July 23, 2006

• My Sexual History: Chapter 11

  "My Sexual History"(Chapter 11)
  A Personal Journey through the pleasures of the flesh
  An "essay" by Michael F. Nyiri
  (begun in December 2004 and continuing)

  RATED: R or MATURE for language and sexual situations. (I've Xanga rated this entry as "discretion required")

  NOTE: I have been presenting this latest series of "essays" in serial form here on WhenWordsCollide for over a year. I am currently posting the eleventh chapter of this  "reminiscence".  Previous entries are in the links below. (I also keep the links in the sidebar and the whole story is always available on my website HERE.) This was originally to have been a series of short essays but has become much longer and more detailed, and will most surely be novel length by the time it is finished.  This entry deals with the decade of the 80s, which, while not as varied from a sexual standpoint as the 70s, still saw lots of changes, and a few surprises. This chapter covers a lot of ground, and is a bit longer than some of the chapters I've previously written, at about 4575 words. Always remember, I am always totally honest in my reminiscences, and I do not write to shock. I am merely recounting my sexual history, as it actually happened. I'd like to mention that the image of the girl with the lollipop I use as my "header image" for this series is a model, and I got the image from the internet. This isn't a photo of one of my girlfriends. I chose it to illustrate the series because it's quite a sexual image, but is not exceedingly purient.  MFN 07/23/06)

  Chapter 1. "Then the boy pees into the girl."
  Chapter 2. "The Very First Kiss"
  Chapter 3. "High School Daze"
  Chapter 4 "Stag Films and Frat Parties, Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll"
  Chapter 5 "Whoreticulture"
  Chapter 6. "Meeting Ruth, the Sexual Goddess"
  Chapter 7. "Red Headed Wretchedness, and A Respite Before Falling in Love"
  Chapter 8. "Cathy: The Second Love of My Life"

  Chapter 9. "Opposites attract: The 38 and the 18 year old."

  Chapter 10. "Melanie and the End of the Me Decade"

  Chapter 11: "Abstinence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder"

  For almost a decade, I had immersed myself in the freedom of the sexual revolution firsthand. From a childhood filled with spiritual ecstacy, through a teenage period filled with yearning, then a college and post college "time of my life", to living in an apartment building where I bedded two of the occupants and almost bedded a third, I had spearheaded my own personal sexual revolution. For all my previous life, I had never masturbated. Once I started, then I couldn't get enough, and created "romantic evenings" filled with drugs and skin mags. I always felt filled with the spirit of true romantic love, but yet most of my experiences in romance in the previous decade involved lots of rigorous sex, and little true romance. The one gril with whom I fell in love, Cathy, in 1978 had rebuffed me for her original boyfriend. She was really the only one in any of many relationships with whom I was in love. The rest I merely lusted after.

  The decade ended. The sex ended too, but I didn't know it as the new decade arrived. I had other troubles.  I was kicked out of my apartment at the beginning of the eighties. On paper, the new owners of the building  wanted to upgrade the building to condominiums, and they excused the month to month tenancy, for an upgrade and higher rates. Some people they allowed to be able to come back after the eviction. Not me. I was part of the "partyers" group in the building who were being eased out into the street. My days of playing "DJ" for the apartment building tenants was beginning to pay me back negatively. A few tenants had never been appreciative of my parties, or possibly of my running around the inside court smashing Malibu lights cause I thought they had eyes in them when I was on acid. I got the eviction notice one evening as I was coming home from work, tacked to my door like a wanted poster. Upon questioning the newly appointed apartment managers, who took over when Kevin's mother died and his family then moved away, about what would happen, they said everybody had to get out of the building while they renovated. Then they would let the tenants come back if they had not already secured housing. I prepared to obtain storage and perhaps room with my friend Tom, although the drive to work would be quite long, and a few days later I got another notice on my door when I came home from work telling me that I was not one of the tenants being invited back. I was being evicted, and had to get out by the first of the month.

  I drank a lot of beer that evening, and the next day I began to read about eviction law and I talked to a few lawyers in the next couple of days after that to weigh my options. I found I could "legally" live in the apartment without paying rent for three months before the marshall appeared at the door to throw my furniture, clothing, and videodisc collection out on the street. I exercised this option, saving enough money for the security deposit and first month's rent on my future digs. 1982 saw me moving out of the place I had called home for most of the 70s. I found a place literally right down the street, much larger, located in an apartment building with a Hawaiian motif. At first, I moved in the two bedroom place by myself. Immediately after I settled in, FedMart, the company for which I had worked for almost five years, went out of business, a fatality of the retail wars in Southern California. I stayed on with the company until the bitter end, collecting a severance package which was almost a full year's pay. A good friend at the time, Jim, who had roomed with me for a bit in my previous apartment, finally moved in with me after I tried two other roommates, since I couldn't afford the rent by myself. I would attend parties with Jim and some of his friends, and I had some female friends at the time, but romance and sex sort of dried up for me in the early eighties. I spent most of 1982 on a permanent vacation, and by Christmas that year, the severance money had just about run out, so I looked for a job, and because I had had problems with alcohol in the recent past, I quit drinking as well. Cold Turkey. Without help. A decade of debauchery ended suddenly. I'd always known I could quit at any time, and proved it as I set out to find a job.

  The job finally materialized in December, as I obtained work with Gemco Stores, another California retail chain. The first position was manager of the Christmas Tree lot, which I had done many times at FedMart. After Christmas, I slid over to the night stocking crew, as there were very few managerial postions to be had due to the shakeup in the industry when FedMart closed all their stores a few months earlier. Eventually, the Dayton Hudson company would reconvert most all of the existing FedMarts into Target Stores. While this was happening, my employment was with Gemco, in Culver City, where I had held my last FedMart position. My next lover to be worked as a hostess in the restaurant I frequented, Dinah's, down the street from the store.

  During this time of my life, I wasn't driving. Part of the reason why I quit drinking alcohol during this time was because the DMV had revoked my driver's license in 1981  following too many drunk driving arrests, and I attended an interview in which the DMV decided I shouldn't have the privilege of driving. I had to give up my position driving a truck after the license revocation, and that's when I was promoted to warehouse manager giving up my job as a  truck driver. When the Honda blew it's timing chain, I didn't have transportation, and throughout the time I had off after FedMart went out of business, I was using public transportation, riding the bus almost everywhere. I was collecting video laserdiscs at this time, and the ability to buy movies I loved, plus renting VHS tapes of current fare from the video stores, afforded me entertainment, so I didn't really miss not having a car.

  Leslie would seat me in the mornings at Dinah's restaurant, a somewhat famous eatery in Culver City where I would breakfast prior to going home for the morning. My schedule at Gemco was quite different than anything I had previously encountered in business, even in the world of retail. I worked nights, clocking in at 11:00 p.m. after the store closed down. The night crew got off at 8:00 a.m. Before taking the bus home, I would stop in at Dinah's. Leslie and I got to be great friends, and after a while we were exchanging books to read, and spending a lot of time talking whenever I was in the restaurant. I also worked sometimes during the day as  a 'call-in" when someone was sick, because my night stocking job was not a full 40 hour a week job. Leslie was not my "sexual ideal". She was like Ruth, short, with large breasts, and long brown hair. We flirted shamelessly, but didn't really discuss having a relationship. Leslie had a boyfriend, and in the time I was getting to know her, her belly was growing from a pregnancy. She wasn't married, and the boy who impregnated her was not her current boyfriend, whom she dumped soon after meeting me. One afternoon, after I finished a day shift, I got an invitation from Leslie to come over to her house. She shared a small beach house with another girlfriend in Hermosa Beach. I took the bus to Hermosa, and I walked the short distance to her abode. Her roommate was out for the evening, and we ate a home cooked meal which she prepared, and sat talking on the couch, when Leslie's ex boyfriend drove up in his pickup. He was irate about something, and Leslie went out on the porch to confront him. Soon he left, but for me any romantic inclinations had melted into their argument, and I asked Leslie to drive me home. I was receiving signals from her, and probably could have "gotten laid" that night at her place, but after seeing her hyped up ex boyfriend snarl and stomp around on the porch, I decided to call it a day.

  We never went out on a date, so Leslie wasn't really a "girlfriend". My life was a bit complicated with everything that had suddenly changed, so I wasn't really looking for the complications of a relationship. I did make friends with some of the people in the new apartment building, in hopes that I could have "lovers" in the same building as I had in the previous apartment in Torrance, but that wansn't going to happen. Before FedMart had gone out of business, I had flirted with some of the cashiers in the Culver City store. I was really sweet on a short older black girl, and missed a couple of chances to get together with her. Most of this time I spent alone however. When not at work, my time was spent watching videos, writing poetry, or hanging out with Jim and my friends.

  I did get a chance to make love to Leslie, one fateful evening soon after our missed opportunity at her place in Hermosa Beach. She moved away from the beach house soon after, and moved back in with her parents in Westminster after her baby boy was born. I used to joke with her, prior to her time off from her hostess duties at Dinah's because of the pregnancy, that I had always wanted to make love to a pregnant woman. She gave birth before I got the chance to find out what that would be like, and a few months after the birth of her child she came over to visit me at my place. Jim, my current roommate, was out for the evening. Her son was with her parents. We began the evening with a meal, and then I read her some of my poems, as I had done with so many other girls throughout my sexual history. One of my poems is titled "Lifescenarios". When Leslie leaned over to kiss me for the first time, I whispered the word. Another "lifescenario" was about to happen.

  A lot had happened since my relationship with Melanie, and a lot of time had passed. Kissing and cuddling with Leslie was quite pleasant, but I could not achieve climax during the actual sex act. This bothered me greatly, although it didn't bother her, as we moved from the living room to my bedroom, removing more clothing, and becoming more excited.  I remained enlarged and engorged, but my penis never exhaled semen that night. Leslie was satisfied, and although she quit the job as hostess for Dinah's soon after, and we only saw each other a few times after that, my unfinished sexual business, as far as I was concerned, gave me some worrisome thoughts. My evening with Leslie was an isolated incident in my sexual history at that point, which had dwindled enough so that I started to believe I would remain celibate. I began writing sad poetry again, and when soon I was forced to kick Jim out of my apartment as roommate when his drinking and carousing started to bother my teetotling demeanor, I found myself quite alone, and began to fall into a depression.

  Jim and I had been drinking buddies since I was introduced to him by John at my apartment back when Kevin's mother and father were still managing the previous apartment building in which I lived. Before I had to kick him out, I had enjoyed quite a history with him and his South Bay friends. Since 1974, when I had moved to the South Bay area of Los Angeles County, near the beach, and close to the rather hedonistic lifestyle it afforded young people in the seventies, I had made many friends, and through them, even more friends. I was constantly caroming between my group up in the San Gabriel Valley, with whom I had attended school, and my new buddies in the South Bay. Jim was a friend of John's who had moved into my old bachelor's apartment in my first South Bay apartment building after I had moved upstairs into a larger one bedroom. John had been impressed with my record collection, and his friend Jim was a musician. During my first meeting with Jim, at my place, he only parroted old Firesign Theater routines, because John also told him I enjoyed that comedy group. Jim was a wanderer and poet, songwriter and guitarist, who had been raised in Redondo Beach. He was a notorious drunk, and had been beat up many times at bars when he would get obstinate. I liked him a lot, however, and once when he didn't want to go be with his parents after one of his hitchhiking trips, I had let him room with me. I had searched him out when I needed a roommate in the Tiki flavored apartment house, and he had easily complied. Jim and I both smoked marijuana and took drugs, including cocaine and speed. We spend a lot of time in each other's company, and I met a lot of his friends. Eventually, Kevin and Jim would form a band together, and Jim became involved with the female violinist in the band.

  Besides Jim, another good friend of mine was Keith, who had been my drug dealer before I met Kevin. Keith was gay, but didn't let anybody in our circle know. I remember partying with Keith, Jim, John, and my old buddy Morgan, and we all tried to get Keith to talk about girls and his relationships. He never did, however, but we didn't mind. I had first met Keith when he worked in the garden department at one of the stores in which I managed the department, and when Kevin entered my life, both Keith and I would get our drugs from Kevin. After Kevin moved, we needed to secure a new source. This is when Keith told me he was gay.

  He could get both pills and pot from a Gay Baths he frequented in Long Beach. Some of the clientele were drug dealers. During the 80s, drug use was almost "accepted" among businessmen. The film industry was overrun with white powder. A lot of executive types in retail sniffed to stay up during long hours and extended shifts. I was no different. Even though I eventually stopped drinking for most of the decade, I never slowed my drug use. When working both night shifts and day shifts at Gemco, I could come home in the evening after a day shift, smoke a bowl of marijuana, watch an hour or so  of a movie, sleep for three hours, get up, and go to work again. I had problems in the 70s with overusing drugs, but I was quite a hand at managing my "addictions" in the 80s. I asked to come along with Keith when he went to the baths, and I obtained a membership card and followed Keith to the dressing rooms, where we doffed our clothing and donned towels. I met some of Keith's "partners". He didn't have a steady boyfriend. In those days right before the outbreak of AIDS became news, a lot of Gay men engaged in faceless sex in Gay Baths. Keith was one of these guys, and I found the whole atmosphere of the Gay Baths to be quite interesting.

  I wasn't engaging in much sex with women, and really didn't think I'd ever be thrown into a situtation where I would be engaging in sex with a male. The Baths reeked of sex. There were Greek styled statues and columns, and cheesy felt paintings of nude men adorning the dark, musky rooms in what might have once been an apartment complex. There were long dark halls, with little "tryst rooms", a somewhat large room where guys could watch gay stag films on a big screen television, and of course the baths themselves were hot and steamy, with a grotto and hot tubs in the back. Some areas had booths set up like in a restaurant. You could order drinks, have lunch, or eat something else if your heart desired it. There was a "membership fee" which I paid when getting the card at the entrance before participating. Once inside the bowels of this house of ill repute, populated by nothing but men and boys clad either in white towels or nothing at all, I actually began to feel a bit sexy, and I joked to Keith that the only thing missing were the women.

  My experience in the Gay Baths the first time was as a spectator. I'm not gay, so I viewed the experience as a spectator. It was as if I had been invited to look at how the other half lives. I met a few real nice guys, who were probably trying to score with me, but I naively brushed off any advances. We stayed a bit, to be hospitable, and made our drug deals, and left. Later on at a restaurant with Keith after the visit, I told him how neat it was that he had let me accompany him. After that, some more of my friends "came out", one of whom was in Jim's band. I had no idea that there were so many "gays" in my immediate circle of friends. I treated them no differently, and our group remained intact. Keith even showed up at my apartment once with a couple of girls he knew, and I partied with the gals until sunrise.

  Coming home from the Gay Baths the first time, I announced loudly to my roommate Jim, "I'm a card carrying queer", which elicited much laughter. The next time I visited the Gay Baths with Keith, a couple of months later, I wandered away from Keith and the guy he was chatting up, and ended up in the television room, where about a dozen towel clad homosexuals were watching a gay themed video on the large screen TV. I found a spot, and proceeded to watch the movie. At one point, a young man, quite good looking, came by my side, and touched me on the shoulder. Before the video had unspooled, I had sex with this young man. He received me, and this sex was the most "faceless" I'd ever had. After the "act" and at the end of the video, he disappeared in the dark musky halls. Even though I've never doubted my sexuality, and still don't, and have never had an experience like this again, I'm glad that I was able to find myself in this situation at least once in my life. Keith disappeared a few months after this escapade. Funny to think that I still looked at Keith as a buddy, and never had any "feelings" for him, nor him for me. The encounter I had in the Gay Bath television room was akin to masturbating for me, it was sex as exercise without any feeling at all. That it was a guy I was pumping in the keister didn't really matter. I don't know what happened to Keith. His parents moved, and soon I had no way in which to get in touch with him.

  As the decade progressed, my abstinence became more ingrained. When my apartment rent was raised higher than I could pay, I moved again, this time to Hermosa Beach. My ex roommate Jim had been rooming with another gay friend and drug dealer, Cecil, a tall, ebony skinned, incredibly personable guy who had almost memorized the Physician's Desk Reference of drugs. He lived six blocks from the ocean, and he loved his "beach bunnies", young white surfer types, who could be found parading through the apartment at all hours. Jim moved into an apartment on his own, and I moved in with Cecil as a temporary arrangement. Irrespective of my previous experience in the Gay Baths, I put a lock on my bedroom door at Cecil's. I didn't want any of his "boyfriends" coming into my room by mistake when I was asleep. The apartment was arranged like a backwards condominium, so that the upper floor, which had a view of the ocean, held the living room and kitchen area. The bottom floor had our bedrooms. I set up my video gear and television in my bedroom, along with a new waterbed, which I bought from one of Cecil's friends.

  I was still abstaining from drinking alcohol, although since Cecil was a drug dealer, my instances of drug use were to increase. I still had no romantic prospects, but my life was filled to the brim with partying. The Gay subculture in the beach cities was not as pronounced as it later became, and a lot of Cecil's friends were only out of the closet with their close friends. At work, nobody knew any of these guys were homosexuals. I visited quite a lot of neat people, and I even accompanied Cecil to Gay Bars in Hollywood. I loved to dance, and it didn't matter to me if I were dancing with men or with women. My hedonism quotient was racked up pretty high during the early to mid eighties. I discovered two new drugs while living with Cecil, a "cocktail" called a "Load" which had codeine as one of the pills, was one of these. Another was "crack cocaine", called "freebasing" in those days. Cecil would buy $350.00 bags of cocaine, and "cook up" a batch of freebase in the kitchen. To engage in the high, one would smoke the highly concentrated mix, and feel incredibly happy and powerful for about ten minutes. Of all the drugs I had used, this was the worst, because it was so expensive, and the high, while being quite delicious, was short, and I always seemed to hallucinate a bunch of 20 dollar bills with wings attached flying out the window. Many times Cecil would entertain his "buddies" in the top part of the house, while I would watch a video in my room with the door locked.

  Eventually Cecil died of AIDS. He moved out of the apartment owing the manager three months rent. I was always giving my half of the rent directly to Cecil, and as his drug use grew, he needed  more money, so he would ask for the rent earlier and earlier. One day his car was gone. And he with it. We got word about a year later that his hedonistic lifestyle had killed him when he contracted the AIDS virus from one of his beach bunnies. Looking back, I was quite lucky that during the early 80s I kept my health, if not my previous sexual life, which all but dried up. The apartment rent was too much for one tenant, and I moved Scott, a workmate from Gemco, into the apartment to help pay the rent. We lived as roommates through 1986, when he joined the Navy, and was stationed elsewhere. I was looking for a roommate again when Jim, my old friend, found himself without a place to live. He had moved out of Cecil's before I moved in, and now I moved him back into the Hermosa Beach apartment. Jim had a girlfriend by then, Claire, who is now his wife, and she would visit quite a bit. I kept up a fulfilling social life, but still couldn't find love. I even stopped writing poetry for the last few years of the decade. Gemco went out of business, like FedMart had, as soon as I was to be promoted to a higher management position. During most of my stay with Cecil, I was the "plant man" working in the Garden Department at Gemco, and then I was promoted to Area Manager in charge of hardlines. My next promotiion, when the chain went out of business, was to operations manager, the number two man in the store. As soon as we heard the news that the company was going to close it's stores, however, I quit, and obtained a manangement job at Target, before the job pool was filled again with ex Gemco managers, some of whom had worked for FedMart previously. The position at Target came with a large raise. I was riding a motorcycle in 1986, purchased with cash, for only 3000 dollars. It was a cruiser, a 650cc one cylinder "thumper" made by Suzuki, and called the "Savage". I still didn't have a license to drive, but I was careful, wore a helmet, and followed all the rules of the road. I pulled the cruiser up in  front of the Target Store in Manhattan Beach, where Cathy, the love of my life had worked for a while when it was still a FedMart, one day in 1986, doffed my helmet, postioned my tie, and entered yet another chain of retail stores, this time as Merchandise Manager. I was in charge of the whole "back end" of the store, including the electronics, hardware, toy, and sporting goods departments. My work week increased in hours, until I was working almost 80 hours a week. I didn't have much time to think of girls, sex, or relationships. The drug use subsided, and I concentrated on work, enjoying my substantial video hobby, which included making video tapes of my own with my new video camera. Jim, Claire, and I socialized. I still would see Tom, my old friend from school once in a while, but most of my time was filled with business at the Target Store. I took management classes and prepared for the career in retail management that had been avoiding me since the other two chains for which I worked went out of business. Thoughts of sex would have to wait a bit longer.

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