born. ↩︎
I realize that the last two posts made me look pretty gay. While I proudly claim the label “queer” for myself, I have sometimes been told that bisexuals don’t really exist. Contrary to popular opinion and some very flawed studies, bisexuals are real. I have debated about telling the following stories, but I feel that it is necessary to set the stage for the following post (A Dark Winter). Alcoholism involves a physical addiction but is often fueled by emotional and spiritual deficits. To recover I had to come to recognize that I was “soul sick.” My soul sickness began before my addiction developed. Even after I knew it was bad for me I continued to drink because it was the only medicine I had that assuaged the deep anguish I felt. Now I will place myself on the autopsy table for a forensic investigation into some of the underlying conditions that amplified my disease. I hope my honesty makes up for the bad impressions you will get from my behavior.
When I was in sixth grade I was pretty uninhibited, often playing the role of clown in class, and very active on the playground. I teased and flirted with the most popular girls in class because I didn’t see why not: I was a boss. I remember hanging out with Lisa and Katie at Lisa’s house on a few afternoons. There was quite a bit of off-color humor, as you would expect with eleven-year-olds. That year for Halloween our town put on a haunted house. There was this old mansion on the edge of town that was in the process of being restored by the historical society. It was made available for the purpose and I suppose a lot of work was put into it. These days it’s not unusual for organizations to put together such things, but at the time it was very new. Everyone was excited to go, and a group of us including some of my siblings went together. I clearly remember going through the first two rooms, the horror displays, the jump scares, the arms reaching out from hidden places to grab at you as you passed. At a certain point something weird happened in my brain. I remember feeling disoriented and dissociated. Suddenly my legs were moving in a new direction without any accompanying thought. I suppose my prefrontal cortex switched off and the animal parts of my brain took over. I somehow got past the workers who were shouting, “Hey, kid, you can’t go that way!” and evaded capture. In serpentine fashion I darted across three rooms and found an exit. Once out in the safety of the cool night air I took a deep breath, relishing my return to consciousness. When my group came out a few minutes later they were saying, “Where were you? We lost track of you and didn’t know what happened.” I was ashamed of the fact that I had panicked, but was also a little bit proud of my daring escape. Their security was weak. Perhaps they didn’t anticipate any of their victims making a break for it.
Over the summer leading into seventh grade I got a girlfriend, Kelly. It began with playground flirtation. I remember being at my dad’s house for a couple weeks after that and thinking of her obsessively. I was lost in fantasy and imagined her thinking of me too. I sensed the potential of — what? I didn’t even know. But when I got back in town, saw her again, and learned that indeed she had been thinking of me the whole time I was gone it was pure elation. This was my first experience of someone I really liked liking me back. That Fall we were “boyfriend and girlfriend,” which really meant that we continued to spend time goofing off on the playground at her condominium complex and talking a lot. I believe we spoke on the phone as well. One day in October she said to me, “Come over here, there is something I want to give you.” We went away from the playground to another courtyard in the complex. “What?” I asked. “Come over here,” she said, leading me into a recessed doorway. I stood with my back against someone’s door as she turned. Smiling, she placed a hand on each of my shoulders. “Close your eyes.” I did, still clueless. All at once I was awash in the sweetest sensation: her soft lips planting one careful kiss on mine. I was overwhelmed. I did not reciprocate, but I could think of very little else for the next few days. But I guess with what was going on at home I somehow couldn’t go any further with her and I cut things off suddenly. For decades I regretted the hurt and confusion she must have felt at me breaking up with her for no apparent reason, but it was a bit like my escape from the haunted house. I couldn’t have told you why I did it. After that I became increasingly shy and inhibited about my crushes.
One of the themes of this blog, a main theme actually, is the dangerous destructive potential of low self-esteem. I think my parents were misguided on this subject. Perhaps as a mix of Catholicism and Twelve-step ideas, I was taught that pride was a sin, humility a virtue, and that “ego deflation at depth” was good spiritual medicine. Whenever my parents perceived that I was getting “too full of myself” they would tear me down verbally. Of course, with Walt it was physical too. Today I understand that self-esteem is different than pride. “Pride” exists as a poor substitute for self-esteem, often activated in response to accusations or insults. It’s natural. Being called “queer” in a derogatory context made me militant in my denials. I finally developed some real self-esteem in my fifties, thanks to going back and finishing my undergraduate degree, and also meeting the love of my life during that time. Her humorous yet loving acceptance of my foibles has helped me to accept that, while utterly unique and weird, I am just like everybody else in that I deserve love and happiness just by virtue of the fact that I exist. I don’t have to “earn” it — it’s a birthright. That, my friends, is self-esteem. My parents weren’t given anything approaching unconditional love growing up. They worked hard to prove that they were of value in the world, but somehow never seemed to really believe they had succeeded. As a result they were very good people, but deeply insecure nevertheless. In my teen years I was plagued by the same sense of inadequacy and it permeated my awkward attempts to gain notoriety through my musical activities.
On with the next story! I met Tana when I was in tenth grade (she was a year older). I sat next to her in marching band class as she played tenor sax and I played baritone sax. Tana was very intelligent and we joked around a lot. She was unusually close to her mom and was active in her church. She was tall and thin, and to be honest, I didn’t find her physically attractive at all. But I loved our friendly banter and I relished how our friendship grew over that year. Enter Trisha. The first Star Wars movie was released over the following summer and made quite an impact. The fact that the music stood out enough to make the album a hit made it all the more popular with us band nerds. That Fall (now I was in eleventh grade) a new girl showed up in band playing French horn. She had recently moved up from L.A., had tacky dyed blonde hair, a curvy body and a cute face. Most sensationally, she had a bubbly-yet-nerdy personality that made her the focus of attention for me and my male friends. We couldn’t get enough of her! I had seen Star Wars in the theater once or twice. She told us she had seen it a dozen times and she knew people in L.A. who had over a hundred viewings under their belts. She talked a lot about how amazing L.A. was, and hungrily soaked up all the attention she was getting. In a small town she was suddenly a big fish.
After seventh grade my “romantic life” had devolved into fantasy-driven, super-secret, excruciating crushes from a distance. With the girls I was friends with I could joke around easily, but when I developed a crush on someone I became quite shy. Trish was a little different because we were part of a friend group (comprised of her and a bunch of guys who lusted after her), so while my crush was secret (barely, I guess), I was able to be my usual boisterous self. We all had a lot of fun that fall. The marching band had been fundraising for a year to make a trip to the Mother Goose Day Parade in El Cajon, down in San Diego County. That meant travelling by air, which I had never done. The parade was scheduled for the Sunday before Thanksgiving. We were playing “Ease On Down the Road” from The Wiz, and the band director’s concept was for us to come to attention, play about eight bars of “Over the Rainbow” while standing still, then start marching to the upbeat popular song from The Wiz. Cool! But we didn’t have an arrangement of Over the Rainbow. The director asked me if I could take this piano arrangement by George Shearing and score it for marching band, writing out all the parts. I could do that! I gained even more notoriety from that accomplishment, as not too many high school juniors could have done it without help. My “ego” was growing.
I hadn’t had anything to drink since the infamous champagne incident before ninth grade, but some of the guys I knew from Jazz Ensemble were partiers. They invited me to go for a drive with them one evening and we cruised Main Street, drank beer, and smoked a joint. I was not used to this form of male companionship. They asked me if I liked any girls (no doubt they had heard the rumors about me liking boys). I said, “Yeah, I think Trisha is really hot.” They started shouting things like, “Yeah! You should bone her!” I was pretty uncomfortable with that attitude, as I already knew her well enough to know she was not that type, appearances perhaps to the contrary. She had quietly admitted to me that she had no sexual experience. But I felt the peer pressure to make some kind of move in her direction. As the trip to San Diego neared, I somehow mustered the courage to call her. I told her I really liked her, thought we would be good together, and asked her if she wanted to hang out with me at the San Diego Zoo, which was planned as part of the trip. She said yes! I was euphoric for about three days as I kept our arrangement secret from the rest of the guys. I was lost in a world of fantasy that included walking around holding hands, maybe sneaking a kiss in front of the giraffes. The night before we were to leave on the trip I received a phone call. She said she was worried that maybe I wanted to go off alone with her, which would probably alienate the other guys and mess up the friend group dynamic. I learned she had actually been a chubby misfit in L.A., had lost weight and dyed her hair over the summer, and was making a new start of things. She told me she had worked hard to develop an outgoing personality and to build up a social circle and didn’t want to ruin it. It really felt like she was confiding in me, which I should have appreciated more than I did.
If I could travel back in time as my sixty-two-year-old self and talk to sixteen-year-old me I would say, “Dude, you got this. She likes you. She wants to go out with you, but she doesn’t want to ruin the trip for the other guys and destroy what she has built. She’s opening up to you. Just play it cool on the trip knowing that you are going to start dating afterwards. Make a plan to go see a movie with her.” But I was an insecure dork, and I felt myself spiraling into despair. I told her I understood, but once on the airplane I couldn’t bring myself to try to sit near her or speak to her, even. I sulked the whole way. She seemed hurt and confused. My mom would have derisively told me to get off my pity pot. Ugh. The trip turned out to be very fun anyway, but I just couldn’t get past the feeling that I was not good enough for her. On the flight back I sat next to Tana. We had been good friends for over a year but she knew nothing about my failed attempt to get something started with Trisha. After take-off I suddenly, without really thinking about it, put my arm around her. She accepted it, and we sort of cuddled the whole way back. I was weirdly gratified when I saw that Trisha had noticed us before quickly turning away. Revenge? What a dick, though. Arriving back in town, Tana took me aside and said that us being a thing was probably a bad idea. She was right, but it was a second blow to my pride.
I never apologized to either of them. The common denominator in all of these stories is that under certain stressful circumstances I would act or react in ways I couldn’t control or even explain. Apologizing or salvaging the situation in some graceful way was simply not within my capabilities at the time. Not long after that weekend Tana’s mother died suddenly. I’m sure it turned her whole world upside down. The following semester she was like a different person: she had ditched the horn-rimmed glasses for contacts, lightened and styled her hair, wore make-up, and now had a stylish wardrobe. Soon she was dating one of the most popular guys in the senior class and became part of the “in” crowd, partying a lot. We never really spoke again.
As for Trisha, our friendship was rekindled when I helped her rehearse a number to audition for the Spring musical. Judging from what she wrote in my yearbook the following year we must have become good friends by the time I graduated, but I am sure the San Diego incident was never mentioned again.
kirkwise 