The List

I find a list hidden away in a box in the closet, a list of every man I’ve ever had, each wanton promiscuity, each lost love stuck between yellowed diary pages filled with secrets. I stopped making such lists so long ago, no longer addicted to the hydraulic triumphs they recorded, no longer addicted to the lists, no longer able to remember. Never a list of girls, no list of the ones that came before my coming out, I notice, no list before the list of the men. I wonder why, so I made one.

Vicky was the daughter of an Army major and a hand model, my first. I saw her mother’s hands in a soap ad on the subway, I know since she brought it to third-grade show-and-tell at PS 134, a mile from Ft. Wadsworth. I touched her tiny breast, once after kissing for hours on a park bench with a view of Manhattan beyond her pink shoulder, the year before they started building the Narrows bridge. Was this fourth grade?

California Sally, second-generation Lebanese, civilian to boot, Sally was rootin’ for JFK. We danced together at the Marina Youth Center, a corrugated metal warehouse a mile from the beach, built with some of Bing Crosby’s millions, guilt money now we know, me trying to avoid Sally’s visible mustache when we slow danced. I remember thinking, it wouldn’t show if her hair wasn’t so black. Sally broke my heart, said she had to — I was for Nixon, tykes for Nixon. “Don’t worry,” Mama said, “Plenty of fish in that sea,” prompting a lovely tantrum.

Killeen, Texas, served me Betty who adored me, we acted together in plays of my choosing, and entered a twist marathon. I won, solo, since Betty dropped out with a stitch in her side that wouldn’t stop, right above the place where her big full skirt met her big wide belt, the same one she always wore when we shopped for 45’s and danced to her tinny record player in the pink bedroom on Ft. Hood’s seedy officer’s row. She hoped I would kiss her like James Darren did, but I didn’t.

Junior High in Austin: record hop DJ every Friday at lunch, I played “Hey Paula” the last song every time, a slow one, since I was pinned to Paula Peters -- only, all I had to give her was my National Honor Society pin, a kind of shame I overcame with the power that a DJ has over the soundtrack of everybody else’s life.

Jersey City provided Phyllis Berman, my first Jew, mostly we talked on the phone, mostly about the other Jewish girls whose families weren’t rich enough to get them into a private high school. My favorite other Jewish girl, the one I really wanted to date, was also a Berman, her name was Reina, she dated the star basketball player, a black giant, the team’s center, and Phyllis said they “did it.”

I hadn’t “done it” with any of them yet, not with anyone, certainly not that other Jewish girl I dated that year, the one who no longer has a name. I liked the Jews because they were so smart, they got it when I quoted Salinger, didn’t think I killed Kennedy because I used to live in Texas. Her father was a cantor, she couldn’t date gentiles, but we snuck into the city anyway, saw The Fantasticks on MacDougal Street, I swear Liza Minelli was in the tiny audience, we had espresso and baklava at a Village café, felt very, very grown up. I held her hand on the Jersey Tube til we separated so as not to be detected in the subterranean inter-religious dating spy play I was writing in my head.

In Kentucky I got popular, a miracle, there was Linda, shiny black bob flying freely as she bounced in the line of cheerleaders, how was it I dated a cheerleader? Her parents loved me, we went to nightclubs, I danced with her mother, I drank Manhattans mixed with Old Fitz, “my brand, sir” I told her dad. Never laid a hand on the well groomed wise crack under her circle pinned popularity, what a good boy am I, what a good boy.

Betty Ann Basham clawed the TV set when the Beatles were on Ed Sullivan, clawed me too, and Carol Carbone, my only other Italian had a gawky older brother, his jeans very tight, so I asked Carol to the junior prom in my parents’ Plymouth Fury, red, with red-and-black naugahyde inside, and push-button transmission — where Carol gave me my first hand job in her strapless baby blue organza, my rented tux unzipped, my sexual appetite on autopilot.

Of the girl who got my cherry a year later, I remember only this through the alcoholic haze: she had a Marilyn Monroe hairdo and her tits, huge and armored in the days before silicon and feminists, sheathed tightly in a sweater from the other side of town. I sealed my reputation was by fucking her on the couch in the student newspaper office, gossip assured that, event though I was blind drunk, even though she was a whore, even though she was not the college boy prescription, not a sorority sister, not a protobeatnik, not a bookish boor, like that horsey girl Kate, the language major just back from Italy, claimed her Bolognese ragu sauce was authentic, or that zoftac philosophy major who made the turkey meatloaf for me on Thanksgiving: I was such a fool, she wouldn't have bothered with me if she had been pretty enough to snag the associate professor she was shagging.

Gigi was the breakthrough, down from Bloomington to visit my college roomy, her ex, we all dropped acid to become wood nymphs and satyrs and eat Julia Child, that night she crawled in my bed with synapses flashing, mounting and fucking me all night long.

That whole senior year it was Kathy, who later changed her name to Lauren with a giggle we’d slide under the big white comforter in the big brick house where we babysat for the young philosophy professor (later killed himself) his heiress wife (still sends xmas cards) and daughter Laura (become a lesbian in real life: no wonder, she masturbated in front of every dinner party, which made Kathy hot I think.)

The year of my first job, my faux grownup debut, there was Jennifer from Ottawa, tapping love letters across the miles on a teletype machines we each had when the AP wasn’t spewing, our own personal email system. We fucked our way across the frozen Canadian tundra that winter, I broke my foot outside of Banff, and the Quebequois acolytes hauled me on a toboggan as Jenny ate yoghurt for breakfast and told me she loved me.

It was all a dream. Waking up, I found daily life with coworker Patsy, nervous fingers and endless Tareytons, puffing and trying to end her shaking fingers with a vodka cocktail, demanding a final mercy fuck when I told her, I have fallen in love with a somebody else, I have fallen in love with a somebody else who happens to be a man, too politically correct to slap me, too gone on me to stop writing and calling, too lost to the liquor to care.

There were women after the coming out, but don’t you dare call me bisexual, they hurled the whispers in the corners of my life after the lesbian secret lover was not so secret, I fell so hard I had to hit a pillow, hit so hard, so long before cynicism was possible. And Janice, bitch goddess feminist filmmaker from New York, way too much woman for me, an object lesson, since she drew the line and let me have it.

If you don’t count the occasional rubbing and groping at a cast party, the snuggling and flirting at the beach, the ambiguity of the eyes that I had a hard time stopping, well if you don’t count all of that, I left the land of women behind, end the list, kill the mystery, the terror and the shame of the distaff muse, turning them in for the growling romp in the gutters and the sweet hopeful handholding at my thirtieth birthday, smilings in the Tavern on the Green with a boy who is holding a piece of my heart.