More on the summer of 1971

My post Remembering the pain, and the joy from October 1 has been on my mind ever since I started writing it. I have dug out and read my journal* from that summer and even gone online trying to find some of the people involved – not an easy task forty-two years later. It has been on my mind because, quite simply, it was the most intense summer of my life. I told the story of Matt in the earlier post, but there are other, equally emotional, stories to tell.

I was living with my friend Judy – not the Judy I asked to marry; no, that’s yet another tale – in Union City, New Jersey. It’s just through the tunnel from Manhattan, but a LONG drive to Merrick and Hempstead, New York, where I was working. It was a crazy drive: down Palisades Ave to Route 495, through the Lincoln Tunnel, all the way across Manhattan, through the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, out 495 again to the Cross Island Parkway to the Southern State Parkway to the Meadowbrook State Parkway to Merrick Ave --but I was young and was driving my first-ever car, an AMC Gremlin.

Soon after starting work at Steak and Brew I became friends with a fellow my age named Paul. I wrote in my journal that the most striking thing about him was that he was a real challenge to me. He was smarter, more well adjusted and at least as strong a personality as I. Most of my friends up til then had been more likely to follow my lead than challenge it. Not Paul. He was in my face anytime I was less than direct or honest, or whenever I was manipulative, while also being loving and gentle, and, as I said, smart as hell. I loved him and cherished our time together.

Soon after, I met Sue and Jay, more waiters. We became inseparable. Jay was a bit younger and shorter, so he became the “son” to my “father” and Sue’s “mother.” We saw each other virtually every day, worked together most nights; we called ourselves “the family.”

Drugs and alcohol were a daily part of our lives, but not to terrible excess. Binge drinking had either not yet been invented, or we hadn’t heard of it. Mostly we talked and laughed and listened to music and talked and hugged and talked.

Through the entire month of July my life was blissed-out happiness. If I wasn’t with Paul I was with my family, or we were all four together. Then, on August 2, I think, I met Matt and that relationship took me away from my three friends. I still worked with them and went out with them, but not as much.

You need to remember that Matt was my first boyfriend. I had had gay sex before but I had never had a relationship, and even though ours was incredibly short, it was also incredibly intense and mind-blowing. We were both Catholic boys from the 50s doing things that guaranteed us a ticket to hell – it was a lot to deal with.

I was being pulled in too many directions and I handled it badly. To this day I cannot tell you exactly what I did but I know I hurt my four friends badly and I take most of the responsibility. The family broke apart, though it’s partly true that Paul took my place. My individual relationships with Paul, Sue and Jay each suffered and the group dynamic was ruined.

Then Matt kicked me out of his life and I was totally destroyed.

Sue and I patched things up and she was supportive of me at the end of the summer, but the magic was gone. Pretty much the same was true of Paul. He was too good a person to add to my pain but, as with Sue, the relationship never regained what it had lost.

Jay was harder. My memory fogs but I think he was more hurt and he also had a harder time with my new sexual explorations. (For the record, everyone else in this tale, probably even Matt, was straight).

One final friend, a woman named Riki, got me through the last terrible week of the summer. Sue had gone back to college, Matt had told me never to see him again and Jay and Paul were casual friends at best. Riki listened to me, held me and tried to cheer me up; she kept me sane.

When I said in the earlier post that I cried most of the 400 miles to Richmond, I really was not exaggerating. I was always someone to feel the pain, to “experience” it; when I was sad I played sad music. Graham Nash and Cat Stevens were my misery mates; I played those tapes over and over.

I want to believe I learned things that summer and that my dealings with later friends were better. At Notre Dame I had been guilty of throwing over one friend for another, and on Long Island I played that scene again, less blatantly perhaps, but with worse consequences. Moving to Richmond and, especially, taking Education of Self, helped me toward being “self-actualized” while still being kind and considerate. It’s a process that continues.

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 *A shout-out to my friend Don, who, on my seventeenth birthday, gave me a journal. The tale of the summer of 1971 comes at the very end of that first journal. There have been ten more volumes since then.

Finally, some of you may wonder what happened to the cynicism and the currency that gives this blog its title. The truth is, I find the current political scene so stupidly depressing that I have almost nothing to say. I’d rather share myself with you; I hope you don’t mind.