How could I argue with that?  Clearly she had missed her calling as a hip guidance counselor, though I thought of life as rather exciting, not dreary, at the moment -- the Post had run an article on student sexuality, and Jenny and I read that we were cohabitating when it was almost unheard of among students, which seemed to give us at least a start on the bohemianism Bibi advocated -- but how to live without much effort, or at least on my own schedule?
     Artists and craftsmen -- maybe leather workers or jewelry makers -- might be able to swing it, but I was a long way from earning anything by staying home to write novels, which is what I dreamed of doing.  I knew a glass-blower named Terry Yelves that hung out at Barney's and went to a studio -- an old barn -- in Door County in the summer where he sold to tourists, and guys who could paint houses, but I was stuck.
     Life magazine came out with a photo spread on Beats who were doing what they called going underground, and I told Bibiana that's what I wanted to do, maybe in Chicago, since I couldn't stand the thought of more reading and writing about some obscure writer -- I tentatively chose Edna St. Vincent Millay from the choices -- to construct an acceptable thesis.  I had been in school for what seemed like a decade and wanted to work on my own stuff.
     She and Gregory Garson thought I would like the Hyde Park area, but the few poems I published locally or regionally meant nothing as far as a career.
     Only Robert Bly at The Sixties was moved enough to respond with any personal insight -- and that was to call me a watered-down Bukowski and chide me for not sending him anything that showed I was paying attention to his droll observations.  The short stories -- though they went over well-enough on the Cheshire level -- were rejected by the literary magazines where I methodically sent them.
     Still, I lucked out when by virtue of still being in grad school I qualified for a work-study program working on the index to a literary encyclopedia Bernard Fleischmann, head of the Comparative Literature Department, was writing.  When he went to Europe for the summer they kept sending my checks even though I didn't have to turn in any work and I knew I would drop out in the fall before anyone could call me on it, though it had been up to him to assign the manuscript pages I was to scour for author references.
     So I could give up the cab driving and drag home a case of beer every other day or so and type and re-type my stuff and send it out and watch the sun rise over Prospect Avenue and the lake -- the sliver I could catch out of the side window, since we were in the rear of the building -- every day until I crashed.
     Old people in their wheelchairs and tied to their beds in the nursing homes on either side of our brick building would moan and curse the attendants, voices carrying through our screen windows, and our older tomcat would leap in through the small panel I left open on the door to the flat roof outside our second-floor apartment most mornings.
     Jenny came home in the afternoon to cook and we would sometimes have sex, maybe go to a movie at the Downer Theatre or Downtown to sneak her into the crowded Barney's on Friday nights -- after midnight -- for raw beef sandwiches.
     Sometimes she just ended up dozing off there in the car while I drank and socialized inside, even if we couldn't get the few brandy and Cokes that would have been enough for her.
       I had been with her one way or another since she was 14, and though I had been getting drunk and jerked off for years on the weekends, I had my uncertainties about dealing with more sex until I experimented by fucking every day for a week or so -- which was fine with her -- until I slacked off, realizing how thoroughly bored I had become.  In any event, the real excitement had been gone for a long time.
     But I always marveled at her capacity to come almost at will, and in the general sexual ignorance of  the time, I speculated that she maintained a natural pathway to vaginal orgasms because she never masturbated.  After all, she claimed she never did.
     Still, after crawling in beside her more and more often with the sunrise, I began sleeping with her all the time, keeping a worn bedspread on my pallet and using it just for study.  I craved some variety, though, speculating about almost every female we socialized with.  I could occasionally get her to humor me with a blowjob, but if -- as I often did -- I would half-joke I think I'll come as she leaned over my legs with her bare ass and its dark, swampy cleft in the air and sucked she would pause and say Don't you dare.
     One time we were almost done, still early in the evening and with the lights uncharacteristically out, when someone knocked at my door and in the crack underneath it in the lighted hallway were what had to be a pair of men's shoes, creaking with a substantial weight.  I figured her parents never really believed she was living with Aileen -- her father had tracked us down once when we were dating to a showing of Elia Kazan's America, America at the Oriental, where she said we would be, expecting to catch her lying.
     Of course, like most of us on the left I considered Kazan a snitch for his testimony to HUAC, and On the Waterfront as a self-serving brief for informers, but it was an American film serious enough to see.
     Watching the door we stayed as quiet as possible, only her head moving enough for her to finish me off through several more rounds of subdued but determined rapping, and the shoes finally moved away without a word being said.
     We never knew who it was for sure, though we figured it was her father, checking on whether she really lived downstairs with Aileen, but of course she was never there.
     Unusual events like that could heighten our desire for sex, especially if I hadn't touched her for a while because I couldn't turn it on right away after she had made me mad.  Even though she would do what few chores she felt like doing while stripped to the waist.
     "Quite looking at my tits," she would say to goad me as she moved around the room, half-heartedly dusting.
     And mad I would get, over her housekeeping habits, primarily -- she had sworn up and down that she would faithfully clean out the cat box, but so many times I would find myself unable to tolerate the clumps she blithely overlooked -- smelling the acrid ammonia fumes -- and do it myself.
     And she would trail in her wake what seemed like a rain of scarves and jewelry and makeup items and papers and God knows what else, while I would reflexively restore them to where I thought they should go.  Not that I couldn't tolerate the growth of dust bunnies or the filmy windows or her dirty ashtrays, but those did take extra work, where she just created disorder when it could as easily have been avoided in the first place.
     "Jesus Christ!  Would your mother leave the sink like that?"  I would say, or bring up whatever the day's irritant was.
    "Nevah," was her usual chirping response -- she though it was cute, like a lot of mannerisms that had lost their charm.  And of course, we knew her mother, like mine, was a cleaning fanatic.
     "You just want me to be Jenny Robot, pick this up, pick that up . . ."  She would go into her machine imitation, moving stiffly.  Truth be told, she was good about doing laundry -- maybe because she just wanted to get out of the apartment -- always offering to take mine, and making the bed.  But it would go right past her whenever I would point out that it was just as easy to keep things neat as she went along.  After all, I always did.
     Of course, she couldn't be bothered to put anything on the grocery list when she used it up, and it became exclusively my job when we went to the Sentry supermarket on Oakland to make sure we were supplied. Kraft Dinner, the makings of tuna noodle casserole for sure, an occasional steak.
     And one time she asked flatly, "Would it make any difference?"
     Meaning, since she sensed my growing indifference -- though my sex urges were about as frequent as ever, only with fewer preliminaries as time went by, more of just bending her over the cast-off furniture, Then would you love me more?
     Well, though I could be evasive when I had to be, or very legalistic, I always had a hard time lying, and after a long mental review of all the women I had been lusting after, I had to admit that no, it wouldn't.
     Hell, if I walked the hall at UWM and saw a woman with a blouse gaping where the buttons were kind of far apart I would change course to follow her for a while for a while if I thought I glimpsed a part of a rounded breast without a bra.  And I felt I couldn't blame myself too much for my lack of overall affection, since she  never had any trouble coming no matter how perfunctory I was.
     Which, though rare, was really how it should be for women as well as men.  After all, we didn't demand much and didn't expect to be complemented ourselves on the mere ability to enjoy sex.
     It was during that time that she would infrequently wake up while I was still alert myself to start a disjointed conversation.  She looked foggy, and I would generally tell her to go back to sleep.  Once she peered at me in bemusement:  "You have circles in your eyes."
     I realized she meant my contact lenses, and since this childishness seemed more than a little odd I probed a little further on a hunch, asking what her name was.  It turned out she was Renée.  That was actually her middle name, and after that since I knew she was, in effect, sleepwalking, I saw no point in doing anything but gently getting her to lie down again.
     And I had recognized her state as closely aligned with an activity I had abandoned a long time ago:  hypnosis.  Even as a boy I had read about it in one of my Uncle Homer's men's magazines when I visited my cousin, Darlene.  He always kept copies of True and Argosy on the coffee table, and though I believed the article mostly fantasy, I was curious enough to check out library books that detailed a history from Mesmer and Charcot through military psychologists who used it to treat what was called shell shock to fairly modern university research.
     Having established its legitimacy -- hypnosis was once used in everything from drug-free childbirth to painless dentistry, including the antics induced by stage hypnotists:  Cluck like a chicken; Sing a song instead of saying your name if asked your identity -- I knew I had to give it a try.
     I became familiar with findings that came from experiments designed to convince skeptics who held that subjects wouldn't act against their own best interests.  Never mind that stage hypnotists had been humiliating stolid citizens -- admittedly pre-selected and tested -- in ways no sane person would voluntarily put up with.  These professors risked a lot by having their volunteers commit petty crimes, like stealing from purses.
     Of course, they were discrediting the notion that subjects were somehow aware there was no real danger in trying to grasp rattlesnakes, since they could see the supposedly invisible glass, or somehow saw through the experimenters who could apparently  trick them into attempting dangerous acts, or were merely trying to please by putting on displays of shivering from extreme cold or, the popular classic -- in some circles -- of beating the heat by removing clothing.  Probably to take a convenient shower.
     The element of trickery was important, since it was recognized that a direct order to do something outrageous could make the victim balk and wake up -- common terminology, though it had been established that the connection with actual sleep was superficial.  A person acting under a post-hypnotic suggestion -- a very real event -- gave no evidence of sleeping, and someone handled by a competent practitioner would engage in aware conversation and acts without any sign of a trance except, of course, extreme suggestibility.
     So I made my first move -- really not expecting it to work -- with my younger cousin, Georgie, in a dim bedroom at my house.  Conclusions about who made a good subject were controversial, but young boys and adolescent girls were generally considered good candidates.  And sleepwalkers.
     But certainly not, despite common beliefs, unintelligent or weak-minded persons, whatever that might mean.  It took a certain amount of intelligence, after all, to follow directions and keep one's mind clear of distracting thoughts.
     But I was certainly astonished to have a 10-year-old in my dim bedroom start responding rather vacantly to my conversational questions, and following the few commands I could improvise to test him, being unprepared for success.  Inducing him to give silly answers to my queries about his name and age, for example.  But I didn't want to risk jolting him into self-consciousness with something too vigorous, since I had used the common sleep-inducing technique -- though without the clich�d dangling pocket watch found only in bad movies -- and wasn't sure if I could convert him to a more wakeful state.  Even if experts did it all the time.
     But from that time -- after some serious follow-up reading -- I had an activity, if not quite a full-fledged act, to beguile friends at gatherings when no parents were around.  In addition to our clandestine beer-drinking.
     Of course, with friends -- and especially boyfriends -- watching, I couldn't go too far in the way of having the girls take off even their tops by making them think it was getting hot or they were alone and getting ready for bed, though I figured I could.  But I could make people seem to disappear and at least stretch the guys between two chairs, supported only by heads and heels.  With these kinds of results I knew I could, in effect, create future unwitting participants with post-hypnotic suggestions that could be activated by phone or even letters.
     Such commands had to be reinforced over time, of course, if not actually activated, but they could persist for quite a while, as in the little-shown but
horrifically accurate 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate, with Laurence Harvey, Frank Sinatra and an incestuous mother, Angela Lansbury.  There, an innocuous Queen of Hearts was the trigger.
     I also knew that major law-enforcement agencies were well aware of illicit uses of hypnosis, but I believed I could at least be smart enough to exert some powers without attracting attention.  For one thing, subjects in a post-hypnotic trance were very clever at manufacturing rationalizations for the most outlandish behavior, so stealing for me or sexual acts might well be possible.
     I could easily leave such an instruction in place, and no one observing would even notice.  After all, I used post-hypnotic suggestions at my sessions already just to make it easy to put my participants back under with the snap of a finger -- and it was true that my favorite and most susceptible reactors were some of the chicks that always hung around with the group.
     An  enjoyment in dominating otherwise frustratingly sexually aloof females, I imagine, that made me especially patient in demonstrating my prowess, though the guys were always there to look ridiculous if I wanted to use them.
     Still, I was scrupulous about removing all such future possible influences from everyone's minds before the party was over, though of course the care I gave to having them remember the experience as enjoyable and deeply restful ensured a repeating supply of subjects.
      The sleep-inducing technique came about -- and was successful -- because, though young myself, I had a rather deep and, when I wanted it to be, soothing, some might say boring, monotonous voice.  Not like the stage hypnotists who worked with a loud, overpowering tone under bright lights and noisy conditions.
     But even I later employed a method myself closer to theirs of tricking persons to go under, not against their will -- which was considered impossible, in the absence of an already-implanted suggestion -- but surely without their consent, in the guise of what was purported to be only a test of their ability to comply with a practitioner's directions.  This involved some forceful, rapid talking and instructions to willingly close eyes and blank out and just listen to commands that had you imagining falling backwards and trusting the circle of onlookers to catch you, and eventually being unable to articulate your correct name.  My buddies thought it was fun to supply newcomers whom I could put under this way.
     So did I, at first.  But I became increasingly uneasy at whatever power I could wield, and soon eliminated most of the potentially humiliating aspects, and never called upon any of the girls for any nudity or anything sexual, even covertly.  Tempting though it might have been to have a sex slave, the idea of someone following my wishes not of their free will repelled me, and seemed to make for a barren, cold relationship that could ultimately leave me alienated even from the world itself.  Strong, perhaps, but the idea was chilling.
     And so were certain consequences of a trance:
     Subjects were unpredictable, and could be unnerving.  They were usually very literal in their interpretations, but with variable results.  You could tell someone that when she woke up so-and-so would not be there.  Sometimes I would say you won't see him.  Sure enough, she would usually ignore anything the other party said and did, even making excuses for his non-appearance, but sometimes she would hear the disembodied voice, which could freak anyone out.
     Just because I said you won't see him.
     And it always nagged at me that no one ever came up with the definitive explanation of what hypnosis actually is, though theories abound.  From Freudian childish regression to simply succumbing to a barrage on the senses to the apparent disassociation that accompanies sleep and its dreams.  And indeed, one could talk to a sleepwalker and lead her to a demonstrably hypnotic performance.
     But the mystery -- and ultimate neglect -- no doubt stemmed from our ignorance of even the normal functioning of the brain while we had a growing ability to predictably control it through drugs and simple duress, even as we more surely dealt with disease.
     You could add to this the simple ineptness of many a would-be hypnotherapist, said to have been the reason Freud himself gave up on it.
     So by the time of Jenny's displays I had lost interest in undue influence over anybody, feeling it an alienating experience.  Even though I had in our early days found Jenny to be an easily and deeply manipulated target.  And the idea of a woman subject to my sexual whims on demand had become more creepy than anything else.  Especially since I could get anything I wanted, sexual or otherwise, through conventional means.  At least from Jen.  If I had a failing in her eyes, it was that I didn't want enough from her, that she was no longer that significant to me.
     After several sleep-talking episodes that I told her about -- she had no memory of them -- she pondered about it for a while and decided the fugues surfaced because of a deep conflict:  "You know I told you I never masturbated -- I think I wanted a way to tell you I lied . . . it was really a lot . . ."
     Of course, it didn't really matter, and this general indifference of mine meant it was inevitable that she should move out to Allan and Ieva's on Cass Street.  They had gotten married with a baby on the way and they had a room for Jenny in exchange for some babysitting.  I had ignored her more and more, not wanting to make her feel dumb, but she was very defensive.
     I pointed out that I knew very little compared to the Garsons, but I didn't resent them -- just the opposite -- for what I could learn from them.  I remembered an evening when Gregory had been discussing Wisconsin poets Lorine Niedecker and Harland Ristau, whom I as an undergraduate had never heard of.  I was a little discouraged about my pace of learning, and Bibi was slightly amused, making me cringe by calling out to the other room:
     "Hey Greg, Don wants to know when he'll be as smart as you."
     But her defensiveness was a long-time theme with her; when she was 14 and I was in college already and 20 years old she wrote in one early letter:

              . . . .I'm sorry that you were
     sick last week. I thought
     about you alot and I hope you
     will make it all worthwhile
     this coming week. Even though
     I'm "illiterate" I can still
     put down on paper what I want
     to say.
          I'd give anything to be
     able to go out at nite with
     you and have my mother not
     care but I guess "Love in the
     Afternoon" is the best I can
     do a present. . . .

     But I don't know what made her react as if I called her "illiterate."  I guess I was more overbearing than I thought.  I wanted to get laid, after all, and I wasn't dumb enough to insult a girlfriend in a relationship as tentative as this unless it was just banter -- but she called things off anyway, on her own, saying I really was too old for her.  It was two years after that we started going out again, but this time her mother intervened, saying she had to wait until she was 18, changing her mind only when Jen turned 17 and was about to graduate.  So we could see each other,  if only on weekends, and her letters started again:

           . . . .I thought alot about you
     today.  I'm sure going to miss you
     this week just like last week &
     the week before. . . .
     Did you ever notice how I skip from
     subject to subject.  I feel very
     self-concious (sp.) writing to you
     because I know that you notice my
     terrible sentence structures, lack
     of transitions, and my limited
     vocabulary. . . .
     I'm getting quite a few hints on
     the art of "making love" from this
     book I'm reading.  with a little
     practice I should become quite
     adept.  Of course I'll restrict my
     practice time to the time spent
     with you which never seems to be
     enough.  You always said you needed
     me but that I didn't need you.
     Well, I think you're pretty well
     straightened out now & I am
     starting to need you more and more.
     I love you Don, I'm sure of that &
     I know that I want you & now I
     really do need you.  You're so
     quite sometimes that its' hard for
     me to say these things in person.
     I can't wait until Sept. when I
     can quit Allen-Bradley & go to
     school which means I'll also see
     more of you.
          I hope you didn't mind me
     dragging you to that picnic Sun.
     At least you made me happy by
     COMING  ---------- to the
     picnic. . . . That concludes this
     irratic effort . . .

     I was a little taken aback by the mention of being all straightened out, since I had mostly forgotten the performance anxiety that cropped up when I worried about following through on our first spontaneous session.  Even though I got a stifled laugh once when I couldn't help calling myself the incredible shrinking man after a movie we had just seen.
     I knew I was rather withdrawn around her -- though I hoped not overly critical -- mostly because everything I was learning was beyond her and I didn't enjoy just lecturing when what I wanted was a good discussion, but at the time I figured that would come later.  At least I had her pointed toward college.  And I had my own place, moving out from my parents' in time to get drunk on the Fourth of July and toss those firecrackers down the stairwell.  Celebrating independence, of course, and the freedom to fuck like goats.  But a sign of her struggles to come might be in the next letter where she writes of her entrance tests:

      I don't have to go back tomorrow, it's for those eleigible to take the English test to be exempt from English 101.  I'm not elegible because I only got a 60 on the ACT in English . . .
     And she wasn't self-conscious about writing that summer that she wanted to lose some weight, that she had about as much resistance to food, sex & sleep as a wet noodle.  And with her last letter before moving in I realized that I was probably dealing with a girl of rather unusual sexual intensity:

     I went to the doctor to-nite fir my physical for U.W.M.  I never had a real physical before.  I wonder if any other women get "hot pants" from a physical.  Christ, the way he moved his hands around I thought I'd croak. . . . he weighed me so I have definitely decided to go on a diet . . . . I miss you so much during the week, honey . . .I resent every bit of fun or enjoyment you have away from me
. . . .I think I'll go to bed soon.  Then I can dream about you.  I may not be perfect but I'm trying to learn to be the girl you want me to be.  I sure hope you're  happy with me as I am with you.

          All my Love Always,
                           Jenny
     Oddly enough, it was the same Possley family doctor who played a role in her moving in.  Her parents thought it was outrageous for her to even locate in the same building, and relented only to the point of suggesting they ask the doctor -- who had a daughter about Jenny's age -- what he thought.
     They stipulated to following his opinion, not worrying much about it.  As it turned out his daughter was away at college in Madison, and he thought it was perfectly all right for her to move across town, no matter if I was so close by or not.  I did have to wonder if her moist, cozy session with him had influenced his friendly attitude, while I was looking forward to a lover who could get off rubbing it against the corner of the sink.
     So she moved in, and though she was still cuter than almost any chick I had met, her desire to please me didn't always extend -- and she had very black hair -- to shaving her legs and depilitating the dark growth on her arms often enough.  Still, I didn't really want to control her, just wanted to be left alone at times.  It was pointless to try to interest her in something I was reading -- though I tried with some poetry by Dylan Thomas, which I even had on a record, along with Karl Shapiro's In Defense of Ignorance -- when she had to go to every class and take notes while I slept late and skipped lecture sections we managed to take together except the first and last days of the semester.
     And I still aced Econ 101 while she scraped by, and couldn't understand how I -- with some knowledge of Marx and Engels from a philosophy course, honed by the Garsons -- could question a few tenets of capitalism in class.
     Similarly, in a more playful manner, I would use some notions I learned about in Epistemology to try to get her to question the very truth of reality.  But she  quite sensibly maintained nature was concrete and predictable, and any philosophers who claimed otherwise were crazy, or trying to fool you.  And none of that Veil of Maya crap, either.  Ironically, it was when we dropped acid years later that she granted that those thinkers may have had a point.
     But what this materialism of hers -- and mine too, I had to admit -- meant for the notion of free will, she didn't know, though she accepted that too.  Even if,  as I pointed out, a universe of cause and effect didn't alter its mechanics just when it was convenient for us to think so.
     As Vonnegut's Billy Pilgrim concurred with Gen. Rumfoord about the necessity of firebombing Dresden:  "I know, everybody has to do exactly what he does."
     Which explained, I noted, why some of those reductionists could believe that free will was an illusion, that thought was something that just occurred a millisecond after an action.  An epiphenomenon, as it was termed, that accompanied our already determined impulses.  Thanks, Dr. Ross.
     Ultimately, though, such speculation was only rewarding in the beer-soaked sessions of cosmic import I had with other students holding scholarly pretensions, usually in a bar.  So I learned early on not to look to Jenny for intellectual badinage, though she understood when I explained my resolution of the free will versus determinism debate:  It didn't matter.
     We acted the way we acted, and couldn't do any differently even if we were aware of forces pressing on us.  Such awareness merely became another influence, in an infinite regress, yet we still had to act.
     An enlightened society made exceptions for inescapable compulsion -- the proverbial gun to the head -- but otherwise we had to live with the everyday results.  Coerced or not.
     As Bibiana said, "So what if you knew everything was predetermined -- what would you do different?"
     I knew I couldn't argue with that.
     But if I was too remote for too long Jenny would let the cat box fill up while the smaller kitten would make it worse by scratching out his crap onto the linoleum, or drop her own clothes and accessories wherever she felt like until I would explode -- a few times, anyway -- and swing out wildly with a clenched fist at whatever part of her was closest until I was spent after some clubs to the body.
     As she frankly admitted years later, "Sometimes I deserved it and sometimes I didn't."  But it was certainly a frustrating way -- for both of us -- to get attention, and more and more I thought something was wrong and I shouldn't be with her.  And she was the only woman I would ever hit.
     The cats turned out to be a further bother when we discovered way in the back of a deep, dim closet where we tossed rags or at least unwanted clothes that they had been using the pile to piss on.  Close up it reeked, of course, but we didn't notice until Jenny went way back with a flashlight to look for something.  More surprising -- though it wasn't unusual that she had been walking around naked -- she said that on some sort of impulse she had sat down on the old plush floor cushions to turn the flashlight on her own vulva.
     "I could see what it really looked like inside -- I'll never ask you to do anything . . . to do that to me any more.  I can understand why you wouldn't want to . . ."
     It was true that I could find the occasional cunt in pictures or real life to be cute, a defined groove at most with chubby outer lips but the rest tucked away, hair neatly trimmed and not a wild thicket -- but some were more like a gravy boat filled with night crawlers.  Such a critique, I felt, was matched by the description I had read -- seconded by a girlfriend -- of the male genitals as resembling a pile of turkey giblets.
     But with her I had mostly noticed how a true brunette with white skin shaded into red and dark red edging the black pubic hair, a private view that was a little flick of knowledge.
     So I was surprised, mostly because I had generally ignored anyway what hints she had been making that I eat her pussy, and didn't know it was an issue.  It was hard to get to, not like her nipples, and it always did what it was supposed to and left my face and moustache dripping to the point where I didn't really feel right about kissing but didn't know whether to wipe it off.
     And with what?  I thought that might be the equivalent of her spitting my come, which she had never done.  Especially since she came as fast as she wanted without it, anyway -- I would just stroke until she went a little loose and I would ask, "Did you come?"  She would nod while letting out a softly exhaled "uh-huh," and I let myself come too.
     So I guess I ignored her hints while plunging ahead.
     But I could still feel a little guilty since I had even gotten her to douche.  I had read enough women's magazines in their homes, since I was a compulsive reader, like Cosmopolitan -- I would read Ladies Home Journal if that's all I could get my hands on -- to know it wasn't medically necessary, but given the direction of the plumbing and the role of gravity, I felt uneasy about being a backup cleaning system.
     And it seemed they all got yeast infections eventually, or trichomoniasis -- which at least one insisted on pronouncing trichomonas -- or chlamydia.  And TV advertising emphasized the need to feel fresh.
     Anyway, I didn't invent the concept of douching.  So it was only in the abstract that I eyed delectable young ladies and thought I want to see what you taste like.  In reality I didn't want to bother.
     And my fastidious nature wasn't challenged then by anything more outr�:  It would take until the '80s to realize times had changed when I read in Cosmo that ladies should prepare for their bouts of anal sex by inserting a soapy finger.  But then I could feel superior, having picked up on the merits of such personal everyday hygiene years before when reading Kerouac's Big Sur, where he mocked the general populace for not cleansing with soap and water and going around with "dirty azzholes."
     As time went on she took more and more solace in her favorite albums, played on our beat up, green leatherette-covered record player:  Barbra Streisand and West Side Story.  Nothing to be ashamed of, but I soon tired of them and had my own to get drunk to when I had written enough -- or tried to -- for a session and wanted to get to where I could sleep -- shutting her out with the Dylan Thomas and Edith Piaf and Joan Baez and the first of several copies of Carmina Burana.  After first hearing Thomas read I would often think of some coincidentally appropriate lines of his when I left some semen in her hand or on her face, calling forth my Quivering Prince, or prints -- though I doubt any woman picked up the reference.
     In the same way I realized I could stump just about everybody by asking what city in Wisconsin was mentioned in a Dylan Thomas poem.  If I were feeling helpful I would tell them to think villanelle, but that's all.
     There wasn't much besides music and sex to do, anyway.  Since we weren't married I couldn't take her to the tavern with me -- otherwise legal in Wisconsin for underage spouses and children -- and though in earlier days I made it to Barney's or O'Reilly's or Hooligan's every night after second shift it was mostly to line up someone for the weekend.  I was actually very domestic and wanted someone to live with so we would only go out to eat or drink on an impulse.  I didn't want to plan my free time just so I could be sure of getting laid.
     Of course, with anybody new I had to structure time for dates until things worked out; at least whoever it was would know that we were going to screw on a regular basis.  Generally Friday nights, and if it was on Saturday and we spent the night together we had Sunday before getting up to get in enough sex to last the week.
     Drinking at home could get out of hand for me, especially when I was alone; once she came home and I was contentedly balancing a tumbler of bourbon and seltzer on my stomach sitting up on the worn mattress and blasting O Fortuna because, as I told her, I had realized a pattern in my series of short stories and figured out how I could interlock them through one narrator into a novel, yet peddle them separately.
     Thin stuff, but I was happy for the moment, though all I got was an uncomprehending "Terrific."
     I gave her a copy of my latest story, set in our old neighborhood, and when by way of opening a dialogue a few days later I -- somewhat slyly, I thought -- pointed out, "There's a certain amount of hostility toward women there," all she said was, "No shit."
     Rather sullen, I noticed.  Of course, I had been wrapped up in my writing for weeks.
     But then, considering her struggles in English class, I should have known not to expect much in the way of literary criticism.  All her papers were getting low grades, and she was having problems with her English professor, a Dr. Kathryn Whitford.
     An unforgiving harpy, to hear Jenny tell it.
     Still, I knew she cared about me a lot.  I was dutifully working out three or four times a week, rolling down an old quilt over the apartment floor for padding, and when I had progressed to the point where I needed some short pieces of something for more height from the floor for heavier deadlifts she struggled home twice from a nearby construction site and up the staircase cradling some rough concrete blocks.
     And far from resenting my drinking, she knew it mellowed me out and encouraged it by asking whether I wanted a beer whenever she got herself Cokes from the chained and locked fridge in the hall we shared with the lesbian couple next door.  Another guy up on the third floor also used it.
     Generally I didn't accept, since I kept to my own work routine, but she would often make me boloney and cheese sandwiches if she thought I might want one.
     But I at least had hoped I could find someone who could entertain herself, since while I hated conforming to timetables or punching a time clock I had to compensate by setting my own patterns and rituals to concentrate on the important work of the moment, even though it looked like all I had was freedom.
     Other people put in their hours at work -- or in class -- and seemed pretty carefree the rest of the time and didn't understand why I had to be so businesslike except when it was clearly time to let go.
     But she would even intrude on this remoteness, sitting or moving around half-naked until she knew I was watching with a growing interest then half-heartedly covering herself, pretending modesty, suggesting, "Oh no, the mystery -- "
     But with her the sex could be over really fast, lights on and TV babbling away, and she would be left on her own again.  Maybe falling asleep, but several times when we were still side by side, sticky and relaxed, I would see the tears collecting and falling down her cheeks.
     "What's the matter?"
     "I always think it means you still love me."
     But I had no way to manufacture a fascination with her where there wasn't any, and I didn't try to talk her into anything when she hinted at moving out.
     Before she did finally leave she said flatly, though she was somewhat tearful, "I'm never going to be an intellectual.  I'm . . .  never going to to go down to the library to check out the latest poetry books. . . ."
     I couldn't argue with that.  Anyway, there seemed to be a lot of women around now that I was taken, and I had scarcely admitted to myself that she could leave -- though I feared that at least l might get really horny again and begin to imagine what I would do to her if she would turn up at the door.
     But I could let her go because I had the built-in protection guys had against blatant sexual manipulation:  It took a while for real horniness to take over, and until then it was hard to anticipate feeling deprived.  And you could always imagine a new lover in the picture, even if there were no actual candidates.
     But underneath everything I had to admit that if women really controlled life and could demand the most abject worship in return for pussy, I would do it.  If that were the only way.  Fortunately, the world wasn't made so that men were that powerless, and if someone showed a tendency to test me with unreasonable demands I would immediately balk.
     Even as she was leaving, bitter at my indifference and convinced it was my nature, there was a part of me that wanted to say, But you don't understand, I've got this big bloody heart that I want to give to someone and be deeply in love with, it's just not you. . . .  I did advance the bucket theory -- that my affection, apart from sex, was like a fluid that slowly dripped into a pail.  Keep tipping the pail and there was never very much to enjoy, but let it alone and don't test it for a while and it would eventually fill up to come splashing out to surprise us both.  Never seemed to happen, though she claimed to have tried it.
     But there was still another complication:  That fall I'd had a skin infection on my groin, for no apparent reason except that the dry skin that I grew up with that spared me from much adolescent acne sometimes caused a lot of scratching -- and maybe her over-vigorous fingernails carried something too -- and it started to flare up.
     Anxious as I was to get rid of any blemishes on my balls I would compulsively peel the skin  -- as with a sunburn -- layers that came back worse than ever and I would drink until I could fall asleep despite the pain I eventually caused, and usually in the morning it would feel OK.  Scabbing over again.
     Finally, one night that didn't work -- the pain was still excruciating -- and Jenny drove us to the emergency hospital on 25th and Wells Streets, where the examination brought back to me the line, "One was so small it was nothing at all. . . ."  There I got some pills, antibiotics I assumed, though I never was told exactly what I had.  I mentioned the sleep problem and the doctor gave a me a small bottle of Nembutal right then.
     I washed down two with wine that night, and soon drifted away.  The flakes cleared up quickly, and I restrained myself.  I was apologetic about the scabs that had even encroached on my dick, and reticent about sex, but she hesitantly revealed it actually felt good to her.
     But after that when I had to get up early for an exam or something and knowing how hard it would be, I would take some pills and drink wine and go under while playing my most stirring music.
     Capriccio Italien, for one, and the heavily emotional Warsaw Concerto.  Smart-ass that I was, I found I could irritate even musicians when I stumped them by asking who the composer of that one was.  Bonus points for naming the British movie that contained it; double bonus for the American title.
     When drunk I would forego the more cerebral Dvorak and Schoenberg records I brought back from the Garsons, sometimes just wallowing for no real reason except youthful weltschmerz.
     Sadly, the older cat, the orange-striped Max Orion, didn't come back one morning, and we pictured him squashed by a bus, but the little gray one -- eventually left behind by Jenny, though it was supposed to be her responsibility -- was still there, planting both front feet in his food dish and scattering it when he ate.  That was why we called him Pig, and he was especially annoying, since he hadn't been properly socialized and squirmed and struggled whenever I picked him up.  Though he would creep into my lap when I was sitting up in bed and knead the thin blanket covering my legs with his front paws and suck contentedly on a nub of fabric, purring away, that's all he would permit.  No petting.
       half in a fog and then mostly blanked after washing down some sleeping pills with port wine and plumbing the depths of sound, realizing how the kids could take downers at a concert and still stumble around awake as the blasting music was more exquisite for having penetrated layers of drugs, saying I only want to be affectionate, come here you little bastard after it jumped out of my arms and away and I tried again but it would have none of me and I started lighting firecrackers and tossing them as he ran around the room and eventually hid under our one old easy chair as they got closer and I lit one and pitched it underhand under the chair where it exploded as he cowered ungrateful little fucker until I settled down for a while in a stupor and he eventually crawled out blood and drool trickling from the mouth and stealthily onto my lap . . . 
     I felt terrible when I woke up the next day, of course, not only because of the hangover, since I thought I couldn't abide cruelty to children or animals.  Bullying may never be right, but adults could look out for themselves or at least were on notice that they should do something or suffer for it, and that was the way it was.  I had been pushed around myself until I bulked up.
     "Well, goodbye . . ." were Jen's final words as she lingered in the doorway -- probably expecting my last-minute protest -- before taking her remaining few possessions for the short trip to Allan and Ieva's.
     Even if I hurt a bit, I could never directly say so; I would just come on a little romantically until we were screwing, and it happened that way soon enough at the new place.  But for the time being, I had decided to finish another story -- rounding off the lot -- and polish them again on the portable typewriter.  I generally ended the sessions by drinking, and if I was too much awake beyond that, listening to music -- immerse myself in the emotions, actually, of Tchaikovsky warhorses like his violin concerto, or even Ravel's Bolero, but I felt everyone did that once in a while.
     I envisioned Anne-Marie or Aileen or even Barbara Firley from St. Leo's Grade School, all pussies I thought I wanted to eat at one time or another.  Somebody, but I wished Jenny would appear at the door.
     Allen and Ieva were my friends, of course, and were were still part of a group that published an off-campus magazine, first rather effetely called Milieu, then -- maybe even more pretentiously -- riverrun, as Milwaukee at least had three main rivers.  By this time, Julian Feindorfer had taken over exclusively as editor, writing around the country to get submissions from established poets.  One that he actually got was Charles Bukowski's Fire Station poem, while he allowed each of us to print a few of our own.  So we gathered for discussions, or just to party with other graduates.
     Allan allowed as how he was dumpfounded at the job Jules had done.  And he was happy that if any errors made it into print he wasn't the escape goat any more.
     Jenny was generally there, of course, and though I knew she was always loyal when we were a couple, she didn't have any compunction about getting laid when she was unattached -- either because she just liked sex or because she wanted to validate herself with anyone who paid her attention.  The difference to me was important, though I never came to any conclusion.  But it wasn't hard for her to get responses -- while I had to follow all the traditional routes, with lots of empty stretches.
     So it wasn't unusual that we should end up together for the night, after the first time when I came over early and she was doing some ironing in a filmy white gown that swirled openly around her, naked otherwise.
     "I guess I shouldn't be doing this," she said, pulling the robe shut over the prominent pink areolas.
     She was still putting the hot iron up when I came around behind her, twisting her head back and toward me, adding a nuzzling the way women did while prolonging the pure groping of her tits and grinding her ass into me as we approached something more mutual.  Lightly I pinched and rolled her nipples around, while she smiled a little.
     "Is that a banana in your pocket or do you have an erection?"
     Since her humor hadn't changed much since she was 16 and sent me a Hanukkah card, though neither of us was Jewish -- unlike a lot of the students at Washington High, where we both had gone, and the surrounding neighborhood in the Sherman Park area -- I assume she heard that somewhere recently.  She tended to like chanting the Beans, beans, the musical fruit rhyme, and drove me further up the wall when I would come out of the bathroom -- no matter if it was late in the evening on a date -- by observing I bet you feel 10 pounds lighter, though of course in that context it was not relevant at all, and you'd think she would figure it out from my blank-faced shrug.  Not the femininity I pictured when I thought of the tantalizing Anne-Marie, or even Aileen.
     She always had her own kind of wit, though usually of the loudmouth, putdown type:  Not too swift, are you? would be typical, except -- as she pointed out -- around me.  Then she was the opposite of her usual bowling-queen, factory worker type.  But I was careful those days only to come on physically; if she responded, I wouldn't be caught asking for anything more permanent.
     Even though she was fucking Matt Wilensky and dating some others I barely knew about, I didn't care at the moment, though when Wilensky was over there at night I had qualms.  One of those times she asked why I was hanging around when obviously Wilensky was waiting for me to leave, and I had to tell her truthfully that earlier he had asked for a ride home.  A blow to her ego I didn't mind delivering.
     I had to add haltingly that I hoped she was taking care of things so that Matt hadn't been staying with her right before I did.  And leaving his own distasteful quivering prints, I thought, jealousy and hygiene mingling in my thoughts.
     So I guess I projected some ambivalence as we drifted back together, letting her look for a new place for both of us.
     The old building on Prospect Avenue, famous as a party house known simply by its number, 1833, was being converted into yet another nursing home, and I had to move anyway.  So we ended up in the lower front of a four-unit building on E. Kane Place, on the Milwaukee River bluff and behind a similar building on the street in the front.
     Eventually it would be remembered by some as the home of Jeffrey Dahmer's last victim; before that, Kane Place and the Avant Garde would be featured by local writer Tony Hozeny in the stark short novels Driving Wheel and My House is Dark.  And quirky local reporter and columnist -- for the Sentinel and alternative press -- Michael Horne lived for a while in the same building, down the street from the original hippie food co-op that became the thriving Outpost Natural Foods on Capitol Drive.
     After we relocated, I was driving cab again, my work-study job over, and I  threw my earnings, meager as they were, into a coffee can after every 11-hour shift -- or, generally, around dawn -- to add to Jenny's wages from Allen-Bradley to pay the rent.  It was a lot more than we were used to spending as students for the two-bedroom, furnished flat with appliances.
     But her return to factory work made it possible to afford, even as I chafed under images I had of the view the farmer saw plowing behind two horses in a cartoon I had seen, complaining about the same old scenery, walking behind the horse's ass with the same view as I had of the same old butt in the air on our ratty bed. 

     Even if I occasionally had her go down on her knees and crawl to it in front of the tall, circulating fan on a stand on the kitchen linoleum for whatever variety I could think of, it was more to humor me than anything else, with a face almost as endearing as ever looking up, occasionally flicking to my eyes with her own doe eyes to gauge my pleasure as she remembered to employ her tongue on my sac.
     It could bring to mind the satisfying refrain, "The other was large and won prizes."  But I had also been noticing her nose was more pointed than I liked, nostrils a little too prominent.
     Still, I was off in my mind somewhere thinking of how it would be to have someone to really talk to.  Aside from bill-paying and our jobs, we didn't have much diversion.  Just a cheap dual-speaker radio I bought at Arlans discount store, the old TV that sat on a crude bookshelf with my paperbacks, and the battered phonograph.
     The radio, I made a point of specifying, would go with me if we split again, since I paid for it.  She received that remark in silence, shrugging.
     She cooked some meals and I did the dishes, then read the paper, while she watched TV until her bedtime, shows like Ed Sullivan and The Fugitive.  Mostly I would type and re-type my rejected poems and stories.
     The factory didn't do much for her intellectualism. She would come home sweating and strip and flop naked on the floral-print soft chair, the screens on the rear wall facing her letting in a little cool air from the Milwaukee River, while I sat on the couch opposite her, revising my material with the portable typewriter on my lap.
     From near the brush-lined water, bugs -- the smallest living bits of green I've seen -- somehow made it in through even the window screens.
     Slumping down to spread her legs a little, talking maybe about her foreman or whatever.  Once she quoted a fellow line-worker, a married black woman who said her motto was, "When the weather's hot and sticky, that's the time to dunk your wicky."
     I took the hint -- it didn't take much -- but reading and some desultory attempts to write during the mugginess occupied my limited time when I wasn't cab driving.  And there was usually that case of Weber beer to be worked on.
     So it was no surprise that I didn't object when she moved out again -- she always had her parents' home to go to -- though it meant a lot more cab driving for me, usually two 11-hour shifts a week, and less writing.  But the manuscripts were coming back as fast as I sent them anyway.  Almost as irritating, though I had gotten rid of the sloppy gray cat when I moved, she had stuck me with another we called Killer.  Also gray.  We kept him inside, where his annoying qualities included leaving dark, wet footprints in the bathroom sink where the faucet dripped -- to his fascination -- and on the patterned oilcloth on the kitchen table when I was working.  Butter couldn't be left out, of course, covered or not, or it would be stuck to with gray hair.
     He did learn to retrieve crumpled pages and cigaret packs when I tossed them across a room, at least for a few rounds of fetch before he grew bored.
     But because it seemed most of the Humane Society cats came with fleas and ear mites, it had  became my task to wash him in the sink with a special liquid and swab inside his ears with a lotion, once a week, tolerating me and the Q-Tips, even though he lost his cat �lan, pitifully soaked to half of his dry size until I toweled him off before he could scoot off, still damp, to crawl in the dust under the bed.  Something he immediately did anyway when released.
     Occasionally he would get out, and I wouldn't have a clue where to look, but little kids from one of the two adjacent buildings would bring him back to my door.  I had no idea how they knew where he lived.
     Sometimes I came home at dawn and sat in the doorway to the hall in the middle of the building and drowsily drank beer while the sun rose high enough in the east to be warming and some of the same kids -- I scarcely knew whether they were boys or girls or what unit they were from -- would huddle up against me in their thin jackets, everyone very cheerful and cozy for the moment.
     Soon the beer would take over and I could go in to sleep while leaves drifted down like weightless brown and golden wedges.
     But I couldn't keep up with rent, and I didn't need the extra room, shabby though it all was, and I started looking for another place.  At the same time I applied for -- or least was on the lookout for -- different jobs, hoping for one a little more in keeping with my degree.  But I was surviving, and I knew that although it might take a few weeks, I would encounter somebody to go out with and that I would get laid again.
     So every so often I had to explain to myself how I ended up about to marry Jenny.
     It started with the flu, as I said later to those who would ask.
     By then, I had a line on a job at The Milwaukee Journal and had given notice to move when I succumbed to that year's flu, a virulent type that flattened me and then left me unduly weak as I tried to gather my stuff and look for a new apartment.  A cubbyhole was all I wanted, but suddenly all effort was beyond me.
     As time ran out, I called Jenny.  In all sincerity, I asked if I could just park my belongings and myself at her new place a few blocks south on Brady Street.  By most appearances she was happy, with a female roommate, though she told me later that she had moved home and waited for me to get in touch.
     "When you didn't call at my mother's I figured I had to do something -- I wasn't going to live way over there and have her waiting for me to come home every night, and I figured it was over for sure."
     Of course it never occurred to me that she was expecting anything, but I certainly wouldn't have made any domestic overtures.
     So she found Sherry Lerner, a slightly younger UWM student who had an older brother, a disk jockey on WOKY who had changed his name to Peter Wolff.  Rather plain, her main distinction was that she was taking the Pill regularly, though she was a virgin -- without a boyfriend -- just because something could happen real soon and she wanted to be ready.
     So of course, she appreciated Jenny's expertise, and the apartment above Mary's Diner on Brady was just right for both of them -- and on the bus line to the Journal Co. on State Street.
     Jen herself had moved on from Emko foam -- first suggested by Aileen as better than her haphazard approach -- to the newly popular Pill.  This time the chatty gynecologist seemed very concerned that her boyfriend might find her too tight, which could have been flattering to one of us.  But she had to volunteer that, if anything, the opposite was true, which at least he attributed to her extreme lubrication.
     But with two bedrooms it left only the couch in the front room overlooking the busy street -- George Webb's hamburger parlor and the A&P supermarket on the other side -- for me, though at least I could pile my stuff in a heap in the dining room.  The malaise dragged on, though I was soon at least well enough to think about getting out -- the Journal job came through and I started as a library clerk, doing research in the files for reporters and sometimes the general public, whose calls we took because the paper wanted the citizens to think of us as the purveyors of fact -- while Jenny had her own life.
     It turned out the library -- sometimes known as the morgue in movies -- was staffed mostly with young women, hired because college students taking some time off when they weren't sure anymore what they wanted to do in life were somewhat more educated and capable than kids just out of high school, but still willing to work cheap.  At least for a while, until they went back to school or drifted further into bohemia or got married.
     Men like me, with or without a degree, were rarer, though not unheard of -- some didn't fit anywhere else and stayed for decades -- and I passed the 35 words-per-minute typing test with some finagling by management just so they could qualify me.
     Jenny and Sherry, who had some contacts through her brother, were by then taking trips to Chicago and various clubs, though neither could drink legally.  It was there Jenny met a stocky, light-skinned black guy, whose name immediately went past me when I met him at her flat, though all the freckles and reddish hair made him distinctive enough.  She said he was Adam Wade's cousin, and part of his entourage -- they had met at one of Wade's shows -- and she had been going down there to see him for a while until he came back with her.
     Well, all right -- the Journal Library after all was full of women, some of  whom told me they liked my newly-adopted sport coat and colorful striped-shirt look, a change from beatnik utilitarianism -- until I went to bed the first night on the couch just off her bedroom in the front.
     First I drank my usual six-pack or so after coming back from Ehlert's tavern just down the block.  There was no door between us, just a curtain and it wasn't long until I heard -- or imagined I heard -- the thrashing and rumpling and murmurs that seared themselves into my brain as what could only be his mounting her and her lifting her legs and responding with her hips as she always did.  Probably reaching a hand down and cupping his balls.  Or maybe not.  Maybe they were just talking quietly and simply shifting to get comfortable, but I couldn't stand a second more of it and went for the phone.  The mental picture was unbearable.
     She said later that she thought I had just called an old girlfriend, but the only place I could think of on such short notice was my mother's in West Milwaukee, where she had an extra room, mostly used as a showcase for some antiques and collectible dolls.  By then it was early morning and I had to work that day, but she didn't question me much and just sleepily said sure when I asked if I could come over to stay until tomorrow.  So I slept amongst the polished showcases after taking the carefully-costumed dolls off the high, solid bed, itself an antique.
     The room with its air of old, well-preserved sterility and the frozen dolls was a sharp contrast to Jenny's vivacity, writhing far away.
     But what to do the next day?  After work, still weak from the illness and distraught, I called Jenny and said bluntly, "I think we ought to get married."
     Simply, I had thought that if I were that horribly, sickeningly jealous I had to be in love -- Journal cuties forgotten -- and might just well give in to it.  I did wonder how yet another singer, first Al Jarreau, now Adam Wade -- a Johnny Mathis sound-alike with a few modest hits -- had intruded on my life, even if not as directly, though he probably added to the freckled, rutting intruder's appeal.
     She didn't give me an answer then, naturally enough, but we made a date to meet at Kalt's on Oakland Avenue the next night.
     I had my clay stein of dark German beer while we ate corned beef sandwiches -- caricatures of famous performers, mostly at the Fred Miller Theatre next door looking down on us -- as I was mostly silent, since I had no real reason to try to convince her of anything.  I knew what she felt.
     "Well, Don, you know marriage means forever.  And I have to tell you I was, you know, pretty promiscuous when we weren't together."
     I knew that, of course.  Fucked half the East Side was more like it, though I figured I would have done the same thing if I could.
     "Well, at least there won't be any surprises," I said.  But I was having misgivings already, opportunities at the Journal Library rising in the distance.  And there were those unbidden pictures in my mind of her fucking those guys I used used to see her with on campus.  There had been a rally of feminists one bright noon hour when some actually burned bras or anything symbolic they thought appropriate, tossing them one after the other into a flaring trash basket.  It drew a crowd to the edges, myself among them, where I saw her rummage in her purse and shrug and sacrifice a blue box of Tampax.  The event brought us face to face and in talking I mentioned the twinge I felt when I saw her around with one guy or another.
     As she had told me one time, not taunting but almost dreamily, "There's something about young men and their bodies . . ."
     "They may be friends, but I know sooner or later it's gotta be one you're screwing.  Maybe it shouldn't hurt, but it does."
     "Donald, you take sex too seriously," she had claimed.  Now that was a thought.  Of course, I wanted to be hip and like others in our supposedly liberated generation, but while it might have been an option if I could always find a cooperative partner at will, the fact was it took time and planning.  My best scenario was a week after a breakup to hit the bar again and find some chick to talk to.  Then a date on the next weekend to establish rapport.  Even in those fluid times, another week or more -- if all went well -- to get to the bed.  So it was a serious business, though she seemed blithely unaware.
     The corollary was that she thought of me as more desirable than I really was.
     So she was quickly speculating on dates, planning how soon she could tell her parents, and before I knew it I was engaged to get married in June.
     "What about Maurice?" I asked, remembering that was his name.
     "I know how to get rid of him.  I know what he hates."  She looked a little sly -- smug -- and I decided not to ask, though she had insisted on telling me how he preferred to get inside a woman and then never ejaculate, just wait until she came -- if she could, considering his inactivity, and by her own hand -- and then pull out.
     So I surmised it had to do with his manhood, or lack of it, though I didn't want to dwell on the details.  I assumed he would be as chastened as I was when she once demonstrated how cooperative good sex should be when she went all passive and limp, to prove her point, and I quickly wilted in the middle of the act.
     The ring could come when we got around to it, and though I found a small apartment in a red brick building festooned with vines on the Oakland bus line where we could live together for a while, she eventually moved back home for the symbolism of coming fresh to the marriage.
     How could I argue with that?
     But first we cohabited in that already-hot spring month in the stifling small room with no cross ventilation, where I left the cold shower running continuously and the bathroom door open to cool the air.  We were shocked by the ceiling collapsing, saturated, dispersing plaster dust even covering the oven from where we salvaged her tuna casserole.
     So she inadvertently left me to revert to my bachelor ways at the Downtown Journal offices on State Street, where I tried to block the looming future marriage from my mind.
     There was a Sentinel night copy girl -- the Sentinel and the AP shared the block-sized building -- named Matty.  Her skirts were a shade too tight on an ample rear, often exposing tops of dark stockings rolled down to just above the knees on plumpish white thighs when she sat down backwards on an office chair to chat.
     She was still getting over her black boyfriend, who had been a student killed in some sort of mysterious police action at a university dormitory in Stevens Point -- all that she would volunteer -- though she would ride around with me in the sports car on days when I was off, even taking me to the boyfriend's family barbecue in Racine.  I was the only other white person.  So she used me, holding out the possibility of grabbing those big tits someday, but I was plunging much too quickly toward a marriage.  And I wasn't black, while, as she said candidly, the deceased and his buddies treated me like a queen.
     And a rather ditzy blonde -- just out of St. Joan Antida's Catholic school for girls but already pregnant, it turned out -- started shortly after I did, and I supervised her in one of the staff's simple chores, using a ruler with a handle to clip out articles for marking and filing.  With her long, straight, yellow hair -- no dark roots for her -- I found Eleanor really appealing.  I thought of her as the Dutch girl counterpart of the little Dutch boy I saw in myself once when I stared at my reflection in the grade school window.
     The idea probably came from an image in a book, since my family mainly emphasized their German and Bohemian heritage.  But though she was actually Polish, it turned out that I was also Dutch and French, one distant ancestor having moved to Holland from Bremen and married into some newly-arrived French Huguenots, founding our line as an aristocratic-sounding de Bourghelles.
     But Ellie's coming baby had a father in the picture:  Mac Ristic was a surly painter recently graduated from Layton School of Art, who was moving with her to the East Side, and she soon quit.
     Still, our paths crossed every once in a while, leading eventually to an aborted affair.  But clipping newspapers was not her forte, though whether out of simple ineptness or the quick boredom of the gifted, I couldn't tell.
     Our brief fling came after an abusive time with Ristic when I ran into her walking to Glorioso's deli on Brady Street.  She was enthusiastic about astrology, as I soon found out when she eagerly offered to research my chart.  Only to immediately turn cool when she learned I was a Scorpio.
     Apparently the stars said we weren't compatible, though I liked her fine, and at my diplomatic quibble one night with the scientific basis for that finding, and who decided this stuff in the first place? immediately concluded I had proved her point and leaped from the couch.  I was too skeptical and scientific, a real journalist, always needing answers when there were many things that couldn't be explained, like who wrote the Bible.
     Not really true, I wanted to point out.  Starting at least with the Nicaean Council in 325 AD, where books of the Bible were said to have been voted in or out, lots was known or at least speculated on about individual authors of scripture.  Even if it was just conjecture.  And far from being a dedicated scientist, though it was my job as a reporter to ask questions, I was perfectly content to live without the answers, while it was the astrologers who needed even a pseudo-science to deal with uncertainties.
     Already I was wistful over her winsome doll face and impressive ass packed into tight jeans decorated with cursive gold embroidery, slipping away as I realized it was futile to try to grapple with her viewpoint, and so it was all over with us.
     Immediately after her hall door closed I was glad I had returned the copy of Linda Goodman's Sun Signs that warned women about
Scorpios:  "Just behind his frosty reserve is a huge pot of boiling steam that bubbles and seethes continually" and "If you're in love with a Scorpio male and the word passion frightens you, put on your track shoes and run as if King Kong were pursuing you.  He is."
     But on the other hand, I would read, not necessarily, as the whole book was a masterpiece of equivocation.
     But I still had to get back my copy of Paul Goodman's Nature Heals, though at my almost immediate knock she brusquely demanded to know, "Who is it?"  Even while damn well aware who it was.
    And that was before I had the right opportunity to confront her other quirk.  Like only one other woman I knew -- one I had met at Barney's -- she had avoided ever being naked to the waist, even wearing a nightgown that she kept buttoned down the front.
     She always stopped me from fondling whatever breasts she was concealing there, the few times we actually made it to bed before her blowup.  Since it was clear she was self-conscious about their small size, I quickly decided to ignore them and bare her thighs and whatever else I could expose there, happy to find her modesty didn't extend to her genitals.
     She had left her young son with her mother, so with Joan Armatrading singing Down to Zero on her small record player on the bare floor of her bedroom, Mac's coveralls still on the back of the door -- though she claimed he was out of her life -- we had barely satisfactory sex.  But then, I subscribed to the theory that even when it's bad it's good.
     Though she had the sensitivity after a while to turn off the deeply lugubrious Armatrading, whom I actually liked, I had found her shrinking-violet act off-putting enough to take the spontaneous excitement out of everything, and hardly managed to get it in.
     But I had learned a long time ago that squeezing the base of my dick would force it to be hard enough to at least slip past the outside lips, where the right motions could allow the pleasure to take over and I would stiffen more and let go and soon be pumping away.
     Still, after my tentative thrusting she surprised me when we were sitting up side by side, backs against the headboard, when it was over by remarking, "I don't know whether you know it or not, but I climaxed then."  This was startling enough, since she was quite passive, but also because I don't think I ever heard a woman call her orgasm a climax in that kind of intimate conversation.
     But of course the relationship was already doomed, though I had studiously avoided any mention of her tits until she would specifically acknowledge what her problem was and give me an opening to reassure her, whatever it took.
     With only one other coupling in my own bedroom, it didn't happen, though I would always retain the fleeting impression of a small but perfectly adequate -- in my opinion -- breast under my hand in her delicate black bra before she immediately flinched and moved my palm away.  So I never got to explain that tits could be tiny and yet be cute just because they suited their possessor.
     But the Library also employed the tall, rather sturdy Betty Chesak, though she put me off when I joked around and called her my Tawny Goddess.
     Still, she was clearly flattered.  And we could at least talk about the Chicago Symphony and its latest director, Jean Martinon, since she loved the classics.  But she had a boyfriend, a violinist, and was happy just to pass on some of her poetry once in a while when she learned I had published some myself, and theoretically helped edit Feindorfer's magazine.
     Like most of us who were at home there, she enjoyed learning new and obscure facts, and I did find out that she was another who couldn't recall Richard Addinsell, much less the movie Dangerous Moonlight.  Or Suicide Squadron.
     The only other poet to have been in those environs for a while I actually knew: Jerry Berndt from Madison.  Also a filmmaker who showed his first film at the UWM Student Union.
     Word got around all too soon that I was engaged, since Jenny sometimes came to pick me up in the new white Triumph we had bought even before the wedding, with her credit at Allen-Bradley's credit union.  I was never going to get my hand up Mattie's skirt to the smooth white skin that somehow looked damp when she flashed a bit, and I never had much time to get to know anyone else, though candidates drifted in and out over just those few short months.
     Some, I knew, wouldn't care about my marital plans.  I realized the rare attractive female reporters who came into the file and reference area for help didn't even look at me much, maybe out of a sense that they were superior, though I was as old as some who had started reporting right out of college.
     I thought about calling the engagement off, with common sense coming back, at least partly from a conscience that said it was the right thing to do before things got more complicated.
     Though the sex was exciting again for a while, I knew it was only because we had been separated and I hadn't been getting laid.  I came the closest to bailing when Jen came to visit on the East Side and we sat in the car before I took her home after quick afternoon sex when she just pulled up her skirt and I had some of the old time urgency and where she cried again.
     Her hair was in a dark shag cut, and her small, darting tongue and bright lips -- she was always olive-skinned in the summer, especially -- made her adorable, as usual, and I traced a light pattern on her dappled cheek in the sun-baked car with my finger.  The kind of touch she always liked, and she looked pleased.
     I decided maybe events would provide an excuse to split someday, when I wouldn't feel I was to blame, but how could I bring myself to back out now?
     So I found myself being married in the small Methodist church near her house, with Allan Jensen the closest we had to an official photographer, and Bibiana and Gregory Garson in the audience, then in the basement of the church for cake and refreshments but no alcohol -- the church didn't approve -- where we unwrapped their Fugs album.  Then to her parents' house.  Plenty of drinking there, before our getaway to the Hilton Downtown for the weekend and more drinking for me, even a rare bottle of wine for the both of us in the restaurant, where I played at sniffing the cork before eating the prime rib and baked potato.  Extra for the sour cream.
     At the Possley's we circulated in the front rooms, doors and windows open to June sunlight and breezes, for a while standing with my Uncle Al, who had married my Aunt Marjorie after the death of her first husband, the detective.  I had liked my Uncle Stephen Whitty, though having been a cop who had even been in the paper for a shootout in a house on the West Side, he could be intimidating -- especially when he warned me about the pitfalls a juvenile delinquent would face.  So maybe it was fitting that I stole his gun from my aunt after he died.
     But he had his whimsical side.  He liked to tell people, "I may be witty, but the guy who wrote Snowbound was Whittier."  That usually led to his other witticism:  "I'm a poet and I don't know it, but my feet show it -- they're Longfellows."
     Uncle Al, a gruff factory foreman well-liked by the family, stood with us near the staircase -- Jenny still in white with white teeth heightened by her tanned olive skin, I in my dark blue suit and striped blue and white tie -- while he proffered advice, much as he had when he went with me when I was 18 to buy a used car.  Not knowing how similar the circumstances were:
     "You know, marriage is forever."  Shit, I thought, that seems to be the common sentiment.
     "That's a long time."  My stiff bourbon and seltzer in a large tumbler rimmed with gold tinkled as I gulped it.  The Possleys had brought out the good monogrammed glassware.  Combined with the drinking at the hotel it wiped me out at the end of a long day, and there was no sex on our wedding night, though I surprised myself with a never-to-be-topped -- not even close -- five rounds of sex the next day after a morning swim in the rooftop pool before checking out.
     If she was disappointed that splaying her naked legs out on the bed with her dress pulled up and the black patch between them like spilled ink so obviously available, it was soon forgotten.
     But our married time wasn't to be that long, after all.  Jenny had found us a place on Bartlett Avenue on the East Side, and we were back to work on Monday.  By that time I had gone from working days a few in a row, then nights until 11 p.m., to volunteering to take all night shifts.  I could drink when I got off and sleep late and still get up a lot more easily, the only thing that made it possible to last some 13 months.  That was about as long as I could hold any job.
     There were diversions to keep us going.  A variety of drugs was becoming more common, and people at Hooligan's and O'Reilly's and Barney's were sharing.  Though I had gone from being a beatnik to the young gentleman, I thought -- befitting my white sports car, complete with driving gloves -- even sending for a book of Esquire tips on dressing correctly where I learned how to tie my shoes with laces pointing down like little trees and tucking in my shirts by making a fold in the back before pulling up and zipping my pants, unlike TV and movie actors who were always stuffing their shirttails down past their belts -- hippies were moving in.  I could read about them in my own paper, as returnees from the coast talked about starting up their own local underground press, and the first be-in was held at the lakefront in Juneau Park.
     And I had sold my weights to Jenny's brother, knowing full-time work was all I could handle, and smoking again as well.  I could stay at the bars afterwards.  Now that we were married she could even join me, using the car herself if she needed to, though she was liable to fall profoundly asleep and neglect to pick me up for hours.
     Pot was all over, and speed was popular, and people would drop over occasionally and we would drink beer and listen to everything from the Jefferson Airplane to Chico Hamilton, a house-warming gift from Matt Wilensky.  Or we would visit other couples.  She had made a friend, Gail, at UWM, who dated and then married a part-time bartender named Cecil.  He took classes at UWM and worked nights at Stauffer's, Downtown at the top of the Marine Bank high rise on Water St. and Wisconsin Ave. overlooking the city and far onto the lake.  He could afford a really nice apartment, since his method of tending bar included ringing up premium drinks one step below their listed price and dropping the extra quarter into his white shirt pocket.  All night long.
     Once on a Saturday afternoon Cecil stopped in while I was drinking a pint of wine and gave me a Black Cadillac and we went off to the Shag house, where they lived, mostly, and rehearsed for their gig at O'Brad's on Locust Street.  There was a hookah burning some grass in the middle of a floor scattered with cushions, and Cecil said they were also stoking it with opium.
     Already heart pounding from the speed and a little dizzy from the wine on top of it I crouched down and inhaled a few times.  When I stood up all I could think of was that I had become a rising human thermometer while my pulse raced and all the pressure was ascending my spine to my head in a column of pleasure I had never experienced before and I felt my face must be glowing bright red.  Evidently I looked normal, because I could relax a little and slide down with my back against the wall to sit in silence while conversation went on around me until I could lurch to my feet and leave for supper.
     It was Cecil who, before he married Gail, told Jenny about her idea of sex, which was to put down a towel and lie flat on her stomach while he entered her from behind as best he could until he was finished.  It didn't keep him from getting married, though Gail herself even asked Jenny if she came every time she did it.
     "Of course, she was expecting I would say no, or something like that, and when I said yes she shut up real fast."
     I had to point out that Cecil's scenario shouldn't be that surprising -- we knew couples where the guy was always insinuating that he wasn't getting enough and the woman would be coyly letting it be known that he wouldn't stop trying to corner her.  But the truth was, her attitude gave him the pretext to proclaim his studliness.  Just let her keep him milked for a week or so and see what becomes of all that ardor, I said.  And it wasn't likely that the guys hadn't found out about their partner's tepid nature early on.
     At Cecil's, Jenny and I finally dropped our first LSD.  The first half of the experience was delightful, like good pot, until Cecil -- who had plenty of supposed Sandoz lab stuff -- decided we weren't high enough and gave us another dose -- pushing us into complete paranoia to the sounds of Desi, Dino, & Billy.
     I remembered leaving his apartment building on Downer Avenue, his telling us don't wake the neighbors and I saw -- sensed -- the ground as being full of jumbled white bones, all his dead Indian neighbors now sleeping in the earth, as the
Blues Magoos and Western Union by The Five Americans kept reverberating in my head.  Psychedelia was big in 1966, and it all ran together in our brains like a spaghetti of twisted colored cables.
     Jenny had to drive us, and we locked the doors at home and swore not to let anybody get in to get us, while we rode it out.  Pictures of the artists on album covers like Nancy Wilson, looked alive, like real people, while I couldn't bear to look at human flesh -- hers or mine -- since I had X-ray vision and could see tube-veins and cells.
     Eventually, I could look at real skin again, though touch was still exquisitely heightened.
     As the crest subsided I could finally fuck her -- I couldn't pass that experience up -- in extraordinary sex with a dick that seemed twice normal size feeling every molecule as I was sliding into a grasping cylinder of warm, slippery canned peaches, while the elasticity of every muscle in our bodies seemed to knit together and I came, seeming to pump from way down inside my spine for what seemed to take an eternity.
     Later I tried to write some poetry, which was completely worthless except as notes from the navigation.  Unusually relaxed and very peaceful the next day, I called Bibiana to report my insight from one of my poems:  The point is that there is no point.  So much for the universe.  That was as profound as it got, though as I believe to this day, it may very well be true, though not a practical adage to live by.
     The final impact of that night hit me later on a quiet weekend when I settled down with some beers and then a joint only to become terribly depressed, to the point of thinking humankind should protest the very universe with a massive suicide, a die-in.  A few more tries convinced me it was the grass, and I recognized that I had to give it up.
     Back at work I began to think more about how little I was paid, while reporters came in and out and went off to write things I could do with a little training.  And some of the women there paid more attention to them than to me.  The Journal published a few small human-interest pieces I wrote in a column intended for occasional contributors -- using vanity thumbnail photos to make up for lack of payment -- and I began plotting my future in journalism.  Plotting because I didn't see how I could be happy without dropping Jenny.
     How could I be a dashing newsman in a trench coat like the UPI reporter who stopped at Barney's occasionally, and ignore all the women I would meet for 40 years or so because I had a wife at home?  Just going back to UWM brought the anticipation.
     The very air in the library seemed somehow confining and frigid, as I clipped my newspapers and answered phone calls from the public -- I never forgot who Notre Dame's Four Horsemen were or what the o in Gran Turismo Omologato, or GTO, meant once I looked them up, though we were told to ask whether it was for a bar bet and decline to help if it were.
     Was there an organization who could advise the caller on breast feeding?  I had the La Leche League's phone number at hand . . .  Of course I once hated any job that didn't have hours I could plan on, just as I avoided overtime -- figuring I made enough to live on -- especially when it cut into bar-closing hours after second shift.  But I began to appreciate how reporters could come and go and wander around, no doubt fudging their time sheets or whatever.  How hard could it be?  Or copy editing -- ideal for an English major -- might offer the best of several worlds.
     Though only one library clerk was said to have ever gotten out as a reporter, I made arrangements to meet one night with Sentinel City Editor Bob Wills.  He told me that even if I took courses it wouldn't do me much good there, since both papers almost always required master's degrees.
     But by then I was committed, and looked around for a way to finance my future, eventually taking my bachelor's degree to work for the county as a social worker.  That meant I was getting up early again, and to make the transition I drank quietly every night to get to sleep, and going in while holding on rigidly at the edge of normalcy.
     Meantime, as the Vietnam War, well under way, continued I could read about the casualties in the morning paper.  Eventually, a familiar name, a guy who had hung out in the old neighborhood, Pete Feierabend, popped out at me.  Raw as my nerves already were, I cried a little at my desk as I drank from my mug of morning tea.  He hadn't even been born here, but came from Germany.
     As for myself, I applied for conscientious objector status, under the new Dan Seeger decision that said I didn't have to have a religious objection to all war -- philosophical would qualify -- but was turned down by my local draft board after I wrote a lot of bullshit quoting everybody from Gandhi to Martin Luther King Jr.
     Of course, I didn't want to kill anybody, certainly not Vietnamese fighting a nationalistic war for independence, but I wanted to keep my own ass from being blown away, though I had no idea how I might feel about a different war.
     According to the law, I had to be opposed to all wars, and I had already had several clashes with the draft apparatus before the Seeger decision, even took the physical, but they maintained that even though I was over 26 I was liable for the draft until 35 because of my previous student deferment.  It wasn't enough that all students got one and that when I enrolled and signed some papers one specifically said that submission of this form shall not constitute a request for a 2S deferment.  On the government's own document.  Ironically, I could have been exempted if I had taken the government's offer a few months earlier and gotten married then, but when Jenny pointed it out I turned her down.
     How could this be?  I pursued that question for quite a while but officials were evasive until one woman on the phone told me that, well, if I didn't want a deferment I should have specifically requested in writing that I not be given one.
     The next step was a local appeals agent, a lawyer and a holdover -- he personally and his function, which I don't think many people even knew about -- from World War II.  He seemed surprised to hear from me -- from anybody -- and put me on hold, or thought he did, while he told his secretary to hold his calls because I've got a windy one here.  Basically, he told me that he felt justified in intervening only if I were blind or deaf or missing a limb and the draft board still didn't care.
     So the board, after lecturing me on why it was my duty to go, in the tradition of a great-Uncle Howard, a Milwaukeean who had been a captain in WW II, turned me down.  The president of the board also told me that they thought I couldn't have written my statement without professional help.  I thought it was pretty good myself, though I certainly wrote every word.
     Their attitude at least gave me an opening, though, as I pointed out in my letter to the state appeal board that under the draft statutes the board's one and only function was to determine the sincerity of my beliefs, not whether I had gotten any help, and not to shame me by bringing up patriotic relatives.
     I didn't panic, since I didn't know of one person who really didn't want to go who ended up drafted, in addition to those who deliberately chose jail or Canada.  The wait seemed interminable, though.
     When I came home from the Welfare Department late one afternoon Jenny in a red blouse was leaning out of the upstairs window holding a white cardboard sign lettered Good News as I parked just off the alley.  The appeals board had ruled for me 5-0, which meant I was liable for alternative service -- a hospital or mental ward or something similar -- until age 35.  I had already decided not to apply as a medic; they were certainly heroic, but each one freed up a soldier for combat -- and probably had a shorter lifespan.
     I wrote a letter trying to have my current employment as a social worker counted as fulfilling the requirement as a community service itself, though I knew I had stalled the machinery long enough to be in a category -- over 27 -- that was unlikely to be even called short of a homeland invasion.  They wanted the young and flexible, not troublemakers like me.
     But despite Jenny's endearing concern, we weren't getting along, although technically I never committed adultery.  If she didn't ignore the cat box or fill the path to the bedroom with the detritus she shed -- scarves, jewelry, bras -- she was always putting a purse, that could have been filthy from resting any place, on the kitchen table.
     So I went to O'Brad's -- named for an Obradovich -- by myself, and met the first prospect: Sarah from Green Bay -- which of course made me think of a Dylan Thomas poem and how bright . . . frail deeds might have danced as indeed we were dancing.
     I was also seeing a woman the recently-divorced  Cecil was dating too, a former romantic possibility from UWM and Cheshire, named Cynthia.  She'd apparently gotten healthy enough to stay in school and date, and finally found herself a lover -- only to have him flop down and die of a cerebral hemorrhage walking down the sidewalk next to her on Brady Street.
     Ultimately, though, Cynthia decided that since I was technically married -- even if  restless -- it wasn't right to be seeing me.  Unfortunately, she implemented her decision by standing me up on a cold night when I waited in Joe Ermi's bar on State Street across from the Journal building until closing time.  And my bus had stopped running.
     But I had realized that not only did marriage usually make me more adept at handling women, they were going to be all around -- especially if I went into journalism.  How could I spend time in the co-ed classroom to become a new reporter while looking at what my old friend Ray Malina had called the same old hair pie?  Jenny was certainly nice if I paid attention to her, but otherwise would provoke me with all kinds of domestic obstruction instead of taking up intellectual pastimes on her own, or even reading anything besides Time magazine.
     And she balked when I wanted to alphabetize the spice rack.
     Of course, I couldn't expect her to be a poet, but even her work as a draft counselor at the Milwaukee Organizing Committee with the current crop of radicals wasn't very impressive to me, since she was only learning things about the movement I had already gone through, and parroted friends who couldn't teach her from works I didn't already know about, like Fanon's Salt of the Earth or Regis Debray's Revolution in the Revolution.
     With nothing she could impart to me -- my ideal would have been an exotic black painter also into literature and maybe philosophy -- I knew also that with all that pussy out there I would have been stultified by sticking with just a wife, no matter how cute.  No poet herself, as she said, and the most she attempted -- as far as I know -- was the scrap of paper I found:

          Why doesn't he like my friends?
    Why does he think I'm dirty?
    He fucks my fanny
    He fucks my mouth
    I want to fuck his body inside and out

     Poignant enough, I suppose, surprising me, though I would argue that I had nothing against her friends, it was just that I already had my own, and her messiness was under her control.  The supposed uncleanliness of her cunt was up to her, since she had a supply of douche powder and I put up a hook in the bathroom next to the mirror alongside the toilet for the bag, at her direction.  And turnabout -- or in this case, lack of it on my part -- was only fair, since she rarely wanted me to come in her mouth.  With good reason, I suppose, thinking it might deprive her of a climax.
     Otherwise she could be spontaneous if we were in some unconventional spot -- in the alley behind Barney's where I bent her over the trash bin, or a bedroom at someone's party.
     So it was kind of an impasse, though in my experience oral sex wouldn't have been an issue with a lot of women who were uncomfortable at anything beyond straightforward sex in the dark.  They were often the gorgeous ones I lusted after only to be rejected, silently whimpering to myself But I want to know what you taste like, even if I really wouldn't have, not for long, considering my laziness . . .
     So with Sarah to pursue I moved out, taking journalism courses at UWM a few nights a week and working at the Welfare Department.  I drank bourbon and seltzer every night starting when I got home -- even in the bright sun while sitting on the porch watching the curbside trees rustle -- so I could get to sleep early, waking in the night to drink again, until I reached the point where I was waking up with a craving just an hour or so before I had to get up.  But I was convinced I had to do it, shaky with screaming gritty nerve-endings and hung over all at once, even if slightly drunk, every morning, until the founding of Kaleidoscope changed everything while I was barely hanging on.
     By that time in my freedom -- though Jenny came to visit me, causing us to end up telling the court commissioner two different versions of the date on which we last had intercourse, apparently information she thought was crucial to the divorce -- I had completed my training at the Welfare Department.
      But though I thought I was ready to move on from Jen I felt a stab when she went into the bathroom with the door open before climbing onto the unmade sofa-bed, bending over for something.  From behind her I had a good view that shouldn't have been anything unusual by now, but in the short skirt she caused a spontaneous reaction:
     "Jennifer Groeling, where are your panties?"  Her bare ass and hairy snatch from the rear had been a jolt.
     "Oh . . . I forgot about that.  They had holes in them, so I just threw 'em in the wastebasket.  No, actually I was going to go over to O'Reilly's and bend over at the bar and freak everybody out . . . Oh, don't worry, I didn't leave the house like that."
     I had no reason not to believe her -- and I didn't check the wastebasket, at least not then, since I thought it would have revealed too much of my momentary feeling of connection.  Still, I was secretly pleased when she mentioned she was keeping her last name and not going back to Possley.  Too much trouble to change everything.
     Unhappily, by that time I learned Sarah had juvenile diabetes, and though she wanted to keep up with me when we were drinking, it had proved to be a bad strategy when controlling dosage.  I woke up with her sitting naked in bed, lots of freckles on her back and shoulders, drooling and incoherent, her face flushed, tits now forlorn and unerotic.  It was an insulin reaction -- she had explained the difference between that and the cold, clammy unconsciousness that meant a diabetic coma -- and though I tried to get her to drink some orange juice, it just dribbled from her mouth.
     I had already become disenchanted when I learned her disease prevented her from taking the Pill because it would mess further with her hormones and any spontaneity would have to pause while she went into the bathroom to prep herself -- assuming we were near a bathroom and she had her foam at hand.
     I found it's very hard to stuff a totally limp woman into a bra and panties and her skirt -- let alone her girdle -- and I had to then go downstairs and get the young manager to help maneuver her to my car so I could drive her to Columbia Hospital's emergency room.  I plopped her into a wheel chair, where I left her girdle and the rest of clothes on her lap, and they took her inside.
     I had already met a cute girl or two and had been planning a breakup anyway -- now knowing it would be hard to convince anyone, especially her, that it had nothing to do with her illness.
     So I never did find out what happened to her, though Bibiana herself said she heard a guy in her class claim to another that he had stolen her -- he mentioned her by name, Sarah Stein, though she wasn't Jewish -- from a writer that could have been me, since I had recently edited Cheshire at UWM.
     What was more odd, besides the Jewish Cecil Stein being my friend and marrying a Gail Stein, Sarah's roommate -- they rented a house on Bartlett Avenue -- was Stephanie Sue Stein.  Though she was indeed Jewish, her mother was a local pianist and singer known as Irish O'Leary.  Yet another roommate, Ingrid, had been married to well-known cartoonist Dennis Kitchen, one of the founders of the Bugle-American.
     A tangle worthy of a playful writer like Tom Robbins or Kurt Vonnegut.  Maybe a karass out of Cat's Cradle.  Of course, the East Side was very incestuous anyway.
     But in the long run I was desperate to mingle with other young adults and at least act the part of a hip social worker, after my service in the chaos of the Intake Department, calling compassionately on troubled families and straightening them out, in a sport coat and maybe a tie slightly undone and askew.  Instead they activated the unit for which I had been specifically hired -- unknown to me -- in the almost empty former Emergency Hospital between Wells Street and Wisconsin Avenue.  Though, as I had experienced myself, the hospital had been ideal for a large urban population nearby, mostly black and poor, the county had shut it down, leaving the General Hospital miles away on the County Grounds as the far more inaccessible alternative.
     So I was now part of the new crew that did the paperwork for profoundly retarded children in the Southern Colony at Union Grove, after one perfunctory visit where we could observe the hydrocephalics and pinheads and such who -- if they lived -- would be transferred farther and farther north as the parents died.  In the meantime, the new Medical Assistance program of the Federal Government required letters to the responsible adults -- if any -- and the processing of replies that got the state out of paying for their upkeep.  Parents of minors now became liable for payments according to their budgets, though the requirements were quite lenient.
     So I wanted diversion and socializing -- the company of females that swarmed the old building if I were at all lucky -- to distract me from the jumpiness and queasiness of hangovers and fill the void I was feeling -- as always -- after Jenny no longer played her role in my life after I relied on her for so many years.
     Instead it was an almost empty, bare building where a handful of us in one room dictated letters by telephone to be transcribed by the the unit secretary in the former Gimbel's store on Vliet Street.  Rattling around the echoing halls I realized I missed her -- even though I had especially wanted a divorce since starting journalism classes -- knowing how easy it would be to get laid, rather than struggle for dates and trying my hand at seduction.
     The same unit secretary -- whose job it was to call each of us at our desks in the morning to sign us in -- took to calling at the instant work was to start, to report me if I was a minute late, though she hadn't been as diligent until I began sending my typed letters back to her for corrections to her transcriptions.
     "No one else finds mistakes in my work."  But of course they were there, and I couldn't bear to send them out once I spotted them.
     At least there was one other unit in the building, doing conventional casework with single mothers, and one young secretary to deal with several workers -- a 22-year-old recent graduate of secretarial school who lived with her mother on the far North Side.
      I soon got to know Mary, stopping in her office once in a while on breaks and walking the narrow, winding sidewalks lined with shrubs on the sunny grounds together during lunch hour.  I could glance to the side and watch some shapely breasts, though they didn't move around much under her neat blouses that I wanted to unbutton, planning my next move.
     A little kissing and groping in a dusty storeroom, lined with shelves -- somehow I was reticent to go further in the deserted room, just off the empty hallway -- and she even seemed disappointed that we didn't do more.  But I would feel a firm tit and maybe kiss her throat a little bit as low as I felt I could open her blouse, and stop because I thought our absence would be getting noticed.
     Eventually I was regularly driving her home -- I still had the Triumph.
     I could check her out in the daylight, looking for flaws, like a trace of a mustache, but she didn't have a single imperfection, and was probably the prettiest girl I had ever dated.  She told me it wouldn't matter if someone wasn't a Catholic if she really liked him, though the most daring thing she had ever done was to go out drinking with a girlfriend while under 21, and getting caught.
     Her mother thought I could have been a professor, since I wore my standard office sport coats and striped dress shirts, sometimes with a long topcoat when I picked her up on weekends, and a well-groomed mustache.
     Though it was a nice trim house, north of Capitol Drive, they were essentially a middle-income family with few cultural pursuits, and I would find Mary gazing at me when I talked about something going on on the East Side or anti-war activities with a soft, fawning expression, slightly vacant.
     Though I stayed home weeknights drinking so I could sleep -- O'Reilly's in view across Franklin Place on the other side of the intersection with Ogden Avenue, but telling myself I wasn't doing it for fun and wanting to be where I could drop off in my bed as soon as I felt drowsy -- we started dating on weekends.  I would pick out movies like The Family Way with Hayley Mills or Roger Corman's early acid adventure The Trip -- future cult item or cornball journey I wasn't sure, but I thought it was time to subvert her Catholicism with sex and drugs, and I enjoyed the flashes of nudity myself.
     It didn't take long until I got her into my efficiency apartment on the couch, next to the foldout bed where she placidly acquiesced -- even though a virgin -- as I got her out of her sweater and bra for the first time.
     "Can you tell one is bigger than the other?"
     I could, of course -- I even told her it was quite common -- but I hardly cared as I started in on them both and had her nipples stiffened and glistening with saliva as she looked up with her eyes closed.  My plastic desk radio was playing softly: Linda Ronstadt and the Stone Poneys.
     When both of us were sitting up in the bed, propped up with the pillows and naked as I quietly marveled at her perfect form and knowing she wasn't going to stop me I got my hand between her thighs and guided her to fondle my cock for the first time -- actually to see it for the first time.  Or any adult male's, though she did have a younger brother.
     "The girls in school said the guys want you to touch it, but I didn't think I could."
     "Well, they were right . . ."  I didn't want to rush things, and we didn't have any birth control anyway -- that was something I would have to figure out in the future -- so I just used my fingers on her pussy and guided her hand up and down.  I explained the little bit of pre-come was natural and then it spurted to run down her fist as she kept it moving awkwardly until I stopped her with my own hand.
     "I didn't know it would do that . . ."
     So much for sex education in a modern Catholic school, I thought.  I pointed out in a mock-lecturing voice, "You see, that's how babies are made -- "  My best professorial manner, thinking of her mother.
     "I know, but --"
     "But what?"
     "I guess I thought you had to be inside me."
     I left things at that.  I hadn't lost interest in sex, obviously, but taking on all the alcohol every day meant I also looked forward to getting quickly to the part where I could just relax with a strong drink and look with satisfaction on any pussy or bare ass next to me, not worrying about proving anything.
     Procol Harum was popular then too, and rendered a lyric I could relate to, despite its mysterious vision:

               . . . and would not let her be
             one of sixteen vestal virgins
             who were leaving for the coast
             and although my eyes were open
             they might have just as well've been closed

     But as far as explaining it to Mary, who asked me, I could only invoke surrealism, though as an English major I recognized a reference to the Tarot and Chaucer:

                . . . And so it was that later
               as the miller told his tale
               that her face, at first just ghostly,
              turned a whiter shade of pale

It was a few sessions after that when I got her comfortable with sucking me off, and turning end-for-end so I could see twin cowbells swinging as she went down and I burrowed in with my tongue to get our own teeter-totter going.  But with some of her previous shyness remaining, I still had to buy the Emko foam for our first time and insert it in her, laying the tube on a tissue on the side table.  That ended my patience -- and the bourbon and seltzers beckoned me to really plunge into my alcohol, the hell with finesse -- and drive into her cunt and turn her over for good measure and do it from behind as she instinctively raised her rear with her head down.      It was bloodless and fine for me, though I lost track of what she was feeling -- something I could make up for eventually, I hoped.      The day after, early Saturday night, she said in a booth at O'Reilly's, "You know, it hurts a little bit when I sit down," but she was quite clingy and happy otherwise, and our sex life -- and dating life -- was established.      And quite predictable, especially after I left social work, as I generally ignored her then except when I felt an urge would be coming on and I would call her, still at the Welfare Department, and arrange to pick her up after work, or at her home to go out for drinks and get to bed as soon as possible.      Gregory Garson, in touch with the growing underground scene, had thought of me to deliver the paper for a modest amount of money while going to school, and even loaned me their VW Microbus to load up in Port Washington and make the rounds every two weeks.  Fortunately, it was a very mild December in 1967 when I started, lots of rain, and I found a cubbyhole -- once servant's quarters in a mansion on Cramer and Locust -- at $50 a month, and quit my job and made contacts to sell my unpaid-for new white Triumph, since Jenny didn't want it.      When the roads were dry the warm weather made driving to the printer's loading dock in Port Washington and trudging around with the bundles for a few cents a copy easy, though I ended up having to earn my money twice -- if I wanted to get paid I had to peddle several bundles and keep the full quarter apiece, at the bars I was used to drinking at, like Hooligan's and the Tuxedo and O'Reilly's, for $35 or so for two weeks.      Of course I was hassled some by the vets at the Tux -- though O'Reilly's and Hooligan's were cool -- with more than one wanting to know why my paper and I were defending draft resisters and dirty writers.  I kept my responses simple, just looking forward to my mugs of beer, recalling Martin Niemöller and replied, Some day it may be my turn.      But I slept as late as I wanted, getting up to hurry to editor John Kois's house a few blocks north on Oakland Avenue in the afternoon and try my hand at writing.  I was starting to use what I learned in journalism classes.      Several of us would knock off sometime after 10 p.m. -- to Kois's dismay, since he hardly ever drank, just kept on working -- and go down to Barney's and relax with the rest of the regulars.      Sometimes I would take Mary to visit the Garsons.  Once Bibi said, "She seems quite, you know, fond of you . . . but it looks like you're just exploiting her."      "Well, exploit means to use someone without giving anything in return -- "      "Oh, and you have so much to offer --"  If there was any jealousy, I couldn't really tell, but it was certainly a little sarcastic.      "Well, she got to come over to meet you and Gregory . . ."      And she had said once, "You know, your friends are so interesting.  I never really met anybody like that."  But after one session of visiting when we listened to records -- the latest Beatles album -- You say goodbye and I say hello hello -- from November of 1967, she said, "You know, it seems like I'm saying hello and you're saying goodbye."      Even though I had taken her to see the Rep's Othello at the Fred Miller Theatre, and Ravi Shankar at Marquette University, I knew she had a point.  And when I gave her a copy of Anne Sexton's The Sorrow Dance for her birthday she was mostly buffaloed by the whole idea of poetry exchanged by adults.  Or anybody.      But I had to say, "No, no . . ."  And, I thought, hadn't I even made a point of playing Jimi Hendrix' The Wind Cries Mary at the Garsons' for her?  That proved to me I could be caring.      Because I knew she sensed this odd feeling of emptiness I had without Jenny much of the time and she even asked if I wanted to "get a place" together, though I know how close she was to her mother, who would have been left alone.      Forays into entertainment had become rare, unless I was invited to a party.  Underground press reporters and hippies didn't have much money.      But it was hard not to think about sex when hippie chicks came to the office where I sat at one of the old manual typewriters nursing a quart of beer.  Especially since we still ran luscious nude spreads by Peter Tibbs and Jim Middleton, and what would come to be called sexist ads that implied the dropout babes mainly loved to smoke dope and fuck.      I could still depend on just taking her home as long as I had the Triumph.  Once while desultorily necking with her in front of the house, I pulled back from feeling her tits and reached  across her to open her door, thinking it was overdoing things to do much right in front of her home, while her hand was moving slightly on my crotch.  "That's all right," I said, for some reason feeling indifferent, drunker than usual.      "No, I want to. . ."     And she had learned a lot, and I slowly came to her blowjob even though I thought I wouldn't.  On the other hand, if it was some sort of holy day for Catholics, she would demur entirely.      So it went on, and I planted the idea of her going to school again, first getting an apartment nearby, and she eventually found a roommate on the bulletin board in the Student Union and moved away from her mother.  Occasionally, especially after I gave up the Triumph, she would come over after class to Kois's to set headlines in pressable type or other simple tasks -- Kois playing albums continuously from his huge DJ collection supplemented by review copies arriving almost daily by that time -- and if her roommate was gone we would go to her place.      I was annoyed that she was still using foam and wouldn't take the Pill, something to do with being Catholic, and our sessions were rather quick and mechanical and I knew I just wasn't paying enough attention to her.      It could always happen that when we went to an East Side party that Jenny would be there, and though I thought I was doing well at ignoring her, Mary said pointedly, "I know you look for her."      It was true, of course, even as a flushed Jenny came over to me once in the crowded bunch of dancers, though her own ankle was in a cast, everyone passing joints around, and asked if Mary was the new girlfriend.  She had only seen Sarah, one night at Barney's.      "I bet she really looks nice with her clothes off. . ."      I had to honestly say yes, though I also had a resentment that though the East Side was full of hippie chicks -- most younger than I, of course -- I had to recruit my dates from the outside and pursue them in the old-fashioned way.  Not much in the way of free love, as it used to be called, for me.      So it came to a head when one night a bunch of the crew was being driven back from Barney's by Kois on a rare outing, that Mary insisted on being dropped off at her apartment rather than my little room, horny though I was.  I said flat out that we didn't have to have sex -- I knew she had been to mass for something that day -- but that she should stay.  There was always the morning.      It was more or less an ultimatum, and by that time she had made up her mind -- correctly -- that things weren't going anyplace with us and refused, and that was it.  I did take her roommate Carlotta out a few times, though I soon learned it was apparently breaking some chick code, and one of them abruptly ended it for us.      It was back to trolling the bars for me, now without a car and living on meager amounts from Kaleidoscope.      Fortunately everyone knew it was the liberated '60s, and that women were expected to get into bed without much convincing, if any, and I did well enough.  Still, I had always been domestic, and really looked for something stable.      Financially, I struggled on until Big Fred Krause, who had taken over as the Kaleidoscope distributor while I wrote more and more -- drinking six-packs at night and looking out on Brady Street by that time -- said there were jobs on the docks where he worked days and into some nights as a fork-lift driver.  Other hippies that didn't want to be tied permanently to a job had the same idea, and in the autumn of 1971, with a dock strike on the East Coast and then the West Coast creating a cascade of shipping for Milwaukee's port, a lot of us found our way there.      With some restrictions that loosened over time as business inevitably declined, once the labor unrest was over, we could check out of work on any given day or show up to hustle for work -- first as an extra man, then as a replacement as gangs were beefed up or someone missed for an assignment -- at the ILA hiring hall on Jones Island.  I hung on at Kaleidoscope until it folded in December of 1971.      Another Kaleidoscope writer, Mike Zetteler, followed the same path and finally wrote his memoir as a retired longshoreman in 1994 for the Shepherd Express, an alternative paper that I always felt Kaleidoscope made possible through its court battles -- final vindication coming after the paper folded, in a unanimous decision by the Supreme Court reversing Kois's conviction written by Potter Stewart and joined in a separate concurring opinion by William O. Douglas that found it was a real newspaper and not obscene -- driven by our debt and hard times of selling it on the streets, unable to get a real distributor.  But the Shepherd, following a one-time competitor, the tamer Bugle-American, which lasted to 1976, first in Madison, then Milwaukee, set up a dependable distribution and -- most importantly, it turned out -- giving it away and thus selling a lot of advertising.      Even as Barney's itself was collapsing with Barney Frederick's long-deserved retirement to Florida, morphing into John Hawks Pub -- finally moving north to Water St. and Wisconsin Ave. -- some of us regrouped at Hooligan's and O'Reilly's, coming full circle, meeting again as happened with Valerie Vetter from Wauwatosa and me.  The daughter of an insurance executive at Northwestern Mutual, and a lapsed Catholic, she seemed pleased with flouting her conservative parents -- at least her father, since her diminutive mother always wanted to hear the lurid details of her life and helped her conceal them so that she could live at home and even borrow the family Cadillac.      She drank Schlitz malt liquor with a slice of lemon, which appealed to me since I wanted someone who enjoyed alcohol as much as I did but not more, and that seemed rather ladylike, not enough to be a bad influence.  I was a little taken aback, though, when I noticed she usually smoked several joints a night.  But it made her eyes bright and seemed to make her both cheerful and sensual, and only a little more spacy.      Early on when I observed that I found it a little strange that she was getting high alone before I even picked her up she just shrugged.      "Different strokes for different folks."  I learned eventually she liked to drop in some ghetto phrases from her old boyfriend Alonzo.      "I think a hippie lives here," she said the first time -- our first date -- she came to my tiny apartment, where I used to bang Mary, picking up a beaded necklace with carved white fangs I had hanging on a doorknob and kissing it.  We brought along another couple, one of them a black friend she worked with in her short-term factory job at Globe-Union.  She had fixed Denise up with a slight and energetic black East Sider everybody knew -- I seldom saw him with anybody but whites, male or female -- named Johnny Vermier, but I guessed he was humoring us.      As a tax return preparer -- formerly an IRS agent -- he had enough money to spread around, always buying drinks and even taking us out for meals to the point where it was embarrassing, since I couldn't return the favor.  And it was disconcerting the way he chewed with his mouth open and displayed crooked and dark teeth in need of bleaching, even though his father was a dentist.  Still, he was good company and the evening was pleasant and we all wound up on my single mattress on the floor.      Valerie was drunk enough -- and I sensed an underlying nervousness that I attributed to her feeling she was flouting family and Wauwatosa conventions by dating an underground newspaper writer and peddler -- to have Johnny pull the car over once so she could throw up in the gutter.      But she recovered and somewhere along the line refreshed her breath so that we could make out on the mattress until I got her short dress up and my jeans down to my knees, both of us just about oblivious to the other couple and then I was inside her.      I was dimly aware of Johnny, partly on top of Denise and kissing her next to us, glancing over intently for a while -- understandably -- his tongue lolling out in a brown face as he grinned.      I heard from Valerie later that she had been planning on suggesting to me that we move into the tiny bathroom if things got really heavy between us, but I seemed oblivious.      Though the alcohol had numbed me to the point that when I later admitted I was surprised I had done it at all, much less that I came, she said, "Well, I figured that if that was what you hippies did I could go along with it.  Though it wasn't as good as it could have been. . ."      I figured she was referring to my hard-on, though I didn't press it.  And I soon realized she liked to watch herself getting fucked, looking down at her sparse blondish pubic patch -- not over my shoulder or at the ceiling or closing her eyes.      Feels so good to me feels so good to me Donald feels so good to me . . . becoming her usual low chant.      As a former ballet student at the Adele Artinian dance school, as were many Wauwatosa high school girls, she was very flexible in bed, and everything led quickly to the point where she moved in after I traded apartments with a single UWM student who rented one of the two full-sized upstairs units.      We went to her parents' house to tie her mattress and bed to the top of my old car in the middle of the day when her father -- Cactus Jack Vetter himself, the John Birch Society sympathizer -- came home unexpectedly.  Only her mother, who came up the front stairs while her father -- who it seems had sensed something was up and didn't want her to move out, much less with a guy, came up the back staircase, to get us out of there fast.      So we waited out his visit before moving the furniture, padded with a blanket, and she was committed to the East Side and, inevitably, to Kaleidoscope.  Over time a women's collective and gay collective evolved, giving each contingent a double voice, though there was no men's collective.  I guess the idea was that men had too much power already.      The women and some supporters took to trashing "sexist" billboards -- just about anything with an attractive woman in it, especially showing some skin -- that they contended was using sex to sell, with paint-filled balloons.  There was a strike going on at Allen-Bradley that we, of course, supported.  When the women doing layout used a large illustration of the factory with its famous four-side clock -- the "Polish moon" of the  South Side -- with shots of the picketers, I remarked how the tower looked rather phallic, perhaps diminishing the role of the marchers.      Led by a panicked Valerie, the women then obliterated much of the tower and redid the page at the last minute, unfortunately leaving an unfocused muddle.  Such actions continued, with staff disputes over accepting tobacco and beer advertising, but especially ads for magazines such as Ralph Ginzburg's eros or anything with attractive models, and especially classified ads of a personal, sexual nature that demeaned women, which meant ads for escorts or strippers and such.  The culmination of this resulted in Zetteler writing a favorable review of a female folk-singer at the Y-Not II tavern in which he commented on how attractive she was.  A female typist refused to set it in type on the Varitype machine as being sexist.      The irony was that it was Zetteler himself who thought that the paper could provoke a discussion on how far to go in discussing personal appearance, especially in the case of an entertainer who relied on her appeal and obviously sought attention.  So he questioned in print whether such observations had a place in the new, underground -- and anti-sexist -- press.  Without his remarks, Janis Wasiliewski, the typsetter, would never have noticed such comments, as they were a staple of cultural reviewing since criticism of pop culture began.      So she effectively short-circuited any serious discussion by the readers of his concerns.      Nevertheless, when Zetteler threatened to quit unless the review was printed as it was, the women voted him down while all the men except myself abstained from voting.  A gutless tactic, I thought, and Zetteler himself walked and ended up writing for the emerging Bugle-American.      So it was no surprise that when Valerie came across old photos of my recent girlfriend Cheryl, taken by Allan Jensen, a photographer along with his many other talents, I found them torn to shreds in the bottom of one of my dresser drawers.  It was one more case of her growing, unstable temper.  I figured she would say she found them exploitative, though she never said a word, but I suspected un-sisterly rivalry and I just got another set from Allan.      Though I had been somewhat bitter that no hippie chicks came my way, Cheryl had been a welcome fluke -- I had known her at UWM, where she worked on the yearbook on the same floor of open offices above McClellan's restaurant as Cheshire and the Post.  She turned up at a party at 1833 N. Prospect where I lived and Jenny later moved in, but when I was still alone there I had invited Cheryl over to drink and talk but I didn't get any farther -- she was in love with a Latvian painter named Eriks, pronounced without the final s, in the Latvian manner.      Once she had decided on that, as her chat made clear, she knew what her course would be and he would be hers.      So she married him, usually drunk though he was -- passing out regularly at Barney's and sleeping it off in a side booth instead of mingling with patrons -- so it was a surprise when she turned up one day on my doorstep with a copy of the want ads.  She said she had split with Eriks, mainly because he was sleeping around -- and was in the neighborhood looking for apartments.      She had become an art teacher in Detroit, near Cranbrook Academy where Eriks studied, but on moving back took office work in Milwaukee.      I didn't know of any places off-hand, of course, but after she left it dawned on me that it had all been just a ruse to see me again.  So she kept their old flat after all -- not a surprise -- and I could stay there while an apparently ambivalent Eriks parked all night in front of the house, even telling her I was like a vulture waiting to move in.      Which may have been true, although I wasn't expecting a lifetime deal when I finally quit the Freeman and left Waukesha, trading weekend visits for a place to stay permanently -- but she was demurring about me living with her, hemming and hawing until I got the hint and dropped the idea, recognizing her ultimately inscrutable independence.      Still, when Eriks got a job teaching sculpture in Tennessee she moved there to reconcile.  But it didn't work out and she hooked up with a hippie commune in Knoxville where she took to using heroin -- snorting, but recoiling at needles then abruptly cleaning up and moving back to Milwaukee -- leaving behind the image of Eriks leaning over a sink and gagging while forcing himself to eat cheese, a lifelong aversion.  She resumed her staple, weed, which she brought out in bed in the mornings to share before we scrounged leftovers -- her casseroles and such -- from the refrigerator to marvel at the texture and deliciousness.  Then dreamlike sex that crept up on us with prolonged soft intensity I hadn't felt when straight, or drunk, and I once relayed that with some wonder, to be told simply:      "That's the way it's supposed to feel."  As always, speaking softly, a quiet tone yet one that almost commanded you to lean in and pay attention.      I figured as a long-time stoner she should know what she was talking about, and she was endearing sexually in any case because she had kept a bottle of baby oil handy since the early days when she was new to me and I had trouble getting an erection and she gently lubed my cock with long, slender fingers drawing up lightly to the head to help me ease it into her.      A practice that soon became unnecessary.      Contented under the soft, clean quilt I could twist and follow her with my gaze padding around the kitchen seeing in the daylight the faint thin trail down her belly from navel to the dark growth at the joining of her thighs, and the cones of her breasts that her husband had so often photographed and sketched.      It was during this period when I really began noticing that despite her artistic talents -- and becoming a teacher -- she was still traditional in using feminine wiles to get a man, or anything.  And when we were watching local TV news about Louise Tesmer, once our classmate in English courses at UWM who had become one of the first female justices of the peace around, in St. Francis, now moving on to run for circuit court, she murmured that "I don't think women should be judges."      Although of course I supported feminism when it became an issue, I wouldn't have been deterred by her lack of progressivism -- she worked, after all -- but she quietly kept me at a certain distance from her core even if I had wanted a deep commitment.  She rather recognized her role when a mention of Valerie came up, and I pointed out how I became disenchanted after living with her for a while, concluding, "I could never marry her."      "I think I'm a bridge over troubled water," was Cheryl's measured response.  And so she remained, at least between trips to see Eriks or other disappearances -- some to stay with her mother in Menomonee Falls -- though we could explore again the sex that she had first instigated following an abortive try on my part -- taking charge after an evening at Barney's and an even later night session of pot at her place that had me forgetting about anything but continuing the high but instead rousing when she tossed a bottle of baby oil onto her pillow -- then after it was over alluding to Eriks to observe that "I didn't think I would come again."      So we rested naked, the patchy shadows cast by her dim art nouveau lamp drawing the eyes into tracing their lines and gaps on the wall, music faintly audible.      But I also knew that though I was useful she couldn't ever love me, which left me feeling a little slighted, though not really injured.      For compensation I even filched a black-and-white snapshot Eriks had taken with her face, pale and lightly freckled, framed in long, straight brown hair trailing over her shoulder mostly turned away but nipples prominently displayed, to slip into my wallet.  It was around that time -- not long into our affair -- that I noticed she never made a move to go down on me, though I had otherwise come to expect it in any relationship that wasn't ephemeral.  Even though I seldom reciprocated, and so far not with her.      I obliquely brought the idea up, saying, "If you ever feel like being oral, just, ah, feel free . . ."      Only to have her go onto an explanation:  "I told you, I'm not going to stick around for somebody who doesn't want me, so if he wants to learn to eat cheese and do without me, whatever he thinks he needs, I'm not going to hang around there . . . but you heard all that already."      I couldn't bring myself to correct her, so I let it slide until I could take another approach.      But then, during one of our periods of separation, I dated a waitress at the Knickerbocker Hotel coffee shop Val had once worked with and was friends with even though she kept suggesting things such as the two of them taking a bath together, Valerie said.  Andrea had an uncanny resemblance to my ex-wife, especially the gap in her front teeth and ultra-black hair, though her voice wasn't husky at all, unlike Jenny's.      When Valerie found out she wailed about Andrea and her funny teeth and muddy skin and general lack of charm and probable lesbianism.  I never noticed anything about her complexion, but I pointed out that by her feminist standards I should be commended for rising above such things.  It carried no weight with Valerie, and indeed she continued to use makeup herself.  Things started coming to a head when as far back as our time in my little room she picked up a kitchen knife and threatened me with it when I was naked, for buying the Beatles' White Album when we couldn't afford fresh fruit in the house.  While here she was, she complained, unable to defecate for several days now.      Still, I found it laughable and just blocked her with a pillow while I grabbed her weapon.      Things were more serious when on Brady Street above the Kaleidoscope office she took offense at something and -- my usual response when she was irrational -- I tried to walk away, this time into our bedroom where, since it had no lock, I blocked the door with the heavy mahogany dresser left by a previous tenant.  As I watched with concern and in some awe, she proceeded to work on the door with a hammer I had in a toolkit in the kitchen, battering the thin panel into splinters.      She couldn't get any further, and a few days later patched the hole with some fabric before the landlord could discover it, but I was even more concerned by such a little girl with such a bad temper.  Eventually she started complaining of vertigo, to the point where she couldn't even stand on street corners to sell the paper, and at $50 a week -- for which I had to let advertising manager Bert Stitt use my beat-up Volkswagen in his rounds -- I couldn't meet the rent by myself in the spacious apartment overlooking Brady Street.      So she moved back with her parents where someone could take care of her and I moved in with an old friend from the Tuxedo.  Margaret had a rear cottage to herself west of Humboldt Avenue in Riverwest, and since she had been raped by some blacks after being pulled into a car outside a Holton Street jazz lounge she didn't want to live alone.  It was still warm out so I rigged up a pallet, just blankets, and a clock and a radio under the beams of her mostly bare attic.  A few dusty cardboard boxes were lined up where the rafters met the floor.      I could sleep late after writing at the office until dawn and come down after she went to work as a receptionist in a doctor's office, and have the shower as much as I wanted and didn't bother her partying friends.  I did use empty beer cans to piss in when I got home, gaining respect for the capacity of the human bladder when I could fill three half-quart cans after one session to empty the next day.      It was a time when progressive FM radio was paramount, popping up with free-form programs like Bob Reitman and John Kois's starting on WUWM and Reitman moving around the dial, few playlists, something always within my earshot if I could control it and everyone tuning in their favorite extended cuts, it seemed, wherever I went.  Downstairs in Margaret's kitchen, or in her living room, it felt like I was instantly in an aural hip community as I found a promising selection.      It spread to WTOS in Wauwatosa then was picked up further west in Menomonee Falls at WZMF, or wonderful wizzimff as the DJs said -- at least while the trend lasted.  But it also made record companies less dependent on spending for their advertising of album artists in the overly controversial underground press.      Valerie did visit me sometimes, and we had the use of the couch that I occasionally slept on when cold days started creeping in during October.  I could claim it for myself once I threw out one of Margaret's party buddies from the Tux who liked to crash there.  He was an ex-merchant marine named Carl Tollsrud who hung out with the veterans and liked to drink a lot, apolitical if not jingoistic like most of the vets who scorned the hippies.  But when I woke him up and told him he'd have to kick my ass if he wanted to stay on the couch he surprised me by meekly giving way, and we were friendly at the bar after that.      Val liked to lead me downstairs naked in the warm days, her cool hand holding my penis, but eventually it got too cold to stay in the attic at all, and though Margaret even offered to let me sleep in her bed, I had to decline since I had a girlfriend, after all, and though my importuning housemate had a round, pretty face she was awfully fat and I had no real desire for her.  I kissed her once, sitting on her bed, when she asked if I was sure.  Her thighs bulged against the thin nightgown.  She had small tits for a chubby woman, I noticed.      "You want to do it again?"  I guessed the rape hadn't left any effects, but in any case I declined.      With the colder weather arriving and no place to go I made a sudden decision to contact Bill Schanen III, who had taken over the printing business in Port Washington of his father, who had died of a heart attack, caused -- his family believed -- by the stress of losing most of his contracts in the boycott of the company over Kaleidoscope, led by conservative businessman Eugene Grobschmidt.  After letting go the backbone of the reporting and editing staff and putting out the paper mostly by himself, Schanen had decided to hire one reporter, if he could find one to work cheap, while continuing with sports writing and the commercial aspects himself.      I had left Kaleidoscope once before, for my first professional job as a reporter in Waukesha when I felt I had enough classes as a special student in journalism to make my move.  Just like in the movies, I snatched an index card advertising for a beginning reporter from an unlocked display case in Mitchell Hall, preventing anyone else from beating me to it, and rushed to apply at the Waukesha Freeman.      On the strength of a few clippings from the UWM Post and an inoffensive interview with Goodman from Kaleidoscope I was hired to fill in for vacationing staffers, though the only real position open was given to an experienced applicant.  Nevertheless, I worked up quickly from supplying a few obits to covering many governmental agencies after the city editor sandbagged me by having me go with the regular beat reporter to a City Council meeting as an observer to practice my note-taking.      Unexpectedly, he had me write up the second half of the meeting on my own, centering on a local chiropractor offended by Kaleidoscope appearing on Waukesha streets, waving an issue he said contained nude girls and obscene language, demanding an ordinance to prevent such outrages.  Of course, the city attorney dryly pointed out the problem with press freedom, and I thought I captured the tone of the whole exchange with some faint ridicule for the offended party.  Within the constraints of objectivity, naturally.      In 13 months I figured I had learned everything there was to know about small-town journalism, and though I had rented a furnished room there on American Avenue, I lost no time in escaping to Milwaukee after work on Fridays, to stay the weekend with whatever girlfriend I was seeing and hanging out at Barney's where my friends were.  I felt the underground press was where the action was, and the counterculture was a significant development I had to chronicle and be part of.  Much as the Depression and world wars shaped earlier generations and defined their lives.      So I left as soon as I was out of debt, most of it hanging over me from the time of my marriage, and went back to drinking beer while working late into the night and watching the scene on Brady Street.      Schanen could hardly refuse to give me a chance -- and how likely was he to find a competent local reporter at the salary he was paying, I thought -- especially since he had experimented once by hiring an amateur who had organized support for his father after the boycott started, with her Committee for a Free Press getting publicity around the country, in national papers and magazines, including Life.  As a result, subscriptions to his remaining paper, the Ozaukee Press, came in from everywhere to replace the local readers he had lost.      Oddly enough, the organizer of the counter-boycott was once a regular at Barney's, and I had dated Christy and even gotten her into bed a few times, but she was generally elusive -- maddeningly so, since she was black-haired and curvaceously attractive, a lot like my ex-wife without the gap in her teeth.  And of course, I thought her concern over the boycott meant we were intellectually fated to be together.  But she moved on from her office job to Waukesha, from where she commuted to Port Washington as a reporter, something I didn't know until I scanned the police reports one morning and saw her name in a minor traffic accident report.  By that time she had been let go by a regretful Schanen, as fearless but incompetent.  So I looked her up and was charmed all over again when we talked about her committee and her contact with Village Voice writer Joe Flaherty.      Still, she was so full of contradictory behavior that I was glad I still had Valerie to visit me and then Cheryl to give me a place to stay on weekends in the city, though Christy was the one I felt I had really been looking for.      She could be distant or unavailable in the charming house overlooking the park in downtown Waukesha, with her little daughter Melies, but if I had a date lined up in Milwaukee she might call me at the last minute to see if I wanted to come over.  Once it was to join them for cannibal sandwiches for supper, which I had to decline since Cheryl was expecting me, and I was pissed at missing out on the old Barney's delicacy.  But why would she think I could just be ready with no notice on a Friday afternoon?      Yet it would later make me feel guilty when we agreed that Cheryl would call me if she got back from her mother's and I had finished my shift at the Freeman on a Friday -- but was on my way to what I hoped would be an encounter with Christy at Barney's when the phone rang.  As I cleaned up I let it ring for what seemed a thousand times, somehow sounding forlorn as I headed for the door, pangs notwithstanding.      It could be a jolt seeing her, since she was certainly uninhibited.  Getting ready while I waited for her in her living room -- after a break of months -- she once told me I could take a shower with her if I wanted something to do.  I didn't, since my own routine at home had been very thorough and I didn't think I could recreate the effect with her personal products.  And I did hope that I might get a little credit for not slavering at the chance.      It was equally disarming when on one of the few times we actually slept together, in the literal and carnal sense, that I idly asked in the dark -- thinking probably of Jenny's appeal -- if she had pink nipples.  She simply snapped on the bedside lamp and thrust them out like prizes.  And she was still awfully young, and firm and . . . pink, of course.      But I could never pin her down to a serious relationship, or an explanation of why not, and it was no surprise that she took yet another job and moved away.  Still, she ended up with a divorced guy from Barney's that I always considered likeable enough but a nebbish that spent his adult life being pussy-whipped -- which may have been the key.      So I followed Christy at Port Washington -- at least for the four days a week Schanen and I agreed on, at $25 a day -- commuting from West Milwaukee and my mother's house.      The trip was a grind, and with the inevitable evening meetings to be covered -- made worse by me being the only reporter in the almost empty office with a few clerical staff, including Schanen's sister -- I would have a day lasting until 11 p.m. or so, and the drive back.  With no place to go when normal business hours were over until the night-time events got under way, unlike Waukesha where I could go home to rest or shower and shave to get a start on the next morning, I was stuck with Smith Bros. Fish Shanty or a pizza joint or Harry's restaurant to fill the time.  Using the hours to write back at the office would mean a day stretching for 14 hours if I started at a normal time, so I quickly settled on coming in at 11 a.m. or so, or even later.      After all there was very little going on in town that needed me; mostly there were news releases to re-write, as well as the reports of the myriad meetings.  And Schanen covered sports -- which I disdained anyway -- with one antiquated lady left to handle all the society doings, while at least I could stop for beers at the Tuxedo every night.      Naturally, as with any weekly paper, with only the one deadline Friday morning before the presses ran, work piled up until then.  We didn't have what was actually the luxury at a daily paper, a daily deadline that you met or else, but that at least meant a fresh start every morning.      My solution was to clear up my backlog starting Thursday until I went to sleep in the early morning on a layout table and waking up to finish Friday morning before going home for the weekend.  Schanen was unhappy about my whole approach to scheduling, apparently wanting me to be there days and evenings too, though he never thought to advance me the small amount needed to get a room that would make it possible.  And I did drop hints.      Though I was apparently competent enough to edit the entire paper during Schanen's winter vacation to Florida -- my high point being bold headlines and a front page spread for my interview with a nude dancer at a local club trying some novel entertainment with her shaved pussy -- Schanen eventually fired me.      Showing little gratitude, I thought, for a night like that when I stayed even later after a City Council meeting on a tip to trudge in my galoshes through the snow.  A few mixed drinks at the bar -- that I would pay for in the morning -- interviewing the still-naked circuit dancer who explained that her boyfriend took care of shaving her bush wasn't worth it.  But I had that week's cover story for usually staid Port Washington. Girls Go-Go  All the Way At Black Hat      Owner of Lounge Keeps Show      Despite New Ban on Nudity

     He seemed nice enough about it, complimenting my writing and suggesting I was more cut out for a national magazine like Time or something.  But then, I figured he thought my independence just added to the burden of publishing with a crippled business that made him a pariah to much of the community, a burden he was forced to assume after his father had received so much recognition for his courage.  Even if he would rather be pursuing his career as the genteel publisher of a Great Lakes sailing magazine and hanging out with the country club set.
     So I went back to Kaleidoscope and the building where I helped out by showing apartments.  But after a wrangle with the Schanens, who felt I didn't deserve Unemployment Compensation, and a long struggle with the bureaucracy, I got a fistful of checks that I combined with my pittance from Kaleidoscope to survive for the next couple of months while paying rent on an East Side efficiency.
     But once again needing more income, I left Kaleidoscope for the last time to work on the docks, though I contributed some reportage until the autumn it folded after Dennis Gall bought it and assumed its debts for a dollar.
     With money -- and I started collecting Unemployment Compensation that winter when the docks were all but shut down -- I could keep my own apartment, and drink again around the East Side.  Barney's itself had been transformed from our own corner bar by a succession of owners into a typical Downtown spot with bands in the back room and carpeting on the floor in front and higher prices and a more expansive menu.
     Though Valerie had moved back home so that her folks could watch over her, she visited me, one time appearing at my new apartment and going out for a pint of bourbon so I could drink in bed and wake up properly while putting off a hangover.  Though we hear a lot about mean drunks and abusers, the fact was that none of the women I had known to this point objected to my drinking -- in fact, they encouraged it, believing it made me more relaxed and affectionate.
     I'm sure it did, because I worked mostly on my own and had to maintain a stone-faced and focused attitude toward getting anything done.
     She puttered around in the kitchenette, commenting as she filled a glass with cubes, her back turned:  "I wish you loved me as much as I love you," making my drinks, and ended up in the Murphy bed where I found myself straddling her as she leaned back against the pillows and I lazily kept going until I heard her say, "Ohhh . . . you came in my mouth."
     She was not happy about it, and though I said something about making it up to her some other time so she could come, I didn't hear from her for a while after she left.  Not that I worried about it.  Then she found me at the bar and invited me to a party given by her old teacher friend Cathy Gruver from Wauwatosa, who now had a nice apartment on the East Side -- the reason for the gathering.
     It was a small group, the first time we had been together for a while, and we all played a little Trivial Pursuit.  She told me she had arranged for Cathy to leave us alone when the party broke up, and when we were she leaned close in her loose blue sweater.
     "What's the matter, you're alone with a beautiful women to make love  to . . ."
     I hadn't been laid for a while so Cathy's soft, clean bed was ideal for an interlude.  It was a few weeks later that Val told me she was pregnant -- something that wasn't supposed to happen.  She had been on the Pill, off and on, since I met her, and I appreciated it for simplifying things.  One benefit:  It made her tits a lot bigger, verging on impressive, and even seemed to give her a more substantial ass.  So I tried to encourage it without being dominating.
     I had noticed how voluptuous she looked with her back to me and in a tight skirt when she bent over at the low fridge to get cubes and mix drinks at my place, but apparently at Cathy's I was distracted by the company or something, so her loss of padding went unnoticed.  Making her pregnancy quite a a surprise.
     "Hmmm."  I knew she had been going out for a while, but I startled her by asking, "What about Alonzo?"  He was an elusive figure whose family ran some funeral homes, and I heard she had taken up with him again for a while.  We were at the Tuxedo, and she hesitated and drank some beer.
     Of course, I was miffed because I felt I had been tricked.
     "Well  . . . there was only one time with him . . . and I'd expect you to marry me.  But otherwise -- "
     "So, if it happened to be black, we'd know.  Only it would be kinda late."
     After a while she left in her father's Cadillac, and I remained at the bar to contemplate why I hadn't noticed her bra was a little loose at Cathy's, though the  bedroom had been dimly lit by only an opened doorway and she hadn't paraded around in the stark daylight the way we had been doing at Maggie's and even my room.
     I guess to her credit she didn't bug me about it, and I heard her brother had sent her to New York where it was legal to get an abortion.  Of course, I didn't have any money to help her out.
     Though I had only planned to stay at the docks to finish the season, I decided it was interesting enough, and good exercise for me, to stay a full year's cycle, and waited it out to the following spring, collecting Unemployment.
     By that time, with Valerie avoiding me after her abortion -- either to teach me a lesson or guard against getting involved again in our dead-end relationship -- I had moved in with Marlene.
     Eventually I learned Val had become more erratic and violent, even breaking her sister's finger in a tussle, until she was conclusively diagnosed with brain cancer -- inoperable, resulting in her early death.  Certainly a first for me, and I would think of her upturned, affectionate face and find myself staring blankly at a wall and considering the finality of it all.  And the impermanence.
     After talking with Marlene for a while at Hooligan's I realized I had met her once at John Hawks, but she had been somewhat heavier, so now we made a new beginning after lamenting the dispersal of the old crowd.
     Since it was the off season on the docks we would enjoy the use of her couch in the front room -- farther away from her roommate Carrie's bedroom and keeping the sounds of sex down -- late at night until she went on to bed and I kept on drinking bourbon until falling asleep.  Because I generally got up at noon or later, I had a lot of alertness to work off, and it was usually with dawn poking in through the front bay window and the morning DJ on WTOS joking around with the farm report that I finally crashed.
     We found an apartment together in the building where I had already been living on Pleasant Street -- making $5 for each vacant apartment shown to eventual occupants as a night manager and collecting rents from tenants evading the owner during the day.
     She had auburn hair and luminous gray-green eyes and perfectly straight white teeth, and though she never got fat again -- she said she had gone on a pizza and popcorn binge after a disappointing relationship -- she was lush enough.  One of her brothers at a gathering at his house commented with an implied wink that I probably found that she had nice jugs, and indeed she did, though I said I should probably not comment.  Our first times in bed I would dip a finger in her wine glass and rub it around on her nipples and suck it off, though as a hint it wasn't that effective and she didn't go down on me until several months later.  But it turned out she just wasn't very experienced.  Still, when on an impulse I stuck a finger up her ass -- something I wasn't given to, even though Valerie with her tiny, cool tongue had licked me all over -- on the couch, she didn't object, and I figured she would be fun in many ways, as well as bright.
     The hair was important to her -- though it was long and swirled around it wasn't the bright red I disliked nor the henna-based shade of my mother's -- and when it wasn't done up in a damp towel was very striking.
     That spring brought the beginning of my first full year as a longshoreman, though work never again reached the intensity it had the previous fall, except in the closing weeks of the season in December.  The rush, as it was called, only lasted until the last ship out could beat the closing of the St. Lawrence Seaway and we were all laid off, except for a few year-around warehousemen, or old-timers on an occasional small laker.  That was fine with me.
     Unfortunately, shipping on the Great Lakes was already suffering from the switch to huge containerized ships too big for the Soo Locks and we increasingly relied on a cargo we had declined, bags of grain and such -- wheat, corn-soya, powdered milk. flour -- destined as US agricultural aid to starving countries in Africa.  This meant 8 and 12 hour shifts loading 50 lb. bags from pallets to stuff ships to the deck overhead, baking and sweating in summer heat and on into the freezing temperatures of fall and early winter.  Raw hides, scraped, fatty sides out, or greasy and furry if they were higher quality were sometimes netted in, but usually had to be loaded singly while we wore the supplied, often-laundered but decrepit aprons and rubber gloves.
     Some steel gangs were still needed, as well as those for heavy machinery and the occasional smaller container ships or ones with added pads welded to the top decks for containers stacked there, others to be maneuvered into the wings below with forklifts.  But everything was assigned by seniority, the best jobs -- hooking up loads on the shore, signalmen, winchmen -- going to the old-timers.  Sometimes pallets of general cargo were put in place by forklifts or broken down to be restacked individually, as were boxes of soy oil -- more foreign aid.
     But deprivation in the wider world seemed remote as I coped with near collapse after shifts of lifting and stacking and a new domestic scene with a woman with a luscious mouth, linked to an unevenly receding, variegated past.

                                  [Continued Here]