The City and State of My Birth, My Father's Death, Bisexuality (part 1)
four selections from the memoir vault
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THE SULPHUR SMELL IN MT. CLEMENS, MICHIGAN
(the city where I was born and raised)
The sulphur smell of Mt. Clemens was always pervasive. It is my firmest and first memory of the city I grew up near.
Actually, the house I grew up in, the one my grandfather built, was in a subdivision that occupied the same fields and woodlots that had been what was known as Ingleside Farms. Once the huge dairy farm was located at the northwest corner of sixteen-mile road and Gratiot… so it was sixteen miles to the center of Detroit, a distance my father drove daily. I drove it too, for a time after I had dropped out of college and went to work in the city on a remodeling crew in an old printer’s warehouse in what was known as the Edison Plaza area, an area that used to be full of row houses and older homes that were taken down to make room for a wide ring of parking lots around the downtown area in Detroit in the later 60s and 70s, as well as the Lodge Freeway where it approaches the Ambassador Bridge. Or at least I think it was the Lodge. Who can keep track of such names? On my lunch breaks I might take a stroll around the neighborhood. On one short street that had been cut off by the freeway, Plum St., the remaining buildings were boarded up and the curbs were still painted bright if faded psychedelic colors from the short period of time when it was the designated Haight Ashbury of Detroit. Just as the old Blackbottom area of the city was destroyed to make room for another huge freeway ditch through the east side of downtown, this neighborhood of hippies and artists and students was sacrificed on the corresponding west side. Now there are no signs of that neighborhood, the remodeled warehouse is gone, and a huge fortress-like, windowless, casino complex occupies the site.
It seems like my childhood and teen years were punctuated and informed by such transitions. Things taken down, things disintegrating and unused.
Detroit, when I was growing up, actually had a way to go to hit its rock bottom. When I was a child, it was still very busy, had several active shopping districts anchored by the premier shopper’s stretch of downtown Woodward Avenue with the huge Hudson’s store. Once the tallest and by square footage the largest department store in the country. Hudson’s sponsored the yearly Thanksgiving Santa Claus parade, once one of the premier holiday parades in the country. Nearby was the ornate, old anchor store of another regional department store chain, Crowley’s, with its, to me at the time, ancient wooden escalators that had what looked like long and dangerous incisors where the moving steps flattened and moved under the floor. I was terrified as a child due to the stories of children who allegedly were torn to pieces when they did not or could not move quickly enough off the escalator. The ditch-like freeways that were becoming predominant routes in and out of the center city (and facilitated white flight) were seen as a boon to commuters, who moved out of the city into the wide square blocks of nearly identical homes and neighborhoods that stretched out along the diagonal avenues that started near or on Grand Circus Park in downtown Detroit and stretched into the superb farmlands and drained wetlands in the counties around the city. Gratiot was one of those diagonals.
Mt. Clemens was a small town with a notable history that eventually got swallowed up by this sprawl. Its history, or at least the most noteworthy portion of its past since its founding in the first decade of the 1800s, was largely one that was still very present around me whenever I was downtown. As you come into town there was a miniature skyscraper, the county building, which could be seen for a number of miles as you traveled toward the city. It is still there, said to be modeled after the Empire State Building, but under twenty stories and with art deco gargoyles around its top balustrade. The downtown area was busy with a good number of blocks of stores, restaurants and other shops and brown and red brick apartment buildings, old hotels and rooming houses, churches, schools, the old roller rink and offices. Prieh’s department store was Mt. Clemens’ miniature Macy’s and it had the first elevator I ever rode it. The Clinton River ran through the downtown and once, before I was born, for much of the history of the town, was a major trade transportation route. Rumrunners from Canada, including the famous Purple Gang, once used the river, at night, as a way to deliver their illicit cargo during the depression and Prohibition era. The river empties into Lake St. Clair, a wide and shallow lake between Lakes Huron and Erie. The delta at the mouth of the short and very quick St. Clair River, north of the smaller Clinton River, is the largest fresh water marsh and fen in the world... or once was. Much of it over the years has been filled and built over. My memories of the St. Clair River are of the long Great Lakes’ freighters that were a constant except in the winter months. They brought raw materials from the iron ore ranges of the upper Great Lakes to the steel and auto towns on the southern shores of those lakes. My father worked as an engineer for Detroit Edison for the greatest part of his career and Sunday drives often included drives along the St. Clair River where he would show us the huge power generating plants along the river and we might have a Sunday meal at one of the riverside restaurants in a number of the small towns along the river between Mt. Clemens and Port Huron, where the St. Clair river originated as Lake Huron poured through its source.
Immediately surrounding Mount Clemens’ downtown area were a number of huge and ornate hotels. By the time I was old enough to remember them most had already fallen into a state of semi disrepair, and by the time I graduated from high school most were demolished or had burned down. These resort spa hotels, the remaining ones, were where the sulphur smell came from. The city had made its name, in the era that preceded the discovery of antibiotics, as a health spa town with healing waters that were pumped up from the ground around the muddy and slow Clinton River. Heated and drawn into multitudes of tubs, the smelly waters drew celebrities, politicians, and wealthy thugs from all over. My uncle was said to have taken a bath there during one visit and he talked about the stench and the benefits while he laughed about the whole experience. It was already dated, and the hotels were slowly losing ground.
Most probably because of the tourist industry in the city, and the need for porters and maids and kitchen help, the city supported a relatively large and historically old African American population. Unlike the majority of schools in my era, and now, everyone who went to the Mt. Clemens schools eventually attended the large and integrated high school that occupied a prominent place along Cass Avenue, the main east/west corridor through town. The school had the largest auditorium in the city and was built in the mid 1920s with a swimming pool and two gyms, one with a suspended track.
While the high school itself was integrated, the city’s neighborhoods were not, and so the children of the town all attended very segregated elementary and junior high schools and then were thrown together in the high school. This was bound to result in conflicts, and there was an undercurrent of distrust and fear from both sides of the color line that often broke out into open fights and even a riot or two, the worse, in the first years of the 1970s, closed the school for a week or two.
Mt. Clemens also got into the habit for a time of building parking lots in the place of some very old and notable architectural gems and calling it urban renewal, including a number of the hotels that were, one by one, taken down or burned down as the pumps and the stinky waters brought fewer and fewer people into the town and became a topic of derision. Many of the hotels were quite spooky to me. One, The Colonial, occupied what had been a huge, elm-shaded parcel on the north side of the Clinton River along Gratiot Avenue on the south side of downtown. It was about six stories tall, red brick, and sported a wide high porch with tall white pillars along its entire façade. It could well have been one of the haunted houses or hotels that populated a number of the books I liked to read when I was a boy and that I got from the Carnegie library on Saturdays after I swam at the high school during my YMCA swimming lessons. The Carnegie Library is still there, but now serves as an Art Center, while a newer library was built across the street from the high school when I was a teen. We were known to go there on our lunch break, find a hidden spot in the bushes and angles of the modern building, and smoke joints. I would often cut class to go to the listening rooms. My favorite listen? Joni Mitchell’s first LP.
A number, perhaps most, of my memories of being downtown as a boy concern trips I took with my father. He spoke little to me. I took that for granted then, but it puzzles me now. He had very little to say to me and so often I was left in my own world as we went from business to business on a Saturday. The AAA office. The Pure gas station where Dad had most of the work done on our cars… the fellow who managed the station lived across and a few houses down the street from us. He had a boat that he kept in his garage and worked on all winter. There was the Rexall drug store where I would wait in the car as my father looked at magazines and/or waited for prescriptions, and a number of different hardware stores. There was a pull-through party store where beer could be brought to your car. There was a time as well that our shopping and errands gradually took us more routinely in the other direction from downtown Mt. Clemens, when shopping centers and malls began to spring up at almost every intersection at every mile road and Gratiot all the way to 8 Mile Road, the northern border of Detroit. The demise of the old down towns, Mt. Clemens as well as Detroit, seemed assured, but no one thought much about that then.
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MICHIGAN MY MICHIGAN
I have lived the vast majority of my years in Michigan. My attachment to it as a place is inexplicable and strong.
The lakes, both the great inland freshwater seas, and the innumerable inland lakes have such a heartfelt pull on me. I am satisfied with doing most of my hiking and camping in Michigan, although some of my favorite camping spots are also in Northern Ontario, within earshot of another Great Lake, the big one, Superior.
I love the oceans as well, but they are neither as close nor as hospitable, at least to my idea of what a perfect beach might be. The Great Lakes have been used as a resource, eventually to their own detriment, since human beings spread across the continent. The smaller number of what we call Native Americans insured that the great treasures in the waters of the Great Lakes were preserved and the waters fed them well, quenched their thirsts and provided great avenues of commerce. The shores are marked with names that were and still are descriptions that the Native Tribes used to describe a location. Crooked Tree, Big Rock. Big Bay. Place Where the Waters Meet, Marsh of the Blueberries, Great Spirit Island.
Stories of what happened to this great sweetwater repository upon the arrival of Europeans are perhaps the most terrifying example of how the capitalist sensibility can utterly and irrevocably destroy essential resources without which humans cannot survive. It is hard to understand the kinds of vast wealth these Lakes represented, and what was forever destroyed, the endless flocks of migrating waterfowl, the immense schools of fish, the wetlands-defined primeval forests, the crystalline streams from lake to lake to sea.
Now if we see a huge flock of birds, we are likely to consider them pests or ripe for hunting. I recall an amazing sight from one of the high western bluffs on a Lake Michigan island where I was backpacking for a few days. I faced the passage between two islands and watched as an immense flock of cormorants passed between them. It was clear that this population of birds had in its genetic code a habitual way of behaving in such large numbers.
Intermittently and with rather astonishing regularity, birds from the back of the flock would fly up from the moving mass and land at the front, taking over the lead positions as the birds moved through the strait between the islands. The flock itself had to have been at least a half-mile long and almost that wide. I watched it progress, mesmerized by the exact timing and constancy of this leadership exchange… every bird taking its role as leader in a constantly slowly rotating gyre. It was as if they were meant to exist in numbers like these. Of course, humans are not so fond of such large numbers of birds. Cormorants especially have been demonized and extermination policies have been put into place as if they are pests. Great nesting and resting crowds of them leave their odiferous, fecund, blankets of guano and for wealthy shoreline summer residents and their water front idylls, such a stinky reminder that they live in the natural world, even if only for a few months a year, is not to be tolerated. The cormorants have been blamed for many things, but perhaps the most outrageous is the blame they get for the collapse of the yellow perch population in the lakes. Perch, even after the other fisheries had collapsed from over exploitation and ignorant fishing practices, never to be recovered, had thrived in the big lakes and the smaller ones well into my young adult hood. Tasty and easily procured, many restaurants offered lake perch fish fries for incredibly low prices. All you can eat for five dollars. Cole slaw and fried potatoes. And beer. Fishermen were accustomed to bringing home multiple stringers of the fish, twenty to fifty fish at a time. They were considered so plentiful that for most of my younger life there were no limits on how many one could take home. Of course, it was not considered as good or as challenging a catch as some of the other lake fish, walleye (a large cousin of perch) and pike (although many people like to catch these, they are considered bony and difficult to prepare) and trout. Still, no one complained about the multiple platefuls of perch. Until the fishery collapsed. Of course, it had to be because of the birds. Now lake perch is something of a gourmet item, five smallish filets up to and over twenty dollars a plate (and no refills). The winters protect the Lakes, and the deep snows that the northern part of Michigan is especially accustomed to, are an integral part of the ecosystem. Its remaining wetlands (less than 10% of the original extent of the state’s wetlands remains intact) feed on the natural mulch of the deep snow and the often-slow release of water back into the hydrosystem from the melting snow, which is often just a recycling of Great Lakes sourced waters that is sucked into the atmosphere from the warmish lakes’ waters and falls as snow for much of the winter. “Lake Effect Snow” that only slackens off some when major portions of the Lakes are frozen. This happens only in very cold winters and less frequently as the region is impacted by climate change. The cities in Michigan were always founded and settled to facilitate the excavation and processing of raw materials into the products that built the cities' eventually automobile-based late industrial revolution in the United States. Once it was clear that workers were intent on getting their due for their part in that process, the great industrialists turned themselves into multinationals, moved to other parts of the globe searching for the cheapest and most easily controlled working population possible, preferably in places with strong, often US backed dictatorial leadership traditions that would enforce the often brutal norms of cheap labor, and they abandoned the large and medium sized cities all across the US. This included almost every large, medium, and small city in the state. The abandonment of places like Flint, Saginaw and mighty Detroit will, in time, represent a primary great failing and inhumanity of the capitalist system. The Rivera Courtyard in the Detroit Institute of Art is the icon of the golden age of American technology and industry, and a reminder always of what capitalism brought and what it stole away. It was painted during The Depression, days after an immense march of workers took on the Ford Motor company at its immense Rouge River industrial complex and demanded work and wages... and many were killed because of it. I have lived through this legacy. My life is defined by it. My father traveled every day on the racism-inspired daily suburban flight in and out of the center of Detroit, and I, for a short while after I quit college to find out who and what I was, did the same. A river of Detroit automobiles, full of white people who thought they dared not live next to the constant reminders of populations of people who, among many other things, symbolized how capitalism uses and disposes of huge populations of people to meet its ends…. making royalty out of a few privileged members. Perhaps the whole purpose of segregation, at least in the 1950s and 60s, was to keep white workers from making the connection between who were the victims of capitalism in the past and who would be the victims in the future. For a good number of years we, my mother, father and sisters, took a two-week vacation to a cabin on a lake in Northern Michigan, not far from the Straits of Mackinac. I was treated kinder during those vacations, and so remember them fondly. Swimming every day. Fishing for perch with my father for as long as my impatient boy body and mind could tolerate sitting silently in a boat. Later, I would be allowed to take the little outboard out on my own and I would steal cigarettes from my parents and take the boat up a little stream to sit in a still pond surrounded by cedar trees, smoking and coughing. The cottage was one of a number of white cottages in a little group, like uncountable other little groups of cottages on the lakes and streams in northern Michigan where the workers from the cities would come to shed their industrialized stresses and breathe in the cedar scented and legendary asthma-curing air. We collected clams that were numerous in the water and made sandcastles on the little beach. The clams are disappearing now, victim of invasive species, not large flocks of historically native birds. I remember a dream from those childhood years. There was a long road that led from the highway that ran west of where these cottages were situated on the lake. In my childhood it was a dusty gravel road. There was a gas station at the corner of the highway and the road. It had shiny multicolored tile bricks over its façade and a great selection of penny candy inside. In the dream (I was still a boy when I dreamt it) I dreamt I was traveling down that road, toward the lake, but it was winter. Though I had never been to that lake in the winter, in the dream I was going to the cottage in the winter. The road was snow-covered and all the trees were bare and caked with snow and ice. It was a silent dream. The road was not as rumbling and dusty. It was covered in snow. Some months, maybe no more than six months after Susan and Clayton and I moved from Grand Rapids to Petoskey, a city not far from that lake, I was on my usual work related travels in the northern part of the county and I decided to go down that road. It would be the first time I had done so since moving north. I was curious about the group of cottages from my childhood. As I proceeded down the road, in the winter, I remembered that dream. I was, in fact, it seemed, in it. ***
AFTER MY GRANDMOTHER DIED
I feel I first must add that these are my memories and my memories alone. Memory is a tricky thing. I know that. Two people experiencing the same stream of events often, even always, have very different stories to take away. This is especially true among family members.
After my grandmother died, a year and a half after my mother died, my father was left alone with no woman to care for him. I say this because the mothering aspect of his expression of intimacy was the primary aspect of any intimate relationship he had with anyone.
This sounds a bit harsh, but I don’t think he was unusual. My father’s father was absent or cruel much of my father’s childhood. A veteran of the WW1 trenches, my grandfather died a month before I was born, so I never met him... one of the very few and the only stories I heard about his experience in the war was one in which he kicked over a helmet and there was a part of a skull in it. I believe my father and his mother learned early on that they must rely on one another. Dad kept my grandmother close, and she did not appear to mind… at least until she and my mother began to have serious conflict, and grandma moved into a mobile home some miles away from the home her husband built (and of which she shared ownership) when my parents sold that house and moved into a larger one that was perceived to be a better investment.
Dad had numerous medical emergencies in the years between my grandmother’s death and his own. Somehow, I became the primary caregiver.
Well, this was not exactly a surprise. I moved to northern Michigan having gotten a job with a mental health agency there. For about three years prior to our move to Northern Michigan, I had been estranged from my parents.
I am still unsure how this took place, or I fail to remember, but the catalyst appears to have been a phone call they made to me that I did not return. They left a message with Clayton, my son, who was at the time a pre-adolescent kid, and I never heard about it. I am unsure why I did not call to find out why I had not heard from them, and they never tried again. The story was later told that everyone in the family thought they were avoiding me because that’s what I wanted, though I have no recollection of any conversation whatsoever that would have led anyone to believe that.
At any rate, it soon became apparent to me that my life was more comfortable without them. No more flights into an anxiety state I seemed to have no control over whenever they appeared or were going to appear. These were typified by panic that I was fat, a kind of warped body dysmorphia, and a darkness of mood I could not shake for some time after it emerged. I was glad to be rid of that pattern and my life moved forward in pleasing and successful ways with much less inner turbulence and more confidence that had not been a feature of it in the past.
When we moved north, we sent out notecards informing everyone in our address book of our intentions. That included my parents and sisters. I don’t believe we heard from anyone, and I know my parents did not call or acknowledge receipt of the note.
Some months after we moved, we ran into them in a local Kmart very close to our new home. It was uncomfortable but civil and there was no follow up. Again, I suppose this was out of their assumed respect for my unstated wishes, which, perhaps, by this time and with all that water under the bridge, might have been at least partially true. I wanted a family, but I wanted to be allowed to be in a different position in my family. The older I got the more I realized this was not to be allowed. I was better off with little or, if necessary, no contact.
But hope does spring eternal in the inner child, if you’ll forgive my use of that unfortunate metaphor for the unconscious developmental ghosts we all carry around in relationship to the power our parents and families hold over us. After my mother died I became the de facto primary caregiver of my father… albeit without much of the mothering he was most accustomed to. He was uncomfortable with me as caregiver as well but accepted it and was generally distant but polite. He tried hard to have intimate conversation from his relatively unpracticed level of skill in that kind of communication and more often used me as a kind of Sherpa when it was necessary to do so. For instance: he had a furnace that used wood pellets as fuel. It became my job to carry the large weighty bags of pellets down the stairs for him. I did not mind at all. I have always felt useful when I was able to use my strength and muscle power to help people. But I do think I was still trying to get his approval and was delivered into that semi-dream state of potential over reality. Not really a terrible state, or one that should be avoided... though the outcome is often an education and not a resolution.
My father and I had an agreement that he would ask me when he needed help with something. I had a busy life and was more than happy to assist, but I would not be looking after him every minute to make sure all his needs were met, he would have to ask. He was not very good at that, or at least not very good at asking particularly me and preferred to ask neighbors and my sisters who lived far away.
Does this sound bitter? it may indeed be bitter to a degree. Being realistic can often come off as bitter around the edges when from our perpetual state of Disney-fied optimism and hope as it concerns families in American culture we report the reality of how our families actually work or do not work. But it is also quite matter of fact, and any feeling I have as I write this that I am being unfair is cleared when I do a reality check and reaffirm with myself how little effort he put into sustaining a real relationship with me beyond the tasks I was expected to perform for him. His inability to actively engage in the feeling-based work of the maintenance of close relationships was as culturally imposed on him as it is on any man who has never been given a reason to develop relationship skills and leaves that up to others, particularly women. As far as I am concerned, however, that would be, should be, a father’s job, a man's job, too.
Perhaps he simply did not know how. My sisters always talked about how kind and generous he was with them. I never had that experience. And if I never really wanted to accompany him on his fishing outings in Lake St. Clair or sailing on the little flat-topped sailboat we had, it was only because I was entirely uncomfortable as a child when alone with him. He rarely spoke to me when we were alone. This was apparently a very different experience than the one my sisters had.
Later, much later, not long before he died, we did take a trip together to the west coast to visit his cousin, whom he had grown up with. My father offered to pay for one leg of the train trip for me if I would carry his bags and make sure he got to where he needed to go. I was expected to pay for my return trip after leaving him with his cousin. I still thought I could rescue or reform a difficult father-son relationship and agreed to go. In the end it turned into a fine trip even if it failed to accomplish the impossible.
My father took annual circular trips to see my sisters during the holidays in the years after my mother and my grandmother died. He was in Pennsylvania visiting my sister that last holiday when he had a brain bleed that killed him. My sisters and their husbands all gathered at the bedside. I could not be there. I could not see myself sitting at the death bed of a father who could not demonstrate his love with my alcoholic brothers-in-law who were clearly disdainful of me. I remain happy with that decision.
I spoke with my father on the phone shortly before he died, although he was largely incoherent. He was sobbing. I told him I enjoyed our train trip together and that it was a favorite memory. Not a lie. He continued to try to talk and continued crying. I told him he could cry as much as he wanted (I had never seen him cry except at my mother’s casket when he regressed to sound like a very small boy standing there, saying goodbye). He immediately stopped crying. I said good by.
He died some hours later.
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BISEXUALITY PART ONE
I have told part of this story before.
I had taken to visiting him in his office weekly. The class he taught was probably out of my league and beyond my academic standing at the time, but I had been enrolled anyway. I first met him, the professor, during the enrollment process. I wasn’t sure which classes I would take and I was limited in terms of time due to my job at the bookstore. He was acting as a kind of advisor to the process of the evening mass enrollment where I first met him, and I don’t remember if he suggested the class to me, one on Victorian Prose (Mill, Ruskin, Carlyle etc…) or if I asked him about it having placed it on the list of the classes I might take. There was no real rhyme or reason for the classes I would take at that time. I had started with poetry and went on to writing and literature courses in a kind of haphazard way, according to my interests and a kind of gut intuition. And there were few offerings in the night-time frame available to me.
He was enthusiastic about my ability to succeed in the class and already I was rather entranced by the blueness of his eyes. I would probably not have called him beautiful then but will now. It frightened and thrilled me a little.
I did not finish the class. I withdrew after my test scores were quite poor and after I had told him that I was in love with him. Bizarre. Gutsy? Maybe. Naïve. Definitely. Stupid? Hmmm. But it was true, and I thought I had to say it or the whole thing would fall away, and I would lose any opportunity I had.
I have found out since that there is a word for this kind of rather obsessive almost delusional attraction: Limerence. Look it up if you haven’t heard it before. It’s an interesting concept and apparently affects up to a third of us at one time or another. Some of the world’s greatest masterpieces came out of episodes of this kind of unrelenting obsessive, often unrequited, yearning.
But this was confusing and painful. And it wasn’t as if I hadn’t felt a kind of love for another man before. But never like this. I had just broken off with the young woman who was my first real love and to this day I am not sure how much that played into the intensity of my feeling. I did not know love, not really, and I was a neophyte about sex; it was so powerful it terrified me in some ways. I had had sex a lean handful of times with women. I was physically immature and had not developed as quickly as most other boys in adolescence, but was immediately drawn to oral sex with women and was too frightened of pregnancy to push for the penis/vagina kind.
I had not discovered sex with men much at that time either. I do remember stopping at a rest area on my way to visit home from college a couple of years before, or was it after? My chronology may be lacking here. The rest areas along the interstates were quite rustic still back then and you could see if someone was coming in from the parking lot through the opening in the tops of the wooden walls. Driving made me intolerably horny (who can explain it?) especially that day for some reason, and I was hard much of the drive. I could not urinate while erect. There was no one else at the rest stop and so I took some time to jack off. There was the usual come hither homosexually explicit graffiti on the walls, but I had, up until then, not thought that men actually had sex in those stalls.
A foreign sports car pulled up and a handsome well-dressed guy got out of the car. He was probably ten to twenty years older than I was and stood at the other stall. If we leaned back, we could see one another. I stopped masturbating and left, went back to the car and read a book. He never came back out and I wanted to finish what I had started. Doing it in the car seemed too risky. Finally, I went back into the stall thinking he would leave. He did not. He did start a conversation… saying the book I was reading must’ve been sexy. I said nothing. He came over and sucked me off.
Oh, and then there was another time even earlier when I was hitch hiking back from Eight Mile Road to my parents’ home during the months I worked in downtown Detroit after I quit college when I was nineteen, a year of two before I moved to the city where I met the teacher. The guy offered to blow me. I nervously assented; he pulled his van over in a mall parking lot. When he tried to start playing with my ass, I jerked away from him, terrified. He went on to finish me up orally.
But this wasn’t to be a recounting of all those rather lonely and soon to be habitual use of other men to get my rocks off… no relationship…no connection… no names exchanged … more like assisted masturbation. Recreation as opposed to expression of connection. I was hard constantly in those years, often it seemed more an irritation than a pleasure.
The teacher was kind to me when I told him I loved him and that I must be gay. He said, smiling, “maybe you’re bisexual”. Hm. I hadn’t though of that. Wasn’t even sure what it meant. It was 1976.
I’m not sure exactly how long it took me to admit that I was indeed not gay and that bisexual seemed a more appropriate name for whatever I was, whatever my preferences were.
Very soon after I declared to him that I must be gay, told him and a few close friends, I ended up involved in a really intense sexual relationship with a woman who attended the art school near where I lived at the time. I remember a particularly erotic session in the grass in the backyard of her parents’ house one summer night. She was, physically, very small and I could lift her up and down when she was on top of me. I don’t think she came though. I had yet to figure all that out. I also had a fling with a woman who worked at the deli counter in the store next door to the bookstore where I worked.
In earlier years I had attempted to turn a number of long-term close platonic friendships with women into sexual ones but that never seemed to work at all and added to my angst about where sex fit in my life. And I remain a little ashamed of the boorish and probably hurtful nature of those early attempts. I wish I had a way to apologize. Maybe this is it?
I remember having a crush on a pretty and smart young woman the first weeks of college. She lived in the same dorm, and we had taken to going on night walks out on the campus. It was going well. She was as shy as I was, and we had good conversations. There was a domed building on campus, a fieldhouse, and climbing to the top of the dome was a popular nighttime activity, though it was officially forbidden. We went to the top and down again and she was walking a few steps ahead of me as we headed back to the dorm. For some reason I had the urge, playful I thought, to run up behind her and tackle her. I am sure now that this was terrifying to her and as much as it was not done as anything more than in the spirit of play, she avoided me completely after that. It took me a while to figure out why.
Anyway, it seemed that the more I accepted that I could have sex with men and liked having sex with men, the more successful I was in my sexual relations with women. Back in the 1970s there was little reinforcement for this kind of experience. There’s not much now.
I think I was probably the first person I knew, male anyway, who identified as bisexual, unless that teacher did. I kind of completely flipped out, however, dropped the class, and only saw him a number of short, painful times after that. One time was at a party for the poets active in a number of the workshops I frequented at the time. It, his appearance in that group at that party, seemed to come from out of nowhere. It was announced that he was to take on a role as a kind of professional legal advisor for the overarching poetry organization in the city (if memory serves me). I could hardly speak and was so fractured mentally that I could not think my way out of the fog I was trying to find my way through. I left the party without speaking to him other than a clumsy hello in the kitchen where I spilled my glass of wine.
Later I found out he was considered to be quite timid. He was also married and had a number of kids. I know now, in terms of bisexuality, that hardly matters. But I didn’t then. I left that city and moved back to Michigan a year or so later.
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