Reminiscenses from 1970s San Francisco
By: Alex
Tags: Creative Non Fiction, Love, LGBTQ, Gay, San Francisco

It was a dark and stormy night. Well, not actually. It was dark but clear and fresh. It was shortly after 3 a.m. I was sound asleep on my water bed, which sat in my bedroom’s big, bay window. That was at the back of the second-story flat in the three-story Victorian that I shared with a gay couple and a straight couple. We were at 169 Noe Street just off Market and just short of Castro. I loved that house number. Whenever someone wanted my address, instead of writing it down, I would just say, “169 Noe. Just remember Noe, it’s 69, and I’m the 1 that lives there.”

I was dreaming I was at the beach floating on my back in the surf. The waves gently rocked me. Then, I awoke to a deep, resonant sound like distant thunder. The waves were suddenly a tumble. The walls were moving, and the bay window shaking. I was being rolled back and forth across the bed.

Earthquake!

I leapt out of bed and bolted for the hallway. I checked to the right. Richard, Jen, and Daniel were already heading down the front stairs. About to turn and follow them, Jim saw me and yelled for me to get out. The sliding glass door in the kitchen and the rear porch steps were closer. There was another, deeper rumble. The floor shook with the walls. I ran to the door, slid it open, and raced down the stairs.

There was yet a third, more furious juddering as I reached the mid-flight landing. The wooden staircase shook violently. Not trusting it to hold, I leapt over the railing and did a tuck and roll in the soft grass.

At the end of the roll, I came sitting up directly in front of a guy, also sitting on the quaking ground. We looked at each other face to face for a moment. Our hearts raced as fast as the ground shook. Our eyes each traveled down the torso of the other. We were both naked. It was clear from his face that he liked what he saw. He flushed and visibly thickened. I grinned, winked, and returned the favor.

The ground stopped shaking, but our hearts still raced. The Victorian still stood, and the rear staircase was still there in good repair. We stood and made our way to the second floor, through the sliding door, into my bedroom, and onto the water bed. We hadn’t said a word. We had just acted in unison, each knowing what the other intended — each acquiescing.

“From naked strangers on the lawn to nude friends on the waterbed in 65 seconds,” I thought, “must be some kind of record.”

For the next couple of hours, we rolled and pitched about. The warmth of the heated water suffused our skin. We periodically laid still wrapped in each other’s arms.

At one point, I was lying on my stomach. He was on his back next to me. He rolled over onto me, sat up, and began massaging my shoulders and upper back. He was good at it, almost professional. For the moment, there was no sexual element. He was intent on doing the job aptly. He knew instinctively from my little reactions just where to rub or squeeze and just how hard. As there had been to our love-making, so too, here, there was an innate, empathic nature to our relating.

After perhaps half an hour of that, he rolled me over. Sitting astride me on my groin, he smiled a wicked smile. It was clear from the look in his eyes as they wandered down my torso, and from what he was doing with his engorged member on my belly that the time for professional massage was over. We began anew.

When finally I finished inside him, and he simultaneously with me, I collapsed on top of him. I stayed there a bit, rolled off to my right, and cradled my head in the crook of his left shoulder. We held each other. He fell asleep. Just before drifting off myself, I had the thought, “Well, it isn’t love — yet, but it sure is a hell of a good head start.”

We still didn’t know each other’s names.

It turned out his name was Tyler. He called me Alex.

He lived with two roommates in the third-floor flat. After a month of solid morning and evening sessions and midday on weekends, we decided we were lovers. Though he didn’t move out of his flat, he spent most of his free time and nights with me.

He was sizable where it counted, larger than me, which was unusual. He was well defined, nicely muscled, but not overly developed. He was shorter than me, but tall enough. He was compact. He had thick hair the color of midnight and dark brows above hazel eyes that melted my soul down to where it longed to be. His tanned body was hairless but for a thin treasure trail that led down from his sternum to his pubis promising reward at the end. In short, he was my perfect type.

We slept naked, his 5' 11" figure nestled snugly into the curve of my 6' 2 & 1/2" frame. My right arm extended under his neck. He drew my left across his chest and pushed back against me.

He was a bottom. I was versatile. I taught him to top. After that, we would switch roles willy-nilly. We fit so well together. The sex was righteous and grand.

I lived with Jim and his boyfriend Daniel, who had the front bedroom looking onto Noe St. There were also Richard and his girlfriend Jen, who had the second bedroom off the hall to the left as it led back to the eat-in kitchen and my bedroom overlooking the back yard.

Everyone was a student. I was a third-year student in law school but took no classes. Instead, I was an intern law clerk to a federal judge in the Northern District of California. I spent my time in court working co-extensively with the paid law clerks. I earned 18 credits of individual studies for it. After court, I served as president of the Moot Court Board, as an editor of the law review, and, thanks to the dean, as a member of the admissions and orientation committees.

Jim and Richard were friends and students at another law school. Daniel was getting his Master’s Degree in Special Education. Jen was studying to be a physician assistant. Tyler was in an architectural school and spending a year as an intern at a prestigious architecture firm in the Business District.

Jim was a committed vegetarian. The others of us agreed to go along with him. We cooked from two books, Diet for a Small Planet and Recipes for a Small Planet. One of the five of us each cooked one night during the week. The others cleaned up. Saturdays were fend for yourselves nights on the theory that we all would be out anyway. Tyler cooked on Sundays. He wasn’t officially a member of our household, for he maintained his room in the flat above. But, he might as well have been.

Late one evening early in our relationship, I was in my bedroom reading cases at the big, old, wooden teacher’s desk I had found. He came stumbling down the back stairs and into my bedroom. He was really high on something and half unconscious. I feared for him. I walked him round and round my bedroom, my shoulder under his left arm supporting him.

When I finally thought it was safe, I undressed him and put him on the water bed wrapped in a blanket. He began to sweat, but I kept him wrapped up just the same. I sat up all night beside him, afraid that he would stop breathing. I shook him from time to time to make sure he didn’t. I got some water down his throat to keep him hydrated.

That morning, we had an earnest conversation.

I was 29 and did not do drugs. My only drug use had been Marijuana during my first year in law school. I had tried it twice to be sociable. It put me out of touch with time. I hadn’t liked that. Although there were plenty of opportunities to experiment with the full panoply of other drugs, I never did, not so much from morality or conviction as from disinterest.

Tyler was 22 and well acquainted with drugs. The night before proved that.

I told him I never wanted to be so afraid again. I told him that there would be no more drugs, or there would be no more me. It was agreed that there would be no more drugs. I wasn’t surprised that he kept his word. He was young but a man of honor and integrity. I admired him for that. I was also thankful that he wanted to be with me badly enough to give them up.

On weekends, he and I might have lunch at our favorite bistro on Castro Street. It had an inner courtyard with tables scattered around on a wooden deck that girdled the perimeter of a lush, green lawn.

If we weren’t sitting at a table, we would be on the grass. I would either sit cross-legged with a book in my lap or lie prone, propped up on my elbows, with the book lying flat in front of me.

He would strip off his T-shirt, Nikes, and socks and lie supine soaking up the midday sun, dressed only in a pair of Levi 501 cutoffs with a 5" inseam. Neither of us wore underwear. Lying there like that, he showed a substantial bulge. He was ravishing and alluring. I was the envy of everyone around. I found it difficult to concentrate with him arrayed beside me like that.

We would go for bike rides around the base of Buena Vista Park, through the Haight, through Golden Gate Park, across the Golden Gate Bridge, and on through Sausalito to Tiburon. We would wind up at a little bakery cum café with a deck overhanging the bay. After lunch, we might ride back, taking a detour through the Marine Headlands National Park, or catch the ferry to the foot of Market Street.

I quit going to the gay baths. I quit seeing others but not because I subscribed to monogamy. I considered monogamy antiquated and incongruent with the concept of fidelity. Fidelity is a state of mind and devotion, not a net around the genitalia. And, not because Tyler asked or expected me to. He did not. Instead, it was because, in him, I had all that I wanted. I was content to have it so. I was happy that he should know it.

We seldom went to gay bars. Neither of us cared for the noise, smoke, crowds, or loud music. I didn’t dance, and Tyler seemed not to mind giving it up. The pandemonium made socializing a chore rather than a pleasure. The bars were uniformly dead until after 11. By 11, we wanted to be home; we had a water bed to subdue.

We did have friends, many of them couples. We were especial friends with one couple with whom we sometimes spent the night.

We occupied my third year in law school together like that.

At the end of the school year, I took one of two professional, paid courses that taught one how to study for and pass the California bar exam. Every law student knew that the California exam was the most difficult in the country. To take it without a preparatory course was folly. There were several hundred in my course. Jim and Richard took the other.

I made several friends there, men and women. One had moved to the Bay Area from Boston. He had been a lawyer there for five years. This was his third time taking the course, having failed the exam two times prior. That was one measure of how difficult the exam was.

Often, after a ten-hour session, several of us would walk together to the nude, coed, hot-tub spa in the Tenderloin. We would sit in a steaming tub quietly discussing news of the day or literature or music, anything but law. Often, Tyler joined us. I introduced him as my lover. Two of the women were a lesbian couple. The others were straight but perfectly at ease among us, as were the straight men.

Hey, that was the way things were. It was San Francisco. It was 1978. We were in the gay Mecca of the United States, blooming at the height of its glory. Everyone, straight, gay, Mexican, and White, was friends with and supported the causes of everyone else. The city hasn’t seen an era like that since.

After passing the exam, I accepted a clerkship in Fairbanks. Tyler had his architectural internship that he wasn’t willing to abandon. So it was that we came to the end of our story together.

We spent the afternoon of my last day in San Francisco in Sydney Walton Park in the Financial District. We picnicked with a friend of mine, a professional photographer whom I had cajoled into coming along. Morgan took photos all afternoon. When I was in Fairbanks, he sent them to me.

One was of me standing, looking away, lost in thought. Tyler lay prone, gazing up at me. His hazel eyes sparkled in the light. He had a look of admiration and longing on his face that melted my heart and left a pang in my chest.

I spent a year in Fairbanks. Tyler stayed in San Francisco for ten months, then moved on. After Fairbanks, I took a position in Philadelphia. That afternoon in the park was the last he and I spent together.

Sometimes, I regret not having pushed harder for him to join me. But he was good at what he did. He was pursuing his dream as much as I mine. I felt guilty as it was for having prodded him to join me. I couldn’t stand in his way. I wouldn’t lobby him harder.

So, for a year, our dreams and destinies brought us together. It was, in my life at least, a unique experience.

In Greek mythology, there were three Fates, goddesses who wove the threads of all human lives into the warp of the tapestry of time. Their work was absolute. Not even Zeus had power to alter their fixity. For a while, they indelibly brought my thread and Tyler’s in parallel, then ineluctably wove them apart.

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,

Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,

Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it. quatrain LV, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám,

Edward Fitzgerald translation (1859)

© 2020 Steve Alexander