Too Much Me

Sweat dripped from my chin as I counted my tips, but I didn’t mind the humidity. On that summer night of 1972, I had just returned from my junior year in Paris and was waiting tables in the Central West End. It was the bohemian section of St. Louis and I looked the part. At twenty years old, my tall, wiry body looked good in bell bottoms and chambray shirts. A red bandana held my long black hair away from my soggy face as I hurried to finish my shift. I couldn’t wait to get to Potpourri, a nearby gay bar, to reunite with Colton.

***

I first laid eyes on him the previous summer at a downtown bar called The Onyx Room. Though obviously underage, the doorman always allowed me in if I let him pat my ass. Once I passed this gauntlet, Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On rang in my ears as cigarette smoke filled my nostrils. Once inside, I immediately spotted Colton with a group of gay hippies, so I positioned myself on a barstool across the room in hopes that he might notice me.

At nineteen, I was still too shy to make an approach. My few sexual encounters were only with guys who came on to me. Most lived at home like me, so we went to The Oriental, a five-dollar-an-hour hotel in Gaslight Square. After splitting the fee, we climbed some rickety stairs to a dingy room that strangely reeked of old-lady scent, a combination of sweet Shalimar and armpit odor. Every time we ascended the stairs, the booming voice of the big, Black proprietress wafted up the stairs behind us.

“The oil’s in the drawer!”

When we entered the room, the door hit the edge of a king-sized brass bed covered in a threadbare chenille bedspread. My sex life then consisted of friendly frottage and mutual masturbation. The bedside drawer was never opened because I couldn’t yet handle the notion of penetration. Some guys tried to cajole me into it, but no one ever tried to force me.

I sat at the bar peeking at Colton and pining for him to look my way until I ran through all my drinking money.

I finally met him one morning at my friend Andy’s apartment. When the doorbell chimed, he emerged from the bathroom brandishing a boar-bristle hairbrush.

“It’s for Colton. He wants to borrow my brush to keep his hair keeps from breaking off. I don’t know why I’m lending it to him. I’ll never get it back.”

When the hippie demigod from The Onyx Room came through the door, I gasped so hard that my throat went dry.

After Andy introduced us, I looked into Colton’s black-brown eyes for the first time as he spoke.

“Oh, hi. How are ya?”

“Good,” I squeaked in a parched voice, wincing at my lame first impression.

I gulped coffee and took a long, close-up look at Carlton as he talked to Andy. His shiny, black hair looked just fine to me. Parted in the middle like Jim Morrison, it cascaded down to his strong shoulders. His thick lips pouted over a sharp, square jaw that could cut hard cheese. His slightly stooped upper body was swathed in a skin-tight body shirt that emanated the androgynous look of the early-Seventies. His butt strained the seams of cut-off denim shorts festooned with brightly colored patches. His sturdy, pale legs and strappy-sandaled feet reminded me of an alabaster statue of a Greek athlete.

After a brief chat, Colton turned to leave. As he stuffed the brush into his paisley-cloth shoulder bag, he lifted his hand in my direction and disappeared from the room.

“What’s his story?” I asked as soon as the door clicked shut.

Andy told me that Colton lived in a big house with his large, Irish-Catholic family. Already infatuated, my heart flew open to him when I heard that his mother had died when he was twelve. After spending his adolescence helping to raise five siblings, Colton dove headlong into the Counter-Culture when his father remarried. He immersed himself in a motley collection of hippies, groupies and pot dealers, a world devoid of mundane responsibilities.

“He doesn’t have a real job. He’s a free spirit,” Andy sniffed. “Actually, he’s a seamstress at the moment. He sews patches on Levi jackets and stitches embroidered tape on bell-bottoms.”

He paused for a moment and screwed up his face.

“Why are you so interested?”

He continued without waiting for an answer.

“Anyway, he just started a so-called ‘business’ making handbags from old upholstery fabric.”

I recalled thinking that the paisley cloth tote that he carried looked like my grandmother’s knitting bag.

“He has sold one or two on consignment at a head shop,” Andy conceded.

Due to my strong attraction and my sympathetic feelings for his motherless childhood, I started crafting a persona for Colton in my mind. Despite Andy’s obvious efforts to discourage me, I was already stitching together the person that I wanted him to be.

Seamstress ha! He’s an entrepreneur!

After a week of dropping by Andy’s apartment without another appearance from Colton, I decided hunt him down at The Onyx Room.

I sat at the bar nursing a rum-and-coke and gazing at the door. He eventually showed up, walked up to the bar and stood right next to me as he ordered a beer. His nearness made me excited but shy, so I forced myself to speak up.

 “Hi! I’m Ralph. I met you at Andy’s apartment.”

His eyes showed a glimmer of recognition.

“Oh yeah, how are ya?”

He pulled up a stool and I made a feeble stab at small talk. When his eyes drifted over my shoulder toward a guy, on another barstool I decided to make my move.

“Would you like to come over for dinner tomorrow night?” I blurted.

He gave me a puzzled look, then said:

“Yeah, sure. That sounds cool.”

I asked the bartender for a pen, scrawled an address on a cocktail napkin, underlined “7:00 PM” three times, tossed down my drink and left the bar while I was still ahead.

I was house-sitting my sister’s apartment and spent the next day kicking myself for offering to make dinner. I didn’t know how to cook, so I over-boiled a package of spaghetti into a clump of flaccid worms, fried up some hamburger and sloshed a jar of Ragu over it all. Attempting a salad was a culinary bridge-too-far, so I dumped a package of frozen peas into another pot of steaming water.

I put paper napkins, silverware and wine glasses on opposite sides of a little kitchen table, then plunked a Lancer’s wine bottle topped with a melted candle at its center. At 6:50, I poured myself a glass of my sister’s Chianti and waited.

When 7:00 came and went, I guzzled wine for another half-hour. I turned off the stove after the water evaporated and left a clump of wrinkled peas on the bottom of the pot. When the doorbell finally rang, I buzzed Colton in and listened as his footsteps mounted the stairs. He looked a little startled when I opened the door before he could knock, but he strode right into the living room and tossed his man-bag onto the sofa. While he briefly surveyed the apartment, I headed for the kitchen.

“How about a glass of wine? I’m having Chianti,” I chirped like pathetic bon-vivant.

 “Cool.”

I steadied my hand and poured, but I couldn’t think of anything to say.

“This is my sister’s apartment. She lets me use it when she’s away,” I blurted, immediately regretting this bit of oversharing.

“Cool.”

I handed him the wine and he headed for the sofa to settle next to his bag.

“I’ve made spaghetti,” I said, shuddering inside.

God how I sucked at cocktail party banter!

“That’s cool,” he replied. 

I stood frozen in the kitchen until he patted the pillow next to him.

I took a big swig of wine and plopped down next to him. He put his hand on my thigh.

“Why don’t we mellow out here for a while?”

He trained his dark eyes on mine, put his palm behind my neck and my world became tongue-and-saliva as he kissed me. Roiling with desire, I felt him gently push me onto my back and roll on top of me as I sank deeper into the sofa.

He pulled his face back, turned his head towards the open bedroom door, then took my hand and guided me into the room. I sat on the edge of the bed and watched him peel off his clothes before I squiggled out of mine.

His tongue explored my naked body as my fingers clawed into his back like a koala bear on a eucalyptus branch. When he got on his knees and slowly started to lift my legs to his shoulders, I tensed up.

“I’ve never done this before,” I whispered

He sat back on his heels and gently let my legs drop to his sides.

“We don’t have to …”

 “But I want you to!”

The words flowed out of my mouth, bypassing my brain.

Colton reached for the bottle of Vaseline Intensive Care I had positioned hopefully on the bedside table and squirted a puddle into his palm. When he lifted my legs again, my trembling turned into pure passion.

I felt suspended in air as my mind left my body. I closed my eyes and watched a psychedelic light show behind my lids that obliterated time. When we came in unison, I instantly returned to myself and a throbbing pain in the rectum.

“You okay?” he panted.

All I could do was nod.

He rolled over and lay on his back catching his breath. I scooched over to wrap my arms around him, but Colton sprung to his feet.

“Got a towel?”

I raced to the bathroom, snatched a white towel from the rack and jumped back on the bed to watch in silent admiration as he mopped himself off. When he handed me the towel, I gave myself a quick wipe down below and tossed it onto the floor.

Colton settled back on the bed. When I tried to snake my arm around him again, he blocked me.

“Let’s just be quiet for a while,” he sighed, rolling onto his side.

Steeped in adrenalin and rapture beside him, I glanced at the clock on the nightstand. It read 8:10 when Colton sat up and said “I gotta go.” His words snapped me out of my afterglow.

What about dinner? Aren’t you sleeping over? I screamed inside. But all I said was:

“Okay.”

He popped out of bed and gathered his clothes. As he put on his jeans and shirt, I searched the floor for my underwear but they were nowhere in sight. I threw on my jeans as he strapped into his sandals, then marched into the living room. He swooped up his bag and headed for the front door as I trailed behind.

“Thanks,” he said pecking me on the lips before opening the door and pulling it closed behind him.

I stood stupefied for a moment until the disappointment started to surface. Without thinking, I got busy. It’s what I did when I didn’t want to feel something.

I turned my attention to the kitchen and headed for the forlorn dinner table. Just as I snuffed out the candle, a sudden urge to dash to the bathroom overtook me. I sat on the toilet, gritted my teeth and gripped the empty towel rack as blood dripped into the bowl. After a few minutes, I cleaned myself up and went into the bedroom.

I sprawled on the bed and closed my eyes, trying to suppress the pain. Then I suddenly realized that I had just given my gay virginity to the first man that I was totally crazy about, despite many opportunities to toss it away to a stranger. At that moment I decided that I was in love with Colton.

I was smiling when I forced myself back to the kitchen to dump the dinner, wash the dishes and finish off the Chianti. It was 9:15 when I returned to the bedroom.

When I saw the crumpled towel on the floor, I immediately understood why people buy colored towels. I picked it up with my thumb and index finger, dropped it into a hamper in the closet and made a mental note to take the bag to the laundromat in the morning.

I started looking for my clothes again. I found my tie-dyed tee-shirt under the nightstand, then scoured the room for my missing briefs. I tore the top and bottom sheets off the mattress. No underwear. I stripped off the pillow cases, no underwear.

Growing frantic that my sister would discover that I’d been deflowered in her bed, I continued searching for my phantom Jockeys. I yanked the mattress off the box spring and moved the bed frame. No underwear. I kept hunting in the same places before I gave up, replaced the mattress and remade the bed. Then I showered and cleaned the bathroom.

It was 10:30 when I flopped onto the bed. When I rolled over to turn off the table lamp, my hand brushed against the elastic waistband dangling inside the lampshade.

Figures in the Bed by Francis Bacon

My junior year in Paris that fall was a turning point. The infinite pleasures of the city transformed me from a lawn-green suburbanite into an inveterate denizen of concrete and glass landscapes. In the first few weeks after my twentieth birthday, I gawked at James Baldwin chatting with friends outside of the Café Flore and kept an eye out for  Marlon Brando who had been sighted wandering the sidewalks while filming Last Tango in Paris.

Besides taking literature courses at the Sorbonne, I took early morning art history classes at the Louvre before the museum opened its doors to the daily throng. When I attended a Francis Bacon exhibit at the Grand Palais one rainy afternoon, I was so deeply moved by his disturbing paintings that I had to sit down midway through the collection to collect myself.

My day-to-day French improved because I took pronunciation courses at L’Alliance Française and diligently avoided other American students who spoke English most of the time. Before I left, a new Parisian acquaintance sometimes stopped me about ten minutes into a conversation after detecting a faint accent. When he asked if I was from another European country, I replied that I was an American.

“Ah non, pas possible (No, not possible)!” he exclaimed with a shocked look on his face.

It was the highest compliment one could hope for from a Frenchman.

Although I loved my life abroad, I still longed for Colton and sent him feverish love-letters every week. However, strong these feelings were in me, they didn’t deter me from having an eight-month liaison with Alain. At twenty-seven, he was handsome in the light skinned, dark-haired Gallic way. His short, wiry body was clad in tailored suits and scented with expensive cologne whenever we met at the Café Deux Magots. 

Like any self-respecting French man, Alain set out to seduce me. On our first date, he lavished me with witty conversation over a great dinner in a trendy gay restaurant. Afterwards, he walked us around the Latin Quarter for a couple more hours of probing conversation. By the time we parted at the Saint-Michel Notre-Dame metro station, he knew all about me. He air-kissed my cheeks three times before taking a business card and pen from his suit pocket to mark the date, time and location of our next rendezvous on the back.

It was a very continental affair, passionate but unsentimental about sex. Up to that point, my assignations with American guys had been haphazard and brusque. When I finally went to Alain’s apartment near the Luxembourg Gardens, he poured me a snifter of brandy and we settled on his sofa. As he quizzed me about my life, the subject inevitably came around to my infatuation with Colton. He listened intently, and even offered some brotherly advice, before he finally pulled me toward him. After a long make-out session, he took me to his bedroom for the first of many sessions of unhurried, sensual sex.

Over the next few months, I learned a lot in Alain’s bed. He taught me to relax and savor his lovemaking. After a few weeks, he arranged for my first orgy with three other young guys. We covered each other in peanut oil and writhed together on plastic drop cloths while Alain sat on the sidelines choreographing the scene in a soft voice before joining us.

After each tryst on the Left Bank, I took a cab back to my rented room in the 17th Arrondissement. Streaming by food vendors setting up their stalls in Les Halles at 2:00 AM, I leaned back in my seat. Tired and sated, I closed my eyes and let the deep awareness that I was living the best year of my life wash over me.

*** 

Back in St. Louis the following summer, I sat at the bar at Potpourri after my waiter’s shift and trained my eyes on the front door. When Colton walked in, I flew at him. After a hug, he reared back, smiled and turned to order a drink.

I didn’t mind when his eyes started scanning the bar. I was more sophisticated about the needs of men after my sojourn in France and I had even mastered the art of cocktail banter. As we chatted, he mentioned some friends at the University of Missouri.  

“Do you want to come to Columbia with me next weekend?”

 “Sure,” I replied.

“Good. Hey can you drive?”

“No problem.”

We finished off our drinks and headed for the Oriental where I couldn’t wait to show him some of my new Gallic tricks.

That Sunday afternoon, I pulled my VW bug in front of a building on the outskirts of the Mizzou campus. When we entered a spacious apartment where Indian-print fabrics covered every window, a zaftig, frizzy-haired woman in a peasant dress gave Colton a big kiss and offered me a hit off of a huge joint. Though I never knew for sure, she claimed to be Mario Puzo’s daughter. Since everyone in America had read The Godfather, and the movie was breaking box-office records, she enjoyed a minor celebrity.

She disappeared into the kitchen while her roommate, a veritable twin saturated in patchouli oil, kept the chit-chat and the joints flowing. The munchies had kicked into high gear by the time our hostess reappeared with a crusty pan of her “Famous Lesbian Lasagna.” After we gorged on pasta, salad and ice cream, we sat around drinking wine while Colton and his friends laughed and gabbed until midnight as Judy Collins sang sweetly in the background. Unable to find my way into the conversation, I frequently checked my watch. I couldn’t wait to get Colton into bed again.

When the women finally wafted into their bedrooms, Colton and I pulled out a sofa bed. I lunged at him as soon as we hit the mattress. He kissed me for a while, then pulled away and laid back on his pillow. When I tried to nuzzle up to him, he lay stiffly (not in a good way) beside me .

“What’s the matter, too much dope?” I asked.

He shot me a cross look and poked his finger at my face.

“No,” he replied. “Too much you!”

He then turned on his side. Within minutes he was asleep while I churned with anger and disbelief on the sofabed.

Aren’t we in love for God’s sake? I thought, staring at the ceiling. What about all those love letters?

As he softly snored beside me, I realized that he had never even mentioned my letters. While I had proclaimed my love in writing over and over again, he had never written back. That’s when I understood that I was always just one of his sex mates.

How could I have been so stupid?

I repeated this mantra to myself all night until a huge resentment swelled up inside of me like a Macy’s Day balloon. By sunrise, I was so angry and hurt that I poked him sharply with my elbow. When he woke with a start, I was out of bed putting on my clothes.

“I need to get home.”

Bleary-eyed, he quickly dressed while I waited at the front door. We left the apartment while our hostesses were asleep and all the way back to St. Louis, Colton smoked a joint and stared out at the passing scenery while I seethed behind the wheel. When I dropped him off outside of his house, he closed the passenger door and leaned into the window.

“Catch ya later.”

I glared straight ahead before peeling away.

Glancing into the rear-view mirror, I caught him staring at the receding car for a second before he shrugged and slung his bag over his shoulder. In the space of one night with Puzo’s alleged daughter, Colton went from being the love of my life to sleeping with the fishes.

In the years to come, I sometimes pictured Colton reading one of my love letters. I imagined a quizzical look passing over his face as he set it aside, took another toke off his joint and hunched back over the sewing machine to make another unsold bag to add to the mountainous pile on the floor beside him.

Post Script:

I know that most people have troubled first relationships and I’d like to say that Colton was my last. The truth is that I repeated the same pattern with men until much later in life. Soon after meeting a guy, I projected onto him all of the qualities I needed him to have and then suffocated him with all of the affection that I wanted for myself.  When the relationship ultimately failed, it deepened my low self-esteem which led to bitterness and self-defeating behaviors.

When I entered 12-Step recovery and heard the phrase “addicts don’t have relationships, they take hostages,” it baffled me. When I began working my program, I soon realized that I was way too clingy in love. After taking my inventory, I realized that I held a core belief that I wasn’t enough for anyone because I couldn’t save my parents (mostly from themselves). This belief led me to overcompensate in my relationships to prove (mostly to myself) that I was enough. As I grew in recovery and counseling, I saw that I was never deficient in the love department, I just grew up in an impossible situation.

A convergence of the right man, good timing, deep therapy and codependency recovery transformed my love life twelve years ago. These days I believe that my relationship will last if I can just stay out of my own way. I know now that any inter-personal problems I encounter are not the result of my not being enough. On the contrary, they usually happen because I’m indulging in old, self-defeating thoughts or behaviors and being way too much.

Too much me.