A Song of Innocence and Experience

"Tyger, Tyger burning bright, In the forests of the night." William Blake

The summer I read Henry Miller’s novel “Tropic of Cancer” (a mind-blowing experience I wrote about here) I was hit on several times by men in Beverly Hills and West LA.

A couple months into my summer job at Wyman, Bautzer the head of the law firm’s administration department, my direct boss, offered me a doobie one afternoon. I was standing in his office listening to the list of chores he wanted me to do that day. The marijuana was much stronger than I expected. Within a few minutes I had vertigo and my vision was telescoping in and out as I looked at Don’s face. I found myself struggling to focus on what Don was saying, especially as he changed subjects.

I saw a strange look come into his eyes and he started talking about how he liked to invite handsome young men to his apartment. When I apparently looked bewildered he said he liked to give them money. His eyes glittered as his face telescoped in and out within my vision.

“I’d like to give you money, Chris. I’m very well paid here and I could give you lots of money. Would you like that?”

I felt a trap closing around me.

The hair stood up on the back of my neck as his voiced dropped and he purred more words, asking what evenings I might be able to visit him. Don talked softly and gently, watching my every move.

I turned and, without a word, fled his office for a stairwell where I could hide out and wait to come down from the high.

I want to emphasize that I didn’t feel intimidated by Don, or that my job was threatened in any way. Once I came down from my high we resumed our normal work relationship. I’d gotten my summer internship through Senator Thomas Kuchel, a name partner at Wyman, Bautzer, Rothman, Kuchel and Silbert and Don was only offering me money, not threatening my job—he was in no position to do that, and we both understood it.

Later that week, Bonwit Teller in Beverly Hills had a big sale. The store was a five-minute drive from Wyman, Bautzer and after work I bought a shirt. Given the 80% discount, I decided I could afford to have it taken in for a perfect fit.

I went back to the fitting rooms, and the tailor appeared, a skinny old man with glasses. I stepped up and stood on a little platform in front of the three-paneled mirror. The tailor knelt down and began pinning up the shirt, inquiring as he went whether or not I liked the fit. As I watched him in the mirrors, he seemed nervous and furtive, his fingers flitting in the air around me like a startled bird.

The tailor asked me to button the collar at the neck to ensure the shirt hung straight, and just as I finished buttoning the collar he adjusted the shirt by tugging downward on the hem—and groped me. In a flash, my fingers closed into a fist, and I swung my arm in an arc from my collar and knocked his hand away without a word.

We were both silent. Wordlessly, the old tailor finished pinning my shirt with even more jittery fingers, gave me a claim ticket, and I left. When I returned to pick up the finished shirt, I was relieved when a woman came out to take my ticket, and returned herself with the shirt so I could pay and get out of there.

There were several other incidents that summer, but none of them happened again twice in one week. Still, I was a virgin and was beginning to wonder if I was giving off inviting signals to men. I was inexperienced with flirting, and had no idea whether or not I had been accidentally leading them on. Was I unconsciously homosexual? Maybe the men recognized something about me I didn’t know yet about myself.

I didn’t believe it.

I didn’t get angry with any of the men, and I’d understood their interest was a compliment. My immediate response to their desire was to be repelled, physically and emotionally. So I dismissed that possibility.

Meanwhile, I also noticed that summer that in the real world where I was now working, attractive women in their twenties and thirties were also being very friendly to me. This was very different from the way USC sorority girls had behaved for the past two years. For the most part, sorority girls seemed to ignore me. After a couple years at USC, I felt none of the immediate connection with sorority girls I used to feel in high school with my female friends. They seemed obsessed with relationships as a game, full of falseness and superficial feints.

The older women I met that summer at work and around West LA were completely different: natural, casual and friendly. They were capable, energetic young women who enjoyed life. Unlike my revulsion to men, I enjoyed the company of older women. The puzzle was that women don’t show their hands the way men do. They were cheerful and gave me inexpensive but thoughtful little gifts and treats. Sometimes, they would touch my hands or shoulders, seemingly accidentally.

A weekend surfing with friends in the summer of 1980. I knew even less about women than I did about surfing.

I realized I was supposed to do something next, take some sort of initiative, reciprocate in some way, but I didn’t know what to do. I realized touching a woman would be a big mistake. There was some essential link in the flirting process I hadn’t figured out yet. I was missing something really important. My intuition told me that without figuring out what that specific step might be—and taking it first—any other action would be a big mistake and almost certainly turn friendly flirting into indignant rejection—or worse. In short, by the summer I turned twenty my virginity was blossoming into a full, (un)blown case of arrested development.

Earlier in my teenage years I’d been in good shape. I had lots of female friends, and most importantly I had a long-distance relationship with a beautiful and intelligent girl named Nicole whom I’d met in eighth grade.

Nicole - a photo I took in our history class

We’d known each other for two years, and kept writing after I moved with my family to the other side of the world. We wrote more than twice a month and signed our letters “Love”. I was convinced I would grow up one day and marry Nicole. She was everything I ever wanted in a woman. As a result, for three years in high school and the first two years of college I’d repeatedly turned down opportunities to have relationships.

By that summer, I realized those years without relationships were lost years of social experience, and I was an inept and clumsy amateur—perhaps not worthy of Nicole, despite my purity and loyalty. I had no idea how to suggest a date with a friendly secretary at Wyman, Bautzer, much less re-start, when the time came, a relationship for the rest of my life with the love of my soul.

My predicament, which was clear to me by the summer I turned twenty years old, had crept up on me after a fast start. When I was sixteen years old, I spent most of the summer in Sevilla, Spain, living in a pension with older university students from Nigeria.

Sevilla, Spain with my housemate Gideon 1976

Young Spanish women would visit and we’d hang out on the roof as the evenings faded into night, enjoying the cool breezes and talking. The women were very nice to me, making my Nigerian friends jealous. One exceptionally beautiful young woman sat next to me one night. We sat on the roof with our backs against the parapet and talked about our lives until she asked me if I had made love yet. I’ll never forget the way my understanding of her question emerged from Spanish, and my surprise that the same phrase hacer el amor is the exact same as “to make love” in English. I truthfully answered “No,” and she nodded and changed the subject. She never visited the pension again.

A year later, I ended up on the Greek island of Corfu, during the summer between high school and college, and this time I had the opportunity to bid goodbye to my virginity in a setting that sounds like fantasy: on the beach of a Greek island, under a full moon, in the arms of a beautiful blonde woman.

I was travelling with five high school friends, two other guys and three young women. For weeks we’d been making our way south from Germany, through France and Spain, and then along the Mediterranean coast. Four of the group were couples and started to have sex. Lisa and I—who had dreamed up the idea of the trip after I loaned Lisa my copy of James Michener’s novel “The Drifters”—were just good friends. Lisa had a boyfriend back in Germany, and I had the love of my life, Nicole, on the other side of the world.

Nicole - the year we were good friends 1974

We had two tents between the six of us, and as far as Pamplona, where we went for the Fiesta of San Fermín and the Running of the Bulls, guys slept in one tent and women in the other. Somewhere on the Ligurian Coast of Italy, the two couples paired off and each took a tent, while Lisa and I slept next to each other as friends out in the open.

One night while we were still on the Ligurian Coast, one of the couples decided to sleep on the beach, for some reason. So Lisa and I ended up together in a tent. It might have been a set up.

With our small group budget that evening we’d bought and shared two bottles of wine, not enough to get drunk but enough to be feeling relaxed and pleasantly buzzed. A bright half moon was in the sky and shone down through the pine trees. I got into my sleeping bag and lay on my back, looking at the stars through the open entrance to the tent just beyond my head. Instead of getting into her sleeping back, Lisa sat next to me.

She said something inconsequential and I replied. She was above me.

We kept talking about nothing and by slow degrees she leaned closer to me.

The moonlight through the tent opening burnished her hair with silver, but I couldn’t see her eyes, just the tip of her nose and the curve of her upper lip.

My first thought was that she was drunk, but I could hear her breathing, and it was regular.

I looked up, trying to see her eyes, but all I could see were pools of shadow. I knew I was supposed to do something.

But I was loyal to Nicole Lee.

I twisted away and reached for my canteen.

“Would you like a drink?” I asked, moving out from underneath Lisa. I sat up and drank some water.

“No,” she said. “Forget it.”

Lisa turned away, started to arrange her sleeping bag, and got inside.

After a while I heard Lisa’s regular breathing, and I knew she was asleep. I lay awake a long time that night.

In the Milan train station we heard about a beach called Pelekas on the island of Corfu, and so we all agreed stop at Corfu on our way to Athens. Ayt

At St. Peters in Rome on the way to Corfu:
Lisa, Veronica, the author, Liz, Joe and Arnie

When we arrived on Corfu we followed the other travelers to a bus which took us to the remote western side of the island. Continuing to follow other travelers, we hiked down a steep goat path that descended a cliff, and found ourselves walking through an olive grove just above a beautiful beach. Gratefully we walked into the cool shade under the trees, and the slope became flatter and easier. On all sides we saw simple encampments of sleeping bags, sometimes a tarp, and very rarely, a tent. Naked people were lying about in the shade, leaning up against the olive trees, or moving about slowly and casually.

The amazing variety of the human form surrounded us. The sheer multitude of buttocks, and breasts, and penises, and shapes of pubic and facial hair seemed to render insignificant the customs and restraints of our own first seventeen years of life. There was as much variety to physiques as we had seen all our lives in faces. Instead of erotic or ugly, breasts seemed lazy, wise, tired, confident, comforting, and stingy. Penises seemed frivolous, impertinent, indolent, arrogant, awkward, inquisitive and self-important.

We began glancing around for a suitable place to stop, but this part of the olive grove was thickly populated. Women were walking with their breasts swaying lazily in the piebald sun, and men with their shoulders in that awkward hunch men seem to have when they are nude, their penises bobbing or swinging from side to side. The sea shone like beaten gold through the leaves of the trees ahead, and we could hear the faint rhythmic sound of surf. It was very quiet in the grove itself, and the sound of footfalls, and the jingling of our packs, was distinct above the low murmur of conversation in many languages that drifted beneath the shade.

“I’m going to do it, too,” Veronica announced.

We came back out into the sunlight in a meadow just beyond the trees. Our line flattened and then curved into a little circle as we gathered at the spot that we had spontaneously and unanimously chosen. We shrugged off our backpacks and dropped them in the middle of the meadow.

“Should we get our swim suits?” asked Lisa.

“Nah, I’m going in like this,” I said.

“Me, too,” said Veronica.

I had meant that I was going to wear my shorts, but I wasn’t so sure about Veronica.

There was a ring of bushes around the meadow, but there was a gap where we could see the sea. I pushed through it, finding a steep path down a bluff that dropped about thirty yards to the sand.

Skidding down, I stripped off my shirt and kicked off my sandals, running towards the Ionic sea. I was still wearing my hiking shorts as I dove into the water and started swimming. When I looked up, the others were just walking into the water.

Lisa was wearing her orange bikini and Veronica had a towel wrapped around her body. I was swimming sidestroke about fifty meters out, and I watched the two guys wade into their waists while the girls stopped at a spot close to where most of our sandals and shirts lay on the sand. Lisa unfolded her towel and laid it on the sand. Veronica unwrapped her towel.

It was the first time I had ever seen a living woman in the flesh, and I caught my breath. I was flooded with rapture. When the rulers of Troy first gazed upon the overwhelming beauty of Helen they exclaimed: oú nemesis “no blame!” They instantly understood, and agreed, that the Trojan warriors and the Greek warriors who were ready to willingly lay down their lives in a war for the sake of a woman of such entrancing, divine beauty had made the right—the only possible—decision for men. The beauty a woman can reveal in her human form also makes other souls incandescent in the rapt awareness of immortal harmony and the cosmos with its super-abundant largesse.

I turned on to my back and swam for several yards to prove that it didn’t matter.

Veronica and the other two women was standing in shoulder-deep water for a while, with Arnie and Joe staying near them, before I swam up to them. Veronica pretended to be casual. The water was crystal clear, and as I came up I made a point of only looking at Veronica’s eyes.

Having spent years in locker rooms around the naked bodies of other young men, I was totally unprepared for the intensity of my response to the sight of Veronica’s body. I recognized and admired the masculine beauty of a young man’s body but I had never experienced this state of hyper-aware wonder, admiration and delight in the naked presence of a woman. The unimpeded flow through the poles of feminine and masculine energy illuminated my mind and animated very cell in my body.

I was intensely aware of her shape in the water, just inches from me. Her presence next to me was wonderful. I had a sense of delight that I didn’t understand.

At the sight of Veronica in all her woman’s beauty and glory, her body shining in the Mediterranean sunlight and surrounded by clear water, I instantly felt intensely alive. I had a primal sense of being part of nature, enveloped by a natural and cosmic order. I felt the sudden revelation of its deepest laws, to which I was subject like falling through the air, but instead of the terror of negative gravity, my body, mind and soul were illuminated by a joyous light and I felt a delight at being at home in the universe.

Eventually, after swimming lazily and standing around some more, we all came out of the water and lay on our towels spread out on the beach. Veronica remained naked all day. Her beautiful, milk-white breasts were badly sun-burned, however, and she covered up the following days.

Her pioneering self-revelation had taught me a lesson: I felt years of poses and roles falling away from me. Before the end of that first day, the very act of covering my penis began to seem to me not just silly, but conceited. What was special about me? Nothing. What was the point of hiding anything?

Pelekas in the summer of 1978

The three of them looked me over, and then looked intently at my face as I approached. It was a strange, wild thing to feel so vulnerable, and so powerful. The choice to be vulnerable given me a wild, exultant sense of freedom and power. Now, I was walking around with my body exposed to sun and breeze, and I understood why the Classical Greeks competed athletically, and went into combat, naked. My nature was stronger and better adapted to the environment of the earth than I had ever imagined.

My upbringing had humiliated me and trained me to be deeply estranged and repelled by my own body. A year before Corfu, I’d endured an excruciating incident one evening in the Austrian Alps because I was so alienated from my own body.

I was with a church youth group on a skiing vacation. There were thirty or forty of us, including adults. My closest friends did not participate in the group, but all the teenagers and adults knew each other well and were friendly. As it happened, my father’s secretary and her husband were two of the adult chaperones on the trip.

After a day of skiing, followed by showers and a change of clothes and then dinner, there was some kind of religious service in a hotel auditorium. The lesson that night was about the loving humility shown by Jesus Christ when he washed the feet of his disciples. The speaker invited anyone who felt moved to wash the feet of somebody else to do so, and pans of warm water and towels were provided. The lights were dimmed and we all lay on our backs. Personally, I had no intention of moving and was just waiting out the time.

Then I felt someone gently untying my shoes, and moving as little as possible I looked and saw it was Lita. Lita was an exotic beauty. She was Mexican, and she had the warm brown eyes, beautiful face, and sensuous lips of a tropical siren, with a curvy body and a warm, friendly, casual energy. I thought she was very attractive and sexy—along with everybody else. Her white bread Anglo husband was a nice guy, rail-thin and earnest, who had converted her from her native Catholicism to evangelical Christianity. Lita brought a warm, even simmering, passion to the Protestant youth group like a candle glowing in the middle of a cold, formal table setting.

Lita untied my sneakers and gently removed them, then she carefully tugged off my socks. This could have been an incredibly comforting, consoling and even sexually arousing moment, but my mind raced ahead, processing the anxieties instilled by my family upbringing.

I was wearing wool socks! What if my feet were smelly? I almost writhed in an agony of mortification and humiliation at thought of beautiful, sexy Lita kneeling over my feet and being disgusted by their smell. Those were the rules in my family.

What could have been a sensuous experience felt like torture. I was stressed and could barely tolerate the feel of Lita’s gentle, affectionate hands on my feet, bathing them in warm water and then toweling them dry.

I started to feel relief once my feet were washed, any offensive odor having been expunged, and even better as Lita put my socks put back on and replaced my sneakers. Once my shoelaces were tied I could breath and again, and I remember she tapped the side of my shoes lightly, in a friendly gesture.

Several days on the beach at Pelekas walking around naked had relaxed me, and I felt completely at home in my body at last.

One morning I was looking up at the deep cobalt sky just after dawn. Lisa’s honey-brown hair, which was now full of blonde streaks from weeks in the Mediterranean sun, spilled out of the top of the sleeping bag twenty yards away. By this time, we’d spent a month sleeping next to each other under the open sky as our friends shared the tent. We were completely relaxed, just friends who’d gotten to know each other well, and we normally slept right next to each other under the stars.

Lisa was turned away from me. I lay wondering why she had moved, when I realised that the surface of my belly was tight and dry. I had involuntarily come all over myself during my sleep. For a while I wondered if I had cried out in my sleep, perhaps saying Lisa’s name, or someone else’s. Perhaps that was why she had moved away.

Until I day or so before, I would have been absolutely humiliated by what had happened. But the more I thought about it, the more I decided I just didn’t care. It was too bad if Lisa had been grossed out, or whatever, but it was a totally innocent event. I couldn’t help the wet dream. It had been totally out of my control.

After the better part of a week on Corfu, for the first time in my life I felt no obligation to apologize for being a young man. I rose, walked to the beach, and took a cool, early swim. When I returned the three of them were still asleep. Lisa ignored me when she did wake up. Her chilly behavior kept me from bringing up what happened.

With the other two couples tightly absorbed in each other, Lisa’s rejection was almost the exit door from my group of friends, and it was with a sense of increasing isolation that I went with the five of them down to the beach later that morning.

So I decided to go my own way and started hanging out a couple hundred yards down the beach, by myself, just relaxing and enjoyed the extraordinary beauty of Corfu.

A day or two later I was walking naked along the beach when I saw a young woman, also naked, walking out of the waves of the Ionic Sea. Her head was turned away as she was ringing water out of her hair with her hands. She looked like a pagan goddess with a voluptuous body and long blonde curls, dripping with seawater.

When she straightened her head I recognized her.

We’d been in the same high school math class two years before and sat at the same table in a high school math class in Germany. Her name was Kalina, she was a year older than me and was studying calculus, while I was working on trigonometry. We’d become friendly.

Kalina had always looked bulky and awkward in clothes, and now I could see why. She had a slightly childish awkwardness as she stepped across the hot sand with her big breasts and full hips. I felt a constriction in my throat.

I walked up and said “Hi.”

She looked at me blankly.

“It’s me, Kalina—Chris.”

She was brushing her wet blonde hair off her forehead. She looked at me with irritation.

“Kalina, remember me? I’m Chris from Heidelberg High School.”

She looked at me, puzzled. Then she looked at me again, gazing long and intently, up and down, and studied my beard and my eyes.

“Chris from Miss Edward’s math class?” Kalina said at last.

“Yeah!” I said. “What are you doing here?”

“I’ve been coming here for years,” she said.

I had come to accept and appreciate the many varieties of the naked human form, but even more than Veronica, Kalina turned out to be a spectacular example of a divine ideal of beauty in a woman’s form.

“No way,” I said. “This is my first time.”

“You were always so straight,” she said, smiling.

I shrugged, smiling back.

“Are you traveling alone?” she asked.

“I’m here with friends,” I said, indicating back down the beach. “You want to come over and visit?”

Kalina shook her head dismissively, sending droplets of sea water flying from her blonde curls.

“Nah, why don’t you come by and see me?”

“Sure,” I said.

“I’m in the grove behind the taverna. Just walk up the path and ask for me.”

“Ok,” I said. “See you later.”

“See ya,” she said, smiling.

I looked back and she was looking over her shoulder at me, the smile still floating on her lips.

The next evening the other five decided to go to the taverna for dinner and a beer. When they had left, I took a bottle of retsina and walked across the meadow. Silver moonlight glittered on the sea like a whisper. Under the olive trees, bright patches of moonlight shone like stepping stones across a dark river. The moon was full and I only had to ask twice before I found Kalina’s camp.

Kalina was sitting by a little fire, listening to a battery-run radio with another young woman.

“Hey, how you doing,” she said when I stepped into the light from the fire. She introduced me to her English friend Fiona.

“I brought a bottle of retsina,” I said.

“Can’t stand the stuff,” she said. “Horse piss. No offense to horses intended.”

“It’s not great,” I admitted. “But Corfu with lousy wine is still the best spot on earth.”

Kalina laughed. “Yeah, it’s not bad.”

She sat back against a tree and began fossicking around in a bag. Then she started to roll a hash joint.

I opened the wine and took a drink.

“This is better,” she said. “Corfu with good dope is the best place in the universe.”

She laughed.

Some of my high school friends had a betting pool to see who would get me high first, and once I found out about it I was determined no one would collect on the bet. Even during our Eurail trip I hadn’t tried anything.

“Are you mixing it with tobacco?” I asked, looking for an excuse to decline.

“Yeah, it’s hash, not marijuana.”

“I’ll stay with the retsina,” I said, as if tobacco was the issue.

“Cool,” she said.

Kalina and Fiona passed it back and forth, and we talked desultorily about what we’d seen on our travels, and about what was going on at the beach. Kalina didn’t have much to say about what she was doing with her life, but we bantered like the friends we were.

Her English friend didn’t say much either, and after an hour and a half, she walked into the shadows to her sleeping bag. She and Kalina had had two joints by then, and I had drunk half the bottle.

“You really turned out cool,” Kalina said.

“It was an accident,” I said.

“It was a fucking miracle.”

We kissed. Her lips and her tongue sent a thrill coursing through my entire body. It was a very different sensation from the wonder and delight I’d experienced before, which seemed to radiate from my soul. My feelings now were intensely physical.

We were both wearing camping shorts. I was wearing a t-shirt on and she had a cotton tank top that couldn’t contain her breasts. During our long kiss, as we became increasingly abandoned, powerful sensations flooded through me I’d never experienced before.

Until then I was only playing. I planned to experiment a little, maybe fool around a bit. I was curious.

I’d wanted to see how this would unfold, but I suddenly realized I was on a runaway train. We were right in the middle of something really intense and were both acting like we’d made our decision.

I sat back and took a breath.

We both glanced down and contemplated my huge urgent erection. It had liberated itself from my shorts while we were kissing, and was most of its length was visible in the firelight, taut and throbbing, against my thigh.

“Let’s go for a swim,” she said.

“Sure,” I said hopelessly.

Kalina stood up, pulled her top off in a quick motion, and stooped over, sliding her pants off. Her breasts swung and banged invincibly against each other, and I obediently took off my clothes. Kalina stepped quickly out of the firelight down the path through the grove to the beach, and I, achingly charged, my cock pointing toward the moon, followed.

We walked naked through the darkness, and suddenly I felt alone and vulnerable.

We threaded our way through the meadow to avoid the broad apron of light thrown out by the taverna. I felt no corresponding emotional context—or intellectual assent—for my aroused physical state. Kalina was just acting naturally, and generously, on the assumption I wanted sex—but it wasn’t true.

I wasn’t actually cool.

I really was straight.

Besides—what about Nicole? I had the gift of the crystal unicorn I’d bought for her in Italy carefully wrapped at the bottom of my backpack!

What about God? He might have been ok with me fooling around and maybe acquiring some useful experience, but I was certain he had destined Nicole and me for each other. If I went with the flow of what has happening between me and Kalina, I’d be both rejecting God and betraying Nicole.

I started to pray furiously, and in great earnest: Dear God, please get me out of this. I don’t want it. I’m in way over my head.

The night sky was so flooded with moonlight that only in the farthest corner of the sky, above the sea, was it dark enough for me to see the stars thrown like sugar across eternity.

We approached the hedge on the top of the bluff.

“I’ll go ahead,” I said. “The branches might scratch you.”

“No, I’ll go first,” Kalina said, disappearing into the gloom.

Moments later, she cried out. I rushed forward, tearing branches back.

Kalina was curled up, half way down the bluff, moaning and holding her ankle.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“My ankle,” she said. “I think I’ve sprained it.”

“It’ll be all right,” I said. I touched it lightly with my fingers.

“Ow,” she said. “Ouch!”

“Ok,” I said. “Let’s get you down to the water. Cool water is probably the best thing. Don’t worry.”

I knelt down and guided her in putting her arms around my neck. She lay against my back, breathing painfully. Her naked body pressed against me as I reached down with my forearms to support her thighs as they gripped my waist.

When we were close to the water’s edge, I knelt down so that Kalina could sit back and settle herself on the sand.

I dug a hole in the sand which filled with cool water and she put her foot in it. After about half an hour I helped her up. We walked out into the water, with Kalina leaning heavily on me.

The surf was placid, and we stood in a column of moonlight, the water around our waists. I helped her walk slowly out of the water. After fifteen or twenty minutes the pain started to ebb.

I knelt down, and she laid herself along my back and put her arms around my neck. I laboured up the slope, ducking my head against the branches. She hid her face against my shoulders as the bushes snapped and scraped against us.

When we reached the top of the bluff, I let her down and walked her back to her camp in the olive grove.

“See you,” I said.

“Thanks,” she said.

A couple days later we left Corfu, headed further east for Athens, and then a turn around and a fast return to Germany before our six week Eurail passes expired. We just made it.

On the train back from Greece to Heidelberg - August 1978

A few days later I flew back to America for the first time in three years and rejoined my family at our new home in Southern California. I found a letter waiting for me from Nicole.

She’d written the letter months before. Nicole wrote that she and her father would be travelling to the US so she could start her freshman year at Smith College in Massachusetts. I was a couple weeks from beginning my freshman year at USC in Los Angeles.

Their itinerary from Korea would bring them through Travis Air Force Base on the way to San Francisco and then Boston. I knew how to get to Travis, a real coincidence in those days before GPS. They were landing in two days. It was a seven hour drive north, and I had time to get there and meet Nicole and her dad.

I understood this nearly miraculous opportunity as a divine confirmation I had been right the month before on Corfu to choose to save my virginity for Nicole one day.

I just drove to the airport. There was no way to contact Nicole in those days before mobile phones and the Internet. Security was also not as strict decades ago, and I was able to talk my way onto the base. I’d arrived in plenty of time and awaited their arrival. I was deeply tanned from my travels through the Mediterranean, bearded, and was wearing a Greek fisherman’s cap.

Nicole and her father were absolutely astonished to see me. Jet-lagged, they struggled to recognize me.

“Hello, Mr. Lee, welcome to the United States,” I said and politely offered my hand to Mr. Lee, who shook it.

Then I looked at Nicole. Shaking her hand would be ridiculous, but I’d never kissed her. We’d only held hands once. Nicole stood there frozen. Should I give her a kiss—perhaps on the cheek? Give her a hug? In front of her father?

All my new confidence drained out of me.

Nicole looked uncomfortable.

“Hi,” I said, smiling but otherwise not moving a muscle. “It’s great to see you.”

Corfu wasn’t relevant for my return to normal life. Nicole posture and expression were the opposite of Kalina’s confident friendliness.

Nicole’s expression was tired and tense. She wasn’t Veronica or Kalina, their splendid bodies naked in the shining water and shining air. Nicole was demurely cloaked in rumpled traveling clothes.

Mr. Lee had made no arrangements for transportation to San Francisco—not a trivial challenge in the days before Uber—and he had been hoping to convince a local taxi to take them all the way to the city.

He gladly my offer to drive them to San Francisco. I was driving a very hot muscle car my uncle, who lived a few miles from Travis, had generously loaned me after my car broke down the day before after the long drive from Los Angeles.

Nicole sat next to me. I felt blissful and full of joy at seeing Nicole again and being so close together.

My embarrassment and the awkwardness between us seemed to fade away as we hurtled down the freeway towards the coast. I’d learned to drive on the German autobahn where there are no speed limits. My unwillingly throttled animal spirits erupted, and I nonchalantly threaded the powerful car through traffic at 90 miles an hour as I talked non-stop to Nicole. Nicole began to smile and talk naturally, as if it had been three days, not three years, since we’d last seen one another.

Mr. Lee wasn’t distracted like Nicole and I.

He kept hesitantly asking me to slow down, being careful not to startle me and precipitate the very catastrophic accident he feared. It was another minor miracle I wasn’t pulled over by the California Highway Patrol.

Now I was sitting beside Nicole, our hearts within each other’s electromagnetic fields, driving her to San Francisco with her father. The Corfu night was my test, and I had withstood temptation. I saw both events as mirror images of each other.

When we got to San Francisco, I drove them to the hotel.

Mr. Lee discreetly excused himself and left us to our own devices for several hours.

It should have been my dream come true. Instead, we both felt ourselves back in the same embarrassing predicament.

“I brought you a present,” I said, giving Nicole the carved crystal unicorn I’d bought for her in IItaly.

Nicole unwrapped the box. She seemed to think I had gone to too much trouble.

I felt humiliated.

We became more shy and awkward. It had all been so different around the campfire a month before.

It was a beautiful afternoon in San Francisco. The sun was shining and the breeze was fresh. Nicole and I walked around downtown and then up Coit Hill to Coit Tower. I had set the tone at the outset when Nicole arrived with her dad at Travis and there was no opportunity to change course now.

I gradually felt a growing sense of defeat.

I don’t remember saying goodbye to Nicole, or anything about the drive back to my uncle’s house, or my drive the next day to Los Angeles.

Nicole and Mr. Lee arrive at Smith College a few days after I drove them
to San Francisco 1978

Two years later, it was the end of the summer again, and this time I’d read Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer.” Not only that, but I’d just been accepted to Columbia University in New York. I’d applied only at the beginning of August, so I was accepted for the Spring semester that would be starting in January.

It would be the first time since San Francisco two years before that Nicole and I would be so close. I was going to get another chance.