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
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