May 14, 2005

• My Sexual History: Chapter 4

  Now That I’ve Got Your Attention Dept.

  “My Sexual History”(Chapter 4)
  A Personal Journey through the pleasures of the flesh
  An “essay” by Michael F. Nyiri
  (begun in December 2004)

  (NOTE: I am presenting this latest series of “essays” in serial form here on WhenWordsCollide. I am currently posting the fourth chapter of this latest ”reminiscence”  here for your enjoyment. This week I am in college, and sample drink, partying and physical “petting” for the first time. If you wish to catch up on the story, the links take you to previous chapters in the series. My apologies, but this entry is rather long, and hopefully is at least a bit entertaining. It is only partially “edited” and probably still needs much work, but I haven’t posted one of the “sexual history” chapters in a while, so here goes.  MFN)

  1. “Then the boy pees into the girl.”

  2. “The Very First Kiss”

  3. “High School Daze”

  4  “Stag Films and Frat Parties, Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll”

  i.
  The tight and safe little world my mother had always created for the family started to come apart almost immediately after I had graduated, with honors, from high school. I watched the dissolution of our family from afar, however, even though I lived at home, because the “real world” with which I came in contact after the “sanctity” of my high school experience offered so much that I tended to “turn off” my total experience while at home, and I deliberately didn’t want to think that my family life was in fact coming apart at the seams.

  This began during my senior year. When 1971 dawned, my mother became more nervous and upset at almost every occurrence in our lives and in the world. The late sixties were a burden on the whole country, and for my parents, and especially for my mother, who “created” our own safe world, the state of the real world, which was presented on the televison news every night, was not quite the world in which she wanted to raise her children, and the increasingly dire daily news, plus the influx of Mexican families in our neighborhood wound her tighter than usual. Mother wanted to move away from our home town, away from the robust and loud Mexican families which surrounded our house. On television, the news was filled with student rebellions, and in high school, I was speaking out for breaking the dress code, and I wore sideburns, which bothered Mother, who didn’t like facial hair on her son because it proved I was growing up and away from her.

  We moved to a less racially mixed neighborhood. Brother and Sister didn’t necessarily like the move, but in time they made new friends at the local high school. I also made some new friends, but was reintroduced to some old high school friends, and tended to hang out with either old friends from high school or new ones from college or work, and didn’t get home most nights until way after dark, so I didn’t see a lot of my parents, although I lived at home.

  One weekend I was reunited with a group from the drama department, for a going away party for one of the guys who was going into the military. In those days, going into the military meant going to Vietnam, and maybe dying, so the going away parties were filled with a sense of despair, and were somewhat overindulgent. One of the gals who was known as a major flirt in high school didn’t wear underpants under her skirt. One of the activities we engaged in during this particular party involved going to the park, and we actually “played” on the children’s recreational equipment. At one point, I and Melody were on the swing set, I was in the saddle, and she was astide my lap. I felt very good, especially in my nether regions between my legs, as we soared above the playground. I still hold a tender spot in my memories for this frozen moment in time. After the party, however, I never mingled with that group of high school friends again, and never saw Melody again either. Our episode on the swing set was my first real “feel” of a sexual nature in my life.

  In the summer before college, my best friend Steve broke up with Kathy, my majorette from high school. Any thoughts of “sex” involving Kathy were moreso thoughts of love and undying affection. I had been “in love” with the girl since my freshman year in high school, and four years later, thought I would finally have a chance to woo and win her, and “consummate” my special love for her, which had produced a major amount of poems in the previous year. I told Steve of my affection after their breakup, but when I asked Kathy to go out one evening when I chanced upon her at the retail store in which I held a boxboy position, she told me that she “didn’t go out with friends”. I never did understand her meaning with that statement. She didn’t go out with Steve’s friends? Or perhaps she felt I was a friend and not a potential lover. I never found out. My first year of college was a completely foreign experience for me. I had always been a popular student in high school, and in college I was one of a thousand other statistics hurrying to their next class.

  I never forgot Kathy, and composed many dripping love poems for her in absentia, while my dreams, not entirely “sexual” to my virginal mind, existed with her unconditional love as the carrot on an unreachable erotic stick dangling before me. Kathy was tall, with long legs, small breasts, and she was “cute”, not “beautiful”. To me, if there is a “sexual ideal” this is still it. I become aroused at the sight of shapely long legs. Kathy was fairly thin, but not skinny. I still admire tall women, even those taller than myself. That’s as much a turn on to me as long, lustrous hair, which Kathy also had in abundance.

  From the time in the sixth grade when I had glimpsed Gene’s brother’s Playboy magazine, I had been intrigued by the glossy magazine which had interesting articles, fantastic interviews, and lots of photos of naked women. I eventually began collecting the magazines in 1968, while still in high school. The place to which the family moved  was larger than the previous house we lived in, but my father, being a consummate handyman and woodworker, had built extensive add ons to our first home, and one of these was a separate bedroom for me. I could easily “hide” things in my own room, and I began buying Playboys every month. I began to “fall in love” with some of the Playmates, and even gazed longingly at the nude voluptuous bodies of these impossibly beautiful women. Still, my complete “sexual identity” at the time was mixed with thoughts of romance and love, and I never masturbated to any of the centerfolds while in high school or college. In our new home, I had a “suite” of rooms. My bedroom, with my own front door, complete with key, was a large room built behind the garage, and I split it into a ‘living area” and a “sleeping area” by placing my tall bookcases and wardrobe in the middle of the large room. My father built a “hallway” connecting my “rooms” with the bathroom in the garage, so I actually had my own complete apartment in the family home. Because of this, as the family began to fall apart with mother’s increasing nervousness and fears, I was able to “hide” from the reality of home life. Besides, I attended USC in downtown Los Angeles, had a full time job as the garden department manager for a hardware chain in the town in which I had attended high school, 30 miles away from college, and lived about 30 more miles to the north. The physical locations of all the places I had to be during each day prohibited me from wanting to do too much of anything when I got home from school and work except sleep. I spent a lot of time after getting off work before going home with my ex high school friends, however, and young men tend to think about sex a lot more when they are together in a pack.

  As the 70s dawned, the nascent “porn industry” began to get “respectable” with the opening of two movies in downtown Hollywood, the Mitchell Brothers’ “Behind the Green Door” and Gerard Damiano’s “Deep Throat”. I and my friend Steve, fresh from his breakup with Kathy, attended a screening of another seminal porn film, “The Devil in Miss Jones”. The movie was screened at “The Cave” which is still on Hollywood Boulevard, and which still screens pornographic movies, even in the age of downloadable sex from the internet. Steve was a bit more of a prude than even I at the time. I had always been a religious sort until high school, but Steve and his family still attended Church on a regular basis, and I remember my seeming shock when he made the suggestion we go see a “porno”. We were both movie buffs, and film aficianados. My love affair with movies, with or without sex symbols, had begun early in life, and in college I majored in English Literature, but minored in film history. USC has always had a very fine film school, and in the days before home video, I was able to view many classic films for the first time in my classes which people take for granted nowadays. Steve and I had just seen Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange” which was one of the few movies in the 70s rated “X”, for “adults only”, and I guess Steve felt really “adult” going to see this rather violent film, which featured some “nudity”. The next step was the “porno” film “The Devil in Miss Jones”. The experience of watching an actual naked woman having sex, albeit with the cheap special effects and trappings of the movie, transformed my perception of the act, which had been anathema to me since the explanation of “pissing into the girl” so long before. Finally, I got excited about the prospect of “having sex”. As I recall, Steve didn’t like the movie in the least. I didn’t like the movie, but I immensely enjoyed the sight of writhing slippery naked women being penetrated, and lovingly cupping the manhood of the male star and swallowing his penis whole. My own little friend, as was his habit, snapped to attention more than once.

  ii.
  I spent my late teens juggling a 40 hour work schedule with a full 16  unit course of study every semester at school. At home I participated in “artistic endeavors” with my little brother, who was a little more than two years my junior. I was still farily close to my siblings, even though they were still in high school. I drove my brother and sister to school some mornings, and helped to teach my sister to drive. I made friends with both my sister’s and my brother’s circle of high school friends. I have always wondered how I kept my sanity in the early 70s with my schedule, but I was able to adjust time so that I could accomplish much in the way of school and work, and still have a good time with my buddies from high school and maintain a close relationship with my siblings. Some of the artistic endeavors were writing and performing plays, making music, and recording comedy skits on my small reel to reel tape recorder. My brother became very popular at the high school he and my sister attended, and I got to know a lot of the more creative kids with whom he hung around. In order to blow off steam from my schedule, and as a result of hanging around my ex high school buds, I began to “experiment” with drinking alcohol in those few hours when school and work were over, before I would drive the 30 miles home.

  Many evenings were spent first going to a movie, either with Steve, Jon, Bill, Tom, or a host of other friends, and then some of us would park one of our cars, and pack inside, passing around a bottle of Boone’s Farms Strawberry Hill wine. Steve, being a bit of a prude, “just said no” to these bonding exercises, and it was usually his house outside of which we parked, so that if any police happened upon us, we could all pile out of the car stinking drunk and tell them we were going to visit Steve. This happened whether he was home or not. Of course it was youthful paranoia which sparked a lot of these actions, and we never had any confrontations with the law. We did get rather drunk at times, and I found that I really enjoyed this loosey goosey feeling which tended to break down my inhibitions, and let me sample a state of mind that was entirely foreign. It also built up my confidence regarding budding sexual advances, and I began to get a bit more flirtacious regarding the girls at work, and with my sister’s girlfriends.

  The “drinking parties” in either my car or Jon’s usually happened on Friday nights. These were called “cruise nights” in our little “gang” and began usually by driving our cars up and down the same stretch of roadway over and over again for three or four hours. We rarely “connected” with girls, which was our chief reason (besides showing off our custom cars) for the exercise. The Dart I had in high school eventually went to my sister, and I bought a 1971 Volkswagen when I was in college. It was painted mellow yellow, and I pinstriped the outside of the car. It sported 14″ rims on the front wheels and 15″ rims on the back, with air shocks so that the smallish body of the car could lift above the rather large “slicks” positioned on the magnesium wheels. The inside was carpeted, and included an eight track system with four speakers. Jon, who was very active in his Church, but who was the leader of our little “gang” and who had instigated our plunge into drinking alcohol, also had a tricked out Volkswagen. Another friend had an American Motors Javelin. Young men, especially in the car culture of Southern California, love and maintain their cars. After cruising, we would have a late meal at the Bob’s Big Boy restaurant, bid Steve goodbye at his door, pull out the Strawberry Hill, and pass around the bottle. Talk would gravitate to the girls we had been chasing during our “cruise” and sex began to loom larger and larger in my life.

  One of my friends from middle school came back into my life around this time, and he used to hold these magnificent parties first at his home and then at the home of his girlfriend, whose family was rather well off monetarily, and who lived in a mansion with two stories, a circular driveway, and a large back yard. These parties included lots of drinking. The place had a full bar. There was dancing, socializing, and I met many new friends at these parties, which were held every four or five months during my college years. This guy was also named Steve. He was also a car nut. Sometimes I would get off work in the afternoons, and drive to the rental yard where he worked. He would close the place down, as he was the junior manager, and then his workmates and I would hole up in the back of one of the camper shells the place rented, pull out the beer and start partying. It seems to me in retrospect that my complete college experience off campus was one ongoing unbroken party, albeit with different revellers involved in three or more different cities and towns.

  My college friends in the fraternities, one of which I almost but not quite pledged for membership, were rabblerousing partiers. We had a rather boisterous stag party for one of my friends who was getting married in one of the apartments off campus at U.S.C. Although there were no women in attendance, not even a stripper, there were porn films, which in those pre home video days were shown on a sheet with a 16 mm projector. So sex became a presence for the first time in my life, along with alcohol, parties, and reckless abandonment, while I attended college. My grades weren’t as high as in high school, and I even had to repeat a class or two, but they were math and science classes. I was doing pretty well in my English Literature classes, and even received A+ grades in my 14th and 15th century English Lit class.

  
  iii.
  I never forgot my love for Kathy, and even caught up with her and visited her and her female roommate at their apartment with my friend Jon sometime in the latter part of my college experience. But my feelings for her remained platonic. Jon had a ‘steady girl’ but that didn’t stop him from “hanging with the buds” every Friday night. I was growing consistenly more friendly with Emma Sue, one of my sister’s best friends. Emma would baby sit at one of the homes on the cul de sac on which she lived. She would call me when the parents would leave, and I would go “visit” her. Emma, like Kathy, was tall, with long legs and smallish breasts. She, too, was very cute, with a lopsided smile and long blonde hair which framed her angelic face beautifully. Although I was still a virgin, as was she, about a year my junior, she was the very first girl with whom I had the pleasure of “making out”. For the first time in my young life, deep feelings of love comingled with a healthy sexual appetite. As we kissed, and as our kisses grew more passionate and heady, and as my hands found more and more interesting places on which to rest while kissing her, my overriding sense of love also increased, along with the rapidity of my heartbeat and my breathing. The breathing of my bulging member increased as well. 

  Emma and I exchanged many letters. We began dating, usually with my sister, her best friend, and her boyfriend. We became another of my “gangs” with whom I would spend time. In 1972, as my sister and her class graduated from high school, and my brother was coming up for graduation the next year, I was in the middle of my four year college experience. I shuttled back and forth from work and school thinking of what parties I would be attending and with which people I would be spending time. I was doing rather well in the retail industry, and kept getting raises which allowed me to always have money in my pocket. I had many groups of friends, many obligations, and many good times. But everything was about ready to get really weird. My mother had a major stroke in 1972. Her controlling nature and nervous energy collapsed at once with her body and one morning, after she and I had had a mind numbing quarrel about some insipid thing or another, she had to be hospitalized, and the toll would eventually cause my father’s heart, which was very weak, to fail completely. He had just recovered from a forklift accident at work which had broken his hips and almost paralyzed him. He had finally gone back to work when I was in my last year of high school, and his woodworking in our garage was a form of therapy for him, since he also suffered from arthritis. He had high blood pressure and a bad heart, and in those days heart care was not as advanced as it is today.

  Our whirlwind life, first moving from our home town to another, and then having to deal with my mother’s stroke and the subsequent hospitalization, almost stopped dead in it’s tracks. Mom came home for a while after the stroke, but then had another, more debilitating “bi-lateral” stroke which completely paralyzed her. Now, in between school, work, partying with my friends, seeing Emma Sue, and spending time with three separate “groups” for entertainment, I also had to make almost nightly visits to my mother’s hospital room, where a shallow empty vessel that was previously my demanding but loving mother stared at me with vacant eyes.

  The next two years were rather bleak but also wildly erratic and I would discover more interesting ways to lose my fears and sadness, and forget problems in lieu of wild parties and drunken abandon. Father once met me outside the house when I got home late. “Son, I want to talk to you.”
  “Oh, hi, Dad. Is everything all right” That was a constant greeting while my mother was in the hospital.
  “I know you’ve been drinking”
  “Uh, Dad…some of the guys drink a little after I get off work.”
  “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about this for a while” We were standing in the driveway, where the warmth from my car’s engine wafted into the immediate atmosphere, facing each other across an expanse of only a few feet but many disparate years of experience.
  “I won’t lie to you, Dad. I’ve been drinking a bit for a year now. But I don’t drink here. And I try to sober up before coming home.”
  “Son”, my father was not a tall man. He was short and bald, but wiry and strong. He made an impression, although he was generally a quiet man, because when he did speak, he commanded attention. “I know you’ve been drinking. It’s just that with everything that’s been going on, I haven’t had time to talk to you about it. You know that you can get in trouble.”
  “Yes, dad. It’s still a couple of years until I’m legal. But it helps with the schedule I’ve got to keep by helping me wind down with my friends.”
  “Mike, I used to drink when I was in the service, you know that.”
  “Yes” I had just driven over thirty miles, and we always went into a restaurant and drank lots of coffee after drinking, so I wasn’t “drunk” by any means, and obviously my father had known about my drinking for a while. “I’m not really “drunk” you know”
  “I know, son, but this is what I want to tell you. I don’t want you drinking here at home. I gave up drink when I married your mom, and if I had to do this, you can’t drink in the house either. Do you understand?”
  I was mesmerized by the fact that I wasn’t being “bawled out” by this episode, which I’d seen performed in movies and read about in books for most of my life. This wasn’t really a “confrontation” at all, but a mere relating of the facts. Dad had to give up something he enjoyed, although he’d never told us kids these facts, because he married my mom, who was a teetotaler. Drink was never to be consumed in the family home because of this.
  “Sure Dad,” I half slurred, “I don’t drink here anyway.” At the time, I felt relief and also a sense of youthful indignation, even though the “confrontation” was turning out better than it had in countless movies and books.
  “You won’t drink in my house”. The threat was thinly veiled, but it was there. My father had only once had to physically “abuse” me, although I never thought of it as abuse and still don’t. My parents fully believed that if you “spared the rod” you “spoiled the child” and throughout my childhood, the “threat” of physical harm was enough to stop us children from getting into any further “trouble”. Once I had hurt my brother fairly seriously while “roughhousing” as my mother called our boisterous play, and Dad had nearly choked me to death at the dinner table in order to make his point. This is the only time he ever laid a hand on me in anger, and though my brother and I didn’t stop “roughhousing” because of it, we knew that the threat was real.
  I never did drink in the family home while my father was still alive. He would die a short time later, of his 13th heart attack.

  During the year 1973, my third in college, my brother graduated from high school, my sister got involved with another boyfriend, who would eventually become her husband, and Emma and I parted ways. I remained a virgin, even after many evenings of heavy petting with Emma. I became a more sexual person but still I made many friendships with women that were purely platonic, and because I still equated sex with love, if I didn’t have feelings for a girl who was a friend, I didn’t make any “undue advances”. I still act that way, over thirty years later. I made female friends at both work and school.

   

  To Be Continued as it is written. Chapter Five: “Whorticulture: It’s Cherry Poppin’ Time” where the author finally actually has sex for the first time is next up, but probably not for a few weeks.

  ---

  This episode you have just read was written twice. I wrote a shorter version a couple of weeks ago, but wasn’t satisfied with the chapter’s direction, and deleted the whole thing and started over. It’s been a while since I have posted any chapters, because then I left this story on the backburner while mulling over exactly what episodes to recount. A lot happened to me during college, and this is supposed to be merely a recounting of my sexual history, and not a full blown autobiography, although eventually all the “chapters” will probably be combined with the autobiography I’m writing on AllThingsMike in the Half Century section, which hasn’t been updated in a year or so.

  I’m not sure whether or not I am still satisfied with this chapter as a writer. Since I tend to get a bit verbose at times, (all the time) every time I go back to “edit” I end up “adding” more than I subtract. I know that when reading blogs people have time constraints, and might not have the time to slog through something this long. I actually had to break this chapter up into three sections.

  This is a story about sex and the author still hasn’t had any sex as the fourth chapter ends, so it will be interesting to note how this is going to turn out stylistically. I wanted to “detail” more of mine and Emma’s “relationship” but the entry is way too long as it is. I am putting this up somewhat unedited from the last “edit” so I will be reading it online after posting to see if there are any grammatical or spelling errors I have made. I use notepad as my typewriter and I don’t use computer spellcheckers. I rely upon my own intelligence and memory, and the reference materials online to help me self edit everything I write, and I do make lots of typing errors which hopefully will not be evident to anyone who has slogged through today’s entry, or that I will have found and corrected when people do read. If you need to “catch up” links to the three previous chapters are provided in my introduction. MFN

  • 12:31 pm
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