Virginity
A St. Louis and New Haven story of the 1970s
Having shed my virginity one midnight only the month before, in the cab of a Ford pickup parked in a West Texas cotton field, with a man I hardly knew (and now barely remember at all – a young summer assistant met at the doctor’s office, where I’d gone in hopes they’d find something – anything – that might exempt me from the draft – it was Vietnam War times and we were all looking for a way out that didn’t involve mutilation or moving to Canada – they didn’t), surely I was ready to launch into marriage with the girl I’d been trying desperately for months to believe would be the love of my life – or could be made to be, with enough will power and grit.
How’s that for an attention grabbing start?
Not long after that momentous night, I was driving out of West Texas toward New Haven in an old red Chevy station wagon that might, or might not, make it all the way: a gift of my father when his new car arrived; albatross on the streets of New Haven as the snow mounted; towed away more than once; ultimately delivered back to Texas the next year, and good riddance!
But first, a life-changing stop in St. Louis.
When I asked her to marry me, it seemed like the thing to do, the thing everyone, including me, expected – never mind that cotton field. But no one else knew about that. Except, well, him, of course. I hadn’t even come close to a cotton field night with her by then, and really never did, never mind a little of what they used to call “heavy petting.” Saving it for marriage, we said – or I said, and she agreed. We both knew that wasn’t true, but we both agreed to accept it, for our different reasons.
She and I had dated through our last year of college. By graduation, it had become more or less understood that we were more or less serious. We were part of the same little clique of smart kids (so we thought) who insecurely tried to seem cool, without going the extremes of the radicals of the time, and with only disdain for campus Greek life – ironic since she was, in fact, Greek – second generation. Her grandmother, who had married a rich man (though certainly not for his riches), and then had to flee to America with nothing but a suddenly poor husband when the Turks retook Smyrna, stubbornly refused for the rest of her life to learn English, spoke only Greek, in protest at her disillusionment. When it came time to face the wrath of my fiancé’s volatile Greek father (that I was not Greek could not be denied), it was her grandmother who made the case for love. And in the end, she prevailed. Her granddaughter and I were engaged.
And then I continued my drive from West Texas to New Haven, and graduate school, as planned. Only it didn’t go as planned. Not at all.
But mostly that’s a story for another day. For this story, it’s enough to say that my new life in New Haven – armpit of America, as one of my clever classmates called it, and I agreed – turned to shit in short order. Suddenly I’d become a intellectual minnow in a big (and minnow-eating) intellectual sea. The draft had only paused to regroup, not run in retreat. I knew no one, and no one seemed interested in knowing me – not even the faculty advisor they assigned: “I’m new here too,” he said, and that was that.
My graduate student stipend barely stretched to cover the rent on a sad, shabby (in no way chic) “furnished” hovel on the wrong end of Davenport Avenue, which shared a wall with the screen end of a blue movie theater – source of moans and groans, which from noon till after midnight never ceased, only occasionally broke off for breath. And though I knew those moaning lovers weren’t two boys, the cotton field memories, when the two moaners HAD both been boys, didn’t fade, no matter how much will power I applied.
In December, I fell in desperate, unrequited infatuation with a visiting friend of classmates at a History Department party. He flirted; I made a hash of flirting back. But fear prevailed and I fled, alone. Then I sat alone in my car till two, across the street from the apartment he was guest in, longing for him to appear at the window and beckon me. Such things happen in novels and movies. It happened in Maurice, which Forster finally had the courage to publish after his death, and which I’d just read (or soon would). But it didn’t happen for me, that night.
In February, I met a Brazilian in Sterling Library. Though the little dance we danced was more tango than salsa, I followed his lead back to his apartment. He turned on soft music and dimmed the lights. He offered me a drink, and suggested we get comfortable. He slid his hand up my arm, and looked into my eyes. He closed his own eyes and leaned in to kiss my lips. My nerve deserted me and I bolted – another missed opportunity or bullet dodged: but whichever, it marked another milestone in my journey to who knew where.
She and I wrote, though not often. And called, even less often since there were no unlimited voice plans then. But we didn’t have much to talk about anyway, after we agreed to leave setting the date till later, like the sex. Before long we both knew, though we didn’t say it, that the date would never get set, and the name of another classmate began appearing in her letters, a Classics student for whom “Greek love” meant something very different than it meant for me.
Sometime in the spring, I wrote my lesbian friend (the only friend I could write about such things, though I wouldn’t know openly she was a lesbian for years yet): “As you may have guessed, I’ve been having doubts about the wisdom of the engagement I've contracted. I think that both of us, at least a little, suspect the marriage will never happen. And once again, I’m feeling an infatuation for another person.” Not even with my lesbian friend was I yet able to mention that the “person” was a “he.”
By June, I'd flunked out of grad school, my hopes and dreams had turned to ashes, and my draft board had written me a "friendly" letter ordering me to "empty bed pans for 24 consecutive months – because (I paraphrase), if you don't, we'll wreck your life."
But I had a plan: I’d rent a cheap room in St. Louis, do my time in the locked psych ward of Deaconess Hospital (they told me I was working there, an alternate service orderly, and not a patient – but sometimes I wasn’t sure), and save lots of money – a relative term, considering the wage I got. And at the end of my two years, I’d go to Europe – which, of course, meant Paris – for as long as my money lasted.
That would be May, 1973 – not so far away, really – and I’d be free; no more worries about the draft. I wondered what it would feel like to be rid of that. I’d had it hanging over me since at least my junior year in high school – made even more ominous by a draft lottery number well down in the lower half (eat-shit-and-die smug, cute Midland twins, with your advice to “do your duty” and your own number above 300!).
But before Paris (“We’ll always have Paris, (I paraphrase) if we ever get there.”), were the two years to be got through. And so I was headed back west, further into a 1971 that wasn't looking likely to be the best year ever. I wasn’t going to Vietnam; that was a plus. But I was going to the still unknown, unwelcome, and frightening, since I had no choice about it – or no choice that seemed to promise any more attractive outcome, anyway. But at least there was an end in sight. It's hard to imagine freedom without having tasted it before, but in just two years …