Ruby Slippers and twelve other junior year memories

Continued from last week.

I was telling Michelle the other day that the only time I ever noticed shoes on a woman was in my junior year of college. Her name was Carmela Maria . . . gaaaaah. How do you forget the last name of a woman you might have married — in a parallel universe where her dad the longshoreman wouldn’t have killed you first? Anyway, they were Carmela’s ruby slippers, and I’m saving that story for a bit later.

1. The house on Milvia. Fellow Napa State Mental Hospital volunteer and all-around pal Debbie — she of the corn silk smooth hair and affinity for boyfriends with huge hands — knew I was miserable in the dorms. Her lesbian roommates were graduating that year, and Debbie was looking to find a smaller place. She invited me over to her apartment to watch Gone with the Wind and, more to the point, to check the place out. By the way, watching GwtW with three hyperintelligent women, two gay and one most emphatically not gay, had to be a high point of my sophomore year.

I loved the place. Quiet neighborhood close to school, grocery stores, fresh produce stand, cheese shop, bakery, fish market, bookstore . . . heaven, the best place I’ve ever lived in. It was one of those sleepy, concrete pylon-obstructed areas where you just know everyone’s growing hemp in their garages, watched over by a beautiful Husky named Nikka Sue, a dog who had come to Debbie’s rescue one evening when some creepy dude was following her home.

It took me a while to recognize the apartment. Remember how my hippy cousin dowsed a map to find me a place to stay, freshman year? The apartment complex without vacancies? This was the very same place.

More stories below the cut.

2. Russ and Roger. Rooming with That Doofus in the dorms gave me a greater appreciation for my freshman year roommate, Russ, who in retrospect was annoying only because he insisted on waking up at 6 AM and throwing on all the lights and shouting, “GOD, YOU’RE LAZY,” at my groaning form.

Now that we had a real place with a kitchen and one-and-a-half bathrooms and a living room, Russ’s good points truly shined. He cleaned everything. He wouldn’t let us touch the dirty dishes, claiming we did them all wrong. Neither Roger nor I argued the point.

I think we found Roger through one of those bulletin boards where students advertised for rides, jobs, roommates, and so forth. Roger in a nutshell: 6′ 11″ Berkeley socialist of Scottish ancestry (he hated, haaaated, our local market’s advertised “Scotch Buy Specials.” He would ask me, “How would you like it if they called them ‘Jew Buys’?”) who eventually sold out and became a corporate minion. Roger introduced me to the Dead Kennedys.

Russ, doing his sports photographer shtick.

3. Stouffer Chemical. Between the college credits I had earned in high school and working my butt off my first two years at Berkeley, I was sufficiently ahead of the game that I could take six months off for an externship. I went to work at Stauffer Chemical company in Richmond, CA. My team’s project: horning in on a top-selling Monsanto herbicide — Monsanto’s patent would be expiring within a year, and we wanted to be ready to go with our own brand.

This would be my first and last taste of corporate science. Thanks to my friends there, chemical technicians Gary and Theresa, I first conceived of the notion of becoming a doctor.

“But it’s such a long haul,” I whined.

“How long?” said Gary.

“I don’t know. Med school, residency . . . easily ten years.”

Theresa said, “In ten years, you could be doing what we’re doing,” and that was the most convincing argument I’ve heard before or since for investing more than a decade in training.

4. Healing. Yes, I was still in masochist mode, beating myself up. It’s been over six months and you still haven’t gotten over her? But there was something salubrious about the mindless work at Stauffer. Still felt like I’d had open heart surgery but the depression faded, and now I wanted nothing more than to have a woman fall in love with me. Which brings me to . . .

5. Mary, my neighbor from the dorms, the gal who boinked my roomie in front of me. I never could understand it when a woman said she “just wanted to be friends.” Perseverence would yield the prize, I was sure of it. Mary and I went to see Beach Blanket Babylon together, and we saw G. Gordon Liddy debate Timothy Leary (back when they were on the road together). IIRC, we double-dated with Roger and went to see Pink Floyd’s The Wall together. And to cap it all, I cooked for her! And it was a good meal, too, and she still wasn’t interested!

To this day, I don’t understand it. What’s not to love?

6. Old Smuggler. One night, Roger and I split a pint of Old Smuggler. I think that was the last time I got rolling-on-the-floor, praying-to-the-porcelain-god drunk; I remember thinking, Why did I do this? and, This isn’t fun.

7. German. Back in school, I decided I would finally get my major’s German requirement out of the way. I had been spoiled by classes full of chem majors and (gag me!) pre-meds; here I was rubbing shoulders with frat boys and sorority girls. The most beautiful woman in class was a Chinese sorority princess who, I’m not exaggerating, never looked at me or spoke to me. Not once. Second-prettiest was a Hispanic woman . . . call her Linda. She had a boyfriend but she despised him. She wanted me.

I wasn’t imagining this.

I was terrified.

If it weren’t for my mysterious fascination with Carmela (story still to come), Linda would have sunk her hooks into me, I’m sure of it. As it was, after the final, Linda hung around, waiting for Carmela to leave, evidently thinking that she and I could hang out together afterward. Eventually, the shock registered that I had chosen Carmela — plain, overweight, shapeless Carmela (from Linda’s POV, I’m sure; I thought Carmela was anything but plain) — and Linda was not happy.

But before I get back to Carmela, I forgot to mention

8. Dara, fellow chemist, fellow tribe. I apologize if I’ve told this story before. Dara played women’s soccer and she had a thing for one of the men’s soccer players. I had a thing for Dara. Not a serious thing; merely that she had been bitchy to me on more than one occasion and I liked that in a woman. The three of us (me, Dara, and her soccer guy) went on a daytime-date to the Exploratorium. I soon realized she had no interest in me, and soccer guy had no interest in Dara.

Soccer guy and I hit it off great, though. We talked all day long. Was Dara ever steamed!

Berkeley campus

9. Sympatico. Okay, so this isn’t chronological, but . . .

One sunny, blue-sky day after German, Carmela and I sat together on a patch of grass somewhere near Wheeler Auditorium. Quite out of nowhere, she and I began riffing off each other — and oh, do I wish I had a better memory of what we were saying, but it seemed as though we had hit upon some sort of consensual fantasy world. Kind of like the way married couples can, after years together, read each other’s minds and laugh at one another’s unfinished jokes, but here we were doing it and we barely knew each other.

That’s when I first thought: I could love this woman.

She was heavy but not obese, had dark, curly hair, dark brown eyes, and a round face, very sweet to look upon. She was half Hispanic, half Italian, and she had witch’s blood from her Italian side. Her grandmother had kept a witch’s workbook which her neighbors burned after her death. Her grandmother had also given Carmela a gold necklace, which she wore every day. The necklace? The number thirteen, Carmela’s lucky number.

10. The ruby slippers. Towards the end of that first quarter of German, our teacher took us out to dinner at a German restaurant in the city. Carmela wore ruby slippers and took great delight in showing them off.

Linda came with her boyfriend. She treated him like scum the whole evening. If I’d ever felt any attraction to Linda, seeing her abuse her boyfriend killed it.

I think it was that evening when Carmela told me a bit about herself. She wanted to be a chemistry major but she had encountered a lot of resistance at home. From what she told me, I suspected that no one but Carmela believed she could do it; and I also sensed that she was more than stubborn enough to do whatever she wanted to do.

I admired that. And I thought her ruby slippers were cool, too.

11. First date. After the German final, we went to a Japanese restaurant on Shattuck Ave., and that was a mistake. She was not down with sushi. Fortunately, we had ordered some teriyaki, too, so Carmela didn’t have to go hungry.

I have to give her credit: she never led me on. At dinner, she told me about her father the longshoreman (or merchant marine, or sailor, or fisherman . . . my memory fails me . . . but he was away at sea, and came home often enough to be an enforcer) who insisted she marry a Catholic and who would kill any man unwise enough to deflower his little girl.

Didn’t matter to me. If I were persistent, she would fall in love with me. So I persisted.

11. Dreams. Carmela believed she had lived a past life in Ancient Greece. She visited this Bronze Age version of herself frequently in dreams. As Carmela grew older, the girl in the dream grew older, too. Greek Carmela married young and saw her husband off to a foreign war. When I knew Carmela, her Other still waited for her husband’s return. I have a mental image of a seamstress working near a window with a view of the sea; I don’t know if Carmela left me with that image, or perhaps I had a dream of my own.

12. The second date. I had in mind that we should spend a Saturday together. We would walk around Golden Gate Park, go to the aquarium, maybe the natural history museum, get lunch, dinner, and maybe end up at one of the stand-up comedy clubs afterwards. Trouble was, I didn’t share any of that with Carmela. We were walking around Golden Gate Park for about a half an hour (neither one of us could remember how to find the aquarium) when her feet began talking.

“My feet didn’t know you were going to make them walk all afternoon.”

For the first time, I noticed she had on heels. Short ones, but heels nonetheless.

“My feet are not very happy with you.”

After being a dumbshit for another fifteen or twenty minutes, I finally listened to her feet. She had picked me up from one of the BART stations, and had parked on a side street near the Park. We went back to her car and drove around aimlessly. Typical Hoffman date. We ended up at the Serramonte Mall, where I found a wonderful little pet store that sold reptiles and amphibians. (I hadn’t yet discovered East Bay Vivarium.)

I suspect it redeemed me in her eyes, the way I fawned over those critters. She promised she would take me back to the store when I was ready to make a purchase. But after that date, I don’t think I ever saw her again.

13. And the aftermath. My heart never broke over Carmela. She told me (repeatedly) that I was off limits; she did everything but use that horrible phrase, “let’s just be friends.” It took some time to realize it, but I knew she wouldn’t fall in love with me, and so I never let myself make the mistake of falling in love with her.

But I regret the whole thing. Why? Because I wish one or the other of us had said, “Let’s just be friends.” Because we could have been amazing, terrific friends, friends for life. Like my high school GF before her, and Karen after, Carmela and I understood one another. At the time, I didn’t realize how rare that could be.

I could have called her during my senior year but I never did. I’d had my mind set on one thing and I couldn’t quite change gears to do something else. What an arse. Later, a few years into my marriage, I had the thought, Wouldn’t it be nice to find out how she’s doing? But by then, I had forgotten her last name, had no way of tracking her down.

***

Yeah, I know it’s late. I’ve been chipping away at this all day. But if you’d like da linky lurve, you know what to do.

Michelle goes in for egg retrieval tomorrow. Think about her, pray for her, beam fertile thoughts her way.

Will my lesbian readers please tell Shaina to cross over already? She’s this close. She only needs a wee nudge.

And while you’re at it, give Lyvvie’s Inner Lesbian some love, too.

Darla’s dream homes (what do you call a German Lord, I wonder?)

Trish has some nifty vocabulary words. But she missed one — taint, the space between . . . well, you know.

And Da Nator? Well, her Plumbing and Porn post is worth more pimpage can I provide on this one measly line. More lurve later, D.N.

D.