DRUGS FOR ELLEN by
PAULINA BORSOOK

                       
     In every society, there are a few drugs that are sanctioned (in our own, it's historically 
been alcohol, caffeine, and tabacco) --- and the rest that are shunned. And so it is, I 
think, with how you are to give up your virginity. In some places with guys it's supposed to 
be with prostitutes and with women to their bridegrooms on their wedding night; in 
others, sexplay has been a part of childhood, and holding out for someone, anyone 
would seem as barbarous as the in-effect month-long gangbang carried out by new 
husbands with their friends, a tableau vivant traditionally enacted with newly-acquired 
wives on certain Micronesian islands.

     So in our own, it's supposed to be that you first go to bed with your long-time 
boyfriend, preferably the captain of the football team (though in my case, the putative 
candidate sent me his lacrosse and soccer medals in the mail --- and as desperately 
painfully ardently entangled as we were, i could not give into him to that final degree). 
Or the man you married (he came much, much later). Or the experience is supposed to 
be a painful disaster. Or comic. Or causing of pregnancy. Unsatisfying awkward 
embarrassing; a giving into impulse; a being coerced by a horny teenager or seduced 
by an older man; a Virginia Reel with the guy you spotted in your freshman dorm. Your 
brother's roommate, your partner from the debate team, someone you met while 
youth-hosteling around Europe.  A TA. A professor. A heavy in the Movement.

   You're supposed to be able to laugh about it, or recount it with sentimentality, fit it into 
acceptable kinds of reminisence. If it was about love, you are supposed to be able to 
discuss your long courtship before, how your relationship turned out after. If it was not, 
you are supposed to be able to speak of it now with rue.

    But the champion of my first time was all wrong, by the rules of engagement of the 
playgroup I travel in. He was the wrong kind of drug, and as such I seldom mention him --
- just as it's fine to be a recovering anything, and have a 12-step program to back it up --
- but it's not fine to simply chew on your tail, and thrash around, and shake your head 
and shiver a bit when asked about your demons, to say "it's complicated..."

   I have gone for years without thinking about him, maybe because I know of no 
sanctioned mode of discourse for talking about him. Maybe the time has come to talk 
about him because -stupidly, dimly- I realize maybe the crazy logic of my love life did 
indeed begin with him: a long line of wildly inappropriate guys, where -I- chose -them-, 
the sex was celestial, the linkage was mystical --- and it could not last. It's not that he 
made me; it's that he was my morning star. Weird to think of him so many burned-out 
cases later, and how the unconscious is a wonderful thing, and locks on to the patterns 
it's programmed to recognize.

    In speciation, there's the notion of lock-and-key sexuality: the genitalia of one insect 
species will simply not fit properly with that of another. Each lock works with only one key, 
none other will do. And so it does seem to be with the enzyme and substrate --- not, 
necessarily, of who I've gone to bed with --- but with that lesser group of those I've 
made love with. There is some neuronal tangle of fit, a torture of pheromones and 
perhaps electrical impulses, things of the amphibian brain that I do not understand, any 
more than I understand why I generally like sleek animals such as Borzois but make 
exceptions for horses with noble chests and thick stocky necks such as Percherons and 
generally don't like the color yellow except for in certain flowers and how to me, 
bananas smell like death tastes. Past life, intra-uterine conditioning, alien transmissions: I 
don't understand where this pattern language comes from, can only record that it 
exists.

   So I had been holding out for him: boy-crazy sex-fiend that seems to be my genetic 
endowment phenotypically expressing itself even before puberty, I hand't known what I 
was waiting for. I had loved before him, thrown myself into a guy's arms with total 
alacrity, had moments so enmeshed and so bittersweet with crazed adolescent 
longings that I couldn't really understand, much less meet --- that even now, my teeth 
hurt to think on it. The music of then can still bring tears to my eyes. But a technical virgin I 
remained, though my heart had been broken, as objective a metric as you could ask 
for of how serious my intent had been.

   As for he with whom I could finally do the do, I met him on the street, when traveling 
with a schoolfriend, in the hippie part of the foreign city where she and I were larking 
around. In the instant of glancing over at him, I was stunned. He was simply sitting 
against a wall; physically modest and quietly appealing,  5'9" if that. If you had to pick an 
icon of that moment, think Steven Stills crossed with Charles Manson. The Stills douceur 
with the Manson charisma --- but no menace. I like my outlaws to be beauiful losers, not 
thugs.

   He smiled, cocked his head to signal me to come sit by him --- and I did, I did, I 
immediately nestled in the crook of his arm. And for the first time in my life, I felt safe. At 
home. At ease. Released from the existential burden of having been thrust into world.

    I can't remember what we words we used; I don't believe there was much to say. But 
we walked and talked, and the friend I was traveling with serenaded us (because she 
so felt the rightness of it; she died only a few years later in a car crash. There are no 
witnesses now), and I went back to find him the next day. More of the same: joy and 
calm at being by his side. Serenity and the exuberance of life. I can't remember much, 
except for the lightness of being. And surprisingly, a kind of chasteness --- nothing 
beyond kissing on street corners.

   I knew he was the one. When I returned to the place of captivity where I was growing 
up, everyone --- mother, friends, the boyfriend I acquired later on that summer (a fine 
figure: former cat burglar, former Jesuit in training, at that moment an ethologist in 
training; rock and roll drummer, Free Clinic volunteer; reader of William Burroughs, 
Thomas Pynchon, R.D. Laing, and Richard Farina; fucker of faculty wives) --- all 
comented that I seemed in possession of a secret, slightly elsewhere.

   The one whose Zippo lighter I still have in a box somewhere was with me; my thoughts 
were always with him. When I went outside at night, I looked for Venus, the first star at 
night, for we had looked at her together.

   And I couldn't make the leap for Archangel Michael, the elegant dreamboat with the 
platinum hair, the guy straight out of "Magister Ludi". My own Saint Augustine of the 
coathanger shoulders. Long fingers, smooth rap, glory and conflicts and all. 

   So I chose to go after the one I was supposed to be with, running away from home to 
find him. When through relying on that slave's-underground of the late 60s, and the 
pulling of my waif act (random guys wanted to help), I was lead to him (remember, it 
was an era of crashpads and no email), I sat with him and grinned as he held my hand in 
the living room/kitchen of the commune where he hung around. One of the flat-mates 
serenaded us on his Gibson guitar (he, too, would die not so many years later, of Lou 
Gehrig's disease), singing that Dylan love song covered by The Band and Joan Baez, the 
one about coming home to your baby, with the refrain 'down in the easy chair'. It was a 
cinematic moment, as Hollywood doesn't know how to make any more.

     And we went to bed, and it was what I had wanted my entire life. We fit and there 
was no fear/no pain, telepathic and just right: it was what I had always been meant to 
be doing, something at last that gave easy access to the unconscious, that urge for 
transcendent loss of self I knew I'd always had, but that no one I knew in my every day 
life would have believed, given how many books I read. I had found my place in the 
middle of the world, the circumstance where self-consciousness and irony fled, the 
thing that was closest to my core, most grounding, most elemental, a release from the 
prisonhouse of words and clumsiness. Without knowing beforehand that I had done so, I 
had chosen the man who would deliver me unto my True Self --- I had picked rightly.

   It turns out he had slept with hundreds of women, yet I did rank with those he loved; 
obviously he had a genius for loving, for now, looking back after so many others to 
compare with, he still counts as Being Correct. Present. Expressive. Communicative. 
Responsive. Knowing who he was with, and why he was there. 

   It was the 60s, there was no AIDS, no herpes. Anything we caught (in those days it was 
the delightfully old-fashionedly name Veneral Diseases, not STDs. More sanitization of the 
messiness of sex...) could be cured. Not that I came away with anything more than 
memories.

   I felt at one with the cosmos, in step with the rhythm of the universe, myself expanded 
and enlarged --- and I discovered that I only wanted more, infinitely more: not for the 
physiology of it, but for the psychic release. I knew I had chosen properly, for none of 
the guys I had messed around with before had somehow given me to feel - yes, I can 
do this. Yes, I find no resistance here. Yes, I can slip into this and under this man's skin and 
it's All Right.

   Of course, to anyone outside it was utterly wrong. We slept together only once or 
twice more: he would fondly pat me on the knee and shake his head 'ah, I wish I had 
met you when I was younger' (remember he was 23), for he now only wanted to have 
sex to make babies --- and he already had something of a main squeeze, a gorgeous 
charismatic half-Chinese/half-Jewish woman, who I think had borne his child when he 
had been in jail for about a year for dealing speed. I met her a few days later.

    It all seemed to figure to me: she was amazing, and I was 15, just coming into my own.

   It sounds infinitely squalid by today's standards of safe sex and appropriateness.

   But it wasn't.

   I loved him, I knew he loved me --- whatever that meant to me, it meant to him, which 
is why I chose him --- there's a reason the Bibical term to have sex is 'to know'. And he 
knew me in intrapsyhcic strands and currents in which I needed to be known, which are 
about the preconscious and the intuitive, brain functions both higher and lower than 
what goes on in couples' counseling or gets listed in personal ads: never mind his sixth-
grade education, the poor Maritime background, the loucheness. But then, streetfreaks 
weren't unseemly nor necessarily displaced from the mental healthcare system or 
choosing a lifestyle of criminality. It was simply other times, other mores --- that was in 
another country, and besides the wench, the bloke, is dead...

   I may seldom think of him now because I have, for the most part, left being off being 
an adventurer. For in that time, what I cared for was finding the moments of perfection 
and moving on, confident there would be others. Settling down, hanging on, endurance 
over time: these made no sense, not when there were so much bliss to be had, other 
amazing encounters to happen on, for look at what I had found and made! And for 
that reason, I guess I have never filed him in the box of 'relationship failure' or 'why did I 
pick someone that things couldn't work with' or any of the other tropes I have come to 
harangue myself with, as pain of love lost/destroyed and the exhaustion of serial 
monogamy have overtaken me with age. He was fine for then, though from here, he 
looks to be the first of series, of selecting for the ecstatic over the practical, the self lost 
in the Divine over that which is sensible. 

     And as much as I do jabber on, and make all my guys confront the stuff they don't 
want to look at, with him there was none of what we used to call an Analysis (in the 
Marxist denotation): he was what I am always craving, the man where I don't have to 
explain, who brings out the girl, who expects her to be there, and gives her all the room 
she wants. All this within the confines of a bed. Talking has nothing to do with this.

    So, John, this is for you. It's not been right that I have spoken of you so little for 20 years 
(it was starting about 20 years ago -- a little less than 10 years after we came together --
- that with the direction my life was heading, you wouldn't have been explicable to 
those who were beginning to colonize it), not allowed you to factor into my exhumations 
of  psychosexual style, neurotic structure. You don't and you didn't fit into what is 
culturallly allowable: I don't know that I ever got off so scot-free again for loving 
someone whom I couldn't really possess, for being compelled by a haunting sexual 
beauty I couldn't explain. 

    What you were, was something entirely -personal-, allied to how I have never have 
had the words to explain to most of my intimates what my gooey mushy woowoo side is 
about. But you understood it, instinctively: it was, I conjecture, all of me you were 
interested in. But that's like saying all you were interested in was my soul. What there was 
between us, made only sense to me --- but it did, through my ankles, up through my 
brows.

   And after you, a kind of existential relativism slipped into my affairs: well, I thought, it 
can never be for those reasons of hermetic union ever again, so I might as well find 
some other, lesser, more profane and quotidian reasons to go to bed with someone --- 
for go to bed, I must. To love again. And I did, and I have, and I would never diminish 
those sweet moments and true-heart bonds since. With other guys, it's been as much 
about telling our stories, and attempts at dailyness, and trying to find some way to 
reconcile the mundane and the sacred, the parts that don't fit with the parts that do. 
Alas, I could only have had intimations (like Jan Hus, and Wycliffe, of the Reformation to 
come), based on the boyfriends I'd had up until you and how it was with them and what 
I wanted from them (how soon can we jackknife into a safe place to make out?) and 
what I wasn't good at (being a friendly presentable girlfriend) that I would be far better 
at the communion of bed --- th!
 an I ever would be at what went on
 elsewhere: domestic partner. yokemate. wife.  

    So you were the first, for the kind of reason the heart knows and the head can't. And 
almost 30 years later, when only now do I have the distance from us to rip open the 
sutures and be fairly confident I won't bleed to death, you are serving the function that 
has become more than a little spooky: muse. Lost love opens up the writer's veins...

    Wherever you are, if you still live, here's this.                             

COPYRIGHT 1996 PAULINA BORSOOK