Highs in the Low Fifties

by Marion Winik

  When I re-injured a sprained ankle later that fall (I wish I could say it was sports related but in fact I am just tragically uncoordinated), Ken insisted I go to the emergency room. Against my better judgment—knowing from experience that there is nothing you can do for a sprain except rest, ice, compress, and elevate—I let Ken drag me to a Patient First urgent care center. While we were waiting I noticed a paperback copy of the book Desire, a memoir of sex addiction by Susan Cheever, on the chair beside me, atop a crocheted blue shawl. I picked it up to see if they had used a quote from the review I’d written of the book. They hadn’t, and I put the book back. Who was the person who had left it there, I wondered. When a friendly-looking, blonde, blue-eyed woman gingerly carrying her hurt left arm in her right returned to claim her things, I told her I had looked at her book.

  “Oh,” she said. “I’m a therapist!” She obviously wanted to dispel the impression that she was reading it because she was a sex addict.

  “And I,” I quickly replied, “am a book reviewer.”

  She was taken away to have something more done to her arm. As I sat there, I thought about the woman, feeling more and more drawn to her. This, I was sure, was my therapist. So I sneaked down the hall and peeked in the cracks between the curtains of the treatment rooms until I found her. She and her attending physician looked up, surprised, as I boldly swept in and asked, “Can I have your business card?”

  I saw Tracy on Tuesdays, right after my hot yoga class. We talked about my ex-husband, of course, whose anger and blame were still very live issues for me, and about my recent bad experiences with the race-car driver in Annapolis. This seemed to exemplify another disastrous element of my character: the power of good looks and good kissing to blow my circuits. One does get to a point in life where it’s sort of exhausting, filling in the same old backstory, and then even more discouraging to realize how similar the new stories are. But Tracy was a good listener, neither a pushover nor a super-confrontational critic, and I never had to throw my purse at her once.

  God knows I have always been too restless and impulsive and impatient for my own good, sometimes drastically so, and I have long suffered with the burning desire to climb out of my head and go someplace else, often with some sort of chemical assistance. While motherhood has made me a much healthier person—as it couldn’t Sylvia Plath—it hasn’t fixed every glitch. Tracy wouldn’t be able to, either, but she did help me out of the postmarital pain pit and onto more solid ground. I miss her, which is more than I can say for most of my old pay-pals.

  Just like love, therapy is always worth another try.

  little sweetheart of the boston strangler

  Like so many therapists before her, Tracy had to be made aware of my disturbing romantic history. My taste in men has always been unusual, going beyond the standard predilection for “bad boys” into uncharted territory.

  For example, my earliest memory of romance is an attempt to initiate a pen-pal correspondence with jailbird Albert DeSalvo, the Boston Strangler himself. It was 1967, I was nine years old, and I had just read Gerald Frank’s true-crime bestseller, The Boston Strangler. (This was typical of my reading material at the time, consisting mainly of books my mother had requested from the library for herself.) What you may not realize is that DeSalvo was never even charged with the thirteen killings he is associated with; he was in the pen for something else. And if you had read the interview in this book, and found out, as I did, about his horrible, sad childhood and marriage, you’d probably want to write him a letter, too. (Too late; he was murdered in jail in 1973.)

  I graduated from DeSalvo to the boys of the boardwalk in my hometown of Asbury Park, New Jersey. When we were fourteen, my neighbor Donna Benoit and I both fell in love with a doltish hoodlum named Dave Reis. I can’t remember what was good about him except his shoulder-length blond hair, which was very straight and shiny and hung in his face. He may have had a missing tooth. We found him on a particular bench where you could always meet guitar-playing ne’er-do-wells, and guitar was our bond. Good thing, as he was not much of a conversationalist. From him, I learned the opening bars of “Stairway to Heaven.” Soon after, he stole my guitar.

  Dave Reis was followed by Buddy West, who came in a set with his brother Bobby. Bobby was strawberry blond and freckly, Buddy, rawboned and hazel-eyed. They had an apartment on the top floor of a rattrap building called the Santander. This was an early experience of bad sex on a bare, possibly insect-infested mattress. Also, they stole cash from my father’s desk drawer and steaks from our freezer. My sister dated Bobby, but Buddy was all mine.

  An even less memorable seaside rendezvous was with The Guy with the Convertible that I Bailed out of Jail. I recall nothing about him except that the bail was $150.

  Why was I like this? Perhaps it was my parents’ fault for bringing me up in comfort and ease, with my own shag-carpeted bedroom, ballet and piano lessons, new clothes each fall, and family trips to Disney World. What were they trying to do to me? To rebel against their kindness and generosity, I pretty much had to seek malevolence and dysfunction, or simply spiritual and material impoverishment.

  As an undergraduate, I completely lost my heart to my six-foot-six, curly-haired housemate Mitch, who had a cocaine problem and had suffered a nervous breakdown, but was the focus of my hopes and dreams and terrible poetry for many years. Also at Brown I met Jan, my first long-term boyfriend. Just as I had had my enthusiasm for the Boston Strangler, Jan had a fixation on Squeaky Fromme, spokeswoman for the Manson Family and would-be assassin of President Gerald Ford, and had even thought of a plan for springing her from jail.

  Jan was devoted to bringing down the capitalist state by making free long-distance phone calls and robbing banks, both according to schemes he’d found in Steal This Book. For the bank-robbing, you went through old obituaries in the library to find a baby who would have been about your age if it hadn’t died. You got this dead baby a Social Security card and some other ID, then used that to buy traveler’s checks. You reported the checks lost, got replacements, then quickly cashed both sets at different banks, wearing a disguise for the security cameras. The whole thing made me a nervous wreck, so I was relegated to driving the getaway car, a copper-colored 1972 Olds Cutlass given me by my uncle Philip, who I hope is not reading this.

  Eventually our revolutionary ideals led us to East Germany, where we could live among like-minded brethren. After several months of unbelievably dull and oppressive socialist living, we went to West Berlin, where we hoped to go to film school for free. By this time, I was so homesick I missed the tollbooths on the New Jersey Turnpike, and started making plans to get out of there. Thirty-five years later, Jan still lives in Berlin being super-cool and disaffected. He makes art movies and documentaries.

  I returned home to a ménage-à-fifteen that Sandye and Nancy were running down in Austin. It was then that I met David Rodriguez, an authentic Mexican-American street person, at an art opening. My friends and I were at the event for the free food, and in the months to come he would teach us many more ways to get things for free. Hopelessly in love, I hitchhiked with him to Colorado to a creative writing conference. He went to an outdoor concert where he was arrested while trolling around the grounds for pills people had dropped. When the police searched him, they found someone else’s ID in his pocket—someone who was wanted for grand larceny in the town of Junction, Colorado, hundreds of miles away. I hitchhiked out behind the police car to spring him. Ultimately, he stole our stereo.

  Over the years, I took several trips abroad with Sandye. These provided many opportunities for unsuitable liaisons, as word of a female American tourist passing through town with her easy virtue and her MasterCard will bring out the flower of any country’s freeloading sleazebags. In fact, they’re not all sleazebags—some are quite nice—and for this reason it is possible to think of yourself as doing charitable work overseas rather than just being taken advant
age of by the uncircumcised.

  For example, Dave and his friends were a group of on-the-dole Liverpudlians we met in a bar. They gave us cigarettes and took us to what seemed to be their home, a tent in a field outside Cambridge. Dave was sallow, hollow-cheeked, and so thin I feared I might accidentally suffocate him. Though he and his friends stole our camera right after we took the group photos, when I got home there was a letter suggesting he come to the States and live with me. In a trailer, he said.

  Perhaps the biggest mistake I ever made was when I went with my bluegrass-loving college friends to the Fiddlers’ Convention in Union Grove, North Carolina, in 1977. I didn’t like bluegrass as much as they did, and I soon found live banjo and fiddle combined with very strong LSD to be a form of psychological torture. Even today I cannot hear bluegrass without experiencing a nerve-jangling acid flashback. However, this unpleasantness was dwarfed by my decision to sleep with a guy named Tim. I remember little about him except his first name, and that he looked something like Gregg Allman. I met him that evening when he fell into our bonfire. The rest of our romance is a blank until the next morning, when he failed to stumble all the way outside the tent for a pee and apparently mistook my sleeping bag for a large tree root.

  By the 1980s, things had gotten rather grim. Eddie Gonzalez was my sister Nancy’s first husband’s friend from high school, and I think he may have been the original link in the chain that got us all doing intravenous drugs. Since Eddie is now many years dead of AIDS, I don’t want to go on too much about his terrible complexion, his tedious conversation, or his addiction—all of these I was only too eager to share at the time. Even he was horrified by the stupidity of my crush on him.

  As should now be clear, the apparent bizarreness of my first marriage must be seen in context. If Tony was a penniless, gay bartender who had recently lost his job as an ice-skating coach due to his drug problem, he was still a significant upgrade from his predecessors. Aside from his other charms, he was madly in love with me, and innately nurturing and domestic.

  After his death, I repelled the advances of a gorgeous, wealthy, physically fit, and socially conscious doctor—yes, a millionaire MD. He wanted to take me to Hawaii and entertain me at his marble-floored mansion. I gave him no encouragement, though during a particularly screwed-up period, after his crush had petered out, I tried unsuccessfully to get him to write me a Vicodin prescription. During the same period, I rejected the marriage proposal of a perfectly nice single dad I’d been hanging out with for a few years. I was waiting for the appearance of my second husband, I suppose, whose complex combination of alcoholism, anarchism, anger, OCD, distrust of women, brilliance, and talents in the bedroom made him the romantic disaster of all time. Even the fact that he loved bluegrass couldn’t stop me.

  Having heard this entire backstory, plus a few more-recent updates, Tracy had me write down what I was looking for in a man. I took my assignment seriously and handed in several paragraphs. Tracy came back the next week with her assessment.

  “You want to date yourself,” she told me.

  It was true: I had the checkered past, the dubious emotional health, the bohemian habits that I was historically attracted to, and I certainly shared my interests. I often treated myself less than nicely, which would keep me interested, and while I might not be ideal on the erotic front, no one was more efficient.

  Unfortunately, still clinging to my multi-decade obsession with lost causes, I was not available.

  Was there no way to just stop all this and be happy with my dear, affectionate housemates, Jane and Beau; my new and old friends; yoga and chardonnay; occasional re-screenings of Shakespeare in Love?

  Not yet, anyway.

  the ambassadress of the white race

  Despite Tracy’s ministrations, I was still reeling from the calamity of the Doucher when on the first Tuesday in November, my food-writer pal Martha and I made our monthly outing to the happy hour held by a city magazine we both wrote for. I brought Jane and Martha brought her daughter Mary, since having them play together saved us each the cost of a sitter. They ran off to a less-crowded corner of the place while we struggled to get near the bar. Fresh from months of hot yoga, I had exhumed my black miniskirt and heels from their mausoleum.

  On the way, I attempted to wriggle past a tall African-American gentleman with short, graying hair and the build of a retired NFL tight end. “Can I help you, baby?” he asked with amusement. “Do you need a glass of wine?” He was dressed in an immaculate three-piece suit with a pocket square. As he sized me up, his lips curved in a deep U shape, like a ladle. “I think I need to get to know you better.”

  Not long after we’d introduced ourselves, shouting to be heard and still smushed together by the crowd, J. Joshua Johnson asked me out. “Would you like to spend some time with me?” he asked, smooth as Southern Comfort. “Can I take you to lunch?”

  I studied him skeptically.

  “It doesn’t have to be lunch! I’ll take you to dinner, I’ll take you to breakfast—I’ll take you anywhere you want to go,” he said, his dimples deep, his teeth glinting.

  At this point I caught sight of Jane and Mary threading their way toward us. Jane explained that they couldn’t get near the hors d’oeuvres and were starving. “Could we go sit down and order?” asked Mary.

  “Well, sure,” I said magnanimously, then called after them, “Hey! Split something!”

  By this time, Martha had materialized at my elbow. I introduced her to my new friend. “He wants to take me to lunch,” I told her. The two of them began debating restaurant possibilities. Martha, a food writer, voted for a fancy place in the Inner Harbor.

  J.J. smiled. “Is that okay with you, beautiful? How ’bout this Friday?”

  Well, it sounded okay to me, but it was also happening a little fast. I suggested we get in touch to confirm.

  After his departure, some nearby ladies offered testimonials. A friend of his who owned a deli, clearly a nice Jewish girl like myself, leaned over to comment. “That went well, didn’t it, dolling?”

  “He’s quite a smoothie,” I said.

  “Oh, he’s a very nice man. You should definitely let him take you to lunch,” she said.

  “Go to lunch, yes, you’ll have a lovely time,” another woman, bosomy and blonde, counseled. “But no matter what, do not sleep with him for at least three weeks.”

  “Three weeks?” I said dubiously. I hadn’t had sex in over a year, and that one time had been the relapse situation with my ex. Really, I hadn’t had sex in almost two years.

  “Three weeks!” she repeated firmly. She launched into some of the standard arguments for restraint.

  “Okay,” I said, “you’re right. Three weeks.” She rolled her eyes, as did several others around us. Sure, they were thinking; this woman is a desperate ho.

  When I went to find Jane and Mary, they were seated at a candlelit table surrounded by half-empty plates and glasses. They’d had lobster macaroni and cheese, Caesar salad, garlic bread, and a couple of Shirley Temples. Now the waitress was on her way with cheesecake and a sundae.

  “Whoa,” I said. “That’s quite a spread, girls.” I looked around for Martha as I reached in my bag for my wallet, hoping she would split the bill.

  “You know your friend in the suit?” said Jane. “J.J.?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Well he came and got the check, told us to order dessert, and paid for the whole thing.”

  “He even tipped the waitress,” Mary added.

  My eyes widened and my head swiveled toward the doors through which he must have exited, as if I’d see a twinkling trail of stars hovering above the white marble floor.

  The intervening days were filled with the usual preparations and hysteria about what to wear. I ended up in brown wool wide-leg pants, a somewhat suburban low-cut shirt with metallic peacock feather des
igns on it, and high heels I couldn’t walk in. But there are no high heels I can walk in, so what can you do.

  I waited until Friday morning to get a manicure so it wouldn’t get wrecked before the lunch, then ruinously scraped it getting into the car. By this time I was so wound up, I practically had a stroke driving downtown in the pouring rain, and another when I saw the price of the parking lot in the Inner Harbor.

  A set of revolving doors led me from the monsoon into the smiling welcome of hostesses and coat-takers. The restaurant was warm and dry, with golden sconces glowing against the polished paneling and thick carpets to buttress my tottering heels. J.J. was waiting for me, as impeccably turned out as ever.

  “You look beautiful, darlin’,” he said. “I’m so glad you came. Order anything you want. Anything.”

  As we ate and sipped at balloon goblets of wine, I asked about his childhood. It sounded rough. Between his mother and father, he told me, they’d had twenty-three children. But the ghetto days were clearly over now. He took calls from people in the mayor’s office during lunch. He heard from his daughter Josie, whose car had been towed up at Penn. Throughout the conversation, he sprinkled mention of a lot of cool-sounding things he owned—boats, beach houses, and such.

  And he asked about me. Oh, me. You know, I’m just your standard ex-junkie AIDS widow. It is really hard to condense the story of my life into polite conversation, but I tried. “I hope hanging around with me won’t ruin your reputation,” I concluded.

  “Oh, well. I have some issues in my past, too,” he said, smiling. “I’ll probably tell you when we get to know each other a little better.”