Paris, city of love.
Dave told me he became a heroin addict some five years earlier while visiting Amsterdam for six months. His parents were rich and he said his grandmother was one of the richest women in Israel. He was an only child, no siblings.
His parents lived in Berkeley. His mother was a senior administrator at a huge pharmacological firm. His father was a senior professor in the chemistry department at Berkeley, both P.H.D.’s in chemistry. So he had chemistry in his blood, so to speak, in more ways than one.
He lived and breathed and I’m sure he even dreamed chemistry. His first toy was probably a chemistry set. They still sold those in the sixties. I had a ‘Gilberts’ at thirteen. He would often rattle off a list of molecules and give each their atomic (molar) weight or take a piece of paper and draw out the formula to some larger compound covering half the page, with the atomic bonds and numbers all exact. Then he would hand it to me and nonchalantly say: “Not many people in the world can do that”.
He had few possessions with him, his small T.V., his guns (he had several) but also a large chemistry reference book (as big as a telephone book) which he kept on the coffee table and would pick up and read, the Merck index. He would mumble the molecular weights to obscure chemicals while watching T.V. It would be like me looking up big words that came to mind in my fat, Greek lexicon. But this is what his mind dwelled on and he was a genius at it. He knew combinations the D.E.A. never dreamt were even possible but would have paid millions of dollars to know. He once boasted he could make anything out of anything and I believed him. And there he was, sitting in his dirty long johns on our couch. Lindsey didn’t see it, (she hardly saw anything), but I did, very quickly, within the first few weeks. The possibilities with him were limitless.
Life in our new quarters was harmonious, with bumps along the way of course, as with any ‘ménage a trois’. Dave was much happier because he was so miserable and alone before. But part of his plan (and had been all along) was to get inside Lindsey’s pants, which was not outside the realm of possibilities, given her nature. But he was slow and discreet in this scheme, biding his time, in part, because in these early days we were like young honeymooners, kissing and hugging half the day and also because he quickly grew to like me as a friend. He even told me, not long after we were watching ‘Perry Mason’ together every morning, that he enjoyed my company much more than hers.
I’d told everyone (since early October) that I was returning to Niagara Falls this year for two weeks, for Christmas, and he waited for my absence to make his move. I bought my ticket by selling more of his drugs at the warehouse and he made his score with her and left it off a few days before I got back. I found out about the affair as soon as I returned. Inside the door to the apartment there were fourteen empty pizza boxes stacked up, a stack so high you could sit on it like a chair, the exact amount of days I’d been gone. They weren’t even different pizza boxes, they were all the same, exact ‘Domino’s.
I shook my head at their lack of imagination. But I saw right away that they’d been ‘holed up’ the whole time. Lindsey just couldn’t keep a secret and spilled it out to me the minute we closed our bedroom door the first night of my return, as we proceeded to have great sex. But Dave and I remained as close friends as ever, even closer now that this hurdle was passed and our ‘ménage a trois’ consummated. He was visibly glad to have me back, relieved of the burden of dealing with her, (her inane, often incomprehensible, replies to the simplest remarks). He was done with her completely and in a more drawn out, painful way, so was I. Events had happened before I left that put her in a much different category in my mind, one with an expiration date.
The thing that eroded and soon destroyed my love for her was that she would sleep with anyone and everyone. It was a sort of ‘French’ attitude towards sex and she’d been sent to France, ironically, by a priest, to correct that very disposition.
When I was seventeen my parents took me back to France for a two-week summer vacation, to visit all the friends we’d left seven years earlier. I was sent to stay a few days with my childhood friend ‘Ives’. But he’d changed so much I hardly recognized him or wanted to, he was so shy and introverted. We were at their family beach house, and his sister who was five years older than me, and his brother (Giles), three years older than me, (both of whom I hardly even noticed as a ten-year old) decided to throw a large party without any adult supervision. She was in charge of the place, along with her boyfriend, the entire time.
It was the summer of 1971. They had a keg of wine and thirty guests and got me rattling off about California, L.S.D. trips and ‘Pink Floyd’, which to them was all exciting and unknown, commonplace to me. But I drank the glasses of wine they kept refilling to a final, vomiting excess and the next morning, with a terrible hangover, sitting with ‘Giles’ at a bistro and sipping on some shot glass of green liquor, which the waiter brought me after I thought I’d ordered a soda, (my French was so poor) a very cute girlfriend of his (one of many) comes over and sits with us and joins in our conversation. As we got up to leave she turned to me and said: ‘I like you. Would you like to come to my bedroom now and sleep with me’? I blushed and declined, though she was beautiful. I could drop hits of acid without a qualm but was shocked at the suddenness of this proposition and then the thought of getting a strange girl in a foreign land pregnant.
Lindsey had the same sexual freedom as this girl. I think she slept with most of my friends in our one year, on and off, relationship. I know she slept with Bones and May together (as May told me), John Seebach and ‘C’, as they confessed to me straight up. But most of these tryst’s happened when we were already broken up in my mind, so it didn’t matter. In fact, if anything, I thanked them for their honesty, and in May’s case, reciprocity. As I began to catch a hint of her promiscuity I wrote of her early on Oct. 15th,: “Sex was neither as naked nor as intimate as the conversations we had”. But this was pure ‘prevarication’ and ‘premonition’ on my part.
At one point in her strange history, some four years earlier in New Jersey, she sought the advice of a Catholic priest about her sexual license. Their talks proceeded apace over the following weeks, all the way from the confessional to the bedroom. But the priest developed some theological doubts after many orgasms in bed with her. He resolved this complicated conundrum by arranging for her to go to Paris, all expenses paid by charitable church donors, to live there with a group of nuns for three months, hoping no doubt that their good example might chasten her prurience. She stayed the whole summer but the experiment failed miserably. She told me that she found a way of sneaking out every night and would have sex with any chance waiter or taxi driver she met on her sprees. She said she had more sex in Paris, living in a convent, than anywhere ever. Paris is, after all, the city of love.
She wasn’t a nymphomaniac, just affable and ‘easy’. She looked upon a quick tumble in bed as a good way of breaking the ice, a conversation starter, something like what a handshake or a ‘hello’ would be to others. The strange fact that she continued in this habit after she fell in love with me (which I could tell from the devastating grief she suffered when I told her I was breaking up with her), I’ll never fathom.
