Avis
AVIS
Saturday night, and time for The Broadway!
The Broadway was the Denver gay bar my friends and I used to go to; it was on Broadway, the main drag of Denver — not right downtown, but walking distance from where we lived.
We were all denizens of the ashram, who could no longer take the hypocrisy, double-dealings, theft and fraud that we had found in the DLM organization. We were all looking to get out.
That nippy Saturday night the snow crunched under our feet as we walked down the hill from the ashram. There were six of us, four men and two women. One of the women was Avis; neither woman was gay — which didn’t keep anyone out of The Broadway on a Saturday night.
…..
Falling in love with a woman — it was a complete shock, a surprise, an incredible event. Although I’d had girlfriends, the relationships were really mostly physical — I didn’t allow myself to develop feelings of deep friendship — or rather, feelings of deep friendship, true relationship, never came to me they way they did with men. For men I was passionate: deeply sexually attracted, filled with passion and finding a satisfaction of a life-long yearning, a satisfaction that lasted usually for eighteen months to about two years, after which I would become disillusioned with the other, and leave him to reassert my “freedom,” which meant I wanted to play the field again, to slut around for a few months, until another passion overtook me.
I was not completely ignorant of women; I was not a virgin. I’d lived with a woman named Barbara in New York; she was my first. She’d been my lover Rubin’s girl, and I kind of inherited her, we slept together on my narrow bed for most of a year. [One night she was in bed while I was getting undressed. Watching me take my clothes off, she said oiut of the blue, “Your body’s not that bad!” How did that make me feel? You guess.] She even invited me to visit her parents, who lived in Albany (we hitch-hiked there), so maybe she was serious; but I wasn’t. She followed me to Boston when I moved there to study macrobiotics. She finally gave up when she decided I just wanted the sex. Which was true.
After that I had affairs with another of women, but it seems that they didn’t want to get serious with me. I like mad, passionate but brief affairs, a kind of truncated but affectionate lust, and they just wanted brief lust, one-night stands; by then I’d had quite enough of those, thank you very much. Even in the Divine Light Mission ashram, the sex, though open (we all slept on the floor in common rooms, often as many as twenty to the room.; There’s nothing like fucking in the sleeping bag while other women are going in and out of the room; showtime! [But then, it’s better than jerking off in a sleeping bag, which gets messy.]
Avis was attractive for mind, for her personality, for her optimism and warmth. It was not a physical thing, not lust; I’d had plenty of lust, but an acute attraction such as I’d never known or even imagined before.
So at that bar called the Broadway because that’s where it was, I was oblivious to the gay scene around me, and also to the busty girls on roller skates delivering drinks, even to the drinks themselves; I had attention only for Avis, because I knew at once that I wanted to spend time with her, more time than could occur in the ashram.
We moved out of the ashram together a week later.