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My Love Life: To All the Boys I´ve Loved Before.

by Faracy Grouse

PART I: Childhood

Time has softened the harshness of so many of my experiences. Memory´s eye has sweetened the details of the good ones. There are other events that need never make paper.
These  memories I share with you so you can laugh at, or with me, but mostly to know that being alone is not a sickness. It is better to be alone with yourself than with someone you should not love.

I was the strange girl growing up. Not the one who would like to look back and think of herself as strange, but genuinely Dawn Wiener strange. I was the one with the kick me signs posted on their back: the one who got along much better with teachers than students: the one who had crushes on the weird boys. Something made me think that if I found them appealing first I might actually have a chance.
First there were the celebrity crushes; Pierce Brosnan in the Remington Steele era, Michael J. Fox, "although I admitted that to no one," The Edge from U2, this being before I was even seven years old. I look back without shame, my best friend had it for Pat Sajack and Bob from Seseme Street at that age.
I´ll fast forward past 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade. There was a lot of forced square dancing in gym class, and playing M.A.S.H. with my other fellow little weirdos. Sixth grade is when things started to seem hard core. People "went together" or were "going together" and did such things as kissing! All of the "populars" were going together it seemed. Where did they go? The dollar theater?The mall?
Things are pretty limited when you´re twelve. All I knew is that I wanted in on it. I decided to go for the slightly chubby asian boy that I used to sit by, Andy Chan. I thought I had a real chance here, we were both starting to be marginally accepted by the normal kids, were in the Gifted and Talented program... Most importantly, no one else would have thought of him! Well, it didn´t work. Even he made fun of me. Writing notes to boys is always, ALWAYS a very bad idea.
On the plus side, I learned the joy of masturbating thinking about all the male athletes from the "Unified Team" the former Soviets during the 1992  Olympics that year. God Bless Viktor Petrenko!  I still have my little homemade notebook paper covered pins with hand drawn Olympic Rings, and "I cheered for the Unified Team" written beneath. And yes, I wore them in public, usually on a neon pink fanny pack.
Junior High was gross. That´s the word that just comes to my mind. Everyone makes a big point to look very different from elementary school; girls start smearing shit on their faces, and boys start to wear rock and roll t-shirts, but otherwise 7th grade is pretty tame. Eight grade is when things become terrifying. Somehow that summer between makes once innocent little boys into dirty, oily (trying to grow it like Kurt Cobain) haired, flannel wearing teenagers. Girls (myself included) started to define themselves by the color they dyed their hair. Mine was Nice n´Easy Blue Black, so I wasn´t just a weirdo anymore, I was a goth weirdo. I was in love with every Asian boy in my school. This also being the era of Cross Colors clothing, I was doing my part not to be racist. Asians were the safe minority in my school since there were no Hispanics, and of course in my house anyone remotely black would cause my father to have a heart attack. Again, so success. I graduated from eight grade without being kissed, but knowing much more about anti-depressants than I should have.
High School... Wow, these were big boys, some even had facial hair! Some even drove cars, and might even have sex!
And the girls, they had huge boobs, and swore all the time, and everyone was bisexual and pagan. These the very teenagers that terrified me all of my life, and now I was surrounded by them.  Somehow I forced myself into being very aggresive that year, some might just call it vapid
Very few people knew me, and there was theater, the home of the semi-talented loser who loves to make orgy jokes. I got into a production of Guy´s and Dolls, as a chorus girl/Havana Whore. This meant cast parties, some of which were unsupervised in people´s dingy basements. At one of these happenings I met my first quasi-boyfriend:Jaguar. It was dimmly lit, he was wearing a Good Company T-shirt (local husband and wife talk show) and under such auspicious circumstances bore enough of a resemblence to Lenny Kravits to get my attention. He was one of those black kids who acted not just white but talked about his Celtic background, about Theater, all of his lesbian friends. He dyed the pony tail part of his shaved under hair eggplant, and smelled like organic cleaning products. He was the first boy I ever kissed, and it was anti-climactic. A Space Balls wedding ceremony in someone´s kitchen. We went on our "honeymoon" on the city bus, walked around, ate noodles, and attempted to make out once.
I freaked out. Something that I had been fantasizing about doing for so many years, here it was waiting for me on a fold out couch covered in cat hair. He had man breasts!  I was so disgusted that I couldn´t be near him. I think it was really his smell that did me in, but the man breasts just didn´t work. He was oddly not very into it either. Seeing him in later years in passing on the street and at Gay Pride festivals I must admit he got really hot... and really gay.
My first real boyfriend came in 10th grade, a hook up by a seemingly wise senior who was also a self proclaimed witch, and seemed to have the answer to everything.
His name was Jimmy. He was terrible. I was desperate and on lots of anti-depresants, so somehow he seemed enchanting. I was 15, he was 21, that should have rung warning bells right away. He was about 5´8" and 120 lbs soaking wet. He wore trench coats, he had a mullet, and smelled like dirty backpack. On the up side, he had a car, and was old enough to buy my friends cigarettes and liquor, but more on the down side. He lived in the 3rd ring suburbs with his parents, attended (but failed) community college classes, was really into Role Playing, guns, and making bombs, but perhaps worst of all thought he could not only make people disappear, but also that he was often visited by aliens (the shadows.) His religion was Jedi, he worked overnight stock at a grocery store and lived on a steady diet of Mountain Dew and Pizza Rolls. After we got caught by the Park Police and my parent forbade me from seeing him, we continued in secret. He got a trashy apartment much too close to my house with some equally steller people. We snuck around, me cutting class to be with him, me being locked into the psych Ward because of the shit he was putting me through. Him thinking he was going to marry me, and even buying a ring that I wore. Him thinking if anyone got in the way of us being together he would just make them disappear. I lost my virginity to this mother fucker! He thought he could somehow break my hymen manually with a razor blade. I still remember him attempting to de-hymanize me with a straight razor, holding a sock under me to catch the blood. I made him stop thank God. He had me convinced that the area around the perinuem was part of the hyman, and me tensing up and going into vaginisms was because of this. He got inside eventually anyhow. I just remember his insistence on calling it "making love" and me wanting to call it "fucking." The veins in his bony forehead always popping out, his skinny slimy frame on top of me, and that foul smell.
He didn´t think he needed to use soap when he bathed, or deoderant. He lived on ramen noodles and vodka lemonade toawrds the end. He had two foot high wall of dirty dishes, and of course the obligatory cat pissing all over the filty seman and blood stained sheets on the couch.  He never had a dime to his name, and started asking my for money, always "hon, do you have any money." Did I mention that he was borderline schizophrenic. By the time I was completely done with him, he had two restraining orders against him. It ended rather quietly, him staulking me at work, demanding his ring and CDs back so he could pay his rent.
I wonder how many more 15 year olds he´s been with since, and if he´s locked up yet.

I met Tazmin as a freshman, but only as a friend. He was two years older than me, smoked a lot of pot, and was attending an alternative school. Two years later I met him again, sans the pot. I had always had a huge crush on him, he was cute really, small but strangely attractive. He was quick witted, at least in comparison to my friends, and was the Asian boy that had eluded me for so long. He was the best friend of one of my ultra-safe male friends from school.
He had a car, he had that floppy hair that was long in the front and buzzed in the back, and his pants were so huge that two or three more of him could have fit inside; but he had a wallet chain, and smelled like altoids and car exhaust. This to me, after a year of Jimmy, was pure sex. Our relationship consisted almost solely of him showing up randomly at my door, us driving around to no where specific, listening to Geggy Tah and Sublime, him talking in monologue.
Eventually we would wind up at a mall, often with a bunch of other girls, as he liked to be with an entourage, and have our (date) at the food court. We never quite had sex, parents would always come home, or it would be just too cold in the car. I gave him really lame head through a banana condom about a block from my parents house one night in the backseat, it was 20 below zero.
He dumped me on Valentines day, I was crushed for months.

Part II    The Late Teenage Years
I started to hang out with lesbians, and was starting to wonder if I too was amongst them.This was the mid 1990´s in Minneapolis, which seeminly meant that you were required to have a sexuality crisis. Mine came soon after Tazmin. I had recurrent sex dreams about girls, but I would wake up terrified that I might be gay. As I said, I had taken to hanging out with the lesbians at my high school. They all thought I was one of them that just wasn´t out to themself yet.
I had come to the startling conclusion that I might be at least bisexual, but certainly not pagan; it seemed as if the two entities had become synonymous with each other. Oh no, I was a confused Jewish girl raised by a Mormon convert mother and a non practicing Orthodox Jewish father.. meaning I was absolutely nothing in the eyes of most Jews, yet I clung to being Jewish because dammit they were the cool monotheists. I was definitely very into God. I remember asking Him one night what his views on homosexuality were, or really sexuality in general. Perhaps I was imagining things, but the response seemed to be “as long as no one gets hurt, I really don´t care.”  No matter where this idea came from, it gave me profound comfort to think I might not be horrible for fantasizing about Bjork, or Japanese girls.  Being bisexual seemed like a cop out, but it seemed to cleanly define how I felt. I was attracted to both sexes, but differently.  I had been with males, but never a female. I could only imagine what it would be like, and I thought it must be much less messy. The problem being that I was afraid of performing cunnilingus, not that I hadn´t tasted myself ( I am a curious girl afterall.) But someone else´s cho cho! No, that I didn´t know if I could do.
I was also blessed with the ability to only fall for straight women, just as I was doomed to fall madly in love with gay men.  I had the sexual taste of a moderately bisexual, but mostly gay man. Very cute girls, but cute in an almost camp way, and gorgeously effeminate men. Not that I had ever been with either.  Because of this condition, I decided to only like completely unattainable people,  “shiny orbs.”  Beautiful, untouchable objects that float above you and give off a radiant glow. Some people might have disagreed on who I would call a shiny orb, but my taste, and gaydar was under major renovation.
Towards the end of my senior year of high school I started to notice a boy in my English class that was definitely not a shiny orb. He was something very other, and I found him repulsive.
So repulsive that I couldn´t stop thinking about him. I would wait to see if his beady little eyes would turn my way to check out whether or not I was wearing my padded bra. He was not attractive, not by any measure, and not even in the dark. To describe him would do him injustice, but I´ll give it a shot. Izekial, who from now on will be called Zeek was about 5´8”, fluctuated between 140 and 180 pounds, had incredibly oily, buzz cut dirty blonde hair, a billy goat goatee, splotchy skin, and a very wide permemnantly broken out nose. But he did have really nice legs. He smelled oddly of chlorine and Tide laundry detergent.
Zeek was stranger than I could ever hope to be, enthralling himself with mathematical equations, iambic meter, and the musical stylings of Slick Rick and Megadeath. After much deliberation by means of throwing black and white stones in a circle, white for yes, and black for no,
I got up the guts to write him one of my famous letters.
To my shock and amazement, it worked!  Things still did not progress as quickly as I had hoped, and I still didn´t have him as my fantasy prom date, which was a good thing in retrospect.
I began going to his house after lunch during my free hour, and eventually got up the nerve to link arms with him on the way back to school.  The day before graduation, I decided to take things into my own hands. With a CD of Scottish ambient music, and the excuse to watch his extensive collection of Planet of the Apes, I shut him into his activity room, and sort of had my way with him. More like, me asking “Zeek, can I hug you,” then “Zeek, can I kiss you”, then “Zeek, do you want to see my tits.” This is as far as it went for quite awhile, but by graduation day we were together. Just in time to repulse everyone at the senior party afterwards.
Some kids are weird because of the need to be different, or because they want to be different just like everyone else. Zeek was not one of those, he was deeply fucked up. His father was in an institution for the criminally insane since he attempted to kill Zeek and his mother when Zeek for only a few months old. His mother, Fern ran a home daycare and never left the house.
I blame his upbringing for his negative strange aspects.  All of his life was spent being treated like a toddler, as that was the age his mother cared for.
I remember their calendar had little stars on it, and upon asking Zeek what the stars meant I found out it was the symbol for “Zeek had a bowl movement today!” Meaning that he could have icecream.  Zeek was almost nineteen years old, and his mother still asked him about his shit!  I also found out rather matter of factly about the turkey baster enemas that were administered if there were not sufficient stars. Perhaps more disturbing than that, was a family friend named Mel. Mel was considered by Fern to be like a surrogate father to Zeek, he was his longtime floor hockey coach, the guy that took him to Promise Keepers, and drove up from Iowa just to see him.  I found out that Mel would corner Zeek in his van, and say things like “you must love me” and then kiss him on the mouth. Or insist on sharing a bed with him, and God only knows what might have happened that Zeek might have blocked out. I was the first person that knew about this, and the first person to tell him it wasn´t right.
Between the experiences with Mel, the disturbing Oedipal relationship with his mother,  and the barrage of anti-gay videos and pamphlets and cologne with names such as Compulsion, and Gigolo from his father in the nut house, one could only expect Zeek to have sexual issues.
We had sex for the first time July 5th, since July 4th was much too sacred to him, he was afterall an Eagle Scout and devout Patriot. He thought that a person only got one chance to be with someone, and that sex equaled marriage, and of course you could only ever be married once. He was Missouri Sinate Lutheran. The sex lasted about 20 seconds, which was good because my parents walked in the door shortly afterwards. He was afraid to touch my vagina, since it was wet and strange to him. He couldn´t even refer to it by its proper name. So imagine sex with very little touching and a free lifestyles condom.
Despite our lack of sex life, as we had sex all of 12 times in almost a year, we were very good friends. He is the only ex boyfriend that I can say that about. Zeek for all of his strangeness was a genuinly sweet person, and very interesting. He had his own very unique spirituality, which often entailed him fighting ghosts and demons in his living room at night, or helping me understand what it was like to be possessed by a spirit. For some reason he made people trust him on these things, why would Zeek lie. He had no other friends besides me, and I was his link to the world beyond his sick, tunafish and diaper smelling house.  Things were never bad between us, perhaps this is why it ended as it did. I was completely bored, and not at all attracted to him physically. I just wanted to be friends, and never have to touch him again. It almost worked.

II The Late Teen Years
When you are nineteen years old you do many stupid things. I think not being able to drink alchohol
legally in the US until you are 21 actually leads to much of this. Certainly it is the cause of too much sex, for alchohol, and because of illegally bought alchohol. I wish I could blame being drunk for why I ever got involved with Jay.
As I mentioned before, I was bored to bits with Zeek. Silly me also wanted someone who fit the tall, dark, and androgynous type I had so long admired.
Out of desperation, and the tip that easy and raunchy boys went there, I attended one Saturday Night showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. There the usual suburban (goth) types sauntered about the theatre lobby in their latest Hot Topic purchase, while others enjoyed being lead about on dog leaches, or making out with strangers. It was like Sodom and Ghemorra in a Mid-western strip mall.
I, in my best trashy second hand lingerie top was approached by someone:  kind of tall, 5´11”, kind of dark, brown hair and brown eyes, and wanting desperately to be androgynous with poorly applied black eyeliner and burgundy lipstick. It was Jay-  His brilliant pickup line was “I steal you.”  I thought he would work for the night, my plan was only to make out with someone else, just to feel alive again.  I wound up back at his townhouse, 30 miles outside of the city for a Rocky afterparty.
We lied in his bed and watched cartoons, and talked about deep things such as the musical ensemble Skid Row. That would be the last time we ever communicated on such a spiritual level.
I was not expecting him to call me when I gave him my number, but of course he did, within hours no less.  I found out several important things in this phone call: He was an apprentice electrician, he thought I was really special and wanted to see me again, and that last little bit about him moving out of his spacious townhouse at the end of the month for a double wide trailer... by his own free will. I headed no attention to minor details, and promptly drove out to his place where we commenced the most sexually explicit six months of my life. Thus breaking poor little Zeek´s heart, who thought he could somehow win me back.
As time passed, or rather three weeks, Jay begin to lose whatever mystique he once held. Once moved into the trailer, things went from raunchy to just plain white trash. He could not pronounce his own name for starters, he was unable to pronounce vowels at the beginning of words thus making him a ´lectrician, and ´talian.  Without the makeup he looked like a young, uglier, and trashier Steven Tyler with short hair (worn with anti-sideburns,) and he smelled like electrical glue and flatulence... But he could fix my often broken down car, made pancakes once in awhile, and had his own place with cable television. I pretty much moved in, commuting 30 miles each way to the University and work.
There are three kinds of sex, quality, mandatory, and quantity; we should have won a prize for the last. We fucked just to fuck, just to see how much it was possible in one day, one week, one month. Then we went for stunts, like food, and objects, and hot wax. Then locations, in a tent, in my parents house, in my parents bed, in the car while driving, at a wedding and so forth. When all of that started to get boring, Jay´s somewhat dormant bisexual side came out again. He wanted me to stick candles up his ass while we were fucking, and all the anal stuff that I never again want to think about or explore. Notably I did once pour warming motion lotion in his crack, and had the pleasure of watching him run around the trailer and try to cool it with icecubes.  Alas, I was not enough. Even though I bought the largest strap on dick I could find in the hopes of placating his need to see his trampy drag hag friend Wayne, I was too late. I knew in the back of my mind that he was cheating on me the whole time we were together, but was in deep denial. I thought that I could change him, him and everyone else. I thought that slowly introducing him to facts such as Prince and Michael Jackson being two completely different people would enlighten him. That showing him Kusturica films, informing him of the subtle difference in meaning of scent and flavor, that Marilyn Manson was NOT the direct descendent of Charles Manson, or even that fruits and vegetable have a diuretic effect might sink in- no,  it had all been for nothing. Besides the fact that he was cheating on me, and that he would stick his match stick dick in me whenever he felt like it, holding me down if need be, I still somehow saw some kind of good in him. I actually cared about him. I thought he cared about me.  Even he had his little endearing qualities, driving up to Cross Lake to go pontooning with his parents, playing dress up, cooking together, fixing cars together. We had just spent an enormous amount of time together, and I was in a place that should have felt familiar. I was afraid of the unknown. I knew that he would never leave his little town, would always spent every cent on his truck and other toys, and would always cheat.
Why did I stay for another two months? I had Mono, I was depressed, and I thought
would be alone again. I so was deeply afraid of being alone that I was willing to cling to anything to prevent it, even if being alone was a profoundly better alternative.
My Mono was taking a severe toll on me, I had been accepted as a transfer student into an Ivy League University and another private Music Conservatory for opera. I had to defer both of them to move back in with my parents and recuperate. By this point my parents hated Jay, and my mother enrolled me in abuse counseling. Although literally in and out of the hospital, I would still drive out and see him! That was so stupid! And with my swollen spleen still fuck him, although now he complained that I was boring in bed, and that my “pussy had become too lose.”  It was pure addiction at this point. I just wanted to see if I could somehow, at any cost make him care about me.
That never happened of course. I just caught him in the act, and with the last shred of dignity I had dumped him over the phone.. to which I heard he was elated about.  About a week later, he came knocking on my bedroom window in full Rocky regalia, trying to make up with me. Thank God I just couldn´t stand the sight of him anymore. Even if the reason for this was that I had met someone else, and was of course indulging my addiction for serial monogamy.. the result was the same.
No more semi-goth-bisexual-Italian-electrician-trailertrash boy!

Part III The Era of Non-Relationships a.k.a. The Era of Copulating Indiscriminately.
Having just lived through a pretty awful period of my life I took great pleasure in telling any willing person about it in gory detail; More like look at what a poor girl I am, and please love me.
I was hanging out with my friends again, and doing pretty normal sophomore in college type of things: Getting trashed on vodka and fresca in my friend´s dorm room, driving to the Indian casino just to play five dollars on the nickel slots and drink free pop, and the obligatory sex with people who you should have never crossed that line with.
I would classify this period of my life as a period of looking for love by way of copulation, since this was the only kind of affection I had ever really known from men. I had a few male friends who never tried to get into my pants, but that was due to the fact that we felt like siblings or some other sort of very sexless relation, it would have been disgusting for all involved.
I could list each and every person I had sex with during this time, but just about all of them were under regrettable circumstances. I´d prefer to think of it as the final blow to that idea of sex equals love. Love equals love, and sex equals sex, when the twain shall meet is lovely, but such is a rare and beautiful happening.
:There were the androgynous former Jehovah’s witnesses who smelled of crayons and made cute muppet sounds while they slept; bipolar Greek boys who thought they would marry me and gave me the very cinematic memory of pouring bottles of water over each other in 100 degree heat of July in Athens, with a view of the Parthenon out the window. There was the de-christening of an airport elevator, and things that happen when you´re drunk that you hope to never have to think about again... There were some one night stands, and even worse the two night stand.. made worse when the nights aren´t even consecutive, the second one always being “um, can we uh do what we did that other time.” There was horrible sex, mediocre sex, and some that was maybe even good.. But that´s all it was. Sex without love is just wet, sweaty, and risky. The conquest was over, Wilt Chamberlain I would never be, let alone Willie Nelson. Fuck sex! I never wanted to wake up regretting what I´d done again. I never wanted to shudder when passing someone on the street. I decided that I would only have sex with people I could wake up next to the next day and be happy that I had shared my body so intimately with them.
I took a cue from Morrissey, and became celibate. For once in my life I was happy being alone, indeed this was one of the happiest periods of my life. I was traveling across the Middle East and Europe, meeting wonderful people, people who really did just want to know me, not fuck me.
I met several men who changed by life, but I´ll mention one by name as he was truly the first gentleman I had ever met. Robert in Scotland, the title I gave him, his name plus his geographic location. I met him by chance, like you meet all of God´s messengers, walking around Edinburgh.
I was lost, looking for some traditional Scottish Ceili, and I asked him for directions at a bus stop.
Most of us don´t want to know people we meet at bus stops, but this changed that for me.
He just happened to be going where I was, so we went together. He invited me to have a drink with him and his friends if my event didn´t turn out as I had hoped.. To make a long story short, I ended up crashing at his place for the rest of the week. We stayed up all night, and slept until the late afternoon talking about working in box factories in Lawrence Kansas and drinking PBR on people´s decks, listening to music, and doing just about everything except anything even remotely sexual. He was brilliant, sweet, and entertaining. This was the first time in my life when a man was just kind to me, and did not want sex in return. What a revelation!  When I told people back home about him they told me he was probably gay, or thought I was repulsive. I didn´t agree with either.  I had just been introduced to life beyond sex, and it was good.
There is that old line that good things come to those who wait, and also you will find something when you stop looking. I believe them both. I believe in the genuine goodness of human beings. One day one of those brilliant shining orbs will crash down to earth right in front of me, like a meteor. They will look up to me from the ground, and I may look like a shining orb of light to them.
I also believe that I will one day wake up next to someone that I am deeply grateful for having had the chance to do something so intimate with. I will learn to enjoy sex.

Description
My Love Life: To All the Boys I´ve Loved Before.

by Faracy Grouse

PART I: Childhood

Time has softened the harshness of so many of my experiences. Memory´s eye has sweetened the details of the good ones. There are other events that need never make paper.
These  memories I share with you so you can laugh at, or with me, but mostly to know that being alone is not a sickness. It is better to be alone with yourself than with someone you should not love.

I was the strange girl growing up. Not the one who would like to look back and think of herself as strange, but genuinely Dawn Wiener strange. I was the one with the kick me signs posted on their back: the one who got along much better with teachers than students: the one who had crushes on the weird boys. Something made me think that if I found them appealing first I might actually have a chance.
First there were the celebrity crushes; Pierce Brosnan in the Remington Steele era, Michael J. Fox, "although I admitted that to no one," The Edge from U2, this being before I was even seven years old. I look back without shame, my best friend had it for Pat Sajack and Bob from Seseme Street at that age.
I´ll fast forward past 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade. There was a lot of forced square dancing in gym class, and playing M.A.S.H. with my other fellow little weirdos. Sixth grade is when things started to seem hard core. People "went together" or were "going together" and did such things as kissing! All of the "populars" were going together it seemed. Where did they go? The dollar theater?The mall?
Things are pretty limited when you´re twelve. All I knew is that I wanted in on it. I decided to go for the slightly chubby asian boy that I used to sit by, Andy Chan. I thought I had a real chance here, we were both starting to be marginally accepted by the normal kids, were in the Gifted and Talented program... Most importantly, no one else would have thought of him! Well, it didn´t work. Even he made fun of me. Writing notes to boys is always, ALWAYS a very bad idea.
On the plus side, I learned the joy of masturbating thinking about all the male athletes from the "Unified Team" the former Soviets during the 1992  Olympics that year. God Bless Viktor Petrenko!  I still have my little homemade notebook paper covered pins with hand drawn Olympic Rings, and "I cheered for the Unified Team" written beneath. And yes, I wore them in public, usually on a neon pink fanny pack.
Junior High was gross. That´s the word that just comes to my mind. Everyone makes a big point to look very different from elementary school; girls start smearing shit on their faces, and boys start to wear rock and roll t-shirts, but otherwise 7th grade is pretty tame. Eight grade is when things become terrifying. Somehow that summer between makes once innocent little boys into dirty, oily (trying to grow it like Kurt Cobain) haired, flannel wearing teenagers. Girls (myself included) started to define themselves by the color they dyed their hair. Mine was Nice n´Easy Blue Black, so I wasn´t just a weirdo anymore, I was a goth weirdo. I was in love with every Asian boy in my school. This also being the era of Cross Colors clothing, I was doing my part not to be racist. Asians were the safe minority in my school since there were no Hispanics, and of course in my house anyone remotely black would cause my father to have a heart attack. Again, so success. I graduated from eight grade without being kissed, but knowing much more about anti-depressants than I should have.
High School... Wow, these were big boys, some even had facial hair! Some even drove cars, and might even have sex!
And the girls, they had huge boobs, and swore all the time, and everyone was bisexual and pagan. These the very teenagers that terrified me all of my life, and now I was surrounded by them.  Somehow I forced myself into being very aggresive that year, some might just call it vapid
Very few people knew me, and there was theater, the home of the semi-talented loser who loves to make orgy jokes. I got into a production of Guy´s and Dolls, as a chorus girl/Havana Whore. This meant cast parties, some of which were unsupervised in people´s dingy basements. At one of these happenings I met my first quasi-boyfriend:Jaguar. It was dimmly lit, he was wearing a Good Company T-shirt (local husband and wife talk show) and under such auspicious circumstances bore enough of a resemblence to Lenny Kravits to get my attention. He was one of those black kids who acted not just white but talked about his Celtic background, about Theater, all of his lesbian friends. He dyed the pony tail part of his shaved under hair eggplant, and smelled like organic cleaning products. He was the first boy I ever kissed, and it was anti-climactic. A Space Balls wedding ceremony in someone´s kitchen. We went on our "honeymoon" on the city bus, walked around, ate noodles, and attempted to make out once.
I freaked out. Something that I had been fantasizing about doing for so many years, here it was waiting for me on a fold out couch covered in cat hair. He had man breasts!  I was so disgusted that I couldn´t be near him. I think it was really his smell that did me in, but the man breasts just didn´t work. He was oddly not very into it either. Seeing him in later years in passing on the street and at Gay Pride festivals I must admit he got really hot... and really gay.
My first real boyfriend came in 10th grade, a hook up by a seemingly wise senior who was also a self proclaimed witch, and seemed to have the answer to everything.
His name was Jimmy. He was terrible. I was desperate and on lots of anti-depresants, so somehow he seemed enchanting. I was 15, he was 21, that should have rung warning bells right away. He was about 5´8" and 120 lbs soaking wet. He wore trench coats, he had a mullet, and smelled like dirty backpack. On the up side, he had a car, and was old enough to buy my friends cigarettes and liquor, but more on the down side. He lived in the 3rd ring suburbs with his parents, attended (but failed) community college classes, was really into Role Playing, guns, and making bombs, but perhaps worst of all thought he could not only make people disappear, but also that he was often visited by aliens (the shadows.) His religion was Jedi, he worked overnight stock at a grocery store and lived on a steady diet of Mountain Dew and Pizza Rolls. After we got caught by the Park Police and my parent forbade me from seeing him, we continued in secret. He got a trashy apartment much too close to my house with some equally steller people. We snuck around, me cutting class to be with him, me being locked into the psych Ward because of the shit he was putting me through. Him thinking he was going to marry me, and even buying a ring that I wore. Him thinking if anyone got in the way of us being together he would just make them disappear. I lost my virginity to this mother fucker! He thought he could somehow break my hymen manually with a razor blade. I still remember him attempting to de-hymanize me with a straight razor, holding a sock under me to catch the blood. I made him stop thank God. He had me convinced that the area around the perinuem was part of the hyman, and me tensing up and going into vaginisms was because of this. He got inside eventually anyhow. I just remember his insistence on calling it "making love" and me wanting to call it "fucking." The veins in his bony forehead always popping out, his skinny slimy frame on top of me, and that foul smell.
He didn´t think he needed to use soap when he bathed, or deoderant. He lived on ramen noodles and vodka lemonade toawrds the end. He had two foot high wall of dirty dishes, and of course the obligatory cat pissing all over the filty seman and blood stained sheets on the couch.  He never had a dime to his name, and started asking my for money, always "hon, do you have any money." Did I mention that he was borderline schizophrenic. By the time I was completely done with him, he had two restraining orders against him. It ended rather quietly, him staulking me at work, demanding his ring and CDs back so he could pay his rent.
I wonder how many more 15 year olds he´s been with since, and if he´s locked up yet.

I met Tazmin as a freshman, but only as a friend. He was two years older than me, smoked a lot of pot, and was attending an alternative school. Two years later I met him again, sans the pot. I had always had a huge crush on him, he was cute really, small but strangely attractive. He was quick witted, at least in comparison to my friends, and was the Asian boy that had eluded me for so long. He was the best friend of one of my ultra-safe male friends from school.
He had a car, he had that floppy hair that was long in the front and buzzed in the back, and his pants were so huge that two or three more of him could have fit inside; but he had a wallet chain, and smelled like altoids and car exhaust. This to me, after a year of Jimmy, was pure sex. Our relationship consisted almost solely of him showing up randomly at my door, us driving around to no where specific, listening to Geggy Tah and Sublime, him talking in monologue.
Eventually we would wind up at a mall, often with a bunch of other girls, as he liked to be with an entourage, and have our (date) at the food court. We never quite had sex, parents would always come home, or it would be just too cold in the car. I gave him really lame head through a banana condom about a block from my parents house one night in the backseat, it was 20 below zero.
He dumped me on Valentines day, I was crushed for months.

Part II    The Late Teenage Years
I started to hang out with lesbians, and was starting to wonder if I too was amongst them.This was the mid 1990´s in Minneapolis, which seeminly meant that you were required to have a sexuality crisis. Mine came soon after Tazmin. I had recurrent sex dreams about girls, but I would wake up terrified that I might be gay. As I said, I had taken to hanging out with the lesbians at my high school. They all thought I was one of them that just wasn´t out to themself yet.
I had come to the startling conclusion that I might be at least bisexual, but certainly not pagan; it seemed as if the two entities had become synonymous with each other. Oh no, I was a confused Jewish girl raised by a Mormon convert mother and a non practicing Orthodox Jewish father.. meaning I was absolutely nothing in the eyes of most Jews, yet I clung to being Jewish because dammit they were the cool monotheists. I was definitely very into God. I remember asking Him one night what his views on homosexuality were, or really sexuality in general. Perhaps I was imagining things, but the response seemed to be “as long as no one gets hurt, I really don´t care.”  No matter where this idea came from, it gave me profound comfort to think I might not be horrible for fantasizing about Bjork, or Japanese girls.  Being bisexual seemed like a cop out, but it seemed to cleanly define how I felt. I was attracted to both sexes, but differently.  I had been with males, but never a female. I could only imagine what it would be like, and I thought it must be much less messy. The problem being that I was afraid of performing cunnilingus, not that I hadn´t tasted myself ( I am a curious girl afterall.) But someone else´s cho cho! No, that I didn´t know if I could do.
I was also blessed with the ability to only fall for straight women, just as I was doomed to fall madly in love with gay men.  I had the sexual taste of a moderately bisexual, but mostly gay man. Very cute girls, but cute in an almost camp way, and gorgeously effeminate men. Not that I had ever been with either.  Because of this condition, I decided to only like completely unattainable people,  “shiny orbs.”  Beautiful, untouchable objects that float above you and give off a radiant glow. Some people might have disagreed on who I would call a shiny orb, but my taste, and gaydar was under major renovation.
Towards the end of my senior year of high school I started to notice a boy in my English class that was definitely not a shiny orb. He was something very other, and I found him repulsive.
So repulsive that I couldn´t stop thinking about him. I would wait to see if his beady little eyes would turn my way to check out whether or not I was wearing my padded bra. He was not attractive, not by any measure, and not even in the dark. To describe him would do him injustice, but I´ll give it a shot. Izekial, who from now on will be called Zeek was about 5´8”, fluctuated between 140 and 180 pounds, had incredibly oily, buzz cut dirty blonde hair, a billy goat goatee, splotchy skin, and a very wide permemnantly broken out nose. But he did have really nice legs. He smelled oddly of chlorine and Tide laundry detergent.
Zeek was stranger than I could ever hope to be, enthralling himself with mathematical equations, iambic meter, and the musical stylings of Slick Rick and Megadeath. After much deliberation by means of throwing black and white stones in a circle, white for yes, and black for no,
I got up the guts to write him one of my famous letters.
To my shock and amazement, it worked!  Things still did not progress as quickly as I had hoped, and I still didn´t have him as my fantasy prom date, which was a good thing in retrospect.
I began going to his house after lunch during my free hour, and eventually got up the nerve to link arms with him on the way back to school.  The day before graduation, I decided to take things into my own hands. With a CD of Scottish ambient music, and the excuse to watch his extensive collection of Planet of the Apes, I shut him into his activity room, and sort of had my way with him. More like, me asking “Zeek, can I hug you,” then “Zeek, can I kiss you”, then “Zeek, do you want to see my tits.” This is as far as it went for quite awhile, but by graduation day we were together. Just in time to repulse everyone at the senior party afterwards.
Some kids are weird because of the need to be different, or because they want to be different just like everyone else. Zeek was not one of those, he was deeply fucked up. His father was in an institution for the criminally insane since he attempted to kill Zeek and his mother when Zeek for only a few months old. His mother, Fern ran a home daycare and never left the house.
I blame his upbringing for his negative strange aspects.  All of his life was spent being treated like a toddler, as that was the age his mother cared for.
I remember their calendar had little stars on it, and upon asking Zeek what the stars meant I found out it was the symbol for “Zeek had a bowl movement today!” Meaning that he could have icecream.  Zeek was almost nineteen years old, and his mother still asked him about his shit!  I also found out rather matter of factly about the turkey baster enemas that were administered if there were not sufficient stars. Perhaps more disturbing than that, was a family friend named Mel. Mel was considered by Fern to be like a surrogate father to Zeek, he was his longtime floor hockey coach, the guy that took him to Promise Keepers, and drove up from Iowa just to see him.  I found out that Mel would corner Zeek in his van, and say things like “you must love me” and then kiss him on the mouth. Or insist on sharing a bed with him, and God only knows what might have happened that Zeek might have blocked out. I was the first person that knew about this, and the first person to tell him it wasn´t right.
Between the experiences with Mel, the disturbing Oedipal relationship with his mother,  and the barrage of anti-gay videos and pamphlets and cologne with names such as Compulsion, and Gigolo from his father in the nut house, one could only expect Zeek to have sexual issues.
We had sex for the first time July 5th, since July 4th was much too sacred to him, he was afterall an Eagle Scout and devout Patriot. He thought that a person only got one chance to be with someone, and that sex equaled marriage, and of course you could only ever be married once. He was Missouri Sinate Lutheran. The sex lasted about 20 seconds, which was good because my parents walked in the door shortly afterwards. He was afraid to touch my vagina, since it was wet and strange to him. He couldn´t even refer to it by its proper name. So imagine sex with very little touching and a free lifestyles condom.
Despite our lack of sex life, as we had sex all of 12 times in almost a year, we were very good friends. He is the only ex boyfriend that I can say that about. Zeek for all of his strangeness was a genuinly sweet person, and very interesting. He had his own very unique spirituality, which often entailed him fighting ghosts and demons in his living room at night, or helping me understand what it was like to be possessed by a spirit. For some reason he made people trust him on these things, why would Zeek lie. He had no other friends besides me, and I was his link to the world beyond his sick, tunafish and diaper smelling house.  Things were never bad between us, perhaps this is why it ended as it did. I was completely bored, and not at all attracted to him physically. I just wanted to be friends, and never have to touch him again. It almost worked.

II The Late Teen Years
When you are nineteen years old you do many stupid things. I think not being able to drink alchohol
legally in the US until you are 21 actually leads to much of this. Certainly it is the cause of too much sex, for alchohol, and because of illegally bought alchohol. I wish I could blame being drunk for why I ever got involved with Jay.
As I mentioned before, I was bored to bits with Zeek. Silly me also wanted someone who fit the tall, dark, and androgynous type I had so long admired.
Out of desperation, and the tip that easy and raunchy boys went there, I attended one Saturday Night showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. There the usual suburban (goth) types sauntered about the theatre lobby in their latest Hot Topic purchase, while others enjoyed being lead about on dog leaches, or making out with strangers. It was like Sodom and Ghemorra in a Mid-western strip mall.
I, in my best trashy second hand lingerie top was approached by someone:  kind of tall, 5´11”, kind of dark, brown hair and brown eyes, and wanting desperately to be androgynous with poorly applied black eyeliner and burgundy lipstick. It was Jay-  His brilliant pickup line was “I steal you.”  I thought he would work for the night, my plan was only to make out with someone else, just to feel alive again.  I wound up back at his townhouse, 30 miles outside of the city for a Rocky afterparty.
We lied in his bed and watched cartoons, and talked about deep things such as the musical ensemble Skid Row. That would be the last time we ever communicated on such a spiritual level.
I was not expecting him to call me when I gave him my number, but of course he did, within hours no less.  I found out several important things in this phone call: He was an apprentice electrician, he thought I was really special and wanted to see me again, and that last little bit about him moving out of his spacious townhouse at the end of the month for a double wide trailer... by his own free will. I headed no attention to minor details, and promptly drove out to his place where we commenced the most sexually explicit six months of my life. Thus breaking poor little Zeek´s heart, who thought he could somehow win me back.
As time passed, or rather three weeks, Jay begin to lose whatever mystique he once held. Once moved into the trailer, things went from raunchy to just plain white trash. He could not pronounce his own name for starters, he was unable to pronounce vowels at the beginning of words thus making him a ´lectrician, and ´talian.  Without the makeup he looked like a young, uglier, and trashier Steven Tyler with short hair (worn with anti-sideburns,) and he smelled like electrical glue and flatulence... But he could fix my often broken down car, made pancakes once in awhile, and had his own place with cable television. I pretty much moved in, commuting 30 miles each way to the University and work.
There are three kinds of sex, quality, mandatory, and quantity; we should have won a prize for the last. We fucked just to fuck, just to see how much it was possible in one day, one week, one month. Then we went for stunts, like food, and objects, and hot wax. Then locations, in a tent, in my parents house, in my parents bed, in the car while driving, at a wedding and so forth. When all of that started to get boring, Jay´s somewhat dormant bisexual side came out again. He wanted me to stick candles up his ass while we were fucking, and all the anal stuff that I never again want to think about or explore. Notably I did once pour warming motion lotion in his crack, and had the pleasure of watching him run around the trailer and try to cool it with icecubes.  Alas, I was not enough. Even though I bought the largest strap on dick I could find in the hopes of placating his need to see his trampy drag hag friend Wayne, I was too late. I knew in the back of my mind that he was cheating on me the whole time we were together, but was in deep denial. I thought that I could change him, him and everyone else. I thought that slowly introducing him to facts such as Prince and Michael Jackson being two completely different people would enlighten him. That showing him Kusturica films, informing him of the subtle difference in meaning of scent and flavor, that Marilyn Manson was NOT the direct descendent of Charles Manson, or even that fruits and vegetable have a diuretic effect might sink in- no,  it had all been for nothing. Besides the fact that he was cheating on me, and that he would stick his match stick dick in me whenever he felt like it, holding me down if need be, I still somehow saw some kind of good in him. I actually cared about him. I thought he cared about me.  Even he had his little endearing qualities, driving up to Cross Lake to go pontooning with his parents, playing dress up, cooking together, fixing cars together. We had just spent an enormous amount of time together, and I was in a place that should have felt familiar. I was afraid of the unknown. I knew that he would never leave his little town, would always spent every cent on his truck and other toys, and would always cheat.
Why did I stay for another two months? I had Mono, I was depressed, and I thought
would be alone again. I so was deeply afraid of being alone that I was willing to cling to anything to prevent it, even if being alone was a profoundly better alternative.
My Mono was taking a severe toll on me, I had been accepted as a transfer student into an Ivy League University and another private Music Conservatory for opera. I had to defer both of them to move back in with my parents and recuperate. By this point my parents hated Jay, and my mother enrolled me in abuse counseling. Although literally in and out of the hospital, I would still drive out and see him! That was so stupid! And with my swollen spleen still fuck him, although now he complained that I was boring in bed, and that my “pussy had become too lose.”  It was pure addiction at this point. I just wanted to see if I could somehow, at any cost make him care about me.
That never happened of course. I just caught him in the act, and with the last shred of dignity I had dumped him over the phone.. to which I heard he was elated about.  About a week later, he came knocking on my bedroom window in full Rocky regalia, trying to make up with me. Thank God I just couldn´t stand the sight of him anymore. Even if the reason for this was that I had met someone else, and was of course indulging my addiction for serial monogamy.. the result was the same.
No more semi-goth-bisexual-Italian-electrician-trailertrash boy!

Part III The Era of Non-Relationships a.k.a. The Era of Copulating Indiscriminately.
Having just lived through a pretty awful period of my life I took great pleasure in telling any willing person about it in gory detail; More like look at what a poor girl I am, and please love me.
I was hanging out with my friends again, and doing pretty normal sophomore in college type of things: Getting trashed on vodka and fresca in my friend´s dorm room, driving to the Indian casino just to play five dollars on the nickel slots and drink free pop, and the obligatory sex with people who you should have never crossed that line with.
I would classify this period of my life as a period of looking for love by way of copulation, since this was the only kind of affection I had ever really known from men. I had a few male friends who never tried to get into my pants, but that was due to the fact that we felt like siblings or some other sort of very sexless relation, it would have been disgusting for all involved.
I could list each and every person I had sex with during this time, but just about all of them were under regrettable circumstances. I´d prefer to think of it as the final blow to that idea of sex equals love. Love equals love, and sex equals sex, when the twain shall meet is lovely, but such is a rare and beautiful happening.
:There were the androgynous former Jehovah’s witnesses who smelled of crayons and made cute muppet sounds while they slept; bipolar Greek boys who thought they would marry me and gave me the very cinematic memory of pouring bottles of water over each other in 100 degree heat of July in Athens, with a view of the Parthenon out the window. There was the de-christening of an airport elevator, and things that happen when you´re drunk that you hope to never have to think about again... There were some one night stands, and even worse the two night stand.. made worse when the nights aren´t even consecutive, the second one always being “um, can we uh do what we did that other time.” There was horrible sex, mediocre sex, and some that was maybe even good.. But that´s all it was. Sex without love is just wet, sweaty, and risky. The conquest was over, Wilt Chamberlain I would never be, let alone Willie Nelson. Fuck sex! I never wanted to wake up regretting what I´d done again. I never wanted to shudder when passing someone on the street. I decided that I would only have sex with people I could wake up next to the next day and be happy that I had shared my body so intimately with them.
I took a cue from Morrissey, and became celibate. For once in my life I was happy being alone, indeed this was one of the happiest periods of my life. I was traveling across the Middle East and Europe, meeting wonderful people, people who really did just want to know me, not fuck me.
I met several men who changed by life, but I´ll mention one by name as he was truly the first gentleman I had ever met. Robert in Scotland, the title I gave him, his name plus his geographic location. I met him by chance, like you meet all of God´s messengers, walking around Edinburgh.
I was lost, looking for some traditional Scottish Ceili, and I asked him for directions at a bus stop.
Most of us don´t want to know people we meet at bus stops, but this changed that for me.
He just happened to be going where I was, so we went together. He invited me to have a drink with him and his friends if my event didn´t turn out as I had hoped.. To make a long story short, I ended up crashing at his place for the rest of the week. We stayed up all night, and slept until the late afternoon talking about working in box factories in Lawrence Kansas and drinking PBR on people´s decks, listening to music, and doing just about everything except anything even remotely sexual. He was brilliant, sweet, and entertaining. This was the first time in my life when a man was just kind to me, and did not want sex in return. What a revelation!  When I told people back home about him they told me he was probably gay, or thought I was repulsive. I didn´t agree with either.  I had just been introduced to life beyond sex, and it was good.
There is that old line that good things come to those who wait, and also you will find something when you stop looking. I believe them both. I believe in the genuine goodness of human beings. One day one of those brilliant shining orbs will crash down to earth right in front of me, like a meteor. They will look up to me from the ground, and I may look like a shining orb of light to them.
I also believe that I will one day wake up next to someone that I am deeply grateful for having had the chance to do something so intimate with. I will learn to enjoy sex.