For every boy, there are two girls: the one you know pretty well because she is featured in your fantasies, and though you know her only in photographs, there is some posture or expression that has become for you a sweet, single ticket for release. Your wild Fidel rises–needs to, really–and with a little manipulation and the right spread in Playboy, he speaks his piece. This is just physical.
The other girl is something else; the other girl is a real girl, and she embodies the quandary that is at the center of so much of our literature. She complicates everything wonderfully with a notion we sometimes call love. When I was seventeen, I sat in the window of a Mexican restaurant in deep downtown Salt Lake City with such a girl. This was near Exchange Place, in the shadows of the old office buildings, their gray facades ornate and metropolitan in a city with so few glimpses of urban note; the restaurant has been gone so long now that it feels like something I’m making up, which I am not, but that is how it felt to us then, too: that this was simply a set arranged so we could transcend the ordinary errands of a school day.
There was honestly a red-checked tablecloth, and we sat there like what we were, that is, young people about to enter the world. It was like being lost in our city for that moment, and I noted her smile and her auburn hair, and I had a faint sense even then that I was in, that this was it for me. I’m setting this all down because there I was with a member–as the saying goes–of the opposite sex, thirty months away from bringing any sex into the equation,
and when we did begin the exploration and adventure of sex, there was my old friend, the penis, but things were different for us now. He wasn’t the first guy through the door. I was first, and he followed. It makes sense to separate us this way.
He’d had his way with me from time to time and would again at the odd moment, but now the penis played only a supporting role. I was in love and wouldn’t get out. I was happy for all of it; these thirty years since, it has been my life. The lesson ends here. The oldest lesson. You think you know the pains and pleasures of living in a body, and then love doubles everything and then doubles that again. The penis makes sense at last.
After having been pushed and pulled and rent in twain at times–fires in the streets of my heart, people running in panic through the alleyways, breaking glass, sounding alarms–suddenly there was quiet, and the streetlamps came on, and people came to their porches to listen for music, which also arose, and the revolution had done its work, found its reason. Important alliances had been formed, and in the new, vigorous peace, there was a discussion, a banquet of new proportion, and then dancing.
