Contemplating this whole notion on the one hand made me queasy, while on the other it left me marveling at the improved level of self-esteem among these young girls relative to my own at that age. Because as coldly calculating, reckless, and unromantic as they appeared to be, my own loss-of-virginity story seemed, in retrospect, a lot more disturbing.
Natalie Dylan, Unigirl, and their fellow virginity saleswomen were the granddaughters of the sexual revolution, raised in the era of personal branding. This enabled them to view their various abilities as commodities worth a tidy sum. Whereas I, who grew up an interested but not too active soldier at the dawn of that revolution itself, could only see my own virginity as an embarrassing symbol of all the things I lacked. To me, virginity was something to be gotten rid of quickly, then never discussed again, like body odor or a bad haircut.
From my uncomfortable spot on the sidelines at eighth-grade make-out parties, where I stood cracking jokes by the refreshment table, trying not to eat too many chips while watching with envy as the other girls disappeared into dark corners or back rooms with the boys I liked, I could see no evidence of the thing my mother called “dating.” The way she’d explained it, “dating” was something that happened when large groups of neatly dressed, benignly chuckling teens, wholly uninterested in the notion of two genders, gathered in brightly lit community rec rooms to enjoy soft drinks and pound cake—although, even in this cake-filled scenario, one had to be constantly on guard to keep from getting hijacked into a world of fallopian tubes, sperm, and the horrors of pregnancy. I was never clear on whether the pound cake she promised was served before the pregnancy stuff or after.
By high school, in the late sixties, my family had moved three thousand miles, from North Miami to a hilly, tree-lined suburb on the San Francisco Peninsula, where I quickly learned, like every transfer student trying to assimilate into a brand-new high school social order, that status and group membership had been decided long before I’d arrived. The “in” crowd had apparently stopped taking applications somewhere around third grade. But since the “weird arty kids” were still accepting new members, I took a deep breath, stopped setting my hair, and started wearing dark eyeliner.
Yet, even out here on the West Coast, happily surrounded by my brand-new circle of baby artists, I was still unable to catch a glimpse of that brightly lit dating scenario my mother was selling. On the other hand, little by little I was getting a tantalizing glimpse of a truly compelling erotic subculture full of music and sexual innuendo erupting in all the dark corners around me.
In addition to the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Zombies, and the Yardbirds—with whom I’d had many hours’ worth of deep, meaningful imaginary liaisons—there were suddenly all kinds of seductive-looking, long-haired local San Francisco bands with cryptic, inscrutable names that I could ogle in person. All I needed to do was get permission to take the bus into the city and I could immerse myself in crowds of oddly dressed young people who were smoking, tripping, and passing around enormous bottles of wine. Not only was no one checking IDs, but as long as I changed into the wide-brimmed hat and magenta midcalf-length suede coat I’d bought at the Salvation Army sometime before the bus ride was over, I could transform myself from a bland high school sophomore into someone mysterious who seemed to fit right in.
No, I wasn’t welcomed back into the home of my tidy, shiny parents dressed in that outfit. My dad, in his jaunty Arnold Palmer golf hats and pressed shirts and slacks, commented more than once, as I became increasingly whimsical with all my clothing choices, that he thought I looked like a circus clown. Oddly enough, that was not the look he had in mind for his daughter. It was also not the look I felt I’d achieved. He would have died if he’d ever heard about the afternoon when a woman who was wearing three overcoats and a pair of tennis shoes so threadbare they were held together by rubber bands came up to me as I was walking toward the San Francisco bus depot, made an empathetic face, and pressed a Hershey bar with almonds into my hands.
“Because I understand,” she’d said as she smiled sweetly and walked away.
When I opened the outer wrapper, I saw that she had hidden a five-dollar bill inside. Naturally, I was a little alarmed to learn that I looked like a worst-case scenario to an actual homeless person.
Nevertheless, every weekend I could get away with it, I would go into San Francisco with any of my new friends who were available and spend long, satisfying days being jostled at street fairs, poked and prodded at concerts, my ears ringing from blaring amps, my eyes stinging from billowing clouds of secondhand smoke. Then I would stumble home, tired and happy, right before my curfew, resplendent in brand-new, hand-strung beaded necklaces and earrings (which would usually break by the end of the week), my arms laden with illegible psychedelic posters full of foul language and current editions of Zap Comix. With barely a nod to my parents, I would repair to my room, where I would light cinnamon candles, take out my Rapidograph pen, and copy the ink drawings by R. Crumb and Rick Griffin and Victor Moscoso, trying to match their shading and crosshatching as I duplicated their dancing peanuts in top hats and drooling, perspiring, bug-eyed lunatic people. These were like images beamed to me from a funnier if slightly incomprehensible dimension not too far away that I hoped to someday inhabit.
Meanwhile, in a parallel universe that was still sharing a roof with my own, my parents were drowning in television and newspaper stories full of ominous warnings about drug use, sex, and disease among people my age. They saw my destiny forever ruined by hallucinogen-induced brain damage and unwanted love-in babies. And although I’d never so much as smoked a joint, as far as my parents could tell, I was right on the verge of being lost forever in the quicksand of heroin addiction.
“The only thing I ask of you,” my mother said during one particularly hysterical rant, which began after she read an issue of Life magazine about the growing popularity of cohabitation, “is that you never live with someone and not be married.”
In that one breath she not only mapped the course for my entire adulthood but also destroyed her own credibility, by having repeatedly “asked” many things of me even earlier that very day.
As time went on, my parents became increasingly paranoid. Everything I said or did seemed, to my mother, like an early warning sign of some kind of substance abuse. But the more my father used the phrase “beardo weirdo” to describe someone I had a crush on, the more I knew I was on exactly the right track. If they were against what I was doing, then I was for it. Whatever “it” was.
Although I had never done any of the things my parents feared, the way I saw it, my life with them was its own hellish torment. So the more they lectured me about drugs and pregnancy and VD, the more I resolved to prove them wrong. They didn’t know me. They would never know me. And the more they claimed to know me, the wronger they would be.
Therefore I turned my back on sex and drugs and decided to remain a virgin. This put me at cross-purposes with my carefully cultivated new image as a budding artistic visionary, dressed in purple and swathed in enigmatic beaded artifacts from San Francisco.
The irony was not totally lost on me. I worried constantly that the lack of sex, drugs, and depravity in my life was going to jeopardize my future as an artist. After all, the kind of unconventional rock-and-roll free spirit I was using as my model embraced all the things I was now rejecting. “I wonder if someone can come from a background like mine and still be a creative person?” I fretted in my diary during my junior year of high school. “Sometimes I look at my life and I say, No, Merrill … you can never become anything special. Why? Because you don’t fit the pattern of successful people. Look at your family. No one else in your boring normal life exhibits any great talent. Today I read about John Lennon and his precocious adolescent sex life and I thought, ‘I probably need to have a real love affair in order to become a real artist.’ ”
What was a girl to do?
My short-term plan was to continue to affect an air of jaded world-wear
iness and count on improper assumptions about me being made from the company I kept: a group of artistic kids—many of whom had already been busted for drugs, and most of whom were far more sexually experienced than I. So I kept my fingers crossed that, until I left home, I would benefit from guilt by association.
By the time I got to college, I had come to view my virginity as categorical proof that I was nothing more than an uninspired cog in the wheel of a system I was supposed to be helping to overthrow. If I didn’t jump in and play the game of life as it was meant to be played, I would get drummed right out of the art world before my first show. So losing my virginity rocketed to the top of my first-quarter short list of Things to Do.
There was one problem: I didn’t have a boyfriend. I’d broken up with the poor guy I’d been tormenting during my senior year in high school, and now I didn’t know anyone at all.
Then one afternoon, a week or two in, I took the bus by myself to an art show off campus. This wasn’t intended as an expedition to ferret out boyfriend candidates; I was mainly excited about the possibilities of going places by myself without first having to bust through a roadblock of parents with curled lips and raised eyebrows. What a relief it was not to have to explain to anyone when I would be back.
The art show was held in a communal house that had been rented by a group of grad students. It didn’t look like any art show I’d been to before: large, unframed airbrushed paintings with staples sticking out of gessoed edges hung on the dirty walls of a living room so underfurnished its occupants appeared to have been recently evicted. To me this meant only one thing: the people living there were too smart to get hung up on mundane middle-class bullshit like furniture. Why bother with chairs and end tables if you had a dozen photo-realist paintings of pasty bourgeois people floating in swimming pools?
When I walked in, wearing my navy peacoat and my green felt hat with the leopard-print band, a couple of guys my age immediately began to circle me. The first one had followed me in from the bus stop. He wasn’t bad-looking: curly brown afro, Benjamin Franklin glasses, a blue work shirt. But he was quickly disqualified for appearing to be a little too happy to meet me. He smiled too much, he was too familiar, too touchy-feely. In a flash I could visualize this overly enthusiastic, far too ardent stranger whaling away on top of me, grimacing and thrashing as he expelled giants bullets of sweat like a drawing by S. Clay Wilson. The second guy had long blondish hair, wide-wale corduroy pants, and suede cowboy boots. As superficial signifiers went, this was a hat trick. More important, he was aloof, with an edge that seemed somehow threatening. That he was an upperclassman art major from my very department and willing to talk to me made me feel like an insider!
I didn’t think he was “cute” per se; he was smallish, skinny, and sort of pigeon-chested. But from my perspective, he loomed much larger, held aloft by the immensity of his arrogant disregard for everything. That frosty, unpleasant air of his told me that he was a person of high standards. We had all let him down. Hopefully I would prove the rare exception.
I began following him around the exhibit like an orphaned baby duck, noting how he rolled his eyes at the same paintings that had minutes before impressed me with their details and airbrush techniques.
“This is bullshit,” he said, with a sweeping hand gesture that applied across the board. “Guy’s an asshole. A punk.”
I nodded my head in deference.
From that point on, I tried to make all my comments both vague and dismissive, in the hopes that if they were wrong, they might still seem to contain a hidden, much smarter second meaning.
His name was Brad, and he was so thoroughly unimpressed by the art in this exhibit that he was ready to leave the moment he arrived. “Go get a hot dog?” he asked, tilting his head toward the door before completing even one full lap around the room. I nodded and tagged along behind him as he headed down the block. At first I was a little bit concerned because I was a vegetarian. But it turned out that this dietary restriction of mine was less of a problem than I’d anticipated since at no point did Brad offer to buy me any food. Instead I stood beside him in the small chalet-style fast-food establishment and watched him pile assorted condiments onto his hot dog before he consumed it.
Afterward we both climbed into the cabin of his truck. A pickup truck! How completely perfect was that?
Brad explained that he might as well give me a ride back to his apartment since he lived across the street from the bus stop I would be using. No mention was ever made of giving me a ride back to my dorm.
This notable lack of old-world hospitality didn’t prevent me from saying yes to an invitation to come inside and see his work. Sure, I knew I was taking a risk going into the apartment of a stranger, but I was dazzled by the fact that he had an apartment. Everything in it was his. The chairs were his. The food in the refrigerator: his! He paid his own bills. He had his own truck. What didn’t this guy have?
And what an apartment! Although it was only a three-room flat at the back of a multifamily classic Berkeley brown-shingle house, its central room was dominated by a real restaurant counter, purchased at a thrift store, with four red leather stainless steel stools and a Formica top. Whatever Brad lacked in charm, he made up for with his very own real-life version of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks! Take that, Mom and Dad! No more molded plastic dinette sets in my brave new world! Since you saw me a month ago, I have totally changed. Now I live life in the kind of vivid 3D realm neither of you could even imagine, let alone handle.
It only took a couple of minutes inside Brad’s apartment for me to notice an uptick in uncomfortable silences. But more than likely, they were my fault. I was young and inexperienced. And anyway, it made sense that Brad wasn’t verbal. He was an artist. Words were not his thing. I couldn’t wait to see his paintings. His disrespect for the work of others told me that a door was about to be opened and I would inhale the icy clean air of pure insight. Which is why I was so surprised that he had only two paintings to show me. And those paintings were … well, I wasn’t sure what they were. They were kind of hastily executed knockoffs of ancient Near Eastern erotica onto which Brad had collaged a border of glitter, sequins, and plastic doll heads. Now my challenge was figuring out what expression to put on my face as I looked at them, in order to best reflect a sophisticated level of appreciation I didn’t feel.
“They’re supposed to be bad,” Brad explained, when I remained silent. “They’re intentionally bad.”
That caught me off guard. I’d never heard of anyone doing anything like that. But now that he’d said it, I could see how that might be the kind of interesting choice a real artist might make. Still, I didn’t get why he hadn’t done them just a little bit better. Or a whole lot worse. But then again, I was the idiot who didn’t always understand what Bob Dylan was saying.
“Great. Really great.” I smiled and then just kept on nodding.
Looking back, I wonder if there was anything Brad could have done right then to turn me off. If he’d been Jeffrey Dahmer I probably would have rationalized the severed heads and penises in his refrigerator with a simple “Well, they needed refrigeration. Where else was he going to put them?” The truth was, Brad’s indifference and lack of consideration only inspired me.
Even though I’d only been living in Berkeley for a few weeks, I had begun to adjust to perplexing encounters with the opposite sex. First there was the guy who followed me back to my dorm and read me his free-form erotic poetry until I said I had to go inside and do my homework, at which point he got mad and accused me of not listening to my own body. Then there was the guy who came up to me on the steps of Sproul Hall while I was petting a dog. “How come you’ll give all that love to a stray dog but you won’t give me any?” he asked repeatedly, more or less daring me to give the wrong answer. Later, I actually thought about what he’d said because, after all, this was college so it couldn’t be as stupid as it sounded, could it? Finally there was the guy who, perhaps after reading too many fake Penthouse le
tters supposedly written by “college coeds,” followed me down the street and into a bookstore. “I’d really like to fuck you,” he said, apropos of nothing, scaring me so badly that I took off running in the other direction. As unnerving as that had been, I still proudly chalked the whole weird incident up to my new grittier life full of authentic real-world experiences in the urban jungle. I now lived in a town full of men and women who weren’t ashamed to crave sex. We didn’t mess with brightly lit rooms full of soft drinks and pound cake here in Berkeley. No more plastic suburbia to numb me now. Here at last were crucial milestones logged on the road to making real art.
So, at the end of the evening of the day I met Brad and his intentionally bad paintings, I climbed onto a mattress on top of a loft he’d built behind his Nighthawks diner and made out with him. Up to this point, I had made out with only two people in my life, total. It had taken my high school senior year boyfriend a full year of earnest love letters to get to second base.
“I’m still a virgin,” I said to Brad.
“Really?” he said, oddly indignant. “Then you better go to Planned Parenthood and get on the pill.” He rolled off me, grabbed a pad of paper and a pen, and scribbled detailed instructions on transferring from one bus line to another to get to the clinic in Oakland. His message was clear: if I expected to spend more time with him, everything about me had to change.
As I rode the bus back to my dorm, I ruminated on the events of the day, attempting to reinterpret them so they were more to my liking. Was Brad letting me know, in his terse impatient way, that he liked me so much he couldn’t bear to wait? Was it possible that once I gave in and played along, we would be magically transformed into one of those great artist couples, like whoever that lady was and Picasso?
I didn’t see or hear from Brad again until a few nights later, when we decided to get together for what amounted to our first date. When we spoke on the phone, that trip to Planned Parenthood remained the number one topic. So even though I had a lot of schoolwork to do, I resigned myself to making the cross-town trip. Because, come on: my schedule needed to be flexible enough to accommodate important life-changing events. Same way I had managed to make room for that day-long Black Power conference, where I was the only representative of my gender and race; I went because I knew that it was culturally important for me to attend. And in a different way, so was this. Anyway, I didn’t feel like I had a choice. Even though if, just a few months before, my parents had given me a bunch of orders involving bus trips and pills, I would have stormed out of the room, now I was behaving like someone who’d been abducted and imprisoned in a basement for a decade and had developed Stockholm syndrome.
Cool, Calm & Contentious Page 12
