Trauma

I have a little less than an hour before The Shield--yes I've got TiVo but I still love that mass group experience of feeling like I'm watching it with the rest of America, so--I'll pick up the narrative where I left off. Fast forward a little: an extremely rough crossing to loss of virginity--such a weight of fear and shame and we won't, in this forum, trace that back to parentage or playground bullies or anything else. Forward only! Spring of senior year, saw this Botticelli-angel freshman girl doing a scene in drama and thought: her. Not too many weeks later we had the borrowed apartment from a friends whose parents were out of town, the contraception (foam, of all things: this is 1971 we're talking about) and a whole night all our own. All around us, though, the circle of drama department friends were certain that I'd have "trouble." And said so! Amazing. We got into bed, the Botticeli angel was terrified, I promised we'd go slow, and I, amazingly, was instantly and intensely turned on and thought: trouble? Ha! But her terror didn't go away. She was just shivering shivering scared and much kissing and holding didn't help much. Finally it got really late and she said okay let's just do it. But the deal, she said, was that I had to go in the bathroom while she put the foam in, which I did. There I stood in the dark surrounded by my friend's mom's perfumes and hand creams until her little voice came from the other room saying "Okay you can come back." I came back and she was lying stiffly in bed, shivering, all mine for the taking, with the faint odor of contraceptive foam hanging in the air. All trace of lust was gone. Then after a while the sun came up and we went to school and I didn't have the guts to get naked with a girl for two years. Because I had been--and I didn't realize the degree and truth of this until recently--traumatized. All those fears which I knew in my heart were unfounded turned out to have been stone cold real after all. Let's fast forward through those two years, okay? I got into my first choice impossibly fancy college and went away and was just plain miserable all the time. I made a pact with myself that I would either get over my fears and have a romance by the time I was 25 or I would kill myself, and I believe I may actually have done that. But: there was healing during that time. The healing of staying out of the game and going to Reichian therapy and learning the art of romanticized depression: oh the suffering artist. There are worse forms of depression. Finally the summer of my freshman year at college three thousand miles from home I was introduced, by our mutual karate instructor, to the girlfriend of a reasonably close friend of mine. The shape of her face and body fit right into an outline that had always been there in my head and by her own report she felt the same way. We both immediately said "Oh, we've met", then spent the next half hour trying to figure out where, while her boyfriend fumed silently, fully sensing what was going to happen. What happened is that he went six thousand miles away to study his martial arts, with big championships (never attained) in mind, I waited a decent two weeks and then called her. She became fairly central to my life right away--I would spend every minute with her when I was home from college, which was three thousand miles away--but all that insecurity about sex I was carrying around was a problem for a long time. It was an unusual fear, manifest in fiery makeout sessions, blazing erections, and a terror that if we went one step toward IT it would be that night in senior year all over again, all the fire would go away and I'd be sentenced to another two years or more of hell and suicide at 25. But it turned out all that fear was nothing a few milligrams of quaaludes one windy winter night couldn't take care of. Methqualone or however it is spelled melted that short circuit of fear right out of my head, we had a very long night of unending (and I think unprotected) sex, and so began a passionate, sometimes tumultuous, sometimes terrible, sometimes peaceful and joyous relationship with the woman I have now been married to for 24 years. The morning after the quaalude night I walked back to my parents' house, about three miles, and it was a beautiful warm morning, flowers were blooming in every garden, three friendly dogs followed me the whole way, sprinklers were sending rainbows over lawns, and the entire world was absolutely perfect.

Okay, that's the backstory, or most of it. Fourth Step begins in next posting.